THE transition from the Spanish ventero to the ladron was easy, nor is that from the robbers to the doctors of Spain difficult; the former at least offer a polite alternative, they demand “your money or your life,” while the latter in most cases take both; yet these able practitioners, from being less picturesque in costume, and more undramatic in operations, do not enjoy so brilliant a European reputation as the bandits. Again, while our critical monitors cry thieves on every road of the Peninsula, no friendly warning is given against the Sangrado, whose aspect is more deadly than the coup de soleil of a Castilian sun: woe waits the wayfarer who falls into his hands; the patient cannot be too quick in ordering the measure to be taken of his coffin, or, as Spaniards say, of his tombstone, which last article is shadowed out by the first feeling of the invalid’s pulse—tomar el pulso, es prognosticar al enfermo la loza. It was probably from a knowledge of this contingent remainder, that Monsieur Orfila went, or was sent, from Paris to Madrid, about the time of the Montpensier marriage with the Infanta, in the hopes of rescuing her elder and reigning sister, the “innocent” Isabel, from the fatal native lancets—a well-meant interference of the foreigner, by the way, which the Spanish faculty resented and rejected to a man; nor were the guarded suggestions of this eminent toxicologiste, or investigator of poisons, with regard to the administration of medicines and dispensaries, received so thankfully as they deserved.

However magnificently endowed in former times were the hospitals and almshouses of Spain, the provision now made for poor and ailing humanity is very inadequate. The revenues were first embezzled by the managers, and since have almost been swept away. Trustees for pious and charitable uses are defenceless against armed avarice and appropriation in office; and being corporate bodies, they want the sacredness of private interests, which every one is anxious to defend. Hence the greedy minion Godoy began the spoliation, by seizing the funds, and giving in lieu government securities, which of course turned out to be worthless. Then ensued the French invasion, and the confiscation of military despots. Civil war has done the rest; and now that the convents are suppressed, the deficiency is more evident, for in the remoter country districts the monks bestowed relief to the poor, and provided medicines for the sick. With few exceptions, the hospitals, the Casas de Misericordia, or houses for the destitute, are far from being well conducted in Spain, while those destined for lunatics, and for exposed children, notwithstanding recent improvements, do little credit to science and humanity.

The base, brutal, and bloody Sangrados of Spain have long been the butts of foreign and domestic novelists, who spoke many a true word in their jests. The common expression of the people in regard to the busy mortality of their patients, is, that they die like bugs, mueren como chinches. This recklessness of life, this inattention to human suffering, and backwardness in curative science, is very Oriental; for, however science may have set westward from the East, the arts of medicine and surgery have not. There, as in Spain, they have long been subordinate, and the professors held to be of a low caste—a fatal bar in the Peninsula, where the point of personal honour is so nice, and men will die rather than submit to conventional degradations. The surgeon of the Spanish Moors was frequently a despised and detested Jew, which would create a traditionary loathing of the calling. The physician was of somewhat a higher caste; but he, like the botanist and chemist, was rather to be met with among the Infidels than the Christians. Thus Sancho the Fat was obliged to go in person to Cordova in search of good advice. And still in Spain, as in the East, all whose profession is to put living creatures to death, are socially almost excommunicated; the butcher, bullfighter, and public executioner for example. Here the soldier who sabres, takes the highest rank, and he who cures, the lowest; here the M.D.’s, whom the infallible Pope consults and the autocrat king obeys, are admitted only into the sick rooms of good company, which, when in rude health, shuts on them the door of their saloons; but the excluded take their revenge on those who morally cut them, and all Spaniards are very dangerous with the knife, and more particularly if surgeons. Madrid is indeed the court of death, and the necrology of the Escorial furnishes the surest evidence of this fact in the premature decease of royalty, which may be expected to have the best advice and aid, both medical and theologico-therapeutical, that the capital can afford; but brief is the royal span, especially in the case of females and infantes, and the result is undeniable in these statistics of death; the cause lies between the climate and the doctor, who, as they aid the other, may fairly be left to settle the question of relative excellence between each other.

The Spanish medical man is shunned, not only from ancient prejudices, and because he is dangerous like a rattle-snake, but from jealousies that churchmen entertain against a rival profession, which, if well received, might come in for some share of the legacies and power-conferring secrets, which are obtained easily at deathbeds, when mind and body are deprived of strength. Again, a Spanish surgeon and a Spanish confessor take different views of a patient; one only wishes, or ought to wish, to preserve him in this world, the other in the next,—neither probably in their hearts having much opinion of the remedies adopted by each other: the spiritual practice changes not, for novelty itself, a heresy in religion, is not favourably beheld in anything else. Thus the universities, governed by ecclesiastics, persuaded the poor bigot Philip III. to pass a law prohibiting the study of any new system of medicine, and requiring Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna. Dons and men for whom the sun still continued to stand still, scouted the exact sciences and experimental philosophy as dangerous innovations, which, they said, made every medical man a Tiberius, who, because he was fond of mathematics where strict demonstration is necessary, was rather negligent in his religious respect for the gods and goddesses of the Pantheon; and so, in 1830, they scared the timid Ferdinand VII. (whose resemblance to Tiberius had nothing to do with Euclid) by telling him that the schools of medicine created materialists, heretics, citizen-kings, chartists, barricadoers, and revolutionists. Thereupon the beloved monarch shut up the lecture rooms forthwith, opening, it is true, by way of compensation, a tauromachian university;—men indeed might be mangled, but bulls were to be mercifully put out of their misery, secundum artem, and with the honours of science.

This low social position is very classical: the physicians of Rome, chiefly liberti, freed slaves, were only made citizens by CÆsar, who wished to conciliate these ministers of the fatal sisters when the capital was wanting in population after extreme emigrations—an act of favour which may cut two ways; thus Adrian VI. (tutor to the Spanish Charles V.) approved of there being 500 medical practitioners in the Eternal City, because otherwise “the multitude of living beings would eat each other up.” However, when his turn came to be diminished, the grateful people serenaded his surgeon, as the “deliverer of the country.” In our days, there was only one medical man admitted by the Seville sangre su, the best or noblest set (whose blood is held to be blue, of which more anon) when in rude and antiphlebotomical health; and every stranger was informed apologetically by the exclusive Amphitryons that the M.D. was de casa conocida, or born of a good family; thus his social introduction was owing to personal, not professional qualifications. And while adventurers of every kind are betitled, the most prodigal dispenser of Spanish honours never dreams of making his doctor even a titulado, a rank somewhat higher than a pair de France, and lower than a medical baronetage in England. This aristocratical ban has confined doctors much to each other’s society, which, as they never take each other’s physic, is neither unpleasant nor dangerous. At Seville the medical tertulia, club or meeting, was appropriately held at the apothecary’s shop of Campelos, and a sable junta or consultation it was, of birds of bad omen, who croaked over the general health with which the city was afflicted, praying, like Sangrado in ‘Gil Blas,’ that by the blessing of Providence much sickness might speedily ensue. The crowded or deserted state of this rookery was the surest evidence of the hygeian condition of the fair capital of BÆtica, and one which, when we lived there, we have often anxiously inspected; for, whatever be the pleasantries of those in insolent health, when sickness brings in the doctor, all joking is at an end; then he is made much of even in Spain, from a choice of evils, and for fear of the confessor and undertaker.

The poor in no countries have much predilection for the hospital; and in Spain, in addition to pride, which everywhere keeps many silly sick out of admirably-conducted asylums, here a well-grounded fear deters the patient, who prefers to die a natural death. Again, from their being poor, the necessity of their living at all, is less evident to the managers than to the sufferers; as, say the Malthusians, there is no place vacant at Nature’s table d’hÔte to those who cannot pay, so bed and board are not pressed on Spanish applicants, by the hospital committee; an admitted patient’s death saves trouble and expense, neither of which are popular in a land where cash is scarce, and a love for hard work not prevalent, where a sound man is worth little, and a sick one still less; nor is every doctor always popular for working cures, as could be exemplified in sundry cases of Spanish wives and heirs in general; therefore in the hospitals of the Peninsula, if only half die, it is thought great luck: the dead, moreover, tell no tales, and the living sing praises for their miraculous escape. El medico lleva la plata, pero Dios es que sana!—God works the cure, the doctor sacks the fee! Meanwhile the sextons are busy and merry, as those in Hamlet, and as indeed all gravediggers are, when they have a job on hand that will be paid for; deeply do they dig into the silent earth, that bourn from whence no travellers return to blab. They sing and jest, while dust is heaped on dust, and the corpus delicti covered, and with it the blunders of the medico; thus all parties, the deceased excepted, are well satisfied; the man with the lancet is content that disagreeable evidence should be put out of sight, the fellow-labourer with the spade is thankful that constant means of living should be afforded to him; and when the funeral is over, both carry out the proverbial practice of Peninsular survivors: Los muertos en la huesa, y los vivos Á la mesa, the dead in their grave, the quick to their dinner.

But at no period were Spaniards careful even of their own lives, and much less of those of others, being a people of untender bowels. Familiarity with pain blunts much of the finer feelings of persons employed even in our hospitals, for those who live by the dead have only an undertaker’s sympathy for the living, and are as dull to the poetry of innocent health, as Mr. Giblet is to a sportive house-fed lamb. Matters are not improved in Spain, where the wounds, blood, and slaughterings of the pastime bull-fight, the mueran or death mob-cries, and pasele por las armas, the shoot him on the spot, the Draco and Durango decrees, and practices of all in power, educate all sexes to indifference to blood; thus the fatal knife-stab or surgeon’s cut are viewed as cosas de EspaÑa and things of course. The philosophy of the general indifference to life in Spain, which almost amounts to Oriental fatalism, in the number of executions and general resignation to bloodshed, arises partly from life among the many being at best but a struggle for existence; thus in setting it in the cast, the player only stakes coppers, and when one is removed, there is somewhat less difficulty for survivors; hence every one is for himself and for to-day; aprÈs moi le dÉluge, el ultimo mono se ahoga, the last monkey is drowned, or as we say, the devil takes the hindmost.

The neglect of well-supported, well-regulated hospitals, has recoiled on the Spaniards. The rising profession are deprived of the advantages of walking them, and thus beholding every nice difficulty solved by experienced masters. Recently some efforts have been made in large towns, especially on the coasts, to introduce reforms and foreign ameliorations; but official jobbing and ignorant routine are still among the diseases that are not cured in Spain. In 1811, when the English army was at Cadiz, a physician, named Villarino, urged by some of our indignant surgeons, brought the disgraceful condition of Spanish hospitals before the Cortes. A commission was appointed, and their sad report, still extant, details how the funds, food, wine, &c., destined for the patients were consumed by the managers and their subalterns. The results were such as might be expected; the authorities held together, and persecuted Villarino as a revolucionario, or reformer, and succeeded in disgracing him. The superintendent of this establishment was the notorious Lozano de Torres, who starved the English army after Talavera, and was “a thief and a liar,” in the words of the Duke. The Regency, after this very exposure of his hospital, promoted him to the civil government of Old Castile; and Ferdinand VII., in 1817, made him Minister of Justice.

As buildings, the hospitals are generally very large; but the space is as thinly tenanted as the unpeopled wastes of Spain. In England wards are wanting for patients—in Spain, patients for wards. The names of some of the greatest hospitals are happily chosen; that of Seville, for instance, is called La Sangre, the blood, or Las Cinco Llagas, the five bleeding wounds of our Saviour, which are sculptured over the portal like bunches of grapes. Blood is an ominous name for this house and home of Sangrado, where the lancet, like the Spanish knife, gives no quarter. In instruments of life and death, this establishment resembled a Spanish arsenal, being wanting in everything at the critical moment; its dispensary, as in the shop of Shakspere’s apothecary, presented a beggarly account of empty pill-boxes, while as to a visiting Brodie, the part of that Hamlet was left out. The grand hospital at Madrid is called el general, the General, and the medical assistance is akin to the military co-operation of such Spanish generals as LapeÑa and Venegas, who in the moment of need left Graham at Barrosa, and the Duke at Talavera, without a shadow of aid. There is nothing new in this, if the old proverb tells truth, socorros de EspaÑa, o tarde o nunca; Spanish succours arrive late or never. In cases of battle, war, and sudden death as in peace, the professional men, military or medical, are apt to assist in the meaning of the French word assister, which signifies to be present without taking any part in what is going on. And this applies, where knocks on the head are concerned, not to the medical men only, but to the universal Spanish nation; when any one is stabbed in the streets, he will infallibly bleed to death, unless the authorities arrive in time to pick him up, and to bind up his wounds: every one else—Englishmen excepted, we describe things witnessed—passes on the other side; not from any fear at the sight of blood, nor abhorrence of murder, but from the dread which every Spaniard feels at the very idea of getting entangled in the meshes of La Justicia, whose ministers lay hold of all who interfere or are near the body as principals or witnesses, and Spanish justice, if once it gets a man into its fangs, never lets him go until drained of his last farthing.

The schools and hospitals, especially in the inland remote cities, are very deficient in all improved mechanical appliances and modern discoveries, and the few which are to be met with are mostly of French and second-rate manufacture. It is much the same with their medical treatises and technical works; all is a copy, and a bad one; it has been found to be much easier to translate and borrow, than to invent; therefore, as in modern art and literature, there is little originality in Spanish medicine. It is chiefly a veneering of other men’s ideas, or an adaptation of ancient and Moorish science. Most of their terms of medicinal art, as well as of drugs, jalea, elixir, jarave, rob, sorbete, julepe, &c., are purely Arabic, and indicate the sources from whence the knowledge was obtained, for there is no surer historical test than language of the origin from whence the knowledge of the science was derived with its phraseology; and whenever Spaniards depart from the daring ways of their ancestors, it is to adopt a timid French system. The few additions to their medical libraries are translations from their neighbours, just as the scanty materia medica in their apothecaries’ shops is rendered more dangerous and ineffective by quack nostrums from Paris. It is a serious misfortune to sanative science in the Peninsula, that all that is known of the works of thoughtful, careful Germany, of practical, decided England, is passed through the unfair, inaccurate alembic of French translation; thus the original becomes doubly deteriorated, and the sacred cosmopolitan cause of truth and fact is too often sacrificed to the Gallic mania of suppressing both, for the honour of their own country. Can it be wondered, therefore, that the acquaintance of the Spanish faculty with modern works, inventions, and operations is very limited, or that their text-books and authorities should too often be still Galen, Celsus, Hippocrates, and Boerhaave? The names of Hunter, Harvey, and Astley Cooper, are scarcely more known among their M.D.’s than the last discoveries of Herschel; the light of such distant planets has not had time to arrive.

To this day the Colegio de San Carlos, or the College of Surgeons at Madrid, relies much on teaching the obstetric art by means of wax preparations; but learning a trade on paper is not confined in Spain to medical students; the great naval school at Seville is dedicated to San Telmo, who, uniting in himself the attributes of the ancient Castor and Pollux, appears in storms at the mast-head in the form of lights to rescue seamen. Hence, whenever it comes on to blow, the pious crews of Spanish crafts fall on their knees, and depend on this marine Hercules, instead of taking in sail, and putting the helm up. Our tars, who love the sea propter se, for better for worse, having no San Telmo to help them in foul weather (although the somewhat irreverent gunner of the Victory did call him of Trafalgar Saint Nelson), go to work and perform the miracle themselves—aide toi, et le ciel t’aidera. In our time, the middies in this college were taught navigation in a room, from a small model of a three-decker placed on a large table; and thus at least they were not exposed to sea-sickness. The Infant Antonio, Lord High Admiral of Spain, was walking in the Retiro gardens near the pond, when it was proposed to cross in a boat; he declined, saying, “Since I sailed from Naples to Spain I have never ventured on water.” But, in this and some other matters, things are managed differently on the Thames and the BÆtis. Thus, near Greenwich Hospital, a floating frigate, large as life, is the school of young chips of old blocks, who every day behold in the veterans of Cape St. Vincent and Trafalgar living examples of having “done their duty.” The evidence of former victories thus becomes a guarantee for the realization of their young hopes, and the future is assured by the past.

Next to the barracks, prisons, arsenals, and fortresses of Spain, the establishments for suffering mortality are the least worth seeing, and are the most to be avoided by wise travellers, who can indulge in much better specimens at home. This assertion will be better understood by a sketch or two taken on the spot a few years ago. The so-called asylums for lunatics are termed in Spanish hospitales de locos, a word derived from the Arabic, locao, mad; they, like the cognate Morostans (????) of Cairo, were generally so mismanaged, that the directors appeared to be only desirous of obtaining admission themselves. Insanity seemed to derange both the intellects of the patients and to harden the bowels of their attendants, while the usual misappropriation of the scanty funds produced a truly reckless, makeshift, wretched result. There was no attempt at classification, which indeed is no thing of Spain. The inmates were crowded together,—the monomaniac, the insane, the raving mad,—in one confusion of dirt and misery, where they howled at each other, chained like wild beasts, and were treated even worse than criminals, for the passions of the most outrageous were infuriated by the savage lash. There was not even a curtain to conceal the sad necessities of these human beings, then reduced to animals: everything was public even unto death, whose last groan was mingled with the frantic laugh of the surviving spectators. In some rare cases the bodies of those whose minds are a void, were confined in solitary cells, with no other companions save affliction. Of these, many, when first sent there by friends and relations to be put out of the way, were not mad, soon indeed to become so, as solitude, sorrow, and the iron entered their brain. These establishments, which the natives ought to hide in shame, were usually among the first lions which they forced on the stranger, and especially on the Englishman, since, holding our worthy countrymen to be all locos, they naturally imagined that they would be quite at home among the inmates.

They, in common with many others on the Continent, entertain a notion that all Britons bold have a bee in their bonnet; they think so on many, and perhaps not always unreasonable, grounds. They see them preferring English ways, sayings, and doings, to their own, which of itself appears to a Spaniard, as to a Frenchman, to be downright insanity. Then our countrymen tell the truth in bulletins, use towels, and remove superfluous hairs daily. And letting alone other minor exhibitions of eccentricity, are not the natives of England, Scotland, and Ireland guilty of three actions, any one of which would qualify for Bedlam if the Lord Chancellor were to issue a writ de lunatico inquiriendo?—have they not bled for Spain, in purse and person, on the battlefield, on the railroad, in the Stock Exchange?—

To return, however, to Spanish madmen and their hospitals, the sight was a sad one, and alike disgraceful to the sane, and degrading to the insane native. The wild maniacs implored a “loan” from the foreigner, for from their own countrymen they had received a stone. A sort of madness is indeed seldom wanting to the frantic energy and intense eagerness of all Spanish mendicants; and here, albeit the reasoning faculties were gone, the national propensity to beg and borrow survived the wreck of intellect, and in fact it was and is the indestructible “common sense” of the country.

There was generally some particular patient whose aggravated misery made him or her the especial object of cruel curiosity. Thus, at Toledo, in 1843, the keepers (fit wild beast term) always conducted strangers to the cage or den of the wife of a celebrated Captain-General and first-rate fusilier of Catalonia, an officer superior in power to our Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. She was permitted to wallow in naked filth, and be made a public show. The Moors, at least, do not confine their harmless female maniacs, who wander naked through the streets, while the men are honoured as saints, whose minds are supposed to be wandering in heaven. The old Iberian doctors, according to Pliny, professed to cure madness with the herb vettonica, and hydrophobia with decoction of the cynorrhodon or dog-rose-water, as being doubly unpalateable to the rabid canine species. The modern Spaniards seemed only to desire, by ignorance and ill-usage, to darken any lucid interval into one raving uniformity.

The foundling hospitals were, when we last examined them, scarcely better managed than the lunatic asylums; they are called casas de espositos, houses of the exposed—or la Cuna, the cradle, as if they were the cradle, not the coffin, of miserable infants. Most large cities in Spain have one of these receptacles; the principal being in the Levitical towns, and the natural fruit of a rich celibate clergy, both regular and secular. The Cuna in our time might have been defined as a place where innocents were massacred, and natural children deserted by their unnatural parents were provided for by being slowly starved. These hospitals were first founded at Milan in 787, by a priest named Datheus. That of Seville, which we will describe, was established by the clergy of the cathedral, and was managed by twelve directors, six lay and six clerical; few, however, attended or contributed save in subjects. The hospital is situate in the Calle de la Cuna; near an aperture left for charitable donations, is a marble tablet with this verse from the Psalms, inscribed in Latin, “When my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me in.”

A wicket door is pierced in the wall, which opens on being tapped to admit the sinless children of sin; and a nurse sits up at night to receive those exposed by parents who hide their guilt in darkness.

Some of the babies are already dying, and are put in here in order to avoid the expense of a funeral; others are almost naked, while a few are well supplied with linen and necessaries. These latter are the offspring of the better classes, by whom a temporary concealment is desired. With such the most affecting letters are left, praying the nurses to take more than usual care of a child which will surely be one day reclaimed, and a mark or ornament is usually fastened to the infant, in order that it may be identified hereafter, if called for, and such were the precise customs in antiquity. Every particular regarding every exposed babe is registered in a book, which is a sad record of human crime and remorse.

Those children which are afterwards reclaimed, pay about sixpence for every day during which the hospital has maintained them; but little attention is paid to the appeals for particular care, or to the promise of redemption, for Spaniards seldom trust each other. Unless some name is sent with it, the child is baptized with one given by the matron, and it usually is that of the saint of the day of its admission. The number was very great, and increased with increasing poverty, while the funds destined to support the charges decreased from the same cause. There is a certain and great influx nine months after the Holy week and Christmas, when the whole city, male and female, pass the night in kneeling to relics and images, &c.; accordingly nine months afterwards, in January and November, the daily numbers often exceed the usual average by fifteen to twenty.

There is always a supply of wet nurses at the Cuna, but they are generally such as from bad character cannot obtain situations in private families; the usual allotment was three children to one nurse. Sometimes, when a respectable woman is looking out for a place as wet-nurse, and is anxious not to lose her breast of milk, she goes, in the meanwhile, to the Cuna, when the poor child who draws it off plumps up a little, and then, when the supply is withdrawn, withers and dies. The appointed nurses dole out their milk, not according to the wants of the infants, but to make it do for their number. Some few are farmed out to poor mothers who have lost their own babe; they receive about eight shillings a month, and these are the children which have the best chance of surviving, for no woman who has been a mother, and has given suck, will willingly, when left alone, let an infant die. The nurses of the Cuna were familiar with starvation, and even if their milk of human kindness were not dried up or soured, they have not the means of satisfying their hungry number. The proportion who died was frightful; it was indeed an organized system of infanticide. Death is a mercy to the child, and a saving to the establishment; a grown-up man’s life never was worth much in Spain, much less that of a deserted baby. The exposure of children to immediate death by the Greeks and Romans, was a trifle less cruel than the protracted dying in these Spanish charnel-houses. This Cuna, when last we visited it, was managed by an inferior priest, who, a true Spanish unjust steward, misapplied the funds. He became rich, like Gil Blas’s overseer at Valladolid, by taking care of the property of the poor and fatherless; his well-garnished quarters and portly self were in strange contrast with the condition of his wasted charges. Of these, the sick and dying were separated from the healthy; the former were placed in a large room, once the saloon of state, whose gilded roof and fair proportions mocked the present misery. The infants were laid in rows on dirty mattresses along on the floor, and were left unheeded and unattended. Their large heads, shrivelled necks, hollow eyes, and wax wan figures, were shadowed with coming death. Called into existence by no wish or fault of their own, their brief span was run out ere begun, while their mother was far away exclaiming, “When I have sufficiently wept for his birth, I will weep for his death.”

Those who were more healthy lay paired in cradles arranged along a vast room; but famine was in their cheeks, need starved in their eyes, and their shrill cry pained the ear on passing the threshold; from their being underfed, they were restless and ever moaning. Their existence has indeed begun with a sob, with El primer sollozo de la Cuna, the first sigh of the cradle, as Rioja says, but all cry when entering the world, while many leave it with smiles. Some, the newly exposed, just parted from their mother’s breast, having sucked their last farewell, looked plump and rosy; they slept soundly, blind to the future, and happily unconscious of their fate.

About one in twelve survived to idle about the hospital, ill clad, ill fed, and worse taught. The boys were destined for the army, the girls for domestic service, nay, for worse, if public report did not wrong their guardian priest. They grew up to be selfish and unaffectionate; having never known what kindness was, their young hearts closed ere they opened; “the world was not their friend, nor the world’s law.” It was on their heads that the barber learned to shave, and on them were visited the sins of their parents; having had none to care for them, none to love, they revenged themselves by hating mankind. Their occupation consisted in speculating on who their parents may be, and whether they should some day be reclaimed and become rich. A few occasionally are adopted by benevolent and childless persons, who, visiting the Cuna, take a fancy to an interesting infant; but the child is liable ever after to be given up to its parents, should they reclaim it. Townshend mentions an Oriental custom at Barcelona, where the girls when marriageable were paraded in procession through the streets, and any desirous of taking a wife was at liberty to select his object by “throwing his handkerchief.” This Spanish custom still prevails at Naples.

Such was the Cuna of Seville when we last beheld it. It is now, as we have recently heard with much pleasure, admirably conducted, having been taken in charge by some benevolent ladies, who here as elsewhere are the best nurses and guardians of man in his first or second infancy, not to say of every intermediate stage.

Our readers will concur in deeming that wight unfortunate who falls ill in Spain, as, whatever be his original complaint, it is too often followed by secondary and worse symptoms, in the shape of the native doctor; and if the judgment passed by Spaniards on that member of society be true, Esculapius cannot save the invalid from the crows; the faculty even at Madrid are little in advance of their provincial colleagues, nay, often they are more destructive, since, being practitioners in the only court, the heaven on earth, they are in proportion superior to the medical men of the rest of the world, of whom of course they can learn nothing. They are, however, at least a century behind their brother professors of England. An unreasonable idea of self-excellence arises both in nations and in individuals, from having no knowledge of the relative merits of others, and from having few grounds or materials whereon to raise comparison; it exists therefore the strongest among the most uninformed and those who mix the least in the world. Thus in spite of manifold deficiencies, some of which will be detailed, the self-esteem of these medical men exceeds, if possible, that of the military; both have killed their “ten thousands.” They hold themselves to be the first sabreurs, physicians, and surgeons on earth, and the best qualified to wield the shears of the ParcÆ. It would be a waste of time to try to dispel this fatal delusion; the well-intentioned monitor would simply be set down as malevolent, envious, and an ass; for they think their ignorance the perfection of human skill. Few foreigners can ever hope to succeed among them, nor can any native who may have studied abroad, easily introduce a better system: his elder brethren would make common cause against him as an innovator; he would be summoned to no consultations, the most lucrative branch of practice, while the confessors would poison the ears of the women (who govern the men) with cautions against the danger to their souls, of having their bodies cured by a Jew, a heretic, or a foreigner, for the terms are almost convertible.

Meanwhile, as in courts of justice and other matters in Spain, all sounds admirably on paper—the forms, regulations, and system are perfect in theory. Colleges of physicians and surgeons superintend the science, the professors are members of infinite learned societies, lectures are delivered, examinations are conducted, and certificates duly signed and sealed, are given. The young Galenista is furnished with a licence to kill, but what is wanting from beginning to end, to practitioner and patient, is life. The medical men know, nevertheless, every aphorism of the ancients by rote, and discourse as eloquently and plausibly on any case as do their ministers in Cortes. Both write capital theories and opinions extemporaneously. Their splendid language supplies words which seem to have cost thought. What is deficient is that clinical and best of education where the case is brought before the student with the corollary of skilful treatment: accidental deaths are consequently more common than cures.

Dissection again is even now repulsive to their Oriental prejudices; the pupils learn rather by plates, diagrams, models, preparations, and skeletons, than from anatomical experiments on a subject. As among the ancients and in the East to this day an idea is prevalent among the masses in Spain, that the touch of a dead body pollutes; nor is the objection raised by the clergy, that it savours of impiety to mutilate a form made in the image of God, yet exploded. It will be remembered by our medical readers, if we have any, that Vezalius, the father of modern anatomy, when at Madrid was demanded by the Inquisition from Philip II., to be burnt for having performed an operation. The king sent him to expiate his sin by a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; he was shipwrecked, and died of starvation at Zante.

Can it be wondered at, with such a theoretical education, that practice should continue to be antiquated, classical, and Oriental, and necessarily very limited? In difficult cases of compound fracture, gun-shot wounds, the doctors give the patient up almost at once, although they continue to meet and take fees, until death relieves him of his complicated sufferings. In chronic cases and slighter fractures they are less dangerous; for as their pottering remedies do neither good nor harm, the struggle for life and death is left to nature, who sometimes works the cure. In acute diseases and inflammations they seldom succeed; for however fond of the lancet, they only nibble with the case, and are scared at the bold decided practice of Englishmen, whereat they shrug up shoulders, invoke saints, and descant learnedly on the impossibility of treating complaints under the bright sun and warm air of Catholic Spain, after the formulÆ of cold, damp, and foggy, heretical England.

Most Spaniards who can afford it have their family or bolster doctor, the Medico de Cabecera, and their confessor. This pair take care of the bodies and souls of the whole house, bring them gossip, share their puchero, purse, and tobacco. They rule the husband through the women and the nursery, nor do they allow their exclusive privileges to be infringed on. Etiquette is the life of a Spaniard, and often his death, since every one has heard (the Spaniards swear it is all a French lie) that Philip III. was killed, rather than violate a form. He was seated too near the fire, and, although burning, of course as king of Spain the impropriety of moving himself never entered his head, and when he requested one of his attendants to do so, none, in the absence of the proper officer whose duty it was to superintend the royal chair, ventured to take that improper liberty. In case of sudden emergencies among her Catholic Majesty’s subjects, unless the family doctor be present, any other one, even if called in, generally declines acting until the regular Esculapius arrives. An English medical friend of ours saved a Spaniard’s life by chancing to arrive when the patient, in an apoplectic fit, was foaming at the mouth and wrestling with death; all this time a strange doctor was sitting quietly in the next room smoking his cigar at the brasero, the chafing-dish, with the women of the family. Our friend instantly took 30 ounces from the sufferer’s arm, not one of the Spanish party even moving from their seats. Thus Apollo preserved him! The same medical gentleman happened to accidentally call on a person who had an inflammation in the cornea of the eye: on questioning he found that many consultations had been previously held, at which no determination was come to until at the last, when sea-bathing was prescribed, with a course of asses’ milk and Chiclana snake-broth; our heretical friend, who lacked the true faith, just touched the diseased part with caustic. When this application was reported at the next consultation, the native doctors all crossed themselves with horror and amazement, which was increased when the patient recovered in a week.

As a general rule at the first visit, they look as wise as possible, shake their heads before the women, and always magnify the complaint, which is a safe proceeding all over the world, since all physicians can either cure or kill the patient; in the first event they get greater credit and reward, while in the other alternative, the disease, having been beyond the reach of art, bears the blame. The medicos exhibit considerable ingenuity in prolonging an apparent necessity for a continuance of their visits. A common interest induces them to pull together—a rare exception in Spain—and play into each other’s hands. The family doctor, whenever appearances will in anywise justify him, becomes alarmed, and requires a consultation, a Junta. What any Spanish Junta is in affairs of peace or war need not be explained; and these are like the rest, they either do nothing, or what they do do, is done badly. At these meetings from three to seven Medicos de apelacion, consulting physicians, attend, or more, according to the patient’s purse: each goes to the sick man, feels his pulse, asks him some questions, and then retires to the next room to consult, generally allowing the invalid the benefit of hearing what passes. The Protomedico, or senior, takes the chair; and while all are lighting their cigars, the family doctor opens the case, by stating the birth, parentage, and history of the patient, his constitution, the complaint, and the medicines hitherto prescribed. The senior next rises, and gives his opinion, often speaking for half an hour; the others follow in their rotation, and then the Protomedico, like a judge, sums up, going over each opinion with comments: the usual termination is either to confirm the previous treatment, or make some insignificant alteration: the only certain thing is to appoint another consultation for the next day, for which the fees are heavy, each taking from three to five dollars. The consultation often lasts many hours, and becomes at last a chronic complaint.

It must be said, in justice to these able practitioners, that as a body they are careful in their dress: external appearance, not to say finery in apparel, raises in the eyes of the many, a profession which here is of uncertain social standing. On the same principle how careful is the costume, how brilliant are the shirt-studs of foreign fiddlers when in England! The worthy Andalucian doctor of our Spanish family, and an efficient one, as two of his patients now at rest could testify, never paid a visit except when gaily attired. So the Matador, when he enters the arena to kill the bull, is clad as a first-rate dandy majo. This attention to person arises partly from the Moro-Ibero love of ostentation, and partly from sound Galenic principles and a high sense of professional duty. The ancient authorities enforced on the practitioner an attention to everything which created cheerful impressions, in order that he might arrive at the patient’s pillow like a messenger of good tidings, and as a minister of health, not of death. They held that a grave costume might suggest unpleasant associations to the sick man. Raven-coloured undertaker tights, and a funereal, cadaverous look to match, are harbingers of blue devils and black crape, which no man, even when in blessed health, contemplates with comfort; while the effect of such a facies hippocratica staring in the face of a poor devil whose life is despaired of, must be fatal.

The prescriptions of these well-dressed gentlemen are somewhat more old-fashioned than their coats. Their grand recipe in the first instance is to do nothing beyond taking the fee and leaving nature alone, or, as the set phrase has it, dejar Á la naturaleza. The young and those whose constitutions are strong and whose complaints are weak, do well under the healing influence of their kind nurse Nature, and recover through her vis medicatrix, which, if not obstructed by art, everywhere works wonderful cures. The Sangrado will say that a Spanish man or woman is more marvellously made than a clock, inasmuch as his or her machinery has a power in itself to regulate its own motions, and to repair accidents; and therefore the watchmaker who is called in, need not be in a hurry to take it to pieces when a little oiling and cleaning may set all to rights. The remedies, when the proper time for their application arrives, are simple, and are sought for rather among the vegetables of the earth’s surface than from the minerals in its bowels. The external recipes consist chiefly of papers smeared with lard, applied to the abdomen, sinapisms and mustard poultices to the feet, fomentations of marsh-mallows or camomile flowers, and the aid of the curate. The internal remedies, the tisanes, the Leches de Almendras, de Burras, decoctions of rice, and so forth, succeed each other in such regular order, that the patient scholar has nothing to do but repeat the medical passages in Horace’s ‘Satires.’ In no country, however, can all the sick be always expected to recover even then, since “Para todo hay remedio, sino para la muerte”—“There is a remedy for everything except death.” If by chance the patient dies, the doctor and the disease bear the blame. Perhaps the old Iberian custom was the safest; then the sick were exposed outside their doors, and the advice of casual passengers was asked, whose prescriptions were quite as likely to answer as images, relics, snake-soup, or milk of almonds or asses:—

Nor, if the doctors knew how to prescribe them, are the nicer and most efficacious remedies, the preparations of modern chemical science, to be procured in any except the very largest towns; although, as in Romeo’s apothecary, “the needy” shelves are filled with empty boxes “to make a show.” The trade of a druggist is anything but free, and the numbers are limited; none may open a Botica without a strict examination and licence; although, of course, this is to be had for money. None may sell any potent medicine, except according to the prescription of some local medical man; everything is a monopoly. The commonest drugs are often either wanting or grossly adulterated, but, as in their arsenals and larders, no dispenser will admit such destitution; hay de todo, I have every thing, swears he, and gallantly makes up the prescription simply by substituting other ingredients; and as the correct ones nine times out of ten are harmless, no great injury is sustained. There is nothing new in this, for Quevedo, in his Zahurdas de Pluton, or Satan’s Pigsties, introduces a yellow-faced bilious judge scourging Spanish apothecaries for doing exactly the same, “Hence your shops,” quoth he, for he both preached and flogged, “are arsenals of death, whose ministers here get their pills (balls rather) which banish souls from the earth;” but these and other things have been long done with impunity, as Pliny said, no physician was ever hung for murder. One advantage of general distrust in drugs and doctors is, that the great masses of the people think very little about them or their complaints: thus they escape all fancied and imaginary complaints, which, if indulged in, become chronic, and more difficult to cure than those afflicting the body—for who can minister to a mind diseased? Again, from this want of confidence in remedies, very little physic at all is taken; owing to this limited demand, druggists’ shops are as rare in Spain as those of booksellers. No red, green, or blue bottles illuminate the streets at night, and there are more of these radiant orbs in the Fore street of the capital of the west of England, than in the whole capital of the Spains, albeit with a population six times greater. It is true that, at Madrid, feeding on plum-pudding, diluted with sour cider and clotted cream, is not habitual.

Many of the prescriptions of Spain are local, and consist of some particular spring, some herb, some animal, or some particular air, or place, or bath, is recommended, which, however, is said to be very dangerous, unless some resident local medico be first consulted. One example is as good as a thousand: near Cadiz is Chiclana, to which the faculty invariably transport those patients whom they cannot cure, that is, about ninety-five in the hundred; so in chronic complaints sea-bathing there, is prescribed, with a course of asses’ milk; and if that fail, then a broth made of a long harmless snake, which abounds in the aromatic wastes near Barrosa. We have forgotten the generic name of this valuable reptile of Esculapius, one of which our naturalists should take alive, and either breed from it in the Regent’s Park, or at least investigate his comparative anatomy with those exquisite vipers which make, as we have shown, such delicious pork at Montanches.

We cannot refrain from giving one more prescription. Many of the murders in Spain should rather be called homicides, being free from malice prepense, and caused by the readiness of the national cuchillo, with which all the lower classes are armed like wasps; it is thus always at hand, when the blood is most on fire, and before any refrigeratory process commences. Thus, where an unarmed Englishman closes his fist, a Spaniard opens his knife. This rascally instrument becomes fatal in jealous broils, when the lower classes light their anger at the torch of the Furies, and prefer using, to speaking daggers. Then the thrust goes home; and however unskilled the regular Sangrados may be in anatomy and handling the scalpel, the universal people know exactly how to manage their knife and where to plant its blow; nor is there any mistake, for the wound, although not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, “’t will serve.” It is usually given after the treacherous fashion of their Oriental and Iberian ancestors, and if possible by a stab behind, and “under the fifth rib;” and “one blow” is enough. The blade, like the cognate Arkansas or Bowie knife of the Yankees, will “rip up a man right away,” or drill him until a surgeon can see through his body. The number killed on great religious and other festivals, exceeds those of most Spanish battles in the field, although the occurrence is scarcely noticed in the newspapers, so much is it a matter of course; but crimes which call forth a second edition and double sheet in our papers, are slurred over on the Continent, for foreigners conceal what we most display.

In minor cases of flirtation, where capital punishment is not called for, the offending party just gashes the cheek of the peccant one, and suiting the word to the action observes, “ya estas senalaa;” “Now you are marked.” This is precisely winkel quarte, the gash in the cheek, which is the only salve for the touchy honour of a German student, when called ein dummer junge, a stupid youth:—

Again, “Mira que te pego, mira que te mato,” “Mind I don’t strike thee—mind I don’t kill thee;” are playful fondling expressions of a Maja to a Majo. When this particular gash is only threatened, the Seville phrase was, “Mira que te pinto un jabeque;” “Take care that I don’t draw you a xebeck” (the sharp Mediterranean felucca). “They jest at wounds who never felt a scar,” but whenever this jabeque has really been inflicted the patient, ashamed of the stigma, and not having the face to show himself or herself, is naturally anxious to recover a good character and skin, which only one cosmetic, one sovereign panacea, can effect. This in Philip IV.’s time was cat’s grease which then removed such superfluous marks; while Don Quixote considered the oil of Apariccio to be the only cure for scratches inflicted by female or feline claws.

In process of time, as science advanced, this was superseded by Unto del hombre, or man’s grease. Our estimable friend Don Nicolas Molero, a surgeon in high practice at Seville, assured us that previously to the French invasion he had often prepared this cataleptic specific, which used to be sold for its weight in gold, until, having been adulterated by unprincipled empirics, it fell into disrepute. The receipt of the balsam of Fierabras has puzzled the modern commentators of Don Quixote, but the kindness of Don Nicolas furnished us with the ingredients of this pommade divine, or rather mortale. “Take a man in full health who has been just killed, the fresher the better, pare off the fat round the heart, melt it over a slow fire, clarify, and put it away in a cool place for use.” The multitudinous church ceremonies and holidays in Spain, which bring crowds together, combined with the sun, wine, and women, have always ensured a supply of fine subjects.

In Spain, as elsewhere, the doctor mania is an expensive amusement, which the poor and more numerous class, especially in rural localities, seldom indulge in. Like their mules, they are rarely ill, and they only take to their beds to die. They have, it is true, a parish doctor, to whom certain districts are apportioned; when he in his turn succumbs to death, or is otherwise removed, the vacancy is usually announced in the newspapers, and a new functionary is often advertised for. His trifling salary is made up of payments in money and in kind, so much in corn and so much in cash; the leading principle is cheapness, and, as in our new poor-law, that proficient is preferred, who will contract to do for the greatest number at the smallest charge. His constituents decline sometimes to place full confidence in his skill or alacrity: they oftener do consult the barber, the quack, or curandero; for there is generally in orthodox Spain some charlatan wherever sword, rosary, pen, or lancet is to be wielded. The nostrums, charms, relics, incantations, &c., to which recourse is had, when not mediÆval, are scarcely Christian; but the spiritual pharmacopoeia of this land of Figaro is far too important to form the tail-piece of any chapter.