Henry T. Tuckerman

‘Throw physic to the dogs.’
Macbeth.

‘Friend of my life, which did not you prolong,
The world had wanted many an idle song.’
Pope.

In the moving panoramas of cities are to be seen certain vehicles of all degrees of locomotive beauty and convenience, from the glossy and silver-knobbed carriage with its prancing grays, to the bacheloric-looking sulky with its one gaunt horse, in which are seated gentlemen of a learned and professional aspect, usually wearing spectacles, and always an air of intense respectability, or of contemplation and seriousness. They recognize numerous acquaintances as they pass with a peculiar smile and nod, and are usually accompanied by ‘a little man-boy to hold the horse,’ as the French cook in the play defines a tigre. These mysterious personages rejoice in the title of Doctor—once a very distinctive appellation, but now as common as authorship and travelling. A moralist, watching them gliding by amid fashionable equipages, crowded omnibuses, hasty pedestrians, and all the phenomena of life in a metropolis, would find a striking contrast between the rushing tide around and the hushed rooms they enter. To how many their visit is the one daily event that breaks in upon the monotony of illness and confinement; how many eyes watch them with eager suspense, and listen to their opinion as the fiat of destiny; how many feverishly expect their coming, shrink from their polished steel, rejoice in their cheering ministrations, or dread their long bills! ‘The Doctor!’—a word that stirs the extremest moods, despair and jollity!

There is no profession which depends so much for its efficiency on personal traits as that of medicine; for the utility of technical knowledge here is derived from individual judgment, tact, and sympathy. In other words, the physician has to deal with an unknown element. Between the specific ailment and the remedy there are peculiarities of constitution, the influence of circumstances, and the laws of nature to be considered; so that although the medical adviser may be thoroughly versed in physiology, the materia medica, and the symptoms of disease, if he possess not the discrimination, the observant skill, and the reflective power to apply his learning wisely, it is comparatively unavailing. The aim of the divine and the attorney, however impeded by obstacles, is reached by a more direct course; logic, eloquence, and zeal, united to professional attainment, will insure success in law and divinity; but in physic, certain other qualities in the man are requisite to give scope to the professor. Hence we associate a certain originality with the idea of a doctor; are apt to regard the vocation at the two extremes of superiority and pretension, and justly estimate the individuals of the class according to their capacity of insight and their principles of action, rather than by their mere acquisitions or rank as teachers. The uncertainty of medicine, as a practical art, thus induces a stronger reliance on individual endowments than is the case in any other liberal pursuit.

A philosophical history of the art of healing would be not less curious than suggestive. The absurd theories which checked its progress for centuries, the secrets hoarded by Egyptian priests, the union of medical knowledge with ancient systems of philosophy, the epoch of Galen, the Arabian and Salerno schools, the reformation of Paracelsus, the brilliant discoveries which, at long intervals, illumined the track of the science, and the enlightened principles now realized—if fully discussed—would form an extraordinary chapter in the biography of man. Herein, as with other vocations, modern division of labour has concentrated professional aptitudes. ‘L’ affluence des postulants,’ says Balzac, ‘a forcÉ la mÉdecine a se diviser en catÉgories; il y a le mÉdecin qui professe, le mÉdecin politique et le mÉdecin militant et la cinquiÈme divisions, celle des docteurs qui vendent des remÈdes.’

St. Luke and the Good Samaritan are yet the favourite signs of apothecaries, confirming the original charity of the art; and in the south of Europe may still be seen over the barbers’ shops the effigy of a human arm spouting blood from an open vein—an indication of the once universal custom of periodical depletion. It is now acknowledged that diverse climates require modified treatment of the same disease; that nervous susceptibility is far greater in one latitude than another, and that habits of life essentially individualize the constitution. Indeed, the widest difference exists in the relation of persons to the doctor; some never see him, and others must have a consultation upon the most trifling ailment,—so great is the dependence which can be had upon nature, and so extreme both the faith and the scepticism which exist in regard to curative science.

Popular literature is full of hits at the profession. ‘Le barbier fait plus de la moitiÉ d’ un mÉdecin,’ says MoliÈre, who, in La Malade Imaginaire, has so acutely given the current philosophy of the subject by satirizing the pedantry and charlatanism of the doctors of his day; ‘Nous voyons que, dans la maladie tout le monde a recours aux mÉdecins;—c’est une marque de la faiblesse humaine et non pas de la vÉritÉ de leur art;’ and of all ailments the hardest to cure is ‘la maladie des mÉdecins.’ Imagination has been called by a German philosopher ‘the mediatrix, the nurse, the mover of all the several parts of our spiritual organism.’ ‘I have the worst luck of any physician under the cope of heaven,’ complains Sancho Panza; ‘other doctors kill their patients, and are paid for it too, and yet they are at no further trouble than scrawling two or three cramp words for some physical slip-slop, which the apothecaries are at all the pains to make up.’

It would seem, indeed, as if the advance of science improved medical practice negatively—that is, by inducing what in politics has been called a masterly inactivity; and there is no doubt that no small degree of the success attending Hahnemann’s theory is to be attributed to the comparative abstinence it inculcates in the use of remedial agents. The fact is a significant one, as indicative of the want of positive science in the healing art; and the consequent wisdom of leaving to nature, as far as possible, the restorative process. Indeed, to assist nature is acknowledged, by just observers, to be the only wise course; and this brings us to the inference that a good physician is necessarily a philosopher; it is incumbent on him, of all men, to exercise the inductive faculty; he must possess good causality, not only to reason justly on individual cases, but to apply the progress of science to the exigencies of disease. It is related of Bixio that such was his zeal for science, having long wished to ascertain whether a man instinctively turns when wounded in a vital part, asked his adversary in a duel to aim at one, and, although fatally hurt, exclaimed with ardour, as he involuntarily spun round—‘It is true, they do turn!’

The comparatively slow accumulation of scientific truth in regard to the treatment of disease, is illustrated by the fact that not until the lapse of two thousand years after medicine had assumed the rank of a science, under the auspices of Hippocrates, was the circulation of the blood discovered—an era in its history. The fiery discussion of the efficacy of inoculation, and its gradual introduction, is another significant evidence of the same general truth. But in our own day the rapid and valuable developments of chemistry have, in a measure, reversed the picture. Numerous alleviating and curative agents have been discovered; the gas of poisonous acids is found to eradicate, in many cases, the most fatal diseases of the eye; heat, more penetrating than can be created by other means, is eliminated from carbon in an aËriform state, passes through the cuticle without leaving a mark on its surface, and restores aching nerves or exhausted vitality. Vegetable and mineral substances are refined, analyzed, and combined with a skill never before imagined; opium yields morphine, and Peruvian bark quinine, and all the known salubrious elements are thus rendered infinitely subservient to the healing art. Chloroform is one of the most beneficent of these new agents; and has exorcised the demon of physical pain by a magical charm, without violating, in judicious hands, the integrity of nature.

There is a secret of curative art in which consists the genius of healing; it is that union of sympathy with intelligence, and of moral energy with magnetic gifts, whereby the tides of life are swayed, and one ‘can minister to a mind diseased.’ Fortunate is the patient who is attended by one thus endowed; but such are usually found out of the professional circle;—they are referees ordained by nature to settle the difficulties of inferior spirits; the arbiters recognized by instinct who soothe anger, reconcile doubt, amuse, elevate, and console, by a kind of moral alchemy; and potent coadjutors are they to the material aids of merely technical physicians. ‘Who dare say,’ asks RÉnan, in allusion to the calming and purifying influence of Jesus, ‘that in many cases, and apart from injuries of a dreaded character, the contact of an exquisite person is not worth all the resources of pharmacy?’ ‘It was agony to me,’ wrote Hahnemann, ‘to walk in darkness, with no other light than could be derived from books.’ One of his opponents, from this confession, infers the fallacy of his system; ‘the conviction,’ he observes, ‘is irresistibly forced upon us that he was not a born physician.’ If our ancestors were less enlightened in regard to hygiÈne, and if their physicians were less scrupulous in tampering with the functions of nature, they had one signal advantage over us in escaping the inhuman comments, made after every fatal issue, on the practice and the treatment adopted—no matter with how much conscientious intelligence. We not only suffer the pangs of bereavement, but the reproaches of devotees of each school of medicine and of rival doctors, of having by an unwise choice sacrificed the life for which we would have cheerfully resigned our own! Somewhat of this occult healing force might have been read in the serene countenance of Dr. Physic, of Philadelphia; it predominated in the benevolent founder of the Insane Asylum of Palermo, who learned from an attack of mental disorder how to feel for, and minister to, those thus afflicted. The late Preissnitz, of Graefenberg, seems to have enjoyed the gift which is as truly Nature’s indication of an aptitude for the art, as a sense of beauty in the poet. But this principle is ‘caviare to the general.’

Medicine has lost much of its inherent dignity by the same element, in modern times, that has degraded art, letters, and society—the spirit of trade. This agency encourages motives, justifies means, and leads to ends wholly at variance with high tone and with truth. The gentleman, the philosopher, the man of honour, and with them that keystone in the arch of character—self-respect, are wholly compromised in the process of sinking a liberal art into a common trade. In the economy of modern society, however, the physician has acquired a new influence; he has gained upon the monopoly of the priest: for while the spirit of inquiry, by trenching on the mysterious prerogatives which superstition once accorded, has retrenched the latter’s functions, the same agency, by extending the domain of science and rendering its claims popular, has enlarged the sphere of the other profession. To an extent, therefore, never before known, the doctor fills the office of confessor; his visits yield agreeable excitement to women with whom he gossips and sympathizes; admitted by the very exigency of the case to entire confidence, often revered as a counsellor and friend, as well as relied on as a healer, not infrequently he becomes the oracle of a household. Privileges like these, when used with benevolence and integrity, are doubtless honourable to both parties, and become occasions for the exercise of the noblest service and the highest sentiments of our nature; while, on the other hand, they are liable to the grossest abuse, where elevation of character and gentlemanly instincts are wanting. Accordingly there has sprung into existence, in our day, a personage best designated as the medical Jesuit; whose real vocation, as well as the process by which he acquires supremacy, fully justifies the appellation. Like his religious prototype, he operates through the female branches, who, in their turn, control the heads of families; and the extent to which the domestic arrangements, the social relations, and even the opinions of individuals are thus regulated, is truly surprising. ‘Women,’ says Mrs. Jameson, ‘are inclined to fall in love with priests and physicians, because of the help and comfort they derive from both in perilous moral and physical maladies. They believe in the presence of real pity, real sympathy, where the look and tone of each have become merely habitual and conventional, I may say professional.’ Yet a popular novelist, in his ideal portrait of the physician, justly claims superiority to impulse and casual sympathy as an essential requisite to success. ‘He must enter the room a calm intelligencer. He is disabled for his mission if he suffer aught to obscure the keen glance of his science.’[12]The natural history of the doctor has not yet been written, but the classes are easily nomenclated; we have all known the humorous, the urbane, the oracular, the facetious, the brusque, the elegant, the shrewd, the exquisite, the burly, the bold, and the fastidious; and the character of people may be inferred by their choice of each species. Those in whom taste predominates over intellect, will select a physician, for his agreeable personal qualities; while such as value essential traits, will compromise with the roughest exterior and the least flattering address for the sake of genuine skill and a vigorous and honest mind. As a general rule, in large cities, vanity seems to rule the selection; and it is a lamentable view of human nature to see the blind preference given to plausible but shallow men, whose smooth tongues or gallant air win them suffrages denied to good sense and candid intercourse. The most detestable genus is that we have described under the name of medical Jesuits; next in annoyance are the precisians; the most harmless of the weaker order are the gossips; and there is often little to choose in point of risk to ‘the house of life’ between the very timid and the dare-devils; in a great exigency the former, and in an ordinary case the latter are equally to be shunned. In the HorÆ SubsecivÆ of Dr. John Brown, we find some apt and needed counsel to the aspirants for medical success:—‘The young doctor must have for his main faculty, sense; but all will not do if Genius is not there; such a special therapeutic gift had Hippocrates, Sydenham, Pott, Purcell, John Hunter, Delpech, Dupuytren, Kellie, Cheyne, Baillie, and Abercrombie. Moreover, let me tell you, my young doctor friends, that a cheerful face and step and neckcloth and buttonhole, and an occasional hearty and kindly joke, and the power of executing and setting a-going a good laugh, are stock in our trade not to be despised.’ Brillat Savarin declares, doctors easily become gourmands because so well received.In Paris, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia, all the world over, the medical student is an exceptional character. Their pranks are patent: the rough ones like to kick up rows, and the more quiet are unique at practical jokes. Bob Sawyer is a typical hero. If, like the portrait-painter, doctors are often the playthings of fortune in cities, where the arbitrary whims of fashion decree success; in the country their true worth is more apt to find appreciation, and the individualities of character having free scope, quite original children of Apollo are the result. The name of Hopkins is still memorable in the region where he practised, as one of the literary clique of which Humphries, Dwight, and Barlow were members. Dr. Osborn, of Sandwich, Mass., wrote the popular whaling-song yet in vogue among Nantucketers. Dr. Holyoke, of Salem, is renowned as a beautiful instance of longevity; and the wit of Dr. Spring was proverbial in Boston. The best example of a medical philosopher, in our annals, is that of Dr. Rush, of Philadelphia; he reformed the system of practice; first treated yellow fever successfully, made climate a special study, and, like Burke, laid every one he encountered under contribution for facts. His life of seventy years was passed in ardent investigation. It is remarkable that the first martyr to American liberty was a physician; and, before he fell, Warren eloquently avowed his principles, like KÖrner in Germany, rousing the spirit of his countrymen, and then consecrating his sentiments with his blood. Boylston, the ancestral portraits of whose family are among the best of Copley’s American works, nearly fell a victim to public indignation for his zealous and intelligent advocacy of inoculation, and natural science owes a debt to Barton, Morton, and De Kay, which is acknowledged both at home and abroad. A French doctor has noted the historical importance of his confrÈres, and tells us Hamond was Racine’s master, Lestocq helped to elevate Catharine to the Russian throne, Haller was a poet and romancer, Cuvier was the greatest naturalist of his age, and Murat was a doctor. French mÉdecins have figured in the Chamber and on the Boulevards.

If by virtue of the philosophic instinct and liberal tastes the doctor is thus allied to belles-lettres, he is allured into the domain of science by a still more direct sympathy. To how many has the study of the materia medica, and the culling of simples, proved the occasion of botanical research; and hence, by an easy transition, of exploring the entire field of natural science. Thus Davy was beguiled into chemical investigation; and Abercrombie, by the vestibule of physiological knowledge, sought the clue to mental philosophy; while Spurzheim and Combe ministered to a great charity by clearly explaining to the masses the natural laws of human well-being. It is an evidence of the sagacity of the Russian Peter, that he sought an interview with BoerhaÄve; for by these varied links of general utility the medical office enters into every branch of social economy, and is only narrowed and shorn of dignity by the limited views or inadequate endowments of its votaries. The Jewish physician preserved and transmitted much of the learning of the world, after the fall of the Alexandrian school.[13] Life-insurance and quarantines have become such grave interests, that through them the responsibility of the physician to society is manifest to all; that to individuals is only partially recognized. How Cowper and Byron suffered for wise medical advice, and what ameliorations in states of mind and moral conditions have been induced by the now widely-extended knowledge of hygienic laws! Charles Lamb reasons wisely as well as quaintly in this wise:—‘You are too apprehensive of your complaint. The best way in these cases is to keep yourself as ignorant as the world was before Galen, of the entire construction of the animal man; not to be conscious of a midriff; to hold kidneys to be an agreeable fiction; to account the circulation of the blood an idle whim of Harvey’s; to acknowledge no mechanism not visible. For once fix the seat of your disorder, and your fancies flux into it like bad humours. Above all, take exercise, and avoid tampering with the hard terms of art. Desks are not deadly. It is the mind, and not the limbs, that taints by long sitting. Think of the patience of the tailors; think how long the Lord Chancellor sits; think of the brooding hen.’

In literature the doctor figures with a genial dignity; he has affinities with genius, and a life-estate in the kingdom of letters: witness Garth’s poem of The Dispensary; Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination; Armstrong’s Art of Health; Cowley’s verses, Sprat’s life of him, and Currie’s of Burns; Beattie’s Minstrel; Darwin’s Botanic Garden; Moore’s Travels in Italy; Zimmerman’s Solitude; Goldsmith’s Vicar and Village; Aikin’s Criticisms; Joanna Baillie’s gifted brother, and Lady Morgan’s learned husband. Burke found health at the house of the benign Dr. Nugent, of Bath, at the outset of his career, and married the daughter of his medical friend. ‘Les mÉdecins sont souvent tout a la fois conseillors, arbitres et magistrats au sein des familles.’ The best occasional verses of Dr. Johnson are those that commend the humble virtues of Levett, the apothecary.[14] Dr. Lettson wrote the life of Carver, the American traveller, and his account of that adventurous unfortunate led to the establishment of the Literary Fund Society. Among the graves near Archibald Carlyle’s old church at Inveresk, where that handsome clerical and convivial gossip is buried, is that of the sweet versifier, beloved as the ‘Delta’ of Blackwood, Dr. Moir, who so genially united the domestic lyrist and the good doctor; a Delta framed in bay adorns the pedestal of his monument. Rousseau, an invalid of morbid sensibility, recognizes the professional superiority of the physician as a social agent:—‘Par tous le pays ce sont les hommes les plus vÉritablement utiles et savants.’ The MÉdecin de Campagne of Balzac, and the Dr. Antonio of Ruffini, are elaborate and charming illustrations of this testimony of the author of Emile. What a curious chapter would be added to the Diary of a Physician, had Cabanis kept a record of his interviews with those two illustrious patients—Mirabeau and Condorcet. The social affinities of the doctor prove indirectly what we before suggested, that it is in the character more than in the learning, in the mind rather than the technical knowledge, that medical success lies. One of the shrewdest of the profession, Abernethy, declared thereof,—‘I have observed, in my profession, that the greatest men were not mere readers, but the men who reflected, who observed, who fairly thought out an idea.’ Almost intuitive is the venerable traditional ideal of the physician; among the aborigines of this continent, the ‘medicine man’ was revered as nearest to the ‘Great Spirit.’ ‘I hold physicians,’ said Dr. Parr, ‘to be the most enlightened professional persons in the whole circle of human arts and sciences.’ In our own day, Lever’s Irish novels, and in our own country the writings of Drake, Mitchell, Holmes, Bigelow, Francis, and others, indicate the literary claims of the profession. Think of Arbuthnot beside Pope’s sick-bed, and the latter’s apostrophe:—

of Garth ministering to Johnson, and Rush philosophizing, with Dr. Franklin, and the friendship of Pope and Cheselden. Bell’s comments on art, Colden’s Letters to LinnÆus, and Thatcher’s Military Journal, are attractive proofs of that liberal tendency which leads the physician beyond the limits of his profession into the field of philosophical research. The bequest of Sir Hans Sloane was the nucleus of the British Museum. We all have a kind of affection for Dr. Slop, who, drawn from Dr. Burton, of York—a cruel, instrumental obstetrician,—is the type of an almost obsolete class, as the doctor in Macbeth is of the sapient pretender of all time. As to ideal doctors, how real to our minds is that Wordsworthean myth Dr. Fell, the physician of Sancho Panza, and the Purgon of MoliÈre; while Dulcamara is a permanent type of the clever quack, Dr. Bartolo of the solemn professor, and Sangrado of the merciless phlebotomist. To think it ‘more honourable to fail according to rule than to succeed by innovation,’ is a satire of no local significance, but the constant creed of the medical pedant. Satirized years ago by the French comic dramatist, the profession was caricatured the other day by a young disciple of Esculapius, who in a clever drawing represented the votary of homoeopathy with a little globule between thumb and finger, engaged in a kind of airy swallowing; the allopathic patient in an easy-chair is making wry faces over a large spoonful of physic; the believer in hydropathy sits forlorn and shivering in a sitz-bath, with a large goblet of water raised to his lips; while the Thomsonian victim is writhing and nauseating in anguish; and in the midst a skeleton, with a syringe for a baton, is dancing in a transport of infernal joy. Southey took a wise advantage of the popular idea of a doctor, in the genial and speculative phase of the character, when he gave the title to his last rambling, erudite, quaint, and charming production. Men of letters accordingly are wont to fraternize with the best of the profession; and there has always been a reciprocal interchange between them, both of affection and wit. Thus Halleck tells us, in Fanny,—

The record of our surgeons in the war for the Union is alike honourable to their patriotism, humanity, and skill.

Popular writers have indicated the claims and character of the profession, not only in a dramatic or anecdotal way, but by personal testimony and observation; and those who have had the best opportunities, and are endowed with liberal sympathies, warmly recognize the possible usefulness and probable benevolence of a class of men more often satirized than sung. The privations and toil incident to country practice half a century ago are scarcely imagined now. Sir Walter Scott tells us,—‘I have heard the celebrated traveller Mungo Park, who had experienced both courses of life, rather give the preference to travelling as a discoverer in Africa, than to wandering by night and day the wilds of his native land in the capacity of a country practitioner.’ Dr. Johnson, a livelong invalid, and not apt to overlook professional foibles, gives a high average character to the doctor. ‘Whether,’ he observes, ‘what Sir William Temple says be true, that the physicians have more learning than the other faculties, I will not stay to inquire; but I believe every man has found in physicians great liberality and dignity of sentiment, very prompt effusion of beneficence, and willingness to exert a lucrative art where there is no hope of lucre.’

It is a nervous process to undergo the examination of a Parisian medical professor of the first class. Auscultation was first introduced by one of them, Laennec, and diagnosis is their chief art. In their hands the stethoscope is a divining-rod. So reliable is their insight, that they seem to read the internal organism as through a glass; and one feels under Louis’s inspection as if awaiting sentence. The laws of disease have been thoroughly studied in the hospitals of Paris, and the philosophy of symptoms is there understood by the medical savans with the certainty of a natural science, but the knowledge and application of remedies is by no means advanced in equal proportion. Accordingly, the perfection of modern skill in the art seems to result from an education in the French schools, combined with experience in English practice; thorough acquaintance with physiology, and habits of acute observation and accurate deduction, are thus united to executive tact and ability. And similar eclectic traits of character are desirable in the physician, especially the union of solidity of mind with agreeableness of manner; for in no vocation is there so often demanded the blending of the fortiter in re with the suaviter in modo.

The absence of faith in positive remedies that obtains in Europe is very striking to an American visitor, because it offers so absolute a contrast to the system pursued at home. I attended the funeral of a countryman a few days after reaching Paris, and on our way to PÈre la Chaise his case and treatment were fully discussed; his disease was typhus fever. Previous to delirium he had designated a physician, a celebrated professor, who only prescribed gomme syrop. For a week I travelled with a Dominican friar, who had so high a fever that in America he would have been confined to his bed; he took no nourishment all the time but a plate of thin soup once a day, and when we reached our destination he was convalescent. Abstinence and repose are appreciated on the Continent as remedial agencies; but they are contrary to the genius of our people, who regard active enterprise as no less desirable in a doctor than a steamboat captain.

Veteran practitioners have demonstrated that certain diseases are self-limited, that the art of treating diseases is still ‘a conjectural study,’ and avowed the conviction that ‘the amount of death and disaster in the world would be less if all disease were left to itself, than it now is under the multiform, reckless, and contradictory modes of practice.’ A conscientious student, of high personal character, entered upon the profession with enthusiastic faith; experience in the use of remedies made him sceptical, and he resorted to evasion by giving water only under various pretexts and names. His success was so much greater than that of his brethren, that he felt bound to reveal the ruse; but continued thenceforth to assert that, all things being equal, more patients would survive, if properly guarded and nourished, without medicine than with.

The influence of the mind upon the body is, in some instances, so great, that it accounts for that identity of superstition and medicine which is one of the most remarkable traits in the history of the science. Sir Walter Raleigh’s cordial was as famous in its day as Mrs. Trulbery’s water praised by Sir Roger de Coverley. In Egypt, old practitioners cure with amulets and charms; among the Tartars they swallow the name of the remedy with perfect faith; and from the Puritan horseshoe to keep off witchcraft, to Perkins’ tractors to annihilate rheumatism, the history of medical delusions is rife with imaginary triumphs. As late as the seventeenth century, when Arabian precepts and the Jewish leech of chivalric times had disappeared, when the square cap and falling beards had given place to the wig and cane, in some places the mystic emblems of skull, stuffed lizards, pickled fetus, and alembic gave a necromantic air to the doctor’s sanctum.

The unknown is the source of the marvellous, and the relation between a disease and its cure is less obvious to the common understanding than that between the evidence and the verdict in a law case, or religious faith and its public ministration in the office of priest. The imagination has room to act, and the sense of wonder is naturally excited, when, by the agency of some drug, mechanical apparatus, or mystic rite, it is attempted to relieve human suffering and dispel infirmity. Hence the most enlightened minds are apt to yield to credulity in this sphere, much to the annoyance of the ‘regular faculty,’ who complain with reason that quackery, whether in the form of popular specifics or the person of a charlatan, derives its main support from men of civic and professional reputation. Think of Dr. Johnson, in his infancy, being touched for king’s evil by Queen Anne, in accordance with a belief in its sovereign efficiency, unquestioned for centuries. Sir Kenelm Digby was as much celebrated in his day for his recipe for a sympathetic powder, which he obtained from an Italian friar, as for his beautiful wife or his naval victory; and the good Bishop Berkeley gave as much zeal to the Treatise on the Virtues of Tar-water as to that on the Immateriality of the Universe.

Shakspeare has drawn a quack doctor to the life in Caius, the French physician, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and uttered an impressive protest against the tribe in All’s Well that Ends Well:—

An American member of the medical profession[15] has traced in the great bard of nature a minute knowledge of the healing art, citing his various allusions to diseases and their remedies. Thus we have in Coriolanus the ‘post-prandial temper of a robust man,’ and the physiology of madness in Hamlet and Lear. The wasting effects of love, melancholy, the processes of digestion, respiration, circulation of the blood, infusion of humours, effects of passions on the body, of slow and swift poisons, insomnia, dropsy, and other phenomena described with accuracy. CÆsar’s fever in Spain, Gratiano’s warning, ‘creep into a jaundice by being peevish;’ the physical effects of sensualism in Antony and Cleopatra, the external signs of sudden death from natural causes in Henry VI., and summary of diseases in Troilus and Cressida, are described with professional truth. How memorable his Apothecary’s portrait! while the medical critic assures us that, in a passage in Midsummer-Night’s Dream, the ‘accessories of a sickly season are poetically described,’ and that Falstaff admirably satirizes the ‘ambiguities of professional opinion,’ while, in Mrs. Quickly’s description of his death, and the dying scene of Cardinal Beaufort, as well as the senility of Lear, the mellow virility of old Adam, the ‘thick-coming fancies’ of remorse, and Ophelia’s aberration—every minute touch in the memorable picture of ‘a mind diseased’—indicate a profound insight, and suggest, as no other poet can, how intimately and universally the ‘ills that flesh is heir to,’ and the vocation of those who minister to health, are woven into the web of human destiny and the scenes of human life. Who has so sweetly celebrated ‘Nature’s sweet restorer’ and the ‘healing touch’? or more emphatically declared, ‘when the mind’s free the body’s delicate,’ and—

The memoirs of celebrated men abound with physiological interest; their eminence brings out facts which serve to vindicate impressively the phases of medical experience, and the relation of the soul to its tabernacle. Madden’s Infirmities of Genius is a book which suggests an infinite charity, as well as exposes the fatal effects of neglecting natural laws. Lord Byron used to declare that a dose of salts exhilarated him more than wine. Shelley was a devoted vegetarian. Cowper spoke from experience when he sang the praises of the cups ‘that cheer but not inebriate.’ Johnson had faith in the sanative quality of dried orange-peel. When Dr. Spurzheim was first visited by the physicians in his last illness, he told them to allow for the habitual irregularity of his pulse, which had intermitted ever since the death of his wife. George Combe used to tell a capital story, in his lectures, of the manner in which a pious Scotch lady made her grandson pass Sunday, whereby, while outwardly keeping the Sabbath, he violated all the rules of health. Two of the most characteristic books in British literature are Greene’s poem of the Spleen, and Dr. Cheyne’s English Malady; and another is the history of the Gold-headed Cane, or rather of the five doctors that successively owned it. The cane, indeed, was ever an indispensable symbol of medical authority. The story of Dr. Radcliffe’s illustrates its modern significance; but the association of the walking-staff and the doctor comes down to us from mediÆval times. ‘He smelt his cane,’ in the old ballads, is a phrase suggestive of a then common expedient; the head of the physician’s cane was filled with disinfectant herbs, the odour of which the owner inhaled when exposed to miasma. Even at this day, in some of the provincial towns in Italy, we encounter the doctor in the pharmacist’s shop, awaiting patients,—his dress and manner such as are reproduced in the comic drama, while the quack of the Piazza is recognized on the operatic stage.

How unprofessional medicine is becoming may be seen in current literature, when De Quincey’s metaphysical account of the effects of opium, and Bulwer’s fascinating plea for the Water-Cure, are ranked as light reading. To the lover of the old English prose-writers there is no more endeared name than Sir Thomas Browne, and his Religio Medici and quaint tracts are among the choicest gifts for which philosophy is indebted to the profession; while the classical student owes to Dr. Middleton a Life of Cicero. The vivacious Lady Montagu is most gratefully remembered for her philanthropic efforts in behalf of inoculation for smallpox; and our Brockden Brown has described the phenomena of an epidemic, in one of his novels, with more insight though less horror than Defoe.

It is in pestilence and after battle that the doctor sometimes rises to the moral sublime, in his disinterested and unwearied devotion to others. It must, however, be confessed that, notwithstanding these incidental laurels, the authority of the profession has so declined, the malades imaginaires so increased with civilization, and the privileges of the faculty been so encroached upon by what is called ‘progress,’ that a doctor of the old school would scorn to tolerate the fallen dignity of a title that once rendered his intercourse with society oracular, and authorized him with impunity to whip a king, as in the case of Dr. Willis and George the Third.

‘The philosophy of medicine, I imagine,’ observed Dr. Arnold, ‘is zero; our practice is empirical, and seems hardly more than a course of guessing, more or less happy.’ None have been more sceptical than physicians themselves in regard to their own science: Broussais calls it illusory, like astrology; and Bichat declares ‘it is, in respect to its principles, taken from most of our materia medicas, impracticable for a sensible man; an incoherent assemblage of incoherent opinions, it is, perhaps, of all the physiological sciences, the one which shows plainest the contradictions and wanderings of the human mind.’ Montaigne used to beseech his friends that, if he fell ill, they would let him get a little stronger before sending for the doctor. Louis XIV., who was a slave to his physicians, asked MoliÈre what he did for his doctor. ‘Oh, sire,’ said he, ‘when I am ill I send for him. He comes; we have a chat, and enjoy ourselves. He prescribes; I don’t take it,—and I am cured.’

‘There is a certain analogy,’ says an agreeable writer, ‘between naval and medical men. Neither like to acknowledge the presence of danger.’ On the other hand, each patient’s character as well as constitution makes a separate demand upon his sympathy; for in cases where fortitude and intelligence exist, perfect frankness is due, and in instances of extreme sensibility it may prove fatal; so that the most delicate consideration is often required to decide on the expediency of enlightening the invalid. If it is folly to theorize in medicine, it is often sinful to flatter the imagination for the purpose of securing temporary ease. A physician’s course, like that of men in all pursuits, is sometimes regulated by his consciousness, and he is apt to prescribe according to his own rather than his patient’s nature; thus a fleshy doctor is inclined to bleed, and recommend generous diet; a nervous one affects mild anodynes; a vain one talks science; and a thin, cold-blooded, speculative one, makes safe experiments in practice, and is habitually non-committal in speech. Almost invariably short-necked plethoric doctors enjoy freeing the vessels of others by copious depletion, and those more delicately organized advocate fresh air and tonics; the one instinctively reasoning from the surplus, and the other from the inadequate vitality of which they are respectively conscious. I knew a doctor who scarcely ever failed to prescribe an emetic, and the expression of his countenance indicated chronic nausea.

Medicine enjoys no immunity from the spirit of the age. Who does not recognize in the popularity of Hahnemann’s system the influence of the transcendental philosophy, a kind of intuitive practice analogous to the vague terms of its disciples in literature; those little globules with the theoretical accompaniment catch the fancy; castor-oil and the lancet are matter-of-fact in comparison. And so with hydropathy. There is in our day what may be called a return-to-nature school. Wordsworth is its expositor in poetry, Fourier in social life, the Pre-Raphaelites in painting. The newly-appreciated efficacy of water accords with this principle. It is an elemental medicament, limpid as the style of Peter Bell, free from admixture as the individual labour in a model community, and as directly caught from nature as the aËrial perspective of England’s late scenic limner. Even what has been considered the inevitable resort to dissection in order to acquire anatomical knowledge, it is now pretended, has a substitute in clairvoyance. Somewhat of truth in this spiritualizing tendency of science there doubtless is; but fact is the basis of positive knowledge, and the most unwarrantable of all experiments are those involving human health.

If the mental experience of a doctor naturally leads to philosophy, the moral tends to make him a philanthropist. He is familiar with all the ills that flesh is heir to. The mystery of birth, the solemnity of death, the anxiety of disease, the devotion of faith, the agony of despair, are phases of life daily open to his view; and their contemplation, if there is in his nature a particle either of reflection or sensibility, must lead to a sense of human brotherhood, excite the impulse of benevolence, and awaken the spirit of humanity. Warren’s Diary of a Physician gives us an inkling of what varieties of human experience are exposed to his gaze. Vigils at the couch of genius and beauty, full of the stern romance of reality, or imbued with tenderness and inspiration, are recorded in his heart. He is admitted into sanctums where no other feet but those of kindred enter. He becomes the inevitable auditor and spectator where no other stranger looks or listens. Human nature, stripped of its conventionalities, lies exposed before him; the secrets of conscience, the aspirations of intellect, the devotedness of love, all that exalts and all that debases the soul, he beholds in the hour of weakness, solitude, or dismay; and hard and unthinking must he be if such lessons make no enduring impression, and excite no comprehensive sympathies.

‘The corner-stone of health,’ says a German writer, ‘is to maintain our individuality intact;’ and while the hygienic reformer has lessened the bills of mortality, personal culture has emancipated society from much of the ignorant dependence and insalubrious habits of less enlightened times.