settle some time till it hath thrown out all its waterish humor, which
separate by wary inclination. Take now of this concrete blood five
or six pounds, which put to ten or twelve pints of spirits of wine.
Shake them well together, and let it digest six or eight days in warm
ashes.” Distil. Add the fixed salt drawn out of the _caput mortuum_ of
the blood by “calcination,” “solution,” “filtration,” “coagulation,”
often repeated; “and what shall remain behind is the Arcanum of Blood”
(p. 10).
When obtained in the manner above described, this invaluable remedy
is “to be taken in broth or treacle-water with a fasting” (and let us
devoutly hope an unusually vigorous) “stomach.” Only one caution is
necessary. The “sound young man’s” blood must have been shed “when
Mercury was above the horizon and in conjunction with the sun in Gemini
or Virgo.”
After the broth of man’s blood, a “Balsamick Remedy for Arthritick
Pains,” composed of the bones of a man “which hath not been buried
fully a year,” beat up into a powder, calcined, and applied on lint,
appears a comparatively mild and pleasant receipt. So, likewise, is
the “Quintessence of Toads,” to be composed in the month of June or
July of a “great quantity of overgrown toads,” reduced, calcined,
and distilled as usual, and then “dissolved in spirit of oranges or
treacle-water ready for use,” either externally, when it cures “cancers
and pestilential venom,” or internally, against “all sorts of poison.”
The above prescriptions are taken, be it said, not from the manual
of one of those vulgar quacks to whom we are too apt to credit every
absurdity of ancient medicine, but from a serious treatise by Edward
Bolnest, physician in ordinary to the King (1672), dedicated to George
Duke of Buckingham, and described on the title-page as “Shewing a
Rational [!] Way of preparing Animals, Vegetables, and Minerals for
a Physical Use, by which they are made most efficacious, safe, and
pleasant Medicines for the Preservation and Restoration of the Life of
Man.” How honest was the worthy author in his belief in his “Mummiall
Quintessence,” and all the rest, may be judged from his frank avowal
“to the Reader” that the medicines prescribed he might “_in some
measure_ in time of need trust to,” because, adds Dr. Bolnest candidly,
“I never yet from the best of medicines always found those certain
effects I could have desired.”
These were, however, refined preparations compared to the prescriptions
in use in still earlier generations. In the great folio of M. Pietro
Andrea Matthioli (Venice, 1621), adorned with hundreds of really
admirable woodcuts of medicinal herbs and flowers, there are directions
for rubbing wounds with cow-dung, swallowing beeswax, silk, sweat, and
saliva, and drinking hare’s blood and dog’s dung dissolved in milk as
a cure for dysentery. Nervous people are to dine on cooked vipers.
Persons with the toothache are to apply to their teeth a serpent’s
skin steeped in vinegar, or to powder the callosities on a horse’s
legs, and stuff their ears therewith. A black eye may be treated with
a poultice of human milk, incense, and the blood of a tortoise. For
the not very serious affection of hiccough a beverage is recommended,
of which the chief ingredient is the flesh of a mummy; thus affording
us further evidence that cannibalism survived in medicine, and was
approved by the faculty in Italy as well as England, down to a very
recent period. Besides these “strange meats,” Matthioli regularly
classifies in a table a multitude of what he is pleased to call “simple
medicines,” among which are to be found the bodies, or parts of bodies,
of wolves, scorpions, centipedes, ostriches, beavers, and dogs, the
cast-off skins of serpents, the horns of unicorns (when attainable!),
the hoofs of asses and goats, beeswax, silk, asphalt, and several
filthy substances which cannot here be named. Albertus Magnus (_vide_
the curious little black-letter volume, _Le Grat Albert_, in the
British Museum) orders nervous patients to eat eagles’ brains, whereby
they may acquire the courage of the king of birds; while the brains of
the owl, the goat, the camel, etc., convey the peculiar qualities of
each of those animals. Pliny’s great work, it is needless to say, is a
repertory of marvellous counsels and observations. Earth taken out of a
human skull acts as a depilatory, and benefit is derived from chewing
plants which have happened to grow in the same unpleasant receptacle.
On the principle, we presume, of “I am not the rose, but I have dwelt
near the rose,” herbs growing on a manure heap are found especially
efficacious as remedies for quinsy. The hair of man, taken from a
cross, is good for quartan fevers, and human ear-wax is the only proper
application to a wound occasioned by a human bite. The uses of saliva
are numberless, and fill a whole chapter of the _Natural History_.
“Fasting spittle,” in particular, applied to the eyes, is an infallible
cure for ophthalmia,--a remedy which Persius treats with blameworthy
scepticism as an old-womanly practice. In cases where bread has stuck
in the throat, a piece of the same loaf should be inserted in the ears.
The use of the fluid which exudes from the pores of the skin is so
valuable that (Pliny assures us) the owners of the Grecian gymnasia
made a thriving trade by selling the scrapings of the bodies of
athletes, which, “compounded with oil, is of an emollient, calorific,
and expletive nature.” If any lady desire to cultivate an interesting
and pallid appearance, she ought to imitate Drusus, who drank goats’
blood to make it appear that his enemy Cassius had poisoned him. For
melancholy (an affection which seems to have given great concern to
the old doctors), Dioscorides recommends black hellebore held in the
mouth,--certainly a recipe on homœopathic principles, since a mouthful
of hellebore would scarcely naturally serve, like the Psalmist’s wine
and oil, either to make glad the heart of man or to give him a cheerful
countenance. A better remedy for the same melancholy is “broth of old
cock,” our Scotch friend cockaleekie.
For some unexplained reason, two only among the ills to which flesh is
heir, and they among the most serious,--frenzy and inflammation of the
stomach,--seem to have escaped from the dread _régime_ of Sacrificial
Medicine, and indeed are treated with surprising lenity. Dioscorides
thinks that frenzy can be cured by asparagus and white wine, and
considers that the patient suffering from gastritis should have a
plaster of roses applied to the seat of his disease!
Besides the “exhibition” of nauseous and revolting draughts,
boluses, and pills, the system of Sacrificial Medicine has at all
times commanded many other ingenious resources for the creation of
unnecessary pain, trouble, and annoyance to sick persons and their
friends. If, for example, a stiff-necked patient were unmanageable in
the matter of some particularly disagreeable dose, he might still be
induced to go on vexing nature by some out-of-the-way diet, and potions
repeated at stated intervals, till faith or life succumbed in the
struggle. One old physician, Ætius, in this way prescribed for the gout
a separate dietary for every month of a whole year. Another, the great
Alexander of Tralles, ordained three hundred and sixty-five potions,
so arranged as to furnish out a course for two years; whereupon Dr.
Friend, the learned author of the _History of Physick_, remarks that
“his receipts were as good as any of those which our new pretenders to
physick make use of,” but adds the discouraging dictum, “After all,
gout is a distemper with which it were best not to tamper.”
Then there were fearful tortures in the way of excoriations, of which
St. John Long’s famous remedy was a notable example,--blisters,
cauteries, and setons, too unpleasant to dwell upon. Scarification was
a comparatively merciful form of these inflictions. It was practised,
according to Prosper Albinus (_Hist. Phys._, p. 17), in the following
agreeable manner: “First, make a strait [tight] ligature on the leg;
then rub the leg below it, put it into warm water, and beat _till it
swells_, and so scarify”! Something worse than this was practised
down to the present generation in the case of wounds. It is in the
writer’s recollection that an unhappy groom who had lost a piece of
flesh out of the calf of his leg sought assistance after his accident
from a motherly old cook, the medical adviser in ordinary of the whole
household. The good woman evidently held the doctrine of Sacrificial
Medicine deep in her soul, as well as a due estimate of the utility,
under all circumstances, of the art of cookery. Encouraging the poor
young man with suitable reflections on the purifying use of salt and
fire, she accordingly rubbed a handful from her salt-box into the
wound, and then held the miserable limb steadily to the kitchen fire!
A bath of blood has been frequently employed to resuscitate exhausted
patients. When Cæsar Borgia barely survived swallowing his share
of the bottles of poisoned wine which his respectable father, Pope
Alexander VI., had intended for the Cardinal, but took by mistake for
himself and his son, it is said that an ox was brought into Cæsar’s
apartments and disembowelled, to enable him to get into it and receive
such vitality as the warm, bleeding carcass might impart. We are here
at the point where Sacrificial Medicine assumes the vicarious form,
and the poor brutes are made to suffer instead of the human patients
for the benefit of the latter. In an account of the birth of the Duc
de Bourgogne, grandson of Louis XIV., in the _Curiosités Historiques_
(p. 48), amid the description of the raptures of the splendid court
assembled on the occasion, there is a casual mention of an incident
affording a wonderful contrast to all this royal joy and magnificence.
The attendant chief _accoucheur_, the celebrated Dr. Clement, to
prevent suffering on the part of the mother (the Dauphine), applied
to her person the skin of a sheep, newly flayed. To obtain this quite
fresh, a butcher was engaged to skin the animal alive in the adjoining
room; and, being anxious to offer the skin as quickly as possible to
the doctor, he carried it into the chamber of the Dauphine, leaving
the door open. The sheep, in its agony, followed him, and ran in,
bleeding and skinless, among the shrieking crowd of courtiers and
grandees. In modern times, worse things than these are done to animals,
professedly for the benefit of mankind; but they are now performed
quietly in physiological laboratories, not paraded in public, else it
is to be believed that even the most selfish among us would cry, “Hold!
we desire no cure of disease, no scientific knowledge, at any such
horrible price.”
Yet, again, there was a class of Sacrificial Remedies whose merit
consisted in requiring the patient to travel a long way, or to apply
to some hardly accessible personage, to obtain relief. There were Holy
Wells having no medicinal properties whatever, which cured all the
multitudes of people who made long and painful pilgrimages to reach
them. More remarkable still were the benefits derived in cases of
scrofula from being touched by a king,--a privilege, it may be safely
guessed, not accorded without some delay and solicitation, and possibly
not without fees to royal attendants, scarcely disinterested witnesses
of the miracles which followed. The history of this particular delusion
would alone form a very curious chapter, since Archbishop Bradwardine,
in 1348, appealed to the whole world in proof of the wonder, till
Samuel Johnson’s scarred and mighty head was subjected to the royal
touch. When we recall the fact that only in the eighteenth century
did a special religious service for the ceremony cease to form a part
of the Liturgy of the Church of England, we do not seem to ourselves
to have yet advanced a great way beyond this harmless superstition.
Indeed, it is only in the present generation that the scientific name
of the malady has generally superseded its familiar title of the
“King’s Evil,” or by ellipsis “the Evil,” by which it is even now known
in remote parts of the country.
Where it was impossible to obtain help from a king, there yet remained
the possibility of being touched by somebody else, who might possess
some rare and peculiar privilege and fitness for healing disease.
The odd malady, popularly called “shingles,” for example, somehow
suggested to the sufferers the desirability of having recourse to some
special agency of relief; and this was found in persons who had either
themselves eaten the flesh of an eagle, or whose fathers or ancestors
had done so. Within the last thirty years, a gentleman’s servant in
Wales has been known to perform a journey of forty miles across the
mountains to be touched by a man whose grandfather had eaten an eagle.
Finally, there is a large heterogeneous class of prescriptions,
obviously owing their origin to the principle of Sacrificial Medicine,
of which the simple rule has been to prevent the miserable patient
from adopting any mode of relief for his sufferings which Nature might
point out, and adding to them fresh pain by any ingenious device which
may occur to his physician. Of this kind was the treatment of fever
in vogue till quite recently, when the patient was carefully shut up
in a close room, with well-curtained bed and warm bedclothes, and
was prohibited from relieving his thirst with any cold drink. Truly,
if Marcellus Sidetes, who is said to have written forty-two books
in “heroic” verse “concerning distempers,” had given us a picture
of all the misery which must have been occasioned in the world by
the really _insolent_ disregard of Nature and common sense shown in
these matters,--how many thousands of lives have been thrown away,
and through what maddening misery the survivors must have struggled
back to life,--those poems, instead of being forgotten by the world,
might have done us precious service by reminding us that there is some
counterweight to be placed in the scale wherein we are wont to measure
our debts of gratitude to medical science.
Another appalling device was that of the renowned English physician,
John of Gaddesden, who introduced the practice of treating the
small-pox by wrapping up the patient in scarlet, hanging his room in
scarlet, and in fact compelling him to rest his feverish eyes only
on that flaring hue. John tried this notable device, according to
his own showing, on one of the sons of King Edward I. (it does not
appear to which he refers), and complacently adds to his report,
“_et est bona cura_.” In those days, however, doors and windows were
not made air-tight, and up the capacious chimneys a considerable
portion of fresh air must always have rushed. It was reserved for a
later generation to perfect the ingenious system for aggravating and
intensifying fever by pasting down the modern window, closing the
registers, and (as a climax) engaging nurses to lie beside the sufferer
to keep up the heat! The writer heard some years ago from the lips of a
Member of Parliament, now deceased, the recital of his own treatment
as a boy, in or near London, under a severe attack of small-pox. His
life being specially valuable as that of an only son, his affectionate
parents, by the advice of a distinguished physician, obtained the
services of _two fat women_, who were established permanently in bed
on each side of the child during the whole course of the disease! What
stipend was offered to tempt these poor obese females to perform this
awful service has escaped from the record.
Reading over all these marvellous prescriptions, it is a refreshing
exercise to picture the fashionable “leech,” the Gull or Jenner of the
period, physician in ordinary to the King or Queen, suave and solemn,
filled to the brim with all the conscious dignity of Science, standing
beside the sick-bed of some mighty prince or peer, and giving to the
awe-stricken attendants his high commands to hang the room with scarlet
cloth, or to bring to the patient one of the horrid messes prepared
with such infinite pains under his direction, in his own laboratory.
We can almost hear him condescendingly explaining to the chief persons
present what occult relationship exists between the small-pox and
the scarlet cloth, or how the Arcanum of Toads comes to be specially
valuable, having been composed of the fattest old toads, selected
precisely at the right season,--_videlicet_ midsummer. Of course, in
each successive generation there was nothing for the unlearned laity
to do but to bow submissively to the dicta of the exponent of Science
as it existed at the time. People may always laugh at what is past
and gone; but to suspect that living men may be mistaken, or that new
systems of medicine, philosophy, or theology, may be destined, like the
old, to “have their day and cease to be,” is audacity to which no one
should advance. We dare not, therefore, suggest that, to our grandsons,
half our modern nostrums (of which the fashion comes in freshly one
season and usually falls into disrepute a few years after) may possibly
appear scarcely a degree less ridiculous than the Arcanum of Toads or
the Mummiall Quintessence. It was not much worse, after all, to make
a patient drink a dead man’s blood than to rob him of his own, in the
_Sangrado_ style to which (in the memory of us all) the world owes
the loss of Cavour. It would have been a mercy to a poor Florentine
lady, lately deceased, had her physician counselled her merely to eat
earth-worms pickled in vinegar, or green lizards boiled alive in oil,
as recommended by Dr. Salmon, instead of bleeding her from the arm
nineteen times in the fortnight following her confinement and (as may
be readily understood) preceding her untimely death.
Sacrificial Medicine, however, in its simpler and more easily
recognizable forms, is undoubtedly on the wane, though a good deal
of its spirit may still be traced in our behavior to the sick. To
homœopathy (as to many another kind of heresy), we probably owe
somewhat of the mitigation of orthodoxy; and children, noticing the
busts of Hahnemann in the shop windows, may be properly taught to bless
that great deliverer who banished from the nursery those huge and
hateful mugs of misery,--black founts of so many infantine tears,--mugs
of sobs and sighs and gasps and struggles unutterable, from one of
which Madame Roland drew the first inspiration of that martyr spirit
which led her onward to the guillotine, when she suffered herself to be
whipped six times running, sooner than swallow the abominable contents.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] As the modern mind may be a little puzzled as to the mode in
which some of these substances can be introduced into our internal
economy, the following extract from the _Family Dictionary_ of Dr.
Salmon (1696) may throw light on the subject: “CORAL, to prepare,--Take
such a quantity as ye think convenient. Make it into a fine powder by
grinding it upon a Porphyry or an Iron Mortar. Drop on it by degrees a
little rosewater, and form it into balls for use. After this manner,
Crabs’-Eyes, Pearls, Oister shells, and Precious stones are prepared
to make up Cordials compounded of them and other suitable materials
for the strengthening of the heart in fevers, or such like violent
diseases, and to restore the Decays of nature.” Ebony is swallowed by
rasping it in shavings and making a decoction.
THE FITNESS OF WOMEN FOR THE MINISTRY OF RELIGION.
Among the anomalies of our social state may be counted the fact that,
while it is generally admitted that women are more religious than men,
it is to men that in our age and country the Ministry of Religion is
(with infinitesimal exceptions) exclusively committed. While nine
persons out of ten are conscious that their earliest sentiments of
piety have been derived from a mother, and that a sister or a wife
has alone enabled the troubled faith of their latter years to survive
the shocks of worldliness and doubt, there is yet not one recognized
channel by which these waters of life, stored in the fountain of
women’s hearts, can flow beyond the narrowest borders; while, on the
contrary, it is not too much to surmise that to a very large number
of clergymen, well-meaning, learned, and conscientious, the sense of
dryness of soul in all that concerns the more spiritual part of their
office is a perpetual self-reproach. _Habitans in Sicco_ writes every
autumn in the newspapers to complain he can obtain no refreshment from
his weekly sermon at any church in his neighborhood, while around him
all the time are private wells and underground rivers of the purest
element of feeling for which he thirsts. It is a case of
“Water, water, everywhere,
But not a drop to drink.”
What we want first and above all things in our ministers of religion is
_that they should be intensely religious_; and knowing this, and that
all other gifts and acquirements are comparatively of small avail for
the purpose, we deliberately exclude from the sacred office that moiety
of the community among whom this special and most precious grace is, at
all events, least rare.[27]
The reasons for this exclusion are, however, amply sufficient to
account, historically, for the anomaly. They are of two kinds, which
I shall take leave to characterize as the Bad and the Good. There is
a very deep-rooted prejudice, inherited from the ascetics of early
Christianity, whereby the idea of womanhood is connected with very
base associations. It is impossible to ignore this fact in any review
of the religious position of the sex; and it is therefore better to say
bluntly that, from this point of view, a woman is looked upon rather as
an emissary from the pit than a “daughter of the Lord Almighty,” rather
a temptation to earthly passion than a helpmate to heavenly purity.
Springing up when the old classical world had sunk into a corruption
and foulness which we can now probably little realize in imagination,
the frenzy of asceticism which was nourished among the deserts of the
Thebaid and attained its full growth in the monasteries of Greece and
Italy,--the origin of all the legends of which the “Temptation of
St. Anthony” is the type,[28]--has left almost ineffaceable traces
throughout the nations of Europe; of course much more sharply marked in
the Latin and Greek Churches, which have canonized these poor fanatics,
and still set apotheosized virginity on one of the thrones of heaven,
than among Protestant communities, wherein marriage has been always
placed on a moral level with celibacy, and Martin Luther has been
thoroughly absolved for his conjugal affection for the singularly plain
old lady whose portrait by Lucas Cranach we beheld some years ago in
the Exhibition of Old Masters in Burlington House.[29] Nevertheless,
even among Protestant Christians, a certain impression has remained,
the reverse of the faith of their old Teuton forefathers, that women
were nearer to the mind of the Divinity than men. The highest religious
_status_ a woman could attain in Milton’s opinion was a sort of deputy
piety,--
“He for God only, she for God in him”;