his most scathing satires "The Noble Savage" and "The Medicine Man of
Civilisation." He refused to subscribe to the popular and amiable
sentiment that the African barbarian was an interesting survival, or that
the Ojibbeway Indian was picturesque. After a severe indictment of them,
Dickens instanced their customs in medicine as a proof of their
irremediable depravity. "When the noble savage finds himself a little
unwell," he wrote, "and mentions the circumstance to his friends, it is
immediately perceived that he is under the influence of witchcraft. A
learned personage, called an Imyanger, or Witch Doctor, is sent for to
Nooker the Umtargartie, or smell out the witch. The male inhabitants of
the kraal being seated on the ground, the learned doctor, got up like a
grizzly bear, appears and administers a dance of the most terrific nature,
during the exhibition of which remedy he incessantly gnashes his teeth,
and howls,--'I am the original physician to Nooker the Umtargartie. Yow,
yow, yow! No connection with any other establishment. Till, till, till!
All other Umtargarties are feigned Umtargarties, Boroo, Boroo! but I
perceive here a genuine and real Umtargartie, Hoosh, Hoosh, Hoosh! in
whose blood, I, the original Imyanger and Nookerer, will wash these bear's
claws of mine!' All this time the learned physician is looking out among
the attentive faces for some unfortunate man who owes him a cow, or who
has given him any small offence, or against whom, without offence, he has
conceived a spite. Him he never fails to Nooker as the Umtargartie, and he
is instantly killed." This is no burlesque, and I have given the record in
Dickens's inimitable language because it most vividly sets before us the
custom of the medicine-men of barbarous races. But the medicine-men of
Longfellow's description, the men who came to appease and console
Hiawatha, who
"Walked in silent, grave procession,
Bearing each a pouch of healing,
Skin of beaver, lynx, or otter,
Filled with magic roots and simples,
Filled with very potent medicines,"
--these may be accepted as the milder type of magicians who, among a
primitive people, claimed not only to be able to heal the living, but to
restore the dead.
Mr. Austine Waddell, in his exhaustive work on the Buddhism of Tibet,
tells us that a very popular form of Buddha is as "the supreme physician"
or Buddhist AEsculapius, the idea of whom is derived from an ancient legend
of the "medicine-king" who dispensed spiritual medicine. The images of
this Buddha are worshipped as fetishes, and they cure by sympathetic
magic. The supplicant, after bowing and praying, rubs his finger over the
eye, knee, or particular part of the image corresponding to the affected
part on his own body, and then applies the finger carrying this hallowed
touch to the afflicted spot. Mr. Waddell says that this constant friction
is rather detrimental to the features of the god; whether it is beneficial
to the man's body is of course largely a matter of faith and
circumstances. As might be expected, talismans to ward off evils from
malignant planets and demons, whence come all diseases, are in great
request. The eating of the paper on which a charm has been written is
considered by the Tibetan to be the easiest and most certain method of
curing a malady, and the spells which the Lamas use in this way are called
"za-yig," or edible letters. A still more mystical way of applying these
remedies, according to Mr. Waddell, is by the washings of the reflection
of the writing in a mirror, a habit common in other quarters of the globe.
In Gambia, for instance, this treatment is relied upon by the natives. A
doctor is called in, he examines the patient, and then sits down at the
bedside and writes in Arabic characters on a slate some sentences from the
Koran. The slate is then washed, and the dirty infusion is drunk by the
patient. In Tibet, Chinese ink is smeared on wood, and every twenty-nine
days the inscription reflected in a mirror. The face of the mirror during
the reflection is washed with beer, and the drainings are collected in a
cup for the patient's use. This is a special cure for the evil eye. The
medicine-men of Tibet can also supply charms against bullets and weapons,
charms for the clawing of animals, charms to ward off cholera, and even
charms to prevent domestic broils. This is surely evidence of high
civilisation.
It would be hopeless to endeavour to exhaust this subject. Only a few
selected instances can be given to illustrate how large a part magic has
played, and still plays, in the healing art. Medicine is by no means freed
of its superstitions yet, and the success of quack advertisements of the
day abundantly proves that the civilised public is still prone to believe
that universal remedies are obtainable, and that miracles can be wrought.
Modern medical science, as one of its great exponents has pointed out,
plays a waiting game when miracles are spoken of, and when magic is
claimed to supersede specific remedies. "When it is asked to believe in
the violent and erratic violation of laws of matter and force, science
stands on an impregnable rock, fenced round by bulwarks of logical fact,
and flanked by the bastions of knowledge of nature and her constitution."
And as exact knowledge spreads, Prospero will have no alternative but to
break his staff, and bury it fathoms deep.
Chaucer's Doctor of Physic.
BY W. H. THOMPSON.
In the "Canterbury Tales" we have an inimitable gallery of fourteenth
century portraits, drawn from life, with all a great master's delicacy of
finish and touch. And in none of these pictures does Chaucer excel himself
more than in that of his "Doctor of Physic." We may take it for granted
that the portrait is no mere fanciful one, with its pre-Raphaelite
minuteness of detail, sketched with the poet's own peculiar skill. With
what mischievous and yet altogether playful and good-natured humour is the
man of medicine presented to us!
"With us there was a doctour of phisike
In all this world ne was there none like him
To speak of phisike and of surgerie."
What manner of man was this paragon of medical knowledge? In personal
appearance he was somewhat of an exquisite. "Clothes are unspeakably
significant" saith the immortal Teufelsdrockh, and every practitioner who
has his _clientele_ largely yet to make knows the importance of being
well dressed. Chaucer's grave graduate was apparelled in a purple surcoat,
and a blue and white furred hood.
"In sanguine and in perse he clad was all
Lined with taffata and with sendall,"
and yet no luxurious sybarite by any means was he,
"Of his diet measureable was he,
For it was no superfluity,
But of great nourishing and digestable."
A man of simple habits, even perhaps given to holding his purse strings
somewhat tightly.
"He was but easy of expense,
He kept that he won in pestilence."
For, as the poet adds with his characteristic merry sly humour,
"Gold in physic is a cordial,
Therefore he loved gold in special."
The science of medicine since Chaucer's day has made extraordinary
advances, and it is only fair to judge his doctor by contemporary
standards. To-day, we fear, he would be largely regarded as little better
than a charlatan and a quack. It is true, he was acquainted with all the
authorities, ancient and modern, from AEsculapius and Galen down to
Gaddesden, the author of the "Rosa Anglica," the great English book of
fourteenth century medicine. But this last named luminary of physic would
aid him very little on the road to true knowledge. This medical "Rose,"
which Leland calls a "large and learned work," only serves to illustrate
the impotence of the professors of the healing arts at that period. This
is the recipe of Gaddesden for the small-pox. "After this (the appearance
of the eruption) cause the whole body of your patient to be wrapped in red
scarlet cloth, and command everything about the bed to be made red. This
is an excellent cure. It was in this manner I treated the son of the noble
king of England when he had the small-pox, and I cured him without leaving
any marks." To cure epilepsy, he orders the patient "and his parents" to
fast three days, and then go to church. "The patient must first confess,
and he must have mass on Friday and Saturday, and then on Sunday the
priest must read over the patient's head the gospel for September, in the
time of vintage after the feast of the Holy Cross. After this the priest
shall write out this portion of the gospel reverently, and bind it about
the patient's neck, and he shall be cured." If epilepsy was to be
exorcised by such a remedy as this, we venture to assert that it must have
been largely a case of faith-healing.
[Illustration: GEOFFREY CHAUCER.
(_From Harleian M.S.--4866 fol. 91._)]
Seeing then that such was the condition of the science of medicine in
Chaucer's days, we must take with a good deal of reservation his statement
that his doctor
"Knew the cause of every malady
Were it of cold, or hot, or moist, or dry,
And where engendered, and of what humour."
Anyhow, some of the remedies prescribed for the "sick man," and the
"drugs," which his friends the apothecaries were so ready to supply, would
have seemed extraordinary enough to us.
The poet tells us the doctor's study was but "little in the Bible," and
that though a "perfect practitioner," the ground of his scientific
knowledge was astronomy, _i.e._, astrology; the "better part of medicine,"
as Roger Bacon calls it. In dealing with his patients he was guided by
"natural magic."
To this practice Chaucer alludes in another of his poems, the "House of
Fame."
"And clerks eke, which con well,
All this magic naturell,
That craftily do her intents,
To make in certain ascendents,
Images--lo through which magic,
To make a man be whole or sick."
So that in spite of what appears to us the charlatanry in his make up, the
doctor was supposed to be a person of importance in the eyes of his fellow
pilgrims, with quite the standing of an accredited medical man of to-day,
is evidenced by the manner in which mine host Bailly addresses him. Master
Bailly was no particular respecter of persons, indeed, on the contrary, he
was somewhat of a Philistine; yet he was all respect to this man of
medicine. It is as "Sir" Doctor of Physic, the host addresses him; also
declaring him to be a "proper man," and like a prelate. After the story of
chicanery related by the Canon's Yeoman, it is to the physician he looks
to tell a tale of "honest matter." Such is his bearing towards him
throughout.
The doctor's contribution to the "Canterbury Tales," too, is of a serious,
sober kind, in keeping with his character; and concludes with some sound
moral advice. Therefore, whatever foibles he may have, the "doctor of
physic" is presented to us as a sterling gentleman, no unworthy
predecessor of those who to-day, on more modern lines, still follow in his
footsteps.
The Doctors Shakespeare Knew.
BY A. H. WALL.
"O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In herbs, plants, shrubs, and their true qualities.
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor ought so good, but, strained from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse."
--_Romeo and Juliet._
"By medicine life may be prolong'd."--_Cymbeline V. 5._
In Walckenaer's "Memoirs of Madame de Sevigne," and in the amusing,
interesting volume which Gaston Boissier devoted to her works and letters,
we have glimpses of the medical profession in France, which show us it was
in her time and country, just what it was in England in the same century
when it was known to Shakespeare. For one more or less genuine physician
there were thousands of charlatans and quacks, and the contempt which our
great dramatic poet frequently expresses in his works for medical
practitioners must, in fairness, be regarded as applicable to the latter,
not to the former. In 1884, an American writer on this subject (Dr. Rush
Field, in his "Medical Thoughts of Shakespeare") strove to show that our
great philosophic poet and playwright's opinion of all the medical
practitioners was a low one. "He uses them frequently," he says, "as a
tool by which deaths are produced through the means of poison, and
generally treats them with contempt." That he might fairly do this, and
that in doing it he rather displayed respect and regard for the genuine,
more or less scientific professors of the healing art, can be very readily
demonstrated by anyone at all familiar with his plays. But to return to
Madame de Sevigne. At a time when she was growing old, when her letters
speak so sadly of the dying condition of Cardinal de Retz at Commercy, of
Madame de la Fayette's being consumed by slow fever, and La Roche confined
to his armchair by gout, of Corbinelle's threatened insanity, and of his
taking "potable gold" as a remedy for headache, she writes also of
small-pox and other fevers having permanently settled at Versailles and
Saint-Germain, where the King and Queen were attacked, and ladies and
gentlemen of the Court were decimated, and cases of apoplexy and
rheumatism were rapidly increasing in every direction. "Fashionable folk,
used up with pleasure-making, sick through disappointed ambition,
fidgetting without motive, agitating without aim, tainted with morbid
fancies and suspicion," found themselves in the doctor's hands, and were
far more ready to select practitioners who promised magically swift and
easy cures, than those who spoke of slow and gradual recovery by means
which were neither painless nor pleasurable. "Everybody," says Boissur,
"women included, battled with one another to possess marvellous secrets
whereby obstinate complaints should be immediately cured. Madame Fouquet
applied a plaster to the dying Queen, which cured her, to the great
scandal of the Faculty unable to save her; and the Princess de Tarente
served out drugs to all her people at Vitre.
[Illustration: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
(_The Stratford Portrait._)]
Madame Sevigne wrote of her as "the best doctor in the upper classes; she
has rare and valuable compounds of which she gives us three pinches with
prodigious effect." When writing to her daughter, she begs her not to
neglect taking such medicines as "cherry water," "extract of periwinkles,"
"viper-broth," "uric acid," and "powdered crab's-eyes." She says the
extract of periwinkles "endowed Madame de Grignam with a second youth."
Writing to her daughter, "If you use it, when you re-appear so fair
people will cry, 'O'er what blessed flower can she have walked,' then I
will answer 'On the periwinkle.'" She tells, too, how the Capuchins, who
still retained their ancient medical reputation, treated the rheumatism in
her leg "with plants bruised and applied twice a day; taken off while wet
twice a day, and buried in the earth, so that as they rotted away her
pains might in like way decrease." "It's a pity you ran and told the
surgeons this," she says to her daughter, "for they roar with laughter at
it, but I do not care a fig for them." In like way Madame de Scudery tells
Bassy, "There is an abbe here who is making a great bother by curing by
sympathy. For fever of all kinds, so they say, he takes the patient's
spittle and mingles it with an egg, and gives it to a dog; the dog dies
and the patient recovers.... They say he has cured a quantity of people."
Turning from these illustrations of medical practice in France to see how
identical it is with that adopted in England when Shakespeare lived, we
recall the advice of that eminent gentleman, Andrew Rourde, who recommends
people to wash their faces once a week only, using a scarlet cloth to wipe
them dry upon, as a sure remedy in certain cases. In other instances we
find that certain pills made from the skulls of murderers taken down from
gibbets, and ground to powder for that purpose, were popular as medicine,
that a draught of water drunk from a murdered man's skull had wonderful
medicinal properties, and that the blood of a dragon was absolutely
miraculous in the cures it effected. The touch of a dead man's hand was
another ghastly remedy in common use, and the powder of mummy was a
wonderful cure for certain grave complaints. Love-philtres were also
regarded from a medicinal point of view, and the strange doings of quack
_accoucheurs_ are not less absurdly terrible. That the seventeenth century
physician himself was not always proof against these products of ancient
ignorance and superstition, is abundantly apparent. Van Helmont, the son
of a nobleman, born in Brussels, and very carefully educated for his
profession, practised both medicine and magic medicinally. He rejected
Galen, inclined to that illiterate pretender Paracelsus, and determined
that the only way by which he could defy disease, and utterly destroy it,
was through what he called _Archaeus_. Speaking of digestion, for instance,
he denied that it was either chemical or mechanical in its nature, but the
result of this _Archaeus_, a spiritual activity, working in a very
mysteriously complicated way, for both evil and good. It has been said
that he was one of Lord Bacon's disciples, but for that assertion there
certainly is no sufficient foundation, for Bacon, if a mystic by
inclination, was logical in reasoning. In England Van Helmont had an
English follower in the person of another physician, Dr. Fludd, a disciple
of the famous inventor of the camera obscura, and conjecturally the first
photographer. His grand quack remedy was "the powder of sympathy," which
was the "sword-salve" of Paracelsus (composed of moss taken from the skull
of a gibbetted murderer, of warm human blood, human suet, linseed oil,
turpentine, etc.). This was applied, not to the wound, but to the sword
that inflicted it, kept "in a cool place!" Certain plants pulled up with
the left hand were regarded as a sure remedy in fever cases, but the
gatherer, while gathering, was not to look behind, for that deprived the
plants of their medicinal value.
Amongst other physicians of Shakespeare's century was Mr. Valentine
Greatrake, who came to London from Ireland, where his supposed magical
cures had been awakening a great sensation. He hired a large house in
Lincoln's Inn Fields, to which vast crowds of patients of all kinds and
conditions crowded daily, all clamouring to be cured. He received them in
their order, says an eye-witness, with "a grave and simple countenence."
For, as Shakespeare wrote, "Thus credulous fools are caught." ("Comedy of
Errors," 1, 2.) Greatrake (afterwards executed for high treason) asserted
that every diseased person was possessed by a devil, and that by his
prayers and laying on of hands the devil could be cast out. Lord Conway
sent for him to cure an incurable disease from which his wife was
suffering, and even some of the most learned and eminent people of the
time were amongst his patrons. St. Evremond wrote, "You can hardly imagine
what a reputation he gained in a short time. Catholics and Protestants
visited him from every part, all believing that power from heaven was in
his hands."
In an Act of Parliament which was passed in the year 1511, we read, in its
preamble, that "the science and cunning of Physic and Surgery" was
exercised by "a great multitude of ignorant persons, of whom the greater
part have no manner of insight in the same, nor in any other kind of
learning--some also can read no letters in the book--so far forth that
common artificers, as smiths, weavers, and women, boldly and accostumably
took upon them great cures, and things of great difficulty, in which they
partly used sorceries and witchcraft, and partly supplied such medicines
unto the diseased as are very noisome, and nothing meet therefore; to the
high displeasure of God," etc.
A large number of the pretended remedies thus used in medical practice are
clearly traceable back to the ancient Magi, who were professors of
medicine, as well as priests and astrologers.
With these facts before you, turn to your Shakespeare, and see how he
regarded the popular delusions thus created and fostered, with their
"Distinguished cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such libertines of sin."
--_Comedy of Errors._
Do you remember the other lines from this source, in which the poet speaks
of "This pernicious slave," who "forsooth took on him as a conjurer, and,
gazing in mine eyes, feeling my pulse, and with no face, as't were,
outfacing me, cried out I was possessed." This is not the stern, grave
doctor in "Macbeth," who did not pretend to "raze out the written troubles
of the brain," but said, "Therein the patient must minister unto himself."
There is no depreciation of the healing art in Shakespeare's painting of
Lear's physician, as there is of the "caitiff wretch" of an apothecary,
who sold poison to Romeo in a very different way to that in which the
physician in Cymbeline supplied a deadly drug to the Queen. "I beseech
your grace," says he, speaking in solemn earnestness, "without offence
(my conscience bids me ask) wherefore you have commanded of me these most
poisonous compounds." In "All's well that Ends Well," you will recognize
the foregoing descriptions of medicinal delusions in the interview between
Helena and the King, who says, we "may not be so credulous of cure, when
our most learned doctors leave us, and the congregated college have
concluded that labouring art can never ransom Nature from her maid estate,
I say we must not so stain our judgment, or corrupt our hope, to
prostitute our past-cure malady to empirics." In this play both "Galen and
Paracelsus" are mentioned, and their names then represented rival schools
of medicine.
How smartly and merrily Shakespeare wrote of such cures as Greatrake
professed to effect, we see in Henry VI., where Simpcox, supposed to be
miraculously cured of blindness, is asked to and does describe what he
sees, "If thou _hadst_ been born blind, thou might'st as well have known
all our names as thus to name the several colours we do wear."
In the "Merry Wives of Windsor" we have "Master Caius that calls himself
doctor of physic," and is called by Dame Quickly a "fool and physician."
The two were in Shakespeare's time very commonly combined, and often, as
we have shown, very strangely. Dr. Caius was a real name borne by a
learned gentleman who was physician to Queen Elizabeth. In Cymbeline the
name of the physician is Cornelius. This again was the name of a real
physician, who, in the sixteenth century, gained great reputation in
Europe chiefly by restoring Charles V. to health after a tediously long
illness. We may presume that Shakespeare was familiar with the fact.
Amongst the doctors of our poet's time it was a common custom to throw up
cases when they believed them hopeless. Shakespeare's Sempronius says,
"His friends, like physicians, thrice gave him o'er," and Lord Bacon in
his work on "The Advancement of Learning," says of Physicians, "In the
enquiry of diseases, they do abandon the cures of many, some as in their
nature incurable, and others as past the period of cure, so that Sylla
triumvirs never prescribed so many men to die as they do by their ignorant
edicts." We have spoken of the sword-salve cure for wounds. Of dealers in
poison who visited fairs and market-places, and attracted crowds by the
aid of a stage fool, we get a glimpse in "Hamlet," where Laertes says:--
"I bought an unction of a mountebank,
So mortal, that but dip a knife in it,
Where it draws blood, no cataplasm so rare
Collected from all simples that have virtue,
Under the moon can save the thing from death."
There is a hit at doctors who gave others remedies they had not enough
faith in to adopt for themselves:--
"Thou speak'st like a physician, Helicarnus:
Who minister'st a potion unto me
That thou would'st tremble to receive thyself."
--_Pericles._
In the same play the true physician receives full appreciation. Cerimon
says of himself:--
"'Tis known, I ever
Have studied physic, through which secret art,
By turning o'er authorities, I have
Together with my practice, made familiar
To me, and to my aid, the blest infusions
That dwell in vegitives, in metals, stones.
And I can speake of the disturbances
That nature works, and of her cures; which doth give me
A more content in course of true delight
Than to be thirsty after tottering honour,
Or tie my treasure up in silken bags,
To please the fool, and death."
And one of the two listening gentlemen adds:--
"Your honour has through Ephesus pour'd forth
Your charity, and hundreds call themselves
Your creatures, who by you have been restored."
And Pericles, with his supposed dead wife in his arms, turning to Cerimon,
who has saved her from the grave, says:--