CONCERNING PETER HOPKINS AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE MOON AND TIDES UPON
THE HUMAN BODY. A CHAPTER WHICH SOME PERSONS MAY DEEM MORE CURIOUS
THAN DULL, AND OTHERS MORE DULL THAN CURIOUS.
A man that travelleth to the most desirable home, hath a habit of
desire to it all the way; but his present business is his travel; and
horse, and company, and inns, and ways, and weariness, &c., may take
up more of his sensible thoughts, and of his talk and action, than his
home.
BAXTER.
Few things in this world are useless,—none indeed but what are of
man's own invention. It was one of Oberlin's wise maxims that nothing
should be destroyed, nothing thrown away, or wasted; he knew that
every kind of refuse which will not serve to feed pigs, may be made to
feed both man and beast in another way by serving for manure: perhaps
he learnt this from the Chinese proverb, that a wise man saves even
the parings of his nails and the clippings of his beard, for this
purpose. “To burn a hair,” says Darwin, “or a straw, unnecessarily,
diminishes the sum of matter fit for quick nutrition, by decomposing
it nearly into its elements: and should therefore give some
compunction to a mind of universal sympathy.” Let not this cant about
universal sympathy nauseate a reader of common sense, and make him
regard Darwin's opinion here with the contempt which his affectation
deserves. Every thing may be of use to the farmer. And so it is with
knowledge; there is none, however vain in itself and however little it
may be worth the pains of acquiring it, which may not at some time or
other be turned to account.
Peter Hopkins found that his acquaintance with astrology was sometimes
of good service in his professional practice. In his days most of the
Almanacs contained Rules Astrological showing under what aspects and
positions different modes of remedy were to be administered, and
different complections were to let blood. He had often to deal with
persons who believed in their Almanack as implicitly as in their
Bible, and who studied this part of it with a more anxious sense of
its practical importance to themselves. When these notions were
opposed to the course of proceeding which the case required, he could
gain his point by talking to them in their own language, and
displaying, if it were called for, a knowledge of the art which might
have astonished the Almanack-maker himself. If he had reasoned with
them upon any other ground, they would have retained their own
opinion, even while they submitted to his authority; and would neither
have had faith in him, nor in his prescriptions.
Peter Hopkins would never listen to any patient who proposed waiting
for a lucky day before he entered upon a prescribed course of
medicine. “Go by the moon as much as you please,” he would say; “have
your hair cut, if you think best while it wexes, and cut your corns
while it wanes; and put off any thing till a lucky day that may as
well be done on one day as another. But the right day to be bled is
when you want bleeding; the right day for taking physic is when physic
is necessary.”
He was the better able to take this course, because he himself
belonged to the debateable land between credulity and unbelief. Some
one has said that the Devil's dubitative is a negative,—_dubius in
fide, infidelis est_;[1] and there are cases, as in Othello's, in
which from the infirmity of human nature, it is too often seen that
to be once in doubt
Is—once to be resolved.
[Footnote 1: SEXTUS PYTHAGORAS.]
There is however a state of mind, or to speak more accurately a way of
thinking, in which men reverse the Welshman's conclusion in the old
comedy, and instead of saying ‘it may be, but it is very impossible,’
resolve within themselves that it is very impossible, but it may be.
So it was in some degree with Peter Hopkins; his education, his early
pursuits, and his turn of mind disposed him to take part with what was
then the common opinion of common men, and counterbalanced, if they
did not perhaps a little preponderate against the intelligence of the
age, and his own deliberate judgment if he had been called upon
seriously to declare it. He saw plainly that astrology had been made a
craft by means whereof knaves practised upon fools; but so had his own
profession; and it no more followed as a necessary consequence from
the one admission that the heavenly bodies exercised no direct
influence upon the human frame, than it did from the other that the
art of medicine was not beneficial to mankind.
In the high days of astrology when such an immediate influence was
affirmed upon the then undisputed authority of St. Augustin, it was
asked how it happened that the professors of this science so
frequently deceived others, and were deceived themselves? The answer
was that too often instead of confining themselves within the
legitimate limits of the art, they enlarged their phylacteries too
much. Farther, that there were many more fixed stars than were known
to us, yet these also must have their influence; and moreover that the
most learned professors differed upon some of the most important
points. Nevertheless so many causes and effects in the course of
nature were so visibly connected, that men, whether astrologers or
not, drew from them their own conclusions, and presaged accordingly:
_mirum non est, si his et similibus solerter pensiculatis, non tam
astrologi quam philosophi, medici, et longâ experientiâ edocti
agricolæ et nautæ, quotidie de futuris multa vera predicunt, etiam
sine astrologiæ regulis de morbis, de annonâ, deque tempestatibus._
All persons in Peter Hopkins's days believed that change of weather
may be looked for at the change of the Moon; and all men except a few
philosophers believe so still, and all the philosophers in Europe
could not persuade an old sailor out of the belief. And that the tides
have as much influence over the human body in certain stages of
disease, as the moon has over the tides, is a popular belief in many
parts of the world. The Spaniards think that all who die of chronic
diseases breathe their last during the ebb. Among the wonders of the
Isle and City of Cadiz, which the historian of that city, Suares de
Salazar, enumerates, one is, according to P. Labat, that the sick
never die there while the tide is rising or at its height, but always
during the ebb: he restricts the notion to the Isle of Leon, but
implies that the effect was there believed to take place in diseases
of any kind, acute as well as chronic. “Him fever,” says the Negro in
the West Indies, “shall go when the water come low. Him alway come hot
when the tide high.”
If the Negroes had ever heard the theory of the tides which Herrera
mentions, they would readily believe it, and look upon it as
completely explaining the ground of their assertion; for according to
that theory the tides are caused by a fever of the sea, which rages
for six hours, and then intermits for as many more.
But the effect of the tides upon the human constitution in certain
states is not a mere vulgar opinion. Major Moor says that near the
tropics, especially in situations where the tide of the sea has a
great rise and fall, scarcely any person, and certainly no one
affected with feverish or nervous symptoms, is exempted from
extraordinary sensations at the periods of spring tides. That these
are caused by the changes of the moon he will not say, for he had
never fully convinced himself, however plausible the theory, that the
coincident phenomena of spring tides, and full and change of the moon,
were cause and effect; but at the conjunction and opposition, or what
amounts to the same, at the spring tides, these sensations are
periodically felt. There is an account of one singular case in which
the influence was entirely lunar. When Mr. Galt was travelling in the
Morea, he fell in with a peasant, evidently in an advanced stage of
dropsy, who told him, that his father had died of a similar complaint,
but differing from his in this remarkable respect—the father's
continued to grow regularly worse, without any intervals of
alleviation; but at the change of the moon the son felt comparatively
much easier. As the moon advanced to the full, the swelling enlarged;
and as she waned, it again lessened. Still, however, though this
alteration continued, the disease was gaining ground.
“The moon,” Mr. Galt observes, “has, or is believed to have, much more
to say in the affairs of those parts, than with us. The climate is
more regular; and if the air have tides, like the ocean, of course
their effects are more perceptible.”
In an early volume of the Philosophical Transactions are some
observations made by Mr. Paschal on the motions of diseases, and on
the births and deaths of men and other animals, in different parts of
the day and night. Having suspected, he says, that the causes of the
tides at sea exert their power elsewhere, though the effect may not be
so sensibly perceived on the solid as on the fluid parts of the globe,
he divided, for trial of this notion, the natural day into four
senaries of hours; the first consisting of three hours before the
moon's southing, and three after; the second, of the six hours
following; and the third and fourth contained the two remaining
quarters of the natural day. Observing then the times of birth and
death, both in human and other subjects, as many as came within the
circle of his knowledge, he found, he says, none that were born or
died a natural death in the first and third senaries, (which he called
first and second tides,) but every one either in the second or fourth
senaries, (which he called the first and second ebbs). He then made
observations upon the motions of diseases, other circumstances
connected with the human frame, alterations of the weather, and such
accounts as he could meet with of earthquakes and other things, and he
met with nothing to prevent him from laying down this as a maxim:—that
motion, vigour, action, strength, &c., appear most and do best, in the
tiding senaries; and that rest, relaxation, decay, dissolution, belong
to the ebbing ones.
This theorist must have been strongly possessed with a favorite
opinion, before he could imagine that the deep subterranean causes of
earthquakes could in any degree be affected by the tides. But that the
same influences which occasion the ebb and flow of the ocean have an
effect upon certain diseases, is a conclusion to which Dr. Pinckard
came in the West Indies, and Dr. Balfour in the East, from what they
observed in the course of their own practice, and what they collected
from the information of others. “In Bengal,” Dr. Balfour says, “there
is no room to doubt that the human frame is affected by the influences
connected with the relative situations of the sun and moon. In certain
states of health and vigour, this influence has not power to show
itself by any obvious effects, and in such cases its existence is
often not acknowledged. But in certain states of debility and disease
it is able to manifest itself by exciting febrile paroxysms. Such
paroxysms shew themselves more frequently during the period of the
spring tides, and as these advance become more violent and obstinate,
and on the other hand tend no less invariably to subside and terminate
during the recess.
“I have no doubt,” says this practitioner, “that any physician who
will carefully attend to the diurnal and nocturnal returns of the
tides, and will constantly hold before him the prevailing tendency of
fevers to appear at the commencement, and during the period of the
spring; and to subside and terminate at the commencement and during
the period of the recess, will soon obtain more information respecting
the phenomena of fevers, and he able to form more just and certain
judgements and prognostics respecting every event, than if he were to
study the history of medicine, as it is now written, for a thousand
years. There is no revolution or change in the course of fevers that
may not be explained by these general principles in a manner
consistent with the laws of the human constitution, and of the great
system of revolving bodies which unite together in producing them.”
Dr. Balfour spared no pains in collecting information to elucidate and
confirm his theory during the course of thirty years practice in
India. He communicated upon it with most of the European practitioners
in the Company's dominions; and the then Governor General, Lord
Teignmouth, considered the subject as so important, that he properly
as well as liberally ordered the correspondence and the treatise, in
which its results were embodied, to be printed and circulated at the
expense of the government. The author drew up his scheme of an
Astronomical Ephemeris, for the purposes of Medicine and Meteorology,
and satisfied himself that he had “discovered the laws of febrile
paroxysms,” and unfolded a history and theory of fevers entirely new,
consistent with itself in every part, and with the other appearances
of nature, perfectly conformable to the laws discovered by the
immortal Newton, and capable of producing important improvements in
medicine and meteorology. He protested against objections to his
theory as if it were connected with the wild and groundless delusions
of astrology. Yet the letter of his correspondent, Dr. Helenus Scott,
of Bombay, shews how naturally and inevitably it would be connected
with them in that country. “The influence of the moon on the human
body,” says that physician, “has been observed in this part of India
by every medical practitioner. It is universally acknowledged by the
doctors of all colours, of all casts, and of all countries. The people
are taught to believe it in their infancy, and as they grow up, they
acknowledge it from experience. I suppose that in the northern
latitudes this power of the moon is far less sensible than in India.
Here we universally think that the state of weakly and diseased bodies
is much influenced by its motions. Every full and change increases the
number of the patients of every practitioner. That the human body is
affected in a remarkable manner by them I am perfectly convinced, and
that an attention to the power of the moon is highly necessary to the
medical practitioner in India.”
This passage tends to confirm, what indeed no judicious person can
doubt, that the application of astrology to medicine, though it was
soon perverted, and debased till it became a mere craft, originated in
actual observations of the connection between certain bodily
affections, and certain times and seasons. Many, if not most of the
mischievous systems in physics and divinity have arisen from dim
perceptions or erroneous apprehensions of some important truth. And
not a few have originated in the common error of drawing bold and
hasty inferences from weak premises. Sailors say, what they of all men
have most opportunities of observing, that the moon as it rises clears
the sky of clouds: _a puesta del sol_, says a Spanish chronicler,
_parescio la luna, e comio poco a poco todas las nuves._ The “learned
and reverend” Dr. Goad, sometime Master of Merchant Taylors' School,
published a work “of vast pains, reading and many years experience,”
which he called “_Astro-Meteorologia_, or a Demonstration of the
Influences of the Stars in the alterations of the Air; proving that
there is not an Earthquake, Comet, Parhelia, Halo, Thunder-storm or
Tempest, or any other Phenomena, but is referable to its particular
planetary aspect, as the sub-solar cause thereof.”