THE DOCTOR IN HIS CURE. IRRELIGION THE REPROACH OF HIS PROFESSION.
Virtue, and that part of philosophy
Will I apply, that treats of happiness
By virtue specially to be achieved.
TAMING OF THE SHREW.
A practitioner of medicine possesses in what may be called his cure,
that knowledge of all who are under his care, which the parochial
priest used to possess in former times, and will it is to be hoped
regain whenever the most beneficial of all alterations shall be
effected in the Church Establishment, and no Clergyman shall have a
duty imposed upon him which it is impossible to fulfil,—impossible it
is, if his parishioners are numbered by thousands instead of hundreds.
In such cases one of two consequences must inevitably ensue. Either he
will confine himself to the formalities of his office, and because he
cannot by any exertions do what ought to be done, rest contented with
performing the perfunctory routine; or he will exert himself to the
utmost till his health, and perhaps his heart also, is broken in a
service which is too often found as thankless as it is hopeless.
Our Doctor was, among the poorer families in his cure, very much what
Herbert's Country Parson is imagined to be in his parish. There was
little pauperism there at that time; indeed none that existed in a
degree reproachful to humanity; or in that obtrusive and clamorous
form which at present in so many parts of this misgoverned country
insults and outrages and endangers society. The labourers were not so
ill paid as to be justly discontented with their lot; and he was not
in a manufacturing district. His profession led him among all classes;
and his temper as well as his education qualified him to sympathize
with all, and accommodate himself to each as far as such accommodation
was becoming. Yet he was every where the same man; he spoke the King's
English in one circle, and the King's Yorkshire in another; but this
was the only difference in his conversation with high and low. Before
the professors of his art indeed, in the exercise of their calling,
the distinctions of society disappear, and poor human nature is stript
to its humanities. Rank, and power, and riches,—these—
cannot take a passion away, Sir,
Nor cut a fit but one poor hour shorter.[1]
The most successful stock jobber, or manufacturer that ever counted
his wealth by hundreds of thousands—
must endure as much as the poorest beggar
That cannot change his money,—this is the equality
In our impartial essences![1]
Death is not a more inexorable leveller than his precursors age and
infirmity and sickness and pain.
[Footnote 1: BEAUMONT and FLETCHER.]
Hope and fear and grief and joy act with the same equitable disregard
of conventional distinctions. And though there is reason for
disbelieving that the beetle which we tread upon feels as much as a
human being suffers in being crushed, it is yet undoubtedly true that
except in those cases where individuals have so thoroughly corrupted
their feelings as to have thereby destroyed the instinctive sense of
right and wrong, making evil their good, what may be termed the
primitive affections exist in as much strength among the rudest as
among the most refined. They may be paralyzed by pauperism, they may
be rotted by the licentiousness of luxury; but there is no grade of
society in which they do not exhibit themselves in the highest degree.
Tragic poets have been attracted by the sufferings of the great, and
have laid the scene of their fables in the higher circles of life; yet
tragedy represents no examples more touching or more dreadful, for our
admiration or abhorrence, to thrill us with sympathy or with
indignation, than are continually occurring in all classes of society.
They who call themselves men of the world and pride themselves
accordingly upon their knowledge, are of all men those who know least
of human nature. It was well said by a French biographer, though not
well applied to the subject[2] of his biography, that _il avait pu,
dans la solitude, se former à l'amour du vrai et du juste, et même à
la connoissance de l'homme, si souvent et si mal à propos confondue
avec celle des hommes; c'est-à-dire, avec la petite experience des
intrigues mouvantes d'un petit nombre d'individus plus ou moins
accrédités et des habitudes etroites de leurs petites coteries. La
connoissance des hommes est à celle de l'homme ce qu'est l'intrigue
sociale à l'art social._
[Footnote 2: The ABBE SIEYES.]
Of those passions which are or deserve to be the subject of legal and
judicial tragedy, the lawyers necessarily see most, and for this
reason perhaps they think worse of human nature than any other class
of men, except the Roman Catholic Clergy. Physicians on the contrary,
though they see humanity in its most humiliating state, see it also in
the exercise of its holiest and most painful duties. No other persons
witness such deep emotions and such exertions of self-controul. They
know what virtues are developed by the evils which flesh is heir to,
what self-devotion, what patience, what fortitude, what piety, what
religious resignation.
Wherefore is it then that physicians have lain under the reproach of
irreligion, who of all men best know how fearfully and wonderfully we
are made, and who it might be thought would be rendered by the scenes
at which they are continually called upon to assist, of all men the
most religious? Sir Thomas Brown acknowledges that this was the
general scandal of his profession, and his commentator Sir Kenelm
Digby observes upon the passage, that “Physicians do commonly hear ill
in this behalf,” and that “it is a common speech (but,” he
parenthesizes, “only amongst the unlearned sort) _ubi tres medici duo
athei_.” Rabelais defines a Physician to be _animal incombustible
propter reliqionem_.
“As some mathematicians,” says an old Preacher, “deal so much in
Jacob's staff that they forget Jacob's ladder, so some Physicians (God
decrease the number!) are so deep naturalists that they are very
shallow Christians. With us, Grace waits at the heels of Nature, and
they dive so deep into the secrets of philosophy that they never look
up to the mysteries of Divinity.”
Old Adam Littleton who looked at every thing in its best light, took a
different view of the effect of medical studies, in his sermon upon
St. Luke's day. “His character of Physician,” said he, “certainly gave
him no mean advantage, not only in the exercise of his ministry by an
acceptable address and easy admission which men of that profession
every where find among persons of any civility; but even to his
understanding of Christian truths and to the apprehending the
mysteries of faith.
“For having as that study directed him, gone orderly over all the
links of that chain by which natural causes are mutually tied to one
another, till he found God the supreme cause and first mover at the
top; having traced the footsteps of Divine Goodness through all the
most minute productions of his handmaid Nature, and yet finding human
reason puzzled and at a loss in giving an account of his almighty
power and infinite wisdom in the least and meanest of his works; with
what pious humility must he needs entertain supernatural truths, when
upon trial he had found every the plainest thing in common nature
itself was mystery, and saw he had as much reason for his believing
these proposals of faith, as he had for trusting the operations of
sense, or the collections of reason itself.
“I know there is an unworthy reproach cast upon this excellent study
that it inclines men to atheism. 'Tis true the ignorance and
corruption of men that profess any of the three honourable faculties,
bring scandal upon the faculty itself. Again, sciolists and
half-witted men are those that discredit any science they meddle with.
But he that pretends to the noble skill of physic, and dares to deny
that which doth continually _incurrere in sensus_, that which in all
his researches and experiments he must meet with at every turn, I dare
to say he is no Physician; or at least that he doth at once give his
profession and his conscience too the lye.”