SIR HANS SLOANE.
The lives of three physicians--Sydenham, Sir Hans Sloane, and
Heberden--completely bridge over the uncertain period between old
empiricism and modern science. The son of a wealthy Dorsetshire
squire, Sydenham was born in 1624, and received the most important
part of his education in the University of Oxford, where he was
created Bachelor of Medicine 14th April, 1648. Settling in London
about 1661, he was admitted a Licentiate of the Royal College of
Physicians 25th June, 1665. Subsequently he acquired an M.D. degree at
Cambridge, but this step he did not take till 17th May, 1676. He also
studied physic at Montpellier; but it may be questioned if his
professional success was a consequence of his labours in any seat of
learning, so much as a result of that knowledge of the world which he
gained in the Civil war as a captain in the Parliamentary army. It was
he who replied to Sir Richard Blackmore's inquiry after the best
course of study for a medical student to pursue--"Read Don Quixote; it
is a very good book--I read it still." Medical critics have felt it
incumbent on themselves to explain away this memorable answer--attributing
it to the doctor's cynical temper rather than his scepticism with
regard to medicine. When, however, the state of medical science in the
seventeenth century is considered, one has not much difficulty in
believing that the shrewd physician meant exactly what he said. There
is no question but that as a practitioner he was a man of many doubts.
The author of the capital sketch of Sydenham in the "Lives of British
Physicians" says--"At the commencement of his professional life it is
handed down to us by tradition, that it was his ordinary custom, when
consulted by his patients for the first time, to hear attentively the
story of their complaints, and then say, 'Well, I will consider of
your case, and in a few days will order something for you.' But he
soon discovered that this deliberate method of proceeding was not
satisfactory, and that many of the persons so received forgot to come
again; and he was consequently obliged to adopt the usual practice of
prescribing immediately for the diseases of those who sought his
advice." A doctor who feels the need for such deliberation must labour
under considerable perplexity as to the proper treatment of his
patient. But the low opinion he expressed to Blackmore of books as
instructors in medicine, he gave publicly with greater decorum, but
almost as forcibly, in a dedication addressed to Dr. Mapletoft, where
he says, "The medical art could not be learned so well and so surely
as by use and experience; and that he who would pay the nicest and
most accurate attention to the symptoms of distempers would succeed
best in finding out the true means of cure."
Sydenham died in his house, in Pall Mall, on the 29th of December,
1689. In his last years he was a martyr to gout, a malady fast
becoming one of the good things of the past. Dr. Forbes Winslow, in
his "Physic and Physicians"--gives a picture, at the same time painful
and laughable, of the doctor's sufferings. "Sydenham died of the gout;
and in the latter part of his life is described as visited with that
dreadful disorder, and sitting near an open window, on the ground
floor of his house, in St. James's Square, respiring the cool breeze
on a summer's evening, and reflecting, with a serene countenance and
great complacency, on the alleviation to human misery that his skill
in his art enabled him to give. Whilst this divine man was enjoying
one of these delicious reveries, a thief took away from the table,
near to which he was sitting, a silver tankard filled with his
favourite beverage, small beer, in which a sprig of rosemary had been
immersed, and ran off with it. Sydenham was too lame to ring his bell,
and too feeble in his voice to give the alarm."
Heberden, the medical friend of Samuel Johnson, was born in London in
1710, and died on the 17th of May, 1801. Between Sydenham and Heberden
came Sir Hans Sloane, a man ever to be mentioned honourably amongst
those physicians who have contributed to the advancement of science,
and the amelioration of society.
Pope says:--
"'Tis strange the miser should his cares employ,
To gain those riches he can ne'er enjoy;
Is it less strange the prodigal should waste
His wealth to purchase what he ne'er can taste?
Not for himself he sees, or hears, or eats,
Artists must chuse his pictures, music, meats;
He buys for Topham drawings and designs,
For Pembroke statues, dirty gods, and coins;
Rare monkish manuscripts, for Hearne alone,
And books for Mead, and butterflies for Sloane."
Pope's _Moral Essays_, Epistle IV.
Hans Sloane (the seventh and youngest child of Alexander Sloane,
receiver-general of taxes for the county of Down, before and after the
Civil war, and a commissioner of array, after the restoration of
Charles II.) was born at Killileagh in 1660. An Irishman by birth, and
a Scotchman by descent, he exhibited in no ordinary degree the energy
and politeness of either of the sister countries. After a childhood of
extreme delicacy he came to England, and devoted himself to medical
study and scientific investigation. Having passed through a course of
careful labour in London, he visited Paris and Montpellier, and,
returning from the Continent, became the intimate friend of Sydenham.
On the 21st of January, 1685, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal
Society; and on the 12th of April, 1687, he became a Fellow of the
College of Physicians. In the September of the latter year he sailed
to the West Indies, in the character of physician to the Duke of
Albemarle, who had been appointed Governor of Jamaica. His residence
in that quarter of the globe was not of long duration. On the death of
his Grace the doctor attended the Duchess back to England, arriving
once more in London in the July of 1689. From that time he remained in
the capital--his professional career, his social position, and his
scientific reputation being alike brilliant. From 1694 to 1730, he was
a physician of Christ's Hospital. On the 30th of November, 1693, he
was elected Secretary of the Royal Society. In 1701 he was made an
M.D. of Oxford; and in 1705 he was elected into the fellowship of the
College of Physicians of Edinburgh. In 1708 he was chosen a Fellow of
the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris. Four years later he was
elected a member of the Royal Society of Berlin. In 1719 he became
president of the College of Physicians; and in 1727 he was created
President of the Royal Society (on the death of Sir Isaac Newton), and
was appointed physician to King George II. In addition to these
honours, he won the distinction of being the first[6] medical
practitioner advanced to the dignity of a baronetcy.
[6] The learned Librarian of the College of Physicians in a letter to
me, elicited by the first edition of "The Book About Doctors,"
observes on this point: "Sir Hans Sloane is commonly stated to have
been the first medical baronet, but I think incorrectly. Sir Edmund
Greaves, M. D., a Fellow of the College, who died 11th Nov., 1680, is
said, and I am disposed to think with truth, to have been created a
Baronet at Oxford in 1645. Anthony A. Wood it is true calls him a
'pretended baronet,' but he was acknowledged to be a true and
veritable one by his colleagues of our college, and considering the
jealousy of physicians, which is not quite so great by the way as you
seem to think, this is no small testimony in favour of my belief. In
the 5th edition of Guillim's Heraldry he is made to be the 450th
baronet from the first institution of the order, and is placed between
William de Borcel of Amsterdam and George Carteret of Jersey. If you
think the matter worthy of investigation you may turn to Nash's
Worcestershire, vol. i., p. 198."
In 1742, Sir Hans Sloane quitted his professional residence at
Bloomsbury; and in the society of his library, museum, and a select
number of scientific friends, spent the last years of his life at
Chelsea, the manor of which parish he had purchased in 1722.
In the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1748, there is a long but
interesting account of a visit paid by the Prince and Princess of
Wales to the Baronet's museum. Sir Hans received his royal guests and
entertained them with a banquet of curiosities, the tables being
cleverly shifted, so that a succession of "courses," under glass
cases, gave the charm of variety to the labours of observation.
In his old age Sir Hans became sadly penurious, grudging even the
ordinary expenses of hospitality. His intimate friend, George Edwards,
F.R.S., gives, in his "Gleanings of Natural History," some particulars
of the old Baronet, which present a stronger picture of his parsimony
than can be found in the pages of his avowed detractors.
"Sir Hans, in the decline of his life, left London and retired to his
manor-house, at Chelsea, where he resided about fourteen years before
he died. After his retirement at Chelsea, he requested it as a favour
to him (though I embraced it as an honour due to myself), that I would
visit him every week, in order to divert him for an hour or two with
the common news of the town, and with everything particular that
should happen amongst his acquaintance of the Royal Society, and other
ingenious gentlemen, many of whom I was weekly conversant with; and I
seldom missed drinking coffee with him on a Saturday, during the whole
time of his retirement at Chelsea. He was so infirm as to be wholly
confined to his house, except sometimes, though rarely, taking a
little air in his garden in a wheeled chair; and this confinement made
him very desirous to see any of his old acquaintance, to amuse him. He
was strictly careful that I should be at no expense in my journeys
from London to Chelsea to wait on him, knowing that I did not
superabound in the gifts of fortune. He would calculate what the
expense of coach-hire, waterage, or any other little charge that might
attend on my journeys backward and forward would amount to, and would
oblige me annually to accept of it, though I would willingly have
declined it."
Such generosity speaks of a parsimonious temper and habit more
forcibly than positive acts of stinginess would.
On the death of Sir Hans Sloane, on the 11th of January, 1753, his
museum and library passed into the hands of the nation for a
comparatively small sum of money, and became the nucleus of our
British Museum.
The Royal Society of Sir Hans Sloane's time differed widely from the
Royal Society of the present day. The reader of Mr. Charles Weld's
history of that distinguished fraternity smiles a painful smile at the
feeble steps of its first members in the direction of natural science.
The efficacy of the divining rod, and the merits of Sir Kenelm Digby's
sympathetic powder, were the subjects that occupied the attention of
the philosophers of Charles II.'s reign. Entries such as the following
are the records of their proceedings:--
"_June 5._--Col. Tuke related the manner of the rain like corn at
Norwich, and Mr Boyle and Mr Evelyn were entreated to sow some of
those rained seeds to try their product.
"Magneticall cures were then discoursed of. Sir Gilbert Talbot
promised to bring what he knew of sympathetical cures. Those that had
any powder of sympathy were desired to bring some of it at the next
meeting.
"Mr Boyle related of a gentleman, who, having made some experiments of
the ayre, essayed the quicksilver experiment at the top and bottom of
a hill, when there was found three inches difference.
"Dr Charleton promised to bring in that white powder, which, put into
water, heates that.
"The Duke of Buckingham promised to cause charcoal to be distilled by
his chymist.
"His Grace promised to bring into the society a piece of a unicorne's
horn.
"Sir Kenelme Digby related that the calcined powder of toades
reverberated, applyed in bagges upon the stomach of a pestiferate
body, cures it by several applications."
"_June 13._--Colonel Tuke brought in the history of rained seedes,
which were reported to have fallen downe from heaven in Warwickshire
and Shropshire, &c.
"That the dyving engine be going forward with all speed, and the
treasurer to procure the lead and moneys.
"Ordered, that Friday next the engine be tried at Deptford."
"_June 26._--Dr Ent, Dr Clarke, Dr Goddard, and Dr Whistler, were
appointed curators of the proposition made by Sir G. Talbot, to
torment a man presently with the sympatheticall powder.
"Sir G. Talbot brought in his experiments of the sympathetick cures."
It is true that these passages relate to transactions of the Royal
Society that occurred long before Sir Hans was one of the body. But
even in his time the advances made towards greater enlightenment were
few and feeble, when compared with the strides of science during the
last century. So simple and childish were the operations and
speculations of the Society in the first half of the eighteenth
century, that even Sir John Hill was able to cover them with ridicule.
Sir Hans had two medical successors in the presidentship of the Royal
Society--Sir John Pringle, Bart., elected Nov. 30, 1772, and William
Hyde Wollaston, M.D., elected June 29, 1820. The last-mentioned
physician had but a brief tenure of the dignity, for he retired from
the exalted post on Nov. 30, 1820, in favor of Sir Humphrey Davy,
Bart.
Humphrey Davy (the son of the Penzance woodcarver, who was known to
his acquaintances as "Little Carver Davy") was the most acute natural
philosopher of his generation, and at the same time about the vainest
and most eccentric of his countrymen. With all his mental energy, he
was disfigured by a moral pettiness, which, to a certain extent,
justified Wordsworth's unaccustomed bitterness in "A Poet's
Epitaph":--
"Physician art thou? one all eyes;
Philosopher? a fingering slave,
One that would peep and botanize
Upon his mother's grave!
"Wrapt closely in thy sensual fleece,
O turn aside--and take, I pray,
That he below may rest in peace,
Thy ever-dwindling soul away!"
At the summit of his success, Davy was morbidly sensitive of the
humility of his extraction. That his father had been a respectable
mechanic--that his mother, on her husband's death, had established
herself as milliner in Penzance, in order to apprentice her son to an
apothecary in that town--that by his own intellects, in the hard
battle of life, he had raised himself from obscure poverty to a
brilliant eminence--were to him facts of shame, instead of pride. In
contradiction to this moral cowardice, there was in him, on some
points, an extravagant eccentricity, which, in most men, would have
pointed to imperviousness to ridicule. The demands of society, and the
labours of his laboratory, of course left him with but little leisure.
He, however, affected not to have time enough for the ordinary
decencies of the toilet. Cold ablutions neither his constitution nor
his philosophic temperament required, so he rarely washed himself.
And, on the plea of saving time, he used to put on his clean linen
over his dirty--so that he has been known to wear at the same time
five shirts and five pairs of stockings. On the rare occasions when he
divested himself of his superfluous integuments, he caused infinite
perplexity to his less intimate friends, who could not account for his
rapid transition from corpulence to tenuity.
The ludicrousness of his costume did not end there. Like many other
men of powerful and excitable minds, he was very fond of angling; and
on the banks of the Thames he might be found, at all unsuitable
seasons, in a costume that must have been a source of no common
merriment to the river nymphs. His coat and breeches were of green
cloth. On his head he wore a hat that Dr. Paris describes as "having
been originally intended for a coal-heaver, but as having, when in its
raw state, been dyed green by some sort of pigment." In this attire
Davy flattered himself that he resembled vegetable life as closely as
it was possible for mortal to do.
But if his angling dress was droll, his shooting costume was more so.
His great fear as an angler was that the fish should escape him; his
greatest anxiety as a bearer of a gun was to escape being shot. In the
one character, concealment was his chief object--in the other,
revelation. So that he might be seen from a distance, and run fewer
chances of being fired into by accident, he was accustomed on shooting
excursions, to crown himself with a broad-brimmed hat, covered with
scarlet. It never struck him that, in our Protestant England, he
incurred imminent peril of being mistaken for a cardinal, and knocked
over accordingly.
Naturally, Davy was of a poetical temperament; and some of his boyish
poetry possesses merit that unquestionably justifies the anticipation
formed by his poet-friends of the flights his more mature muse would
take. But when his intellect became absorbed in the pursuits by which
he rendered inestimable service to his species, he never renewed the
bright imaginings of his day-spring.
On passing (in 1809) through the galleries of the Louvre, he could
find nothing more worthy of admiration than the fine frames of the
pictures. "What an extraordinary collection of fine frames!" he
observed to the gentleman who acted as his guide, amidst the treasures
of art gathered from every part of the Continent. His attention was
directed to the "Transfiguration"; when, on its being suggested to him
that he was looking at a rather well-executed picture, he said,
coldly, "Indeed! I am glad I have seen it." In the same way, the
statues were to him simply blocks of material. In the Apollo
Belvidere, the Laocoon, and the Venus dei Medici, he saw no beauty;
but when his eyes rested on the Antinous, treated in the Egyptian
style, and sculptured in alabaster, he made an exclamation of delight,
and cried, "Gracious powers, what a beautiful stalactite!"
More amusing than even these criticisms, is a story told of Lady Davy,
who accompanied her husband to Paris. She was walking in the Tuileries
garden, wearing the fashionable London bonnet of the day--shaped like
a cockle-shell. The Parisians, who just then were patronizing bonnets
of enormous dimensions, were astounded at the apparition of a
head-dress so opposed to their notions of the everlasting fitness of
things; and with the good breeding for which they are and have long
been proverbial, they surrounded the daring stranger, and stared at
her. This was sufficiently unpleasant to a timid English lady. But her
discomfort had only commenced. Ere another minute or two had elapsed,
one of the inspectors of the garden approached, and telling her
Ladyship that no cause of _rassemblement_ could be permitted in that
locality, requested her to retire. Alarmed and indignant, she appealed
to some officers of the Imperial Guard, but they could afford her no
assistance. One of them politely offered her his arm, and proposed to
conduct her to a carriage. But by the time she had decided to profit
by the courtesy, such a crowd had gathered together, that it was found
necessary to send for a guard of infantry, and remove _la belle
Anglaise_, surrounded with bayonets.