A Book about Doctors Part 28

Lord Denman was closely connected with the medical profession by family ties: his father being Dr. Denman, of Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, the author of a well-known work on a department of his profession; his uncle being Dr. Joseph Denman of Bakewell; and his two sisters having married two eminent physicians, Margaret being the wife of Sir Richard Croft, Bart., and Sophia the wife of Dr. Baillie. Lord Kingsdown's medical ancestor was his grandfather, Edward Pemberton, M.D., of Warrington.

But though the list of the enn.o.bled descendants of medical pract.i.tioners might be extended to the limits of a volume, the writer of these pages is not aware of any case in which a doctor has, by the exercise of his calling, raised himself to the peerage. As yet, the dignity of a baronetcy is the highest honour conferred on the most ill.u.s.trious of the medical faculty, Sir Hans Sloane being the first of the order to whom that rank was presented. More than once a physician has won admission into the _n.o.blesse_, but the battle resulting in such success has been fought in the arena of politics or the bustle of the law courts. Sylvester Douglas deserted the counter, at which he commenced life an apothecary, and after a prolonged servitude to, or warfare with, the cliques of the House of Commons, had his exertions rewarded and his ambition gratified with an Irish peerage and a patrician wife. On his elevation he was of course taunted with the humility of his origin, and by none was the reproach flung at him with greater bitterness than it was by a brother _parvenu_ and brother poet.

"What's his t.i.tle to be?" asked Sheridan, as he was playing at cards; "what's Sylvester Douglas to be called?"

"Lord Glenbervie," was the answer.

"Good Lord!" replied Sheridan; and then he proceeded to fire off an _impromptu_, which he had that morning industriously prepared in bed, and which he subsequently introduced into one of his best satiric pieces.

"Glenbervie, Glenbervie, What's good for the scurvy?

For ne'er be your old trade forgot.

In your arms rather quarter A pestle and mortar, And your crest be a spruce gallipot."

The brilliant partizan and orator displayed more wit, if not better taste, in his ridicule of Addington, who, in allusion to the rise of his father from a humble position in the medical profession, was ordinarily spoken of by political opponents as "The Doctor." On one occasion, when the Scotch members who usually supported Addington voted in a body with the opposition, Sheridan, with a laugh of triumph, fired off a happy mis-quotation from Macbeth,--"Doctor, the Thanes fly from thee."

Henry Bickersteth, Lord Langdale, was the luckiest of physicians and lawyers. He used the medical profession as a stepping-stone, and the legal profession as a ladder, and had the fortune to win two of the brightest prizes of life--wealth and a peerage--without the humiliation and toil of serving a political party in the House of Commons. The second son of a provincial surgeon, he was apprenticed to his father, and educated for the paternal calling. On being qualified to kill, he became medical attendant to the late Earl of Oxford, during that n.o.bleman's travels on the Continent. Returning to his native town, Kirby Lonsdale, he for awhile a.s.sisted his father in the management of his practice; but resolved on a different career from that of a country doctor, he became a member of Caius College, Cambridge, and devoted himself to mathematical study with such success that, in 1808, when he was twenty-eight years old, he became Senior Wrangler and First Smith's prizeman. As late as the previous year he was consulted medically by his father. In 1811 he was called to the bar by the Inner Temple, and from that time till his elevation to the Mastership of the Rolls he was both the most hard-working and hard-worked of the lawyers in the Equity Courts, to which he confined his practice. In 1827 he became a bencher of his Inn; and, in 1835, although he was a staunch and zealous liberal, and a strenuous advocate of Jeremy Bentham's opinions, he was offered a seat on the judicial bench by Sir Robert Peel. This offer he declined, though he fully appreciated the compliment paid him by the Tory chieftain. He had not, however, to wait long for his promotion. In the following year (1836) he was, by his own friends, made Master of the Rolls, and created a peer of the realm, with the additional honour of being a Privy-Councillor. His Lordship died at Tunbridge Wells, in 1851, in his sixty-eighth year. It would be difficult to point to a more enviable career in legal annals than that of this medical lawyer, who won the most desirable honours of his profession without ever sitting in the House of Commons, or acting as a legal adviser of the Crown--and when he had not been called quite twenty-five years. To give another touch to this picture of a successful life, it may be added, that Lord Langdale, after rising to eminence, married Elizabeth, daughter of the Earl of Oxford, to whom he had formerly been travelling medical attendant.

Love has not unfrequently smiled on doctors, and elevated them to positions at which they would never have arrived by their professional labours. Sir Lucas Pepys, who married the Countess De Rothes, and Sir Henry Halford, whose wife was a daughter of the eleventh Lord St. John of Blestoe, are conspicuous amongst the more modern instances of medical pract.i.tioners advancing their social condition by aristocratic alliances. Not less fortunate was the farcical Sir John Hill, who gained for a bride the Honourable Miss Jones, a daughter of Lord Ranelagh--a n.o.bleman whose eccentric opinion, that the welfare of the country required a continual intermixture of the upper and lower cla.s.ses of society, was a frequent object of ridicule with the caricaturists and lampoon-writers of his time. But the greatest prize ever made by an ?sculapius in the marriage-market was that acquired by Sir Hugh Smithson, who won the hand of Percy's proud heiress, and was created Duke of Northumberland. The son of a Yorkshire baronet's younger son, Hugh Smithson was educated for an apothecary--a vocation about the same time followed for several years by Sir Thomas Geery Cullum, before he succeeded to the family estate and dignity. Hugh Smithson's place of business was Hatton Garden, but the length of time that he there presided over a pestle and mortar is uncertain. In 1736 he became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, but he withdrew from that learned body, on the books of which his signature may be found, in the year 1740. A few months after this secession, Sir Hugh led to the altar the only child and heiress of Algernon Seymour, Duke of Somerset. There still lives a tradition that the lady made the offer to Sir Hugh immediately after his rejection by a famous belle of private rank and modest wealth. Another version of the story is that, when she heard of his disappointment, she observed publicly, "that the disdainful beauty was a fool, and that no other woman in England would be guilty of like folly." On hearing this, the baronet, a singularly handsome man, took courage to sue for that to which men of far higher rank would not have presumed to aspire. The success that followed his daring, of course, brought upon him the arrows of envy. He had won so much, however, that he could, without ill-humour, bear being laughed at. On being created Duke of Northumberland in 1766, he could afford to smile at a proposition that his coronet should be surrounded with senna, instead of strawberry-leaves; for, however much obscure jealousy might affect to contemn him, he was no fit object for disdain--but a gentleman of good intellect and a lordly presence, and (though he had mixed drugs behind a counter) descended from an old and honourable family. The reproach of being a Smithson, and no Percy, had more force when applied to the second duke in the Anti-Jacobin, than it had when hurled vindictively at the ex-doctor himself by the mediocrities of the _beau monde_, whom he had beaten on their own ground by superior attractions and accomplishments.

"Nay," quoth the Duke, "in thy black scroll Deductions I espye-- For those who, poor, and mean, and low, With children burthen'd lie.

"And though full sixty thousand pounds My va.s.sals pay to me, From Cornwall to Northumberland, Through many a fair countree;

"Yet England's church, its king, its laws, Its cause I value not, Compared with this, my constant text, _A penny saved is got_.

"No drop of princely Percy's blood Through these cold veins doth run; With Hotspur's castles, blazon, name, I still am _poor_ Smithson."

Considering the opportunities that medical men have for pressing a suit in love, and the many temptations to gentle emotion that they experience in the aspect of feminine suffering, and the confiding grat.i.tude of their fair patients, it is perhaps to be wondered at that only one medical duke is to be found in the annals of the peerage.

When Swift's Stella was on her death-bed, her physician said, encouragingly--"Madam, you are certainly near the bottom of the hill, but we shall endeavour to get you up once more," the _na?ve_ reply of the poor lady was, "Doctor, I am afraid I shall be out _of breath_ before I get to the top again." Not less touching was the fear expressed by Steele's merry daughter to her doctor, that she should "die _before the holidays_." Both Stella and Sir Richard's child had left their personal charms behind them when they so addressed their physicians; but imagine, my brother, what the effect of such words would be on your susceptible heart, if they came from the lips of a beautiful girl. Would you not (think you) try to win other such speeches from her?--and if you tried, dear sir, surely _you_ would succeed!

Prudence would order a physician, endowed with a heart, to treat it in the same way as Dr. Glynn thought a cuc.u.mber ought to be dressed--to slice it very thin, pepper it plentifully, pour upon it plenty of the best vinegar, and then--throw it away. A doctor has quite enough work on his hands to keep the affections of his patients in check, without having to mount guard over his own emotions. Thackeray says that girls make love in the nursery, and practise the arts of coquetry on the page-boy who brings the coals upstairs--a hard saying for simple young gentlemen triumphing in the possession of a _first_ love. The writer of these pages could point to a fair dame, who enjoys rank amongst the highest and wealth equal to the station a.s.signed her by the heralds, who not only aimed tender glances, and sighed amorously to a young waxen-faced, blue-eyed apothecary, but even went so far as to write him a letter proposing an elopement, and other merry arrangements, in which a carriage, everlastingly careering over the country at the heels of four horses, bore a conspicuous part. The silly maiden had, like Dinah, "a fortune in silvyer and gold," amounting to ?50,000, and her blue-eyed Adonis was twice her age; but fortunately he was a gentleman of honour, and, without divulging the mad proposition of the young lady, he induced her father to take her away for twelve months'

change of air and scene. Many years since the heroine of this little episode, after she had become the wife of a very great man, and the mother of children who bid fair to become ornaments to their ill.u.s.trious race, expressed her grat.i.tude cordially to this Joseph of the doctors, for his magnanimity in not profiting by the absurd fancies of a child, and the delicacy with which he had taken prompt measures for her happiness; and, more recently, she manifested her good will to the man who had offered her what is generally regarded as the greatest insult a woman can experience, by procuring a commission in the army for his eldest son.

The embarra.s.sments Sir John Eliot suffered under from the emotional overtures of his fair patients are well known. St. John Long himself had not more admirers amongst the _?lite_ of high-born English ladies.

The king had a strong personal dislike to Sir John,--a dislike possibly heightened by a feeling that it was sheer impudence in a doctor to capture without an effort the hearts of half the prettiest women amongst his subjects--and then shrug his shoulders with chagrin at his success. Lord George Germain had hard work to wring a baronetcy out of his Majesty for this victim of misplaced affection.

"Well," said the king, at last grudgingly promising to make Eliot a baronet--"my Lord, since you desire it, let it be; but remember he shall not be my physician."

"No, sir," answered Lord George--"he shall be your Majesty's baronet, and my physician."

Amongst other plans Sir John resorted to, to scare away his patients and patronesses, he had a death's-head painted on his carriage-panels; but the result of this eccentric measure on his practice and on his sufferings was the reverse of what he desired. One lady--the daughter of a n.o.ble member of a Cabinet--ignorant that he was otherwise occupied, made him an offer, and on learning to her astonishment that he was a married man, vowed that she would not rest till she had a.s.sa.s.sinated his wife.

Poor Radcliffe's loves were of a less flattering sort, though they resembled Sir John Eliot's in respect of being instances of reciprocity all on one side. But the amorous follies of Radcliffe, ludicrous though they became under the touches of Steele's pen, are dignified and manly when compared with the senile freaks of Dr. Mead, whose highest delight was to comb the hair of the lady on whom, for the time being, his affections were set.

Dr. Cadogan, of Charles the Second's time, was, like Sir John Eliot, a favourite with the ladies. His wont was to spend his days in shooting and his evenings in flirtation. To the former of these tastes the following lines refer:--

"Doctor, all game you either ought to shun, Or sport no longer with the unsteady gun; But like physicians of undoubted skill, Gladly attempt what never fails to kill, Not lead's uncertain dross, but physic's deadly pill."

Whether he was a good shot we cannot say; but he was sufficiently adroit as a squire of dames, for he secured as his wife a wealthy lady, over whose property he had unfettered control. Against the money, however, there were two important points figuring under the head of "set-off"--the bride was old and querulous. Of course such a woman was unfitted to live happily with an eminent physician, on whom bevies of court ladies smiled whenever he went west of Charing Cross.

After spending a few months in alternate fits of jealous hate and jealous fondness, the poor creature conceived the terrible fancy that her husband was bent on destroying her with poison, and so ridding his life of her execrable temper. One day, when surrounded by her friends, and in the presence of her lord and master, she fell on her back in a state of hysterical spasms, exclaiming:--

"Ah! he has killed me at last. I am poisoned!"

"Poisoned!" cried the lady-friends, turning up the whites of their eyes. "Oh! gracious goodness!--you have done it, doctor!"

"What do you accuse me of?" asked the doctor, with surprise.

"I accuse you--of--killing me--ee," responded the wife, doing her best to imitate a death-struggle.

"Ladies," answered the doctor, with admirable _nonchalance_, bowing to Mrs. Cadogan's bosom a.s.sociates, "it is perfectly false. You are quite welcome to open her at once, and then you'll discover the calumny."

John Hunter administered a scarcely less startling reproof to his wife, who, though devoted in her attachment to him, and in every respect a lady worthy of esteem, caused her husband at times no little vexation by her fondness for society. She was in the habit of giving enormous routs, at which authors and artists, of all shades of merit and demerit, used to a.s.semble to render homage to her literary powers, which were very far from common-place. A lasting popularity has attested the excellence of her song:--

"My mother bids me bind my hair With bands of rosy hue; Tie up my sleeves with ribbons rare, And lace my boddice blue.

"'For why,' she cries, 'sit still and weep, While others dance and play?'

Alas! I scarce can go or creep, While Lubin is away.

"'Tis sad to think the days are gone, When those we love are near; I sit upon this mossy stone, And sigh when none can hear.

"And while I spin my flaxen thread, And sing my simple lay, The village seems asleep or dead, Now Lubin is away."

John Hunter had no sympathy with his wife's poetical aspirations, still less with the society which those aspirations led her to cultivate. Grudging the time which the labours of practice prevented him from devoting to the pursuits of his museum and laboratory he could not restrain his too irritable temper when Mrs. Hunter's frivolous amus.e.m.e.nts deprived him of the quiet requisite for study.

Even the fee of a patient who called him from his dissecting instruments could not reconcile him to the interruption. "I must go,"

he would say reluctantly to his friend Lynn, when the living summoned him from his investigations among the dead, "and earn this d----d guinea, or I shall be sure to want it to-morrow." Imagine the wrath of such a man, finding, on his return from a long day's work, his house full of musical professors, connoisseurs, and fashionable idlers--in fact, all the confusion and hubbub and heat of a grand party, which his lady had forgotten to inform him was that evening to come off!

Walking straight into the middle of the princ.i.p.al reception-room, he faced round and surveyed his unwelcome guests, who were not a little surprised to see him--dusty, toilworn, and grim--so unlike what "the man of the house" ought to be on such an occasion.

"I knew nothing," was his brief address to the astounded crowd--"I knew nothing of this kick-up, and I ought to have been informed of it beforehand; but, as I have now returned home to study, I hope the present company will retire."

Mrs Hunter's drawing-rooms were speedily empty.

One of the drollest love stories in medical ana is that which relates to Dr. Thomas Dawson, a century since alike admired by the inhabitants of Hackney as a pulpit orator and a physician. Dawson was originally a Suffolk worthy, unconnected, however, with the eccentric John Dawson, who, in the reign of Charles the Second, was an apothecary in the pleasant old town of Framlingham, in that county. His father, a dissenting minister, had seven sons, and educated six of them for the Nonconformist pulpit. Of these six, certainly three joined the Established Church, and became rectors--two of the said three, Benjamin and Abraham, being controversial writers of considerable merit. Thomas Dawson adhered to the tenets of his father, and, combining the vocations of divine and physic-man, preached on Sundays, and doctored during the rest of the week. He was Mead and Mead's father in one: though the conditions of human existence, which render it impossible for one person to be in two places at the same time, prevented him from leaving chapel to visit his patients, and the next minute urging the congregation to offer up a prayer for the welfare of the unfortunate sufferers. Amongst the doctor's circle of acquaintance Miss Corbett of Hackney was at the same time the richest, the most devout, and the most afflicted in bodily health. Ministering to her body and soul, Dr. Dawson had frequent occasions for visiting her. One day he found her alone, sitting with the large family Bible before her, meditating on perhaps the grandest chapter in all the Old Testament. The doctor read the words to which the forefinger of her right hand pointed--the words of Nathan to David: "_Thou art the man_." The doctor took the hint; and on the 29th of May, 1758, he found a wife--and the pious lady won a husband. The only offspring of this strange match was one son, a Mr. Dawson, who still resides at a very advanced age of life in the charming village of Botesdale, in Suffolk. When the writer of these pages was a happy little boy, making his first acquaintance with Latin and Greek, at the Botesdale Grammar School, then presided over by the pious, manly, and gentle ----, he was an especial pet with Mr. Dawson. The worthy gentleman's little house was in the centre of a large garden, densely stocked with apple and other fruit trees; and in it he led a very retired life, visited by only a very few friends, and tended by two or three servants--of whom one, an ancient serving man, acted as a valet, gardener, and groom to an antique horse which const.i.tuted Mr. Dawson's entire stud.

The small urchin before-mentioned had free access at all times to the venerable gentleman, and used to bring him the gossip of the town and school, in exchange for apples and other substantial gifts. Thin and attenuated, diminutive, so as to be little more than a dwarf, with vagrant eager eye, hooked as to his nose, and with a long beard, snowy-white, streaming over his waistcoat, the octogenarian used to receive his fair-haired child-visitor. May he be happy--as may all old gentlemen be, who are kind to little schoolboys, and give them apples and "tips!"

The day that Abernethy was married he went down to the lecture-room to deliver his customary instruction to his pupils. His selection of a wife was as judicious as his marriage was happy; and the funny stories for long current about the mode in which he made his offer are known to be those most delusive of fabrications, fearless and extreme exaggerations of a little particle of the truth. The brutality of procedure attributed to the great surgeon by current rumour was altogether foreign to his nature. The Abernethy biscuit was not more audaciously pinned upon his reputation, than was the absurd falsehood that when he made his offer to his future wife he had only seen her once, and then wrote saying he should like to marry her, but as he was too busy to "make love," she must entertain his proposal without further preliminaries, and let him know her decision by the end of the week.

Of Sir John Eliot the fortunate, mention has already been made in this chapter. Let us now speak of John Eliot, the luckless hero of a biography published in 1787, under the t.i.tle of "A Narrative of the Life and Death of John Eliot, M.D., containing an account of the Rise, Progress, and Catastrophe of his unhappy pa.s.sion for Miss Mary Boydell." A native of Somersetshire, John Elliot wrote a tragedy when only twelve years of age, and after serving an apprenticeship to a London apothecary, fell in love with one Miss Mary Boydell, a niece of a city alderman. The course of this gentleman's love ran smoothly till he chanced, by evil fortune, to read an announcement in a newspaper, that a Miss Boydell had, on the previous day, been led to the altar by some gentleman--not called Dr. John Elliot, certainly not himself.

Never doubting that _the_ Miss Boydell of the newspaper was _his_ Miss Boydell, the doctor, without making any further inquiries after the perfidious fair one, sold his shop and fixtures, and ran off from the evil city of heartless women, to commune with beasts of the field and birds of the air in sylvan retirement. Not a little chagrined was Miss Boydell at the sudden disappearance of her ideal apothecary, whom her uncle, the alderman, stigmatized in round, honest, indignant language, as a big blackguard. After twelve years spent in wandering, "a forlorn wretch, over the kingdom," Dr. Elliott returned to London, set up once more in business, and began, for a second time, to drive a thriving trade, when Delilah again crossed his path. "One day," he says, telling his own story, "entering my shop (for I had commenced again the business of apothecary) I found two ladies sitting there, one of whom I thought I could recognize. As soon as she observed me, she cried out, 'Mr. Elliot! Mr. Elliot!' and fell back in a swoon. The well-known voice struck me like a shock of electricity--my affections instantly gushed forth--I fell senseless at her feet. When I came to myself, I found Miss Boydell sitting by my side." And _his_ Miss Boydell was Miss Boydell still--innocent of wedlock.

Imogene being proved true, and Alonzo having come to life, the youthful couple renewed the engagement entered into more than twelve years before. The wedding-day was fixed, the wedding-clothes were provided, when uncle (the alderman), distrustful that his niece's scranny lover would make a good husband, induced her at the last moment to jilt him, and marry Mr. Nicols, an opulent bookseller. The farce was now to wear an aspect of tragedy. Infuriated at being, after all, _really_ deceived, Dr. Elliot bought two brace of pistols, and bound them together in pairs. One pair he loaded only with powder; into the other he put the proper quantum of lead, as well as the pernicious dust. Armed with these weapons, he lay in wait for the destroyer of his peace. After some days of watching he saw her in Prince's Street, walking with the triumphant Nicols. Rushing up, he fired at her the two pistols (not loaded with ball), and then s.n.a.t.c.hing the other brace from his pocket, was proceeding to commit suicide, when he was seized by the bystanders and disarmed.

The next scene in the drama was the princ.i.p.al court of the Old Bailey, with Dr. Elliot in the dock, charged with an attempt to murder Miss Boydell. The jury, being satisfied that the pistols were not loaded with ball, and that the prisoner only intended to create a startling impression on Miss Boydell's mind, acquitted him of that charge, and he was remanded to prison to take his trial for a common a.s.sault.

Before this second inquiry, however, could come off, the poor man died in Newgate, July 22, 1787, of a broken heart--or jail fever. Ere his death, he took a cruel revenge of the lady, by writing an autobiographic account of his love experiences, in which appeared the following pa.s.sage:--"Fascinated as I was by the charms of this faithless woman, I had long ceased to be sensible to these defects, or rather my impa.s.sioned imagination had converted them into perfections.

But those who did not labour under the power of this magic were struck by her ungraceful exterior, and mine ears have not unfrequently been shocked to hear the tongue of indifference p.r.o.nounce that the object of my pa.s.sion was _ugly and deformed_. Add to this, that Miss Boydell has long since ceased to boast the bloom of youth, and then let any person, impartial and unprejudiced, decide whether a pa.s.sion for her, so violent as that I have manifested, could be the produce of a slight and recent acquaintance, or whether it must not rather be the consequence of a long habit and inveterate intimacy." Such was the absurd sad story of John Elliot, author of "The Medical Almanack,"

"Elements of the Branches of Natural Philosophy," and "Experiments and Observations on Light and Colours."

The mournful love-story of Dr. John Elliot made a deep impression on the popular mind. It is found alluded to in ballads and chap-books, and more than one penny romance was framed upon it. Not improbably it suggested the composition of the following parody of Monk Lewis's "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene," which appeared at the close of the last century, during the first run of popularity which that familiar ballad obtained:--

"GILES BOLUS THE KNAVE AND BROWN SALLY GREEN.