A Book about Doctors Part 4

"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 const.i.tution 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 pa.s.sing (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 Laoc.o.o.n, 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 stalact.i.te!"

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 c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l. 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 _ra.s.semblement_ 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 a.s.sistance. 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.

CHAPTER V.

THE APOTHECARIES AND SIR SAMUEL GARTH.

Baldwin Hamey, whose ma.n.u.script memoirs of eminent physicians are among the treasures of the College, praises Winston because he treated his apothecary as a master might a slave. "Heriliter imperavit," says the Doctor. The learned Thomas Winston, anatomy lecturer at Gresham College, lived to the age of eighty years, and died on the 24th of October, 1655. He knew, therefore, apothecaries in the day of their humility--before prosperity had encouraged them to compete with their professional superiors.

The apothecaries of the Elizabethan era compounded their medicines much as medicines are compounded at the present--as far as manipulation and measuring are concerned. Prescriptions have altered, but shop-customs have undergone only a very slight change. The apothecaries' table of weights and measures, still in use, was the rule in the sixteenth century, and the symbols (for a pound, an ounce, a drachm, a scruple, a grain, &c.) remain at this day just what they were three hundred years ago.

Our good friend, William Bulleyn, gave the following excellent rules for an apothecary's life and conduct:--

"THE APOTICARYE.

"1.--Must fyrst serve G.o.d, forsee the end, be clenly, pity the poore.

"2.--Must not be suborned for money to hurt mankynde.

"3.--His place of dwelling and shop to be clenly to please the sences withal.

"4.--His garden must be at hand with plenty of herbes, seedes, and rootes.

"5.--To sow, set, plant, gather, preserve and kepe them in due tyme.

"6.--To read Dioscorides, to know ye natures of plants and herbes.

"7.--To invent medicines to chose by coloure, tast, odour, figure, &c.

"8.--To have his morters, stilles, pottes, filters, gla.s.ses, boxes, cleane and sweete.

"9.--To have charcoals at hand, to make decoctions, syrupes, &c.

"10.--To kepe his cleane ware closse, and cast away the baggage.

"11.--To have two places in his shop--one most cleane for the phisik, and a baser place for the chirurgie stuff.

"12.--That he neither increase nor diminish the physician's bill (_i.

e._ prescription), and kepe it for his own discharge.

"13.--That he neither buy nor sel rotten drugges.

"14.--That he peruse often his wares, that they corrupt not.

"15.--That he put not in _quid pro quo_ (_i. e._, use one ingredient in the place of another, when dispensing a physician's prescription) without advys.e.m.e.nt.

"16.--That he may open wel a vein for to helpe pleuresy.

"17.--That he meddle only in his vocation.

"18.--That he delyte to reede Nicolaus Myrepsus, Valerius Cordus, Johannes Placaton, the Lubik, &c.

"19.--That he do remember his office is only to be ye physician's cooke.

"20.--That he use true measure and waight.

"21.--To remember his end, and the judgment of G.o.d: and thus I do commend him to G.o.d, if he be not covetous, or crafty, seeking his own lucre before other men's help, succour, and comfort."

The apothecaries to whom these excellent directions were given were only tradesmen--grocers who paid attention to the commands of physicians. They were not required to have any knowledge of the medical science, beyond what might be obtained by the perusal of two or three writers; they were not to presume to administer drugs on their own judgment and responsibility--or to perform any surgical operation, except phlebotomy, and that only for one malady. The custom was for the doctors to sell their most valuable remedies as nostrums, keeping their composition a secret to themselves, and themselves taking the price paid for them by the sick. The commoner drugs were vended to patients by the drug-merchants (who invariably dealt in groceries for culinary use, as well as in medicinal simples), acting under the directions of the learned graduates of the Faculty.

In the fourth year of James I., a charter was obtained, that "Willed, ordained, and granted, that all and singular the Freemen of the Mystery of Grocers and Apothecaries of the City of London ... should and might be ... one body corporate and politique, in deed, fact, and name, by the name of Warden and Commonalty of the Mystery of Grocers of the City of London." But in the thirteenth year of the same king, the apothecaries and grocers were disunited. At the advice of Theodore de Mayerne and Henry Atkins, doctors in physick, another charter was granted, const.i.tuting drug-venders a distinct company. Amongst the apothecaries mentioned in this charter are the names of the most respectable families of the country. Gideon de Laune, one of this first batch of apothecaries, ama.s.sed a very large fortune in his vocation, and founded a family at Sharsted, in Kent, from which several persons of distinction draw part of their origin; and not a few of De Laune's brethren were equally lucky.

At their first foundation as a company the apothecaries were put completely under control of the College of Physicians, who were endowed with dangerous powers of inspecting their wares and punishing their malpractices. But before a generation had pa.s.sed away, the apothecaries had gained such a firm footing in society that the more prosperous of them could afford to laugh at the censures of the College; and before the close of a century they were fawned upon by young physicians, and were in a position to quarrel with the old.

The doctors of that day knew so little that the apothecaries found it easy to know as much. A knowledge of the herbals, an acquaintance with the ingredients and doses of a hundred empirical compounds and systems of maltreating eruptive fevers, gout, and consumption, const.i.tuted all the medical learning of such men as Mayerne or Gibbons. To pick up that amount of information was no hard task for an ambitious apothecary.

Soon the leading apothecaries began to prescribe on their own responsibility, without the countenance of a member of the College. If they were threatened with censure or other punishment by a regular physician, they retorted by discontinuing to call him in to consultations. Jealousies soon sprang up. Starving graduates, with the diplomas of Oxford and Cambridge and the certificates of the College in their pockets, were embittered by having to trudge the pavements of London, and see the mean medicine-mixers (who had scarce scholarship enough to construe a Latin bill) dashing by in their carriages. Ere long the heartburnings broke out in a paper warfare, as rancorous and disreputable as any squabble embalmed in literature. The scholars called the rich tradesmen thieves, swindlers, and unlettered blockheads. The rich tradesmen taunted the scholars with discontent, falsehood, and ignorance of everything except Latin and Greek.

Pope took the side of the physicians. Like Johnson, Parr, and all men of enlightenment and sound scholarship, he had a high opinion of the Faculty. It is indeed told of him, on questionable authority, that on his death-bed, when he heard the bickerings of Dr. Burton and Dr.

Thompson, each accusing the other of maltreating his patient, he levelled with his last breath an epigram at the two rivals--

"Dunces, rejoice, forgive all censures past-- The greatest dunce has killed your foe at last."

To Dr. Arbuthnot he wrote--

"Friend to my life, which did not you prolong, The world had wanted many an idle song."

His feeble health, making his life a long disease, never allowed him vigour and confidence enough to display ingrat.i.tude to the Faculty, and ill.u.s.trate the truth of the lines--

"G.o.d and the doctor we alike adore, But only when in danger, not before; The danger o'er, both are alike requited, G.o.d is forgotten, and the doctor slighted."