Medical Essays, 1842-1882 Part 23

Wiseman, the great surgeon, was discoursing eloquently on the efficacy of the royal touch in scrofula. The founder of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, consorting with alchemists and astrologers, was treasuring the ma.n.u.scripts of the late pious Dr. Richard Napier, in which certain letters (Rx Ris) were understood to mean Responsum Raphaelis,--the answer of the angel Raphael to the good man's medical questions. The ill.u.s.trious Robert Boyle was making his collection of choice and safe remedies, including the sole of an old shoe, the thigh bone of a hanged man, and things far worse than these, as articles of his materia medica.

Dr. Stafford, whose paper of directions to his "friend, Mr. Wintrop," I cited, was probably a man of standing in London; yet toad-powder was his sovereign remedy.

See what was the state of belief in other matters among the most intelligent persons of the colonies, magistrates and clergymen. Jonathan Brewster, son of the church-elder, writes the wildest letters to John Winthrop about alchemy,--"mad for making gold as the Lynn rock-borers are for finding it."

Remember the theology and the diabology of the time. Mr. Cotton's Theocracy was a royal government, with the King of kings as its nominal head, but with an upper chamber of saints, and a tremendous opposition in the lower house; the leader of which may have been equalled, but cannot have been surpa.s.sed by any of our earth-born politicians. The demons were prowling round the houses every night, as the foxes were sneaking about the hen-roosts. The men of Gloucester fired whole flasks of gunpowder at devils disguised as Indians and Frenchmen.

How deeply the notion of miraculous interference with the course of nature was rooted, is shown by the tenacity of the superst.i.tion about earthquakes. We can hardly believe that our Professor Winthrop, father of the old judge and the "squire," whom many of us Cambridge people remember so well, had to defend himself against the learned and excellent Dr. Prince, of the Old South Church, for discussing their phenomena as if they belonged to the province of natural science:

Not for the sake of degrading the aspect of the n.o.ble men who founded our State, do I refer to their idle beliefs and painful delusions, but to show against what influences the common sense of the medical profession had to a.s.sert itself.

Think, then, of the blazing stars, that shook their horrid hair in the sky; the phantom ship, that brought its message direct from the other world; the story of the mouse and the snake at Watertown; of the mice and the prayer-book; of the snake in church; of the calf with two heads; and of the cabbage in the perfect form of a cutlash,--all which innocent occurrences were accepted or feared as alarming portents.

We can smile at these: but we cannot smile at the account of unhappy Mary Dyer's malformed offspring; or of Mrs. Hutchinson's domestic misfortune of similar character, in the story of which the physician, Dr. John Clark of Rhode Island, alone appears to advantage; or as we read the Rev. Samuel Willard's fifteen alarming pages about an unfortunate young woman suffering with hysteria. Or go a little deeper into tragedy, and see poor Dorothy Talby, mad as Ophelia, first admonished, then whipped; at last, taking her own little daughter's life; put on trial, and standing mute, threatened to be pressed to death, confessing, sentenced, praying to be beheaded; and none the less pitilessly swung from the fatal ladder.

The cooper's crazy wife--crazy in the belief that she has committed the unpardonable sin--tries to drown her child, to save it from misery; and the poor lunatic, who would be tenderly cared for to-day in a quiet asylum, is judged to be acting under the instigation of Satan himself.

Yet, after all, what can we say, who put Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress,"

full of nightmare dreams of horror, into all our children's hands; a story in which the awful image of the man in the cage might well turn the nursery where it is read into a madhouse?

The miserable delusion of witchcraft ill.u.s.trates, in a still more impressive way, the false ideas which governed the supposed relation of men with the spiritual world. I have no doubt many physicians shared in these superst.i.tions. Mr. Upham says they--that is, some of them--were in the habit of attributing their want of success to the fact, that an "evil hand" was on their patient. The temptation was strong, no doubt, when magistrates and ministers and all that followed their lead were contented with such an explanation. But how was it in Salem, according to Mr. Upham's own statement? Dr. John Swinnerton was, he says, for many years the princ.i.p.al physician of Salem. And he says, also, "The Swinnerton family were all along opposed to Mr. Parris, and kept remarkably clear from the witchcraft delusion." Dr. John Swinnerton--the same, by the way, whose memory is illuminated by a ray from the genius of Hawthorne--died the very year before the great witchcraft explosion took place. But who can doubt that it was from him that the family had learned to despise and to resist the base superst.i.tion; or that Bridget Bishop, whose house he rented, as Mr. Upham tells me, the first person hanged in the time of the delusion, would have found an efficient protector in her tenant, had he been living, to head the opposition of his family to the misguided clergymen and magistrates?

I cannot doubt that our early physicians brought with them many Old-World medical superst.i.tions, and I have no question that they were more or less involved in the prevailing errors of the community in which they lived. But, on the whole, their record is a clean one, so far as we can get at it; and where it is questionable we must remember that there must have been many little-educated persons among them; and that all must have felt, to some extent, the influence of those sincere and devoted but unsafe men, the physic-practising clergymen, who often used spiritual means as a subst.i.tute for temporal ones, who looked upon a hysteric patient as possessed by the devil, and treated a fractured skull by prayers and plasters, following the advice of a ruling elder in opposition to the "unanimous opinion of seven surgeons."

To what results the union of the two professions was liable to lead, may be seen by the example of a learned and famous person, who has left on record the product of his labors in the double capacity of clergyman and physician.

I have had the privilege of examining a ma.n.u.script of Cotton Mather's relating to medicine, by the kindness of the librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, to which society it belongs. A brief notice of this curious doc.u.ment may prove not uninteresting.

It is ent.i.tled "The Angel of Bethesda: an Essay upon the Common Maladies of Mankind, offering, first, the sentiments of Piety," etc., etc., and "a collection of plain but potent and Approved REMEDIES for the Maladies." There are sixty-six "Capsula's," as he calls them, or chapters, in his table of contents; of which, five--from the fifteenth to the nineteenth, inclusive--are missing. This is a most unfortunate loss, as the eighteenth capsula treated of agues, and we could have learned from it something of their degree of frequency in this part of New England. There is no date to the ma.n.u.script; which, however, refers to a case observed Nov. 14, 1724.

The divine takes precedence of the physician in this extraordinary production. He begins by preaching a sermon at his unfortunate patient.

Having thrown him into a cold sweat by his spiritual sudorific, he attacks him with his material remedies, which are often quite as unpalatable. The simple and cleanly practice of Sydenham, with whose works he was acquainted, seems to have been thrown away upon him.

Everything he could find mentioned in the seventy or eighty authors he cites, all that the old women of both s.e.xes had ever told him of, gets into his text, or squeezes itself into his margin.

Evolving disease out of sin, he hates it, one would say, as he hates its cause, and would drive it out of the body with all noisome appliances.

"Sickness is in Fact Flagellum Dei pro peccatis mundi." So saying, he encourages the young mother whose babe is wasting away upon her breast with these reflections:

"Think; oh the grievous Effects of Sin! This wretched Infant has not arrived unto years of sense enough, to sin after the similitude of the transgression committed by Adam. Nevertheless the Transgression of Adam, who had all mankind Foederally, yea, Naturally, in him, has involved this Infant in the guilt of it. And the poison of the old serpent, which infected Adam when he fell into his Transgression, by hearkening to the Tempter, has corrupted all mankind, and is a seed unto such diseases as this Infant is now laboring under. Lord, what are we, and what are our children, but a Generation of Vipers?"

Many of his remedies are at least harmless, but his pedantry and utter want of judgment betray themselves everywhere. He piles his prescriptions one upon another, without the least discrimination. He is run away with by all sorts of fancies and superst.i.tions. He prescribes euphrasia, eye-bright, for disease of the eyes; appealing confidently to the strange old doctrine of signatures, which inferred its use from the resemblance of its flower to the organ of vision. For the scattering of wens, the efficacy of a Dead Hand has been out of measure wonderful. But when he once comes to the odious cla.s.s of remedies, he revels in them like a scarabeus. This allusion will bring us quite near enough to the inconceivable abominations with which he proposed to outrage the sinful stomachs of the unhappy confederates and accomplices of Adam.

It is well that the treatise was never printed, yet there are pa.s.sages in it worth preserving. He speaks of some remedies which have since become more universally known:

"Among the plants of our soyl, Sir William Temple singles out Five [Six]

as being of the greatest virtue and most friendly to health: and his favorite plants, Sage, Rue, Saffron, Alehoof, Garlick, and Elder."

"But these Five [Six] plants may admitt of some compet.i.tors. The QUINQUINA--How celebrated: Immoderately, Hyperbolically celebrated!"

Of Ipecacuanha, he says,--"This is now in its reign; the most fashionable vomit."

"I am not sorry that antimonial emetics begin to be disused."

He quotes "Mr. Lock" as recommending red poppy-water and abstinence from flesh as often useful in children's diseases.

One of his "Capsula's" is devoted to the animalcular origin of diseases, at the end of which he says, speaking of remedies for this supposed source of our distempers:

"Mercury we know thee: But we are afraid thou wilt kill us too, if we employ thee to kill them that kill us.

"And yett, for the cleansing of the small Blood Vessels, and making way for the free circulation of the Blood and Lymph--there is nothing like Mercurial Deobstruents."

From this we learn that mercury was already in common use, and the subject of the same popular prejudice as in our own time.

His poetical turn shows itself here and there:

"O Nightingale, with a Thorn at thy Breast; Under the trouble of a Cough, what can be more proper than such thoughts as these?"...

If there is pathos in this, there is bathos in his apostrophe to the millipede, beginning "Poor sowbug!" and eulogizing the healing virtues of that odious little beast; of which he tells us to take "half a pound, putt 'em alive into a quart or two of wine," with saffron and other drugs, and take two ounces twice a day.

The "Capsula" ent.i.tled "Nishmath Chajim" was printed in 1722, at New London, and is in the possession of our own Society. He means, by these words, something like the Archxus of Van Helmont, of which he discourses in a style wonderfully resembling that of Mr. Jenkinson in the "Vicar of Wakefield." "Many of the Ancients thought there was much of a Real History in the Parable, and their Opinion was that there is, DIAPHORA KATA TAS MORPHAS, A Distinction (and so a Resemblance) of men as to their Shapes after Death." And so on, with Ireaeus, Tertullian, Thespesius, and "the TA TONE PSEUCONE CROMATA," in the place of "Sanconiathon, Manetho, Berosus," and "Anarchon ara kai ateleutaion to pan."

One other pa.s.sage deserves notice, as it relates to the single medical suggestion which does honor to Cotton Mather's memory. It does not appear that he availed himself of the information which he says, he obtained from his slave, for such I suppose he was.

In his appendix to "Variolae Triumphatae," he says,--

"There has been a wonderful practice lately used in several parts of the world, which indeed is not yet become common in our nation.

"I was first informed of it by a Garamantee servant of my own, long before I knew that any Europeans or Asiaticks had the least acquaintance with it, and some years before I was enriched with the communications of the learned Foreigners, whose accounts I found agreeing with what I received of my servant, when he shewed me the Scar of the Wound made for the operation; and said, That no person ever died of the smallpox, in their countrey, that had the courage to use it.

"I have since met with a considerable Number of these Africans, who all agree in one story; That in their countrey grandy-many dy of the small-pox: But now they learn this way: people take juice of smallpox and cutty-skin and put in a Drop; then by'nd by a little sicky, sicky: then very few little things like small-pox; and n.o.body dy of it; and n.o.body have small-pox any more. Thus, in Africa, where the poor creatures dy of the smallpox like Rotten Sheep, a merciful G.o.d has taught them an Infallible preservative. 'T is a common practice, and is attended with a constant success."

What has come down to us of the first century of medical practice, in the hands of Winthrop and Oliver, is comparatively simple and reasonable. I suspect that the conditions of rude, stern life, in which the colonists found themselves in the wilderness, took the nonsense out of them, as the exigencies of a campaign did out of our physicians and surgeons in the late war. Good food and enough of it, pure air and water, cleanliness, good attendance, an anaesthetic, an opiate, a stimulant, quinine, and two or three common drugs, proved to be the marrow of medical treatment; and the fopperies of the pharmacopoeia went the way of embroidered shirts and white kid gloves and malacca joints, in their time of need. "Good wine is the best cordiall for her," said Governor John Winthrop, Junior, to Samuel Symonds, speaking of that gentleman's wife,--just as Sydenham, instead of physic, once ordered a roast chicken and a pint of canary for his patient in male hysterics.

But the profession of medicine never could reach its full development until it became entirely separated from that of divinity. The spiritual guide, the consoler in affliction, the confessor who is admitted into the secrets of our souls, has his own n.o.ble sphere of duties; but the healer of men must confine himself solely to the revelations of G.o.d in nature, as he sees their miracles with his own eyes. No doctrine of prayer or special providence is to be his excuse for not looking straight at secondary causes, and acting, exactly so far as experience justifies him, as if he were himself the divine agent which antiquity fabled him to be. While pious men were praying--humbly, sincerely, rightly, according to their knowledge--over the endless succession of little children dying of spasms in the great Dublin Hospital, a sagacious physician knocked some holes in the walls of the ward, let G.o.d's blessed air in on the little creatures, and so had already saved in that single hospital, as it was soberly calculated thirty years ago, more than sixteen thousand lives of these infant heirs of immortality.

[Collins's Midwifery, p. 312. Published by order of the Ma.s.sachusetts Medical Society. Boston, 1841.]

Let it be, if you will, that the wise inspiration of the physician was granted in virtue of the clergyman's supplications. Still, the habit of dealing with things seen generates another kind of knowledge, and another way of thought, from that of dealing with things unseen; which knowledge and way of thought are special means granted by Providence, and to be thankfully accepted.

The mediaeval ecclesiastics expressed a great truth in that saying, so often quoted, as carrying a reproach with it: "Ubi tres medici, duo athei,"--"Where there are three physicians, there are two atheists."

It was true then, it is true to-day, that the physician very commonly, if not very generally, denies and repudiates the deity of ecclesiastical commerce. The Being whom Ambroise Pare meant when he spoke those memorable words, which you may read over the professor's chair in the French School of Medicine, "Te le pensay, et Dieu le guarit," "I dressed his wound, and G.o.d healed it,"--is a different being from the G.o.d that scholastic theologians have projected from their consciousness, or shaped even from the sacred pages which have proved so plastic in their hands. He is a G.o.d who never leaves himself without witness, who repenteth him of the evil, who never allows a disease or an injury, compatible with the enjoyment of life, to take its course without establishing an effort, limited by certain fixed conditions, it is true, but an effort, always, to restore the broken body or the shattered mind.

In the perpetual presence of this great Healing Agent, who stays the bleeding of wounds, who knits the fractured bone, who expels the splinter by a gentle natural process, who walls in the inflammation that might involve the vital organs, who draws a cordon to separate the dead part from the living, who sends his three natural anaesthetics to the over-tasked frame in due order, according to its need,--sleep, fainting, death; in this perpetual presence, it is doubtless hard for the physician to realize the theological fact of a vast and permanent sphere of the universe, where no organ finds itself in its natural medium, where no wound heals kindly, where the executive has abrogated the pardoning power, and mercy forgets its errand; where the omnipotent is unfelt save in malignant agencies, and the omnipresent is unseen and unrepresented; hard to accept the G.o.d of Dante's "Inferno," and of Bunyan's caged lunatic. If this is atheism, call three, instead of two of the trio, atheists, and it will probably come nearer the truth.

I am not disposed to deny the occasional injurious effect of the materializing influences to which the physician is subjected. A spiritual guild is absolutely necessary to keep him, to keep us all, from becoming the "fingering slaves" that Wordsworth treats with such shrivelling scorn. But it is well that the two callings have been separated, and it is fitting that they remain apart. In settling the affairs of the late concern, I am afraid our good friends remain a little in our debt. We lent them our physician Michael Servetus in fair condition, and they returned him so damaged by fire as to be quite useless for our purposes. Their Reverend Samuel Willard wrote us a not over-wise report of a case of hysteria; and our Jean Astruc gave them (if we may trust Dr. Smith's Dictionary of the Bible) the first discerning criticism on the authorship of the Pentateuch. Our John Locke enlightened them with his letters concerning toleration; and their Cotton Mather obscured our twilight with his "Nishmath Chajim."

Yet we must remember that the name of Basil Valentine, the monk, is a.s.sociated with whatever good and harm we can ascribe to antimony; and that the most remarkable of our specifics long bore the name of "Jesuit's Bark," from an old legend connected with its introduction.

"Frere Jacques," who taught the lithotomists of Paris, owes his ecclesiastical t.i.tle to courtesy, as he did not belong to a religious order.

Medical science, and especially the study of mental disease, is destined, I believe, to react to much greater advantage on the theology of the future than theology has acted on medicine in the past. The liberal spirit very generally prevailing in both professions, and the good understanding between their most enlightened members, promise well for the future of both in a community which holds every point of human belief, every inst.i.tution in human hands, and every word written in a human dialect, open to free discussion today, to-morrow, and to the end of time. Whether the world at large will ever be cured of trusting to specifics as a subst.i.tute for observing the laws of health, and to mechanical or intellectual formula as a subst.i.tute for character, may admit of question. Quackery and idolatry are all but immortal.

We can find most of the old beliefs alive amongst us to-day, only having changed their dresses and the social spheres in which they thrive.