The Doctor in History, Literature, Folk-Lore, Etc Part 9

But apart from his flowing wig, or his defence of Harvey, or his learned medical history, written in part when he was a prisoner in the Tower for supposed complicity in the Atterbury Plot, or for skill in the treatment of disease, John Freind had a pioneer's claim to distinction.

The doctor, strange to say, was a Member of Parliament, and on resuming his seat on his release from incarceration, he brought before the House of Commons, in 1725, a remarkable pet.i.tion from the Royal College of Physicians, to restrain "the pernicious use of spirituous liquors." And though he might speak but as the mouthpiece of his brother Fellows, it needed no small degree of courage to broach such a subject in those days of general coa.r.s.e indulgence among all cla.s.ses; especially if his own language was as direct and forcible as that of the pet.i.tioners.

Therefore, in his triple character as the historian of medicine, as the champion of William Harvey, and as the foremost M.P. to advocate the cause of temperance before our national legislative a.s.sembly, John Freind, M.D., claims a niche in our Walhalla of notable old doctors.

In the nave of Westminster Abbey on a memorial of polished granite is this inscription--"Beneath are deposited the remains of JOHN HUNTER, born at Long Calderwood, Lanarkshire, N.B., on February 14th, 1728; died in London on October 10th, 1793. His remains were removed from the Church of St.

Martins-in-the-Fields to this Abbey on March 28th, 1858. The Royal College of Surgeons of England have placed this table over the grave of Hunter to record their admiration of his genius as a gifted interpreter of the Divine power and wisdom that works in the laws of organic life, and their grateful veneration for his services to mankind as the Father of scientific surgery. 'O Lord, how manifold are Thy works; in wisdom hast Thou made them all.'"

Such honours are not paid to the remains of men of common stamp. And of no common stamp was the sandy-headed youth who, having spent ten years of his life learning cabinet making, resolved on striking out a better career for himself; and in his twentieth year took horse and journeyed to London to place himself under his elder brother, WILLIAM HUNTER, then rising into note as a medical pract.i.tioner and a teacher of anatomy. In October, 1748, he entered his brother's dissecting room, and whether the fitting of joints in cabinetware had been of initiatory service, or he had had access to the books of his medical relations in Glasgow, or that as a boy upon his father's farm, observation of the domestic animals and of the wild inhabitants of wood and fell, had roused the desire to master the secrets of animated nature, sure it is that William speedily foretold a successful future for his new pupil as an anatomist.

At all events he used his interest to place his promising brother under the eminent surgeon of Chelsea Hospital, and later under another at St.

Bartholomew's. Then, shocked by the rough speech and manners of his countrified brother, and his need of education, the cla.s.sical elder packed him off to college to pick up a little refinement along with Latin and Greek.

In vain. Irrepressible and hot-tempered John could not sit down quietly to study dead languages. Back he came from Oxford in haste, to study dead bodies in his brother's dissecting room, and serve as demonstrator to his course of lectures, simultaneously with his study of living bodies at St.

George's Hospital, where in a comparatively short time he became house-surgeon.

His appointment as staff-surgeon to our troops on foreign service marked the six intervening years before he settled down to practise in London. He had laboured ten years on human anatomy, and had dissected a number of the lower animals, laying the foundation of his collection of comparative anatomy. Even while on foreign service he had amused himself with studying the digestive faculties of snakes and lizards when in a torpid state, and many were the contributions he sent home to his brother's museum.

His return to London, as a teacher of surgery and anatomy, was a marked success, though private practice had to grow. In 1776, he was appointed surgeon extraordinary to His Majesty George III., but eleven years prior to this was admitted a Fellow of the Royal Society, slightly in advance of his elder brother. Then in 1768, the bachelor, William, shifted himself and his museum from Jermyn Street to Windmill Street, and resigned the lease to John, thus securing independent action to the latter, and facilities for creating a natural-history museum of his own.

Hitherto, the brothers had worked together in unison, but now John committed the unpardonable offence of bringing home to Jermyn Street "a tocherless bride," fourteen years younger than himself, endowed only with beauty and accomplishments, and a faculty for filling the house with a.s.semblies of wit and fashion, which blunt-spoken John designated "kick-ups," no doubt with an irreverent big D as a prefix, swearing being as characteristic as hard work.

And work hard he did, early and late, not merely to maintain his extensive and lucrative practice, but to provide and prepare subjects for the museum in the rear of his town house, and for the valuable and original lectures he delivered in language forcible and clear, if neither refined nor academic.

His chief workshop, so to speak, was at his country "Box" at Earl's Court, the grounds of which he had converted into a zoological garden, so many wild animals were there kept for study. There is a story told of his facing an escaped lion and flicking him back to his den with his pocket handkerchief, showing his fearlessness and his knowledge of leonine nature.

Another tale is told of his intervention between fighting dogs and leopards, he dragging the infuriated leopards back to their cage by their collars--and _fainting_ when the feat was accomplished, for his was not a burly frame, and his heart was in a threatening condition.

An element of humour mingles with the gruesome in Sir B. W. Richardson's account of the ruse employed to cheat watchful executors, and obtain the body of O'Brien the Irish Giant,[2] so as to convert it into the skeleton now in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln's Inn.

Those were the days when surgeons were not particular where they obtained subjects for their scalpels, whether from the resurrection men or from the gallows, and John Hunter was not more dainty than his fellows. But also from travelling shows and menageries, and from animals that died in the Tower he was supplied. And so rapidly did his museum grow, absorbing the bulk of his income, that ere long he had to remove to what is now Leicester Square, and erect a building in the rear for his collection.

Honours fell upon him thickly as they had fallen on his brother, alike British and foreign, of which he took little heed, absorbed as he was in the pursuit of knowledge, and its demonstration. His discoveries placed him far ahead of the science of his time, though his courtly brother, earlier in the field and first to leave it, ran him close. Indeed their final quarrel and alienation arose out of a disputed claim to a certain discovery in feminine physiology, brought before the Royal Society, a quarrel which transferred William's museum to the University of Glasgow, and excluded John from his will.

The so-called "Lyceum Medic.u.m" in Leicester Square, became the home of the "Society for the Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge," and the "Philosophical Transactions" of the Society testify to the genius and untiring activity of its promoter. How he found time for his many written essays and discourses on topics wide apart as "Gunshot-wounds" and "Teeth"

is a marvel. No wonder the frail human machine wore out so early. He had worked when he should have rested, worked regardless of premonitions and attacks John Hunter must have well understood, and died at last at sixty-two, a victim of one of those fits of pa.s.sion no man with a diseased heart can indulge in safely.

Setting out originally from the tablet in Westminster Abbey to describe what manner of man was the old doctor who lay beneath, it became imperatively necessary to bracket the two brothers, John and William Hunter, together, since, according to Sir B. W. Richardson, they were "twins in science," if not in birth. Had not William already come to the front when John sought him out, he could not have been his teacher, or given his younger brother his first start in life, his introduction, or his facilities for study. Then they worked together, became one in anatomical discovery, in their zeal for collecting all that ill.u.s.trated their theories, all that was rare and curious, into unprecedented museums.

Yet how widely the personalities of the brothers differed. They both stood out among contemporaries, yet William, with his slight form, mildly refined face, set off by an unpretentious wig, and delicate hands, under lace ruffles, and wide coat cuffs, a cla.s.sical scholar, an antiquary, a numismatist, as well as a naturalist,--Queen Charlotte's medical referee, stepping out from his chariot, gold cane in hand, to visit his courtly patients, was the very _beau ideal_ of a fashionable physician of that day, one who shone in drawing-rooms as well as in the lecture-hall.

Blue-eyed John, with high cheek bones, broad, slightly receding forehead, tangled red hair, and a s.h.a.ggy mane of whisker that made his keen face a triangle, tender of heart, yet brusque and coa.r.s.e of speech, rough in manner as in dress (with not a sign of frill or ruffle), despising dilettante coteries, not squeamish in seeking "subjects," pa.s.sionate and determined, caring little for empty honours, for money only to swell his museum, and nothing for courtly circles, though created surgeon-extraordinary to George III., and owing his large practice solely to the force of his character, his science, and his skill. So far he was his brother's ant.i.thesis. John was a diamond in the rough; William the gem cut and polished. And such were the two old doctors to whom England's College of Surgeons owes its Hunterian Museum; the University of Glasgow the other. Had not the brothers quarrelled, the two would have formed one grand unrivalled collection.

s.p.a.ce is limited, and so must be our notes of these other celebrated "old doctors," whom it would be invidious to overlook. Of these EDWARD JENNER stands prominently out, but he has been already dealt with by another hand.

It is scarcely possible to pa.s.s by JOHN ABERNETHY, F.R.S., the eccentric physician, whose principle was that men should eat to live, not live to eat, who maintained that the stomach was the chief seat of health or disease, according as it was used or abused, and that water was the one natural and nutrient beverage. The practical way in which he ill.u.s.trated his theories respecting overfeeding,--filling a pail with food from various dishes in correspondence with the heterogeneous mixture on his patients' plates--and his brusque replies to some other of his patients, have perpetuated his name through his oddities, rather than as a benefactor of his kind, who revolutionized the medical practice of his time, and of course excited envy and antagonism. His hair, kept together at the nape of the neck with a ribbon tie, was brushed back from his forehead, and added a degree of sharpness to his somewhat hatchet-shaped face, when he told the timorous lady who was "afraid she had swallowed a spider," "Then put a fly in your mouth, madam, and the spider will come up to catch him." Or when he threw the shilling from his fee back to a mother with a delicate daughter, "Take that, madam, and buy her a skipping-rope,"

an intimation that exercise was needed. It was an age of coa.r.s.e feeding and strong drinking, an age of drastic purges and much blood-letting, and Abernethy's temperance principles, so much in advance of his time, provoked considerable opposition from his medical brethren, whose satirical epigrams he was not slow to cap.

But contemporary squibs and satires cannot affect the real good which has made Abernethy's name a household word. Indeed it has been stamped upon a biscuit. It is stamped also on a medical society he founded at St.

Bartholomew's Hospital, where his centenary has recently been celebrated.

Many have been the contributions to scientific medicine and surgery since the rough days of the old doctors I have endeavoured to chronicle, but these men of wigs and ties, gold-headed canes and pouncet-boxes, breeches and buckled shoes, were the pioneers of progress, they cleared the way for the men of this day and generation, and left their mark on their own age, not to be effaced by newer and more advanced successors, to whom they have served as stepping-stones.

The Lee Penny.

The story of the Lee Penny is full of historic interest, and the legends respecting it furnished Sir Walter Scott with some incidents for his novel the "Talisman."

This amulet is a stone of a deep red colour and triangular shape, in size about half-an-inch on each side, and is set in a silver coin. The various accounts which have come under our notice are agreed that this curious relic of antiquity has been in the Lee family since a period immediately after the death of King Robert the Bruce.

The monarch was nearing his end, and as he lay on his death-bed, he was much troubled for having failed to visit in person the Holy Land to a.s.sist in the Crusade. His long war with the English had rendered it impossible for him to leave his kingdom to fight in a foreign land, even in the cause of religion.

Sir James Douglas, his tried and trusty friend, stood beside the bed of his king, and was in sore distress. As a last request the king implored that as soon as possible after his soul had left his body Douglas would take his heart to Jerusalem. On the honour of a knight, Sir James faithfully promised to discharge the trust.

The king died in 1329, and his heart was enclosed in a silver case. Sir James suspended it from his neck with a chain, and without delay gathered round him a suitable retinue, and made his way towards the Holy Land. He was not destined to reach that country, for on his route the intelligence reached him that Alphonso, King of Leon and Castile, was waging war with the Moorish chief, Osmyn of Granada. To a.s.sist the Christians, he felt it was his duty, and in accordance with the dying charge of his king. With courage he engaged in the fray, but was soon surrounded by hors.e.m.e.n, and he who had fought so long and bravely, realised that he must meet his doom far from the country he loved so well. He made a desperate effort to escape. The precious casket he took from his neck and threw it before him, saying, "Onward, as thou were wont, thou n.o.ble heart! Douglas will follow thee." He followed it and was slain. After the battle was over the brave knight was found resting on the heart of Bruce. The mortal remains of the valiant knight were carried back to his home and buried in his church of St. Bride, at Douglas.

The heart of Bruce was entrusted to Sir Simon Locard, and by him borne back to Scotland, and at last found a resting-place beneath the high altar of Melrose Abbey, and its site is still pointed out. Mrs. Hemans wrote a charming poem on Bruce's heart in Melrose Abbey, commencing:--

"Heart! that did'st press forward still, Where the trumpet's note rang shrill; Where the knightly swords are crossing, And the plumes like sea-foam tossing, Leader of the charging spear, Fiery heart! and liest thou here?

May this narrow spot inurn Aught that could so beat and burn?"

We are told the family name of Locard was changed to Lockheart, or Lockhart, from the circ.u.mstance of Sir Simon having carried the key of the casket, and was granted as armorial insignia, heart with a fetter-lock, with the motto, "Corda serrata pando." According to a contributor to Chambers's "Book of Days," v., 2, p. 415, from the same incident, the Douglases bear a human heart, imperially crowned, and have in their possession an ancient sword, emblazoned with two hands holding a heart, and dated 1329, the year Bruce died.

Lockhart was not daunted at the failure of the first attempt to reach Jerusalem, and, in company with such Scottish knights as escaped the fate of their leader, they once more proceeded, and arrived in the Holy Land, and for some time fought in the wars against the Saracens.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LEE PENNY.]

The following adventure is said to have befallen him. He made prisoner in battle an Emir of wealth and note. The aged mother of his captive came to the Christian camp to save her son from his captivity. Lockhart fixed the price at which his prisoner should ransom himself; and the lady, pulling out a large embroidered purse, proceeded to tell down the amount. In this operation, a pebble inserted in a coin, some say of the lower empire, fell out of the purse, and the Saracen matron testified so much haste to recover it as to give the Scottish knight a high idea of its value. "I will not consent," he said, "to grant your son's liberty unless the amulet be added to the ransom." The lady not only consented to this, but explained to Sir Simon the mode in which the talisman was to be used. The water in which it was dipped operated as a styptic, or a febrifuge, and the amulet possessed several other properties as a medical talisman.

Sir Simon Lockhart, after much experience of the wonders which it wrought, brought it to his own country, and left it to his heirs, by whom, and by Clyde side in general, it was, and is still, distinguished by the name of the Lee Penny, from the name of his native seat of Lee.

Its virtues were brought into operation by dropping the stone in water which was afterwards given to the diseased to drink, washing at the same time the part affected. No words were used in dipping the stone, or money permitted to be taken by the servants of Lee. People came from all parts of Scotland, and many places in England, to carry away the water to give to their cattle.

Some interesting information respecting this amulet appears in an account of the Sack and Siege of Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1644. "As one of the natural sequences," says the writer, "of prolonged distress, caused by this brave but foolhardy defence against overwhelming odds, the plague broke out with fatal violence in Newcastle and Gateshead, as well as Tynemouth and Shields, during the following year. Great numbers of poor people were carried off by it; while tents were erected on Bensham Common, to which those infected were removed; and the famous Lee Penny was brought out of Scotland to be dipped in water for the diseased persons to drink, and the result said to be a perfect cure. The inhabitants (that is to say, the Corporation, we presume), gave a bond for a large sum in trust for the loan; and they thought the charm did so much good, that they offered to pay the money down, and keep the marvellous penny with a stone in which it is inserted; but the proprietor, Lockhart of Lee, would not part with it."

We are told that many years ago a remarkable cure is alleged to have been performed on Lady Baird of Sauchton Hall, near Edinburgh, who, having been bitten by a mad dog, was seized with hydrophobia. The Lee Penny was sent for, and she used it for some weeks, drinking and bathing in the water it had been dipped in, and she quite recovered.

"The most remarkable part of the history," as Sir Walter Scott says, "perhaps was, that it so especially escaped condemnation when the Church of Scotland chose to impeach many other cures which savoured of the miraculous, as occasioned by sorcery, and censured the appeal of them, 'excepting only the amulet called the Lee Penny, to which it pleased G.o.d to annex certain healing virtues, which the Church did not presume to condemn.'"

The Lee Penny is preserved at Lee House, in Lanarkshire, the residence of the present representative of the family.

How Our Fathers were Physicked.

BY J. A. LANGFORD, LL.D.