CHAPTER VII

DOCTORS AND ILLNESSES

MEDICAL science shared the transitional character of all other science at the opening of the seventeenth century: the blind following of tradition was beginning to yield to the advance of experimental knowledge. Early in the century Harvey announced to the world his grand discovery of the circulation of the blood, and anatomical knowledge was continually being added to by the researches of Hook, Lower, and Mayow. The enormous advance in surgery which later days were to see had not yet begun, and in spite of the stirring of new ideas already germinating, empirical learning still held its ground. The 'meer dull Physitian,' whom Bishop Earle sketches,1 whose one panacea was cupping, and who 'was sworn to Galen and Hippocrates as university men to 'their statutes though they never saw them,' was still a familiar figure, with 'his discourse all aphorisms, though 'his reading be only Alexis of Piemont.'

The old-fashioned knowledge of the properties of herbs and simples, which had been carried to great perfection, was now beginning to be considered a little out of date, and yielding to such new nostrums as the 'bezoars' and 'orampotabily,' of which Lady Brilliana Harley thought so much. A note to her Letters thus explains the properties of these discoveries, new in her day and highly prized: 'Bezoars-concretions met with

1 Microcosmography.

in the bodies of ruminant animals and considered highly • alexipharmic: their virtues now considered imaginary. "Orampotabily," Aurum potabile - another medicine ' rejected from the Materia Medica, but formerly much ' vaunted by empirics as a powerful tonic.' Herbalist lore was indeed less in the hands of the physician than in those of the wise woman, or more or less in those of the mistress of every household.

For in those days people who lived in the country could not be sending off for the doctor on every little emergency. Every mother or nurse knew what to do for whooping-cough, measles, or croup; could dress a wound or set a broken bone if needful, and her store of recipes comprised medical prescriptions, and prescriptions, and these carefullyhoarded manuals were handed down in families for generations. The old one in my own possession, alluded to in Home Life under the Stuarts, contains not only prescriptions for cough and gout and all manner of minor ails, but for such serious maladies as smallpox, the plague, and the evil. Dame Margaret Verney bequeathed her 'Cookery and medisable Boockes' by will to her daughters; but in spite of them the delicate ones seem to have required the doctor often, for amongst the old bills and account books are continual entries for pills and potions. Poor Pen in especial was continually dosed, and so was Cary, when, as a sorrowful young widow, she returned to her old home. Perhaps the Turkey rhubarb which was so constantly administered to Mary Verney's two little boys may have tended to make them weak and rickety, and was responsible for Edmund's curvature of the spine and little Jack's crooked legs.

The favourite remedy for any and every ail then and for long after was cupping. Some ladies were competent to inflict it upon members of their household, but, as a rule, it was done by the barber-chirurgeon, who was also tooth-drawer, and whose methods and instruments for the latter branch of his art were of a primitive barbarity.

Occasionally the blacksmith was resorted to as an extractor of teeth, and for some occult reason bone-setting seems to have been numbered among the gifts of a blacksmith; for Anthony Wood relates that having fallen from his horse and put out his shoulder, after a week of suffering he resorted to Adams, a locksmith in Cat Street, who was a noted bone-setter. This worthy practitioner 'gave ' him sweet words and told him all was well,' and therewith wrenched it in; whereupon he fell into a sown.'

Surgery was quite in its infancy: antiseptic treatment was absolutely unknown, and the use of anesthetics was hardly yet introduced, though opium was occasionally given. Lady Warwick, in her Meditations, refers to the practice of giving opium to stupefy the person who takes it that he may not be sensible of pain. The account of the treatment of the first Lord Falkland's injured leg gives a distressing idea of what people had to suffer at the hands of the surgeons of those days. He had met with an accident while out shooting in attendance on the King at Theobalds, and it appears to have been a compound fracture, for we gather it was from a fall, not a gunshot wound. It was so mismanaged in the beginning that it gangrened, and the leg had to be amputated-in those days a horrible operation, not only on account of the absence of chloroform, but from the antiquated instruments used. He bore it without a change of ' countenance,' but shortly after, hemorrhage set in while the surgeons were absent at tables. When summoned, they do not seem to have hurried themselves, and when at length they arrived they said it was too late to do anything; there was no hope, and they calmly suffered him to bleed to death. These were no obscure practitioners, but the royal surgeons whom the King had desired should attend upon the patient.

Over against such as these we may set the portrait of more than one delightful doctor of the day. Besides those distinguished men of science who were adding to the

resources of their profession, and to whose researches modern medicine owes so much, there were general practitioners who would have remained unknown but for the private letters and journals in which their names occur. It is with these that our chief concern lies, as it is from the point of view of the patient that the doctor has his place in these pages.

Amongst the many interesting characters which the Verney letters depict, there is hardly one more attractive than the doctor uncle, William Denton, younger brother to Margaret, Lady Verney, who was a Denton of Hillesdon. He was but seven years senior to his eldest nephew Sir Ralph, and between the two existed a very warm and durable friendship, unbroken even by their finding themselves arrayed on opposite sides in the war. Dr. Denton was one of the physicians-in-ordinary to the King, and was in attendance on his person during the Scotch campaign. He remained faithful to the Royalist cause, but he was a wide-minded man, and not improbably among the many on either side who were alive to the good in those who opposed them, and sensible of the faults and follies on their own side. His friendship and kindness for Ralph and his wife never faltered; indeed to Mary he was absolutely devoted, and when she came to England on her tedious and difficult mission he was like a brother to her, aiding and sustaining her in every way, helping her to get access to the people it was important she should see, finding her suitable lodgings, looking after her health, and making arrangements for her journeys, and at last undertaking the distressing task of breaking to her the woeful tidings of the loss of her two children.

He was a good friend, too, to the orphan girls at Claydon, and did his best for poor Mall, the unsatisfactory one, when she got into trouble, and arranged the marriage which should save her good name. His influence on the younger nephews, too, was always exerted for good, and when young Edmund, in disgrace after leaving Oxford,

was sent into a kind of banishment at his grandmother's, it was intercourse with his young uncle that set him in a better way and brought out the nobler side of his character. He was a highly-educated man, and had preceded his nephews at Magdalen Hall; he studied medicine under a famous physician, Henry Ashworth, taking his doctor's degree at the age of twenty-nine. He had a great fondness for general literature as well as for the studies proper to his profession, and his letters to Ralph are full of mention of books, either sending or recommending them to him. When growing old and sick of a fever, he writes of himself as 'an old, old man with a bed full of 'books.'

Like his contemporary, the celebrated Norwich physician, he did not find that his profession tended to make him less a Christian. He was, in fact, a deeply religious man, though with a vein of shrewd humour and worldly commonsense; his letters to his nephew, who was growing morbid in his distress at the loss of his adored young wife, breathe no less genuine Christianity than good sense and tenderheartedness. He was almost as fond of horses as of books, and very knowing about them, but he did not share his younger nephew Henry's passion for the turf. His contemporaries described him as 'an ingenious and phasetious man, who for his Polite Conversation among the Ladies of the Court was called the Speaker of the Parliament ' of Woemen.'

It is almost more as a Christian than as a doctor that the name of Sir Thomas Browne has come down to posterity the work by which he is best known, his Religio Medici, is invaluable as setting forth the attitude of a certain type of mind in his day towards religion. He writes neither as theologian nor as saint; a man of the world, in a way a man of profound learning, yet of the old school rather than the new, he stands nicely balanced on the meeting-point between science and superstition. His professional views were of the most antiquated cast,