SACRIFICIAL MEDICINE.

The world has done wrong to laugh at the old lady who reproved her sailor grandson for “telling her such a scandalous fib as that he had seen a fish fly in the air,” but restored her confidence to the hopeful youth when he proceeded to narrate how he had picked up a wheel of Pharaoh’s chariot on the Red Sea shore. Practically, we all jump easily at beliefs toward the level of which we have already climbed by previous knowledge (or previous prejudice, as it may chance), and refuse, donkey-wise, to budge an inch toward those which happen to be on a plane above our preconceived notions of what either is or ought to be. It is this propensity, of course, which makes the most baseless calumny mischievous by paving the way for the next slander against its object. And it is it, also, which grants interminable leases of life to false systems of physics and religion by securing a welcome for every fiction and fallacy which at any time may seem to favorthem, and closing the door in the face of truths which militate against and might explode them.

A curious study of the “Grammar of Assent,” as used by the majority of mankind in the matter which comes nearest to their own business and bosoms, might, I think, be made by unearthing the preconceived notions and preparatory ideas which must needs exist as regards the healing art, and which can have enabled doctors confidently to prescribe, and patients meekly to accept, the horrid and shocking remedies in use from the earliest period,—remedies of which it is a mild criticism to say that they were worse than the diseases they professed to cure. Had the minds of men concerned with medical inquiries been really free from antecedent convictions,—blank sheets of paper whereon Nature could have written down her facts, which experience might have read and collated,—it is clear enough that good diet, exercise, and cleanliness, and the occasional use of simple preparations of herbs, would early have constituted the primitive and sound rules of medical science, to be supplemented, as time went on, by discoveries of the therapeutic value of more rare vegetable substances and of a few minerals. Never could practical observation, by any possibility, have suggested that it would be beneficial to a sick man to make himswallow potable gold or powdered skulls, or a bolus of decomposed old toads and earth-worms. Theun-“scientific use of the imagination” can alone have dictated these and scores of no less absurd and obnoxious prescriptions, prompted by somea prioritheory of whatought, antecedently to experience, to be suitable for the cure of disease, and “in accordance with the eternal fitness of things.”

What, then, were the notions in obedience to which these marvellous remedies were ordained? If we exclude from present consideration all the really useful therapeutic agents, discovered doubtless by genuine experience and recorded by the ancient physicians, Galen and Hippocrates, Dioscorides and Avicenna, and all the rest, and also set aside those which, though not really useful, might have been readily mistaken for being so by imperfect early observation, we find the immense residue of absurd and monstrous recipes to fall into two categories; namely, the remedies which were exceedingly costly and the remedies which were either very painful or very disgusting. In other words, a large part of the medical science of all past ages proves that the doctors and their patients valued remediesin proportion to the price to be paid for them, either in money or in suffering. In short, they adopted freely the Doctrine of Sacrifice as applied to medicine. Consideringthat Nature nearly always proceeds on precisely the opposite track,—that she does not ask us “to do some great thing,” but, like the true prophet, only bids us “wash and be clean”; makes the cheapest and commonest things the most wholesome, and affords us normally, by our instinctive desire or loathing, the surest test of the fitness or unfitness of food for our use,—there is something exceedingly curious in the all but universal assumption of mankind that it was only necessary to find something particularly rare and expensive, or else something extraordinarily revolting, to obtain a panacea for all the woes of mortality. It was ridiculous (in the estimation of our forefathers) to suppose that a great noble or king should dissolve pearls in his drink or swallow liquid gold, and yet, forsooth, be no better after all than a poor wretch who could afford himself only a little milk or water. Still more incredible was it that a man should submit to some agonizing scarification or actual cautery, or should compel himself to bolt some inexpressibly disgusting mess which his doctor had taken a year to concoct and distil through a score of furnaces and retorts, and yet, when all was over, receive no more benefit than if he had endured no hardship, or had only drunk some cowslip julep or herb tea. Such tame and impotent conclusions could not be receivedfor a moment. If patients would onlypayenough orsufferenough, theymustbe cured. This, it really seems, was the underlying conviction of men of old, on which half the therapeutics of past times were unconsciously based.

Let us cull a few illustrations of the ingenious development of those principles by the invention of nostrums distinguished by one or other of the grand characteristics, roughly definable as costliness or nastiness. Perhaps, ere the close of our brief review, we may find we have less reason than we fancy at starting to congratulate ourselves on the disappearance of this phase of human folly, or to rest assured that inductive science alone now rules in the sick-room, and that neither doctors nor patients retain any faith in sacrificial medicine.

The use of costly things as remedies for disease constitutes a kind ofhaute médecinenecessarily of limited application. With the exception of the great search for theAurum Potabilein the Middle Ages, there are much fewer traces of it than of the other form of sacrifice, in which the patientpayait de sa personne. Everybody could be scarified or made to swallow worms and filth; but there were not many patients who could afford to pay for emeralds to tie on their stomachs in cases of dysentery, as recommended by Avenzor, nor for “eight grainsof that noble lunar medicine, the wine of silver,” nor for “dissolved pearls,” either of which (Matthioli assures us) is “sovereign against melancholy.” Dioscorides might in vain recommend powdered sapphires for starting eyes, orSt.Jerome vaunt their virtues for many other troubles, to the majority of sufferers in their own or any other age. Coral was more within popular reach; and probably a considerable number of believing souls have followed Galen’s prescription and tried its use for spitting of blood, and Pliny’s recommendation of it for the stone. Avicenna found that a cordial made of it is “singularly productive of joy”; and Matthioli says it has “truly occult virtues against epilepsy,” whether “hung about the neck or drunk in powders.”[26]Emeralds or rubies, and even silk (then a rarer substance in Europe than now), afford, according to Dioscorides, relief in a variety of ailments; but of course nothing could be so generally, and indeed universally, useful as gold. He who coulddiscover how to make men actually drink the most costly of metals would teach them nothing less than the secret of immortality. TheAurum Potabile, or noble “Solar Oyl,” especially when mixed with the “Lunar Oyl” of silver, and “Mercurial Oyl,” forms, as Bolnest assures us, “a great Arcanum, fit to be used in most diseases,especially in chronick.” By itself alone, indeed, the drinkable gold was understood to be an elixir of life,—a conclusion not a little remarkable, when we consider that the only real value of the metal is its convenience as a circulating medium and for the fabrication of ornaments, and that the artificial importance thus attached to it must have so affected men’s minds as to cause them to idealize it as a sort of divine antidote to disease and death.

In an earlier and truer-hearted age, Paradise was believed to be a garden, and it was the Fruit of a Tree of Life which would make men live forever. But when, as Gibbon satirically observes, in the dissolution of the Roman world, men coveted only a place in the Celestial City of gold and pearl, the secret of immortality was sought (not inappropriately) at the bottom of a Rosicrucian crucible.

There was, it must be confessed, a profoundvulgarityin this whole system of costly medicine, which it would be flattering to ourselves to think we had in our day quite overpassed and discarded. But in truth, though we are not wont to dissolve pearls or powder emeralds or drink solar or even lunar “Oyl,” it may be fairly asked whether we do not contrive to melt down a handful of sovereigns in every attack of illness to very little better purpose than if we had simply given them to an old alchemist to put in his furnace and make for us an elixir of life? What are these long rows of items in our druggist’s bill for draughts, embrocations, liniments, blisters, gargles, and what not, represented, when the housemaid clears our room for convalescence, by a whole regiment of quarter-emptied phials and pill-boxes on our table? What are those considerable drafts recorded in our check-book, not only for the attendance of our customary medical adviser (which might be reasonable), but for the visits of the eminent consulting physician, brought down, perchance, fifty or five hundred miles to look at us for five minutes while we lay speechless in our fever? Did anybody ever use one-half, or even one-third, of the expensive medicines ordered in every illness from the pharmacy day after day? Or did anybody find a medical man, in view of apatient’s straitened circumstances, telling his anxious friends that the remains of the last bottle of his physic would answer as well as a new one, or that they might readily change it, by adding a few drops of some fresh ingredient, instead of ordering another six ounces from the chemist, to be set aside in its turn, half used, to-morrow? Or (what is still more to the purpose) did anybody ever hear of a case wherein the physician summoned for consultation (possibly at enormous cost) has given his honest opinion that the regular medical attendant of the patient has mistaken his case, and that the treatment ought to be altogether reversed?

The same idea has been at the bottom of our proceedings and those of our ancestors which we ridicule; namely, that if we do but spend money enough, a curemustfollow.

But, as I remarked before, the notion that costliness of itself is a test of medicinal virtue has been, necessarily, far less prolific of results than the kindred idea that by the pain and disgust entailed on a patient might be estimated the value of the remedy applied to his disease. As to disgust, it would really appear as if some ancient prophets of the healing art, some Phœbus Epicurios or Æsculapius, must have laid down as a principle for the selection of health-restoring compounds and concoctions,“By their nauseousness ye shall know them.” Else were the recipes for all the hideous, abominable witch-broths, wherewith the older books of medicine are replete, quite unaccountable on any theory of human sanity. Many of them (which weak-souled patients have swallowed by the ounce and the pound) were of a kind which it is quite impossible to quote; nor can we wonder that, as Plato tells us, the Athenian physicians were wont to engage the great rhetorician Gorgias to accompany them and persuade their patients to take their prescriptions. Let the following, however, be taken as moderate examples:—

“Take what Animal soever thy fancy best liketh, and thou thinkest most fit to prepare. Kill it and take it (but separate nothing of its impurities, as feathers, hoofs, hairs, or other heterogeneous substance), bruise all in a large and strong mortar to a fit consistency, put it then into a vessel for putrefaction, and put upon it of the blood of animals of the same kind so much as may well moisten it, or, which is better, cover it all over. Shut close the vessel and set it to putrifie,in fimo equino, for forty dayes that it may ferment.” (The result is to be distilled, calcined, rectified, and distilled over again and again, “seven times to separate its phlegme,” till finally) “thou hast a pleasant [!!], safe, and noble Animal Arcanum to fortifie the animal life, and restore health and vigor to its languishing spirit, till God doth call for its final dissolution and separation.”—Aurora Chymica,p.6.

This was bad enough, but a great advance (in the line of sacrifice) was made when to the mereodiousness, we may say beastliness, of the doseper secould be added the horror of eating what had once formed part of a human body,—in short, of cannibalism. Theordonnanceswhich follow really seem to have a connection with ancient idol-rites of human sacrifice, and possibly (had we means of tracing them) might be fathered on the earliest worshippers of Hesus or of Odin. The seasons of the year (spring and autumn) wherein the victim must die (very carefully defined in these prescriptions) seem to give color to this view. Down to the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, Helps tells us, the Aztecs used yearly to slay a young man in spring that the nobles might eat his heart as a sort of sacrament. Anyway, it is rather startling to find that just two hundred years ago in London the physician in ordinary to the King recommended cannibalism to Englishmen without the smallest apology or hesitation.

A Mummiall Quintessence.Take of the flesh of a sound young man, dying a natural death about the middle of August, three or four pounds. Let the flesh be taken from his thighs or other fleshy parts. Put it into a fit glass and pour upon it spirit of wine. Let it stand so three or four days. Take out the flesh and put it upon a glass plate, and imbibe it with spirits of salts. Let it stand uncovered, but in the shade, where no dust or other filth may fall upon it.Be sure you often turn it, and, being well dried, you may put it up in a fit jar and keep it for use.—Aurora Chymica,chap.iii.

A Mummiall Quintessence.

Take of the flesh of a sound young man, dying a natural death about the middle of August, three or four pounds. Let the flesh be taken from his thighs or other fleshy parts. Put it into a fit glass and pour upon it spirit of wine. Let it stand so three or four days. Take out the flesh and put it upon a glass plate, and imbibe it with spirits of salts. Let it stand uncovered, but in the shade, where no dust or other filth may fall upon it.Be sure you often turn it, and, being well dried, you may put it up in a fit jar and keep it for use.—Aurora Chymica,chap.iii.

A still more efficacious remedy, “producing wonderful effects both in preserving and restoring health,” may be obtained by distilling, filtering, calcining, and coagulating this “Mummiall” till it have a “saccharine taste,” when the “matter may be left of the thickness or consistency of honey, which must be kept in glass vessels closely shut.” (Ibid.,p.8.)

If the “sound young man” should have been killed in the spring instead of in “the middle of August,” the learnedDr.Bolnest is not without a remedy. His flesh is, indeed, no longer useful for a “Mummiall,” but his blood may be made into a “very high balsam, exceeding much the powers and virtue of natural balsam; a potent preservative in time of pestilence, leprosie, palsie, and gout of all sorts.”

“Take of such blood a large quantity. Gather in glass vessels. Let it settle some time till it hath thrown out all its waterish humor, which separate by wary inclination. Take now of this concrete blood five or six pounds, which put to ten or twelve pints of spirits of wine. Shake them well together, and let it digest six or eight days in warm ashes.” Distil. Add the fixed salt drawn out of thecaput mortuumof the blood by “calcination,” “solution,” “filtration,” “coagulation,” often repeated; “and what shall remain behind is the Arcanum of Blood” (p.10).

When obtained in the manner above described, this invaluable remedy is “to be taken in broth or treacle-water with a fasting” (and let us devoutly hope an unusually vigorous) “stomach.” Only one caution is necessary. The “sound young man’s” blood must have been shed “when Mercury was above the horizon and in conjunction with the sun in Gemini or Virgo.”

After the broth of man’s blood, a “Balsamick Remedy for Arthritick Pains,” composed of the bones of a man “which hath not been buried fully a year,” beat up into a powder, calcined, and applied on lint, appears a comparatively mild and pleasant receipt. So, likewise, is the “Quintessence of Toads,” to be composed in the month of June or July of a “great quantity of overgrown toads,” reduced, calcined, and distilled as usual, and then “dissolved in spirit of oranges or treacle-water ready for use,” either externally, when it cures “cancers and pestilential venom,” or internally, against “all sorts of poison.”

The above prescriptions are taken, be it said, not from the manual of one of those vulgar quacks to whom we are too apt to credit every absurdity of ancient medicine, but from a serious treatise by Edward Bolnest, physician in ordinary to the King (1672), dedicated to George Duke of Buckingham,and described on the title-page as “Shewing a Rational [!] Way of preparing Animals, Vegetables, and Minerals for a Physical Use, by which they are made most efficacious, safe, and pleasant Medicines for the Preservation and Restoration of the Life of Man.” How honest was the worthy author in his belief in his “Mummiall Quintessence,” and all the rest, may be judged from his frank avowal “to the Reader” that the medicines prescribed he might “in some measurein time of need trust to,” because, addsDr.Bolnest candidly, “I never yet from the best of medicines always found those certain effects I could have desired.”

These were, however, refined preparations compared to the prescriptions in use in still earlier generations. In the great folio of M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli (Venice, 1621), adorned with hundreds of really admirable woodcuts of medicinal herbs and flowers, there are directions for rubbing wounds with cow-dung, swallowing beeswax, silk, sweat, and saliva, and drinking hare’s blood and dog’s dung dissolved in milk as a cure for dysentery. Nervous people are to dine on cooked vipers. Persons with the toothache are to apply to their teeth a serpent’s skin steeped in vinegar, or to powder the callosities on a horse’s legs, and stuff their ears therewith. A black eye may be treated with apoultice of human milk, incense, and the blood of a tortoise. For the not very serious affection of hiccough a beverage is recommended, of which the chief ingredient is the flesh of a mummy; thus affording us further evidence that cannibalism survived in medicine, and was approved by the faculty in Italy as well as England, down to a very recent period. Besides these “strange meats,” Matthioli regularly classifies in a table a multitude of what he is pleased to call “simple medicines,” among which are to be found the bodies, or parts of bodies, of wolves, scorpions, centipedes, ostriches, beavers, and dogs, the cast-off skins of serpents, the horns of unicorns (when attainable!), the hoofs of asses and goats, beeswax, silk, asphalt, and several filthy substances which cannot here be named. Albertus Magnus (videthe curious little black-letter volume,Le Grat Albert, in the British Museum) orders nervous patients to eat eagles’ brains, whereby they may acquire the courage of the king of birds; while the brains of the owl, the goat, the camel, etc., convey the peculiar qualities of each of those animals. Pliny’s great work, it is needless to say, is a repertory of marvellous counsels and observations. Earth taken out of a human skull acts as a depilatory, and benefit is derived from chewing plants which have happened to grow in the same unpleasantreceptacle. On the principle, we presume, of “I am not the rose, but I have dwelt near the rose,” herbs growing on a manure heap are found especially efficacious as remedies for quinsy. The hair of man, taken from a cross, is good for quartan fevers, and human ear-wax is the only proper application to a wound occasioned by a human bite. The uses of saliva are numberless, and fill a whole chapter of theNatural History. “Fasting spittle,” in particular, applied to the eyes, is an infallible cure for ophthalmia,—a remedy which Persius treats with blameworthy scepticism as an old-womanly practice. In cases where bread has stuck in the throat, a piece of the same loaf should be inserted in the ears. The use of the fluid which exudes from the pores of the skin is so valuable that (Pliny assures us) the owners of the Grecian gymnasia made a thriving trade by selling the scrapings of the bodies of athletes, which, “compounded with oil, is of an emollient, calorific, and expletive nature.” If any lady desire to cultivate an interesting and pallid appearance, she ought to imitate Drusus, who drank goats’ blood to make it appear that his enemy Cassius had poisoned him. For melancholy (an affection which seems to have given great concern to the old doctors), Dioscorides recommends black hellebore held in the mouth,—certainlya recipe on homœopathic principles, since a mouthful of hellebore would scarcely naturally serve, like the Psalmist’s wine and oil, either to make glad the heart of man or to give him a cheerful countenance. A better remedy for the same melancholy is “broth of old cock,” our Scotch friend cockaleekie.

For some unexplained reason, two only among the ills to which flesh is heir, and they among the most serious,—frenzy and inflammation of the stomach,—seem to have escaped from the dreadrégimeof Sacrificial Medicine, and indeed are treated with surprising lenity. Dioscorides thinks that frenzy can be cured by asparagus and white wine, and considers that the patient suffering from gastritis should have a plaster of roses applied to the seat of his disease!

Besides the “exhibition” of nauseous and revolting draughts, boluses, and pills, the system of Sacrificial Medicine has at all times commanded many other ingenious resources for the creation of unnecessary pain, trouble, and annoyance to sick persons and their friends. If, for example, a stiff-necked patient were unmanageable in the matter of some particularly disagreeable dose, he might still be induced to go on vexing nature by some out-of-the-way diet, and potions repeated at stated intervals,till faith or life succumbed in the struggle. One old physician, Ætius, in this way prescribed for the gout a separate dietary for every month of a whole year. Another, the great Alexander of Tralles, ordained three hundred and sixty-five potions, so arranged as to furnish out a course for two years; whereuponDr.Friend, the learned author of theHistory of Physick, remarks that “his receipts were as good as any of those which our new pretenders to physick make use of,” but adds the discouraging dictum, “After all, gout is a distemper with which it were best not to tamper.”

Then there were fearful tortures in the way of excoriations, of whichSt.John Long’s famous remedy was a notable example,—blisters, cauteries, and setons, too unpleasant to dwell upon. Scarification was a comparatively merciful form of these inflictions. It was practised, according to Prosper Albinus (Hist. Phys.,p.17), in the following agreeable manner: “First, make a strait [tight] ligature on the leg; then rub the leg below it, put it into warm water, and beattill it swells, and so scarify”! Something worse than this was practised down to the present generation in the case of wounds. It is in the writer’s recollection that an unhappy groom who had lost a piece of flesh out of the calf of his leg sought assistance after his accident from amotherly old cook, the medical adviser in ordinary of the whole household. The good woman evidently held the doctrine of Sacrificial Medicine deep in her soul, as well as a due estimate of the utility, under all circumstances, of the art of cookery. Encouraging the poor young man with suitable reflections on the purifying use of salt and fire, she accordingly rubbed a handful from her salt-box into the wound, and then held the miserable limb steadily to the kitchen fire!

A bath of blood has been frequently employed to resuscitate exhausted patients. When Cæsar Borgia barely survived swallowing his share of the bottles of poisoned wine which his respectable father, Pope Alexander VI., had intended for the Cardinal, but took by mistake for himself and his son, it is said that an ox was brought into Cæsar’s apartments and disembowelled, to enable him to get into it and receive such vitality as the warm, bleeding carcass might impart. We are here at the point where Sacrificial Medicine assumes the vicarious form, and the poor brutes are made to suffer instead of the human patients for the benefit of the latter. In an account of the birth of the Duc de Bourgogne, grandson of Louis XIV., in theCuriosités Historiques(p.48), amid the description of the raptures of the splendid court assembled on the occasion, there is acasual mention of an incident affording a wonderful contrast to all this royal joy and magnificence. The attendant chiefaccoucheur, the celebratedDr.Clement, to prevent suffering on the part of the mother (the Dauphine), applied to her person the skin of a sheep, newly flayed. To obtain this quite fresh, a butcher was engaged to skin the animal alive in the adjoining room; and, being anxious to offer the skin as quickly as possible to the doctor, he carried it into the chamber of the Dauphine, leaving the door open. The sheep, in its agony, followed him, and ran in, bleeding and skinless, among the shrieking crowd of courtiers and grandees. In modern times, worse things than these are done to animals, professedly for the benefit of mankind; but they are now performed quietly in physiological laboratories, not paraded in public, else it is to be believed that even the most selfish among us would cry, “Hold! we desire no cure of disease, no scientific knowledge, at any such horrible price.”

Yet, again, there was a class of Sacrificial Remedies whose merit consisted in requiring the patient to travel a long way, or to apply to some hardly accessible personage, to obtain relief. There were Holy Wells having no medicinal properties whatever, which cured all the multitudes of people who made long and painful pilgrimages to reach them.More remarkable still were the benefits derived in cases of scrofula from being touched by a king,—a privilege, it may be safely guessed, not accorded without some delay and solicitation, and possibly not without fees to royal attendants, scarcely disinterested witnesses of the miracles which followed. The history of this particular delusion would alone form a very curious chapter, since Archbishop Bradwardine, in 1348, appealed to the whole world in proof of the wonder, till Samuel Johnson’s scarred and mighty head was subjected to the royal touch. When we recall the fact that only in the eighteenth century did a special religious service for the ceremony cease to form a part of the Liturgy of the Church of England, we do not seem to ourselves to have yet advanced a great way beyond this harmless superstition. Indeed, it is only in the present generation that the scientific name of the malady has generally superseded its familiar title of the “King’s Evil,” or by ellipsis “the Evil,” by which it is even now known in remote parts of the country.

Where it was impossible to obtain help from a king, there yet remained the possibility of being touched by somebody else, who might possess some rare and peculiar privilege and fitness for healing disease. The odd malady, popularly called “shingles,” for example, somehow suggested to the sufferers thedesirability of having recourse to some special agency of relief; and this was found in persons who had either themselves eaten the flesh of an eagle, or whose fathers or ancestors had done so. Within the last thirty years, a gentleman’s servant in Wales has been known to perform a journey of forty miles across the mountains to be touched by a man whose grandfather had eaten an eagle.

Finally, there is a large heterogeneous class of prescriptions, obviously owing their origin to the principle of Sacrificial Medicine, of which the simple rule has been to prevent the miserable patient from adopting any mode of relief for his sufferings which Nature might point out, and adding to them fresh pain by any ingenious device which may occur to his physician. Of this kind was the treatment of fever in vogue till quite recently, when the patient was carefully shut up in a close room, with well-curtained bed and warm bedclothes, and was prohibited from relieving his thirst with any cold drink. Truly, if Marcellus Sidetes, who is said to have written forty-two books in “heroic” verse “concerning distempers,” had given us a picture of all the misery which must have been occasioned in the world by the reallyinsolentdisregard of Nature and common sense shown in these matters,—how many thousands of lives have been thrown away, andthrough what maddening misery the survivors must have struggled back to life,—those poems, instead of being forgotten by the world, might have done us precious service by reminding us that there is some counterweight to be placed in the scale wherein we are wont to measure our debts of gratitude to medical science.

Another appalling device was that of the renowned English physician, John of Gaddesden, who introduced the practice of treating the small-pox by wrapping up the patient in scarlet, hanging his room in scarlet, and in fact compelling him to rest his feverish eyes only on that flaring hue. John tried this notable device, according to his own showing, on one of the sons of King Edward I. (it does not appear to which he refers), and complacently adds to his report, “et est bona cura.” In those days, however, doors and windows were not made air-tight, and up the capacious chimneys a considerable portion of fresh air must always have rushed. It was reserved for a later generation to perfect the ingenious system for aggravating and intensifying fever by pasting down the modern window, closing the registers, and (as a climax) engaging nurses to lie beside the sufferer to keep up the heat! The writer heard some years ago from the lips of a Member of Parliament, now deceased, the recital of hisown treatment as a boy, in or near London, under a severe attack of small-pox. His life being specially valuable as that of an only son, his affectionate parents, by the advice of a distinguished physician, obtained the services oftwo fat women, who were established permanently in bed on each side of the child during the whole course of the disease! What stipend was offered to tempt these poor obese females to perform this awful service has escaped from the record.

Reading over all these marvellous prescriptions, it is a refreshing exercise to picture the fashionable “leech,” the Gull or Jenner of the period, physician in ordinary to the King or Queen, suave and solemn, filled to the brim with all the conscious dignity of Science, standing beside the sick-bed of some mighty prince or peer, and giving to the awe-stricken attendants his high commands to hang the room with scarlet cloth, or to bring to the patient one of the horrid messes prepared with such infinite pains under his direction, in his own laboratory. We can almost hear him condescendingly explaining to the chief persons present what occult relationship exists between the small-pox and the scarlet cloth, or how the Arcanum of Toads comes to be specially valuable, having been composed of the fattest old toads, selected precisely at the right season,—videlicetmidsummer. Of course, in each successive generation there was nothing for the unlearned laity to do but to bow submissively to the dicta of the exponent of Science as it existed at the time. People may always laugh at what is past and gone; but to suspect that living men may be mistaken, or that new systems of medicine, philosophy, or theology, may be destined, like the old, to “have their day and cease to be,” is audacity to which no one should advance. We dare not, therefore, suggest that, to our grandsons, half our modern nostrums (of which the fashion comes in freshly one season and usually falls into disrepute a few years after) may possibly appear scarcely a degree less ridiculous than the Arcanum of Toads or the Mummiall Quintessence. It was not much worse, after all, to make a patient drink a dead man’s blood than to rob him of his own, in theSangradostyle to which (in the memory of us all) the world owes the loss of Cavour. It would have been a mercy to a poor Florentine lady, lately deceased, had her physician counselled her merely to eat earth-worms pickled in vinegar, or green lizards boiled alive in oil, as recommended byDr.Salmon, instead of bleeding her from the arm nineteen times in the fortnight following her confinement and (as may be readily understood) preceding her untimely death.

Sacrificial Medicine, however, in its simpler and more easily recognizable forms, is undoubtedly on the wane, though a good deal of its spirit may still be traced in our behavior to the sick. To homœopathy (as to many another kind of heresy), we probably owe somewhat of the mitigation of orthodoxy; and children, noticing the busts of Hahnemann in the shop windows, may be properly taught to bless that great deliverer who banished from the nursery those huge and hateful mugs of misery,—black founts of so many infantine tears,—mugs of sobs and sighs and gasps and struggles unutterable, from one of which Madame Roland drew the first inspiration of that martyr spirit which led her onward to the guillotine, when she suffered herself to be whipped six times running, sooner than swallow the abominable contents.

FOOTNOTES:[26]As the modern mind may be a little puzzled as to the mode in which some of these substances can be introduced into our internal economy, the following extract from theFamily DictionaryofDr.Salmon (1696) may throw light on the subject: “Coral, to prepare,—Take such a quantity as ye think convenient. Make it into a fine powder by grinding it upon a Porphyry or an Iron Mortar. Drop on it by degrees a little rosewater, and form it into balls for use. After this manner, Crabs’-Eyes, Pearls, Oister shells, and Precious stones are prepared to make up Cordials compounded of them and other suitable materials for the strengthening of the heart in fevers, or such like violent diseases, and to restore the Decays of nature.” Ebony is swallowed by rasping it in shavings and making a decoction.

[26]As the modern mind may be a little puzzled as to the mode in which some of these substances can be introduced into our internal economy, the following extract from theFamily DictionaryofDr.Salmon (1696) may throw light on the subject: “Coral, to prepare,—Take such a quantity as ye think convenient. Make it into a fine powder by grinding it upon a Porphyry or an Iron Mortar. Drop on it by degrees a little rosewater, and form it into balls for use. After this manner, Crabs’-Eyes, Pearls, Oister shells, and Precious stones are prepared to make up Cordials compounded of them and other suitable materials for the strengthening of the heart in fevers, or such like violent diseases, and to restore the Decays of nature.” Ebony is swallowed by rasping it in shavings and making a decoction.

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