Part 22 (1/2)

In addition to the evidence as to methods of treatment furnished by the ma.n.u.scripts I have cited, I subjoin the following doc.u.ment, to which my attention was called by Dr. Shurtleff, our present Mayor. This is a letter of which the original is to be found in vol. lxix. page 10 of the ”Archives” preserved at the State House in Boston. It will be seen that what the surgeon wanted consisted chiefly of opiates, stimulants, cathartics, plasters, and materials for bandages. The complex and varied formulae have given place to simpler and often more effective forms of the same remedies; but the list and the manner in which it is made out are proofs of the good sense and schooling of the surgeon, who, it may be noted, was in such haste that he neglected all his stops. He might well be in a hurry, as on the very day upon which he wrote, a great body of Indians--supposed to be six or seven hundred--appeared before Hatfield; and twenty-five resolute young men of Hadley, from which town he wrote, crossed the river and drove them away.

HADLY May 30: 76

Mr RAWSON Sr

What we have recd by Tho: Houey the past month is not the chiefest of our wants as you have love for poor wounded I pray let us not want for these following medicines if you have not a speedy conveyance of them I pray send on purpose they are those things mentioned in my former letter but to prevent future mistakes I have wrote them att large wee have great want with the greatest halt and speed let us be supplyed. Sr Yr Sert WILL LOCHS.

(Endorsed)

Mr. Lockes Letter Recd from the Governor 13 Jane & acquainted ye Council with it but could not obtaine any thing to be sent in answer thereto. 13 June 1676.

I have given some idea of the chief remedies used by our earlier physicians, which were both Galenic and chemical; that is, vegetable and mineral. They, of course, employed the usual perturbing medicines which Montaigne says are the chief reliance of their craft. There were, doubtless, individual pract.i.tioners who employed special remedies with exceptional boldness and perhaps success. Mr. Eliot is spoken of, in a letter of William Leete to Winthrop, Junior, as being under Mr.

Greenland's mercurial administrations. The latter was probably enough one of these specialists.

There is another cla.s.s of remedies which appears to have been employed occasionally, but, on the whole, is so little prominent as to imply a good deal of common sense among the medical pract.i.tioners, as compared with the superst.i.tions prevailing around them. I have said that I have caught the good Governor, now and then, prescribing the electuary of millipedes; but he is entirely excused by the almost incredible fact that they were retained in the materia medica so late as when Rees's Cyclopaedia was published, and we there find the directions formerly given by the College of Edinburgh for their preparation. Once or twice we have found him admitting still more objectionable articles into his materia medica; in doing which, I am sorry to say that he could plead grave and learned authority. But these instances are very rare exceptions in a medical practice of many years, which is, on the whole, very respectable, considering the time and circ.u.mstances.

Some remedies of questionable though not odious character appear occasionally to have been employed by the early pract.i.tioners, but they were such as still had the support of the medical profession. Governor John Winthrop, the first, sends for East Indian bezoar, with other commodities he is writing for. Governor Endicott sends him one he had of Mr. Humfrey. I hope it was genuine, for they cheated infamously in the matter of this concretion, which ought to come out of an animal's stomach, but the real history of which resembles what is sometimes told of modern sausages.

There is a famous law-case of James the First's time, in which a goldsmith sold a hundred pounds' worth of what he called bezoar, which was proved to be false, and the purchaser got a verdict against him.

Governor Endicott also sends Winthrop a unicorn's horn, which was the property of a certain Mrs. Beggarly, who, in spite of her name, seems to have been rich in medical knowledge and possessions. The famous Thomas Bartholinus wrote a treatise on the virtues of this fabulous-sounding remedy, which was published in 1641, and republished in 1678.

The ”antimonial cup,” a drinking vessel made of that metal, which, like our qua.s.sia-wood cups, might be filled and emptied in saecula saeculorum without exhausting its virtues, is mentioned by Matthew Cradock, in a letter to the elder Winthrop, but in a doubtful way, as it was thought, he says, to have shortened the days of Sir Nathaniel Riche; and Winthrop himself, as I think, refers to its use, calling it simply ”the cup.” An antimonial cup is included in the inventory of Samuel Seabury, who died 1680, and is valued at five s.h.i.+llings. There is a treatise ent.i.tled ”The Universall Remedy, or the Vertues of the Antimoniall Cup, By John Evans, Minister and Preacher of G.o.d's Word, London, 1634,” in our own Society's library.

One other special remedy deserves notice, because of native growth. I do not know when Culver's root, Leptandra Virginica of our National Pharmacopoeia, became noted, but Cotton Mather, writing in 1716 to John Winthrop of New London, speaks of it as famous for the cure of consumptions, and wishes to get some of it, through his mediation, for Katharine, his eldest daughter. He gets it, and gives it to the ”poor damsel,” who is languis.h.i.+ng, as he says, and who dies the next month,--all the sooner, I have little doubt, for this uncertain and violent drug, with which the meddlesome pedant tormented her in that spirit of well-meant but restless quackery, which could touch nothing without making mischief, not even a quotation, and yet proved at length the means of bringing a great blessing to our community, as we shall see by and by; so does Providence use our very vanities and infirmities for its wise purposes.

Externally, I find the pract.i.tioners on whom I have chiefly relied used the plasters of Paracelsus, of melilot, diachylon, and probably diaphoenicon, all well known to the old pharmacopoeias, and some of them to the modern ones,--to say nothing of ”my yellow salve,” of Governor John, the second, for the composition of which we must apply to his respected descendant.

The authors I find quoted are Barbette's Surgery, Camerarius on Gout, and Wecherus, of all whom notices may be found in the pages of Haller and Vanderlinden; also, Reed's Surgery, and Nicholas Culpeper's Practice of Physic and Anatomy, the last as belonging to Samuel Seabury, chirurgeon, before mentioned. Nicholas Culpeper was a shrewd charlatan, and as impudent a varlet as ever prescribed for a colic; but knew very well what he was about, and badgers the College with great vigor. A copy of Spigelius's famous Anatomy, in the Boston Athenaeum, has the names of Increase and Samuel Mather written in it, and was doubtless early overhauled by the youthful Cotton, who refers to the great anatomist's singular death, among his curious stories in the ”Magnalia,” and quotes him among nearly a hundred authors whom he cites in his ma.n.u.script ”The Angel of Bethesda.” Dr. John Clark's ”books and instruments, with several chirurgery materials in the closet,” a were valued in his inventory at sixty pounds; Dr. Matthew Fuller, who died in 1678, left a library valued at ten pounds; and a surgeon's chest and drugs valued at sixteen pounds.'

Here we leave the first century and all attempts at any further detailed accounts of medicine and its pract.i.tioners. It is necessary to show in a brief glance what had been going on in Europe during the latter part of that century, the first quarter of which had been made ill.u.s.trious in the history of medical science by the discovery of the circulation.

Charles Barbeyrac, a Protestant in his religion, was a pract.i.tioner and teacher of medicine at Montpellier. His creed was in the way of his obtaining office; but the young men followed his instructions with enthusiasm. Religious and scientific freedom breed in and in, until it becomes hard to tell the family of one from that of the other. Barbeyrac threw overboard the old complex medical farragos of the pharmacopoeias, as his church had disburdened itself of the popish ceremonies.

Among the students who followed his instructions were two Englishmen: one of them, John Locke, afterwards author of an ”Essay on the Human Understanding,” three years younger than his teacher; the other, Thomas Sydenham, five years older. Both returned to England. Locke, whose medical knowledge is borne witness to by Sydenham, had the good fortune to form a correct opinion on a disease from which the Earl of Shaftesbury was suffering, which led to an operation that saved his life. Less felicitous was his experience with a certain ancilla culinaria virgo,--which I am afraid would in those days have been translated kitchen-wench, instead of lady of the culinary department,--who turned him off after she had got tired of him, and called in another pract.i.tioner. [Locke and Sydenham, p. 124. By John Brown, M. D. Edinburgh, 1866.] This helped, perhaps, to spoil a promising doctor, and make an immortal metaphysician. At any rate, Locke laid down the professional wig and cane, and took to other studies.

The name of Thomas Sydenham is as distinguished in the history of medicine as that of John Locke in philosophy. As Barbeyrac was found in opposition to the established religion, as Locke took the rational side against orthodox Bishop Stillingfleet, so Sydenham went with Parliament against Charles, and was never admitted a Fellow by the College of Physicians, which, after he was dead, placed his bust in their hall by the side of that of Harvey.

What Sydenham did for medicine was briefly this he studied the course of diseases carefully, and especially as affected by the particular season; to patients with fever he gave air and cooling drinks, instead of smothering and heating them, with the idea of sweating out their disease; he ordered horseback exercise to consumptives; he, like his teacher, used few and comparatively simple remedies; he did not give any drug at all, if he thought none was needed, but let well enough alone.

He was a sensible man, in short, who applied his common sense to diseases which he had studied with the best light of science that he could obtain.

The influence of the reform he introduced must have been more or less felt in this country, but not much before the beginning of the eighteenth century, as his great work was not published until 1675, and then in Latin. I very strongly suspect that there was not so much to reform in the simple practice of the physicians of the new community, as there was in that of the learned big-wigs of the ”College,” who valued their remedies too much in proportion to their complexity, and the extravagant and fantastic ingredients which went to their making.

During the memorable century which bred and bore the Revolution, the medical profession gave great names to our history. But John Brooks belonged to the State, and Joseph Warren belongs to the country and mankind, and to speak of them would lead me beyond my limited--subject.

There would be little pleasure in dwelling on the name of Benjamin Church; and as for the medical politicians, like Elisha Cooke in the early part of the century, or Charles Jarvis, the bald eagle of Boston, in its later years, whether their practice was heroic or not, their patients were, for he is a bold man who trusts one that is making speeches and coaxing voters, to meddle with the internal politics of his corporeal republic.

One great event stands out in the medical history of this eighteenth century; namely, the introduction of the practice of inoculation for small-pox. Six epidemics of this complaint had visited Boston in the course of a hundred years. Prayers had been asked in the churches for more than a hundred sick in a single day, and this many times. About a thousand persons had died in a twelvemonth, we are told, and, as we may infer, chiefly from this cause.

In 1721, this disease, after a respite of nineteen years, again appeared as an epidemic. In that year it was that Cotton Mather, browsing, as was his wont, on all the printed fodder that came within reach of his ever-grinding mandibles, came upon an account of inoculation as practised in Turkey, contained in the ”Philosophical Transactions.” He spoke of it to several physicians, who paid little heed to his story; for they knew his medical whims, and had probably been bored, as we say now-a-days, many of them, with listening to his ”Angel of Bethesda,” and satiated with his speculations on the Nishmath Chajim.

The Reverend Mather,--I use a mode of expression he often employed when speaking of his honored brethren,--the Reverend Mather was right this time, and the irreverent doctors who laughed at him were wrong. One only of their number disputes his claim to giving the first impulse to the practice, in Boston. This is what that person says: ”The Small-Pox spread in Boston, New England, A.1721, and the Reverend Dr. Cotton Mather, having had the use of these Communications from Dr. William Dougla.s.s (that is, the writer of these words); surrept.i.tiously, without the knowledge of his Informer, that he might have the honour of a New fangled notion, sets an Undaunted Operator to work, and in this Country about 290 were inoculated.”