Part 28 (1/2)
Lord Denman was closely connected with the medical profession by family ties: his father being Dr. Denman, of Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, the author of a well-known work on a department of his profession; his uncle being Dr. Joseph Denman of Bakewell; and his two sisters having married two eminent physicians, Margaret being the wife of Sir Richard Croft, Bart., and Sophia the wife of Dr. Baillie. Lord Kingsdown's medical ancestor was his grandfather, Edward Pemberton, M.D., of Warrington.
But though the list of the enn.o.bled descendants of medical pract.i.tioners might be extended to the limits of a volume, the writer of these pages is not aware of any case in which a doctor has, by the exercise of his calling, raised himself to the peerage. As yet, the dignity of a baronetcy is the highest honour conferred on the most ill.u.s.trious of the medical faculty, Sir Hans Sloane being the first of the order to whom that rank was presented. More than once a physician has won admission into the _n.o.blesse_, but the battle resulting in such success has been fought in the arena of politics or the bustle of the law courts. Sylvester Douglas deserted the counter, at which he commenced life an apothecary, and after a prolonged servitude to, or warfare with, the cliques of the House of Commons, had his exertions rewarded and his ambition gratified with an Irish peerage and a patrician wife. On his elevation he was of course taunted with the humility of his origin, and by none was the reproach flung at him with greater bitterness than it was by a brother _parvenu_ and brother poet.
”What's his t.i.tle to be?” asked Sheridan, as he was playing at cards; ”what's Sylvester Douglas to be called?”
”Lord Glenbervie,” was the answer.
”Good Lord!” replied Sheridan; and then he proceeded to fire off an _impromptu_, which he had that morning industriously prepared in bed, and which he subsequently introduced into one of his best satiric pieces.
”Glenbervie, Glenbervie, What's good for the scurvy?
For ne'er be your old trade forgot.
In your arms rather quarter A pestle and mortar, And your crest be a spruce gallipot.”
The brilliant partizan and orator displayed more wit, if not better taste, in his ridicule of Addington, who, in allusion to the rise of his father from a humble position in the medical profession, was ordinarily spoken of by political opponents as ”The Doctor.” On one occasion, when the Scotch members who usually supported Addington voted in a body with the opposition, Sheridan, with a laugh of triumph, fired off a happy mis-quotation from Macbeth,--”Doctor, the Thanes fly from thee.”
Henry Bickersteth, Lord Langdale, was the luckiest of physicians and lawyers. He used the medical profession as a stepping-stone, and the legal profession as a ladder, and had the fortune to win two of the brightest prizes of life--wealth and a peerage--without the humiliation and toil of serving a political party in the House of Commons. The second son of a provincial surgeon, he was apprenticed to his father, and educated for the paternal calling. On being qualified to kill, he became medical attendant to the late Earl of Oxford, during that n.o.bleman's travels on the Continent. Returning to his native town, Kirby Lonsdale, he for awhile a.s.sisted his father in the management of his practice; but resolved on a different career from that of a country doctor, he became a member of Caius College, Cambridge, and devoted himself to mathematical study with such success that, in 1808, when he was twenty-eight years old, he became Senior Wrangler and First Smith's prizeman. As late as the previous year he was consulted medically by his father. In 1811 he was called to the bar by the Inner Temple, and from that time till his elevation to the Masters.h.i.+p of the Rolls he was both the most hard-working and hard-worked of the lawyers in the Equity Courts, to which he confined his practice. In 1827 he became a bencher of his Inn; and, in 1835, although he was a staunch and zealous liberal, and a strenuous advocate of Jeremy Bentham's opinions, he was offered a seat on the judicial bench by Sir Robert Peel. This offer he declined, though he fully appreciated the compliment paid him by the Tory chieftain. He had not, however, to wait long for his promotion. In the following year (1836) he was, by his own friends, made Master of the Rolls, and created a peer of the realm, with the additional honour of being a Privy-Councillor. His Lords.h.i.+p died at Tunbridge Wells, in 1851, in his sixty-eighth year. It would be difficult to point to a more enviable career in legal annals than that of this medical lawyer, who won the most desirable honours of his profession without ever sitting in the House of Commons, or acting as a legal adviser of the Crown--and when he had not been called quite twenty-five years. To give another touch to this picture of a successful life, it may be added, that Lord Langdale, after rising to eminence, married Elizabeth, daughter of the Earl of Oxford, to whom he had formerly been travelling medical attendant.
Love has not unfrequently smiled on doctors, and elevated them to positions at which they would never have arrived by their professional labours. Sir Lucas Pepys, who married the Countess De Rothes, and Sir Henry Halford, whose wife was a daughter of the eleventh Lord St. John of Blestoe, are conspicuous amongst the more modern instances of medical pract.i.tioners advancing their social condition by aristocratic alliances. Not less fortunate was the farcical Sir John Hill, who gained for a bride the Honourable Miss Jones, a daughter of Lord Ranelagh--a n.o.bleman whose eccentric opinion, that the welfare of the country required a continual intermixture of the upper and lower cla.s.ses of society, was a frequent object of ridicule with the caricaturists and lampoon-writers of his time. But the greatest prize ever made by an ?sculapius in the marriage-market was that acquired by Sir Hugh Smithson, who won the hand of Percy's proud heiress, and was created Duke of Northumberland. The son of a Yorks.h.i.+re baronet's younger son, Hugh Smithson was educated for an apothecary--a vocation about the same time followed for several years by Sir Thomas Geery Cullum, before he succeeded to the family estate and dignity. Hugh Smithson's place of business was Hatton Garden, but the length of time that he there presided over a pestle and mortar is uncertain. In 1736 he became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, but he withdrew from that learned body, on the books of which his signature may be found, in the year 1740. A few months after this secession, Sir Hugh led to the altar the only child and heiress of Algernon Seymour, Duke of Somerset. There still lives a tradition that the lady made the offer to Sir Hugh immediately after his rejection by a famous belle of private rank and modest wealth. Another version of the story is that, when she heard of his disappointment, she observed publicly, ”that the disdainful beauty was a fool, and that no other woman in England would be guilty of like folly.” On hearing this, the baronet, a singularly handsome man, took courage to sue for that to which men of far higher rank would not have presumed to aspire. The success that followed his daring, of course, brought upon him the arrows of envy. He had won so much, however, that he could, without ill-humour, bear being laughed at. On being created Duke of Northumberland in 1766, he could afford to smile at a proposition that his coronet should be surrounded with senna, instead of strawberry-leaves; for, however much obscure jealousy might affect to contemn him, he was no fit object for disdain--but a gentleman of good intellect and a lordly presence, and (though he had mixed drugs behind a counter) descended from an old and honourable family. The reproach of being a Smithson, and no Percy, had more force when applied to the second duke in the Anti-Jacobin, than it had when hurled vindictively at the ex-doctor himself by the mediocrities of the _beau monde_, whom he had beaten on their own ground by superior attractions and accomplishments.
”Nay,” quoth the Duke, ”in thy black scroll Deductions I espye-- For those who, poor, and mean, and low, With children burthen'd lie.
”And though full sixty thousand pounds My va.s.sals pay to me, From Cornwall to Northumberland, Through many a fair countree;
”Yet England's church, its king, its laws, Its cause I value not, Compared with this, my constant text, _A penny saved is got_.
”No drop of princely Percy's blood Through these cold veins doth run; With Hotspur's castles, blazon, name, I still am _poor_ Smithson.”
Considering the opportunities that medical men have for pressing a suit in love, and the many temptations to gentle emotion that they experience in the aspect of feminine suffering, and the confiding grat.i.tude of their fair patients, it is perhaps to be wondered at that only one medical duke is to be found in the annals of the peerage.
When Swift's Stella was on her death-bed, her physician said, encouragingly--”Madam, you are certainly near the bottom of the hill, but we shall endeavour to get you up once more,” the _na?ve_ reply of the poor lady was, ”Doctor, I am afraid I shall be out _of breath_ before I get to the top again.” Not less touching was the fear expressed by Steele's merry daughter to her doctor, that she should ”die _before the holidays_.” Both Stella and Sir Richard's child had left their personal charms behind them when they so addressed their physicians; but imagine, my brother, what the effect of such words would be on your susceptible heart, if they came from the lips of a beautiful girl. Would you not (think you) try to win other such speeches from her?--and if you tried, dear sir, surely _you_ would succeed!
Prudence would order a physician, endowed with a heart, to treat it in the same way as Dr. Glynn thought a cuc.u.mber ought to be dressed--to slice it very thin, pepper it plentifully, pour upon it plenty of the best vinegar, and then--throw it away. A doctor has quite enough work on his hands to keep the affections of his patients in check, without having to mount guard over his own emotions. Thackeray says that girls make love in the nursery, and practise the arts of coquetry on the page-boy who brings the coals upstairs--a hard saying for simple young gentlemen triumphing in the possession of a _first_ love. The writer of these pages could point to a fair dame, who enjoys rank amongst the highest and wealth equal to the station a.s.signed her by the heralds, who not only aimed tender glances, and sighed amorously to a young waxen-faced, blue-eyed apothecary, but even went so far as to write him a letter proposing an elopement, and other merry arrangements, in which a carriage, everlastingly careering over the country at the heels of four horses, bore a conspicuous part. The silly maiden had, like Dinah, ”a fortune in silvyer and gold,” amounting to ?50,000, and her blue-eyed Adonis was twice her age; but fortunately he was a gentleman of honour, and, without divulging the mad proposition of the young lady, he induced her father to take her away for twelve months'
change of air and scene. Many years since the heroine of this little episode, after she had become the wife of a very great man, and the mother of children who bid fair to become ornaments to their ill.u.s.trious race, expressed her grat.i.tude cordially to this Joseph of the doctors, for his magnanimity in not profiting by the absurd fancies of a child, and the delicacy with which he had taken prompt measures for her happiness; and, more recently, she manifested her good will to the man who had offered her what is generally regarded as the greatest insult a woman can experience, by procuring a commission in the army for his eldest son.
The embarra.s.sments Sir John Eliot suffered under from the emotional overtures of his fair patients are well known. St. John Long himself had not more admirers amongst the _?lite_ of high-born English ladies.
The king had a strong personal dislike to Sir John,--a dislike possibly heightened by a feeling that it was sheer impudence in a doctor to capture without an effort the hearts of half the prettiest women amongst his subjects--and then shrug his shoulders with chagrin at his success. Lord George Germain had hard work to wring a baronetcy out of his Majesty for this victim of misplaced affection.
”Well,” said the king, at last grudgingly promising to make Eliot a baronet--”my Lord, since you desire it, let it be; but remember he shall not be my physician.”
”No, sir,” answered Lord George--”he shall be your Majesty's baronet, and my physician.”
Amongst other plans Sir John resorted to, to scare away his patients and patronesses, he had a death's-head painted on his carriage-panels; but the result of this eccentric measure on his practice and on his sufferings was the reverse of what he desired. One lady--the daughter of a n.o.ble member of a Cabinet--ignorant that he was otherwise occupied, made him an offer, and on learning to her astonishment that he was a married man, vowed that she would not rest till she had a.s.sa.s.sinated his wife.
Poor Radcliffe's loves were of a less flattering sort, though they resembled Sir John Eliot's in respect of being instances of reciprocity all on one side. But the amorous follies of Radcliffe, ludicrous though they became under the touches of Steele's pen, are dignified and manly when compared with the senile freaks of Dr. Mead, whose highest delight was to comb the hair of the lady on whom, for the time being, his affections were set.
Dr. Cadogan, of Charles the Second's time, was, like Sir John Eliot, a favourite with the ladies. His wont was to spend his days in shooting and his evenings in flirtation. To the former of these tastes the following lines refer:--
”Doctor, all game you either ought to shun, Or sport no longer with the unsteady gun; But like physicians of undoubted skill, Gladly attempt what never fails to kill, Not lead's uncertain dross, but physic's deadly pill.”
Whether he was a good shot we cannot say; but he was sufficiently adroit as a squire of dames, for he secured as his wife a wealthy lady, over whose property he had unfettered control. Against the money, however, there were two important points figuring under the head of ”set-off”--the bride was old and querulous. Of course such a woman was unfitted to live happily with an eminent physician, on whom bevies of court ladies smiled whenever he went west of Charing Cross.
After spending a few months in alternate fits of jealous hate and jealous fondness, the poor creature conceived the terrible fancy that her husband was bent on destroying her with poison, and so ridding his life of her execrable temper. One day, when surrounded by her friends, and in the presence of her lord and master, she fell on her back in a state of hysterical spasms, exclaiming:--
”Ah! he has killed me at last. I am poisoned!”