Part 34 (1/2)
THE COUNTRY MEDICAL MAN.
The country doctor, such as we know him--a well-read and observant man, skilful in his art, with a liberal love of science, and in every respect a gentleman--is so recent a creation, that he may almost be spoken of as a production of the present century. There still linger in the provinces veteran representatives of the ignorance which, in the middle of the last century, was the prevailing characteristic of the rural apothecary. Even as late as 1816, the law required no medical education in a pract.i.tioner of the healing art in country districts, beyond an apprentices.h.i.+p to an empiric, who frequently had not information of any kind, beyond the rudest elements of a druggist's learning, to impart to his pupils. Men who commenced business under this system are still to be found in every English county, though in most cases they endeavour to conceal their lack of scientific culture under German or Scotch diplomas--bought for a few pounds.
Scattered over these pages are many anecdotes of provincial doctors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from which a truthful but not complimentary picture of their order may be obtained. Indeed, they were for the most part vulgar drunken knaves, with just learning enough to impose on the foolish crowds who resorted to them. The most brilliant of the fraternity in Henry the Eighth's reign was Andrew Borde, a Winchester pract.i.tioner. This gentleman was author and buffoon, as well as physician. He travelled about the country from market to fair, and from fair to market, making comic orations to the crowds who purchased his nostrums, singing songs, and enlivening the proceedings when they were becoming dull with grimaces of inexpressible drollery. It was said of Sir John Hill,
”For physic and farces His equal there scarce is; His farces are physic, His physic a farce is.”
Borde's physic doubtless was a farce; but if his wit resembled physic, it did so, not (like Hill's) by making men sick, but by rousing their spirits and bracing their nerves with good hearty laughter. Everywhere he was known as ”Merry Andrew,” and his followers, when they mounted the bank, were proud to receive the same t.i.tle.
Mr. H. Fleetwood Sheppard communicated in the year 1855, some amusing anecdotes to ”Notes and Queries” about the popular Dorsets.h.i.+re doctor--little Dr. Grey. Small but warlike, this gentleman, in the reign of James the First, had a following of well-born roisterers that enabled him to beard the High Sheriff at the a.s.sizes. He was always in debt, but as he always carried a brandy-flask and a brace of loaded pistols in his pocket or about his neck, he neither experienced the mental hara.s.s of impecuniosity nor feared bailiffs. In the hour of peril he blew a horn, which he wore suspended to his person, and the gentlemen of his body-guard rallied round him, vowing they were his ”sons,” and would die for him. Says the MS.--”This Doctor Grey was once arreste by a pedler, who coming to his house knocked at ye dore as yey (he being desirous of Hobedyes) useth to doe, and ye pedler having gartars upon his armes, and points, &c., asked him whether he did wante any points or gartars, &c., pedler like. Grey hereat began to storme, and ye other tooke him by ye arme, and told him that he had no neede be so angry, and holdinge him fast, told him y he had ye kinge's proces for him, and showed him his warrant. 'Hast thou?' quoth Grey, and stoode stil awhile; but at length, catchinge ye fellowe by both ends of his collar before, held him fast, and _drawinge out a great rundagger, brake his head in two or three places_.”
Again, Dr. Grey ”came one day at ye a.s.sizes, wheare ye sheriffe had some sixty men, and he wth his twenty sonnes, ye trustyest young gentlemen and of ye best sort and rancke, came and drancke in Dorchester before ye sheriffe, and bad who dare to touch him; _and so after awhile blew his horn and came away_.” On the same terms who would not like to be a Dorsets.h.i.+re physician?
In 1569 (_vide_ ”Roberts' History of the Southern Counties”) Lyme had no medical pract.i.tioner. And at the beginning of the seventeenth century Sir Symonds D'Ewes was brought into the world at c.o.xden Hall, near Axminster, by a female pract.i.tioner, who deformed him for life by her clumsiness. Yet more, Mrs. D'Ewes set out with her infant for London, when the babe, unable to bear the jolting of the carriage, screamed itself into a violent illness, and had to be left behind at Dorchester under the care of another doctress--Mrs. Margaret Waltham.
And two generations later, in 1665, the Rev. Giles Moore, of Ess.e.x, had to send twenty-five miles for an ordinary medical man, who was paid 12_s._ per visit, and the same distance for a physician, whose fee was ?1--a second physician, who came and stayed two days, being paid ?1 10_s._
Of the country doctors of the middle and close of the last century, Dr. Slop is a fair specimen. They were a rude, vulgar, keen-witted set of men, possessing much the same sort of intelligence, and disfigured by the same kind of ignorance, as a country gentleman expects now to find in his farrier. They had to do battle with the village nurses at the best on equal terms, often at a disadvantage; masculine dignity and superior medical erudition being in many districts of less account than the force of old usage, and the sense of decorum that supported the lady pract.i.tioners. Mrs. Shandy had an express provision in her marriage settlement, securing her from the ignorance of country doctors. Of course, in respect to learning and personal acquirements, the rural pract.i.tioners, as a cla.s.s, varied very much, in accordance with the intelligence and culture of the district in which their days were spent, with the cla.s.s and character of their patients, and with their own connections and original social condition. On his Yorks.h.i.+re living Sterne came in contact with a rought lot. The Whitworth Taylors were captains and leaders of the army in which Dr. Slop was a private. The original of the last-mentioned worthy was so ill-read that he mistook Lithop?dii Senonensis Icon for the name of a distinguished surgical authority, and, under this erroneous impression, quoted Lithop?dus Senonensis with the extreme of gravity.
This Lithop?dus Senonensis story is not without its companions. A prescription, in which a physician ordered _extract, rad valer._, and immediately under it, as an ingredient in the same mixture, a certain quant.i.ty of _tinctura ejusdem_, sorely perplexed the poor apothecary to who it was sent to be dispensed. _Tinctura ejusdem!_ What could it be! _Ejusdem!_ In the whole pharmacopoeia such a drug was not named.
Nothing like it was to be found on any label in his shop. At his wits'
end, the poor fellow went out to a professional neighbour, and asked, in an off-hand way, ”How are you off for _Tinctura Ejusdem_? I am out of it. So can you let me have a little of yours.” The neighbour, who was a sufficiently good cla.s.sical scholar to have _idem_, _eadem_, _idem_ at his tongue's end, lamented that he too was ”out of the article.” and sympathizingly advised his _confr?re_, without loss of time, to apply for some at Apothecaries' Hall. What a delightful blunder to make to a _friend_, of all the people in the world! The apothecary must have been a dull as well as an unlettered fellow, or he would have known the first great rule of his art--”When in doubt--_Use water!_” A more awkward mistake still was that made by the young dispenser, who, for the first time in his life, saw at the end of a prescription the words _pro re nat?_. What could they mean? _pro re nat?!_ What could _pro re nat?_ have to do with a mixture sent to a lady who had just presented her husband with an heir. With the aid of a Latin Dictionary, the novice rendered _pro re nat?_ ”for the thing born.” Of course. Clearly the mixture was for the baby. And in a trice the compound to be taken by an adult, as circ.u.mstances should indicate a necessity for a dose, was sent off for the ”little stranger.”
May not mention here be made of thee, ancient friend of childhood, Roland Trevor? The whole country round, for a circle of which the diameter measured thirty fair miles, thou wert one of the most popular doctors of East Anglia. Who rode better horses? Who was the bolder in the hunt, or more joyous over the bottle? Cheery of voice, with hearty laughter rolling from purple lips, what company thou wert to festive squires! The grave some score years since closed over thee, when ninety-six years had pa.s.sed over thy head--covering it with silver tresses, and robbing the eye of its pristine fire, and the lip of its mirthful curl. The shop of a country apothecary had been thy only _Alma Mater_; so, surely, it was no fault of thine if thy learning was scanty. Still, in the pleasant vales of Loes and Wilford is told the story of how, on being asked if thou wert a believer in _phrenology_, thou didst answer with becoming gravity, ”I never keep it, and I never use it. But I think it highly probable that, given frequently and in liberal doses, it would be very useful in certain cases of irregular gout.”
Another memory arises of a country doctor of the old school. A huge, burly, surly, churlish old fellow was Dr. Standish. He died in extremely advanced age, having lived twenty-five years in the present century. A ferocious radical, he was an object of considerable public interest during the period of political excitement consequent on the French Revolution. Tom Paine, the Thetford breeches-maker of whom the world has heard a little, was his familiar friend and correspondent.
It was rumoured throughout the land that ”government” had marked the doctor out for destruction.
”Thar sai,” the humbler Suffolk farmers used to gossip amongst themselves, ”thar sai a picter-taikin chap hav guv his poortright to the King. And Billy Pitt ha'sin it. And oold King Georgie ha' swaren as how that sooner nor later he'll hav his hid” (_i. e._ head).
The ”upper ten” of Holmnook, and the upper ten-times-ten of the distance round about Holmnook, held themselves aloof from such a dangerous character. But the common folk believed in and admired him.
There was something of romance about a man whom George III. and Billy Pitt were banded together to destroy.
Standish was a man of few words. ”Down with the bishops!” ”Up with the people!” were his stock sentiments. He never approached nearer poetry than when (yellow being then the colour of the extreme liberal party in his district) he swore ”there worn't a flower in the who' o'
crashun warth lookin' at but a sunflower, for that was yallow, and a big un.”
The man had no friends in Holmnook or the neighbourhood; but every evening for fifty years he sate, in the parlour of the chief inn, drinking brandy-and-water, and smoking a ”churchwarden.” His wife--(his wooing must have been of a queer sort)--a quiet, inoffensive little body, sometimes forgot she was but a woman, and presumed to have an opinion of her own. On such occasions Standish thrashed her soundly with a dog-whip. In consequence of one of these castigations she ran away from her tyrant. Instead of pursuing her, Dr. Standish merely inserted the following advertis.e.m.e.nt in the county paper:--
”_Dr Standish to all whom it may concern._--Dr Standish's wife having run away, he wants a housekeeper. Dr Standish doesn't want good looks in a woman: but she must know how to hold her tongue and cook a plain joint. He gives ten pounds. Mrs Standish needn't apply--she's too much of a lady.”
But poor Mrs. Standish did apply, and, what is more, obtained the situation. She and her lord never again had any quarrel that obtained publicity; and so the affair ended more happily than in all probability it would have done had Sir Creswell Creswell's court been then in existence. Standish's practice lay princ.i.p.ally amongst the mechanics and little farmers of the neighborhood. Much of his time was therefore spent in riding his two huge lumbering horses about the country. In his old age he indulged himself in a gig (which, out of respect to radical politics, he painted with a flaring yellow paint); but, at the commencement of the present century, the by-roads of Suffolk--now so good that a London brougham drawn by one horse can with ease whisk over the worst of them at the rate of ten miles an hour--were so bad that a doctor could not make an ordinary round on them in a wheeled carriage. Even in the saddle he ran frequent risk of being mired, unless his horse had an abundance of bone and pluck.
Standish's mode of riding was characteristic of the man. Straight on he went, at a lumbering six miles an hour trot--dash, dosh, dus.h.!.+--through the muddy roads, sitting loosely in his seat, heavy and shapeless as a sack of potatoes, looking down at his brown corduroy breeches and his mahogany top-boots (the toes of which pointed in directly opposite directions), wearing a perpetual scowl on his brows, and never either rising in his stirrups or fixing himself to the saddle with his knees. Not a word would he speak to a living creature in the way of civil greeting.
”Doctor, good morning to you,” an acquaintance would cry out; ”'tis a nice day!”
”Ugh!” Standish would half grunt, half roar, trotting straight on--dish, dosh, dus.h.!.+
”Stop, doctor, I am out of sorts, and want some physic,” would be the second form of address.
”Then why the ---- ---- didn't you say so, instead of jawing about the weather?” the urbane physician would say, checking his horse.