The Funny Side of Physic Part 11

So we find men in the medical profession who were better as they were,--bakers, barbers, butchers, tailors, tinkers, pedagogues, cobblers, horse doctors, etc., etc.

There used to be a fish-peddler going about Boston, blowing a fish-horn, and crying his "fresh cod an' haddock," who, getting tired of that loud crying and loud smelling occupation, took to blowing his horn for his "wonderful discovery" of a "pasture weed," which cured every humor but a thundering humor (one can see the humor of the joke), and every eruption since the eruption of Hecla in 1783,--which is a pity that he had not made his discovery in time to have tried it on old Hecla's back when it was up.

BARBERS AS DOCTORS.

A barber of Boston, accidentally overhearing a gentleman mention a certain remedy for the "barber's itch," seized upon the idea of speculating upon it, and at once sold out his shop, made up the ointment, clapped M. D. to his name, put out his circulars, and is now seeking whom he may devour, as a physician.

With the looseness of morals and the laxity of our laws, one of these fellows "can make a doctor as quick as a tinker can make a tin kettle."

Probably more barbers have become doctors than any other artisans, for the reason that barbers were formerly nearly the only acknowledged "blood-letters." In the earlier days of Abernethy, barber surgeons were recognized, and the great doctor said of himself, "I have often doffed my hat to those fellows, with a razor between their teeth and a lancet in their hands." Doubtless some of them arrived to usefulness in the profession. Dr. Ambrose Pare, a French barber surgeon, was called the father of French surgery, and enjoyed the confidence of Charles IX. An eminent surgeon of London was Mr. Pott. He was contemporary with Dr.

Hunter, and gave lectures at St. Bartholomew Hospital in Hunter's presence. Some person asking a wag one day where Dr. Hunter was, he replied that, "with barber surgeons he _had gone to pot_."

This alliance of surgery and shaving, to say nothing of other qualifications with which they were sometimes a.s.sociated, conceivably enough furnished some pretext for apprentices.h.i.+ps, since d.i.c.key Gossip's definition of

"Shaving and tooth-drawing, Bleeding, cabbaging, and sawing,"

was by no means always sufficiently comprehensive to include the multifarious accomplishments of "the doctor." "I have seen," says Dr.

Macillwain, of England, "within twenty-five years, chemist, druggist, surgeon, apothecary, and the significant, '&c.,' followed by hatter, hosier, and linen draper, all in one establishment."

I saw in New Hamps.h.i.+re, in 1864, doctor, barber, and apothecary represented by one man.

William b.u.t.ts, another barber surgeon of London, was called to attend Henry VIII., and was rewarded for his professional services with the honor of knighthood in 1512. Another, who was knighted by Henry VIII., was John Ayliffe, a sheriff, formerly a merchant of Blackwell Hall.

Royalty had a chronic habit of knighting quacks. Queen Anne became so charmed by a tailor, who had turned doctor, and who, by some hook or crook, was called to prescribe for the queen's weak eyes, that she had him sworn in, with another knave, as her own oculist. "This lucky gentleman,"

says a reliable author, "was William Reade, a botching tailor of Grub Street, London. To the very last he was a great ignoramus, as a work ent.i.tled 'A Short and Exact Account of all Diseases Incident to the Eyes,'

attests; yet he rose to knighthood, and the most lucrative and fas.h.i.+onable practice of the period." Reade (_Sir William_) was unable to read the book he had published (written by an _amanuensis_); nevertheless, aristocracy, and wise and worthy people at that, who listened to his dignified voice, viewed his pompous person, encased in rich garments, and adorned with jewelry and lace ruffles, _cap-a-pie_, resting his chin upon his enormous gold-headed cane, as, reclining in his splendid coach, drawn by a span of superb blood horses, up to St. James, considered him the most learned and eminent physician of that generation.

In the British Museum is deposited a copy of a poem to the great oculist.

This poem Reade himself had written, at the hand of a penny-a-liner, a "poet of Grub Street," immediately after he was knighted, which has been mainly instrumental in handing his name down to posterity.

TINKER AS DOCTOR.

About the year 1705, one Roger Grant rose into public notice in London, by his publication of his own "marvellous cures." This fellow was no fool, though a great knave. He was formerly a travelling tinker, subsequently a cobbler, and Anabaptist preacher. From tinkering of pots, he became mender of soles of men's boots and shoes; thence saver of souls from perdition, a tinkerer of sore eyes, and lightener of the body. The following bit of poetry was written in 1708 for his benefit, the "picture"

being one which Grant, who was a very vain man, had gotten up from a copperplate likeness of himself, to distribute among his friends. The picture was found posted up conspicuously with the lines:--

"A tinker first, his scene of life began; That failing, he set up for a cunning man; But, wanting luck, puts on a new disguise, And now pretends that he can cure your eyes.

But this expect, that, like a tinker true, Where he repairs one eye, he puts out two."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE EYE DOCTOR.]

He worked himself into notoriety by the publication, in pamphlet form, of his cures,--a mixture of truth strongly spiced with falsehood,--and scattering it over the community. "His plan was to get hold of some poor, ignorant person, of imperfect vision, and, after treating him with medicine and half-crowns for a few weeks, induce him to sign a testimonial, which he probably had never read, that he was born blind, and by the providential intervention of Dr. Grant, he had been entirely restored. To this certificate the clergyman and church-wardens of the parish, in which the patient had been known to wander in mendicancy, were asked to attest; and if they proved impregnable to the cunning representations of the importunate solicitors, and declined to sign the certificate, the doctor did not scruple to save them that trouble by signing their names himself."

More than once was the charge of being a tinker preferred against him. The following satire was written and published for his benefit--with Dr.

Reade's--after Queen Anne had Dr. Grant sworn in as her "oculist in ordinary":--

"Her majesty sure was in a surprise, Or else was very short-sighted, When a tinker was sworn to look to her eyes, And the mountebank Reade was knighted."

"THE LITTLE CARVER DAVY."

The distinguished chemical philosopher and physician of Penzance, Sir Humphry Davy, Bart., was the son of a poor wood-carver, at which trade Humphry worked in his earlier days, and was named by his familiar a.s.sociates, the "Little Carver Davy." On the death of his father, the widow established herself as a milliner at Penzance, where she apprenticed her son to an apothecary. His mother was a woman of talent and great moral sense. When, as Sir Humphry, he had reached the summit of his fame, he looked back upon the facts of his humble origin, his father's plebeian occupation and a.s.sociates, and his mother's mean pursuit, followed for his benefit, with mortification instead of regarding them as sources of pride.

A BUTCHER BOY ESCAPES THE CLEAVER AND BECOMES A GREAT PHYSICIAN AND POET.

In a rickety old three story house, the lower part of which was occupied as a butcher's shop and trader's room, and the upper stories as a dwelling-house, at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in 1721, was born Mark Akenside.

His father was a butcher, and one day, as the boy Mark was a.s.sisting at the menial occupation of cutting up a calf, a cleaver fell from the shop block upon another "calf,"--that of young Akenside's leg,--which lamed him for life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE YOUNG SURGEON'S FIRST EXPERIENCE.]

Akenside was a Nonconformist, and by the aid of the Dissenters' Society young Mark was sent to Edinburgh to study theology. From theology he went to physic, his honest parent refunding the money to the society paid for his studies under their patronage, and he subsequently obtained his degree at Cambridge, and became a fellow of the R. S.

Like Davy, Akenside became ashamed of his plebeian origin. His lameness, like Lord Byron's, was a continual source of mortification to him.

He became a physician to St. Thomas; and, as he went with the students the rounds of the hospital, the fastidiousness of the little bunch of dignity at having come so closely in contact with the vulgar rabble, induced him, at times, to make the strongest patients precede him with _brooms_, to clear a way for him through the crowd of diseased wretches, who, nevertheless, had wonderful faith in his wisdom, and would cry out, "_Bravo for the butcher boy with a game leg!_" as they fell back before the fearful charge of corn brooms.

By the a.s.sistance of friends, and his ever extensive practice, Akenside was enabled, to the day of his death, in 1770, to keep his carriage, wear his gold-hilted sword, and his huge well-powdered wig.

HOW ONE HOP-PED FROM OBSCURITY.

"Dr. Messenger Monsey, in the heyday of his prosperity, used to a.s.sert to his friends that the first of his known ancestors was a baker and a retailer of hops. At a critical point of this worthy man's career, when hops were 'down,' and feathers 'up,' in order to raise the needful for present emergencies he ripped up his beds, sold the feathers, and refilled the ticks with hops. When a change occurred in the market soon afterwards the process was reversed; even the children's beds were reopened, and the hops sold for a large profit over the cost of replacing the feathers!"

"That's the way, sirs, that my family hop-ped from obscurity," the doctor would conclude, with great gusto.

The Duke of Leeds used, in the same manner, to delight in boasting of his lucky progenitor, Jack Osborn, the shop lad, who rescued his master's beautiful daughter from a watery grave at the bottom of the Thames, and won her hand away from a score of n.o.ble suitors, who wanted, literally, the young lady's _pin_-money as much as herself. Her father was a pin manufacturer, and had in his shop on London Bridge ama.s.sed a considerable wealth in the business. The jolly old man, instead of disdaining to bestow the lovely and wealthy maid--his only child--on an apprentice, exclaimed,--

"Jack Osborn won her, and Jack shall wear her."

When Lord Bath vainly endeavored to effect a reconciliation between the doctor and Garrick, who had fallen out, Monsey said,--

"Why will your lords.h.i.+p trouble yourself with the squabbles of a merry-andrew and a _quack_ doctor?"

Monsey continued his quarrel with Garrick up to the day of the death of the great tragedian. The latter seldom retaliated, but when he did his sarcasm cut to the bone.

Garrick's style of satire may be inferred from his epigram on James Quin, the celebrated actor, and illegitimate son of an Irishman, "whose wife turned out a bigamist." When Garrick make his debut on the London stage, at G.o.dman's Fields playhouse, October 19, 1741, as "Richard the Third,"

Quin objected to Garrick's original style, saying,--

"If this young fellow is right, myself and all the other actors are wrong."

Being told that the theatre was crowded to the dome nightly to hear the new actor, Quin replied that "Garrick was a new religion; Whitefield was followed for a time, but they would all come to church again." Hence Garrick wrote the following epigram:--

"Pope Quin, who d.a.m.ns all churches but his own, Complains that heresy infects the town; That Whitefield-Garrick has misled the age, And taints the sound religion of the stage.

'Schism,' he cries, 'has turned the nation's brain, But eyes will open, and to church again!'

Thou great Infallible, forbear to roar; Thy bulls and errors are revered no more.

When doctrines meet with general approbation, It is not _heresy_, but reformation."