Part 15

Of a more genial disposition, though no less original character, was Dr. John Cookley Lettsom. He was born in a small island near Tortola, called Little Van Dyke, which belonged to his father. A view of it may be seen in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, December Supplement, 1815. When only six years of age he was sent to England for his education, being entrusted to the care of a Mr. Fothergill, then a famous preacher among the Quakers. His father dying before he came of age, that gentleman became his guardian, and with a view to his future profession sent him to Dr. Sutcliffe. For two years he attended St. Thomas's Hospital, and then returned to his native place in the West Indies to take possession of any property that might remain; but on his arrival he found himself L500 worse than nothing, his elder brother, then dead, having run through an ample fortune, leaving to his younger brother only a number of negro slaves, whom he at once emancipated. He entered on the medical profession, and in five months made the astonishing sum of L2,000, with which he returned to Europe, visited the medical schools of Paris and Edinburgh, took his degree of M.D. at Leyden in 1769, and was admitted a licentiate of the College of Physicians of London in the same year. His rise in his profession was rapid. In 1783 he earned L3,600; in 1784, L3,900; in 1785, L4,015; in 1786, L4,500; and in some years his income reached L12,000. But he was at the same time giving away hundreds--nay thousands--in gratuitous advice, and the poorer order of the clergy and struggling literary men received not only gratuitous advice, but substantial aid. He was one of the original projectors and supporters of the General Dispensary, of the Finsbury and Surrey Dispensaries, of the Margate Sea-Bathing Infirmary, as well as of many other charitable institutions. In 1779 he purchased some land on the east side of Grove Hill, Camberwell, where he erected the villa which for years was associated with his name, and where he entertained some of the most eminent literati of his time. The house contained a library of near ten thousand volumes, and a museum full of natural and artistic curiosities. The grounds were most tastefully laid out and adorned with choice trees, shrubs and flowers. The avenue of elms, still retaining the name of Camberwell Grove, formed part of the small estate and the approach to the house. It is sad to relate that Dr. Lettsom's excessive devotion to science and literature impaired his resources, and compelled him eventually to quit Grove Hill. He died in 1815, aged seventy-one years. He being in the habit of signing his prescriptions 'J. Lettsom,' some wag, putting forth the lines as the doctor's own composition, wrote thus:

'When patients comes to I, I physics, bleeds, and sweats 'em; Then, if they choose to die, What's that to I? I lets 'em.'

Everyone has heard, and has a story to tell, of Dr. John Abernethy (b. 1764, d. 1831), so we do not know whether in telling our stories of him we shall be able to tell the reader anything new; but as he was a medical eccentricity, we cannot omit him from our portrait gallery. But let us premise that if we call him eccentric we refer to his manners only, in which he did not take after his chief instructor, Sir Charles Blick, who was a fashionable physician of the extra-courteous school. In scientific knowledge Abernethy greatly excelled all his colleagues, though he got less fame by that than by his oddities. When he had made up his mind to marry he wrote off-hand to a lady a note of proposal, saying that he was too busy to attend in person, but he would give her a fortnight for consideration. His irritable temper at times rendered him very disagreeable with patients and medical men who consulted him. When the latter did so, he would walk up and down the room with his hands in his pockets and whistle all the time, and end by telling the doctor to go home and read his (Abernethy's) book. On being asked by a colleague whether a certain plan he suggested would answer, the only reply he could obtain was: 'Ay, ay, put a little salt on a bird's tail, and you will be sure to catch him.' He could hardly be induced to give advice in cases which appeared to depend on improper diet. A farmer of immense bulk came from a distance to consult him, and having given an account of his daily meals, which showed an immense amount of animal food, Abernethy said: 'Go away, sir; I won't attempt to prescribe for such a hog!' A loquacious lady he silenced by telling her to put out her tongue; she having done so, 'Now keep it there till _I_ have done talking,' said Abernethy. A lady having brought her daughter, he refused to prescribe for her, but told the mother to let the girl take exercise. Having received his guinea, he gave the shilling to the mother and said: 'Buy the girl a skipping-rope as you go along.' When the late Duke of York consulted him, he stood whistling with his hands in his pockets, and the Duke said: 'I suppose you know who I am?' 'Suppose I do,' was the uncourtly reply, 'what of that?' To a gentleman who consulted him for an ulcerated throat, and wanted him to look at it, he said: 'How dare you suppose that I would allow you to blow your stinking, foul breath in my face!' But sometimes he met a Tartar. A gentleman who could not succeed in getting the doctor to listen to his case, suddenly locked the door, put the key into his pocket, and took out a loaded pistol. Abernethy, alarmed, asked if he meant to murder him. No, he only wanted him to listen to his case, and meant to keep him a prisoner till he did. The patient and the surgeon afterwards became great friends. The Duke of Wellington having insisted on seeing him out of his usual hours, and abruptly entering his room, was asked by the doctor how he got in. 'By that door,' was the reply. 'Then,' said Abernethy,' I recommend you to make your exit by the same way.' He refused to attend George IV. until he had delivered his lecture at the hospital, in consequence of which he lost a royal appointment. To a lady who complained that on holding her arm over her head she felt pain, he said: 'Then what a fool you must be to hold it up!' He was fond of calling people fools. A countess consulted him, and he offered her some pills, when she said she could never take a pill. 'Not take a pill! What a fool you must be!' was the courteous reply.

Abernethy usually cut patients short by saying: 'I have heard enough. You have heard of my book?' 'Yes.' 'Then go home and read it.' This book gives admirable rules for dieting and general living, though few persons would be willing to comply with them rigidly; he himself did not. When someone told him that he seemed to live like most other people, he replied: 'Yes, but then I have such a devil of an appetite!' One day a lawyer suffering from dyspepsia, brought on by want of exercise and good living, went to consult Abernethy. As he came out of the consulting-room he met another lawyer, a friend of his. 'What the devil brought you here?' said one, and the other echoed the question, and the reply of each was the same. 'What has he prescribed for you?' asked the newcomer. The prescription was produced and read as follows: 'Read my book, p. 72. J. Abernethy.' The first lawyer agreed to wait for his friend whilst he went to consult the doctor. In about a quarter of an hour he came out, well pleased apparently with his interview. 'Well, what is your prescription?' inquired lawyer number one. Number two produced a slip of paper, on which was written: 'Read my book, p. 72. J. Abernethy.' That was what each got for his guinea. But Abernethy deserves praise for three utterances, viz., that mind is a miraculous energy added to matter, and not the result of certain modes of organization, as modern scientists maintain; that an operation is a reproach to surgery, and that a patient should be cured without recourse to it; and that vivisection experiments are morally wrong and physiologically unsafe, because unreliable.

That Dr. Abernethy, with his uncouth manners and vulgar repartee, should have been so successful in his profession is a marvel; certainly few people of the present day would tolerate such rudeness as his. Possibly in former days the doctor's distinctive dress had a secret influence of its own. The gold-headed cane, the elaborate shirt-frill, the massive snuff-box, tapped so argumentatively in consultation, the pompous manner and overbearing assurance, no doubt exercised a spell with which we are unacquainted now.

Abernethy had imitators, but they had been pupils of his. Tommy Wormald, or 'Old Tommy,' as the students called him, was Abernethy over again in voice, style, appearance and humour. To an insurance company he reported on a bad life proposed to them: 'Done for.' When an apothecary wanted to put him off with a single guinea at a consultation on a rich man's case, he said: 'A guinea is a lean fee, and the patient is a fat patient. I always have fat fees from fat patients. Pay me two guineas instantly; our patient is a fat patient.' Some rich but mean people would drive to St. Bartholomew's to get advice gratis as out-patients. To this Tommy meant to put a stop. Seeing a lady dressed in silk, he thus addressed her before a roomful of people: 'Madam, this charity is for the poor, destitute invalids; I refuse to pay attention to destitute invalids who wear rich silk dresses.' The lady quickly disappeared. Will no Old Tommy arise at the present day and put an end to the abuse, which is as rampant as ever?

Doctors are not agreed as to what constitutes medical science. By an empiric a quack is meant. Now, an empiric goes by observation only, without rational grounds; yet Sir Charles Bell asserted that physiology was a science of observation rather than of experiment, which is the rational ground the quack is said to disregard. Who is right? Without attempting to answer the question, which would lead us too far, we must rest satisfied with the fact that the profession and the public have agreed to stigmatize certain individuals as quacks who, with or without any medical training, pretend to cure diseases by charms, manipulations, or nostrums, which have no scientific or rational basis. Quacks have existed at all times, for mankind, especially suffering mankind, has ever been credulous. Henry VIII. endeavoured to put down those of his own times by establishing censors in physic, but the public would not be enlightened, and so the quacks flourished. In 1387 one Roger Clerk, of Wandsworth, pretending to be a physician, got twelve pence in part payment from one Roger atte Haccke, in Ironmonger Lane, for undertaking the cure of his wife, who was ill. He put a charm, consisting of a piece of parchment, round her neck, but it did her no good, whereupon Roger brought him before the chamber at Guildhall for his deceit and falsehood, and Roger Clerk was sentenced to be led through the middle of the city with trumpets and pipes, he riding on a horse without a saddle, the said parchment and a whetstone[#] for his lies being hung about his neck, a urinal also being hung before him, and another on his back. In the reign of Edward VI. one Grig, a poulterer in Surrey, was set in the pillory at Croydon, and again in the Borough, for cheating people out of their money by pretending to cure them by charms or by only looking at the patient.

[#] Early in English history we find the whetstone as the symbol of a liar. Why? Does lying imply a sharpened wit, as a whetstone sharpens a blade? The custom is referred to in 'Hudibras,' II., i. 57-60.

Was Valentine Greatrakes, whom Charles II. invited to his Court, a quack? If he was, he was a harmless one, since he gave no physic, but only pretended to cure by magnetic stroking. Our modern magnetizers are not so modest; they have added much hocus-pocus to Valentine's simple process.

From among the medical oddities of the latter part of the last century we must not omit Dr. Von Butchell, who lived in Mount Street, and pretended to cure every disease. He applied for the post of dentist to George III., but when the King's consent was obtained he said he did not care for the custom of royalty. When his wife died, he had her embalmed and kept in his parlour, where he allowed his patients to see the body; so that the modern showman who exhibited the dead body of his wife at Olympia was, after all, only a copyist. But whilst the doctor was half-mad, the world was altogether mad; for his exhibiting the corpse of his wife was not considered as eccentric as his letting his beard grow, which then was held to be the height of madness. And there seems to have been method in _his_ madness, for he sold the hairs out of his beard at a guinea each to ladies who wished to have fine children. He used to ride about the West End on a pony painted with spots by the doctor himself. There is an engraving extant of him, showing him astride on it. The horse was afterwards, in consequence of a dispute with the stable-keeper who had charge of it, sold at Tattersall's, where, as a curiosity, it fetched a good price. There was a wonderful inscription on the outside of his house, extending over the front of the next, and his neighbour rebuilding his frontage, half the inscription was obliterated. Butchell was also a great advertiser, and his advertisements even now afford amusing reading. He never would visit a patient, though as much as L500 was offered him for a visit--patients had to go to his house. 'I go to none,' he said in his advertisements. Many persons used to visit him, not for getting advice, but simply to converse with such an original. He was twice married. His first wife he dressed in black, and his second in white, never allowing a change of colour. He was one of the earliest teetotalers. The profits he and some of his contemporaries made on their quack draughts and pills led, in 1788, to the imposition of the tax on 'patent medicines.'

But to come down to more recent times, in 1700 one John Pechey, living at the Angel and Crown, in Basing Lane, an Oxford graduate and member of the College of Physicians, London, advertised that all sick people might for sixpence have a faithful account of their diseases and plain directions for their cure, and that he was prepared to visit any sick person in London for 2s. 6d.; and that if he were called by any person as he passed by, he would require but one shilling for his advice. A physician who in our day advertised like this would be deprived of his diploma. In 1734 one Joshua Ward became a celebrity even among quacks by his pills, which he extensively advertised, and which were patronized by the Queen herself. There was a rhyming quack, Dr. Hill, who also wrote a farce, and wanted Garrick to produce it, till the latter published the following distich on him:

'For farces and physic his equal there scarce is, His farces are physic, his physic a farce is.'

A Dr. Hannes, a contemporary of Dr. Radcliffe, ordered his servant to stop a number of coaches between Whitehall and the Royal Exchange, and to inquire at each whether it belonged to Dr. Hannes, as he was called to a patient. Entering Garraway's Coffee-House, the servant put the same question. Dr. Radcliffe happening to be there, he asked who wanted Dr. Hannes. The servant named several lords who all wanted him. 'No, no, friend,' said Radcliffe; 'Dr. Hannes wants the lords.'

Quacks were never more flourishing than they are now, and they always will be, for the public like mysterious remedies, and are anxious to recommend them and to force them on their friends. In nothing is a little knowledge more dangerous than in medicine; mothers and nurses especially, who have acquired some smattering of it from their conversations with doctors, may do a lot of mischief. To them are due nearly all so-called diseases of children--as if children must necessarily have diseases--a superstition which is shared by some doctors, who also encourage the reading of their books. The reading of those books has physically the same effect on the body that the reading or hearing of ghost stories has morally on the mind: the reader or hearer everywhere feels dis-ease and sees ghosts; _ergo_ beware of medical books and goblin stories--both are unwholesome. Modern invalids are fortunate in escaping the tortures inflicted on patients in earlier days. Edmund Verney thus writes concerning his father, Sir Ralph Verney, of Claydon House, in 1686: 'He hath been blooded, vomited, blistered, cupt and scarified, and hath three physicians with him, besides apothecary and chirurgian.' And then he wonders that 'he still continues very weak.' The marvel was that he survived at all. Had not Moliere a few years before the above date said: 'You must not say that a man died of such and such a disease, but of so many physicians, surgeons and apothecaries'?

The most pungent and most witty definition of the doctor's character probably is that given, I think, by Talleyrand. When Napoleon, in a fit of despondency, said that he would forsake war and turn physician, the sarcastic courtier said _sotto voce_: '_Toujours assassin?_'

*XV.*

*THE LOST RIVERS OF LONDON.*

London is deficient in two conditions to render it picturesque: it lacks diversity of surface, and it lacks water. In so vast an expanse of ground as is covered by London, Ludgate Hill and Notting Hill are mere molehills.[#] As to water, it has the Thames, but that is accessible at short and broken intervals only. There is the Embankment from Blackfriars to Westminster; a short bit at Chelsea, and the Albert Embankment. But the City people during the day have no time to waste on their Embankment, and in the evening they are gone to the suburbs, and so this grand promenade is given up to occasional country cousins' visits, and to permanent ruffianism. For, of course, no one from the more northern parts of London ever thinks of coming so far to take a stroll on that Embankment, from which nothing is to be seen but mud-banks in the near prospect, as by a perverse arrangement of nature it is generally low water when you want to take a walk; on the opposite bank only dismal wharves present themselves. As to the Chelsea Embankment, that is patronized by the dwellers in that region only, if they do not neglect it altogether, as people generally do who live in a rather picturesque locality. The less we say about the Albert Embankment the better; its characteristics are dingy hovels and smoke-belching pottery chimneys on one side, smoke and cinders from passing steam-barges and penny steamers on the river, and a dreary outlook on the opposite side, scarcely relieved by the Tate Gallery, which, for reasons unknown to the general public, but self-evident to those who can see the wire-pulling behind, has been pitched, like a King Log, into the Pimlico swamp. All other parts of the river are inaccessible to the public, and therefore as good as non-existent for the Londoner.

[#] The highest point north is Hampstead Hill, 400 feet above sea-level; to the south Sydenham Hill, 365 feet; Primrose Hill, about 260 feet; Herne Hill, about 180 feet; Denmark, about 100 feet; Orme Square, 95 feet; Broad Walk, 90 feet; North Audley Street, 83 feet; Tottenham Court Road, 85 feet; Regent Circus, 90 feet; Cornhill, 60 feet; Charing Cross, 24 feet; Euston Road, 90 feet; Cheapside, 59 feet; Farringdon Street, 28 feet; St. Katherine's, Regent's Park, 120 feet; Camberwell Green, 19 feet.

Thus much for the Thames. As to other pieces of water to be found in public parks, they are mere ponds, and of benefit only locally. As to public fountains, which form the peculiar charm of so many Continental cities, where the melodious splash of water is heard day and night, London possesses none. True, there are two squirts in Trafalgar Square, and the Shaftesbury fountain is making asthmatic efforts to assert itself, whilst the Angel at the top seems to be shooting Folly as it flies all around him in the savoury purlieus of the Haymarket. The small drinking fountains found here and there are evidences of philanthropy, which may be grateful to children and tramps, to horses and dogs, but do not add much to the aquatic features of London. There are canals, it is true, but they are private property, and so fenced, hoarded, and walled in, as to be of no use to the public. And as a rule their water is so dirty that no one with a nose would walk by the side of them, even if allowed to do so.

But London was not always so deadly level and so waterless as it is now. In ancient days there were high hills and deep valleys in the very heart of it. From the river Lea to the river Brent on the northern side of London there were numerous rivulets and brooks descending from the northern heights through the City and its western outskirts into the Thames, brooks and rivulets which at times assumed such dimensions as to cause serious inundations. It was the same in the south of London, where from the Ravensbourne to the Wandle similar watercourses reached the Thames from the southern hills.

All those brooks between the four rivers we have named, and which alone are still existing, have totally disappeared. What were their features, when they still flowed from northern and southern heights, and what were the causes and the process of their disappearance, we now intend to investigate, by proceeding from east to west, and taking the northern shore of the Thames first.

The site on which the Romans founded London was the rising ground on the northern bank of the Thames, from the present Fish Street Hill, or Billingsgate, to the Wallbrook. At a later date of their occupation they extended the City eastward to the Tower, and westward to the valley of the Fleet. Then the valley of the Wallbrook divided the City into two portions of almost equal size. To the north the buildings extended to the present Aldgate and to Moorfields, and westward to Newgate and Ludgate. The wall which encompassed the town began at the Tower, and in a line with various bends in it terminated at the Arx Palatina, somewhere near the present _Times_ office. On the east of the town, where the country was flat, there was a marsh, extending to the river Lea. To the north-west were dense forests stretching far into Middlesex, and abounding with deer, wild boar, and other savage animals. This forest was partly the cause of the many brooks, which in those days watered London from the northern heights; it being a well-known fact that trees absorb and retain moisture.

It is doubtful whether there were any Roman buildings west of the Fleet; Fleet Street and the Strand certainly were then undreamt of, and did not come into existence till centuries after the Romans had left our island. To the west of the present Strand, the ground lying very low, it was frequently inundated by the river, and there are persons still living who can remember Belgravia and Pimlico as a dismal swamp. Westminster Abbey stood on an island, which rose above the marshy environs, and even as late as the times of Charles II. occasional high tides converted the palace of Whitehall into an island.

The great forest of Middlesex above mentioned came close to the City wall; it had, in fact, occupied a portion of the site on which the City was built, and as much of it had been cut down, and so much space cleared, as the builders required for their operations. But the nature of the forest ground could not be as readily changed. It was still full of moisture, and numerous rills continued to flow through it. Now, one of the most important of them was the Langbourne.