Part 10

I have a vivid recollection of the mingled awe and terror which this fell disease inspired when it was announced that it had crossed the sea and made its first victims in this country. It had made its way across the continent from town to town on the banks of the great rivers, but into England it was imported by sick sailors. Many generations had passed away since anything like a pestilence had been known in England, and the cholera therefore created a panic among all classes of the people, which served to augment its virulence and render those of a nervous temperament more liable to be attacked by it. Doctors were utterly unacquainted with its proper treatment, and indeed had no knowledge whatever of the disease. Hence it raged without check wherever it appeared, and the rapidity with which it carried off its victims added to the terror inspired by its approaches. The first death at Lower Norwood, where my parents then resided, was that of the pastor of the Independent Chapel, situated only two doors from my father's house. He died in a few hours from the time he experienced the premonitory symptoms, and such was the dread of infection that the corpse was buried the same night by torchlight, in the burial-ground of the chapel, wrapped in a sheet coated with pitch.

Though a period of seventeen years separated the first cholera epidemic from the second, the lessons which the former should have taught had not been so well learned as they should have been, and the latter, with which these reminiscences are chiefly concerned, inspired a wild, unreasoning terror in only a little less degree than that of 1832.

I remember a case at Mitcham, in which the women attending a patient were seized with a panic on the approach of death, and rushed out of the house, leaving the poor wretch, a woman, to die alone, the corpse being afterwards found rigid and distorted.

The apparently erratic manner in which the disease spread, sometimes carrying off victims from one side of a street and sparing the other side, sometimes smiting every member of a family in one house, and passing over all the other houses in the same street, was a puzzle to persons who had given no attention to the causes of the disease, and were content to regard it as a sign of the wrath of God, reasoning about the matter as little as did the Israelites whose relatives were swept off at Kibroth-hattaavah. They had not given sufficient attention to the laws of health to understand that the disease found its victims where those laws were neglected, whether from carelessness or from ignorance.

I remember two cases at Croydon in which all the inmates of the houses in which the disease manifested its dread presence were carried off by it. One occurred in a cottage in St. James's Road, one of a row which had originally been level with the road, but had become overshadowed by the approach to the railway bridge. There were three victims in that house, and no other case in the same row, or in the neighbourhood. The other case occurred in King Street, one of several narrow, closely-built streets in the centre of the town, and the victims were a widow and her only child, the latter dying not alone, for, like Byron's Haidee,--

"----she held within A second principle of life, which might Have dawned a fair and sinless child of sin; But closed its little being without light, And went down to the grave unborn, wherein Blossom and bough lie withered with one blight."

A remarkable incident occurred while the fell disease was in the full swing of its ravages. The wife of a working man living in the Old Town, a low-lying and densely populated quarter, was attacked by it, and at once removed to a temporary hospital that had been established on Duppas Hill, a tabular eminence overlooking the town, and in the thirteenth century the scene of the tournament in which the son of Earl Warrenne was by misadventure slain. There her husband went, on his return from labour, to ascertain her condition, and heard with a shock which the reader may imagine that she was dead. When the poor fellow had in some degree recovered from the blow, he expressed a wish to see the corpse and take it to his home. He seems to have been unable to realise that his wife was really dead, though the nurses and doctors assured him that she had passed away. The idea that life yet lingered in the form that was apparently lifeless grew upon him as he gazed and though he may never have read "The Giaour," he may have felt the force of the thought so finely expressed by Byron in the lines that introduce his picture of the Greece of his day:--

"He who hath bent him o'er the dead, Ere the first day of death is fled, The first dark day of nothingness, The last of danger and distress (Before Decay's effacing fingers Have swept the lines where beauty lingers), And marked the mild angelic air, The rapture of repose that's there, The fixed yet tender traits that streak The languor of the pallid cheek, And--but for that sad shrouded eye, That fires not, wins not, weeps not, now, And but for that chill, changeless brow, Where cold Obstruction's apathy Appals the gazing mourner's heart, As if to him it could impart The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon; Yes, but for these, and these alone, Some moments, aye, one treacherous hour, He still might doubt the tyrant's power; So fair, so calm, so softly sealed, The first, last look by death revealed!"

Whether it was feeling or reason that inspired the thought that life yet lingered in the apparently inanimate, but not yet rigid form, which the loving husband conveyed to his humble dwelling, it was undoubtedly to that inspiration that the woman owed her preservation from death. For she was not dead. Signs of returning animation were perceived when the supposed corpse was placed upon the bed, and the neighbour women who came in to perform the last sad offices for the dead were there to welcome her on her return to life. I will not attempt to describe the feelings with which the husband beheld the eyelids of his wife unclose, and the rose-tints return to the pallid cheeks. Like the Greek painter who, conscious of the inadequacy of his art to fully portray the grief of Agamemnon for the loss of his son, covered the countenance of the old king with a veil, I draw the curtain upon the scene, and leave it to the imagination of the reader.

Among the remedies for the cholera which came into vogue during the prevalence of the epidemic of 1849, the rubbing of the stomach with brandy and salt obtained a considerable degree of repute; and the chemists vied with each other, as in the recent epidemics of influenza, in the concoction and advertising of various cholera mixtures, one of the most efficacious of which was a preparation of opium and chalk.

The lessons of the cholera were not so entirely neglected on this occasion as they were after the epidemic of 1832; but it is a sad reflection on our legislation that we were indebted to the ravages of disease, or rather to the fear inspired by them, for sanitary reforms which ought to have resulted from foresight. There had been sanitary inquiries by Royal Commissions between 1842 and 1849, but little had been done towards carrying out the recommendations which resulted from them. The existence of cholera in India, and the causes which produced it, had long been known; but so long as its ravages were confined to the people of that country no one seemed to think that it concerned the people of England. It was known, too, that whatever might be the true causes of zymotic diseases, concerning which medical opinions differed, accumulations of filth, contaminated sources of water supply, and an impure condition of the atmosphere tended to produce their outbreaks, and to aggravate their virulence. But then we had been used to these evils since the days of the Plantagenets, and though they had become intensified with the increase of population and the growth of the large towns, had not Malthus taught us that epidemics of disease were one of the means used by divine providence to prevent the numbers of the human race from exceeding the means of subsistence?

The cholera epidemic of 1849 roused the public mind from its lethargy, and prepared it to act upon the recommendations of the General Board of Health and to comply with the Sanitary Act of that year. The old wells of London were closed, and the like course was adopted in Croydon, where a constant supply of practically pure water was obtained by boring down to the chalk. Other towns followed the example, one of the foremost being Birmingham, which received a supply which enabled the inhabitants to dispense with the insalubrious rain-water butt. Sewerage works were undertaken where no efficient system of drainage had before existed. Attention was called to the important questions of sewage disposal and the pollution of rivers; and though much even now remains to be done in this direction, and in the improvement of the water supply of the large manufacturing towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, sanitation has been cleared of most of its difficulties by better knowledge of the philosophy of cause and effect, so that we no longer regard the calamities resulting from our own ignorance and neglect of the laws of nature as the inflictions of Providence.

Some Old Doctors.

BY MRS. G. LINNAEUS BANKS.

It is not my intention to go back to those Greek fathers of the healing art, Hippocrates and Galen, or to dwell on the days when every monastery held within its walls some learned brother accredited to administer to bodies as well as souls diseased, or when the mistress of every feudal castle, every baronial-hall, was trained and skilled in leechcraft, distilled herbs, concocted potions and unguents, and not only physicked her household, but was prepared to staunch and dress the gaping wounds received in siege or tournay. Nor yet have we ought to do with those pretenders to science who mingled astrology with pharmacy, ascribed to every plant its ruling planet, and held that the potency of all herbs depended on the conjunction of planets, or the phase of the moon under which they were gathered--a belief, indeed, under which old Nicholas Culpepper compiled his well-known "Herbal" early in the seventeenth century.

Medicine and surgery have made rapid strides since the days, not a century agone, when in the naval cockpit, and on the open battlefield, the hatchet was the ready implement for amputation, the rough cautery that of a red hot iron applied to the fizzing flesh; and when the doctor cried, "Spit, man, spit" to the suffering soldier with a gunshot wound in his chest, and when the sputum came tinged with blood, simply plugged up the bullet-hole and left the poor fellow to his fate, while he passed on to cases less hopeless. And _en passant_ I may say that wooden legs and stumps for arms were so common in the writer's young days as scarcely to attract attention--so ready were army surgeons to amputate.

These are not matters on which I have to dwell, but I think the present work would be incomplete without a record of those men of original mind, whose acute observation and unwearied investigations in the past have indissolubly linked their names with discoveries which have revolutionised the practice of both medicine and surgery.

In the opinion of Solomon, "there is nothing new under the sun;" and if such was the case in his day, how much more of a verity must be the truism in ours.

So the most startling and perfect revelation of any great fact in human physiology may have been dimly perceptible to earlier intelligences groping in the dark, faint adumbrations of which may fall on the sensorium of the final discoverer, until a ray of divine light dispels the mists of ages, and the man, developing his crude idea with infinite pains, realises a great truth, and cries out "Eureka" to an astonished--and too often--an unbelieving world.

Thus it may have been with the renowned practitioner, WILLIAM HARVEY, who came into the world when all England was filled with alarms of an "Invincible Spanish Armada," then preparing to devastate our shores and spare neither man nor maid, babe nor mother. Yet the scare passed and peace came, and the boy grew, until his educational course at Cambridge ended, and his bias led him towards Padua, then the great seat of academical and medical lore, and there he took his doctor's degree in physic. With the prestige of Padua upon him, in 1607, when he was but twenty years of age, he was elected Fellow of the College of Physicians (founded by Dr. Linacre in the reign of Henry VII.), and in 1715, the man of twenty-eight became their Anatomical Reader.

A noteworthy appointment this, since consequent study and investigation led to the grand discovery that the heart--to speak unscientifically--was a sort of muscular pumping-engine, sending the blood circulating along a series of blood-vessels to every part of the system, changing in character on its course until it returned to its centre, the seat of life, to be pumped out afresh to circulate as before and do its appointed work.

In 1628, Harvey made his discovery known in a learned treatise "On the circulation of the blood," and as may be supposed, his daring assertions roused a violent spirit of opposition amongst his medical brethren, even among those who began to feel the pulses of their patients for the first time, and to comprehend _why_ there should be a fluttering or audible beating under the sick one's ribs, and wherefore the fatal hemorrhage following a sword-thrust or a gunshot wound.

In spite of opposition his teaching created a revolution in medical practice. The discoverer was called before Charles I. and his Court to demonstrate the action of the heart and subsidiary organs, in support of his new doctrine.

Fresh honours fell upon him even when too old to bear the burden. And when in the fulness of time, William Harvey, who had outlived three monarchs, made his own exit under Cromwellian rule, he bequeathed infinitely more to posterity in his invaluable discovery than can be summed up in the estate, library, and museum now in the proud possession of the College of Physicians. These are held by a mere body of men. The other has a world-wide significance.

Yet, as in his life, even in his grave, detractors strove to dim the glory of his important revelation, ascribing to the theological physician Servetus, to Realdus Columbus, and to Andreas Caesalpinas, the credit of prior discovery.

It remained for another learned physician, a century later, to deal with these counter-claims, and whilst admitting their vague individual conceptions of an elusive mystery, to establish once and for ever William Harvey's inalienable right as sole discoverer.

This notable champion was JOHN FREIND, M.D., F.R.S., distinguished as the Medical Historian, and Harveian lecturer to the College of Physicians, at a time when he and his fellows shaved their heads and mounted Ramillies wigs as outward guarantees for the profundity of wisdom they enshrined.

But apart from his flowing wig, or his defence of Harvey, or his learned medical history, written in part when he was a prisoner in the Tower for supposed complicity in the Atterbury Plot, or for skill in the treatment of disease, John Freind had a pioneer's claim to distinction.

The doctor, strange to say, was a Member of Parliament, and on resuming his seat on his release from incarceration, he brought before the House of Commons, in 1725, a remarkable petition from the Royal College of Physicians, to restrain "the pernicious use of spirituous liquors." And though he might speak but as the mouthpiece of his brother Fellows, it needed no small degree of courage to broach such a subject in those days of general coarse indulgence among all classes; especially if his own language was as direct and forcible as that of the petitioners.

Therefore, in his triple character as the historian of medicine, as the champion of William Harvey, and as the foremost M.P. to advocate the cause of temperance before our national legislative assembly, John Freind, M.D., claims a niche in our Walhalla of notable old doctors.

In the nave of Westminster Abbey on a memorial of polished granite is this inscription--"Beneath are deposited the remains of JOHN HUNTER, born at Long Calderwood, Lanarkshire, N.B., on February 14th, 1728; died in London on October 10th, 1793. His remains were removed from the Church of St. Martins-in-the-Fields to this Abbey on March 28th, 1858. The Royal College of Surgeons of England have placed this table over the grave of Hunter to record their admiration of his genius as a gifted interpreter of the Divine power and wisdom that works in the laws of organic life, and their grateful veneration for his services to mankind as the Father of scientific surgery. 'O Lord, how manifold are Thy works; in wisdom hast Thou made them all.'"

Such honours are not paid to the remains of men of common stamp. And of no common stamp was the sandy-headed youth who, having spent ten years of his life learning cabinet making, resolved on striking out a better career for himself; and in his twentieth year took horse and journeyed to London to place himself under his elder brother, WILLIAM HUNTER, then rising into note as a medical practitioner and a teacher of anatomy. In October, 1748, he entered his brother's dissecting room, and whether the fitting of joints in cabinetware had been of initiatory service, or he had had access to the books of his medical relations in Glasgow, or that as a boy upon his father's farm, observation of the domestic animals and of the wild inhabitants of wood and fell, had roused the desire to master the secrets of animated nature, sure it is that William speedily foretold a successful future for his new pupil as an anatomist.

At all events he used his interest to place his promising brother under the eminent surgeon of Chelsea Hospital, and later under another at St. Bartholomew's. Then, shocked by the rough speech and manners of his countrified brother, and his need of education, the classical elder packed him off to college to pick up a little refinement along with Latin and Greek.

In vain. Irrepressible and hot-tempered John could not sit down quietly to study dead languages. Back he came from Oxford in haste, to study dead bodies in his brother's dissecting room, and serve as demonstrator to his course of lectures, simultaneously with his study of living bodies at St. George's Hospital, where in a comparatively short time he became house-surgeon.

His appointment as staff-surgeon to our troops on foreign service marked the six intervening years before he settled down to practise in London. He had laboured ten years on human anatomy, and had dissected a number of the lower animals, laying the foundation of his collection of comparative anatomy. Even while on foreign service he had amused himself with studying the digestive faculties of snakes and lizards when in a torpid state, and many were the contributions he sent home to his brother's museum.

His return to London, as a teacher of surgery and anatomy, was a marked success, though private practice had to grow. In 1776, he was appointed surgeon extraordinary to His Majesty George III., but eleven years prior to this was admitted a Fellow of the Royal Society, slightly in advance of his elder brother. Then in 1768, the bachelor, William, shifted himself and his museum from Jermyn Street to Windmill Street, and resigned the lease to John, thus securing independent action to the latter, and facilities for creating a natural-history museum of his own.

Hitherto, the brothers had worked together in unison, but now John committed the unpardonable offence of bringing home to Jermyn Street "a tocherless bride," fourteen years younger than himself, endowed only with beauty and accomplishments, and a faculty for filling the house with assemblies of wit and fashion, which blunt-spoken John designated "kick-ups," no doubt with an irreverent big D as a prefix, swearing being as characteristic as hard work.

And work hard he did, early and late, not merely to maintain his extensive and lucrative practice, but to provide and prepare subjects for the museum in the rear of his town house, and for the valuable and original lectures he delivered in language forcible and clear, if neither refined nor academic.

His chief workshop, so to speak, was at his country "Box" at Earl's Court, the grounds of which he had converted into a zoological garden, so many wild animals were there kept for study. There is a story told of his facing an escaped lion and flicking him back to his den with his pocket handkerchief, showing his fearlessness and his knowledge of leonine nature.

Another tale is told of his intervention between fighting dogs and leopards, he dragging the infuriated leopards back to their cage by their collars--and _fainting_ when the feat was accomplished, for his was not a burly frame, and his heart was in a threatening condition.

An element of humour mingles with the gruesome in Sir B. W. Richardson's account of the ruse employed to cheat watchful executors, and obtain the body of O'Brien the Irish Giant,[2] so as to convert it into the skeleton now in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln's Inn.

Those were the days when surgeons were not particular where they obtained subjects for their scalpels, whether from the resurrection men or from the gallows, and John Hunter was not more dainty than his fellows. But also from travelling shows and menageries, and from animals that died in the Tower he was supplied. And so rapidly did his museum grow, absorbing the bulk of his income, that ere long he had to remove to what is now Leicester Square, and erect a building in the rear for his collection.

Honours fell upon him thickly as they had fallen on his brother, alike British and foreign, of which he took little heed, absorbed as he was in the pursuit of knowledge, and its demonstration. His discoveries placed him far ahead of the science of his time, though his courtly brother, earlier in the field and first to leave it, ran him close. Indeed their final quarrel and alienation arose out of a disputed claim to a certain discovery in feminine physiology, brought before the Royal Society, a quarrel which transferred William's museum to the University of Glasgow, and excluded John from his will.

The so-called "Lyceum Medicum" in Leicester Square, became the home of the "Society for the Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge," and the "Philosophical Transactions" of the Society testify to the genius and untiring activity of its promoter. How he found time for his many written essays and discourses on topics wide apart as "Gunshot-wounds" and "Teeth" is a marvel. No wonder the frail human machine wore out so early. He had worked when he should have rested, worked regardless of premonitions and attacks John Hunter must have well understood, and died at last at sixty-two, a victim of one of those fits of passion no man with a diseased heart can indulge in safely.