Part 7

and yet no luxurious sybarite by any means was he,

"Of his diet measureable was he, For it was no superfluity, But of great nourishing and digestable."

A man of simple habits, even perhaps given to holding his purse strings somewhat tightly.

"He was but easy of expense, He kept that he won in pestilence."

For, as the poet adds with his characteristic merry sly humour,

"Gold in physic is a cordial, Therefore he loved gold in special."

The science of medicine since Chaucer's day has made extraordinary advances, and it is only fair to judge his doctor by contemporary standards. To-day, we fear, he would be largely regarded as little better than a charlatan and a quack. It is true, he was acquainted with all the authorities, ancient and modern, from AEsculapius and Galen down to Gaddesden, the author of the "Rosa Anglica," the great English book of fourteenth century medicine. But this last named luminary of physic would aid him very little on the road to true knowledge. This medical "Rose," which Leland calls a "large and learned work," only serves to illustrate the impotence of the professors of the healing arts at that period. This is the recipe of Gaddesden for the small-pox. "After this (the appearance of the eruption) cause the whole body of your patient to be wrapped in red scarlet cloth, and command everything about the bed to be made red. This is an excellent cure. It was in this manner I treated the son of the noble king of England when he had the small-pox, and I cured him without leaving any marks." To cure epilepsy, he orders the patient "and his parents" to fast three days, and then go to church. "The patient must first confess, and he must have mass on Friday and Saturday, and then on Sunday the priest must read over the patient's head the gospel for September, in the time of vintage after the feast of the Holy Cross. After this the priest shall write out this portion of the gospel reverently, and bind it about the patient's neck, and he shall be cured." If epilepsy was to be exorcised by such a remedy as this, we venture to assert that it must have been largely a case of faith-healing.

(From Harleian M.S.--4866 fol. 91.)]

Seeing then that such was the condition of the science of medicine in Chaucer's days, we must take with a good deal of reservation his statement that his doctor

"Knew the cause of every malady Were it of cold, or hot, or moist, or dry, And where engendered, and of what humour."

Anyhow, some of the remedies prescribed for the "sick man," and the "drugs," which his friends the apothecaries were so ready to supply, would have seemed extraordinary enough to us.

The poet tells us the doctor's study was but "little in the Bible," and that though a "perfect practitioner," the ground of his scientific knowledge was astronomy, i.e., astrology; the "better part of medicine," as Roger Bacon calls it. In dealing with his patients he was guided by "natural magic."

To this practice Chaucer alludes in another of his poems, the "House of Fame."

"And clerks eke, which con well, All this magic naturell, That craftily do her intents, To make in certain ascendents, Images--lo through which magic, To make a man be whole or sick."

So that in spite of what appears to us the charlatanry in his make up, the doctor was supposed to be a person of importance in the eyes of his fellow pilgrims, with quite the standing of an accredited medical man of to-day, is evidenced by the manner in which mine host Bailly addresses him. Master Bailly was no particular respecter of persons, indeed, on the contrary, he was somewhat of a Philistine; yet he was all respect to this man of medicine. It is as "Sir" Doctor of Physic, the host addresses him; also declaring him to be a "proper man," and like a prelate. After the story of chicanery related by the Canon's Yeoman, it is to the physician he looks to tell a tale of "honest matter." Such is his bearing towards him throughout.

The doctor's contribution to the "Canterbury Tales," too, is of a serious, sober kind, in keeping with his character; and concludes with some sound moral advice. Therefore, whatever foibles he may have, the "doctor of physic" is presented to us as a sterling gentleman, no unworthy predecessor of those who to-day, on more modern lines, still follow in his footsteps.

The Doctors Shakespeare Knew.

BY A. H. WALL.

"O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies In herbs, plants, shrubs, and their true qualities. For nought so vile that on the earth doth live But to the earth some special good doth give; Nor ought so good, but, strained from that fair use Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse." --Romeo and Juliet.

"By medicine life may be prolong'd."--Cymbeline V. 5.

In Walckenaer's "Memoirs of Madame de Sevigne," and in the amusing, interesting volume which Gaston Boissier devoted to her works and letters, we have glimpses of the medical profession in France, which show us it was in her time and country, just what it was in England in the same century when it was known to Shakespeare. For one more or less genuine physician there were thousands of charlatans and quacks, and the contempt which our great dramatic poet frequently expresses in his works for medical practitioners must, in fairness, be regarded as applicable to the latter, not to the former. In 1884, an American writer on this subject (Dr. Rush Field, in his "Medical Thoughts of Shakespeare") strove to show that our great philosophic poet and playwright's opinion of all the medical practitioners was a low one. "He uses them frequently," he says, "as a tool by which deaths are produced through the means of poison, and generally treats them with contempt." That he might fairly do this, and that in doing it he rather displayed respect and regard for the genuine, more or less scientific professors of the healing art, can be very readily demonstrated by anyone at all familiar with his plays. But to return to Madame de Sevigne. At a time when she was growing old, when her letters speak so sadly of the dying condition of Cardinal de Retz at Commercy, of Madame de la Fayette's being consumed by slow fever, and La Roche confined to his armchair by gout, of Corbinelle's threatened insanity, and of his taking "potable gold" as a remedy for headache, she writes also of small-pox and other fevers having permanently settled at Versailles and Saint-Germain, where the King and Queen were attacked, and ladies and gentlemen of the Court were decimated, and cases of apoplexy and rheumatism were rapidly increasing in every direction. "Fashionable folk, used up with pleasure-making, sick through disappointed ambition, fidgetting without motive, agitating without aim, tainted with morbid fancies and suspicion," found themselves in the doctor's hands, and were far more ready to select practitioners who promised magically swift and easy cures, than those who spoke of slow and gradual recovery by means which were neither painless nor pleasurable. "Everybody," says Boissur, "women included, battled with one another to possess marvellous secrets whereby obstinate complaints should be immediately cured. Madame Fouquet applied a plaster to the dying Queen, which cured her, to the great scandal of the Faculty unable to save her; and the Princess de Tarente served out drugs to all her people at Vitre.

(The Stratford Portrait.)]

Madame Sevigne wrote of her as "the best doctor in the upper classes; she has rare and valuable compounds of which she gives us three pinches with prodigious effect." When writing to her daughter, she begs her not to neglect taking such medicines as "cherry water," "extract of periwinkles," "viper-broth," "uric acid," and "powdered crab's-eyes." She says the extract of periwinkles "endowed Madame de Grignam with a second youth." Writing to her daughter, "If you use it, when you re-appear so fair people will cry, 'O'er what blessed flower can she have walked,' then I will answer 'On the periwinkle.'" She tells, too, how the Capuchins, who still retained their ancient medical reputation, treated the rheumatism in her leg "with plants bruised and applied twice a day; taken off while wet twice a day, and buried in the earth, so that as they rotted away her pains might in like way decrease." "It's a pity you ran and told the surgeons this," she says to her daughter, "for they roar with laughter at it, but I do not care a fig for them." In like way Madame de Scudery tells Bassy, "There is an abbe here who is making a great bother by curing by sympathy. For fever of all kinds, so they say, he takes the patient's spittle and mingles it with an egg, and gives it to a dog; the dog dies and the patient recovers.... They say he has cured a quantity of people."

Turning from these illustrations of medical practice in France to see how identical it is with that adopted in England when Shakespeare lived, we recall the advice of that eminent gentleman, Andrew Rourde, who recommends people to wash their faces once a week only, using a scarlet cloth to wipe them dry upon, as a sure remedy in certain cases. In other instances we find that certain pills made from the skulls of murderers taken down from gibbets, and ground to powder for that purpose, were popular as medicine, that a draught of water drunk from a murdered man's skull had wonderful medicinal properties, and that the blood of a dragon was absolutely miraculous in the cures it effected. The touch of a dead man's hand was another ghastly remedy in common use, and the powder of mummy was a wonderful cure for certain grave complaints. Love-philtres were also regarded from a medicinal point of view, and the strange doings of quack accoucheurs are not less absurdly terrible. That the seventeenth century physician himself was not always proof against these products of ancient ignorance and superstition, is abundantly apparent. Van Helmont, the son of a nobleman, born in Brussels, and very carefully educated for his profession, practised both medicine and magic medicinally. He rejected Galen, inclined to that illiterate pretender Paracelsus, and determined that the only way by which he could defy disease, and utterly destroy it, was through what he called Archaeus. Speaking of digestion, for instance, he denied that it was either chemical or mechanical in its nature, but the result of this Archaeus, a spiritual activity, working in a very mysteriously complicated way, for both evil and good. It has been said that he was one of Lord Bacon's disciples, but for that assertion there certainly is no sufficient foundation, for Bacon, if a mystic by inclination, was logical in reasoning. In England Van Helmont had an English follower in the person of another physician, Dr. Fludd, a disciple of the famous inventor of the camera obscura, and conjecturally the first photographer. His grand quack remedy was "the powder of sympathy," which was the "sword-salve" of Paracelsus (composed of moss taken from the skull of a gibbetted murderer, of warm human blood, human suet, linseed oil, turpentine, etc.). This was applied, not to the wound, but to the sword that inflicted it, kept "in a cool place!" Certain plants pulled up with the left hand were regarded as a sure remedy in fever cases, but the gatherer, while gathering, was not to look behind, for that deprived the plants of their medicinal value.

Amongst other physicians of Shakespeare's century was Mr. Valentine Greatrake, who came to London from Ireland, where his supposed magical cures had been awakening a great sensation. He hired a large house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, to which vast crowds of patients of all kinds and conditions crowded daily, all clamouring to be cured. He received them in their order, says an eye-witness, with "a grave and simple countenence." For, as Shakespeare wrote, "Thus credulous fools are caught." ("Comedy of Errors," 1, 2.) Greatrake (afterwards executed for high treason) asserted that every diseased person was possessed by a devil, and that by his prayers and laying on of hands the devil could be cast out. Lord Conway sent for him to cure an incurable disease from which his wife was suffering, and even some of the most learned and eminent people of the time were amongst his patrons. St. Evremond wrote, "You can hardly imagine what a reputation he gained in a short time. Catholics and Protestants visited him from every part, all believing that power from heaven was in his hands."

In an Act of Parliament which was passed in the year 1511, we read, in its preamble, that "the science and cunning of Physic and Surgery" was exercised by "a great multitude of ignorant persons, of whom the greater part have no manner of insight in the same, nor in any other kind of learning--some also can read no letters in the book--so far forth that common artificers, as smiths, weavers, and women, boldly and accostumably took upon them great cures, and things of great difficulty, in which they partly used sorceries and witchcraft, and partly supplied such medicines unto the diseased as are very noisome, and nothing meet therefore; to the high displeasure of God," etc.

A large number of the pretended remedies thus used in medical practice are clearly traceable back to the ancient Magi, who were professors of medicine, as well as priests and astrologers.

With these facts before you, turn to your Shakespeare, and see how he regarded the popular delusions thus created and fostered, with their