CHAPTER XXIV. P. I.

QUACK AND NO QUACK, BEING AN ACCOUNT OF DR. GREEN AND HIS MAN KEMP. POPULAR MEDICINE, HERBARY, THEORY OF SIGNATURES, WILLIAM DOVE, JOHN WESLEY, AND BAXTER.

Hold thy hand! health's dear maintainer;     Life perchance may burn the stronger: Having substance to maintain her     She untouched may last the longer.         When the Artist goes about         To redress her flame, I doubt         Oftentimes he snuffs it out.                                                             QUARLES.

It was not often that Rowland Dixon exhibited at Ingleton. He took his regular circuits to the fairs in all the surrounding country far and wide; but in the intervals of his vocation, he, who when abroad was the servant of the public, became his own master at home. His puppets were laid up in ordinary, the voice of Punch ceased, and the master of the motions enjoyed otium cum dignitate. When he favoured his friends and neighbours with an exhibition, it was speciali gratiâ, and in a way that rather enhanced that dignity than derogated from it.

A performer of a very different kind used in those days to visit Ingleton in his rounds, where his arrival was always expected by some of the community with great anxiety. This was a certain Dr. Green, who having been regularly educated for the profession of medicine, and regularly graduated in it, chose to practice as an itinerant, and take the field with a Merry Andrew for his aid-de-camp. He was of a respectable and wealthy family in the neighbourhood of Doncaster, which neighbourhood on their account he never approached in his professional circuits, though for himself he was far from being ashamed of the character that he had assumed. The course which he had taken had been deliberately chosen, with the twofold object of gratifying his own humour, and making a fortune; and in the remoter as well as in the immediate purpose, he succeeded to his heart's content.

It is not often that so much worldly prudence is found connected with so much eccentricity of character. A French poetess, Madame de Villedieu, taking as a text for some verses the liberal maxim que la vertu dépend autant du temperament que des loix, says,

Presque toujours chacun suit son caprice; Heureux est le mortel que les destins amis Ont partagé d'un caprice permis.

He is indeed a fortunate man who if he must have a hobby-horse, which is the same as saying if he will have one, keeps it not merely for pleasure, but for use, breaks it in well, has it entirely under command, and gets as much work out of it as he could have done out of a common roadster. Dr. Green did this; he had not taken to this strange course because he was impatient of the restraints of society, but because he fancied that his constitution both of body and of mind required an erratic life; and that, within certain bounds which he prescribed for himself, he might indulge in it, both to his own advantage, and that of the community,—that part of the community at least among whom it would be his lot to labour. Our laws had provided itinerant Courts of Justice for the people. Our church had formerly provided itinerant preachers; and after the Reformation when the Mendicant Orders were abolished by whom this service used to be performed, such preachers have never failed to appear during the prevalence of any religious influenza. Dr. Green thought that itinerant physicians were wanted; and that if practitioners regularly educated and well qualified would condescend to such a course, the poor ignorant people would no longer be cheated by travelling quacks, and sometimes poisoned by them!

One of the most reprehensible arts to which the Reformers resorted in their hatred of popery, was that of adapting vulgar verses to church tunes, and thus associating with ludicrous images, or with something worse, melodies which had formerly been held sacred. It is related of Whitefield that he, making a better use of the same device, fitted hymns to certain popular airs, because, he said, “there was no reason why the Devil should keep all the good tunes to himself.” Green acted upon a similar principle when he took the field as a Physician Errant, with his man Kemp, like another Sancho for his Squire. But the Doctor was no Quixote; and his Merry Andrew had all Sancho's shrewdness, without any alloy of his simpleness.

In those times medical knowledge among the lower practitioners was at the lowest point. Except in large towns the people usually trusted to domestic medicine, which some Lady Bountiful administered from her family receipt book; or to a Village Doctress whose prescriptions were as likely sometimes to be dangerously active, as at others to be ridiculous and inert. But while they held to their garden physic it was seldom that any injury was done either by exhibiting wrong medicines or violent ones.

Herbs, Woods and Springs, the power that in you lies If mortal man could know your properties!1

There was at one time abundant faith in those properties. The holy Shepherdess in Fletcher's fine pastoral drama, which so infinitely surpasses all foreign compositions of that class, thus apostrophises the herbs which she goes out to cull:

O you best sons of earth, You only brood unto whose happy birth Virtue was given, holding more of Nature Than man, her first-born and most perfect creature,— Let me adore you, you that only can Help or kill Nature, drawing out that span Of life and breath even to the end of time!

So abundantly was the English garden stocked in the age of the Tudors, that Tusser, after enumerating in an Appendix to one of his Chapters two and forty herbs for the kitchen, fourteen others for sallads or sauces, eleven to boil or butter, seventeen as strewing herbs, and forty “herbs branches and flowers for windows and pots,” adds a list of seventeen herbs “to still in summer,” and of five and twenty “necessary herbs to grow in the garden for physic, not rehearsed before;” and after all advises his readers to seek more in the fields. He says,

The nature of Flowers dame Physic doth shew; She teacheth them all to be known to a few.

Elsewhere he observes that

The knowledge of stilling is one pretty feat, The waters be wholesome, the charges not great.

1 FLETCHER.

In a comedy of Lord Digby's, written more than a hundred years after Tusser's didactics, one of the scenes is laid in a lady's laboratory, “with a fountain in it, some stills, and many shelves, with pots of porcelain and glasses;” and when the lady wishes to keep her attendant out of the way, she sends her there, saying

I have a task to give you,——carefully To shift the oils in the perfuming room, As in the several ranges you shall see The old begin to wither. To do it well Will take you up some hours, but 'tis a work I oft perform myself.

And Tusser among “the Points of Housewifery united to the Comfort of Husbandry,” includes good housewifely physic, as inculcated in these rhymes;

Good houswife provides ere an sickness do come, Of sundry good things in her house to have some; Good aqua composita, and vinegar tart, Rose water, and treacle to comfort the heart; Cold herbs in her garden for agues that burn, That over-strong heat to good temper may turn; White endive, and succory, with spinage enow, All such with good pot-herbs should follow the plough. Get water of fumitory liver to cool, And others the like, or else go like a fool; Conserves of barberry, quinces and such, With syrups that easeth the sickly so much.

Old Gervase Markham in his “Approved Book called the English Housewife, containing the inward and outward virtues which ought to be in a complete woman,” places her skill in physic as one of the most principal; “you shall understand,” he says, “that sith the preservation and care of the family touching their health and soundness of body consisteth most in her diligence, it is meet that she have a physical kind of knowledge, how to administer any wholesome receipts or medicines for the good of their healths, as well to prevent the first occasion of sickness, as to take away the effects and evil of the same, when it hath made seizure upon the body.” And “as it must be confessed that the depths and secrets of this most excellent art of physic, are far beyond the capacity of the most skilful woman,” he relates for the Housewife's use some “approved medecines and old doctrines, gathered together by two excellent and famous physicians, and in a manuscript given to a great worthy Countess of this land.”

The receipts collected in this and other books for domestic practice are some of them so hyper-composite that even Tusser's garden could hardly supply all the indigenous ingredients; others are of the most fantastic kind, and for the most part they were as troublesome in preparation, and many of them as disgusting, as they were futile. That “Sovereign Water” which was invented by Dr. Stephens was composed of almost all known spices, and all savoury and odorous herbs, distilled in claret. With this Dr. Stephens “preserved his own life until such extreme old age that he could neither go nor ride; and he did continue his life, being bed-rid five years, when other physicians did judge he could not live one year; and he confessed a little before his death, that if he were sick at any time, he never used any thing but this water only. And also the Archbishop of Canterbury used it, and found such goodness in it that he lived till he was not able to drink out of a cup, but sucked his drink through a hollow pipe of silver.”

Twenty-nine plants were used in the composition of Dr. Adrian Gilbert's most sovereign Cordial Water, besides hartshorn, figs, raisins, gillyflowers, cowslips, marygolds, blue violets, red rose-buds, ambergris, bezoar-stone, sugar, aniseed, liquorice, and to crown all, “what else you please.” But then it was sovereign against all fevers; and one who in time of plague should take two spoonsfull of it in good beer, or white wine, “he might walk safely from danger, by the leave of God.”—The Water of Life was distilled from nearly as many ingredients, to which were added a fleshy running capon, the loins and legs of an old coney, the red flesh of the sinews of a leg of mutton, four young chickens, twelve larks, the yolks of twelve eggs, and a loaf of white bread, all to be distilled in white wine.

For consumption, there were pills in which powder of pearls, of white amber and of coral, were the potential ingredients; there was cockwater, the cock being to be chased and beaten before he was killed, or else plucked alive! and there was a special water procured by distillation, from a peck of garden shell-snails and a quart of earth worms, besides other things; this was prescribed not for consumption alone, but for dropsy and all obstructions. For all faintness, hot agues, heavy fantasies and imaginations, a cordial was prepared in tabulates, which were called Manus Christi: the true receipt required one ounce of prepared pearls to twelve of fine sugar, boiled with rose water, violet water, cinnamon water, “or howsoever one would have them.” But apothecaries seldom used more than a drachm of pearls to a pound of sugar, because men would not go to the cost thereof; and the Manus Christi simplex was made without any pearl at all. For broken bones, bones out of joint, or any grief in the bones or sinews, oil of swallows was pronounced exceeding sovereign, and this was to be procured by pounding twenty live swallows in a mortar with about as many different herbs! A mole, male or female according to the sex of the patient, was to be dried in an oven whole as taken out of the earth, and administered in powder for the falling evil. A grey eel with a white belly was to be closed in an earthen pot, and buried alive in a dunghill, and at the end of a fortnight its oil might be collected to “help hearing.” A mixture of rose leaves and pigeon's dung quilted in a bag, and laid hot upon the parts affected, was thought to help a stitch in the side; and for a quinsey, “give the party to drink,” says Markham, “the herb mouse-ear, steept in ale or beer; and look when you see a swine rub himself, and there upon the same place rub a slick-stone, and then with it slick all the swelling, and it will cure it.”

To make hair grow on a bald part of the head, garden snails were to be plucked out of their houses, and pounded with horse-leaches, bees, wasps and salt, an equal quantity of each; and the baldness was to be anointed with the moisture from this mixture after it had been buried eight days in a hot bed. For the removal and extirpation of superfluous hairs, a depilatory was to be made by drowning in a pint of wine as many green frogs as it would cover, (about twenty was the number,) setting the pot forty days in the sun, and then straining it for use.

A water specially good against gravel or dropsy might be distilled from the dried and pulverized blood of a black buck or he-goat, three or four years old. The animal was to be kept by himself, in the summer time when the sun was in Leo, and dieted for three weeks upon certain herbs given in prescribed order, and to drink nothing but red wine, if you would have the best preparation, though some persons allowed him his fill of water every third day. But there was a water of mans blood which in Queen Elizabeth's days was a new invention, “whereof some princes had very great estimation, and used it for to remain thereby in their force, and, as they thought, to live long.” A strong man was to be chosen, in his flourishing youth, and of twenty-five years, and somewhat choleric by nature. He was to be well dieted for one month with light and healthy meats, and with all kinds of spices, and with good strong wine, and moreover to be kept with mirth; at the month's end veins in both arms were to be opened, and as much blood to be let out as he could “tolerate and abide.” One handful of salt was to be added to six pounds of this blood, and this was to be seven times distilled, pouring the water upon the residuum after every distillation, till the last. This was to be taken three or four times a year, an ounce at a time. One has sight of a theory here; the life was thought to be in the blood, and to be made transferable when thus extracted.

Richard Brathwait, more famous since Mr. Haslewood has identified him with Drunken Barnaby, than as author of “the English Gentleman and the English Gentlewoman, presented to present times for ornaments, and commended to posterity for precedents,” says of this Gentlewoman, “herbals she peruseth, which she seconds with conference; and by degrees so improves her knowledge, as her cautelous care perfits many a dangerous cure.” But herbals were not better guides than the medical books of which specimens have just been set before the reader, except that they did not lead the practitioner so widely and perilously astray. “Had Solomon,” says the author of Adam in Eden, or the Paradise of Plants, “that great proficient in all sublunary experiments, preserved those many volumes that he wrote in this kind, for the instruction of future ages, so great was that spaciousness of mind that God had bestowed on him, that he had immediately under the Deity been the greatest of Doctors for the preservation of mankind: but with the loss of his books so much lamented by the Rabbins and others, the best part of this herbarary art hath since groaned under the defects of many unworthy authors, and still remains under divers clouds and imperfections.” This writer, “the ingeniously learned and excellent Herbarist Mr. William Coles,” professing as near as possible to acquaint all sorts of people with the very pith and marrow of herbarism, arranges his work according to the anatomical application of plants, “appropriating,” says he, “to every part of the body, (from the crown of the head, with which I begin, and proceed till I come to the sole of the foot,) such herbs and plants whose grand uses and virtues do most specifically, and by signature thereunto belong, not only for strengthening the same, but also for curing the evil effects whereunto they are subjected:—the signatures being as it were the books out of which the ancients first learned the virtues of herbs; Nature, or rather the God of Nature, having stamped on divers of them legible characters to discover their uses, though he hath left others without any, that after he had shewed them the way, they, by their labour and industry which renders every thing more acceptable, might find out the rest.” It was an opinion often expressed by a physician of great and deserved celebrity, that in course of time specifics would be discovered for every malady to which the human frame is liable. He never supposed, (though few men have ever been more sanguine in their hopes and expectations,) that life was thus to be indefinitely prolonged, and that it would be man's own fault, or his own choice, if he did not live for ever; but he thought that when we should thus have been taught to subdue those diseases which cut our life short, we should, like the Patriarchs, live out the number of our days, and then fall asleep,—Man being by this physical redemption restored to his original corporeal state.

Then shall like four straight pillars, the four Elements Support the goodly structure of Mortality: Then shall the four Complexions, like four heads Of a clear river, streaming in his body, Nourish and comfort every vein and sinew: No sickness of contagion, no grim death, Or deprivation of health's real blessings, Shall then affright the creature, built by Heaven, Reserved for immortality.2

2 FORD.

He had not taken up this notion from any religious feeling; it was connected in him with the pride of philosophy, and he expected that this was one of the blessings which we were to obtain in the progress of knowledge.

Some specific remedies being known to exist, it is indeed reasonable to suppose that others will be found. Old theorists went farther; and in a world which everywhere bears such undeniable evidences of design in every thing, few theories should seem more likely to be favourably received than the one which supposed that every healing plant bears, in some part of its structure, the type or signature of its peculiar virtues: now this could in no other way be so obviously marked, as by a resemblance to that part of the human frame for which its remedial uses were intended. There is a fable indeed which says that he who may be so fortunate as to taste the blood of a certain unknown animal would be enabled thereby to hear the voice of plants and understand their speech; and if he were on a mountain at sunrise, he might hear the herbs which grow there, when freshened with the dews of night they open themselves to the beams of the morning, return thanks to the Creator for the virtues with which he has indued them, each specifying what those virtues were, le quali veramente son tante e tali che beati i pastori che quelle capessero. A botanical writer who flourished a little before the theory of signatures was started complains that herbal medicine had fallen into disuse; he says, “antequam chemia patrum nostrorum memoriâ orbi restitueretur, contenti vivebant ὅι τῶν ἰατρῶν κομψὸι και χαριὲστατοι pharmacis ex vegetabilium regno accersitis parum solliciti de Solis sulphure et oleo, de Lunæ sale et essentiâ, de Saturni saccaro, de Martis tincturâ et croco, de vitriolo Veneris, de Mercurio præcipitato, et Antimonii floribus, de Sulphuris spiritu et Tartari crystallis: nihilominus masculè debellabant morbos, et tutè et jucundè. Nunc sæculi nostri infelicitas est, quod vegetabilibus contemptim habitis, plerique nihil aliud spirant præter metallica ista, et extis parata horribilia secreta.”3 The new theory came in timely aid of the Galenists; it connected their practice with a doctrine hardly less mysterious than those of the Paracelsists, but more plausible because it seemed immediately intelligible, and had a natural religious feeling to strengthen and support it.

3 Petri Laurembergii Rostochiensis Horticultura—Præloquium, p. 10.

The Author of Adam in Eden refers to Oswald Crollius as “the great discoverer of signatures,” and no doubt has drawn from him, most of his remarks upon this theory of physical correspondence. The resemblance is in some cases very obvious; but in many more the Swedenborgian correspondences are not more fantastic; and where the resemblances exist the inference is purely theoretical.

Walnuts are said to have the perfect signature of the head; the outer husks or green covering represents the pericranium, or outward skin of the skull, whereon the hair groweth,—and therefore salt made of those husks is exceeding good for wounds in the head. The inner woody shell hath the signature of the skull, and the little yellow skin or peel, that of the dura and pia mater which are the thin scarfs that envelope the brain. The kernel hath “the very figure of the brain, and therefore it is very profitable for the brain and resists poisons.” So too the Piony, being not yet blown, was thought to have “some signature and proportion with the head of man, having sutures and little veins dispersed up and down, like unto those which environ the brain: when the flowers blow they open an outward little skin representing the skull:” the piony therefore besides its other virtues was very available against the falling sickness. Poppy heads with their crowns somewhat represent the head and brain, and therefore decoctions of them were used with good success in several diseases of the head. And Lillies of the Valley, which in Coles's days grew plentifully upon Hampstead-heath, were known by signature to cure the apoplexy; “for as that disease is caused by the dropping of humours into the principal ventricles of the brain, so the flowers of this lilly hanging on the plants as if they were drops, are of wonderful use herein.”

All capillary herbs were of course sovereign in diseases of the hair; and because the purple and yellow spots and stripes upon the flowers of Eyebright very much resemble the appearance of diseased eyes, it was found out by that signature that this herb was very effectual “for curing of the same.” The small Stone-crop hath the signature of the gums, and is therefore good for scurvy. The exquisite Crollius observed that the woody scales of which the cones of the pine tree are composed, resemble the fore teeth; and therefore pine leaves boiled in vinegar make a gargle which relieves the tooth-ache. The Pomegranate has a like virtue for a like reason. Thistles and Holly leaves signify by their prickles that they are excellent for pleurisy and stiches in the side. Saxifrage manifesteth in its growth its power of breaking the stone. It had been found experimentally that all roots, barks and flowers which were yellow, cured the yellow jaundice; and though Kidney beans as yet were only used for food, yet having so perfect a signature, practitioners in physic were exhorted to take it into consideration and try whether there were not in this plant some excellent faculty to cure nephritic diseases. In pursuing this fantastic system examples might be shown of that mischief, which, though it may long remain latent, never fails at some time or other to manifest itself as inherent in all error and falsehood.

When the mistresses of families grounded their practice of physic upon such systems of herbary, or took it from books which contained prescriptions like those before adduced, (few being either more simple or more rational,) Dr. Green might well argue that when he mounted his hobby and rode out seeking adventures as a Physician-Errant, he went forth for the benefit of his fellow creatures. The guidance of such works, or of their own traditional receipts, the people in fact then generally followed. Burton tells us that Paulus Jovius in his description of Britain, and Levinus Lemnius have observed, of this our island, how there was of old no use of physic amongst us, and but little at this day, except he says “it be for a few nice idle citizens, surfeiting courtiers, and stall-fed gentlemen lubbers. The country people use kitchen physic.” There are two instances among the papers of the Berkeley family, of the little confidence which persons of rank placed upon such medical advice and medicinal preparations as could be obtained in the country, and even in the largest of our provincial cities. In the second year of Elizabeth's reign Henry Lord Berkeley “having extremely heated himself by chasing on foot a tame deer in Yate Park, with the violence thereof fell into an immoderate bleeding of the nose, to stay which, by the ill counsel of some about him, he dipt his whole face into a bason of cold water, whereby,” says the family chronicler, “that flush and fulness of his nose which forthwith arose could never be remedied, though for present help he had Physicians in a few days from London, and for better help came thither himself not long after to have the advice of the whole College, and lodged with his mother at her house in Shoe-lane.”—He never afterwards could sing with truth or satisfaction the old song,

Nose, Nose, jolly red Nose, And what gave thee that jolly red Nose? Cinnamon and Ginger, Nutmegs and Cloves, And they gave me this jolly red Nose.

A few years later, “Langham an Irish footman of this Lord, upon the sickness of the Lady Catherine, this Lord's wife, carried a letter from Callowdon to old Dr. Fryer, a physician dwelling in Little Britain in London; and returned with a glass bottle in his hand compounded by the doctor for the recovery of her health, a journey of an hundred and forty-eight miles performed by him in less than forty-two hours, notwithstanding his stay of one night at the physician's and apothecary's houses, which no one horse could have so well and safely performed.” No doubt it was for the safer conveyance of the bottle, that a footman was sent on this special errand, for which the historian of that noble family adds, “the lady shall after give him a new suit of cloaths.”

In those days, and long after, they who required remedies were likely to fare ill, under their own treatment, or that of their neighbours; and worse under the travelling quack, who was always an ignorant and impudent impostor, but found that human sufferings and human credulity afforded him a never-failing harvest. Dr. Green knew this: he did not say with the Romish priest populus vult decipi, et decipietur! for he had no intention of deceiving them; but he saw that many were to be won by buffoonery, more by what is called palaver, and almost all by pretensions. Condescending therefore to the common arts of quackery, he employed his man Kemp to tickle the multitude with coarse wit; but he stored himself with the best drugs that were to be procured, distributed as general remedies such only as could hardly be misapplied and must generally prove serviceable; and brought to particular cases the sound knowledge which he had acquired in the school of Boerhaave, and the skill which he had derived from experience aided by natural sagacity. When it became convenient for him to have a home, he established himself at Penrith, in the County of Cumberland, having married a lady of that place; but he long continued his favourite course of life and accumulated in it a large fortune. He gained it by one maggot, and reduced it by many: nevertheless there remained a handsome inheritance for his children. His son proved as maggotty as the father, ran through a good fortune, and when confined in the King's Bench prison for debt, wrote a book upon the Art of cheap living in London!

The father's local fame, though it has not reached to the third and fourth generation, survived him far into the second; and for many years after his retirement from practice, and even after his death every travelling mountebank in the northern counties adopted the name of Dr. Green.

At the time to which this chapter refers, Dr. Green was in his meridian career, and enjoyed the highest reputation throughout the sphere of his itinerancy. Ingleton lay in his rounds, and whenever he came there he used to send for the schoolmaster to pass the evening with him. He was always glad if he could find an opportunity also of conversing with the elder Daniel, as the Flossofer of those parts. William Dove could have communicated to him more curious things relating to his own art; but William kept out of the presence of strangers, and had happily no ailments to make him seek the Doctor's advice; his occasional indispositions were but slight, and he treated them in his own way. That way was sometimes merely superstitious, sometimes it was whimsical, and sometimes rough. If his charms failed when he tried them upon himself, it was not for want of faith. When at any time it happened that one of his eyes was blood-shot, he went forthwith in search of some urchin whose mother, either for laziness, or in the belief that it was wholesome to have it in that state, allowed his ragged head to serve as a free warren for certain “small deer.” One of these hexapeds William secured, and “using him as if he loved him,” put it into his eye; when according to William's account the insect fed upon what it found, cleared the eye, and disappearing he knew not where or how, never was seen more.

His remedy for the cholic was a pebble posset; white pebbles were preferred, and of these what was deemed a reasonable quantity was taken in some sort of milk porridge. Upon the same theory he sometimes swallowed a pebble large enough as he said to clear all before it; and for that purpose they have been administered of larger calibre than any bolus that ever came from the hands of the most merciless apothecary, as large indeed sometimes as a common sized walnut. Does the reader hesitate at believing this of an ignorant man, living in a remote part of the country? Well might William Dove be excused, for a generation later than his John Wesley prescribed in his Primitive Physic quicksilver, to be taken ounce by ounce, to the amount of one, two, or three pounds, till the desired effect was produced. And a generation earlier, Richard Baxter of happy memory and unhappy digestion, having read in Dr. Gerhard “the admirable effects of the swallowing of a gold bullet upon his father,” in a case which Baxter supposed to be like his own, got a gold bullet of between twenty and thirty shillings weight, and swallowed it. “Having taken it,” says he, “I knew not how to be delivered of it again. I took clysters and purges for about three weeks, but nothing stirred it; and a gentleman having done the like, the bullet never came from him till he died, and it was cut out. But at last my neighbours set a day apart to fast and pray for me, and I was freed from my danger in the beginning of that day!”