CHAPTER XCII.
CONCERNING PETER HOPKINS AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE MOON AND TIDES UPON THE HUMAN BODY. A CHAPTER WHICH SOME PERSONS MAY DEEM MORE CURIOUS THAN DULL, AND OTHERS MORE DULL THAN CURIOUS.
A man that travelleth to the most desirable home, hath a habit of desire to it all the way; but his present business is his travel; and horse, and company, and inns, and ways, and weariness, &c., may take up more of his sensible thoughts, and of his talk and action, than his home.
BAXTER.
Few things in this world are useless,—none indeed but what are of man's own invention. It was one of Oberlin's wise maxims that nothing should be destroyed, nothing thrown away, or wasted; he knew that every kind of refuse which will not serve to feed pigs, may be made to feed both man and beast in another way by serving for manure: perhaps he learnt this from the Chinese proverb, that a wise man saves even the parings of his nails and the clippings of his beard, for this purpose. “To burn a hair,” says Darwin, “or a straw, unnecessarily, diminishes the sum of matter fit for quick nutrition, by decomposing it nearly into its elements: and should therefore give some compunction to a mind of universal sympathy.” Let not this cant about universal sympathy nauseate a reader of common sense, and make him regard Darwin's opinion here with the contempt which his affectation deserves. Every thing may be of use to the farmer. And so it is with knowledge; there is none, however vain in itself and however little it may be worth the pains of acquiring it, which may not at some time or other be turned to account.
Peter Hopkins found that his acquaintance with astrology was sometimes of good service in his professional practice. In his days most of the Almanacs contained Rules Astrological showing under what aspects and positions different modes of remedy were to be administered, and different complections were to let blood. He had often to deal with persons who believed in their Almanack as implicitly as in their Bible, and who studied this part of it with a more anxious sense of its practical importance to themselves. When these notions were opposed to the course of proceeding which the case required, he could gain his point by talking to them in their own language, and displaying, if it were called for, a knowledge of the art which might have astonished the Almanack-maker himself. If he had reasoned with them upon any other ground, they would have retained their own opinion, even while they submitted to his authority; and would neither have had faith in him, nor in his prescriptions.
Peter Hopkins would never listen to any patient who proposed waiting for a lucky day before he entered upon a prescribed course of medicine. “Go by the moon as much as you please,” he would say; “have your hair cut, if you think best while it wexes, and cut your corns while it wanes; and put off any thing till a lucky day that may as well be done on one day as another. But the right day to be bled is when you want bleeding; the right day for taking physic is when physic is necessary.”
He was the better able to take this course, because he himself belonged to the debateable land between credulity and unbelief. Some one has said that the Devil's dubitative is a negative,—dubius in fide, infidelis est; 1 and there are cases, as in Othello's, in which from the infirmity of human nature, it is too often seen that
to be once in doubt
Is—once to be resolved.
1 SEXTUS PYTHAGORAS.
There is however a state of mind, or to speak more accurately a way of thinking, in which men reverse the Welshman's conclusion in the old comedy, and instead of saying ‘it may be, but it is very impossible,’ resolve within themselves that it is very impossible, but it may be. So it was in some degree with Peter Hopkins; his education, his early pursuits, and his turn of mind disposed him to take part with what was then the common opinion of common men, and counterbalanced, if they did not perhaps a little preponderate against the intelligence of the age, and his own deliberate judgment if he had been called upon seriously to declare it. He saw plainly that astrology had been made a craft by means whereof knaves practised upon fools; but so had his own profession; and it no more followed as a necessary consequence from the one admission that the heavenly bodies exercised no direct influence upon the human frame, than it did from the other that the art of medicine was not beneficial to mankind.
In the high days of astrology when such an immediate influence was affirmed upon the then undisputed authority of St. Augustin, it was asked how it happened that the professors of this science so frequently deceived others, and were deceived themselves? The answer was that too often instead of confining themselves within the legitimate limits of the art, they enlarged their phylacteries too much. Farther, that there were many more fixed stars than were known to us, yet these also must have their influence; and moreover that the most learned professors differed upon some of the most important points. Nevertheless so many causes and effects in the course of nature were so visibly connected, that men, whether astrologers or not, drew from them their own conclusions, and presaged accordingly: mirum non est, si his et similibus solerter pensiculatis, non tam astrologi quam philosophi, medici, et longâ experientiâ edocti agricolæ et nautæ, quotidie de futuris multa vera predicunt, etiam sine astrologiæ regulis de morbis, de annonâ, deque tempestatibus.
All persons in Peter Hopkins's days believed that change of weather may be looked for at the change of the Moon; and all men except a few philosophers believe so still, and all the philosophers in Europe could not persuade an old sailor out of the belief. And that the tides have as much influence over the human body in certain stages of disease, as the moon has over the tides, is a popular belief in many parts of the world. The Spaniards think that all who die of chronic diseases breathe their last during the ebb. Among the wonders of the Isle and City of Cadiz, which the historian of that city, Suares de Salazar, enumerates, one is, according to P. Labat, that the sick never die there while the tide is rising or at its height, but always during the ebb: he restricts the notion to the Isle of Leon, but implies that the effect was there believed to take place in diseases of any kind, acute as well as chronic. “Him fever,” says the Negro in the West Indies, “shall go when the water come low. Him alway come hot when the tide high.”
If the Negroes had ever heard the theory of the tides which Herrera mentions, they would readily believe it, and look upon it as completely explaining the ground of their assertion; for according to that theory the tides are caused by a fever of the sea, which rages for six hours, and then intermits for as many more.
But the effect of the tides upon the human constitution in certain states is not a mere vulgar opinion. Major Moor says that near the tropics, especially in situations where the tide of the sea has a great rise and fall, scarcely any person, and certainly no one affected with feverish or nervous symptoms, is exempted from extraordinary sensations at the periods of spring tides. That these are caused by the changes of the moon he will not say, for he had never fully convinced himself, however plausible the theory, that the coincident phenomena of spring tides, and full and change of the moon, were cause and effect; but at the conjunction and opposition, or what amounts to the same, at the spring tides, these sensations are periodically felt. There is an account of one singular case in which the influence was entirely lunar. When Mr. Galt was travelling in the Morea, he fell in with a peasant, evidently in an advanced stage of dropsy, who told him, that his father had died of a similar complaint, but differing from his in this remarkable respect—the father's continued to grow regularly worse, without any intervals of alleviation; but at the change of the moon the son felt comparatively much easier. As the moon advanced to the full, the swelling enlarged; and as she waned, it again lessened. Still, however, though this alteration continued, the disease was gaining ground.
“The moon,” Mr. Galt observes, “has, or is believed to have, much more to say in the affairs of those parts, than with us. The climate is more regular; and if the air have tides, like the ocean, of course their effects are more perceptible.”
In an early volume of the Philosophical Transactions are some observations made by Mr. Paschal on the motions of diseases, and on the births and deaths of men and other animals, in different parts of the day and night. Having suspected, he says, that the causes of the tides at sea exert their power elsewhere, though the effect may not be so sensibly perceived on the solid as on the fluid parts of the globe, he divided, for trial of this notion, the natural day into four senaries of hours; the first consisting of three hours before the moon's southing, and three after; the second, of the six hours following; and the third and fourth contained the two remaining quarters of the natural day. Observing then the times of birth and death, both in human and other subjects, as many as came within the circle of his knowledge, he found, he says, none that were born or died a natural death in the first and third senaries, (which he called first and second tides,) but every one either in the second or fourth senaries, (which he called the first and second ebbs). He then made observations upon the motions of diseases, other circumstances connected with the human frame, alterations of the weather, and such accounts as he could meet with of earthquakes and other things, and he met with nothing to prevent him from laying down this as a maxim:—that motion, vigour, action, strength, &c., appear most and do best, in the tiding senaries; and that rest, relaxation, decay, dissolution, belong to the ebbing ones.
This theorist must have been strongly possessed with a favorite opinion, before he could imagine that the deep subterranean causes of earthquakes could in any degree be affected by the tides. But that the same influences which occasion the ebb and flow of the ocean have an effect upon certain diseases, is a conclusion to which Dr. Pinckard came in the West Indies, and Dr. Balfour in the East, from what they observed in the course of their own practice, and what they collected from the information of others. “In Bengal,” Dr. Balfour says, “there is no room to doubt that the human frame is affected by the influences connected with the relative situations of the sun and moon. In certain states of health and vigour, this influence has not power to show itself by any obvious effects, and in such cases its existence is often not acknowledged. But in certain states of debility and disease it is able to manifest itself by exciting febrile paroxysms. Such paroxysms shew themselves more frequently during the period of the spring tides, and as these advance become more violent and obstinate, and on the other hand tend no less invariably to subside and terminate during the recess.
“I have no doubt,” says this practitioner, “that any physician who will carefully attend to the diurnal and nocturnal returns of the tides, and will constantly hold before him the prevailing tendency of fevers to appear at the commencement, and during the period of the spring; and to subside and terminate at the commencement and during the period of the recess, will soon obtain more information respecting the phenomena of fevers, and he able to form more just and certain judgements and prognostics respecting every event, than if he were to study the history of medicine, as it is now written, for a thousand years. There is no revolution or change in the course of fevers that may not be explained by these general principles in a manner consistent with the laws of the human constitution, and of the great system of revolving bodies which unite together in producing them.”
Dr. Balfour spared no pains in collecting information to elucidate and confirm his theory during the course of thirty years practice in India. He communicated upon it with most of the European practitioners in the Company's dominions; and the then Governor General, Lord Teignmouth, considered the subject as so important, that he properly as well as liberally ordered the correspondence and the treatise, in which its results were embodied, to be printed and circulated at the expense of the government. The author drew up his scheme of an Astronomical Ephemeris, for the purposes of Medicine and Meteorology, and satisfied himself that he had “discovered the laws of febrile paroxysms,” and unfolded a history and theory of fevers entirely new, consistent with itself in every part, and with the other appearances of nature, perfectly conformable to the laws discovered by the immortal Newton, and capable of producing important improvements in medicine and meteorology. He protested against objections to his theory as if it were connected with the wild and groundless delusions of astrology. Yet the letter of his correspondent, Dr. Helenus Scott, of Bombay, shews how naturally and inevitably it would be connected with them in that country. “The influence of the moon on the human body,” says that physician, “has been observed in this part of India by every medical practitioner. It is universally acknowledged by the doctors of all colours, of all casts, and of all countries. The people are taught to believe it in their infancy, and as they grow up, they acknowledge it from experience. I suppose that in the northern latitudes this power of the moon is far less sensible than in India. Here we universally think that the state of weakly and diseased bodies is much influenced by its motions. Every full and change increases the number of the patients of every practitioner. That the human body is affected in a remarkable manner by them I am perfectly convinced, and that an attention to the power of the moon is highly necessary to the medical practitioner in India.”
This passage tends to confirm, what indeed no judicious person can doubt, that the application of astrology to medicine, though it was soon perverted, and debased till it became a mere craft, originated in actual observations of the connection between certain bodily affections, and certain times and seasons. Many, if not most of the mischievous systems in physics and divinity have arisen from dim perceptions or erroneous apprehensions of some important truth. And not a few have originated in the common error of drawing bold and hasty inferences from weak premises. Sailors say, what they of all men have most opportunities of observing, that the moon as it rises clears the sky of clouds: a puesta del sol, says a Spanish chronicler, parescio la luna, e comio poco a poco todas las nuves. The “learned and reverend” Dr. Goad, sometime Master of Merchant Taylors' School, published a work “of vast pains, reading and many years experience,” which he called “Astro-Meteorologia, or a Demonstration of the Influences of the Stars in the alterations of the Air; proving that there is not an Earthquake, Comet, Parhelia, Halo, Thunder-storm or Tempest, or any other Phenomena, but is referable to its particular planetary aspect, as the sub-solar cause thereof.”
