CHAPTER CXIX.
THE DOCTOR IN HIS CURE. IRRELIGION THE REPROACH OF HIS PROFESSION.
Virtue, and that part of philosophy
Will I apply, that treats of happiness
By virtue specially to be achieved.
TAMING OF THE SHREW.
A practitioner of medicine possesses in what may be called his cure, that knowledge of all who are under his care, which the parochial priest used to possess in former times, and will it is to be hoped regain whenever the most beneficial of all alterations shall be effected in the Church Establishment, and no Clergyman shall have a duty imposed upon him which it is impossible to fulfil,—impossible it is, if his parishioners are numbered by thousands instead of hundreds. In such cases one of two consequences must inevitably ensue. Either he will confine himself to the formalities of his office, and because he cannot by any exertions do what ought to be done, rest contented with performing the perfunctory routine; or he will exert himself to the utmost till his health, and perhaps his heart also, is broken in a service which is too often found as thankless as it is hopeless.
Our Doctor was, among the poorer families in his cure, very much what Herbert's Country Parson is imagined to be in his parish. There was little pauperism there at that time; indeed none that existed in a degree reproachful to humanity; or in that obtrusive and clamorous form which at present in so many parts of this misgoverned country insults and outrages and endangers society. The labourers were not so ill paid as to be justly discontented with their lot; and he was not in a manufacturing district. His profession led him among all classes; and his temper as well as his education qualified him to sympathize with all, and accommodate himself to each as far as such accommodation was becoming. Yet he was every where the same man; he spoke the King's English in one circle, and the King's Yorkshire in another; but this was the only difference in his conversation with high and low. Before the professors of his art indeed, in the exercise of their calling, the distinctions of society disappear, and poor human nature is stript to its humanities. Rank, and power, and riches,—these—
cannot take a passion away, Sir,
Nor cut a fit but one poor hour shorter.1
The most successful stock jobber, or manufacturer that ever counted his wealth by hundreds of thousands—
must endure as much as the poorest beggar
That cannot change his money,—this is the equality
In our impartial essences!1
Death is not a more inexorable leveller than his precursors age and infirmity and sickness and pain.
1 BEAUMONT and FLETCHER.
Hope and fear and grief and joy act with the same equitable disregard of conventional distinctions. And though there is reason for disbelieving that the beetle which we tread upon feels as much as a human being suffers in being crushed, it is yet undoubtedly true that except in those cases where individuals have so thoroughly corrupted their feelings as to have thereby destroyed the instinctive sense of right and wrong, making evil their good, what may be termed the primitive affections exist in as much strength among the rudest as among the most refined. They may be paralyzed by pauperism, they may be rotted by the licentiousness of luxury; but there is no grade of society in which they do not exhibit themselves in the highest degree. Tragic poets have been attracted by the sufferings of the great, and have laid the scene of their fables in the higher circles of life; yet tragedy represents no examples more touching or more dreadful, for our admiration or abhorrence, to thrill us with sympathy or with indignation, than are continually occurring in all classes of society.
They who call themselves men of the world and pride themselves accordingly upon their knowledge, are of all men those who know least of human nature. It was well said by a French biographer, though not well applied to the subject2 of his biography, that il avait pu, dans la solitude, se former à l'amour du vrai et du juste, et même à la connoissance de l'homme, si souvent et si mal à propos confondue avec celle des hommes; c'est-à-dire, avec la petite experience des intrigues mouvantes d'un petit nombre d'individus plus ou moins accrédités et des habitudes etroites de leurs petites coteries. La connoissance des hommes est à celle de l'homme ce qu'est l'intrigue sociale à l'art social.
2 The ABBE SIEYES.
Of those passions which are or deserve to be the subject of legal and judicial tragedy, the lawyers necessarily see most, and for this reason perhaps they think worse of human nature than any other class of men, except the Roman Catholic Clergy. Physicians on the contrary, though they see humanity in its most humiliating state, see it also in the exercise of its holiest and most painful duties. No other persons witness such deep emotions and such exertions of self-controul. They know what virtues are developed by the evils which flesh is heir to, what self-devotion, what patience, what fortitude, what piety, what religious resignation.
Wherefore is it then that physicians have lain under the reproach of irreligion, who of all men best know how fearfully and wonderfully we are made, and who it might be thought would be rendered by the scenes at which they are continually called upon to assist, of all men the most religious? Sir Thomas Brown acknowledges that this was the general scandal of his profession, and his commentator Sir Kenelm Digby observes upon the passage, that “Physicians do commonly hear ill in this behalf,” and that “it is a common speech (but,” he parenthesizes, “only amongst the unlearned sort) ubi tres medici duo athei.” Rabelais defines a Physician to be animal incombustible propter reliqionem.
“As some mathematicians,” says an old Preacher, “deal so much in Jacob's staff that they forget Jacob's ladder, so some Physicians (God decrease the number!) are so deep naturalists that they are very shallow Christians. With us, Grace waits at the heels of Nature, and they dive so deep into the secrets of philosophy that they never look up to the mysteries of Divinity.”
Old Adam Littleton who looked at every thing in its best light, took a different view of the effect of medical studies, in his sermon upon St. Luke's day. “His character of Physician,” said he, “certainly gave him no mean advantage, not only in the exercise of his ministry by an acceptable address and easy admission which men of that profession every where find among persons of any civility; but even to his understanding of Christian truths and to the apprehending the mysteries of faith.
“For having as that study directed him, gone orderly over all the links of that chain by which natural causes are mutually tied to one another, till he found God the supreme cause and first mover at the top; having traced the footsteps of Divine Goodness through all the most minute productions of his handmaid Nature, and yet finding human reason puzzled and at a loss in giving an account of his almighty power and infinite wisdom in the least and meanest of his works; with what pious humility must he needs entertain supernatural truths, when upon trial he had found every the plainest thing in common nature itself was mystery, and saw he had as much reason for his believing these proposals of faith, as he had for trusting the operations of sense, or the collections of reason itself.
“I know there is an unworthy reproach cast upon this excellent study that it inclines men to atheism. 'Tis true the ignorance and corruption of men that profess any of the three honourable faculties, bring scandal upon the faculty itself. Again, sciolists and half-witted men are those that discredit any science they meddle with. But he that pretends to the noble skill of physic, and dares to deny that which doth continually incurrere in sensus, that which in all his researches and experiments he must meet with at every turn, I dare to say he is no Physician; or at least that he doth at once give his profession and his conscience too the lye.”
