Chapter XXXVII: Famous Englishmen Not in Politics

I

There are, perhaps, a few names of to-day which it is possible to mention without becoming involved in the politics of to-day. The English, it is true, draw a broader line between what is purely political and what is personal than we do. They can give and take hard knocks, whether in Parliament or on the platform or even in the Press, without animosity or resentment. But since in America it seems to be supposed that any reference to these encounters may have its danger side I avoid them for the present. I turn away from the Revolutionary present, of which one's stock of Memories increases day by day, to the more peaceful past or to a more peaceful world in the present; a world unravaged by political passions. True, the past was not always a peaceful past while it lasted. We do not always remember how fierce were the storms which have subsided. But where Death has made a solitude we call it peace.

In two, at least, of the great contests waged these periods of peace I had a share, which {353} I must mention again for the sake of another story I have to tell. One was the conflict about Irish Home Rule which became critical and revolutionary in 1881 and 1886; when I was allowed to state my own views, unpopular as they were in America, in _The Tribune_ week by week or day by day; a policy of generous and far-sighted courage on the part of that journal; honourable to its editor and I hope in the long run not injurious to the paper.

The second was in 1895 and 1896, in _The Times_ of London. When President Cleveland flung his message of war upon the floor of the House at Washington in December, 1895, I necessarily had much to say about it in _The Times_. There again I was given a free hand. It is sometimes said that the correspondents of this journal frame their news dispatches in accordance with orders issued to them from the home office. I can only say, if indeed I may say so much without violating obligations of secrecy, that during a service which lasted ten years I never knew of or heard of any such orders.

Coming to England in the summer of 1896 on a holiday, I had some slight illness and asked a friend whom I should consult. My own doctor was by that time attending patients, I suppose, in another and better world. My friend said he had lately seen fourteen physicians about his son and each of the fourteen had given a different name to his son's disease.

"Then I went to Dr. Barlow, who said, after a {354} long examination, 'I do not know what is the matter with your son nor what to prescribe for him.' Then I felt I had found a doctor whom I could trust."

So I went to Dr. Barlow, without an introduction. At the end of a rather long consultation and a definite opinion and a settled prescription, I asked what his fee was.

"Nothing."

I thought he had misunderstood my question, and repeated it.

"Nothing. I can take no money from a man who has done as much as you have to keep the peace between the two countries."

When I next saw the manager of _The Times_ I told him of this incident, which he seemed to think interesting. He said:

"Such evidences of good feeling from a man so distinguished as Barlow and so far removed from politics do indeed make for good feeling on both sides. I hope you will tell all your own people."

It is difficult, for I cannot tell it without more or less directly paying a compliment to myself. But many years have since ebbed away. Modesty is at best but an inconvenient handmaiden, from whom I would part company if I could. Let her keep to her proper place. An obligation of honour is peremptory; and this, perhaps, is one. I did tell a certain number of friends at the time, and now I repeat the anecdote to a larger number. I set it against Mr. Price Collier's mischievous dictum that English and Americans do not like each {355} other. The dictum already seems to belong to a distant and misty and mythical past.

Since that year of 1896 Dr. Barlow has become (in 1902) Sir Thomas Barlow, Bart., and Physician to the King's Household; about as high as anybody can go in the medical profession. A Lancashire lad to begin, with, he has had a vast hospital experience, and still keeps up his hospital work; he has a vast private practice; Harvard and two Canadian universities have given him their LL.D.; he is an F.R.S., a K.C.V.O., and other parts of the alphabet pay him tribute. All these and many other titles and distinctions have their value, though the late Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, who had more than most men, did say: "They give me every kind of letter to my name except L.S.D." But the essential thing in Sir Thomas Barlow's case is that he has the confidence of the public and of his profession.

One thing, it seems to me, the great surgeons and physicians I have known had in common. They were great men, first of all. They had great qualities outside of their profession. Two years ago last September, a time when the big men are mostly away, I wanted a surgeon and knew not where to find one. A chemist finally gave me a name, Mr. Henry Morris, and an address; name wholly unknown to me, though the address, Cavendish Square, implied at least professional prosperity. I had had a fall at the Playhouse, as Mr. Maude calls his little theatre, the night before, leaving a box by what I supposed {356} to be steps and in the absence of steps coming down on the floor, bruised, and I knew not what else. My surgeon made his examination. What struck me was that he wasted never a word nor a gesture. The touch of his hands, of his fingers, had a mathematical or instrumental precision. So had his questions. In five minutes or less he had covered the ground and delivered his opinion. Anything might have happened, but nothing had, bar the bruised muscles. "We'll attend to those for you." He asked if I was leaving town and when I said I was sailing for New York on Saturday he remarked:

"If you were a working-man I should send you to the hospital and you would be kept in bed till you were well. But if you choose to sail on the _Lusitania_ you must bear the pain. Now, as you are here, you might as well let me overhaul you."

Then, as before, the same precision, the same delicacy of touch, the same rapidity, nothing hurried, nothing missed; his examination a work of art as well as of science. Then he began to talk of other things; and again, and even stronger, was the impression of being in contact with a master mind. Seldom have I spent a more stimulating hour. He was, I found later, Mr. Henry Morris, Consulting Surgeon to the Middlesex Hospital and President of the Royal College of Surgeons. In other words, Mr. Henry Morris, about whom I ought to have known, but did not, was, and is, in the very front rank of his profession. His eminence has since been recognized and {357} rewarded by the King, and he is now Sir Henry Morris, Bart. I suppose even a Republican may admit that if titles are to be conferred they are well conferred on men eminent in science.

II

Sir Thomas Barlow has since been elected President of the Royal College of Physicians in succession to Sir Douglas Powell. This is the Blue Ribbon of the profession, perhaps a greater honour than a knighthood or baronetcy, though the knighthood or the baronetcy is from the King, the source and fountain of all such distinctions. But the Presidency of the Royal College of Physicians is conferred by the Profession itself. The Fellows of the College, who number some three hundred, are the choosing body. They vote by ballot and the man whom they elect is the man by whom they wish to be represented before the public; the man by whom they are content to be judged. They say, in effect, of him whom they choose: "This is the Head of the Medical Profession for the time being." The public, which really and rightly has much more confidence in the judgment of the doctors upon each other than in any lay reputation, accepts that. When you say of a physician, "He is a doctors' doctor," you have said about all you can.

The President of the Royal College of Physicians has, no doubt, duties which are not medical. He has executive, administrative, consultative {358} duties; and the very important duty of dining with the Lord Mayor, the Corporation of the City of London, and the City Companies. In discharging these latter functions he incurs, I suppose, less risk than most men incur. But risk or no risk these feasts have to be faced. Between all Corporations, Guilds, and Colleges there is a kind of freemasonry. They have points of contact, of sympathy, and are likely to stand by each other in difficulties. Whether dinners were invented as a test and standard of friendship, I cannot say. But go to which of them you like, you will find a collection of the Heads of other Companies, Colleges, etc.; not all, perhaps, dinner-giving, but all willing victims of others' hospitality.

The Royal College of Physicians is also a Senate or Parliament; with powers of legislation and of professional guidance and discipline. The Fellows of this College are Trustees for the whole Profession. The President has an authority of his own, depending in part on statutes and on custom, in part on his personal authority. In the latter Sir Thomas Barlow will not be found wanting. It is not the less, it is perhaps the greater, for the genial good nature which accompanies it. I said to him once:

"Sir Thomas, you have one quality which must be a great drawback to your success."

"Dear me, what is that?"

"When you come into a room your patient at once thinks himself better, and even doubts whether he need have sent for you at all, and so {359} gets well much quicker than he ought. It's taking money out of your pocket."

"Very good. I'll take care you don't get well too soon."

There was an electioneering story--oh, no politics in it--the other day with an equally serious but not more serious, side to it. Men were discussing the system of plural voting still prevailing in this country and certain to prevail so long as votes, or any votes, are based on property qualification. Said a well-known doctor:

"I have sixteen votes, all of which I am going to poll."

"But how?"

"Oh, I have two votes of my own and I have fourteen patients who are of the wrong party and not one of them will be well enough to go out till after election."

Think how completely non-political must be a profession of which an eminent member can tell a story like that and run no risk of being misunderstood. The traditions of honour are indeed high among English doctors, nor could they be in better keeping than now in Sir Thomas Barlow's.

One of his predecessors, Sir William Gull, was also not merely fashionable and popular but recognized by his associates as a scientific practitioner. Sir William Jenner was perhaps reckoned by the medical profession the best all-round man ever known. Sir William Gull was not far off, yet there is an anecdote of him which suggests that he put a very high value on the average capacity {360} of doctors. He was asked to go a long distance into the country to see a patient. He declined. He was told that any fee he liked to name would be gladly paid. Still he declined, saying there were cases he could not leave, and when he was pressed further the great man burst out:

"But why do you want me? There are five hundred doctors in London just as good as I am."

Which perhaps was not quite true.

Sir William Broadbent said almost the same thing to me, twenty years ago and more, when I asked him to see Mr. Hay whom I had just left in his rooms, in Ryder Street, St. James's, to all appearance extremely ill. Hay said in his emotional way:

"Broadbent is the only doctor I believe in. If you don't bring Broadbent bring nobody. Let me die."

But Broadbent said no. He was starting to catch a train for a life and death consultation in the country. He must not miss his train.

"But there's time enough. See Hay on your way to the train. Give him five minutes and let somebody else do the rest."

"I shall let somebody else do the whole."

"Hay will see nobody unless he sees you first."

"There are plenty of men as good as I am. I will give you half a dozen names."

"I want none of them. I want you. You know you can stop your carriage for five minutes as you drive to the station."

"My carriage has not come round."

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"My hansom is at the door. Drive with me and let your carriage follow."

Finally he did. When he came out of Hay's bedroom he was a very angry man. He said:

"Your friend has a bad attack of indigestion. He will be all right in an hour."

And away he went. An angry man is not always a just man. Hay--God bless his memory--thought himself suffering from a heart attack. There is, I believe, a medical analogy between the symptoms of heart disease and violent indigestion. I had left him lying on the floor almost in convulsions. How was he to know it was not heart disease, to which he believed himself subject? Hay was not then, to the English, so great a man as he afterwards became. He had not been Ambassador, nor Secretary of State, nor dictated to the European Powers a new policy in the East. I ought not to use the word dictated. It is not descriptive of Hay's methods, which were persuasive. Nor does one Power dictate to another. Let us say he had secured by the adroit use of accepted diplomatic methods the adhesion of the European Powers to his proposals in respect of China. No American Secretary of State had ever made so original or beneficent a use of his power. He had brought his country once for all into the great world-partnership of great Powers the world over.

Sir William Broadbent did not foresee that. He could not. If he had he might have been less angry, for he was thought to be considerate of greatness in all its forms or in many of them. He {362} liked patients of distinction, which is no reproach. He had many of them. But the odd thing was that he seemed never quite able to overcome his awe of rank and title. In a company of persons of rank his manner was not that of an equal. He used to address persons of rank as a servant addresses them; or it might be kinder to say as inferiors in position used to address their superiors two or three generations ago. And always with embarrassment.

Another celebrated man of medicine, Sir Andrew Clark, had an almost factitious renown as Mr. Gladstone's doctor, and Mr. Gladstone was a very good patient, in one sense. One thing this famous physician had; he had absolute confidence in himself. Or, if no doctor has that, he had enough to give his patient confidence, which is perhaps not less important. Old Abernethy used to say: "The second best remedy is best if the patient thinks it best." And I suppose that is as true of doctors as of remedies. If Sir Andrew doubted, he never allowed you to see that he doubted. Like all these great men, he had a social as well as medical popularity and he was very good company at dinner and after.

One evening I met him at a pleasant house where there was a good cook and the company, including the host, did not exceed six; all men. We all noticed that Sir Andrew drank champagne. Presently one of the men said:

"You don't allow us champagne, Sir Andrew, but you allow it to yourself."

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"Oh, I have had a long day, and I am very tired, and I must have it. Besides, when I get home there'll be thirty or forty letters to answer."

So the champagne flowed on, like the water, as Mr. Evarts said, at one of President Hayes's White House dinners. Sir Andrew drank no more than anybody else. It was only because of his habit of prohibiting it to others that we noticed whether his glass was full or empty. As we went upstairs I said to him:

"Do you mean that after all that champagne you are going to answer thirty or forty letters when you get home?"

"No, certainly not."

"Then what did you mean?"

"What I meant was that after my champagne I should not care whether they were answered or not."

It was Sir Andrew Clark who said of Mr. Gladstone, some fifteen years before his death at eighty-eight that there was no physiological reason why he should not live to be 120. If that was meant as a prophecy it had the fate of most prophecies.

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