Chapter I: Part 1

_Post Mortems: II_
MERE MORTALS

_Boswell_: But of what use will my book be when it is finished?

_Johnson_: Never mind the use—do it!

* * * * *

History is an Art and should be written with imagination.

ANATOLE FRANCE.

_Post Mortems: Two_

Mere Mortals

Medico-Historical Essays

By
C. MacLaurin
M.B.C.M., F.R.C.S.E., Hon. Deg. Padua
_Lately Lecturer in Clinical Surgery, the
University of Sydney; Late Consulting
Surgeon, Royal Prince Alfred
Hospital, Sydney; Late Honorary
Surgeon, Royal
Hospital for Women,
Sydney_

New York
George H. Doran Company

COPYRIGHT, 1925,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

MERE MORTALS
—B—
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

This book is
Affectionately Dedicated
To my Wife
and
To my Daughter
MRS. A. P. MACKERRAS

Preface

Great numbers of people, especially medical men, have written to me asking me to continue the short studies of great men of the past that I began in _Post Mortem_; and the result is the present volume.

Many reviewers complained that _Post Mortem_ contained too much “medical jargon,” whatever that may mean. There is doubtfully such a thing as medical jargon; it is merely a method of expressing thoughts for which there is no English equivalent except by the method of a cumbrous sentence. For that reason I have tried to translate my thoughts into English whenever it is possible. If by mischance a technical term should have crept in, you will find most medical terms in any decent modern English dictionary; or failing that, they are all simply taken from the Greek. But there is another jargon than medical. There is the filthy jargon which insists on saying “the Red Plague” when we mean syphilis; or “in a certain interesting condition” when we mean to say “pregnant.”

That jargon I absolutely refuse to use. Those elderly people with fixed minds who prefer that sort of thing had better stick to _Little Arthur_ or something equally fictitious. As a doctor writing on very serious subjects I must claim the doctor’s privilege of writing with absolute frankness; without suspicion of coarseness.

And I beg you not to accept as diagnoses what are sheer speculations.

Acknowledgments

The first drafts of these essays appeared in the _Australasian Medical Journal_, _The Sydney Bulletin_, the Australian _Home, Art in Australia_, and the Australian _Forum_. They have nearly all been considerably modified with the growth of knowledge and frequent rewriting. I have to thank Miss Kibble, of the New South Wales Public Library, for assisting me immensely in hunting up many authorities from whom I quote. Without her help this book could never have been written.

Glossary

_Imperative idea_: An idea that, however malapropos it may be,
keeps mounting into consciousness.

_Obsession_: An imperative idea that compels appropriate action.

_Phobias_: Unconscious fears, often acquired in early infancy,
which may ruin a man’s whole life for him. There are many
different kinds of “phobia” of which syphilophobia is probably
the most common.

These three are all signs of:

_Psychasthenia_: A weird half-sister of neurasthenia, generally
the result of heredity, combined with abnormal education in
early youth. In the psychasthenic state the patient may be
subject to all manner of imperative ideas, obsessions and
phobias. Sometimes he stammers, sometimes he is compelled by
his “unconscious” to jerk his limbs about in quaint antics;
sometimes he is afflicted with awful doubts and scruples.[1]

All the other medical terms are, I think, explained in the text as they arise.

Contents

PAGE

DR. JOHNSON 17

KING HENRY THE SAINT 40

_The Tragedy of the Tudors_:

(_a_) KING HENRY VIII 50

(_b_) EDWARD VI 76

(_c_) MARY TUDOR 86

(_d_) QUEEN ELIZABETH 93

IVAN THE TERRIBLE 103

LUTHER’S DEVIL 117

HENRY FIELDING 128

KING JAMES I 136

KING CHARLES I 143

KING CHARLES II, CATHERINE OF BRAGANZA AND NELL GWYNN 148

HENRI QUATRE AND MARGUERITE DE VALOIS 163

FREDERICK THE GREAT 189

THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE 209

SOME EPIDEMICS OF SOCIAL IMPORTANCE 222

F. W. NIETZSCHE 247

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 255

BARUCH SPINOZA 269

Mere Mortals

Dr. Johnson

There can be little doubt that the illustrious Dr. Johnson was a psychasthenic. His father could see in life nothing but gloom, though his mother seems to have been hearty and sensible enough. Therefore presumably we are entitled to say that the Great Cham’s family history was faulty. At an early age he developed some trouble that his parents diagnosed as scrofula, or tuberculous glands of the neck, but Boswell expressly hints was suspected to have been caught from a nurse. They took him to England’s kindly but not intelligent majesty, Queen Anne, who, wearing a long black hood and diamonds to impress her patients, touched him for his “grievous malady.” But she did not cure him; rather it would seem that she made him worse; for all Johnson’s frightful jerkings and grimaces, roarings and puffings, may possibly be traced back to that one moment of nervous tension when he felt himself a little boy, the observed of all observers, waiting to be touched by the sister-in-law of William the Dutchman.

A child of bad heredity—indeed any child—must be treated with the utmost care long before it appears to be conscious, before it appears to take notice of what is going on around it; quarrelsome parents and angry nurses may so warp his whole mental outlook that it is spoiled for life. And it could not have been a good thing for the coming Great Cham to subject him to such nervous strain as was necessarily involved in taking him before Queen Anne. He was lucky in that it did not make him stammer. Many a sensitive boy has been made to stammer by less than was involved in Sam’s childish treatment. Long before a child appears to be conscious its mind is taking notice of all that goes on around it, and its whole future life may be warped in one moment of terror or anxiety. And the sad thing is that probably Mrs. Johnson senior had made a mistake in diagnosis, that probably little Sam was not suffering from scrofula at all, but from some swelling of the glands of the neck that was due to something in his scalp. That he lived till he was seventy-five seems to show that he never suffered either from tuberculosis or syphilis, those two great slayers; and if his glands had really been tuberculous it is probable that, bursting, they would have formed a “mixed infection” that would have had more serious effects than mere local scarring.

It is possible that while the incident persisted in Johnson’s conscious memory as a “confused and solemn memory,” in his unconscious memory it may have persisted in those extraordinary antics which to Boswell seemed a sort of St. Vitus’s dance. Perhaps in them we see the struggles of a sensitive little boy to avoid the frightful ordeal of being “touched” and resentment at the insult to his masculine grandeur. We know that his masculinity had already been very much insulted at the age of three when a schoolmistress ran after him lest he fall into the gutter.

Psychasthenia is a grim half-sister to neurasthenia, from which it appears to differ in that, while neurasthenia merely shows that the man’s nervous system is not sufficiently strong to stand the stout clouts and buffets of this wicked world, in psychasthenia he has never had a chance. The best translation of the term “psychasthenic” appears to be “unbalanced,” and, though probably psychasthenia was about the best term that Professor Janet could have selected for this queer condition, still it conveys an unwarranted implication of imbecility, for many men of the greatest genius have been utterly unbalanced. The man of genius is seldom actually insane, but he is often unbalanced and of the manic-depressive temperament; at any moment he may be “knocked off his perch” and may become definitely insane.

Thus, subject always to the possible denial of the alienists, I should certainly imagine that Beethoven was psychasthenic, for he was always falling in and out of love, was constantly quarrelling with his landlords, cast his rice pudding at the cook, jammed his hat fiercely on his head when he and Goethe walked before royalty, was looked upon as crazy, and used to run about the fields trying to roar the latest melody that had come into his head. And Charles Lamb not only stammered but had a sister who was definitely insane.

The unbalanced are subject to queer actions which appear to take their origin in the unconscious mind. Thus, there arise from the unconscious into consciousness imperative ideas which insist on recognition however malapropos they may happen to be. Sometimes these actually go on to form obsessions, and I must ask you to permit me to define these two important terms. The imperative idea simply arises into consciousness out of the unconscious. When it compels appropriate action it is generally, though not always, called an obsession. Thus, when Johnson walked along Fleet Street the imperative idea arose from his unconscious that it would be a fitting thing to put his hand upon every horse-post that he passed. When he did so or turned on his tracks that no horse-post should be left uncapped the definition of an obsession would appear to be correct. And from the unconscious arise those queer phobias or fears which often so strangely influence their actions.

Still gossiping about the unbalanced, was St. Francis of Assisi entirely sane when he left all the money that he owed his father on a heap of his clothes and set out to build a church with his own hands? If this be insanity let us have more of it. The ordinary sane stodgy man does not lead the world; secure in his stodginess he makes money and lives happy ever after. But the genius is always a little “cracked,” otherwise he would probably not be a genius. And so many of them have been ill men; in fact one can hardly call to mind as one writes a single really healthy and sane genius, unless possibly Sir Walter Scott. St. Francis is said to have had renal tuberculosis.

That is probably the only real serious objection to birth-control; you can never tell whom you are condemning to perpetual absence of life. Thus Abraham Lincoln, strictly speaking, should never have been born, for his mother, Nancy Hanks, though never insane, lived all her life in the depths of gloom and on the verge of insanity. Yet it would appear that the absence of Old Abe at a given crisis of the world’s history might have made some difference to civilisation. And even if we are to take bodily health as the criterion of fitness, what about Mozart, the tuberculous and pallid little genius of Vienna whom many people still consider as the very greatest musician that ever lived? Certainly not even Beethoven in his first period ever attained to Mozart’s delicious childlikeness of touch.

If the world had insisted that St. Francis of Assisi, Abe Lincoln, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart should not have been born one would think that the world would now be a poorer place than it is. And one names only a few; for Spinoza should never have been born, doomed to live only a few years and then to die of tuberculosis while he was mystically trying to reduce God to a mathematical formula.

In fact one could go on for weeks on this subject, and the conclusion that any fair-minded person must reach is that birth-control, even of the apparently unfit, is too risky an experiment for the human race to try if it wishes to keep its geniuses. You never can tell what the infant may turn out that you are preventing from being born. But I am aware that this is a highly contentious subject, and that awful thing, “the sex-war,” is involved in it. People are sure to have differences of opinion about it; since woman has risen to her new estate these opinions will assuredly be held with more vigour than ever.

“Treat ’em rough” is a known and tried aphorism, which has been elevated to a pitch of almost epic grandeur by Schopenhauer’s “Pitch ’em downstairs”; and probably some such aphorism was in Johnson’s mind when he rode with old Mrs. Porter to the church that they might be married, and, you remember, reduced her to tears before they got there. Up till then he probably had only the poet’s knowledge of woman; but that after such an ill beginning the marriage turned out so happily, seems to argue that Mrs. Porter, though she might paint her face, was nevertheless a woman with the heart of a lion to tame his aggressively masculine soul. And it is quite possible that before she died—she was twice his age, you know—he began to have for her a love similar to that one has for a mother. Of course it may be that Boswell, in his uncomplimentary description of Johnson’s wife, was misled by jealousy of her who sat too near the throne of his hero-worship. But in any case she must have been a remarkable woman to tame Ursa Major as she did.

If one were to translate psychasthenic into “poor in spirit”—which is not very far from its Greek meaning—probably we should come very near to its real inner meaning; and we have the best possible authority for knowing the post-mortem future of the poor in spirit. If the Kingdom of Heaven is to be composed of such men as Johnson and Beethoven it would not be a bad place to inhabit, though the shade of Johnson would certainly insist on carrying home some fallen angel, while Beethoven would probably throw something at a monotonous orchestra of harps, if he could hear it.

In support of the contention that towards the end of her life he had begun to consider Mrs. Porter as less a wife in the ordinary sense of the term than a mother-surrogate whom he could trust as a faithful friend who would never desert him whatever the circumstances, here is a letter that he wrote to the Rev. Dr. Taylor on the day she died:

“SIR,

“Pray desire Mrs. Taylor to inform me what mourning I should
buy for my mother and Miss Porter, and bring a note of writing
with you.”

His dear wife dead he could not trust himself even to buy mourning without her aid.

He appears not to have been able even to take care of himself without some woman to act the mother towards him. Years later he found another mother-surrogate in Mrs. Thrale, who saw to it that he wore respectable clothing with brass buttons, and silver buckles—not too big—on his shoes. It was evidently a severe blow to him when the naughty thing went and married Signor Piozzi, for it left him without a single woman to show him how to take care of himself.

That nervous malady which Boswell diagnosed as a sort of St. Vitus’s dance probably merely represented the violent impulsive and involuntary movements occasionally seen in psychasthenia; had the defect affected the nerves of speech Johnson would probably have stammered; but one can never imagine a man so aggressive stammering.

How far back in life is it possible to remember? Freud thinks that the first five years of life are not retained in conscious memory, although they exercise the greatest possible influence upon our afterlives. Personally I try to think that my first recollection is that of the frightful itching that accompanied the wearing of my first pair of knickerbockers, which my mother used to tell me occurred on my fourth birthday; but it is so difficult to distinguish between what you remember and what older people have told you that one must sometimes think that after all probably Freud may be right, and it is impossible to remember before the fifth birthday.

Johnson’s roars and bluster were probably really to conceal an innate shyness that is frequently seen in very nervous men. In further evidence that he was at heart a shy man here is a letter that he wrote to his old friend Dr. Birch:

“March 29, 1765.

“To Dr. Birch,

“Sir:

“I have sent some parts of my dictionary, such as were at hand,
for your inspection. The favour which I ask of you is that if
you do not like them, you will say nothing.

“I am, sir,

“Your most affectionate humble servant,

“SAM JOHNSON.”

He could not even bear to hear the faithful words of his old friend about the child of his brain, though he felt himself entitled to sign “your most affectionate humble servant.”

Like most men of apparently strong common sense, when you look too critically into their dogmata, Johnson’s common sense begins to look more like uncommon foolishness; for it was certainly no answer to Bishop Berkeley’s metaphysics to bang his foot against a stone. It requires a far more subtle argument which must probably be fortified by the eye of faith, which, you remember, has been defined as “the faculty of believing what you know to be untrue.” But Johnson’s argument is the sort of bluff obvious thing that so appeals to a common-sense person like John Bull. And doubtless that is why Johnson has so appealed to John Bull that he has almost been elevated to the pinnacle of a national hero. Full of rats, poor old gentleman; yet one can’t help loving him for his rats.

As woman seldom stammers, so she is seldom afflicted by psychasthenia, which, being a variation, appears to be almost confined to the male, like genius. Woman is seldom “ratty”; she has far too much hard common sense. Who ever heard of women killing each other to settle whether a word should be spelt homooisian or homoousian? Or to decide whether there are three Gods or One? Yet men have waged savage tumult over these very things, which no person can possibly know. Sometimes lady novelists seem to go ratty when they try to describe men, and ultimately describe some creature who is like nothing on earth; but it is only fair to say that such lady novelists are suspected by men to be between the ages of forty and fifty, and probably for a time slightly unbalanced. But the normal average woman is far saner than the normal average man. Once she has secured her man her chief duty afterwards seems to be to see that his rats do not lead him away from the paths of respectability, into such nonsense as that of Bernard Palissy, for instance, who burned even his furniture to keep the stove going that might lead to the discovery of a porcelain glaze, even though his wife and children might starve. No woman ever followed a will-o’-the-wisp with such fury, simply because no woman was ever so ratty; it is hardly respectable; it seems to be purely a matter of sex-physiology.

But we must dilate yet a little further on the utterly unbalanced character of Johnson. An incident is told of him in 1784, when he was about 74 years of age; as it is impossible to tell it better than Boswell, let us leave it in Boswell’s own words. “Coming home late one night he found a poor woman lying in the street, so much exhausted that she could not walk; he took her upon his back” (by the way it was a quite unnecessarily laborious and cumbersome way to carry a woman; for a giant like Sam it would have seemed an easier matter to stoop down and pick her up in his arms), “and carried her to his home, where he found her to be one of those wretched females who have sunk to the lowest levels of vice, poverty, and disease. Instead of upbraiding her he had her taken care of with all care and tenderness for a long time at considerable expense, till she was restored to health and endeavoured to put her into a virtuous way of living.” This was just the sort of kind, impulsive, and senseless thing that would seem so utterly natural to a psychasthenic and so utterly silly to a normal man. We know now that it is almost impossible to reclaim a prostitute, for no normal woman ever becomes a prostitute. Normal woman always has far too much dignity and self-respect and reads too mystic a meaning into the sexual act ever to offer herself to the embraces of any casual man in the street, however great her economic distress; rather if driven into a corner by poverty a normal woman finds some one male friend to help her, so that she may console herself with the thought that at least she is married in the sight of God, if not in the sight of man. Normal woman is essentially monogamous. But Sam appears to have been as hopeful of success as Theodora when she made her famous raid upon the brothels of Byzantium; one would like to know the ultimate success or failure of his adventure into the underworld. We know that poor Theodora failed absolutely. One cannot help wondering what Anna Williams would have thought of it, for women are the enemies of women; but fortunately for her she seems to have been recently dead, having quarrelled with everyone who was open to quarrel with her. If this be true, at least she never knew to what depths of degradation Samuel could sink. But a doctor can easily imagine the fulsome gratitude that would be lavished by the poor starving prostitute upon the huge preserver when she woke up and found him giving her something to eat without wanting anything else from her. Prostitutes do not meet with so much disinterested kindness in this world that it ever palls. That is why it is so sad that sexual reclamation of them is almost impossible, for too often they carry the seeds of their own destruction with them.

Then there is that delicious incident of Mr. Osborn the bookseller. “The fellow insulted me, so I beat him; but it was in the privacy of my own chamber—it was not in his shop.” Of course. To knock down a publisher was only quite right and proper. Who would not do it? But even a publisher has his rights. To do it in his own shop would be to expose him to the insults of his own servants, and that is positively not done, especially by an Oxford man. Rats, pure rats. Yet publishers are said to be fair game for authors and so far no close-season has been proclaimed for them.

Few men attain to the age of seventy odd without some warning that they are mortal and that the grave is waiting. Of course there is the classic instance of Voltaire, who from the age of sixty odd complained of mortal illness, and yet, recovering, lived to a vast age, wizened, malicious, and “peaky” as a rat. But then, like Mr. Blake, Voltaire was a regular out and out hardened sinner and words could not possibly express the contempt that he felt for the mediæval devil of eighteenth-century Christianity. Probably he persisted in living on just to cheat the devil of his just due because he despised him so.

As a matter of fact we often find that soon after fifty some illness attacks a man from which he never really recovers, even though he may appear to be well; there is always the trifling difference in him that marks the passage of the years. Johnson’s warning came to him—though he did not observe it—many years before when Boswell could observe the sight that he made of himself as he gobbled his meals.

He was evidently very fond of eating; himself, he boasted of his delicate tastes in food; and when he ate “the veins of his forehead stood out and a strong perspiration was visible.” This appears to have much disgusted Macaulay, but most of us have seen similar prowess in perfectly worthy men. Presumably when Boswell said “the veins of his forehead” he meant the superficial temporal arteries, for if they had really been the soft and thin-walled veins, Johnson, bestrewn with bladders, would have looked indeed noteworthy. But there came a time when they stood out once too often, and probably they never shrank back again to the normal size, but became thickened. Thus his blood-pressure rose under the strain of arteriosclerosis and in the course of years the inevitable results of gluttony overtook him. Drink, guzzle, and syphilis are the three deadly sins, and they are deadly in proportion to the effect that they cause upon the arteries. And in the term “arteries” one includes heart and kidneys. The heart is simply a large expansion of an artery, and the kidneys are merely a network of arterioles and capillaries; if one part goes all the rest follow, and thus it is that the term “cardiovascular disease” is generally used to describe the results of high blood-pressure. It is of course possible that Johnson’s glooms may have been due to intestinal auto-intoxication; but melancholia is a constant companion of an unduly sensitive nervous system.

Warnings came in 1782 with breathlessness and pain in the chest; the heart was evidently beginning to rebel, but the first real alarming warning came on the night of June 17th, 1783, when he awoke in the middle of the night and found that he could not speak. Trying to write, he found that “my hand made wrong letters,” that is to say he had not only aphasia, but “agraphia” or loss of power to write. Possibly if anybody had happened to think of it he might have been able to communicate with the outer world by means of children’s block letters. But nobody did; and when his servant came in the morning he could not comprehend why the old gentleman expected him to read something that he had written instead of speaking in answer to his own chatter.

This sudden aphasia in old people is not uncommon, and may be due to several causes, that all in one way or other affect the so-called “speech centre” of the brain. As the “writing centre” is situated in the very near vicinity, it is not surprising that a lesion that affects one generally also affects the other. That Johnson’s right hand was not also paralysed at the same time is rather unusual, because the left side of the brain which controls the right side of the body also contains the speech centre; and it is supposed that it does so because man has for many thousands of years been accustomed to use his right hand more than his left, wherefore the left side of his brain would naturally be more ready to acquire new functions than the right, which only controls the comparatively awkward left hand. If this theory be true it would rather seem to show that men were accustomed to use their right hands long before they could speak; and this indeed is quite probable.

The exact lesion would appear to have been that one of the cerebral arteries that supplied the left side of Johnson’s brain had for some reason been thrown into a state of spasm, and caused temporary softening of the brain owing to interference with its blood-supply. If an artery had actually burst on the site of a tiny aneurysm, as occasionally happens in cases of arteriosclerosis, the old man would not have recovered so soon, even temporarily. As it was, he seems to have recovered sufficiently by July to pay a visit to Dr. Langton at Rochester. The shock and terror induced by an attack of aphasia are generally very dreadful. I remember one elderly lady, who had always been of a most gentle and virtuous way of living, who one day suddenly sat up in bed with a scream, clutching at her bedclothes and at her throat and uttering meaningless noises like an ape. Twelve hours later she had for a time recovered her power of speech, and after lying musing for half an hour, said in her customary gentle voice, “I should like some fish; they say fish is good for the brain.” She had somewhere read that fish contains a large amount of phosphorus, which is supposed to be good for the brain—by patent-medicine vendors. But I shall never forget the scream of that poor lady, nor the look of terror that came over her gentle face.

Johnson’s terror led him to write a prayer for his recovery, done in Latin verse. “The lines were not very good, but I knew them to be not very good, so concluded that I was not impaired in my faculties.” There you see at once the supreme passion of the man—Learning—coming out in what he thought to be the very article of death.

Then, “in order to rouse the vocal organs, I took two drams. Wine has been celebrated for the production of eloquence, so I put myself into violent motion and I think repeated it; but all was in vain.” It is hardly fair to comment upon this action of a man bemused with terror and aphasia that probably wine was the very worst thing he could have taken; for it tends to raise the blood-pressure. Not that it made much difference; Death was focussing his eyes on Dr. Johnson; the call was coming, and no earthly power could avert it.

But apparently even Boswell nods; for after telling of Johnson’s terrible illness in 1783 he goes on to tell how in _1784_ he was able to put a woman on his back and carry her home. Well, one simply does not believe it; the thing is impossible; Boswell must have got his dates mixed a little; for to carry a woman, even though she were starving and the man a giant, is no small feat; and if the man were very old and had just recovered from an attack of aphasia, it would be absolutely incredible. Really, wonderful though we men are—in no way more wonderful than in our power of believing nonsense—we are not such terrible fellows as some say.

After the paralytic stroke all the devils in hell seem to have settled upon the poor old gentleman, with their gout, dropsy, and continual fear of death. Probably the gout was simply another manifestation of the defect of metabolism—faulty chemical physiological process, or dystrophy—that had caused his high blood-pressure. The asthma and oppression in his chest were probably due to a failing heart; and thence also doubtless came the dropsy; for dropsy is not a disease—it is a symptom of many things, generally cardiac or renal. And his cough became exceedingly troublesome, possibly due to congestion of the base of his lungs that would be caused in a way much the same as caused the dropsy; he was becoming “water-logged.”

A rather remarkable thing is that, once having become filled up with dropsy, he got rid of it apparently suddenly. If I remember rightly Dr. Johnson was taking squills at the time, and squills is still used for getting rid of fluid from the body, though it has been supplanted by more efficient drugs. One might perhaps think that hope told Johnson a flattering tale, but he says expressly that he got rid of twenty pints. Queer things happen in dropsy, and even such a pseudo-miracle as Johnson’s is not unknown. Once water-logged with dropsy, legs, belly, lungs and all, it would have seemed to require a miracle to get him emptied, and miracles seldom happen.

The really wonderful thing is, however, that a man of so gloomy a temperament as the Great Cham should have retained such comparative cheerfulness of spirits as he had even after an experience so depressing as an attack of aphasia. He must have been a remarkably brave old man, which is quite in accordance with his strongly masculine character. And this discovery of the wrong dating of one of the most remarkable things that Boswell tells of him only makes his conduct more heroic; for if what I surmise is true, Miss Williams must have been alive and quarrelsome, ready to give Sam the rough side of her tongue for daring to carry home a woman of abandoned character. Cynics have said that to marry a woman is to marry a conscience; but it is even more terrible when the woman is not a man’s wife, but, old, blind, deaf, and quarrelsome, is dependent on his generosity for a living. She may probably consider it her duty to look after his morals as strictly as though she were his wife.

His actual end seems to have been caused by a mild terminal pneumonia, which in a healthy young person would have been thrown off like a cold in the head; but was too much for ancient lungs and tired heart.

“To be miserable,” said Goldsmith, who had known what it was to be inarticulate and despised, “was to ensure the protection of Dr. Johnson.” Was not that a better definition of sainthood than whimsically to pervert the Sermon on the Mount?

To sum up, probably all Johnson’s psychasthenic involuntary movements, which made him so strange a figure to his contemporaries, took their origin in unconscious memory of some affront to his childish masculinity, such as would be caused by taking him to Queen Anne to be “touched.” And she was not even a king, nor yet even in the direct line of accession either! These women! They will go poking their noses in everywhere.

And possibly here too many have been the source of those extraordinary imperative ideas which it was dangerous to deny, lest he roar at you for an ignorant and intolerant fellow. Assuredly you cannot treat a child too carefully if you want it to grow up a sane and normal member of the human race.

King Henry the Saint

It was probably because of his unfair treatment when he was a child that Henry VI of pathetic memory was driven “psychasthenic” in its etymological meaning of “weak-souled.” His father was Henry V, the strong man of Agincourt; his mother Katherine of Valois, herself the daughter of a lunatic. This little boy, of unsound heredity, was born at Windsor while his father was fighting in France, and barely was he five months old when his mother bethought her that her duty was by the side of her husband. She therefore left her baby to the care of a wet-nurse while she herself crossed the Channel. At that time Henry V was sickening for the illness which was soon to kill him. Probably it was the result of hard fighting and worry, together with, as was so often the case with fifteenth-century kings, eating too much.

When he was less than two years old his faithful lieges of the House of Commons asked that they might see him; so mother, nurse and baby set off in “chairs” from Windsor to London. On a certain Saturday they reached Staines, on the banks of the Thames, and on the following day they had purposed to journey to London. But alas! this defilement of the Sabbath so horrified the little king, then doubtless “teething,” that he set up a vast hullabaloo: so bitterly did he weep that the distracted mother and nurse had perforce to take him back to his lodgings, where doubtless the maternal slipper bore its part in his education, for the horrified chronicler tells us that she used every effort. This may have been the first of the famous thrashings that little Henry received, though probably there had been others; in fact, his boyhood seems, to put it crudely, to have been one long wallop. The day of rest having been passed in consoling the infant, and no doubt giving him teething powders or dill-water, and other days having arrived by effluxion of time, they finally got him up to Westminster, where doubtless he twiddled his toes and “gooed” before an admiring concourse of members of Parliament. Soon afterwards the privy council appointed another nurse, probably because the first had so signally failed to smother his bawlings when his subjects had wished to see him. To her he gave an edict that she was to use “every effort to reasonably chastise Us on meet occasion”; so it was clear that chastisement bulked largely in the thoughts of fifteenth-century educationists in dealing with Henry VI.

When he was five he opened Parliament in person, and was set upon a horse to ride throughout London, where the lieges remarked upon the wonderful likeness he bore to the “lovely countenance” of his illustrious father. Quite probably there was a certain amount of imagination in this remark, because everybody knows how a lump of putty on a baby’s face is stoutly asserted by an adoring nurse to be the living image of the noble Roman nose of its father. The imagination of nurses is indeed wonderful.

Then he was, by the terms of his father’s will, put into the hands of the Earl of Warwick as preceptor. Warwick is generally held to have been the model of a preceptor, but one has doubts; for in after years, when Henry had reached the years of articulate complaint, he meekly spoke to the privy council of the thrashings that he had had to endure. Byron has well summed up the orthodox method of instruction:

“O ye who teach the ingenuous youth of nations,
England, France, Holland, Italy or Spain;
I pray you chastise them on all occasions;
It mends their morals—never mind the pain.”

And as the House of Lancaster was nothing if not orthodox I have no doubt that the good Earl did his duty faithfully by his pupil.

Next he had to be crowned King of England; and the ceremony seems to have been distinguished by the inordinate number of times that the archbishop had to strip the little boy to his undershirt and make him don other robes. A collection of clerics had to assist him off the platform staggering under the weight of that crown which was to prove too heavy for him when the murderous political uproar of the Wars of the Roses came to pass.

Then they took him to Paris to crown him King of France, by order of his father, who, dying, still considered himself the great conqueror of France. According to Miss Christie, biographer of Henry VI, the English did everything possible on the occasion to hurt the feelings of the French, but probably little Henry quite enjoyed the service, just like a modern schoolboy. At any rate he got away for a time from his preceptor, who had been busily employed as gaoler to Joan of Arc, treating her with quite unnecessary savagery.

Then came the long process of making peace with France after the Hundred Years’ War. It seems to have consisted of each side making truces which were meant to be broken as soon as made. Then, when he was twenty-three, his subjects ordered their meek king to get him a wife, and after a hunt with varying fortunes among all the princesses of Western Europe who seemed likely to suit, he selected Margaret of Anjou, an exceedingly pretty and lively girl with whose portrait he fell in love. She was then sixteen, and set off for England with high hopes on both sides. Alas! once more the pathetic tragi-comedy of poor Henry VI’s life displayed itself; for the crossing was terribly rough, and Margaret was desperately seasick. Henry rushed to meet her, doubtless to see if she was as pretty as her picture, but she had caught chicken-pox on the ship and he had to postpone the wedding until the pretty bride recovered. Her experience was almost like that of some English brides, who, reaching Melbourne, have found the mosquitoes so attentive that they have come on to Sydney a mere simulacrum of the blooming fresh beauty that had got on board the ship so hopefully at Tilbury Docks.

Six years later, when the Wars of the Roses were coming into full blast and England was rent in twain by quarrels among aristocratic families which were only to be settled by the rise of the heavy-handed Tudors, she bore him his only son; but the effort was disastrous not to her, but to poor young Henry himself. The anxiety, both over her and over his distracted country, had driven him “melancholy,” and he developed well-marked melancholia.[2] While the king lay helpless and silly, unable even to take cognisance of his new-born son when Margaret held it up to him, Margaret took the leadership of England into her own strong hands.

One cannot help wondering how Margaret got on with the nursing. As she was just about to become a mother herself she could not have been very strong; certainly not strong enough to nurse a great big helpless baby as well as her own tiny pink little new-born. Probably she got the duchess of this or the countess of that to do the bulk of the work—for nursing is hard work. There is far more in it than merely fanning a fevered brow and talking romantic nonsense to a helpless man. One often sees two little energetic women go to a bedside, grasp a sick man where it will not hurt him, and then in the twinkling of an eye, he, a mass of incarnate pain, has been moved to an entirely new position with never a twinge. But—they are _professional_ nurses; it has taken them years to learn the little trick. It does not come to woman by a special gift of God. The most fervent wifely devotion does not compensate for its absence. We saw a great deal of these aristocratic amateur nurses during the war; there was a certain royal lady who sometimes used to help me at operations in London, and a great big kind-hearted smiling woman she was, though not very intelligent. But if she made a blunder—and it was never very serious—she always passed it off with so happy a smile that we always overlooked it.

If my reading of Queen Margaret’s character is correct she was a very determined though not very wise young woman, and if her assistant made a bad break doubtless she felt the rough edge of the queen’s tongue. But the main thing was that poor silly young Henry recovered and his wife was able to get on with her war without being worried by anything worse than the normal troubles of a nursing mother.

If she had been a woman before, nursing her saintly husband as if he had been her son, she became a tigress now that she had a real son of her own to fight for; and we have a vivid picture of her raising an army for the House of Lancaster:

“Many assembled for love they bare to the king, but more for
the fear they had for the queen, whose countenance was so
terrible and whose look was so fearful that to all men against
whom she took a small displeasure her frouning was their
undoing and her indignation was their death.”

Could this furious mænad have been the same as the pretty girl who landed, eager, seasick, and ready for chicken-pox, just before her wedding?

We need not go through the whole melancholy history of the Wars of the Roses, which were really just the fifteenth-century murderous way of holding a general election, but without even our modern profession of principles. Everybody knows how Edward IV became king in one of the temporary lulls, how Henry VI, after another attack of melancholia, was captured in spite of the efforts of his strenuous wife; and how, at the battle of Bosworth Henry VII killed his rival Richard of Gloucester, and at last began modern history with the iron rule of the Tudors. Many of us have been to St. Albans, and will be interested in the two particularly savage elections that were held in that city; by a strange misnomer they have been called battles. The wounded used to run into the vast old cathedral for shelter while the election raged furiously up and down the pleasant streets of that dear old town. Of all the houses that looked down upon the fighting and resounded to the roar of the newly invented cannon I suppose that the only ones still standing are the cathedral itself and the ancient hostelry at which so many of us have had afternoon tea.

Edward IV imprisoned poor hapless Henry for years; but at last the redoubtable Warwick the Kingmaker restored the rightful—and by that time melancholic and imbecile—monarch to the throne, amid general rejoicings. His second reign lasted only ten months, terminating in the Tower. There can be little doubt that Richard of Gloucester murdered him privily therein. In 1910 his remains were dug up, and his thin light skull was found with its remnants of hair still plastered with blood.

It would appear that King Henry took to religion as a means of escape from the miseries of his youth. Probably he felt that in the Church only could he see the slightest sign of sympathy for little overthrashed boys.

He was the gentlest and most virtuous of men. The most violent oath that even his worst sufferings ever wrung from his lips was “Forsoothe and forsoothe,” sometimes varied by “Fie for shame.” Queen Margaret could have done better. Once he fled from a ball because the clothes of the ladies displayed more than he thought proper. But even the fury of Margaret could not protect him when Richard Hunchback found him in the way.

Henry’s obsessions took the form of impulsive and senseless generosity to his supposed friends, and of singing unduly loudly in church. Though he was meek enough, Richard of Gloucester showed him that he could not inherit the earth, and according to some religions Margaret, being a woman, would never have been allowed to show him the way past the golden gate into the kingdom of heaven.

Poor, gentle, virtuous Henry; so well-meaning, yet so overwhelmed by the sense of his sin!

And poor tigerish Margaret of Anjou! If she had had sense enough to “come in out of the wet” we might now be saying “Good Queen Peggy” instead of “Good Queen Bess.” But how can you expect a woman to show common sense and self-restraint when she knows they are attacking her only son? They killed him at last at Tewkesbury almost before her eyes, and thenceforward Margaret became a very tigress and was always intriguing with Louis XI to avenge herself upon the Yorkists.

King Henry VIII

“Never ask me,” said John Hunter, “what I have said or written,
but ask me what my present opinions are and I will tell you.”

“Know syphilis in all its manifestations and relations, and all
other things clinical shall be added unto you.”—OSLER.

It is extraordinary what a popular aversion there seems to be to the idea that this man had syphilis, and that many of his actions were due to his syphilis. To judge by the number of letters that I have received from both England and America one would be inclined to think that he was suffering from measles. This I interpret in two ways: firstly, that people still cling to the idea that syphilis is a “loathsome disease”; secondly, that they do not wish to have their pet ideal of a monster rationally explained in medical terms. As a matter of fact, syphilis is far more than a loathsome disease of skin and bone; it would be quite as reasonable to call it often a very grim disease of brain, mind, soul and body. Since the general use of mercury its skin and bone manifestations have sunk into comparative harmlessness, and since the general use of the arseno-benzol compounds the disease seems to have become still less dangerous to the body; but there is always before us the fact that it may be a very terrible affliction for mind and nervous tissues. But people love to hug their little delusions, and so long as they cling to the idea that it is only a “loathsome disease,” so long will syphilis continue to destroy the flower of the human race—hard-working intellectual middle-aged men who once upon a time were very human youths.

And there seems to be a misconception about its hereditary nature. The child of a syphilitic may be apparently healthy in appearance, though its resistance to other diseases may be low; it would need a blood examination by Wassermann’s test to make sure that its troubles were really syphilitic. It need not necessarily show the classical symptoms of “snuffles,” wasting, and rash. All that may happen is that its whole body resisting power is damaged, and it falls a prey to one or other of the innumerable disease germs that are always ready to attack us.

Furthermore, so virulent is sectarian prejudice that almost every single point about Henry’s life seems still to be in dispute. If anybody could tell me a safe track through the maze of conflicting accounts of the reign of Henry Tudor, between the modern feminists who still cling to the idea that he was an unspeakable monster, the Roman Catholic Church which still paints him as the very devil, Froude who hailed him as the great Protestant hero of the Reformation, and the accounts of the ordinary man who looks upon him as a bloodthirsty spot of grease—I believe Charles Dickens used that elegant description—I should welcome it; but as I have no criterion of truth but what medical experience has shown me to be true of men, women and disease, I can only follow the account of him given by Professor Pollard, who, treating him with studied moderation, was prepared to consider him as the “great Erastrian,” the protagonist of State against Church. No doubt that is substantially true. It is not for a doctor to say.

Even the number of premature births endured by his wives is in dispute; and all sorts of cock-and-bull stories are made up to show that his children, if born alive, or his wives if they took ill were singularly subject to the effects of cold and overlong christenings. Once would be all very well; but when it happens more than once it becomes suspicious. It is wonderful what people can invent when they wish to explain a thing by religious and political conspiracies—of which they can really _know_ nothing in an age so utterly different from ours, in which the actors have long gone beyond our intimate knowledge—when the obvious medical truth is staring them in the face. Human beliefs have changed, but syphilis is still the same.

I follow Pollard because he impresses me as a man of common sense. I have not met him; but the sheer virulent abuse of the ordinary man is no argument and is a better description of the critic’s own mind than of his subject.

The facts which can only reasonably be explained by the idea that he was suffering from constitutional syphilis are as follows—I put them in the order in which they impress myself:

(_a_) The extraordinary number of premature births and dead
children from two of his wives, one of whom was young and
healthy. The early death of Catherine’s first-born son is
attributed to the strain of a long christening on a bitter
midwinter day.

(_b_) The poor health of at least three of his children, Mary
Tudor, Edward VI, and the illegitimate Duke of Richmond;
whether Elizabeth escaped the infection is at least doubtful
since Professor Chamberlain has carefully investigated the
details of her health.

(_c_) The terrible degeneration, mental, moral, and physical,
which set in in his early middle age.

(_d_) The facts contained in the extract from the _British
Medical Journal_ of 1910: “From being an able and athletic man
he had become a mass of loathsome infirmities. He was bloated
in face and so unwieldy that he could hardly pass through an
ordinary door. His legs were swollen and covered with festering
sores, causing an unbearable stench. Towards the end those
about him saw that death was at hand, though, according to
Foxe, he would never allow it to be mentioned in his hearing.
Kings never seem to have liked it to be recognised that they
are mortal, in which reluctance to face facts they are much
like other people.”

(_e_) The sinus in his leg which caused him unbearable agony
whenever it was closed. This seems to have been syphilitic
periostitis occurring in an essentially neurotic man.

(_f_) Death in stupor at the comparatively early age of
fifty-five.