Chapter V: Part 5

From Russia the dire disease spread rapidly into almost every country in Europe, and wherever it appeared created the profoundest awe and the most bewildering terror. In Paris it broke out with extreme malignity in March, 1832, and soon raged there with greater virulence than it had exhibited in any other city in Europe except St. Petersburg. The deaths soon reached from four to five hundred daily, and during April they rose to a total for the month of twelve thousand seven hundred. It was hinted that the ravages of this new and dreadful disease were caused by the poisoning of the meat sold in the markets and the water in the public fountains; and the dwellers in the slums became so infuriated by this horrible and absurd rumour that mobs perambulated the streets howling for vengeance on the poisoners. Many unfortunate persons were murdered in the streets on being denounced as the perpetrators of these imaginary crimes, and so paralysed was the arm of justice by the influence of terror that nothing was done to vindicate the majesty of the law. Everyone who could afford to leave Paris fled from it with precipitation, and the city was abandoned to desolation and anarchy. The legislative labours of the two Chambers were suspended, and the peers and deputies were the first to set the example of flight, though Louis Philippe and his family continued to reside at the Tuileries, with an occasional sojourn of a few days at Neuilly.

I have a vivid recollection of the mingled awe and terror which this fell disease inspired when it was announced that it had crossed the sea and made its first victims in this country. It had made its way across the continent from town to town on the banks of the great rivers, but into England it was imported by sick sailors. Many generations had passed away since anything like a pestilence had been known in England, and the cholera therefore created a panic among all classes of the people, which served to augment its virulence and render those of a nervous temperament more liable to be attacked by it. Doctors were utterly unacquainted with its proper treatment, and indeed had no knowledge whatever of the disease. Hence it raged without check wherever it appeared, and the rapidity with which it carried off its victims added to the terror inspired by its approaches. The first death at Lower Norwood, where my parents then resided, was that of the pastor of the Independent Chapel, situated only two doors from my father's house. He died in a few hours from the time he experienced the premonitory symptoms, and such was the dread of infection that the corpse was buried the same night by torchlight, in the burial-ground of the chapel, wrapped in a sheet coated with pitch.

Though a period of seventeen years separated the first cholera epidemic from the second, the lessons which the former should have taught had not been so well learned as they should have been, and the latter, with which these reminiscences are chiefly concerned, inspired a wild, unreasoning terror in only a little less degree than that of 1832.

I remember a case at Mitcham, in which the women attending a patient were seized with a panic on the approach of death, and rushed out of the house, leaving the poor wretch, a woman, to die alone, the corpse being afterwards found rigid and distorted.

The apparently erratic manner in which the disease spread, sometimes carrying off victims from one side of a street and sparing the other side, sometimes smiting every member of a family in one house, and passing over all the other houses in the same street, was a puzzle to persons who had given no attention to the causes of the disease, and were content to regard it as a sign of the wrath of God, reasoning about the matter as little as did the Israelites whose relatives were swept off at Kibroth-hattaavah. They had not given sufficient attention to the laws of health to understand that the disease found its victims where those laws were neglected, whether from carelessness or from ignorance.

I remember two cases at Croydon in which all the inmates of the houses in which the disease manifested its dread presence were carried off by it. One occurred in a cottage in St. James's Road, one of a row which had originally been level with the road, but had become overshadowed by the approach to the railway bridge. There were three victims in that house, and no other case in the same row, or in the neighbourhood. The other case occurred in King Street, one of several narrow, closely-built streets in the centre of the town, and the victims were a widow and her only child, the latter dying not alone, for, like Byron's Haidee,--

"----she held within
A second principle of life, which might
Have dawned a fair and sinless child of sin;
But closed its little being without light,
And went down to the grave unborn, wherein
Blossom and bough lie withered with one blight."

A remarkable incident occurred while the fell disease was in the full swing of its ravages. The wife of a working man living in the Old Town, a low-lying and densely populated quarter, was attacked by it, and at once removed to a temporary hospital that had been established on Duppas Hill, a tabular eminence overlooking the town, and in the thirteenth century the scene of the tournament in which the son of Earl Warrenne was by misadventure slain. There her husband went, on his return from labour, to ascertain her condition, and heard with a shock which the reader may imagine that she was dead. When the poor fellow had in some degree recovered from the blow, he expressed a wish to see the corpse and take it to his home. He seems to have been unable to realise that his wife was really dead, though the nurses and doctors assured him that she had passed away. The idea that life yet lingered in the form that was apparently lifeless grew upon him as he gazed and though he may never have read "The Giaour," he may have felt the force of the thought so finely expressed by Byron in the lines that introduce his picture of the Greece of his day:--

"He who hath bent him o'er the dead,
Ere the first day of death is fled,
The first dark day of nothingness,
The last of danger and distress
(Before Decay's effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers),
And marked the mild angelic air,
The rapture of repose that's there,
The fixed yet tender traits that streak
The languor of the pallid cheek,
And--but for that sad shrouded eye,
That fires not, wins not, weeps not, now,
And but for that chill, changeless brow,
Where cold Obstruction's apathy
Appals the gazing mourner's heart,
As if to him it could impart
The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon;
Yes, but for these, and these alone,
Some moments, aye, one treacherous hour,
He still might doubt the tyrant's power;
So fair, so calm, so softly sealed,
The first, last look by death revealed!"

Whether it was feeling or reason that inspired the thought that life yet lingered in the apparently inanimate, but not yet rigid form, which the loving husband conveyed to his humble dwelling, it was undoubtedly to that inspiration that the woman owed her preservation from death. For she was not dead. Signs of returning animation were perceived when the supposed corpse was placed upon the bed, and the neighbour women who came in to perform the last sad offices for the dead were there to welcome her on her return to life. I will not attempt to describe the feelings with which the husband beheld the eyelids of his wife unclose, and the rose-tints return to the pallid cheeks. Like the Greek painter who, conscious of the inadequacy of his art to fully portray the grief of Agamemnon for the loss of his son, covered the countenance of the old king with a veil, I draw the curtain upon the scene, and leave it to the imagination of the reader.

Among the remedies for the cholera which came into vogue during the prevalence of the epidemic of 1849, the rubbing of the stomach with brandy and salt obtained a considerable degree of repute; and the chemists vied with each other, as in the recent epidemics of influenza, in the concoction and advertising of various cholera mixtures, one of the most efficacious of which was a preparation of opium and chalk.

The lessons of the cholera were not so entirely neglected on this occasion as they were after the epidemic of 1832; but it is a sad reflection on our legislation that we were indebted to the ravages of disease, or rather to the fear inspired by them, for sanitary reforms which ought to have resulted from foresight. There had been sanitary inquiries by Royal Commissions between 1842 and 1849, but little had been done towards carrying out the recommendations which resulted from them. The existence of cholera in India, and the causes which produced it, had long been known; but so long as its ravages were confined to the people of that country no one seemed to think that it concerned the people of England. It was known, too, that whatever might be the true causes of zymotic diseases, concerning which medical opinions differed, accumulations of filth, contaminated sources of water supply, and an impure condition of the atmosphere tended to produce their outbreaks, and to aggravate their virulence. But then we had been used to these evils since the days of the Plantagenets, and though they had become intensified with the increase of population and the growth of the large towns, had not Malthus taught us that epidemics of disease were one of the means used by divine providence to prevent the numbers of the human race from exceeding the means of subsistence?

The cholera epidemic of 1849 roused the public mind from its lethargy, and prepared it to act upon the recommendations of the General Board of Health and to comply with the Sanitary Act of that year. The old wells of London were closed, and the like course was adopted in Croydon, where a constant supply of practically pure water was obtained by boring down to the chalk. Other towns followed the example, one of the foremost being Birmingham, which received a supply which enabled the inhabitants to dispense with the insalubrious rain-water butt. Sewerage works were undertaken where no efficient system of drainage had before existed. Attention was called to the important questions of sewage disposal and the pollution of rivers; and though much even now remains to be done in this direction, and in the improvement of the water supply of the large manufacturing towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, sanitation has been cleared of most of its difficulties by better knowledge of the philosophy of cause and effect, so that we no longer regard the calamities resulting from our own ignorance and neglect of the laws of nature as the inflictions of Providence.

Some Old Doctors.

BY MRS. G. LINNAEUS BANKS.

It is not my intention to go back to those Greek fathers of the healing art, Hippocrates and Galen, or to dwell on the days when every monastery held within its walls some learned brother accredited to administer to bodies as well as souls diseased, or when the mistress of every feudal castle, every baronial-hall, was trained and skilled in leechcraft, distilled herbs, concocted potions and unguents, and not only physicked her household, but was prepared to staunch and dress the gaping wounds received in siege or tournay. Nor yet have we ought to do with those pretenders to science who mingled astrology with pharmacy, ascribed to every plant its ruling planet, and held that the potency of all herbs depended on the conjunction of planets, or the phase of the moon under which they were gathered--a belief, indeed, under which old Nicholas Culpepper compiled his well-known "Herbal" early in the seventeenth century.

Medicine and surgery have made rapid strides since the days, not a century agone, when in the naval cockpit, and on the open battlefield, the hatchet was the ready implement for amputation, the rough cautery that of a red hot iron applied to the fizzing flesh; and when the doctor cried, "Spit, man, spit" to the suffering soldier with a gunshot wound in his chest, and when the sputum came tinged with blood, simply plugged up the bullet-hole and left the poor fellow to his fate, while he passed on to cases less hopeless. And _en passant_ I may say that wooden legs and stumps for arms were so common in the writer's young days as scarcely to attract attention--so ready were army surgeons to amputate.

These are not matters on which I have to dwell, but I think the present work would be incomplete without a record of those men of original mind, whose acute observation and unwearied investigations in the past have indissolubly linked their names with discoveries which have revolutionised the practice of both medicine and surgery.

In the opinion of Solomon, "there is nothing new under the sun;" and if such was the case in his day, how much more of a verity must be the truism in ours.

So the most startling and perfect revelation of any great fact in human physiology may have been dimly perceptible to earlier intelligences groping in the dark, faint adumbrations of which may fall on the sensorium of the final discoverer, until a ray of divine light dispels the mists of ages, and the man, developing his crude idea with infinite pains, realises a great truth, and cries out "Eureka" to an astonished--and too often--an unbelieving world.

Thus it may have been with the renowned practitioner, WILLIAM HARVEY, who came into the world when all England was filled with alarms of an "Invincible Spanish Armada," then preparing to devastate our shores and spare neither man nor maid, babe nor mother. Yet the scare passed and peace came, and the boy grew, until his educational course at Cambridge ended, and his bias led him towards Padua, then the great seat of academical and medical lore, and there he took his doctor's degree in physic. With the prestige of Padua upon him, in 1607, when he was but twenty years of age, he was elected Fellow of the College of Physicians (founded by Dr. Linacre in the reign of Henry VII.), and in 1715, the man of twenty-eight became their Anatomical Reader.

A noteworthy appointment this, since consequent study and investigation led to the grand discovery that the heart--to speak unscientifically--was a sort of muscular pumping-engine, sending the blood circulating along a series of blood-vessels to every part of the system, changing in character on its course until it returned to its centre, the seat of life, to be pumped out afresh to circulate as before and do its appointed work.

In 1628, Harvey made his discovery known in a learned treatise "On the circulation of the blood," and as may be supposed, his daring assertions roused a violent spirit of opposition amongst his medical brethren, even among those who began to feel the pulses of their patients for the first time, and to comprehend _why_ there should be a fluttering or audible beating under the sick one's ribs, and wherefore the fatal hemorrhage following a sword-thrust or a gunshot wound.

In spite of opposition his teaching created a revolution in medical practice. The discoverer was called before Charles I. and his Court to demonstrate the action of the heart and subsidiary organs, in support of his new doctrine.

Fresh honours fell upon him even when too old to bear the burden. And when in the fulness of time, William Harvey, who had outlived three monarchs, made his own exit under Cromwellian rule, he bequeathed infinitely more to posterity in his invaluable discovery than can be summed up in the estate, library, and museum now in the proud possession of the College of Physicians. These are held by a mere body of men. The other has a world-wide significance.

Yet, as in his life, even in his grave, detractors strove to dim the glory of his important revelation, ascribing to the theological physician Servetus, to Realdus Columbus, and to Andreas Caesalpinas, the credit of prior discovery.

It remained for another learned physician, a century later, to deal with these counter-claims, and whilst admitting their vague individual conceptions of an elusive mystery, to establish once and for ever William Harvey's inalienable right as sole discoverer.

This notable champion was JOHN FREIND, M.D., F.R.S., distinguished as the Medical Historian, and Harveian lecturer to the College of Physicians, at a time when he and his fellows shaved their heads and mounted Ramillies wigs as outward guarantees for the profundity of wisdom they enshrined.

But apart from his flowing wig, or his defence of Harvey, or his learned medical history, written in part when he was a prisoner in the Tower for supposed complicity in the Atterbury Plot, or for skill in the treatment of disease, John Freind had a pioneer's claim to distinction.

The doctor, strange to say, was a Member of Parliament, and on resuming his seat on his release from incarceration, he brought before the House of Commons, in 1725, a remarkable petition from the Royal College of Physicians, to restrain "the pernicious use of spirituous liquors." And though he might speak but as the mouthpiece of his brother Fellows, it needed no small degree of courage to broach such a subject in those days of general coarse indulgence among all classes; especially if his own language was as direct and forcible as that of the petitioners.

Therefore, in his triple character as the historian of medicine, as the champion of William Harvey, and as the foremost M.P. to advocate the cause of temperance before our national legislative assembly, John Freind, M.D., claims a niche in our Walhalla of notable old doctors.

In the nave of Westminster Abbey on a memorial of polished granite is this inscription--"Beneath are deposited the remains of JOHN HUNTER, born at Long Calderwood, Lanarkshire, N.B., on February 14th, 1728; died in London on October 10th, 1793. His remains were removed from the Church of St. Martins-in-the-Fields to this Abbey on March 28th, 1858. The Royal College of Surgeons of England have placed this table over the grave of Hunter to record their admiration of his genius as a gifted interpreter of the Divine power and wisdom that works in the laws of organic life, and their grateful veneration for his services to mankind as the Father of scientific surgery. 'O Lord, how manifold are Thy works; in wisdom hast Thou made them all.'"

Such honours are not paid to the remains of men of common stamp. And of no common stamp was the sandy-headed youth who, having spent ten years of his life learning cabinet making, resolved on striking out a better career for himself; and in his twentieth year took horse and journeyed to London to place himself under his elder brother, WILLIAM HUNTER, then rising into note as a medical practitioner and a teacher of anatomy. In October, 1748, he entered his brother's dissecting room, and whether the fitting of joints in cabinetware had been of initiatory service, or he had had access to the books of his medical relations in Glasgow, or that as a boy upon his father's farm, observation of the domestic animals and of the wild inhabitants of wood and fell, had roused the desire to master the secrets of animated nature, sure it is that William speedily foretold a successful future for his new pupil as an anatomist.

At all events he used his interest to place his promising brother under the eminent surgeon of Chelsea Hospital, and later under another at St. Bartholomew's. Then, shocked by the rough speech and manners of his countrified brother, and his need of education, the classical elder packed him off to college to pick up a little refinement along with Latin and Greek.

In vain. Irrepressible and hot-tempered John could not sit down quietly to study dead languages. Back he came from Oxford in haste, to study dead bodies in his brother's dissecting room, and serve as demonstrator to his course of lectures, simultaneously with his study of living bodies at St. George's Hospital, where in a comparatively short time he became house-surgeon.

His appointment as staff-surgeon to our troops on foreign service marked the six intervening years before he settled down to practise in London. He had laboured ten years on human anatomy, and had dissected a number of the lower animals, laying the foundation of his collection of comparative anatomy. Even while on foreign service he had amused himself with studying the digestive faculties of snakes and lizards when in a torpid state, and many were the contributions he sent home to his brother's museum.

His return to London, as a teacher of surgery and anatomy, was a marked success, though private practice had to grow. In 1776, he was appointed surgeon extraordinary to His Majesty George III., but eleven years prior to this was admitted a Fellow of the Royal Society, slightly in advance of his elder brother. Then in 1768, the bachelor, William, shifted himself and his museum from Jermyn Street to Windmill Street, and resigned the lease to John, thus securing independent action to the latter, and facilities for creating a natural-history museum of his own.

Hitherto, the brothers had worked together in unison, but now John committed the unpardonable offence of bringing home to Jermyn Street "a tocherless bride," fourteen years younger than himself, endowed only with beauty and accomplishments, and a faculty for filling the house with assemblies of wit and fashion, which blunt-spoken John designated "kick-ups," no doubt with an irreverent big D as a prefix, swearing being as characteristic as hard work.

And work hard he did, early and late, not merely to maintain his extensive and lucrative practice, but to provide and prepare subjects for the museum in the rear of his town house, and for the valuable and original lectures he delivered in language forcible and clear, if neither refined nor academic.

His chief workshop, so to speak, was at his country "Box" at Earl's Court, the grounds of which he had converted into a zoological garden, so many wild animals were there kept for study. There is a story told of his facing an escaped lion and flicking him back to his den with his pocket handkerchief, showing his fearlessness and his knowledge of leonine nature.

Another tale is told of his intervention between fighting dogs and leopards, he dragging the infuriated leopards back to their cage by their collars--and _fainting_ when the feat was accomplished, for his was not a burly frame, and his heart was in a threatening condition.

An element of humour mingles with the gruesome in Sir B. W. Richardson's account of the ruse employed to cheat watchful executors, and obtain the body of O'Brien the Irish Giant,[2] so as to convert it into the skeleton now in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln's Inn.

Those were the days when surgeons were not particular where they obtained subjects for their scalpels, whether from the resurrection men or from the gallows, and John Hunter was not more dainty than his fellows. But also from travelling shows and menageries, and from animals that died in the Tower he was supplied. And so rapidly did his museum grow, absorbing the bulk of his income, that ere long he had to remove to what is now Leicester Square, and erect a building in the rear for his collection.

Honours fell upon him thickly as they had fallen on his brother, alike British and foreign, of which he took little heed, absorbed as he was in the pursuit of knowledge, and its demonstration. His discoveries placed him far ahead of the science of his time, though his courtly brother, earlier in the field and first to leave it, ran him close. Indeed their final quarrel and alienation arose out of a disputed claim to a certain discovery in feminine physiology, brought before the Royal Society, a quarrel which transferred William's museum to the University of Glasgow, and excluded John from his will.

The so-called "Lyceum Medicum" in Leicester Square, became the home of the "Society for the Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge," and the "Philosophical Transactions" of the Society testify to the genius and untiring activity of its promoter. How he found time for his many written essays and discourses on topics wide apart as "Gunshot-wounds" and "Teeth" is a marvel. No wonder the frail human machine wore out so early. He had worked when he should have rested, worked regardless of premonitions and attacks John Hunter must have well understood, and died at last at sixty-two, a victim of one of those fits of passion no man with a diseased heart can indulge in safely.

Setting out originally from the tablet in Westminster Abbey to describe what manner of man was the old doctor who lay beneath, it became imperatively necessary to bracket the two brothers, John and William Hunter, together, since, according to Sir B. W. Richardson, they were "twins in science," if not in birth. Had not William already come to the front when John sought him out, he could not have been his teacher, or given his younger brother his first start in life, his introduction, or his facilities for study. Then they worked together, became one in anatomical discovery, in their zeal for collecting all that illustrated their theories, all that was rare and curious, into unprecedented museums. Yet how widely the personalities of the brothers differed. They both stood out among contemporaries, yet William, with his slight form, mildly refined face, set off by an unpretentious wig, and delicate hands, under lace ruffles, and wide coat cuffs, a classical scholar, an antiquary, a numismatist, as well as a naturalist,--Queen Charlotte's medical referee, stepping out from his chariot, gold cane in hand, to visit his courtly patients, was the very _beau ideal_ of a fashionable physician of that day, one who shone in drawing-rooms as well as in the lecture-hall. Blue-eyed John, with high cheek bones, broad, slightly receding forehead, tangled red hair, and a shaggy mane of whisker that made his keen face a triangle, tender of heart, yet brusque and coarse of speech, rough in manner as in dress (with not a sign of frill or ruffle), despising dilettante coteries, not squeamish in seeking "subjects," passionate and determined, caring little for empty honours, for money only to swell his museum, and nothing for courtly circles, though created surgeon-extraordinary to George III., and owing his large practice solely to the force of his character, his science, and his skill. So far he was his brother's antithesis. John was a diamond in the rough; William the gem cut and polished. And such were the two old doctors to whom England's College of Surgeons owes its Hunterian Museum; the University of Glasgow the other. Had not the brothers quarrelled, the two would have formed one grand unrivalled collection.

Space is limited, and so must be our notes of these other celebrated "old doctors," whom it would be invidious to overlook. Of these EDWARD JENNER stands prominently out, but he has been already dealt with by another hand.

It is scarcely possible to pass by JOHN ABERNETHY, F.R.S., the eccentric physician, whose principle was that men should eat to live, not live to eat, who maintained that the stomach was the chief seat of health or disease, according as it was used or abused, and that water was the one natural and nutrient beverage. The practical way in which he illustrated his theories respecting overfeeding,--filling a pail with food from various dishes in correspondence with the heterogeneous mixture on his patients' plates--and his brusque replies to some other of his patients, have perpetuated his name through his oddities, rather than as a benefactor of his kind, who revolutionized the medical practice of his time, and of course excited envy and antagonism. His hair, kept together at the nape of the neck with a ribbon tie, was brushed back from his forehead, and added a degree of sharpness to his somewhat hatchet-shaped face, when he told the timorous lady who was "afraid she had swallowed a spider," "Then put a fly in your mouth, madam, and the spider will come up to catch him." Or when he threw the shilling from his fee back to a mother with a delicate daughter, "Take that, madam, and buy her a skipping-rope," an intimation that exercise was needed. It was an age of coarse feeding and strong drinking, an age of drastic purges and much blood-letting, and Abernethy's temperance principles, so much in advance of his time, provoked considerable opposition from his medical brethren, whose satirical epigrams he was not slow to cap.

But contemporary squibs and satires cannot affect the real good which has made Abernethy's name a household word. Indeed it has been stamped upon a biscuit. It is stamped also on a medical society he founded at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, where his centenary has recently been celebrated.

Many have been the contributions to scientific medicine and surgery since the rough days of the old doctors I have endeavoured to chronicle, but these men of wigs and ties, gold-headed canes and pouncet-boxes, breeches and buckled shoes, were the pioneers of progress, they cleared the way for the men of this day and generation, and left their mark on their own age, not to be effaced by newer and more advanced successors, to whom they have served as stepping-stones.

The Lee Penny.

The story of the Lee Penny is full of historic interest, and the legends respecting it furnished Sir Walter Scott with some incidents for his novel the "Talisman."

This amulet is a stone of a deep red colour and triangular shape, in size about half-an-inch on each side, and is set in a silver coin. The various accounts which have come under our notice are agreed that this curious relic of antiquity has been in the Lee family since a period immediately after the death of King Robert the Bruce.

The monarch was nearing his end, and as he lay on his death-bed, he was much troubled for having failed to visit in person the Holy Land to assist in the Crusade. His long war with the English had rendered it impossible for him to leave his kingdom to fight in a foreign land, even in the cause of religion.

Sir James Douglas, his tried and trusty friend, stood beside the bed of his king, and was in sore distress. As a last request the king implored that as soon as possible after his soul had left his body Douglas would take his heart to Jerusalem. On the honour of a knight, Sir James faithfully promised to discharge the trust.

The king died in 1329, and his heart was enclosed in a silver case. Sir James suspended it from his neck with a chain, and without delay gathered round him a suitable retinue, and made his way towards the Holy Land. He was not destined to reach that country, for on his route the intelligence reached him that Alphonso, King of Leon and Castile, was waging war with the Moorish chief, Osmyn of Granada. To assist the Christians, he felt it was his duty, and in accordance with the dying charge of his king. With courage he engaged in the fray, but was soon surrounded by horsemen, and he who had fought so long and bravely, realised that he must meet his doom far from the country he loved so well. He made a desperate effort to escape. The precious casket he took from his neck and threw it before him, saying, "Onward, as thou were wont, thou noble heart! Douglas will follow thee." He followed it and was slain. After the battle was over the brave knight was found resting on the heart of Bruce. The mortal remains of the valiant knight were carried back to his home and buried in his church of St. Bride, at Douglas.

The heart of Bruce was entrusted to Sir Simon Locard, and by him borne back to Scotland, and at last found a resting-place beneath the high altar of Melrose Abbey, and its site is still pointed out. Mrs. Hemans wrote a charming poem on Bruce's heart in Melrose Abbey, commencing:--

"Heart! that did'st press forward still,
Where the trumpet's note rang shrill;
Where the knightly swords are crossing,
And the plumes like sea-foam tossing,
Leader of the charging spear,
Fiery heart! and liest thou here?
May this narrow spot inurn
Aught that could so beat and burn?"

We are told the family name of Locard was changed to Lockheart, or Lockhart, from the circumstance of Sir Simon having carried the key of the casket, and was granted as armorial insignia, heart with a fetter-lock, with the motto, "Corda serrata pando." According to a contributor to Chambers's "Book of Days," v., 2, p. 415, from the same incident, the Douglases bear a human heart, imperially crowned, and have in their possession an ancient sword, emblazoned with two hands holding a heart, and dated 1329, the year Bruce died.

Lockhart was not daunted at the failure of the first attempt to reach Jerusalem, and, in company with such Scottish knights as escaped the fate of their leader, they once more proceeded, and arrived in the Holy Land, and for some time fought in the wars against the Saracens.

The following adventure is said to have befallen him. He made prisoner in battle an Emir of wealth and note. The aged mother of his captive came to the Christian camp to save her son from his captivity. Lockhart fixed the price at which his prisoner should ransom himself; and the lady, pulling out a large embroidered purse, proceeded to tell down the amount. In this operation, a pebble inserted in a coin, some say of the lower empire, fell out of the purse, and the Saracen matron testified so much haste to recover it as to give the Scottish knight a high idea of its value. "I will not consent," he said, "to grant your son's liberty unless the amulet be added to the ransom." The lady not only consented to this, but explained to Sir Simon the mode in which the talisman was to be used. The water in which it was dipped operated as a styptic, or a febrifuge, and the amulet possessed several other properties as a medical talisman.

Sir Simon Lockhart, after much experience of the wonders which it wrought, brought it to his own country, and left it to his heirs, by whom, and by Clyde side in general, it was, and is still, distinguished by the name of the Lee Penny, from the name of his native seat of Lee.

Its virtues were brought into operation by dropping the stone in water which was afterwards given to the diseased to drink, washing at the same time the part affected. No words were used in dipping the stone, or money permitted to be taken by the servants of Lee. People came from all parts of Scotland, and many places in England, to carry away the water to give to their cattle.

Some interesting information respecting this amulet appears in an account of the Sack and Siege of Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1644. "As one of the natural sequences," says the writer, "of prolonged distress, caused by this brave but foolhardy defence against overwhelming odds, the plague broke out with fatal violence in Newcastle and Gateshead, as well as Tynemouth and Shields, during the following year. Great numbers of poor people were carried off by it; while tents were erected on Bensham Common, to which those infected were removed; and the famous Lee Penny was brought out of Scotland to be dipped in water for the diseased persons to drink, and the result said to be a perfect cure. The inhabitants (that is to say, the Corporation, we presume), gave a bond for a large sum in trust for the loan; and they thought the charm did so much good, that they offered to pay the money down, and keep the marvellous penny with a stone in which it is inserted; but the proprietor, Lockhart of Lee, would not part with it."

We are told that many years ago a remarkable cure is alleged to have been performed on Lady Baird of Sauchton Hall, near Edinburgh, who, having been bitten by a mad dog, was seized with hydrophobia. The Lee Penny was sent for, and she used it for some weeks, drinking and bathing in the water it had been dipped in, and she quite recovered.

"The most remarkable part of the history," as Sir Walter Scott says, "perhaps was, that it so especially escaped condemnation when the Church of Scotland chose to impeach many other cures which savoured of the miraculous, as occasioned by sorcery, and censured the appeal of them, 'excepting only the amulet called the Lee Penny, to which it pleased God to annex certain healing virtues, which the Church did not presume to condemn.'"

The Lee Penny is preserved at Lee House, in Lanarkshire, the residence of the present representative of the family.

How Our Fathers were Physicked.

BY J. A. LANGFORD, LL.D.

Delightful old Fuller tells us "Necessary and ancient their Profession ever since man's body was subject to enmity and casualty." There is no doubt of the necessity and antiquity of the doctor's calling, but there is, without doubt, no profession in which such great and beneficent advance has been made in modern times as in the medical. The tortures which our fathers endured under the old treatment are terrible to think of. It was not enough that they were afflicted by disease; the pains which they had to suffer from the supposed remedies far exceeded those which nature imposed. Cupping, blistering, and especially bleeding, were the common applications in nearly all complaints, the Bleeding was also used as a preventive, which proverb truly tells us "is better than cure"; but in this case the supposed disease could scarcely have been worse than the supposed prevention. Five times in the year--"in September, before Advent, before Lent, after Easter, and at Pentecost"--were the periods at which men in health were accustomed to "breathe a vayne." Besides letting of blood, the physician's cane and the surgeon's club were vigorously used on the unfortunate sufferers. Mr. J. C. Jeaffreson, in his very interesting "Book about Doctors," says, "For many centuries fustigation was believed in as a sovereign remedy for bodily ailments as well as moral failings, and a beating was prescribed for an ague as frequently as for picking and stealing." So what with the lancet and the stick combined, our fathers must indeed have shuddered at the approach of any of the "natural shocks that flesh is heir to."

The medicines of those good old times were of a very strange and objectionable kind. Some of the concoctions were composed of many ingredients, and were formed of abominable, not to say disgusting, materials. All nature was ransacked for out-of-the-way and horrible things which could be used as drugs and nostrums for suffering and gullible sufferers. In the reign of Charles II., Dr. Thomas Sherley "recommended a clumsy and inordinate administration of violent drugs" for gout. "Calomel he habitually administered in simple doses. Sugar of lead he mixed largely in his conserves; pulverized human bones he was very fond of prescribing; and the principal ingredient in his gout-powder was 'raspings of a human skull unburied.' But his sweetest compound was his 'Balsam of Bats,' strongly recommended as an unguent for hypochondriacal persons, into which entered adders, bats, sucking-whelps, earth worms, hogs' grease, the marrow of a stag, and the thigh-bone of an ox." A good idea of the things sold to a confiding public as cures for its ills may be gathered from two verses on Colonel Dalmahoy, a well-known--shall we say quack--of the past:--

"Dalmahoy sold infusions and lotions,
Decoctions, and gargles, and pills,
Electuaries, powders, and potions,
Spermaciti, salts, scammony, squills.

Horse aloes, burnt alum, agaric,
Balm, benzoine, blood-stone, and dill;
Castor, camphor, and acid tartaric,
With specifics for every ill."

Metals and precious stones were extensively used in the prescriptions of bygone doctors. Every metal and every stone was credited with some special and peculiar virtue which it alone possessed, and it was applied as a cure for that ailment over which it had influence and power. Bacon tells us, "We know Diseases of Stoppings, and Suffocations, are the most dangerous in the body; And it is not much otherwise in the minde. You may take _Sarza_ to open the Liver; _Steele_ to open the Spleene; _Flowers of Sulphur_ for the Lungs; _Castoreum_ for the Braine," for each of which parts it was believed that the specifics named were most efficacious. The prescriptions of Dr. Bulleyn, in the reign of Elizabeth, are wonderful examples of how our fathers were physicked. Here are two of those quoted by Mr. Jeaffreson. The first is

"_An Embrocation._--An embrocation is made after this manner:--Px. Of a decoction of mallowes, vyolets, barly, quince seed, lettice leaves, one pint; of barly meale, two ounces; of oyle of vyolets and roses, of each, an ounce and half; of butter, one ounce; and then seeth them all together till they be like a brouthe, puttyng thereto, at the ende, foure yolkes of eggs; and the maner of applying is with peeces of cloth, dipped in the aforesaid decoction, being actually hoate."

Our second is "truly a medicine for kings and noblemen;" it is called an

"_Electuarium de Gemmis._--Take two drachms of white perles; two little peeces of saphyre; jacinth, corneline, emerauldes, grannettes, of each an ounce; setwal, the sweete roote dorsnike, the rind of pomecitron, mase, basal seede, of each two drachms; of redde corrall, amber, shewing of ivory, of each two drachms; rootes both of white and red lichen, ginger, long peper, spicknard, folium indicum, saffron, cardamon, of each one drachm; of troch diarodon, lignum aloes, of each half a small handful; cinnamon, galinga, zurnbeth, which is a kind of setwal, of each one drachm and a half; thin pieces of gold and sylver, of each half a scruple; of musk, half a drachm. Make your electuary with honey emblici, which is the fourth kind of mirobulans with roses, strained in equall partes, as much as will suffice. This healeth cold diseases of ye braine, harte, stomack. It is a medicine proved against the tremblynge of the harte, faynting and swooning, the weakness of the stomacke, pensiveness, solitarines. Kings and noble men have used this for their comfort. It causeth them to be bold-spirited, the body to smell wel, and ingendreth to the face good colour."

The most innocent articles used in the old medicines were fruits, and herbs, and vegetables. To some kinds special virtues are assigned, and Dr. Bulleyn's "Book of Simples," is very pleasant reading. "Pears, apples, peaches, quinces, cherries, grapes, raisins, prunes, raspberries, oranges, medlons, raspberries and strawberries, spinage, ginger, and lettuces are the good things thrown upon the board." We are told of a prune growing at Norwich, and known as the "black freere's prune," that it is "very delicious and pleasaunt, and no lesse profitable unto a hoate stomacke." "The red warden is of greate virtue, conserved, roasted or baken to quench choller." We are also informed that "Figges be good agaynst melancholy, and the falling evil, to be eaten. Figges, nuts, and herb grase do make a sufficient medicine against poison or the pestilence. Figges make a good gargarism to cleanse the throates."

Some of the Doctor's prescriptions are very curious. He prescribes "a smal young mouse rosted," for a child afflicted with a nervous ailment. Nor did he disdain to use the snail in certain cases. He tells us that "Snayles broken from the shelles and sodden in whyte wyne with oyle and sugar are very holsome, because they be hoat and moist for the straightnes of the lungs and cold cough. Snails stamped with camphery, and leven will draw forth prycks in the flesh." Snail broth is not entirely unknown in some country places, even at the present time. Bezoar stone and unicorn's horn were also used in confections.

Cancer has always been, and unfortunately still is, a terrible and an incurable disease, and has afforded a fine field for all kinds of nostrums and specifics which were to produce a "safe and certain cure." One of these, called a "precious water," was thus composed. "Take dove's foote, a herb so named, Arkangell ivy with the berries, young red bryer toppes, and leaves, whyte roses, theyre leaves and buds, red sage, celandyne and woodbynde, of each lyke quantity, cut or chopped and put into pure cleane whyte wyne, and clarified honey. Then breake into it alum glasse and put in a little of the pouder of aloes hepatica. Destill these together softly in a limbecke of glasse or pure tin; if not then in a limbecke wherein aqua vitae is made. Keep this water close. It will not onely kyll the canker (cancer), if it be duly washed therewyth; but also two droppes dayly put into the eye wyll sharp the syght, and breake the pearle and spottes, specially if it be dropped in wyth a little fenell water, and close the eyes after."

In 1739, the British Parliament passed an Act which is unprecedented in the annals of folly. A female quack, named Joanna Stephens, was reported to have effected some most extraordinary cures by the use of a medicine of which she only possessed the secret. She proposed to make it public for the sum of L5,000, and a vain attempt was made to raise the sum by subscription, but only L1,356 3s. was thus raised. An appeal was made to Parliament, and a commission was appointed to enquire into the subject, and a certificate signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishops, Peers, and Physicians, was presented to the House, declaring that they were "convinced by experiment of the utility, efficacy, and dissolving power," of the tested medicine, and Joanna Stephens was rewarded with the desired L5,000. The prescriptions were published, and the following extracts will suffice to show how easily sufferers from diseases may be, and sometimes are, gulled. This lucky quack says:--

"My medicines are a Powder, a Decoction, and Pills."

"The Powder consists of egg-shells and snails, both calcined."

"The Decoction is made by boiling some herbs (together with a ball
which consists of soap, swine's-cresses burnt to a blackness, and
honey), in water."

"The Pills consist of snails calcined, wild carrot seeds, burdock
seeds, asken keys, hips and hawes, all burnt to a blackness--soap and
honey."

Our readers will willingly dispense with the directions of how these dearly purchased medicines should be prepared. Surely

"The pleasure is as great,
In being cheated as to cheat!"

In 1633, Stephen Brasnell, Physician, published a small volume entitled "Helps | for | Svddain | Accidents | Endangering Life. | By which | Those that live farre from Physitions or Chirurgions | may happily preserve the Life | of a true Friend or Neigh-| bour, till such a Man may be | had to perfect the Cure. | Collected out of the best authors | for the generall good." The following is his prescription for all kinds of poisons:--viz. "the Hoofe of an Oxe cut into parings and boyled with bruised mustard-seed in white wine and faire water. The Bloud of a Malard drunke fresh and warme: or els dryed to powder, and so drunke in a draught of white wine. The Bloud of a Stagge also in the same manner. The seeds of Rue and the leaves of Betony boyled together in white wine. Or take ij scruples (that is fortie graines) of Mithridate; of prepared Chrystall, one dram (that is three score grains), fresh Butter one ounce. Mix all well together. Swallow it down by such quantities as you can swallow at once; and drink presently upon it a quarter of a pint of the decoction of French Barley, or so much of six shillings Beere. Of this I have had happy proofe."

There is a much more effective, though a somewhat revolting prescription for "those with abilitie." "Take," says our seventeenth century physician, "take a sound horse, open his belly alive, take out all his entrayles quickly, and put the poysoned partie naked into it all save his head, while the body of the horse retains his naturall heate, and there let him sweat well." Our author admits that "this may be held a strange course, but the same reason that teacheth to devide live pullets and pigeons for plague-sores approveth this way of sweating as most apt to draw to itselfe all poysons from the heart and principall parts of the patient's body. But during this time of sweating he must defend his braine by wearing on his head a quilt." The quilt is to be made by taking a number of dried herbs, which are to be made into a "grosse powder and quilt them up in sarsnet or calico, and let it be so big as to cover all the head like a cap, then binde it on fast with a kerchief." This is called "a Nightcap to preserve the Brain."

There are also curious prescriptions for the stings of bees and wasps, the "bitings of spiders," of which he says "the garden ones are the worst." He tells us that the "flesh of the same beast that biteth, inwardly taken, helpeth much," and that "outwardly the best thing to be applied is the flesh of the same beast that did the hurt, pounded in a morter and applied in manner of a poultis." Here is one about that pretty little animal, the shrew-mouse: "Now the shrew-mouse is a little kind of a mouse with a long sharpe snout and a short tayle; it liveth commonly in old ruinous walls. It biteth also very venomously, and leaveth foure small perforations made by her foure foreteeth. To cure her biting, her flesh roasted and eaten is the best inward antidote if it may be had. And outwardly apply her warme liver and skin if it may be had. Otherwise _Rocket-reeds_ beaten into powder, and mixed with the bloud of a dog. Or els the teeth of a dead man made into a fine powder."

The toad comes in for a good share of attention, and Mr. Bradwell gives a personal anecdote on this subject. He says:--"Myself, while I was a student at _Cambridge_, was so hurt by the spouting of a venomous humour from the body of a great toad into my face while I pashed him to death with a brickbat. Some of the moisture lighted on my right eye, which did not a little endanger it, and hath made it ever since apt to receive any flux of Rheume or Inflammation." Some of our readers may think that this was a fit punishment for having "pashed" the toad to "death with a brickbat."

Among the strangest things ever used as medicine must be placed human skulls. In 1854, Mr. T. A. Trollope gave a short account in _Notes and Queries_ of a book by Dr. Cammillo Brunoni, published at Fabriano in 1726. It was entitled _Il Medico Poeta_ (the Physician a Poet), and gives an account "of the medical uses of human skulls." Dr. Brunoni informs us, says Mr. Trollope, that "all skulls are not of equal value. Indeed, those of persons who have died a natural death, are good for little or nothing. The _reason_ of this is, that the disease of which they died has consumed or dissipated the essential spirit! The skulls of murderers and bandits are particularly efficacious. And this is clearly because not only is the essential spirit of the cranium concentrated therein by the nature of their violent death, but also the force of it is increased by the long exposure to the atmosphere, occasioned by the heads of such persons being ordinarily placed on spikes over the gates of cities! Such skulls are used in various manners. Preparations of volatile salt, spirit, gelatine, essence, etc., are made from them, and are very useful in epilepsy and hoemorrhage. The notion soldiers have, that drinking out of a skull renders them invulnerable in battle, is a mere superstition, though respectable writers do maintain that such a practice is a proved preventive against scrofula."