Chapter VIII: The Peak in Darien: the Riddle of Death, 245 (4)

“Pain, terror, mortal agonies, which scare
Thy heart in man, to brutes thou wilt not spare.
Are theirs less sad and real? _Pain in man
Bears the high mission of the flail and fan;
In brutes, ’tis purely piteous._”

Pain is the one supreme evil of the existence of the lower animals, an evil which (so far as we can see) has no countervailing good. As to death, a painless one--so far from being the supreme evil to them--is often the truest mercy. Thus, instead of the favorite phrase of certain physiologists, that “they would put hecatombs of brutes to torture to save the smallest pain of a man,” true ethics bids us regard man’s _moral_ welfare only as of supreme importance, and anything which can injure _it_ (such, for example, as the practice, or sanction of the practice, of cruelty) as the worst of evils, even if along with it should come a mitigation of bodily pain. On this subject, the present Bishop of Winchester has put the case in a nutshell. “It is true,” he said, “that man is superior to the beast, but the part of man which we recognize as such is his moral and spiritual nature. So far as his body and its pains are concerned, there is no particular reason for considering them more than the body and bodily pains of a brute.”

Of course, the ground is cut from under us in this whole line of argument by those ingenious thinkers who have recently disinterred (with such ill-omened timeliness for the vivisection debate) Descartes’ supposed doctrine, that the appearance of pain and pleasure in the brutes is a mere delusion, and that they are only automata,--“a superior kind of marionettes, which eat without pleasure, cry without pain, desire nothing, know nothing, and only simulate intelligence as a bee simulates a mathematician.” If this conclusion, on which modern science is to be congratulated, be accepted, it follows, of course, that we should give no more consideration to the fatigue of a noble hunter than to the creaking wood of a rocking-horse; and that the emotions a child bestows on its doll will be more serious than those we bestow on a dog who dies of grief on his master’s grave. Should it appear to us, however, on the contrary (as it certainly does to me), that there is quite as good evidence that dogs and elephants reason as that certain physiologists reason, and a great deal better evidence that they--the animals--feel, we may perhaps dismiss the Cartesianism of the nineteenth century, and proceed without further delay to endeavor to define more particularly the fitting sentiment of man to sentient brutes. We have seen we ought to start with a distinct sense of some degree of moral responsibility as regards them. What shape should that sense assume?

We have been in the habit of indulging ourselves in all manner of antipathies to special animals, some of them having, perhaps, their source and _raison d’être_ in the days of our remote but not illustrious ancestors,

“When wild in woods the noble savage ran”;

or those of a still earlier date, who were, as Mr. Darwin says, “arboreal in their habits,” ere yet we had deserved the reproach of having “made ourselves tailless and hairless and multiplied folds to our brain.” Other prejudices, again, are mere personal whims, three-fourths of them being pure affectation. A man will decline to sit in a room with an inoffensive cat, and a lady screams at the sight of a mouse, which is infinitely more distressed at the _rencontre_ than she. I have known an individual, otherwise distinguished for audacity, “make tracks” across several fields to avoid a placidly ruminating cow. In our present stage of civilization, these silly prejudices are barbarisms and anachronisms, if not vulgarisms, and should be treated like exhibitions of ignorance or childishness. For our remote progenitors before mentioned, tusky and hirsute, struggling for existence with the cave bear and the mammoth in the howling wilderness of a yet uncultured world, there was no doubt justification for regarding the terrible beasts around them with the hatred which comes of fear. But the animal creation, at least throughout Europe, has been subdued for ages; and all its tribes are merely dwellers by sufferance in a vanquished province. Their position as regards us appeals to every spark of generosity alight in our bosoms, and ought to make us ashamed of our whims and antipathies toward beings so humble. Shall man arrogate the title of “lord of creation,” and not show himself, at the least, _bon prince_ to his poor subjects? It is not too much to ask that, even toward wild animals, our feelings should be those of royal clemency and indulgence,--of pleasure in the beauty and grace of such of them as are beautiful; of admiration for their numberless wondrous instincts; of sympathy with their delight in the joys of the forest and the fields of air. Few, I suppose, of men with any impressionability can watch a lark ascending into the sky of a summer’s morning without some dim echo of the feelings which inspired Shelley’s Ode. This is, however, only a specially vivid instance of a sympathy which might be almost universal, and which, so far as we learn to feel it, touches all nature for us with a magic wand.

If we are compelled to fight with them, if they are our natural enemies and can never be anything else, then let us wage war upon them in loyal sort, as we contended against the Russians at Balaklava; and, if we catch any prisoners, deal with them chivalrously or at least mercifully. This, indeed (to do justice to sportsmen, much as I dislike their pursuit), I have always observed to be the spirit of the old-fashioned country gentleman, before the gross slaughtering of _battues_ and despicable pigeon-matches were heard of in the land.

As to domestic animals, their demands on us, did we read them aright, are not so much those of petitioners for mercy as of rightful claimants of justice. We have caused their existence, and are responsible that they should be on the whole happy and not miserable. We take their services to carry our burdens, to enhance our pleasures, to guard our homes and our flocks. In the case of many of them, we accept the fondest fidelity and an affection such as human beings scarcely give once in a lifetime. They watch for us, work for us, bear often weary imprisonment and slavery in our service, and not seldom mourn for us with breaking hearts when we die. If we conceive of an arbiter sitting by and watching alike our behavior and the poor brutes’ toil and love, can we suppose he would treat it as merely a piece of _generosity_ on our part, which we were free to leave unfulfilled without blame, that we should behave considerately to such an humble friend, supply him with food, water, and shelter, forbear to overwork him, and end his harmless life at last with the least possible pain? Would he not demand it of us as the simplest matter of _justice_?[24]

For those who accept the Darwinian theory, and believe that the relationship between man and the brutes is not only one of similarity, but of actual kinship in blood, it would have seemed only natural that this new view should have brought forth a burst of fresh sympathy and tenderness. If our physical frames, with all their quivering nerves and susceptibilities to a thousand pains, be, indeed, only the four-footed creature’s body a little modified by development; if our minds only overlap and transcend theirs, but are grown out of those humbler brains; if all our moral qualities, our love and faith and sense of justice, be only their affection and fidelity and dim sense of wrong extended into wider realms,--then we bear in ourselves the irresistible testimony to their claims on our sympathy. And if, like so many of the disciples of the same new philosophy, we are unhappy enough to believe that both man and brute when laid in the grave awake no more, then, above all, it would seem that this common lot of a few pleasures and many pains, to be followed by annihilation, would move any heart to compassion. In the great, silent, hollow universe in which these souls believe themselves to stand, how base does it seem to turn on the weaker, unoffending beings around them, and spoil their little gleam of life and joy under the sun!

Nothing is more startling to me than the fact that some of the leading apostles of this philosophy, and even its respected author himself, should in one and the same breath tell us that an ape, for example, is actually our own flesh and blood, and that it is right and proper to treat apes after the fashion of Professors Munk and Goltz and Ferrier. These gentlemen, as regards the poor _quadrumana_, are rather “more than kin,” and rather “less than kind.”

For those who, whether they believe in evolution or not, still hold faith in the existence of a divine Lord of man and brute, the reasons for sympathy are, in another way, still stronger. That the Christian religion did not, from the first, like the Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Brahminist, impress its followers with the duty of mercy to the brutes; that it was left to a few tender-hearted saints, like St. Francis, to connect the creatures in any way with the worship of the Creator, and to the later development of Protestantism to formulate any doctrine on the subject of duty toward them,--is a paradox which would need much space to explain. Modern religion, at all events, by whatever name it is called, seems tending more and more to throw an additional tender sacredness over our relations to the “unoffending creatures which he,” their Maker, “loves,” and to make us recognize a latent truth in the curiously hackneyed lines of Coleridge concerning him who “prayeth best” and also loveth best “both man and bird and beast.” Where that great and far-reaching softener of hearts, the sense of our own failures and offences, is vividly present, the position we hold to creatures who _have never done wrong_ is always found inexpressibly touching. To be kind to them and rejoice in their happiness seems just one of the few ways in which we can act a god-like part in our little sphere, and display the mercy for which we hope in our turn. Whichever way we take it, I conceive we reach the same conclusion. The only befitting feeling for human beings to entertain toward brutes is, as the very word suggests, the feeling of _humanity_: or, as we may interpret it, the sentiment of sympathy, so far as we can cultivate fellow-feeling; of pity, so far as we know them to suffer; of mercy, so far as we can spare their sufferings; of kindness and benevolence, so far as it is in our power to make them happy.

There is nothing fanatical about this humanity. It does not call on us to renounce any of the useful or needful avocations of life as regards animals, but rather would it make the man imbued with it perform them all the better.[25] We assuredly need not, because we become humane, sacrifice the higher life for the lower, as in the wondrous Buddhist parable so beautifully rendered in the _Light of Asia_, where “Lord Buddha,” in one of his million lives, gives himself, out of pity, to be devoured by a famishing tiger who cannot feed her cubs, and

“The great cat’s burning breath
Mixed with the last sigh of such fearless love.”

We need not even copy the sweet lady in the “Sensitive Plant” who made the bees and moths and ephemeridæ her attendants:--

“But all killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore in a basket of Indian woof
Into the rough woods far aloof,--

“In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.”

This is poetry not meant for practice, and yet even these hyperboles carry a breath as of Eden along with them. Of Eden did I say? Nay, rather of the later Paradise for which the soul of the greatest of the prophets yearned, where “they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.”

I will not attempt here to define how the sentiment of humanity to the brutes, thoroughly ingrained into a man’s heart, would make him decide the question of field sports. My own impression is that it would lead him to abandon first, and with utter disgust, such wretched amusements as pigeon-matches and _battues_ of half-tame pheasants; and, later, those sports in which, as in fox-hunting and coursing and duck-shooting, the sympathy of the sportsman with his hounds and horse, or his greyhound or retriever, is uppermost in his mind, to the exclusion of the wild and scarcely seen object of his pursuit. In nine kinds of such sports, I believe, out of ten, it is rather a case of ill-divided sympathy for animals than of lack of it which inspires the sportsman; and not many would find enjoyment where neither horse nor dog had part,--like poor Robertson, of Brighton, sitting for hours in a tub in a marsh to shoot wild duck, and counting the period so spent as “hours of delight!”

But there is one practice respecting which the influence of such a sentiment of humanity as we have supposed must have an unmistakable result. It must put an absolute stop to vivisection. To accustom ourselves and our children to regard animals with sympathy; to beware of giving them pain, and rejoice when it is possible for us to give them pleasure; to study their marvellous instincts, and trace the dawnings of reason in their sagacious acts; to accept their services and their affection, and give them in return such pledges of protection as our kind words and caresses,--to do this, and then calmly consent to hand them over to be dissected alive, this is too monstrous to be borne. _De deux choses l’une._ Either we must cherish animals--and then we must abolish vivisection--or we must sanction vivisection; and then, for very shame’s sake, and lest we poison the springs of pity and sympathy in our breasts and the breasts of our children, we must renounce the ghastly farce of petting or protecting animals, and pretending to recognize their noble and lovable qualities. If love and courage and fidelity, lodged in the heart of a dog, have no claim on us to prevent us from dissecting that heart even while yet it beats with affection; if the human-like intelligence working in a monkey’s brain do not forbid (but rather invite) us to mutilate that brain, morsel by morsel, till the last glimmering of mind and playfulness die out in dulness and death,--if this be so, then, in Heaven’s name, let us at least have done with our cant of “humanity,” and abolish our Acts of Parliament, and dissolve our Bands of Mercy, and our three hundred Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty throughout the world.

The idea of vivisection (to use the phrase of its two thousand advocates who memorialized Sir Richard Cross) rests on the conception of an animal (a dog, for example) as “a carnivorous creature, valuable for purposes of research,”--a mechanism, in short, of nerves and muscles, bones and arteries, which, as they added, it would be a pity to “withdraw from investigation.” The crass materialism which thus regards such a creature as a dog (and would, doubtless, if its followers spoke out, be found similarly to regard a man) is at the opposite pole of thought and feeling from the recognition of the animal in its higher nature as an object of our tenderness and sympathy. We cannot hold both views at once. If we take the higher one, the lower must become abhorrent in our eyes. There is, there ought to be, no question in the matter of a little more or a little less of torture, or of dispute whether anæsthetics, when they can be employed, usually effect complete and final or only partial and temporary insensibility; or of whether such processes as putting an animal into a stove over a fire till it expires in ten or twenty minutes ought to be called “baking it alive,” or described by some less distressing and homely phraseology. It is the simple idea of dealing with a living, conscious, sensitive, and intelligent creature as if it were dead and senseless matter against which the whole spirit of true humanity revolts. It is the notion of such absolute despotism as shall justify not merely taking life, but converting the entire existence of the animal into a misfortune, which we denounce as a brutal misconception of the relations between the higher and the lower creatures, and an utter anachronism in the present stage of human moral feeling. A hundred years ago, had physiologists frankly avowed that they recognized no claims on the part of the brutes which should stop them from torturing them, they would have been only on the level of their contemporaries. But to-day they are behind the age; ay, sixty years behind the legislature and the poor Irish gentleman who “ruled the houseless wilds of Connemara,” and had the glory of giving his name to Martin’s Act. How their claim for a “free vivisecting table” may be looked back upon a century to come, we may perhaps foretell with no great chance of error. In his last book, published ten years ago, Sir Arthur Helps wrote these memorable words: “It appears to me that the advancement of the world is to be measured by the increase of humanity and the decrease of cruelty.... I am convinced that, if an historian were to sum the gains and losses of the world at the close of each recorded century, there might be much which was retrograde in other aspects of human life and conduct, but nothing could show a backward course in humanity” (pp. 195, 196). As I have said ere now, the battle of mercy, like that of freedom

“Once begun,
Though often lost, is always won.”

Even should all the scientific men in Europe unite in a resolution that “vivisection is necessary,” just as all the Dominicans would have united three hundred years ago to resolve that autos-da-fé were “necessary,” or as all the lawyers and magistrates that the _peine forte et dure_ was “necessary,” or as the statesmen of America did thirty years ago that negro slavery was “necessary,” yet the “necessity” will disappear in the case of the scientific torture of animals as in all the rest. The days of vivisection are numbered.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] A touching story of such sheep-gathering was recently told me on good authority. A shepherd lost his large flock on the Scotch mountains in a fog. After fruitless search, he returned to his cottage, bidding his collie find the sheep, if she could. The collie, who was near giving birth to her young, understood his orders, and disappeared in the mist, not returning for many hours. At last, she came home in miserable plight, driving before her the last stray sheep, and carrying in her mouth a puppy of her own! She had of necessity left the rest of her litter to perish on the hills and in the intervals of their birth the poor beast had performed her task and driven home the sheep. Her last puppy only she had contrived to save.

[22] The best effort to supply the missing chapter of ethics is the charming and eloquent volume, _Rights of an Animal_, by E. B. Nicholson. I thankfully recognize the candor wherewith the author has tackled the difficult problems of the case, and the value of his demonstration that the law of England assumes the fundamental principle that cruelty to an animal is an offence _per se_, and that it is not necessary to show that it injures any human owner or spectator. In this respect, as in all others, our Act (11 and 12 Vict. c. 39) immeasurably transcends the French _Loi Grammont_, which condemns only cruelty exhibited in public places and painful to the spectators. Mr. Nicholson justifies vivisection only so far as it can be rendered absolutely painless by anæsthetics. To such of us as have seen through that delusion, _cadit quaestio_.

[23] As a recent example of this doctrine, see an article in the _Fortnightly Review_ for Feb. 1, 1882. “Is it not,” the author says, “the very basis of ethical doctrine(!) that the moral rights of any being depend on its ethical nature?”

[24] I have endeavored elsewhere to work out this hypothesis of an umpire between man and brute, as a method of helping us to a solution of the problem of what are and what are not lawful actions on our parts toward animals. The reader who may be interested in the inquiry may obtain my pamphlet, _The Right of Tormenting_, price 2_d._, at the office of the Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection, 1 Victoria Street, Westminster.

[25] In fact, many men who pursue such trades, notably butchers, are genuinely humane, and do their best to get through their work in the most merciful way. Several of them have recently expressed warm satisfaction on obtaining Baxter’s mask, whereby oxen may be instantaneously killed without the chance of a misdirected blow. The mask is to be obtained from Mr. Baxter, Ealing Dean, W.

SACRIFICIAL MEDICINE.

The world has done wrong to laugh at the old lady who reproved her sailor grandson for “telling her such a scandalous fib as that he had seen a fish fly in the air,” but restored her confidence to the hopeful youth when he proceeded to narrate how he had picked up a wheel of Pharaoh’s chariot on the Red Sea shore. Practically, we all jump easily at beliefs toward the level of which we have already climbed by previous knowledge (or previous prejudice, as it may chance), and refuse, donkey-wise, to budge an inch toward those which happen to be on a plane above our preconceived notions of what either is or ought to be. It is this propensity, of course, which makes the most baseless calumny mischievous by paving the way for the next slander against its object. And it is it, also, which grants interminable leases of life to false systems of physics and religion by securing a welcome for every fiction and fallacy which at any time may seem to favor them, and closing the door in the face of truths which militate against and might explode them.

A curious study of the “Grammar of Assent,” as used by the majority of mankind in the matter which comes nearest to their own business and bosoms, might, I think, be made by unearthing the preconceived notions and preparatory ideas which must needs exist as regards the healing art, and which can have enabled doctors confidently to prescribe, and patients meekly to accept, the horrid and shocking remedies in use from the earliest period,--remedies of which it is a mild criticism to say that they were worse than the diseases they professed to cure. Had the minds of men concerned with medical inquiries been really free from antecedent convictions,--blank sheets of paper whereon Nature could have written down her facts, which experience might have read and collated,--it is clear enough that good diet, exercise, and cleanliness, and the occasional use of simple preparations of herbs, would early have constituted the primitive and sound rules of medical science, to be supplemented, as time went on, by discoveries of the therapeutic value of more rare vegetable substances and of a few minerals. Never could practical observation, by any possibility, have suggested that it would be beneficial to a sick man to make him swallow potable gold or powdered skulls, or a bolus of decomposed old toads and earth-worms. The _un-_“scientific use of the imagination” can alone have dictated these and scores of no less absurd and obnoxious prescriptions, prompted by some _a priori_ theory of what _ought_, antecedently to experience, to be suitable for the cure of disease, and “in accordance with the eternal fitness of things.”

What, then, were the notions in obedience to which these marvellous remedies were ordained? If we exclude from present consideration all the really useful therapeutic agents, discovered doubtless by genuine experience and recorded by the ancient physicians, Galen and Hippocrates, Dioscorides and Avicenna, and all the rest, and also set aside those which, though not really useful, might have been readily mistaken for being so by imperfect early observation, we find the immense residue of absurd and monstrous recipes to fall into two categories; namely, the remedies which were exceedingly costly and the remedies which were either very painful or very disgusting. In other words, a large part of the medical science of all past ages proves that the doctors and their patients valued remedies _in proportion to the price to be paid for them_, either in money or in suffering. In short, they adopted freely the Doctrine of Sacrifice as applied to medicine. Considering that Nature nearly always proceeds on precisely the opposite track,--that she does not ask us “to do some great thing,” but, like the true prophet, only bids us “wash and be clean”; makes the cheapest and commonest things the most wholesome, and affords us normally, by our instinctive desire or loathing, the surest test of the fitness or unfitness of food for our use,--there is something exceedingly curious in the all but universal assumption of mankind that it was only necessary to find something particularly rare and expensive, or else something extraordinarily revolting, to obtain a panacea for all the woes of mortality. It was ridiculous (in the estimation of our forefathers) to suppose that a great noble or king should dissolve pearls in his drink or swallow liquid gold, and yet, forsooth, be no better after all than a poor wretch who could afford himself only a little milk or water. Still more incredible was it that a man should submit to some agonizing scarification or actual cautery, or should compel himself to bolt some inexpressibly disgusting mess which his doctor had taken a year to concoct and distil through a score of furnaces and retorts, and yet, when all was over, receive no more benefit than if he had endured no hardship, or had only drunk some cowslip julep or herb tea. Such tame and impotent conclusions could not be received for a moment. If patients would only _pay_ enough or _suffer_ enough, they _must_ be cured. This, it really seems, was the underlying conviction of men of old, on which half the therapeutics of past times were unconsciously based.

Let us cull a few illustrations of the ingenious development of those principles by the invention of nostrums distinguished by one or other of the grand characteristics, roughly definable as costliness or nastiness. Perhaps, ere the close of our brief review, we may find we have less reason than we fancy at starting to congratulate ourselves on the disappearance of this phase of human folly, or to rest assured that inductive science alone now rules in the sick-room, and that neither doctors nor patients retain any faith in sacrificial medicine.

The use of costly things as remedies for disease constitutes a kind of _haute médecine_ necessarily of limited application. With the exception of the great search for the _Aurum Potabile_ in the Middle Ages, there are much fewer traces of it than of the other form of sacrifice, in which the patient _payait de sa personne_. Everybody could be scarified or made to swallow worms and filth; but there were not many patients who could afford to pay for emeralds to tie on their stomachs in cases of dysentery, as recommended by Avenzor, nor for “eight grains of that noble lunar medicine, the wine of silver,” nor for “dissolved pearls,” either of which (Matthioli assures us) is “sovereign against melancholy.” Dioscorides might in vain recommend powdered sapphires for starting eyes, or St. Jerome vaunt their virtues for many other troubles, to the majority of sufferers in their own or any other age. Coral was more within popular reach; and probably a considerable number of believing souls have followed Galen’s prescription and tried its use for spitting of blood, and Pliny’s recommendation of it for the stone. Avicenna found that a cordial made of it is “singularly productive of joy”; and Matthioli says it has “truly occult virtues against epilepsy,” whether “hung about the neck or drunk in powders.”[26] Emeralds or rubies, and even silk (then a rarer substance in Europe than now), afford, according to Dioscorides, relief in a variety of ailments; but of course nothing could be so generally, and indeed universally, useful as gold. He who could discover how to make men actually drink the most costly of metals would teach them nothing less than the secret of immortality. The _Aurum Potabile_, or noble “Solar Oyl,” especially when mixed with the “Lunar Oyl” of silver, and “Mercurial Oyl,” forms, as Bolnest assures us, “a great Arcanum, fit to be used in most diseases, _especially in chronick_.” By itself alone, indeed, the drinkable gold was understood to be an elixir of life,--a conclusion not a little remarkable, when we consider that the only real value of the metal is its convenience as a circulating medium and for the fabrication of ornaments, and that the artificial importance thus attached to it must have so affected men’s minds as to cause them to idealize it as a sort of divine antidote to disease and death.

In an earlier and truer-hearted age, Paradise was believed to be a garden, and it was the Fruit of a Tree of Life which would make men live forever. But when, as Gibbon satirically observes, in the dissolution of the Roman world, men coveted only a place in the Celestial City of gold and pearl, the secret of immortality was sought (not inappropriately) at the bottom of a Rosicrucian crucible.

There was, it must be confessed, a profound _vulgarity_ in this whole system of costly medicine, which it would be flattering to ourselves to think we had in our day quite overpassed and discarded. But in truth, though we are not wont to dissolve pearls or powder emeralds or drink solar or even lunar “Oyl,” it may be fairly asked whether we do not contrive to melt down a handful of sovereigns in every attack of illness to very little better purpose than if we had simply given them to an old alchemist to put in his furnace and make for us an elixir of life? What are these long rows of items in our druggist’s bill for draughts, embrocations, liniments, blisters, gargles, and what not, represented, when the housemaid clears our room for convalescence, by a whole regiment of quarter-emptied phials and pill-boxes on our table? What are those considerable drafts recorded in our check-book, not only for the attendance of our customary medical adviser (which might be reasonable), but for the visits of the eminent consulting physician, brought down, perchance, fifty or five hundred miles to look at us for five minutes while we lay speechless in our fever? Did anybody ever use one-half, or even one-third, of the expensive medicines ordered in every illness from the pharmacy day after day? Or did anybody find a medical man, in view of a patient’s straitened circumstances, telling his anxious friends that the remains of the last bottle of his physic would answer as well as a new one, or that they might readily change it, by adding a few drops of some fresh ingredient, instead of ordering another six ounces from the chemist, to be set aside in its turn, half used, to-morrow? Or (what is still more to the purpose) did anybody ever hear of a case wherein the physician summoned for consultation (possibly at enormous cost) has given his honest opinion that the regular medical attendant of the patient has mistaken his case, and that the treatment ought to be altogether reversed?

The same idea has been at the bottom of our proceedings and those of our ancestors which we ridicule; namely, that if we do but spend money enough, a cure _must_ follow.

But, as I remarked before, the notion that costliness of itself is a test of medicinal virtue has been, necessarily, far less prolific of results than the kindred idea that by the pain and disgust entailed on a patient might be estimated the value of the remedy applied to his disease. As to disgust, it would really appear as if some ancient prophets of the healing art, some Phœbus Epicurios or Æsculapius, must have laid down as a principle for the selection of health-restoring compounds and concoctions, “By their nauseousness ye shall know them.” Else were the recipes for all the hideous, abominable witch-broths, wherewith the older books of medicine are replete, quite unaccountable on any theory of human sanity. Many of them (which weak-souled patients have swallowed by the ounce and the pound) were of a kind which it is quite impossible to quote; nor can we wonder that, as Plato tells us, the Athenian physicians were wont to engage the great rhetorician Gorgias to accompany them and persuade their patients to take their prescriptions. Let the following, however, be taken as moderate examples:--

“Take what Animal soever thy fancy best liketh, and thou thinkest most fit to prepare. Kill it and take it (but separate nothing of its impurities, as feathers, hoofs, hairs, or other heterogeneous substance), bruise all in a large and strong mortar to a fit consistency, put it then into a vessel for putrefaction, and put upon it of the blood of animals of the same kind so much as may well moisten it, or, which is better, cover it all over. Shut close the vessel and set it to putrifie, _in fimo equino_, for forty dayes that it may ferment.” (The result is to be distilled, calcined, rectified, and distilled over again and again, “seven times to separate its phlegme,” till finally) “thou hast a pleasant [!!], safe, and noble Animal Arcanum to fortifie the animal life, and restore health and vigor to its languishing spirit, till God doth call for its final dissolution and separation.”--_Aurora Chymica_, p. 6.

This was bad enough, but a great advance (in the line of sacrifice) was made when to the mere odiousness, we may say beastliness, of the dose _per se_ could be added the horror of eating what had once formed part of a human body,--in short, of cannibalism. The _ordonnances_ which follow really seem to have a connection with ancient idol-rites of human sacrifice, and possibly (had we means of tracing them) might be fathered on the earliest worshippers of Hesus or of Odin. The seasons of the year (spring and autumn) wherein the victim must die (very carefully defined in these prescriptions) seem to give color to this view. Down to the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, Helps tells us, the Aztecs used yearly to slay a young man in spring that the nobles might eat his heart as a sort of sacrament. Anyway, it is rather startling to find that just two hundred years ago in London the physician in ordinary to the King recommended cannibalism to Englishmen without the smallest apology or hesitation.

_A Mummiall Quintessence._

Take of the flesh of a sound young man, dying a natural death about the middle of August, three or four pounds. Let the flesh be taken from his thighs or other fleshy parts. Put it into a fit glass and pour upon it spirit of wine. Let it stand so three or four days. Take out the flesh and put it upon a glass plate, and imbibe it with spirits of salts. Let it stand uncovered, but in the shade, where no dust or other filth may fall upon it. Be sure you often turn it, and, being well dried, you may put it up in a fit jar and keep it for use.--_Aurora Chymica_, chap. iii.

A still more efficacious remedy, “producing wonderful effects both in preserving and restoring health,” may be obtained by distilling, filtering, calcining, and coagulating this “Mummiall” till it have a “saccharine taste,” when the “matter may be left of the thickness or consistency of honey, which must be kept in glass vessels closely shut.” (_Ibid._, p. 8.)

If the “sound young man” should have been killed in the spring instead of in “the middle of August,” the learned Dr. Bolnest is not without a remedy. His flesh is, indeed, no longer useful for a “Mummiall,” but his blood may be made into a “very high balsam, exceeding much the powers and virtue of natural balsam; a potent preservative in time of pestilence, leprosie, palsie, and gout of all sorts.”

“Take of such blood a large quantity. Gather in glass vessels. Let it settle some time till it hath thrown out all its waterish humor, which separate by wary inclination. Take now of this concrete blood five or six pounds, which put to ten or twelve pints of spirits of wine. Shake them well together, and let it digest six or eight days in warm ashes.” Distil. Add the fixed salt drawn out of the _caput mortuum_ of the blood by “calcination,” “solution,” “filtration,” “coagulation,” often repeated; “and what shall remain behind is the Arcanum of Blood” (p. 10).

When obtained in the manner above described, this invaluable remedy is “to be taken in broth or treacle-water with a fasting” (and let us devoutly hope an unusually vigorous) “stomach.” Only one caution is necessary. The “sound young man’s” blood must have been shed “when Mercury was above the horizon and in conjunction with the sun in Gemini or Virgo.”

After the broth of man’s blood, a “Balsamick Remedy for Arthritick Pains,” composed of the bones of a man “which hath not been buried fully a year,” beat up into a powder, calcined, and applied on lint, appears a comparatively mild and pleasant receipt. So, likewise, is the “Quintessence of Toads,” to be composed in the month of June or July of a “great quantity of overgrown toads,” reduced, calcined, and distilled as usual, and then “dissolved in spirit of oranges or treacle-water ready for use,” either externally, when it cures “cancers and pestilential venom,” or internally, against “all sorts of poison.”

The above prescriptions are taken, be it said, not from the manual of one of those vulgar quacks to whom we are too apt to credit every absurdity of ancient medicine, but from a serious treatise by Edward Bolnest, physician in ordinary to the King (1672), dedicated to George Duke of Buckingham, and described on the title-page as “Shewing a Rational [!] Way of preparing Animals, Vegetables, and Minerals for a Physical Use, by which they are made most efficacious, safe, and pleasant Medicines for the Preservation and Restoration of the Life of Man.” How honest was the worthy author in his belief in his “Mummiall Quintessence,” and all the rest, may be judged from his frank avowal “to the Reader” that the medicines prescribed he might “_in some measure_ in time of need trust to,” because, adds Dr. Bolnest candidly, “I never yet from the best of medicines always found those certain effects I could have desired.”

These were, however, refined preparations compared to the prescriptions in use in still earlier generations. In the great folio of M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli (Venice, 1621), adorned with hundreds of really admirable woodcuts of medicinal herbs and flowers, there are directions for rubbing wounds with cow-dung, swallowing beeswax, silk, sweat, and saliva, and drinking hare’s blood and dog’s dung dissolved in milk as a cure for dysentery. Nervous people are to dine on cooked vipers. Persons with the toothache are to apply to their teeth a serpent’s skin steeped in vinegar, or to powder the callosities on a horse’s legs, and stuff their ears therewith. A black eye may be treated with a poultice of human milk, incense, and the blood of a tortoise. For the not very serious affection of hiccough a beverage is recommended, of which the chief ingredient is the flesh of a mummy; thus affording us further evidence that cannibalism survived in medicine, and was approved by the faculty in Italy as well as England, down to a very recent period. Besides these “strange meats,” Matthioli regularly classifies in a table a multitude of what he is pleased to call “simple medicines,” among which are to be found the bodies, or parts of bodies, of wolves, scorpions, centipedes, ostriches, beavers, and dogs, the cast-off skins of serpents, the horns of unicorns (when attainable!), the hoofs of asses and goats, beeswax, silk, asphalt, and several filthy substances which cannot here be named. Albertus Magnus (_vide_ the curious little black-letter volume, _Le Grat Albert_, in the British Museum) orders nervous patients to eat eagles’ brains, whereby they may acquire the courage of the king of birds; while the brains of the owl, the goat, the camel, etc., convey the peculiar qualities of each of those animals. Pliny’s great work, it is needless to say, is a repertory of marvellous counsels and observations. Earth taken out of a human skull acts as a depilatory, and benefit is derived from chewing plants which have happened to grow in the same unpleasant receptacle. On the principle, we presume, of “I am not the rose, but I have dwelt near the rose,” herbs growing on a manure heap are found especially efficacious as remedies for quinsy. The hair of man, taken from a cross, is good for quartan fevers, and human ear-wax is the only proper application to a wound occasioned by a human bite. The uses of saliva are numberless, and fill a whole chapter of the _Natural History_. “Fasting spittle,” in particular, applied to the eyes, is an infallible cure for ophthalmia,--a remedy which Persius treats with blameworthy scepticism as an old-womanly practice. In cases where bread has stuck in the throat, a piece of the same loaf should be inserted in the ears. The use of the fluid which exudes from the pores of the skin is so valuable that (Pliny assures us) the owners of the Grecian gymnasia made a thriving trade by selling the scrapings of the bodies of athletes, which, “compounded with oil, is of an emollient, calorific, and expletive nature.” If any lady desire to cultivate an interesting and pallid appearance, she ought to imitate Drusus, who drank goats’ blood to make it appear that his enemy Cassius had poisoned him. For melancholy (an affection which seems to have given great concern to the old doctors), Dioscorides recommends black hellebore held in the mouth,--certainly a recipe on homœopathic principles, since a mouthful of hellebore would scarcely naturally serve, like the Psalmist’s wine and oil, either to make glad the heart of man or to give him a cheerful countenance. A better remedy for the same melancholy is “broth of old cock,” our Scotch friend cockaleekie.

For some unexplained reason, two only among the ills to which flesh is heir, and they among the most serious,--frenzy and inflammation of the stomach,--seem to have escaped from the dread _régime_ of Sacrificial Medicine, and indeed are treated with surprising lenity. Dioscorides thinks that frenzy can be cured by asparagus and white wine, and considers that the patient suffering from gastritis should have a plaster of roses applied to the seat of his disease!

Besides the “exhibition” of nauseous and revolting draughts, boluses, and pills, the system of Sacrificial Medicine has at all times commanded many other ingenious resources for the creation of unnecessary pain, trouble, and annoyance to sick persons and their friends. If, for example, a stiff-necked patient were unmanageable in the matter of some particularly disagreeable dose, he might still be induced to go on vexing nature by some out-of-the-way diet, and potions repeated at stated intervals, till faith or life succumbed in the struggle. One old physician, Ætius, in this way prescribed for the gout a separate dietary for every month of a whole year. Another, the great Alexander of Tralles, ordained three hundred and sixty-five potions, so arranged as to furnish out a course for two years; whereupon Dr. Friend, the learned author of the _History of Physick_, remarks that “his receipts were as good as any of those which our new pretenders to physick make use of,” but adds the discouraging dictum, “After all, gout is a distemper with which it were best not to tamper.”

Then there were fearful tortures in the way of excoriations, of which St. John Long’s famous remedy was a notable example,--blisters, cauteries, and setons, too unpleasant to dwell upon. Scarification was a comparatively merciful form of these inflictions. It was practised, according to Prosper Albinus (_Hist. Phys._, p. 17), in the following agreeable manner: “First, make a strait [tight] ligature on the leg; then rub the leg below it, put it into warm water, and beat _till it swells_, and so scarify”! Something worse than this was practised down to the present generation in the case of wounds. It is in the writer’s recollection that an unhappy groom who had lost a piece of flesh out of the calf of his leg sought assistance after his accident from a motherly old cook, the medical adviser in ordinary of the whole household. The good woman evidently held the doctrine of Sacrificial Medicine deep in her soul, as well as a due estimate of the utility, under all circumstances, of the art of cookery. Encouraging the poor young man with suitable reflections on the purifying use of salt and fire, she accordingly rubbed a handful from her salt-box into the wound, and then held the miserable limb steadily to the kitchen fire!

A bath of blood has been frequently employed to resuscitate exhausted patients. When Cæsar Borgia barely survived swallowing his share of the bottles of poisoned wine which his respectable father, Pope Alexander VI., had intended for the Cardinal, but took by mistake for himself and his son, it is said that an ox was brought into Cæsar’s apartments and disembowelled, to enable him to get into it and receive such vitality as the warm, bleeding carcass might impart. We are here at the point where Sacrificial Medicine assumes the vicarious form, and the poor brutes are made to suffer instead of the human patients for the benefit of the latter. In an account of the birth of the Duc de Bourgogne, grandson of Louis XIV., in the _Curiosités Historiques_ (p. 48), amid the description of the raptures of the splendid court assembled on the occasion, there is a casual mention of an incident affording a wonderful contrast to all this royal joy and magnificence. The attendant chief _accoucheur_, the celebrated Dr. Clement, to prevent suffering on the part of the mother (the Dauphine), applied to her person the skin of a sheep, newly flayed. To obtain this quite fresh, a butcher was engaged to skin the animal alive in the adjoining room; and, being anxious to offer the skin as quickly as possible to the doctor, he carried it into the chamber of the Dauphine, leaving the door open. The sheep, in its agony, followed him, and ran in, bleeding and skinless, among the shrieking crowd of courtiers and grandees. In modern times, worse things than these are done to animals, professedly for the benefit of mankind; but they are now performed quietly in physiological laboratories, not paraded in public, else it is to be believed that even the most selfish among us would cry, “Hold! we desire no cure of disease, no scientific knowledge, at any such horrible price.”

Yet, again, there was a class of Sacrificial Remedies whose merit consisted in requiring the patient to travel a long way, or to apply to some hardly accessible personage, to obtain relief. There were Holy Wells having no medicinal properties whatever, which cured all the multitudes of people who made long and painful pilgrimages to reach them. More remarkable still were the benefits derived in cases of scrofula from being touched by a king,--a privilege, it may be safely guessed, not accorded without some delay and solicitation, and possibly not without fees to royal attendants, scarcely disinterested witnesses of the miracles which followed. The history of this particular delusion would alone form a very curious chapter, since Archbishop Bradwardine, in 1348, appealed to the whole world in proof of the wonder, till Samuel Johnson’s scarred and mighty head was subjected to the royal touch. When we recall the fact that only in the eighteenth century did a special religious service for the ceremony cease to form a part of the Liturgy of the Church of England, we do not seem to ourselves to have yet advanced a great way beyond this harmless superstition. Indeed, it is only in the present generation that the scientific name of the malady has generally superseded its familiar title of the “King’s Evil,” or by ellipsis “the Evil,” by which it is even now known in remote parts of the country.

Where it was impossible to obtain help from a king, there yet remained the possibility of being touched by somebody else, who might possess some rare and peculiar privilege and fitness for healing disease. The odd malady, popularly called “shingles,” for example, somehow suggested to the sufferers the desirability of having recourse to some special agency of relief; and this was found in persons who had either themselves eaten the flesh of an eagle, or whose fathers or ancestors had done so. Within the last thirty years, a gentleman’s servant in Wales has been known to perform a journey of forty miles across the mountains to be touched by a man whose grandfather had eaten an eagle.

Finally, there is a large heterogeneous class of prescriptions, obviously owing their origin to the principle of Sacrificial Medicine, of which the simple rule has been to prevent the miserable patient from adopting any mode of relief for his sufferings which Nature might point out, and adding to them fresh pain by any ingenious device which may occur to his physician. Of this kind was the treatment of fever in vogue till quite recently, when the patient was carefully shut up in a close room, with well-curtained bed and warm bedclothes, and was prohibited from relieving his thirst with any cold drink. Truly, if Marcellus Sidetes, who is said to have written forty-two books in “heroic” verse “concerning distempers,” had given us a picture of all the misery which must have been occasioned in the world by the really _insolent_ disregard of Nature and common sense shown in these matters,--how many thousands of lives have been thrown away, and through what maddening misery the survivors must have struggled back to life,--those poems, instead of being forgotten by the world, might have done us precious service by reminding us that there is some counterweight to be placed in the scale wherein we are wont to measure our debts of gratitude to medical science.

Another appalling device was that of the renowned English physician, John of Gaddesden, who introduced the practice of treating the small-pox by wrapping up the patient in scarlet, hanging his room in scarlet, and in fact compelling him to rest his feverish eyes only on that flaring hue. John tried this notable device, according to his own showing, on one of the sons of King Edward I. (it does not appear to which he refers), and complacently adds to his report, “_et est bona cura_.” In those days, however, doors and windows were not made air-tight, and up the capacious chimneys a considerable portion of fresh air must always have rushed. It was reserved for a later generation to perfect the ingenious system for aggravating and intensifying fever by pasting down the modern window, closing the registers, and (as a climax) engaging nurses to lie beside the sufferer to keep up the heat! The writer heard some years ago from the lips of a Member of Parliament, now deceased, the recital of his own treatment as a boy, in or near London, under a severe attack of small-pox. His life being specially valuable as that of an only son, his affectionate parents, by the advice of a distinguished physician, obtained the services of _two fat women_, who were established permanently in bed on each side of the child during the whole course of the disease! What stipend was offered to tempt these poor obese females to perform this awful service has escaped from the record.