A Book about Doctors Part 23

"I am called out, so adieu."

"March 6th.

"How do you stand this flabby weather? I tremble to hear, but want to hear of all things. If you have done with my stupid West India Ly., pray send 'em, for they go to-morrow or next day at latest. 'Tis hardly worth while to trouble Ld L with so much chaff and so little wheat--then why you!

"Very true. 'Tis a sad thing to have to do with a fool, who can't keep his nonsense to himself. You know I am a rose, but I have terrible p.r.i.c.kles. Dear madam, adieu. Pray G.o.d I may hear you are well, or that He will enable me to make you so, for you must not be sick or die. I'll find fools and rogues enough to be that for you, that are good for nothing else, and hardly, very hardly, good enough for that. Adieu, Adieu! I say Adieu, Adieu.

"M. M."

Truly did Dr. Messenger Monsey understand the art of writing a long letter about nothing.

CHAPTER XVIII.

AKENSIDE.

There were two Akensides--Akenside the poet, and Akenside the man; and of the _man_ Akenside there were numerous subdivisions. Remarkable as a poet, he was even yet more noteworthy a private individual in his extreme inconsistency. No character is more commonplace than the one to which is ordinarily applied the word contradictory; but Akenside was a curiosity from the extravagance in which this form of "the commonplace" exhibited itself in his disposition and manners.

By turns he was placid, irritable, simple, affected, gracious, haughty, magnanimous, mean, benevolent, harsh, and sometimes even brutal. At times he was marked by a childlike docility, and at other times his vanity and arrogance displayed him almost as a madman. Of plebeian extraction, he was ashamed of his origin, and yet was throughout life the champion of popular interests. Of his real humanity there can be no doubt, and yet in his demeanour to the unfortunate creatures whom, in his capacity of a hospital-physician, he had to attend, he was always supercilious, and often cruel.

Like Byron, he was lame, one of his legs being shorter than the other; and of this personal disfigurement he was even more sensitive than was the author of "Childe Harold" of his deformity. When his eye fell on it he would blush, for it reminded him of the ign.o.ble condition in which he was born. His father was a butcher at Newcastle-upon-Tyne; and one of his cleavers, falling from the shop-block, had irremediably injured the poet's foot, when he was still a little child.

Akenside was not only the son of a butcher--but, worse still, a Nonconformist butcher; and from an early period of his life he was destined to be a sectarian minister. In his nineteenth year he was sent to Edinburgh to prosecute his theological studies, the expenses of this educational course being in part defrayed by the Dissenters'

Society. But he speedily discovered that he had made a wrong start, and persuaded his father to refund the money the Society had advanced, and to be himself at the cost of educating him as a physician. The honest tradesman was a liberal and affectionate parent. Mark remained three years at Edinburgh, a member of the Medical Society, and an industrious student. On leaving Edinburgh he practised for a short time as a surgeon at Newcastle; after which he went to Leyden, and having spent three months in that university took his degree of doctor of physic, May 16, 1744. At Leyden he became warmly attached to a fellow-student named Dyson; and wonderful to be related, the two friends, notwithstanding one was under heavy pecuniary obligations to the other, and they were very unlike each other in some of their princ.i.p.al characteristics, played the part of Pylades and Orestes, even into the Valley of Death. Akenside was poor, ardent, and of a nervous, poetic temperament. Dyson was rich, sober, and matter-of-fact, a prudent place-holder. He rose to be clerk of the House of Commons, and a Lord of the Treasury; but the atmosphere of political circles and the excitement of public life never caused his heart to forget its early attachment. Whilst the poet lived Dyson was his munificent patron, and when death had stepped in between them, his literary executor. Indeed, he allowed him for years no less a sum than ?300 per annum.

Akenside was never very successful as a physician, although he thoroughly understood his profession, and in some important particulars advanced its science. Dyson introduced him into good society, and recommended him to all his friends; but the greatest income Akenside ever made was most probably less than what he obtained from his friend's generosity. Still, he must have earned something, for he managed to keep a carriage and pair of horses; and ?300 per annum, although a hundred years ago that sum went nearly twice as far as it would now, could not have supported the equipage. His want of patients can easily be accounted for. He was a vain, tempestuous, crotchety little man, little qualified to override the prejudices which vulgar and ignorant people cherish against lawyers and physicians who have capacity and energy enough to distinguish themselves in any way out of the ordinary track of their professional duties.

He was admitted, by mandamus, to a doctor's degree at Cambridge; and became a fellow of the Royal Society, and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. He tried his luck at Northampton, and found he was not needed there; he became an inhabitant of Hampstead, but failed to ingratiate himself with the opulent gentry who in those days resided in that suburb; and lastly fixed himself in Bloomsbury Square (?tat. 27), where he resided till his death. After some delay, he became a physician of St. Thomas's Hospital, and an a.s.sistant physician of Christ's Hospital--read the Gulstonian Lectures before the College of Physicians, in 1755--and was also Krohnian Lecturer. In speeches and papers to learned societies, and to various medical treatises, amongst which may be mentioned his "De Dysentari?

Commentarius," he tried to wheedle himself into practice. But his efforts were of no avail. Sir John Hawkins, in his absurd Life of Dr.

Johnson, tells a good story of Saxby's rudeness to the author of the "Pleasures of Imagination." Saxby was a custom-house clerk, and made himself liked in society by saying the rude things which other people had the benevolence to feel, but lacked the hardihood to utter. One evening, at a party, Akenside argued, with much warmth and more tediousness, that physicians were better and wiser men than the world ordinarily thought.

"Doctor," said Saxby, "after all you have said, my opinion of the profession is this: the ancients endeavoured to make it a science, and failed; and the moderns to make it a trade, and succeeded."

He was not liked at St. Thomas's Hospital. The gentle Lettsom, whose mild poetic nature had surrounded the author of "The Pleasures of Imagination" with a halo of romantic interest, when he entered himself a student of that school, was shocked at finding the idol of his admiration so irritable and unkindly a man. He was, according to Lettsom's reminiscences, thin and pale, and of a strumous countenance.

His injured leg was lengthened by a false heel. In dress he was scrupulously neat and delicate, always having on his head a well-powdered white wig, and by his side a long sword. Any want of respect to him threw him into a fit of anger. One amongst the students who accompanied him on a certain occasion round the wards spat on the floor behind the physician. Akenside turned sharply on his heel, and demanded who it was that dared to spit in his face. To the poor women who applied to him for medical advice he exhibited his dislike in the most offensive and cruel manner. The students who watched him closely, and knew the severe disappointment his affections had suffered in early life, whispered to the novice that the poet-physician's moroseness to his female patients was a consequence of his having felt the goads of despised love. The fastidiousness of the little fellow at having to come so closely in contact with the vulgar rabble, induced him sometimes to make the stronger patients precede him with brooms and clear a way for him through the crowd of diseased wretches. Bravo, my butcher's boy! This story of Akenside and his lictors, pus.h.i.+ng back the unsightly mob of lepers, ought to be read side by side with that of the proud Duke of Somerset, who, when on a journey, used to send outriders before him to clear the roads, and prevent vulgar eyes from looking at him.

On one occasion Akenside ordered an unfortunate male patient of St.

Thomas's to take boluses of bark. The poor fellow complained that he could not swallow them. Akenside was so incensed at the man's presuming to have an opinion on the subject, that he ordered him to be turned out of the hospital, saying, "He shall not die under my care."

A man who would treat his _poor_ patients in this way did not deserve to have any _rich_ ones. These excesses of folly and brutality, however, ere long reached the ears of honest Richard Chester, one of the governors, and that good fellow gave the doctor a good scolding, roundly telling him, "Know, thou art a servant of this charity."

Akenside's self-love received a more humorous stab than the poke administered by Richard Chester's blunt cudgel, from Mr. Baker, one of the surgeons at St. Thomas's. To appreciate the full force of the story, the reader must recollect that the jealousy, which still exists between the two branches of the medical profession, was a century since so violent that even considerations of interest failed in some cases to induce eminent surgeons and physicians to act together. One of Baker's sons was the victim of epilepsy, and frequent fits had impaired his faculties. Baker was naturally acutely sensitive of his child's misfortune, and when Akenside had the bad taste to ask to what study the afflicted lad intended to apply, the father answered, "I find he is not capable of making a surgeon, so I have sent him to Edinburgh to make a physician of him." Akenside felt this sarcasm so much, that he for a long time afterward refused to hold any intercourse with Baker.

But Akenside had many excuses for his irritability. He was very ambitious, and failed to achieve that success which the possession of great powers warranted him in regarding as his due. It was said of Garth that no physician understood his art more, or his trade less!

and this, as Mr. Bucke, in his beautiful "Life of Arkenside," remarks, was equally true of the doctor of St. Thomas's. He had a thirst for human praise and worldly success, and a temperament that caused him, notwithstanding all his sarcasms against love, to estimate at their full worth the joys of married life; yet he lived all his days a poor man, and died a bachelor. Other griefs also contributed to sour his temper. His lot was cast in times that could not justly appreciate his literary excellences. His sincere admiration of cla.s.sic literature and art and manners was regarded by the coa.r.s.e herd of rich and stupid Londoners as so perfectly ridiculous, that when Smollett had the bad taste to introduce him into _Peregrine Pickle_, as the physician who gives a dinner after the manner of the ancients, the applause was general, and every city tradesman, with scholars.h.i.+p enough to read the novel, had a laugh at the expense of a man who has some claims to be regarded as the greatest literary genius of his time. The polished and refined circles of English life paid homage to his genius, but even in them he failed to meet with the cordial recognition he deserved.

Johnson, though he placed him above Gray and Mason, did not do him justice. Boswell didn't see much in him. Horace Walpole differed from the friend who asked him to admire the "Pleasures of Imagination."

The poets and wits of his own time had a high respect for his critical opinion, and admitted the excellence of his poetry--but almost invariably with some qualification. And Akenside was one who thirsted for the complete a.s.sent of the applauding world. He died after a brief illness in his forty-ninth year, on the 23rd of June, 1770; and we doubt not, when the Angel of Death touched him, the heart that ceased to beat was one that had known much sorrow.

Akenside's poetical career was one of unfulfilled promise. At the age of twenty-three he had written "The Pleasures of the Imagination."

Pope was so struck with the merits of the poem, that when Dodsley consulted him about the price set on it by the author (?120), he told him to make no n.i.g.g.ardly offer, for it was the work of no every-day writer. But he never produced another great work. Impressed with the imperfections of his achievement, he occupied himself with incessantly touching and re-touching it up, till he came to the unwise determination of re-writing it. He did not live to accomplish this suicidal task; but the portion of it which came to the public was inferior to the original poem, both in power and art.

CHAPTER XIX.

LETTSOM.

High amongst literary, and higher yet amongst benevolent, physicians must be ranked John Coakley Lettsom, formerly president of the Philosophical Society of London. A West Indian, and the son of a planter, he was born on one of his father's little islands, Van d.y.k.e, near Tortola, in the year 1744. Though bred a Quaker, he kept his heart so free from sectarianism, and his life so entirely void of the formality and puritanic asceticism of the Friends, that his ordinary acquaintance marvelled at his continuing to wear the costume of the brotherhood. At six years of age he was sent to England for education, being for that purpose confided to the protection of Mr. Fothergill, of Warrington, a Quaker minister, and younger brother of Dr. John Fothergill. After receiving a poor preparatory education, he was apprenticed to a Yorks.h.i.+re apothecary, named Sutcliffe, who, by industry and intelligence, had raised himself from the position of a weaver to that of the first medical pract.i.tioner of Settle. In the last century a West Indian was, to the inhabitants of a provincial district, a rare curiosity; and Sutcliffe's surgery, on the day that Lettsom entered it in his fifteenth year, was surrounded by a dense crowd of gaping rustics, anxious to see a young gentleman accustomed to walk on his head. This extraordinary demonstration of curiosity was owing to the merry humour of Sutcliffe's senior apprentice, who had informed the people that the new pupil, who would soon join him, came from a country where the feet of the inhabitants were placed in an exactly opposite direction to those of Englishmen.

Sutcliffe did not find his new apprentice a very handy one. "Thou mayest make a physician, but I think not a good apothecary," the old man was in the habit of saying; and the prediction in due course turned out a correct one. Having served an apprentices.h.i.+p of five years, and walked for two the wards of St. Thomas's Hospital, where Akenside was a physician, conspicuous for supercilious manner and want of feeling, Lettsom returned to the West Indies, and settled as a medical pract.i.tioner in Tortola. He practised there only five months, earning in that time the astonis.h.i.+ng sum of ?2000; when, ambitious of achieving a high professional position, he returned to Europe, visited the medical schools of Paris and Edinburgh, took his degree of M.D. at Leyden on the 20th of June, 1769, was admitted a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians of London in the same year, and in 1770 was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

From this period till his death, in 1815 (Nov. 20), he was one of the most prominent figures in the scientific world of London. As a physician he was a most fortunate man; for without any high reputation for professional acquirements, and with the exact reverse of a good preliminary education, he made a larger income than any other physician of the same time. Dr. John Fothergill never made more than ?5000 in one year; but Lettsom earned ?3600 in 1783--?3900 in 1784--?4015 in 1785-and ?4500 in 1786. After that period his practice rapidly increased, so that in some years his receipts were as much as ?12,000. But although he pocketed such large sums, half his labours were entirely gratuitous. Necessitous clergymen and literary men he invariably attended with unusual solicitude and attention, but without ever taking a fee for his services. Indeed, generosity was the ruling feature of his life. Although he burdened himself with the public business of his profession, was so incessantly on the move from one patient to another that he habitually knocked up three pairs of horses a-day, and had always some literary work or other upon his desk, he nevertheless found time to do an amount of labour, in establis.h.i.+ng charitable inst.i.tutions and visiting the indigent sick, that would by itself have made a reputation for an ordinary person.

To give the mere list of his separate benevolent services would be to write a book about them. The General Dispensary, the Finsbury Dispensary, the Surrey Dispensary, and the Margate Sea-bathing Infirmary, originated in his exertions; and he was one of the first projectors of--the Philanthropic Society, St. Georges-in-the-Fields, for the Prevention of Crimes, and the Reform of the Criminal Poor; the Society for the Discharge and Relief of Persons Imprisoned for Small Debts; the Asylum for the Indigent Deaf and Dumb; the Inst.i.tution for the Relief and Employment of the Indigent Blind; and the Royal Humane Society, for the recovery of the apparently drowned or dead. And year by year his pen sent forth some publication or other to promote the welfare of the poor, and succour the afflicted. Of course there were crowds of clever spectators of the world's work, who smiled as the doctor's carriage pa.s.sed them in the streets, and said he was a deuced clever fellow to make ten thousand a-year so easily; and that, after all, philanthropy was not a bad trade. But Lettsom was no calculating humanitarian, with a tongue discoursing eloquently on the sufferings of mankind, and an eye on the sharp look-out for his own interest.

What he was before the full stare of the world, that he was also in his own secret heart, and those private ways into which hypocrisy cannot enter. At the outset of his life, when only twenty-three years old, he liberated his slaves--although they const.i.tuted almost his entire worldly wealth, and he was anxious to achieve distinction in a profession that offers peculiar difficulties to needy aspirants. And when his career was drawing to a close, he had to part with his beloved countryseat because he had impoverished himself by lavish generosity to the unfortunate.

There was no sanctimonious affectation in the man. He wore a drab coat and gaiters, and made the Quaker's use of _Thou_ and _Thee_; but he held himself altogether apart from the prejudices of his sect. A poet himself of some respectability, he delighted in every variety of literature, and was ready to shake any man by the hand--Jew or Gentile. He liked pictures and works of sculpture, and spent large sums upon them; into the various scientific movements of the time he threw himself with all the energy of his nature; and he disbursed a fortune in surrounding himself at Camberwell with plants from the tropics. He liked good wine, but never partook of it to excess, although his enemies were ready to suggest that he was always glad to avail himself of an excuse for getting intoxicated. And he was such a devoted admirer of the fair s.e.x, that the jealous swarm of needy men who envied him his prosperity, had some countenance for their slander that he was a Quaker debauchee. He married young, and his wife outlived him; but as a husband he was as faithful as he proved in every other relation of life.

Sat.u.r.day was the day he devoted to entertaining his friends at Grove Hill, Camberwell; and rare parties there gathered round him--celebrities from every region of the civilized world, and the best "good fellows" of London. Boswell was one of his most frequent guests, and, in an ode to Charles Dilly, celebrated the beauties of the physician's seat and his humane disposition:--

"My cordial Friend, still prompt to lend Your cash when I have need on't; We both must bear our load of care-- At least we talk and read on't."

"Yet are we gay in ev'ry way, Not minding where the joke lie; On Sat.u.r.day at bowls we play At Camberwell with Coakley."

"Methinks you laugh to hear but half The name of Dr. Lettsom: From him of good--talk, liquors, food-- His guests will always get some."

"And guests has he, in ev'ry degree, Of decent estimation: His liberal mind holds all mankind As an extended Nation.

"O'er Lettsom's cheer we've met a peer-- A peer--no less than Lansdowne!

Of whom each dull and envious skull Absurdly cries--'The man's down!'

"Down do they say? How then, I pray, His king and country prize him!

Through the whole world known, his peace alone Is sure t' immortalize him.

"Lettsom we view a _Quaker_ true, 'Tis clear he's so in one sense: His _spirit_, strong, and ever young, Refutes pert Priestley's nonsense.

"In fossils he is deep, we see; Nor knows Beasts, Fishes, Birds ill; With plants not few, some from Pelew, And wondrous Mangel Wurzel!

"West India bred, warm heart, cool head, The city's first physician; By schemes humane--want, sickness, pain, To aid in his ambition.

"From terrace high he feasts his eye, When practice grants a furlough; And, while it roves o'er Dulwich groves, Looks down--even upon Thurlow."

The concluding line is an allusion to the Lord Chancellor's residence at Dulwich.

In person, Lettsom was tall and thin--indeed, almost attenuated: his face was deeply lined, indicating firmness quite as much as benevolence; and his complexion was of a dark yellow hue. His eccentricities were numerous. Like the founder of his sect, he would not allow even respect for royalty to make an alteration in his costume which his conscience did not approve; and George III., who entertained a warm regard for him, allowed him to appear at Court in the ordinary Quaker garb, and to kiss his hand, though he had neither powder on his head, nor a sword by his side. Lettsom responded to his sovereign's courtesy by presenting him with some rare and unpurchasable medals.