by the author's own characteristic capitals? "LIVE ON!" Death, as if spurning the carcase, stands inexorably afar off. Baffler of man's law, she has, like Varney, her accomplice, escaped with life. She is not unlikely to pass the extremest boundaries of age. Well, it is a penal sentence: "LIVE ON!" So with Gabriel Varney: "LET HIM LIVE!" It is a charmed life, amid prison tortures. In vain he kneels, the foul tears streaming down, and cries aloud, "I have broken all your laws, I will tell you all my crimes; I ask but one sentence-hang me up,-let me die !" Let him live, is the penal sentence. As with the passer of such another sentence in Lucan, who "sensit pœnamque peti, veniamque timeri ; Vive, licet nolis, . . . . dixit." Vindictive Roger Chillingworth, in the Scarlet Letter, asks what better scheme of vengeance he could devise than to let Hester live-to give her medicines against all harm and peril of life-that so the scarlet letter might still blaze upon her bosom? And such is the very method of his revenge on the fallen minister. What art could do, the malignant physician exhausted on "this miserable priest." That he still breathed, and crept about on earth, was owing all to his enemy's skill. "Better he had died at once! said Hester Prynne.-" Yes, woman, thou sayest truly! cried old Roger Chillingworth, letting the lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes. "Better had he died at once! Never did mortal man suffer what this man has suffered." But the avenger loved to have it so; and the penal sentence imposed by his ingenuity of vindictive art, was one of life, not death. Bracciano's sentence is to the purpose, as set forth in a scene of The Duke's Laboratory: "My sentence! For the punishment is mine, As mine the fault was. She must die . . . ... Die! yes. And then my punishment begins. For I must live. There's punishment for both.” And so is a passage in the last scene of Talfourd's tragedy of Glencoe, where Henry Macdonald rushes with uplifted arm to slay Glenlyon, and that arm is stopped by Lady Macdonald, with the scathing injunction, "Let him live. Glenlyon, I pray you may have life stretch'd out beyond A CHAPTER IV. Materia Medica. § I. PHYSICKED IN VAIN. All's Well that Ends Well, Act i., Sc. I. KING of France, name and date unknown, is the subject of colloquy in the opening scene of All's Well that Ends Well. Long has the king been ailing, and vain hitherto has been any and all medical aid. So vain in the past, that there is no hope for the future. Every resource would seem to have been exhausted, every remedy is a pronounced failure, every physician is at his wits' end. "What hope is there of his majesty's amendment?" the Countess of Roussillon inquires. "He hath abandoned his physicians, madam," is Lafeu's reply, "under whose practices he hath persecuted time with hopes; and finds no other advantage in the process but only the losing of hope by time." One cannot but recall the piteous case in the gospels of a certain woman which had an issue of blood twelve years, and had suffered many things of many physicians, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse. And one thinks too of the prophet's burden of woe against the daughter of Egypt: "In vain shalt thou use many medicines; for thou shalt not be cured." Were but that skilled physician, Helena's father, yet living, the French king might cherish some hope: "If he were living, I would try him yet ; Lend me an arm ;-the rest have worn me out This king and his physicians are of a mind: he, that they cannot help him; they, that they cannot help. Is it for Helen to essay a cure? "How shall they credit a poor unlearned virgin, when the schools, embowelled of their doctrine, have left off the danger to itself?" Seeking relief, and finding none; seeking it everywhere, to find it nowhere one may apply a bit of Plautus,— Pergo ad alios; venio ad alios; deinde ad alios; una res. It is all the same-go to whom one will. Una res-the same story, over and over again. We are told of Jacob Cats, the Dutch poet, who nowadays, even by his own countrymen, is more praised than read, that after having in vain sought relief from all the medical men whom he consulted, he recovered his health by means of a powder given him by an old alchemist. What avails it? is the Dutch burgomaster's question and answer in one, to Margaret Brandt's offer, as a physician's daughter, to prescribe for his sick child. The learnedest leeches in all Rotterdam had all seen this patient, and bettered her not. Not one of them could master her complaint. One skilled wight called it spleen; another, liver; another, blood; another, stomach; and another declared her to be possessed. Margaret replies: "Your leeches are all in different stories . . . because they know not their trade.* I have heard my father say each is enamoured of some one evil, and seeth it with his bat's eye in every patient. Had they stayed at home, and ne'er seen. your daughter, they had answered all the same, spleen, blood, stomach, lungs, liver, lunacy, or, as they call it, possession."-Rousseau expatiates on a painful malady from which he suffered being aggravated, instead of abated, * * Otheman assures Queen Elizabeth, in 1587, of a like incompetency, metaphorically speaking, on the part of those who had for a long time past been "doctoring" the Netherlands. "I believe, madam, that this sick person has had so many diseases for twenty years, and has had so many different doctors-some without experience, and others without fidelity—that the more despairing the patient is of his own case, the more honour it will be to the one who cures him." by the treatment of the faculty. The doctors, he declares, did him as much harm as the disease did. He saw in succession Morand, Daran, Helvétius, Malouin, Thierry, who, all of them very learned, and all his friends, treated him each in his own way, gave him no kind of relief, and weakened his system not a little. The more strictly he followed their directions, the yellower, thinner, feebler he became. In another place Jean-Jacques thus repeats his experience in this matter: "Il y avait déjà plusieurs années que je m'étais livré tout-à-fait aux médecins, qui, sans alléger mon mal, avaient épuisé mes forces et detruit mon tempérament." There is a crisis in the history, psychological and physiological, of Contarini Fleming-whose life-history is, indeed, expressly designated a psychological romance-when physician follows physician, and surgeon surgeon, without benefit to the patient, impatient. All the doctors he describes as holding different opinions, yet none of them right; they satirise each other in private interviews, and exchange compliments in consultations. One tells him to be quiet; another, to exert himself; one declares that he must be stimulated; another, that he must be soothed. He is, in turn, to be ever on horseback, and ever on a sofa. He is bled, blistered, boiled, starved, poisoned, electrified, galvanized; and at the end of a year he finds himself with exactly the same oppression on his brain, and as far as ever from a cure. It is the same sort of story with that * Being of a sanguine temperament, he had believed every assertion, and every week expected to find himself cured. "When, however, a considerable period of time had elapsed without any amelioration, I began to rebel against these systems, which induced so much exertion and privation, and were productive of no good. I was quite desperate of cure; and each day I felt more keenly that, if I were not cured, I could not live. I wished, therefore, to die unmolested. I discharged all my medical attendants, and laid myself down like a sick lion in his lair."Contarini Fleming, Part iv., ch. vi. Such, the author affirms, are the inevitable consequences of consulting men who decide by precedents which have no resemblance, and never busy themselves about the idiosyncrasy of their patients. |