Coictier, physician to Lewis the Eleventh, has the credit of ridding his master of our Edward the Fourth, by duly doctoring the wine presented by the French to the English monarch. When Pope Adrian the Sixth departed this life, the Romans crowned his physician with laurel, as the saviour of his country. So again (but with gold for laurel) in the instance of Clement the Seventh, for whom Curtius had fatally prescribed:

"Curtius occidit Clementem: Curtius auro

Donandus, per quem publica parta salus."

Henry of Navarre's chief physician, De La Riviere, was for some time mainly occupied in devising antidotes to poison, which he well knew was offered to his master on various occasions, and in the most insidious ways. About the same time occurred the elaborate attempt of the Portuguese Jew, Dr. Lopez, on the life of Queen Elizabeth, whose physician-in-ordinary he had got to be appointed all in the interests of Philip of Spain. The Earl of

Leicester's Italian physician, Julio, was affirmed by his contemporaries to be a skilful compounder of poisons, which he applied with such frequency, that the Jesuit Parsons extols ironically the marvellous good luck of the Queen's great favourite in the opportune deaths of those who stood in the way of his wishes.

Dr. Rimbault, in his memoir of Sir Thomas Overbury, tells us of Dr. Mayerne, who had been physician to Henry the Fourth of France, and was "well experienced in the secret state poisonings of the French capital," that he was invited over to England by James the First in order to be his own physician, and with this result, if not this object, that he became the prime mover in the secret state poisonings of the English capital.

It used to be a matter of course, when a great man died, to accuse his physicians of killing him; or to glorify them for it, as the case might be. Thus at the death of Henrietta, daughter of Henry IV. of France, and wife of our Charles I., some one wrote on her physician, Valot, what is thus Englished by Mr. Besant

"A cruel fate, the same for each,
Three of a royal race befel;

What killed the husband and the sire,
The wife and daughter slew as well.
Each died by an assassin's blow;
Ravaillac, Cromwell, and Valot.
Henry by stroke of traitor's knife,

Charles on the scaffold lost his head;
And now the daughter and the wife,

Slain by her doctor, here lies dead."

And after the death of Cardinal Mazarin, over whom the doctors wrangled, not being able to make up their minds as to his disease, the people would make way for Doctor Guénant in the streets, crying, "Let him pass-let him pass! He is the doctor who killed the cardinal for us." As popular, this practitioner, as that Florentine celebrated in Boileau was the reverse:

"Dans Florence jadis vivait un médecin,
Savant hâbleur, dit-on, et célèbre assassin.
Lui seul y fit long-temps la publique misère :
Là le fils orphelin lui redemande un père;
Ici le frère pleure un frère empoisonné:
L'un meurt vide de sang, l'autre plein de séné:
Le rhume à son aspect se change en pleurésie,
Et par lui la migraine est bientôt frénésie.

Il quitte enfin la ville, en tous lieux détesté."

One main point in the allegations of Titus Oates was that Sir George Wakeman, the Queen's physician, had engaged to poison Charles the Second, the Queen herself being privy to the scheme. From the Popish Plot to pure fiction the transit is smooth and short; and we might fill a few pages with references accordingly to such notorieties as the Doctor Rappaccini of Hawthorne, whose patients were interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment, and who was said to have produced new varieties of poison, more horribly deleterious than Nature, without the assistance of this learned person, would ever have plagued the world with; or as Scott's Alasco, who is poisoner, quacksalver, alchemist, and astrologer, all in one; or again his Henbane Dwining, in the Fair Maid of Perth,

in whom, slight wasted anatomy though he be, Harry the Smith discerns more danger than in twenty tall men-at-arms, and who undertakes without demur the desired riddance of the heir-apparent of Scotland's crown. The Pottingar might have sat for the original of Dunbar's invective——

"In pottingry he wrocht great pyne;

He murdreit mony in medecyne."

But of fiction there may already have been more than enough, in this chapter of instances commonly accepted as matters of fact.

*

Recorded of other physicians besides Desgenettes is the answer made by him to Napoleon at Jaffa, when asked if it would be an act of humanity to administer opium to the invalid obstructives there: "My business is to cure, and not to kill." The Turks are not, by all accounts, the "best good Christians" in matters of this sort. Dr. Oppenheim's work on the state of medicine in Turkey throws a sickly light on the doings of deadly doctors, when their dispensing power is in request, in the way of ministrations to death; and the author himself, whose practice lay among the better classes of Turks, had, it seems, to make a hurried departure at last, since a great man, whose enemy was under treatment, proposed that the doctor should dispense poison, and when the proposal was declined, proceeded to try his own skill by attempting to poison the doctor. Mr. Nassau Senior's Journal in Turkey offers corroborative evidence, another European physician being his authority, who had declined applications of a similar kind, without however the same sequel of having to run for his life. Such applicants would seem to take literally Gulliver's report of the ways and means of British physicians in his time, and their cheap rating of life, as viewed professionally they seldom fail in their prognostics, Captain Lemuel assured his Houyhnhnm master,-their predictions in real diseases, when at all malignant, generally portending

* In German; but some edifying excerpts from it may be seen in the late Dr. Graves's Studies in Physiology.

death, "which is always in their power, when recovery is not; and therefore, upon any unexpected signs of amendment, after they have pronounced their sentence, rather than be accused as false prophets, they know how to approve their sagacity to the world, by a seasonable dose." A horse laugh from the four-footed listener would here perhaps have been appropriate; but of course the Houyhnhnm was too well-bred and too inhumanly humane for that.

Montesquieu's Persian Letter-writer classes together, at Venice, the two professions of physician and confessor,* and goes on to say: "On dit que les héritiers s'accommodent mieux des médecins que des confesseurs." It was a true bill of indictment, by Burns, against at least one of Doctor Hornbook's patients-no, patrons :

"A countra laird had ta'en the bats,

Or some curmurrin in his guts,

His only son for Hornbook sets,

An' pays him well.

The lad, for twa guid gimmer pets,

Was laird himsel."

For a couple of ewes, in their second year, were this doctor's services at the son's absolute disposal, and one deadly dose was enough.

* The general reader may call to mind how physician and confessor figure together, for evil purpose, in Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, under the auspices of aspiring Aramis.

For other reminders of deadly doctoring in fiction we may refer, in passing, to Zeluco's studied non-interference between physician and patient; to the leech of Folkestone in one of the (prose) Ingoldsby Legends; to the significant "Je ne dis pas qu'il aida la nature et le douleur" with which Fr. Soulié connects "On fit appeler le médecin pensionné," in the case, SO soon to terminate fatally, of Madame Destrames; to--but no; space is wanting; and we must abruptly come, like her, to a bad end.

? VI.

DYING OF AN UNTOLD DISEASE.

Hamlet, Act iv., Sc. I.

CLAUDIUS Compares his affected tolerance of Hamlet's mad goings on his over-indulgence of those dangerous whims and fatal vagaries, which ought to have been checked at once, and once for all-to the mistaken pride or modesty of the sufferer from some mortal malady, which is thus allowed to run its course, undiscovered, to the bitter end. Himself the king charges, on the score of a too tender reserve and reticence, with letting the mischief gather to a head. He has not taken the proper steps in time,

Occultare morbum funestum. We may apply alike what Ovid says on the expediency of resisting first advances, a cure being attempted too late when through lingering hesitancy the malady has waxed strong,

"Principiis obsta; sero medicina paratur

Cum mala per longas convaluere moras ;"

and what Horace says of the false shame of the foolish that makes them conceal their uncured, but otherwise not incurable, wounds: "Stultorum incurata malus pudor ulcera celat." It is, in fact, historically speaking, a truism that Fitzharding enunciates in The Curfew, where he alleges

"there be patients

Who, by a scant disclosure of their ills,

(Either from foolish modesty or pride,)
Mock the physician's labour."

Though by many the death of the Emperor Henry VII. so soon after receiving the eucharist from the hands of a Dominican monk, is ascribed to poison-and the particular poison named too, the juice of Napel-by others he is said