There are heads of men and women delineated hundreds of years ago, so knit into the mystic web of memory and imagination, so familiar through engravings, cameos, and other reproductive forms of art, and so identified with tragic experience, ideal aspiration, or heroic deeds, that the first view of the originals is an epoch in life; we seem to behold them down a limitless vista of time, and they appeal to our consciousness like the faces of the long-loved, long-lost, and suddenly restored. It is as if we had entered a spiritual realm, and were greeted by the vanished idols of the heart, or the ‘beings of the mind and not of clay,’ once arbiters of destiny and oracles of genius. Beatrice Cenci, through soulful eyes, infinitely deepened by a life of tears dried up by the fever of intense anguish, looks the incarnation of beauty and woe—beauty we have adored in dreams, woe we have realized through sympathy. With the first sight of that alabaster skin, those lips quivering with pain, those golden locks, the theme of poets, that corpse-like headband; the fragility, the fervour, the sensibility, and the chaste, ineffable grace; above all, the soulful world of terror, pity, and meekness in the lustrous and melancholy orbs, how familiar, yet how new, how pathetic, yet sublime! The hoary wretch who called her child, seems lurking somewhere in that hushed and sombre palace; the brother whose fair brow was lacerated by parental violence; the resigned mother, the infernal banquet, the prison, the tribunal, the bloody axe, flit with fearful distinctness between our entranced vision and the picture; for tradition, local association, Shelley’s muse, the secret pen of the annalist, and the pencil of Guido, combine to make absolutely real an unparalleled story of loveliness and persecution, maidenhood and martyrdom. It is but recently that the true history of this picture has been authenticated. According to Guerazzi, who has minutely explored contemporary archives, the ‘study’ from which it was painted, Ubaldo Ubaldini made from memory, to console his sister for the loss of Beatrice. He was one of the many artists who loved the beautiful victim, with the passion of youth and the fancy of a painter; one of the courageous but inadequate band who conspired to rescue her at the scaffold;[11] and it was long believed that he died of indignant grief after the catastrophe. Imagine him with the shadow of that mighty sorrow upon his soul, his hand inspired by tender recollection, secluded with her image stamped on his broken heart, and patiently reproducing those delicate features and that anguished expression—his last offering to her he so quickly followed into the valley of death! His ‘study’ fell into the hands of Maffei Barberini, and furnished Guido Reni the materials for this, his most effective and endeared creation. Its marvellous, almost magnetic expression, doubtless gave rise to the belief, so long current, that he sketched Beatrice on her way to execution; but the later explanation is more accordant with probability and more satisfactory to the mind, for such a work requires for the conditions of success both the inspiration of love and the aptitude of skill. Ubaldini furnished one, and Guido the other.

Many travellers, especially women, have expressed great disappointment with the ‘Fornarina.’ They cannot associate a figure so much the reverse of ethereal, and charms so robust, with the refined taste and delicate person of Raffaelo. But such objections are founded on an imaginative not philosophic theory of love. There never was a genuine artist who, in matters of feeling, was not a child of Nature; and we have but to recognize the idiosyncrasies of poet and painter to find a key to their human affinities. What a peculiar interest we feel in the objects of love whose affection cheered, and whose sympathy inspired those products of pen and pencil, which have become part of our mental being! I have seen a crowd of half-bashful and wholly intent English girls watch the carriage which contained the obese, yet still fair-haired Countess, whose youthful charms so long made Byron a methodical hermit at Ravenna; and the respectable matron who, as a child, was deemed by sentimentalists in Germany and her own exaggerated fancy the object of Goëthe’s senile passion, was long courted on that account, at tea-drinkings, by foreign visitors enamoured of Faust and Wilhelm Meister. Still more natural is the sentiment which lures us to earnest acquaintance with the countenance, on which he who gave an angelic semblance to maternity and caught the most gracious aspect of childhood used to gaze with rapture; the eye that responded to his glance, the smile that penetrated his heart, and were fixed on his canvas. The impression which the ‘Fornarina’ of the Tribune instantly gives, is that of genuine womanhood: there is generosity, a repose, a world of latent emotion, an exuberance of sympathetic power, in the full impassioned eye, the broad symmetrical bosom, the rich olive tint; it is precisely the woman to harmonize by her simple presence, and to soothe or exalt by her spontaneous love, the mood of a man of nervous organization and ardent temper. There is a tranquil self-possession in the face and figure which the sensitive and excitable artist especially finds refreshing—a candid nature such as alone can inspire such a man’s confidence, a majestic simplicity peculiar to the best type of Roman women, more delightful to the over-tasked brain and sensibilities than the highest culture of an artificial kind; and there is the fresh, unperverted, richly-developed, harmoniously-united heart and physique, which, notwithstanding the modern standard of female charms, is the normal and the essential basis of honest, natural affinity. I could never turn, in the Florence Gallery, from the pale, delicately-rounded, ideal brow, the almost pleading eye, and the cherubic lips of Raffaelo, instinct with the needs as well as the immortal longings of genius, to the mellow, calm, self-sustained, and healthful ‘Fornarina,’ without fancying the support, the rest, the inexhaustible comfort—in Othello’s sense of that expressive word—which the sensitive artist could find in the cheerful baker’s daughter, the irritable seeker in the serene and satisfied woman, the delicate in the strong, the gentle in the hearty, the ideal in the real, the poetic in the practical, the spiritual in the human; and I contemplated her noble contour, her contented smile, her beaming cheek, and eye undeepened by the experience that withers as it teaches—yet soulful with latent emotion, with an ever-increasing sense of her native claims to Raphael’s love.

Musical organizations are especially sensitive to the pictorial spell; the letters of Mendelssohn indicate how it influenced his development. Writing from Venice of church services he attended, he says:—‘Nothing impressed me with more solemn awe than when, on the very spot for which they were originally created, the “Presentation of Mary and the Child in the Temple,” “The Assumption of the Virgin,” “The Entombment of Christ,” and “The Martyrdom of St. Peter,” in all their grandeur, gradually steal forth out of the darkness in which the long lapse of time has veiled them. Often I feel a musical inspiration, and since I came here have been busily engaged in composition.’ And from Florence he writes:—‘There is a small picture here which I discovered for myself. It is by Fra Bartolomeo, who must have been a man of most devout, tender, and earnest spirit. The figures are finished in the most exquisite and consummate manner. You can see in the picture itself that the pious master has taken delight in painting it, and in finishing the most minute details, probably with a view of giving it away to gratify some friend; we feel as if the painter belonged to it, and still ought to be sitting before his work, or had this moment left.’ This personal magnetism about pictures is an authentic evidence of their vital relation to character, and it is felt often in an incredible way by the imaginative and susceptible. The same gifted and generous composer, who thus wrote of Titian and Fra Bartolomeo, speaks of the impression he received from Raphael’s portrait by himself:—‘Youthful, pale, delicate, and with such inward aspirations, such longing and wistfulness in the mouth and eyes, that it is as if you could see into his very soul; that he cannot succeed in expressing all that he sees and feels, and is thus impelled to go forward, and that he must die an early death;—all this is written on his mournful, suffering, yet fervid countenance.’

Vandyke’s portraits of Charles the First impress the spectator with regal fanaticism, and a tragic destiny, more than some of the written histories of his reign. The exquisite hands of Leonardo’s ‘Gioconde’ are as eloquent of feminine grace and sensibility as the most elaborate description. Correggio’s ‘Magdalen,’ in the remorseful abandon and beautiful sadness of its expression, reveals her who ‘loved much,’ repented, and was forgiven. Giovanni di Medici, in the Uffizzi Gallery, fulfils to the imagination the ideal of mediæval Italian soldiership. Stuart’s ‘Washington’ embodies the serene conscience, the self-control, the humane dignity and birthright of command, which consecrate our peerless chief; and Delaroche’s ‘Napoleon Crossing the Alps’ perpetuates the intense purpose and insatiable ambition that won so many battles and died of anxiety on an ocean-rock. Such instances, which might easily be multiplied, prove how a single department of art, and that the least estimated, is allied to history, patriotism, and sentiment, and capable of touching their secret springs and unveiling their limitless perspective at a glance. Guercino’s ‘Hagar’ is a biblical poem. Hamlet’s filial reproaches borrow their keenest sting from two ‘counterfeit presentments,’ and Trumbull’s faithful and assiduous pencil has transmitted the individualities of our Revolutionary drama. And thus the art of portraiture, even in its general relations, may become, through illustrious subjects and rare fidelity, the romance which association of ideas breeds from reality.

I was never more impressed with the absolute line of demarcation between the imitative and the inventive, even in the lighter processes of art, than when examining the graphic series of illustrations of The Wandering Jew. Nature is represented under all forms—the woods, the desert, the ocean, caves, meadows, and skies; and these fixed elemental features might be well reflected by mechanical aids, photographed or reproduced through chemical and optical means; but the true meaning of each picture consisted in the ever-present shadow pursuing the Wanderer—the form of the Holy One bowed under his cross: it glimmered in the water, was stamped on the rock, outlined in the gnarled forest branches, pencilled in the floating vapour, reflected in the ice-mirrored lake, with a latent and inevitable yet unobtrusive and apparently accidental omni-presence, as if wrought into the texture of nature through the creative anguish of conscience—which emphatically announced an intelligence far beyond all mechanical art, and interfused the material with the abstract, the imaginative, and the human, as only genius can. The same thing is evinced by comparing the best photographs of architecture, figures, or landscapes with the sketch-book of a genuine artist; in certain points there will be found a special intelligence and feeling which transcend the most remarkable imitative truth. How much of this is suggested, for instance, by the mere catalogue of an album on the table at a Parisian soirée: fleurs de Redonté, chevaux de Carl Vernet, Bedouins d’Horace, aquarelles de Ciceri, petit paysages de Géniole, caricatures de Grandville et de Monnier, beaux brigands de Schnetz—‘tous chéfs d’œuvre au petit pied.’

A portrait of little Fritz drumming, in the Berlin Gallery, Carlyle hails, in his Life of Frederick the Great, as ‘one tiny islet of reality amid the shoreless sea of fantasms, Flaying of Bartholomews, Rape of Europas,’ &c. Napoleon was delighted to remember that his mother reclined on tapestry representing the heroes of the Iliad, when she brought him into the world.

For how long and with what vividness are certain pictures associated with localities. Gainsborough’s ‘Blue Boy,’ and Reynolds’s ‘Strawberry Girl,’ are among the salient retrospective images of the English school at the Manchester Exhibition. We think of Correggio with Parma, Perugino with Perugia, Fra Angelico with Florence, Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ and Guercino’s ‘Hagar’ with Milan, Murillo with Seville, Vandyke with Madrid, Rubens with Antwerp, Watteau with Paris, and Paul Potter’s ‘Bull’ with the Hague.

The Dutch school, in a philosophical estimate, is but the compensation afforded by the romance of art for its deficiency in nature; the element of the picturesque not found in mountains, forests, and cataracts, the lowland painters wrought from flowers and firesides; the radiant tulips and exquisite interiors, the humble but characteristic in life and manners. To seize upon individuality is the conservative tact of both painter and poet; whoever does this effectively contributes to the world’s gallery of historical portraits, and keeps before the living the faces, costume, and actions of bygone races and heroes. Catlin’s aboriginal portraits introduced the American native tribes to Europe; a naturalist abroad has but to turn over Audubon’s portfolio to become intimately acquainted with every bird whose plumage or song makes beautiful our woodlands and seashore; the traveller who rests an hour at Perugia may trace on the walls of a church the original, crude, yet pious expression which Raphael developed into angelic beauty. Vernet has, by the very multiplicity of his battle-pieces, signalized on canvas the military genius of the French nation; the faith which so distinguishes the fifteenth from the speculation of the eighteenth century is manifest to us most eloquently in the masterpieces of religious art which yet remain in peerless beauty to attest the holy convictions that inspired them; and all that is peculiar in Grecian culture has found no exponent like the statues of her divinities. Hogarth preceded Crabbe and Dickens in making palpable the shadows of want, crime, and luxury. The Italian satirist, who endowed animals with speech and made them represent the absurdities of humanity, hinted their possible significance less than Landseer who individualized their most salient traits, or Kaulbach who revealed the brute creation in the highest intuitive expression. There is a piquant rustic beauty by Greuze, which embodies and embalms, in its exquisite suggestiveness, the special claim of naïve brightness and grace that belongs almost exclusively to French lovable women; and there is a portrait of an American matronly belle of the days of Washington, by Stuart, which represents the type of mingled self-reliance and womanly loveliness that has made the ladies of our Republican court so memorably attractive.

DOCTORS.

In the moving panoramas of cities are to be seen certain vehicles of all degrees of locomotive beauty and convenience, from the glossy and silver-knobbed carriage with its prancing grays, to the bacheloric-looking sulky with its one gaunt horse, in which are seated gentlemen of a learned and professional aspect, usually wearing spectacles, and always an air of intense respectability, or of contemplation and seriousness. They recognize numerous acquaintances as they pass with a peculiar smile and nod, and are usually accompanied by ‘a little man-boy to hold the horse,’ as the French cook in the play defines a tigre. These mysterious personages rejoice in the title of Doctor—once a very distinctive appellation, but now as common as authorship and travelling. A moralist, watching them gliding by amid fashionable equipages, crowded omnibuses, hasty pedestrians, and all the phenomena of life in a metropolis, would find a striking contrast between the rushing tide around and the hushed rooms they enter. To how many their visit is the one daily event that breaks in upon the monotony of illness and confinement; how many eyes watch them with eager suspense, and listen to their opinion as the fiat of destiny; how many feverishly expect their coming, shrink from their polished steel, rejoice in their cheering ministrations, or dread their long bills! ‘The Doctor!’—a word that stirs the extremest moods, despair and jollity!

There is no profession which depends so much for its efficiency on personal traits as that of medicine; for the utility of technical knowledge here is derived from individual judgment, tact, and sympathy. In other words, the physician has to deal with an unknown element. Between the specific ailment and the remedy there are peculiarities of constitution, the influence of circumstances, and the laws of nature to be considered; so that although the medical adviser may be thoroughly versed in physiology, the materia medica, and the symptoms of disease, if he possess not the discrimination, the observant skill, and the reflective power to apply his learning wisely, it is comparatively unavailing. The aim of the divine and the attorney, however impeded by obstacles, is reached by a more direct course; logic, eloquence, and zeal, united to professional attainment, will insure success in law and divinity; but in physic, certain other qualities in the man are requisite to give scope to the professor. Hence we associate a certain originality with the idea of a doctor; are apt to regard the vocation at the two extremes of superiority and pretension, and justly estimate the individuals of the class according to their capacity of insight and their principles of action, rather than by their mere acquisitions or rank as teachers. The uncertainty of medicine, as a practical art, thus induces a stronger reliance on individual endowments than is the case in any other liberal pursuit.

A philosophical history of the art of healing would be not less curious than suggestive. The absurd theories which checked its progress for centuries, the secrets hoarded by Egyptian priests, the union of medical knowledge with ancient systems of philosophy, the epoch of Galen, the Arabian and Salerno schools, the reformation of Paracelsus, the brilliant discoveries which, at long intervals, illumined the track of the science, and the enlightened principles now realized—if fully discussed—would form an extraordinary chapter in the biography of man. Herein, as with other vocations, modern division of labour has concentrated professional aptitudes. ‘L’ affluence des postulants,’ says Balzac, ‘a forcé la médecine a se diviser en catégories; il y a le médecin qui professe, le médecin politique et le médecin militant et la cinquième divisions, celle des docteurs qui vendent des remèdes.’

St. Luke and the Good Samaritan are yet the favourite signs of apothecaries, confirming the original charity of the art; and in the south of Europe may still be seen over the barbers’ shops the effigy of a human arm spouting blood from an open vein—an indication of the once universal custom of periodical depletion. It is now acknowledged that diverse climates require modified treatment of the same disease; that nervous susceptibility is far greater in one latitude than another, and that habits of life essentially individualize the constitution. Indeed, the widest difference exists in the relation of persons to the doctor; some never see him, and others must have a consultation upon the most trifling ailment,—so great is the dependence which can be had upon nature, and so extreme both the faith and the scepticism which exist in regard to curative science.

Popular literature is full of hits at the profession. ‘Le barbier fait plus de la moitié d’ un médecin,’ says Molière, who, in La Malade Imaginaire, has so acutely given the current philosophy of the subject by satirizing the pedantry and charlatanism of the doctors of his day; ‘Nous voyons que, dans la maladie tout le monde a recours aux médecins;—c’est une marque de la faiblesse humaine et non pas de la vérité de leur art;’ and of all ailments the hardest to cure is ‘la maladie des médecins.’ Imagination has been called by a German philosopher ‘the mediatrix, the nurse, the mover of all the several parts of our spiritual organism.’ ‘I have the worst luck of any physician under the cope of heaven,’ complains Sancho Panza; ‘other doctors kill their patients, and are paid for it too, and yet they are at no further trouble than scrawling two or three cramp words for some physical slip-slop, which the apothecaries are at all the pains to make up.’

It would seem, indeed, as if the advance of science improved medical practice negatively—that is, by inducing what in politics has been called a masterly inactivity; and there is no doubt that no small degree of the success attending Hahnemann’s theory is to be attributed to the comparative abstinence it inculcates in the use of remedial agents. The fact is a significant one, as indicative of the want of positive science in the healing art; and the consequent wisdom of leaving to nature, as far as possible, the restorative process. Indeed, to assist nature is acknowledged, by just observers, to be the only wise course; and this brings us to the inference that a good physician is necessarily a philosopher; it is incumbent on him, of all men, to exercise the inductive faculty; he must possess good causality, not only to reason justly on individual cases, but to apply the progress of science to the exigencies of disease. It is related of Bixio that such was his zeal for science, having long wished to ascertain whether a man instinctively turns when wounded in a vital part, asked his adversary in a duel to aim at one, and, although fatally hurt, exclaimed with ardour, as he involuntarily spun round—‘It is true, they do turn!’

The comparatively slow accumulation of scientific truth in regard to the treatment of disease, is illustrated by the fact that not until the lapse of two thousand years after medicine had assumed the rank of a science, under the auspices of Hippocrates, was the circulation of the blood discovered—an era in its history. The fiery discussion of the efficacy of inoculation, and its gradual introduction, is another significant evidence of the same general truth. But in our own day the rapid and valuable developments of chemistry have, in a measure, reversed the picture. Numerous alleviating and curative agents have been discovered; the gas of poisonous acids is found to eradicate, in many cases, the most fatal diseases of the eye; heat, more penetrating than can be created by other means, is eliminated from carbon in an aëriform state, passes through the cuticle without leaving a mark on its surface, and restores aching nerves or exhausted vitality. Vegetable and mineral substances are refined, analyzed, and combined with a skill never before imagined; opium yields morphine, and Peruvian bark quinine, and all the known salubrious elements are thus rendered infinitely subservient to the healing art. Chloroform is one of the most beneficent of these new agents; and has exorcised the demon of physical pain by a magical charm, without violating, in judicious hands, the integrity of nature.

There is a secret of curative art in which consists the genius of healing; it is that union of sympathy with intelligence, and of moral energy with magnetic gifts, whereby the tides of life are swayed, and one ‘can minister to a mind diseased.’ Fortunate is the patient who is attended by one thus endowed; but such are usually found out of the professional circle;—they are referees ordained by nature to settle the difficulties of inferior spirits; the arbiters recognized by instinct who soothe anger, reconcile doubt, amuse, elevate, and console, by a kind of moral alchemy; and potent coadjutors are they to the material aids of merely technical physicians. ‘Who dare say,’ asks Rénan, in allusion to the calming and purifying influence of Jesus, ‘that in many cases, and apart from injuries of a dreaded character, the contact of an exquisite person is not worth all the resources of pharmacy?’ ‘It was agony to me,’ wrote Hahnemann, ‘to walk in darkness, with no other light than could be derived from books.’ One of his opponents, from this confession, infers the fallacy of his system; ‘the conviction,’ he observes, ‘is irresistibly forced upon us that he was not a born physician.’ If our ancestors were less enlightened in regard to hygiène, and if their physicians were less scrupulous in tampering with the functions of nature, they had one signal advantage over us in escaping the inhuman comments, made after every fatal issue, on the practice and the treatment adopted—no matter with how much conscientious intelligence. We not only suffer the pangs of bereavement, but the reproaches of devotees of each school of medicine and of rival doctors, of having by an unwise choice sacrificed the life for which we would have cheerfully resigned our own! Somewhat of this occult healing force might have been read in the serene countenance of Dr. Physic, of Philadelphia; it predominated in the benevolent founder of the Insane Asylum of Palermo, who learned from an attack of mental disorder how to feel for, and minister to, those thus afflicted. The late Preissnitz, of Graefenberg, seems to have enjoyed the gift which is as truly Nature’s indication of an aptitude for the art, as a sense of beauty in the poet. But this principle is ‘caviare to the general.’

Medicine has lost much of its inherent dignity by the same element, in modern times, that has degraded art, letters, and society—the spirit of trade. This agency encourages motives, justifies means, and leads to ends wholly at variance with high tone and with truth. The gentleman, the philosopher, the man of honour, and with them that keystone in the arch of character—self-respect, are wholly compromised in the process of sinking a liberal art into a common trade. In the economy of modern society, however, the physician has acquired a new influence; he has gained upon the monopoly of the priest: for while the spirit of inquiry, by trenching on the mysterious prerogatives which superstition once accorded, has retrenched the latter’s functions, the same agency, by extending the domain of science and rendering its claims popular, has enlarged the sphere of the other profession. To an extent, therefore, never before known, the doctor fills the office of confessor; his visits yield agreeable excitement to women with whom he gossips and sympathizes; admitted by the very exigency of the case to entire confidence, often revered as a counsellor and friend, as well as relied on as a healer, not infrequently he becomes the oracle of a household. Privileges like these, when used with benevolence and integrity, are doubtless honourable to both parties, and become occasions for the exercise of the noblest service and the highest sentiments of our nature; while, on the other hand, they are liable to the grossest abuse, where elevation of character and gentlemanly instincts are wanting. Accordingly there has sprung into existence, in our day, a personage best designated as the medical Jesuit; whose real vocation, as well as the process by which he acquires supremacy, fully justifies the appellation. Like his religious prototype, he operates through the female branches, who, in their turn, control the heads of families; and the extent to which the domestic arrangements, the social relations, and even the opinions of individuals are thus regulated, is truly surprising. ‘Women,’ says Mrs. Jameson, ‘are inclined to fall in love with priests and physicians, because of the help and comfort they derive from both in perilous moral and physical maladies. They believe in the presence of real pity, real sympathy, where the look and tone of each have become merely habitual and conventional, I may say professional.’ Yet a popular novelist, in his ideal portrait of the physician, justly claims superiority to impulse and casual sympathy as an essential requisite to success. ‘He must enter the room a calm intelligencer. He is disabled for his mission if he suffer aught to obscure the keen glance of his science.’[12]

The natural history of the doctor has not yet been written, but the classes are easily nomenclated; we have all known the humorous, the urbane, the oracular, the facetious, the brusque, the elegant, the shrewd, the exquisite, the burly, the bold, and the fastidious; and the character of people may be inferred by their choice of each species. Those in whom taste predominates over intellect, will select a physician, for his agreeable personal qualities; while such as value essential traits, will compromise with the roughest exterior and the least flattering address for the sake of genuine skill and a vigorous and honest mind. As a general rule, in large cities, vanity seems to rule the selection; and it is a lamentable view of human nature to see the blind preference given to plausible but shallow men, whose smooth tongues or gallant air win them suffrages denied to good sense and candid intercourse. The most detestable genus is that we have described under the name of medical Jesuits; next in annoyance are the precisians; the most harmless of the weaker order are the gossips; and there is often little to choose in point of risk to ‘the house of life’ between the very timid and the dare-devils; in a great exigency the former, and in an ordinary case the latter are equally to be shunned. In the Horæ Subsecivæ of Dr. John Brown, we find some apt and needed counsel to the aspirants for medical success:—‘The young doctor must have for his main faculty, sense; but all will not do if Genius is not there; such a special therapeutic gift had Hippocrates, Sydenham, Pott, Purcell, John Hunter, Delpech, Dupuytren, Kellie, Cheyne, Baillie, and Abercrombie. Moreover, let me tell you, my young doctor friends, that a cheerful face and step and neckcloth and buttonhole, and an occasional hearty and kindly joke, and the power of executing and setting a-going a good laugh, are stock in our trade not to be despised.’ Brillat Savarin declares, doctors easily become gourmands because so well received.

In Paris, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia, all the world over, the medical student is an exceptional character. Their pranks are patent: the rough ones like to kick up rows, and the more quiet are unique at practical jokes. Bob Sawyer is a typical hero. If, like the portrait-painter, doctors are often the playthings of fortune in cities, where the arbitrary whims of fashion decree success; in the country their true worth is more apt to find appreciation, and the individualities of character having free scope, quite original children of Apollo are the result. The name of Hopkins is still memorable in the region where he practised, as one of the literary clique of which Humphries, Dwight, and Barlow were members. Dr. Osborn, of Sandwich, Mass., wrote the popular whaling-song yet in vogue among Nantucketers. Dr. Holyoke, of Salem, is renowned as a beautiful instance of longevity; and the wit of Dr. Spring was proverbial in Boston. The best example of a medical philosopher, in our annals, is that of Dr. Rush, of Philadelphia; he reformed the system of practice; first treated yellow fever successfully, made climate a special study, and, like Burke, laid every one he encountered under contribution for facts. His life of seventy years was passed in ardent investigation. It is remarkable that the first martyr to American liberty was a physician; and, before he fell, Warren eloquently avowed his principles, like Körner in Germany, rousing the spirit of his countrymen, and then consecrating his sentiments with his blood. Boylston, the ancestral portraits of whose family are among the best of Copley’s American works, nearly fell a victim to public indignation for his zealous and intelligent advocacy of inoculation, and natural science owes a debt to Barton, Morton, and De Kay, which is acknowledged both at home and abroad. A French doctor has noted the historical importance of his confrères, and tells us Hamond was Racine’s master, Lestocq helped to elevate Catharine to the Russian throne, Haller was a poet and romancer, Cuvier was the greatest naturalist of his age, and Murat was a doctor. French médecins have figured in the Chamber and on the Boulevards.

If by virtue of the philosophic instinct and liberal tastes the doctor is thus allied to belles-lettres, he is allured into the domain of science by a still more direct sympathy. To how many has the study of the materia medica, and the culling of simples, proved the occasion of botanical research; and hence, by an easy transition, of exploring the entire field of natural science. Thus Davy was beguiled into chemical investigation; and Abercrombie, by the vestibule of physiological knowledge, sought the clue to mental philosophy; while Spurzheim and Combe ministered to a great charity by clearly explaining to the masses the natural laws of human well-being. It is an evidence of the sagacity of the Russian Peter, that he sought an interview with Boerhaäve; for by these varied links of general utility the medical office enters into every branch of social economy, and is only narrowed and shorn of dignity by the limited views or inadequate endowments of its votaries. The Jewish physician preserved and transmitted much of the learning of the world, after the fall of the Alexandrian school.[13] Life-insurance and quarantines have become such grave interests, that through them the responsibility of the physician to society is manifest to all; that to individuals is only partially recognized. How Cowper and Byron suffered for wise medical advice, and what ameliorations in states of mind and moral conditions have been induced by the now widely-extended knowledge of hygienic laws! Charles Lamb reasons wisely as well as quaintly in this wise:—‘You are too apprehensive of your complaint. The best way in these cases is to keep yourself as ignorant as the world was before Galen, of the entire construction of the animal man; not to be conscious of a midriff; to hold kidneys to be an agreeable fiction; to account the circulation of the blood an idle whim of Harvey’s; to acknowledge no mechanism not visible. For once fix the seat of your disorder, and your fancies flux into it like bad humours. Above all, take exercise, and avoid tampering with the hard terms of art. Desks are not deadly. It is the mind, and not the limbs, that taints by long sitting. Think of the patience of the tailors; think how long the Lord Chancellor sits; think of the brooding hen.’

In literature the doctor figures with a genial dignity; he has affinities with genius, and a life-estate in the kingdom of letters: witness Garth’s poem of The Dispensary; Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination; Armstrong’s Art of Health; Cowley’s verses, Sprat’s life of him, and Currie’s of Burns; Beattie’s Minstrel; Darwin’s Botanic Garden; Moore’s Travels in Italy; Zimmerman’s Solitude; Goldsmith’s Vicar and Village; Aikin’s Criticisms; Joanna Baillie’s gifted brother, and Lady Morgan’s learned husband. Burke found health at the house of the benign Dr. Nugent, of Bath, at the outset of his career, and married the daughter of his medical friend. ‘Les médecins sont souvent tout a la fois conseillors, arbitres et magistrats au sein des familles.’ The best occasional verses of Dr. Johnson are those that commend the humble virtues of Levett, the apothecary.[14] Dr. Lettson wrote the life of Carver, the American traveller, and his account of that adventurous unfortunate led to the establishment of the Literary Fund Society. Among the graves near Archibald Carlyle’s old church at Inveresk, where that handsome clerical and convivial gossip is buried, is that of the sweet versifier, beloved as the ‘Delta’ of Blackwood, Dr. Moir, who so genially united the domestic lyrist and the good doctor; a Delta framed in bay adorns the pedestal of his monument. Rousseau, an invalid of morbid sensibility, recognizes the professional superiority of the physician as a social agent:—‘Par tous le pays ce sont les hommes les plus véritablement utiles et savants.’ The Médecin de Campagne of Balzac, and the Dr. Antonio of Ruffini, are elaborate and charming illustrations of this testimony of the author of Emile. What a curious chapter would be added to the Diary of a Physician, had Cabanis kept a record of his interviews with those two illustrious patients—Mirabeau and Condorcet. The social affinities of the doctor prove indirectly what we before suggested, that it is in the character more than in the learning, in the mind rather than the technical knowledge, that medical success lies. One of the shrewdest of the profession, Abernethy, declared thereof,—‘I have observed, in my profession, that the greatest men were not mere readers, but the men who reflected, who observed, who fairly thought out an idea.’ Almost intuitive is the venerable traditional ideal of the physician; among the aborigines of this continent, the ‘medicine man’ was revered as nearest to the ‘Great Spirit.’ ‘I hold physicians,’ said Dr. Parr, ‘to be the most enlightened professional persons in the whole circle of human arts and sciences.’ In our own day, Lever’s Irish novels, and in our own country the writings of Drake, Mitchell, Holmes, Bigelow, Francis, and others, indicate the literary claims of the profession. Think of Arbuthnot beside Pope’s sick-bed, and the latter’s apostrophe:—

of Garth ministering to Johnson, and Rush philosophizing, with Dr. Franklin, and the friendship of Pope and Cheselden. Bell’s comments on art, Colden’s Letters to Linnæus, and Thatcher’s Military Journal, are attractive proofs of that liberal tendency which leads the physician beyond the limits of his profession into the field of philosophical research. The bequest of Sir Hans Sloane was the nucleus of the British Museum. We all have a kind of affection for Dr. Slop, who, drawn from Dr. Burton, of York—a cruel, instrumental obstetrician,—is the type of an almost obsolete class, as the doctor in Macbeth is of the sapient pretender of all time. As to ideal doctors, how real to our minds is that Wordsworthean myth Dr. Fell, the physician of Sancho Panza, and the Purgon of Molière; while Dulcamara is a permanent type of the clever quack, Dr. Bartolo of the solemn professor, and Sangrado of the merciless phlebotomist. To think it ‘more honourable to fail according to rule than to succeed by innovation,’ is a satire of no local significance, but the constant creed of the medical pedant. Satirized years ago by the French comic dramatist, the profession was caricatured the other day by a young disciple of Esculapius, who in a clever drawing represented the votary of homœopathy with a little globule between thumb and finger, engaged in a kind of airy swallowing; the allopathic patient in an easy-chair is making wry faces over a large spoonful of physic; the believer in hydropathy sits forlorn and shivering in a sitz-bath, with a large goblet of water raised to his lips; while the Thomsonian victim is writhing and nauseating in anguish; and in the midst a skeleton, with a syringe for a baton, is dancing in a transport of infernal joy. Southey took a wise advantage of the popular idea of a doctor, in the genial and speculative phase of the character, when he gave the title to his last rambling, erudite, quaint, and charming production. Men of letters accordingly are wont to fraternize with the best of the profession; and there has always been a reciprocal interchange between them, both of affection and wit. Thus Halleck tells us, in Fanny,—

The record of our surgeons in the war for the Union is alike honourable to their patriotism, humanity, and skill.

Popular writers have indicated the claims and character of the profession, not only in a dramatic or anecdotal way, but by personal testimony and observation; and those who have had the best opportunities, and are endowed with liberal sympathies, warmly recognize the possible usefulness and probable benevolence of a class of men more often satirized than sung. The privations and toil incident to country practice half a century ago are scarcely imagined now. Sir Walter Scott tells us,—‘I have heard the celebrated traveller Mungo Park, who had experienced both courses of life, rather give the preference to travelling as a discoverer in Africa, than to wandering by night and day the wilds of his native land in the capacity of a country practitioner.’ Dr. Johnson, a livelong invalid, and not apt to overlook professional foibles, gives a high average character to the doctor. ‘Whether,’ he observes, ‘what Sir William Temple says be true, that the physicians have more learning than the other faculties, I will not stay to inquire; but I believe every man has found in physicians great liberality and dignity of sentiment, very prompt effusion of beneficence, and willingness to exert a lucrative art where there is no hope of lucre.’

It is a nervous process to undergo the examination of a Parisian medical professor of the first class. Auscultation was first introduced by one of them, Laennec, and diagnosis is their chief art. In their hands the stethoscope is a divining-rod. So reliable is their insight, that they seem to read the internal organism as through a glass; and one feels under Louis’s inspection as if awaiting sentence. The laws of disease have been thoroughly studied in the hospitals of Paris, and the philosophy of symptoms is there understood by the medical savans with the certainty of a natural science, but the knowledge and application of remedies is by no means advanced in equal proportion. Accordingly, the perfection of modern skill in the art seems to result from an education in the French schools, combined with experience in English practice; thorough acquaintance with physiology, and habits of acute observation and accurate deduction, are thus united to executive tact and ability. And similar eclectic traits of character are desirable in the physician, especially the union of solidity of mind with agreeableness of manner; for in no vocation is there so often demanded the blending of the fortiter in re with the suaviter in modo.

The absence of faith in positive remedies that obtains in Europe is very striking to an American visitor, because it offers so absolute a contrast to the system pursued at home. I attended the funeral of a countryman a few days after reaching Paris, and on our way to Père la Chaise his case and treatment were fully discussed; his disease was typhus fever. Previous to delirium he had designated a physician, a celebrated professor, who only prescribed gomme syrop. For a week I travelled with a Dominican friar, who had so high a fever that in America he would have been confined to his bed; he took no nourishment all the time but a plate of thin soup once a day, and when we reached our destination he was convalescent. Abstinence and repose are appreciated on the Continent as remedial agencies; but they are contrary to the genius of our people, who regard active enterprise as no less desirable in a doctor than a steamboat captain.

Veteran practitioners have demonstrated that certain diseases are self-limited, that the art of treating diseases is still ‘a conjectural study,’ and avowed the conviction that ‘the amount of death and disaster in the world would be less if all disease were left to itself, than it now is under the multiform, reckless, and contradictory modes of practice.’ A conscientious student, of high personal character, entered upon the profession with enthusiastic faith; experience in the use of remedies made him sceptical, and he resorted to evasion by giving water only under various pretexts and names. His success was so much greater than that of his brethren, that he felt bound to reveal the ruse; but continued thenceforth to assert that, all things being equal, more patients would survive, if properly guarded and nourished, without medicine than with.

The influence of the mind upon the body is, in some instances, so great, that it accounts for that identity of superstition and medicine which is one of the most remarkable traits in the history of the science. Sir Walter Raleigh’s cordial was as famous in its day as Mrs. Trulbery’s water praised by Sir Roger de Coverley. In Egypt, old practitioners cure with amulets and charms; among the Tartars they swallow the name of the remedy with perfect faith; and from the Puritan horseshoe to keep off witchcraft, to Perkins’ tractors to annihilate rheumatism, the history of medical delusions is rife with imaginary triumphs. As late as the seventeenth century, when Arabian precepts and the Jewish leech of chivalric times had disappeared, when the square cap and falling beards had given place to the wig and cane, in some places the mystic emblems of skull, stuffed lizards, pickled fetus, and alembic gave a necromantic air to the doctor’s sanctum.

The unknown is the source of the marvellous, and the relation between a disease and its cure is less obvious to the common understanding than that between the evidence and the verdict in a law case, or religious faith and its public ministration in the office of priest. The imagination has room to act, and the sense of wonder is naturally excited, when, by the agency of some drug, mechanical apparatus, or mystic rite, it is attempted to relieve human suffering and dispel infirmity. Hence the most enlightened minds are apt to yield to credulity in this sphere, much to the annoyance of the ‘regular faculty,’ who complain with reason that quackery, whether in the form of popular specifics or the person of a charlatan, derives its main support from men of civic and professional reputation. Think of Dr. Johnson, in his infancy, being touched for king’s evil by Queen Anne, in accordance with a belief in its sovereign efficiency, unquestioned for centuries. Sir Kenelm Digby was as much celebrated in his day for his recipe for a sympathetic powder, which he obtained from an Italian friar, as for his beautiful wife or his naval victory; and the good Bishop Berkeley gave as much zeal to the Treatise on the Virtues of Tar-water as to that on the Immateriality of the Universe.

Shakspeare has drawn a quack doctor to the life in Caius, the French physician, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and uttered an impressive protest against the tribe in All’s Well that Ends Well:—