AND LITERATURE.

H. S. CARTER, M.D., D.P.H.

The advantage of an inclusive title for an essay is that it allows a wide field for exploration by the writer, and in this survey will permit consideration not only of references to doctors and medical matters in literature, but of glances at literary achievements by doctors no less than at such medical men who have been used as prototypes for characters in imaginative writings. Thus we may, for example, refer to Moliere's repeated satires upon the medicine of his time, the immortal verse of Dr. Keats and the supposed portrait of Dr. Allbutt in Middlewareh. Plato discussed Greek and physic, and regarded Hippo- crates as a master, but makes little allusion to him. He has no definite description of the methods of healing in Aesculapian temples. He speaks of epidemics as due to the anger of departed souls. He placed the liver little below the brain in importance and regarded the spleen as a mopper- up of noxious humours. There is a substratum of biology in his writings which his pupil Aristotle was to expand. In the Symposium he makes Eriximachus, a who talks a good deal, give a prescription for hiccough to Aristophanes, who, no doubt, had laughed too much at his own satires. It was that sneezing will cure the most persistent hiccough. Plato fathered some grotesque notions upon medical teaching, though sneezing will sometimes stop a hiccough ; but amyl nitrite is better. Aristotle, who studied medicine, never practised it. He was an all- round philosopher with an interest in natural science, and while laying the foundations of in his Historia animalium, did not disdain ethics and politics. He thought the heart the seat of the soul and was aware of its importance ; he believed in a spontaneous generation, so that the problem of Aphrodite rising from the foam was no problem to him : but he also believed that a child was of its father. His biological studies were deep and covered a large field. The Stagirite was the ancestor of modern biologists and the medical atmosphere of his times pervades his writings. Let us jump the centuries to Chaucer, Comptroller of Customs at ' ' the Port of , and according to Q the greatest story-teller in the power of visualising all sorts and conditions of men and limning them in swift short strokes, before Charles Dickens. Chaucer drew a Doctor of Medicine in his tale of the Doctor of Physick. He is supposed to have been John of Gaddesdon, who among other things was a Pre- bendary of St. Paul's and physician to Edward II. He wrote a book 144 MEDICINE AND LITERATURE?CARTER 145

Rosa Anglica (1314) which was described by his critics as a hotch-potch of quackery and superstition ; it was much denigrated by de Chauliac and later by Haller. It was strong in countryside and domestic lore, but said to contain a reference to the treatment of smallpox by red light. Chaucer's tale is more in the style of the cleric of vSt. Paul's than in that of a physician, but it contains good counsel. In the Prologue to Ids tales Chaucer describes a mediaeval physician, presumably he who told the tale. This good man kept his patient wonderfully well at all times by his natural magic. He knew Hippocrates, and Avicenna? ' and was, in short, a very parfit' practitioner who, once he knew the cause ?f a patient's sickness, made haste to apply suitable remedies. Poggio, the great Florentine scholar of the Renaissance, pilloried the doctors in his facetious stories, which are often indecent. It is fair to say that he attacked the monks also. He wrote moral essays, and his worst stories often point a moral. It is no great step from Chaucer to laughter-loving Francois Rabelais, monk, physician, teacher, editor of Hippocrates, and creator of a marvel of literary art. He was born at Chinon about 1495, and was a practiser of medicine and a vagabond in literature. He is so various in his writings that even scholars are at a loss to interpret him ; for some he is the great humanist, theologian and moralist, but for most a teller of tales and an artist in the shameless exaggeration of the ludicrous, riotously displayed in coarsest caricature With torrents of words. His characters are humanity in the warm flesh. ?His Panurge is next to Falstaff as a comic figure, and his whole book one vast roaring superabundance. It is spattered with strange medical erudition. He attacks the quackery and superstition of his time, but as became a Greek scholar, he followed the Greek ideal and believed and taught that the welfare of the patient is the good physician's prime concern. He was a Doctor of Montpellier and practised in Lyons and elsewhere in the South. Towards the end of his life he was the famous ' Cure of Meudon. Trajan was a fisher of frogs,' he shouts, and the Great Bell of Notre Dame told him that

' Mieulx est de ris que de larmes escrire.' His book can be understood only by those versed in the bypaths of ancient literature and an archaic vocabulary, but we have him in the magic transmutation of Urquhart, whose laughing ebullience sometimes ahnost o'ertops the Master. It is little wonder that in his plays Shakespeare shows much acquain- tance with medicine, for his life almost bridged the gap between the death of Vesalius and the publication of Harvey's thesis 011 the circulation of the blood. The Italian schools were then very active and the estab- lished conclusions of the human mind, that slave of life, were being modi- fied by the influence of men of guiding genius thrown up during the Renaissance. Galen's ideas were being questioned and the teaching of 14<> GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL

Paracelsus was still discussed. Although the planets moved, the common belief was not dissipated that the stars were fixed, revolving with the rolling vault of the heavens on the inner sphere enclosing that product of Nature, man. John Caius, student of the sweating sickness, who enlarged a college foundation at Cambridge, was dead when the poet was a little boy. He was undoubtedly the prototype, in the guise of a French physician, for the Dr. Caius of The Merry Wives of Windsor. There are references in the plays to almost every branch of medicine and surgery. In Troilus and Cressida there is a long list of diseases patently connected with syphilis. Venereal disease is often alluded to. Aesculapius, Hippocrates, Galen, Paracelsus are all mentioned, some more than once. Falstaff got his knowledge of apoplexy from Galen. There are many physicians and surgeons in the plaj^s, and the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet is drawn as a poor sort of fellow dwelling among strange simples in an atmosphere of alchemy. Shakespeare, who described politicians as ' scurvy is not more polite to the doctors. He wrote, the patient dies ' while the physician sleeps,' and advises, trust not the physician ; his antidotes are poison.' That strange sixteenth century swaggering compound of philosopher and charlatan, Paracelsus, whose real contribution to medicine in pharma- cology and therapeutics is overlaid by the turgidity of his writing, was the subject of a poem by Browning. Although there were queer things in Paracelsus' arcana, and he believed in astral influences and a life-force lie called Archaeus, yet according to old Robert Burton, he used to tell his patients that faith and a strong imagination would work wonders. But he does not appear to have been the cultured mystic of Browning's poem. He was a strong rumbustious disputatious character and had little of the lofty spirit with which the poet endows him. The blank verse of the poem is relieved by lyrics, one of which is redolent with the odour of oriental spices which might well have found place in Paracelsus' pharmacy- ' Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes Of labdanum, and aloes balls, Smeared with dull nard, an Indian wipes ' From out her hair : From all accounts there was nothing lyrical about Paracelsus. Browning is credited with using another eminent doctor of this period in poetic fancy: Thomas Iyinacre, physician to Henry VII, who did service by producing scholarly versions of the early medical masters. He was a classicist, and it is upon the opinion of his pupil, Erasmus, that he was a better grammarian than physician (which was also Thomas Fuller's view) that he is alleged to be the subject of A Grammarian's Funeral, ' He settled Hoti's business?-let it be !?- Properly based Oun? Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,' MEDICINE AND LITERATURE?CARTER 147

The closing lines of this poem, wrote Arthur Symons, is one of the noblest requiems ever chanted over the grave of a scholar. Fuller called lyinacre and Caius the Phoenixes of our Profession, in that the latter had in some sort sprung from the ashes of the former. Their joint memorial in Old St. Paul's was crowned by a phoenix. The life of Robert Burton spanned the bridge of these centuries and produced for us what Osier called the greatest treatise on medicine ever written by a layman?The of Melancholy. While no apostle of cheerfulness, the author was no misanthropic pessimist. He was not a doctor, but a clerk in holy orders, of Christ Church, Oxford, full of zeal and charity, and a bit of an astrologer. His book is a strange medley of learning?theology, medicine, classical lore, superstition and common- sense, with not a little psychology are mixed into a literary brew, in Wordy but orderly profusion. It is said he wrote his book to disperse his own melancholy, but however that may be, he has certainly beguiled others out of depression. He got Dr. Johnson out of bed two hours before his usual time. Facetiousness and waggery, profundity and naivete are all there. The book is a mine of strange jewels. Burton is the greatest quoter in literature. vSterne, Milton, Keats all borrowed from him. Browsing in the Anatomy is like spending a sunlit afternoon 111 a dusty old library, for Burton's book is a bookman's book, an endless mosaic of many-coloured patches. Montaigne must be mentioned in passing as another great quoter, of niost curious liiiiul, much interested in doctors and medicine, whose Essais are a mine of delectation for mature readers, who may find much solace and considerable entertainment therein, together with many strange things. The seventeenth century produced philosophers who influenced succeeding medical thought and are good examples of the felicitous association of medicine and literature. Descartes, a profound philosopher, was interested in the natural sciences and had many physicians as his friends. His philosophy has been belaboured and has been thought to be too earth-bound. He was an orderly man and believed in evidence. His meditations led him to the dictum Cogito ergo sum. By his Diseours and his Dc Hominc he helped to pass on the torch of the Renaissance, through his advocacy of scientific methods applied to scientific thought. Coupled with him is our own Francis Bacon with his Advancement of Learning. They were a manifestation of a fresh outlook, and their influence lived. 1 ' liese men, in Macaulay's phrase moved the intellects that moved the World '?including the world of medicine. Besides, do not some claim that Shakespeare's plays were Bacon's own ? The majestic figure of the Chancellor with his calm, lucid mastery of affairs, is sharply contrasted with ' Descartes, whom De Ouincev described as being as restless as a hyaena,' 148 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL

John Locke was a medical graduate of Oxford at the age of 43. He was a truant from medicine to philosophy. In his famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding he advocated freedom of thought and had a powerful influence on subsequent thinkers. Medicine in the seventeenth century had not yet parted from alchemy, and there still flourished many outlandish schools of thought. The signs of the zodiac were still thought to have a bearing on health and disease. Astrology was practised and is ridiculed in the plays of the period. Even Dryden was interested in nativities. The pharmacopoeias contain the queerest and often most loathsome remedies. Earthworms were con- sidered good for plague. Sir Thomas Browne of believed in witches, yet he left that immortal work Religio Medici which Osier thought should be 011 every medical student's bookshelf. Credulous himself, he yet attacked superstition in his Vulgar Errors. He probably believed in the Royal touch for scrofula, mentioned by Shakespeare and practised until the time of Dr. Johnson, who was one of the last touched (by Queen Anne). Strange indeed were the beliefs of those days. Madame de Sevigne believed in the curative power of human urine, a belief that has not even }ret entirely disappeared. It has been used as a lotion for chilblains as well as a draught for internal disorders. The lore of herbs and simples was the business of Nick Culpeper, who was also something of an astrologer. Kipling has drawn him in his story A Doctor of Medicine. The seventeenth century doctor and the pedantry and fallacious reasoning of his practice were scarified by Moliere, who though he flourished under L,ouis XIV, when Richelieu, Iya Fontaine and St. Simon crossed the stage, also dwelt at a time when surgeons were often thought of as rascals brandishing razors. They failed to relieve him of his ill- health and he more than suspected them of killing his only son by over- dosage with antimony. In several plays he attacks and caricatures the doctors with their hollow magnificence and pontifical manners. Especially in Le Malade Imaginaire does he strike hard, burlesquing the pretentious and ridiculous pomp of their graduation ceremonies. But most of his satire is good-humoured and certainly comic. It made little impression on his victims. Le Sage in his picaresque Gil Bias also tilts at the practices of the times. His scenery is Spanish, but his medicine French. His preposterous emaciated Dr. Sangrado, an athletic blood-letter, typifies the practitioner whose cure-all was venesection. Oceans of blood seem to have flowed at the hands of Gui Patin and his colleagues. Patin was a ferocious bleeder and practised 011 himself and his wife as well as on his patients. Many of the sick must have survived only by reason of the immense quantity of water they drank during the process; the idea being, apparently, to wash out the morbid material. MEDICINE AND LITERATURE?CARTER 149

Two seventeenth century doctor poets were Sir vSamuel Garth and Sir Richard Blackmore. Garth, the Kit-Kat poet, a famous Yorkshireman, was monographed by Harvey Cushing (1906). He was a member of the Kit-Kat club of which Steele, Addison and Congreve were members. Kneller painted their portraits less than half-length (hence the term Kit-Kat portraits) to fit their dining-room, and they are still in existence. Garth presided at Dryden's funeral and made a Ivatin oration. In his long poem, The Dispensary, he satirised those who opposed out-patient treatment for the poor. Pope described him as a good Christian without knowing it. Blackmore, to whom Don Quixote was recommended as a useful medical text-book by Sydenham, graduated at and is said to have written his poem The Creation while on his rounds. He was a friend of Addison, bnt Garth and even Dryden criticised his work adversely. With the eighteenth century's opening we come to a critical age. 1 doctors and medicine did not escape. Many men of culture and achieve- ment flourished, but so did quackery, and excessive bleeding and blistering were not out of fashion. Many physicians and surgeons were companions of the essayists, poets and wits of the coffee-houses. There Was still much pomposity and humbug, but medicine was evolving from a craft to an art. A lot of eponymous pills and powders date from this time. The doctors of McMiehacl's Gold-headed Cane belong to this period. 1 )efoe printed his famous Journal of the Plague Year in 1Although fictitious, its account of the plague, which had been well described by the eye-witness Pepys, is as vivid as any onlooker's, because above all things J >efoe was a great journalist. Goldsmith, friend of Johnson, who wrote of him that he touched nothing he did not adorn, was another truant from medicine. With a doubtful degree he practised a little among the poor, but literature made him immortal, if it did not recompense him materially. 7 he Vicar of Wakefield and She Stoops to Conquer, incomparable works, will always be read. Tongue-tied in speech, but golden in writing, it is recorded that when ' ' poor Nolly died, Reynolds gave up painting and Burke wept. Two eighteenth century novelists had something to say about doctors : Sterne and Smollett. Sterne created Dr. Slop in 7 ristram Shandy, a little s<|uat, bigoted, argumentative doctor, a man-midwife, who appeared riding on a diminutive pony. He was drawn from I)r. John Burton of ^ ?rk, an antiquarian, but it is an unkind, almost libellous portrait, it appears. Sterne had a perpetual sneer in his writings as well as his Peculiar Shandyish humour with which he embellished his borrowings *r?m the facetiae of Rabelais, Burton and others. Perhaps, as Osier suggests, he would have made a better doctor than parson ; he might have seen deeper into humanity. The obstetric instruments with which Slop flattened Tristram's nose are said to be still in existence, 150 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL

Smollett studied in Glasgow and graduated at Aberdeen in 1750 after producing Roderick Random. He had been at sea as a surgeon's mate and describes in liis novel the examination for assistant surgeon in the Navy. Roderick sailed in a ship commanded by Tom Bowling. Smollett was a naval surgeon for a time, practised in Downing Street, L,ondon, and tried to set up in Bath. But he was unsuccessful, and literature became his life. Peregrine Pickle, his most popular book, satirises Mark Akenside, a pompous physician who wrote a poem on The Pleasures of Imagination, and Peregrine is made to hoax the doctors of Bath. In Count Fathom the eighteenth century doctor is lampooned. Smollett had great power of imaginative description and much can be gleaned from his books of medicine in his day. He helped to revise Smellie's Midwifery, and translated Don Quixote and (HI Bias. His novels, though full flavoured, are still very readable. A failure in medicine was George Crabbe, but his narrative verse is still read. He was a parson as well as a doctor. In his poems he gives a lurid description of a patient in a mad-house. He had no high flights of poetic fancy. Poor Crabbe saw all the ugliness of life and his humour was ' grim. In his poem The Village we see the parish doctor, he carried fate ' and physic in his eye,' and was a potent quack long versed in human ills.' George did not like quacks. Much which is readily accessible, has been written about Dr. Johnson and his relations to medicine and doctors. The great man apparently suffered from scrofula, hypochondriasis, gout, asthma, hydrocele, renal disease and dropsy. Rolleston thinks he had hypertension behind his renal disease. He dreaded dying, but made a good end. Pie knew many doctors and was attended by Heberden and Percival Pott among others. He dabbled in medicine himself and corresponded with physicians about his health. Boswell's Life contains a great deal of interest on these matters. The great moralist himself wrote the lives of Garth, Akenside and Boer- haave. He thought that doctors do more good to mankind without hope of reward than men of any profession, and he expressed what were probably his real feelings towards physicians in his elegiac verses on the death of Dr. Iyevet. On the other hand, that other great man, Voltaire, is supposed to have thought that medicine, like war, is murderous and conjectural. It is strange that poetry and physic have never been far apart. Even Edward Jenner of Gloucestershire, who introduced protective inoculation against smallpox, was a bird-fancier and wrote an Address to a Robin. It would be easy to fill a book about medicine and literature in the nineteenth century and after. Many discoveries in ancillary sciences cleared the paths and helped to pull medicine away from the lingering superstitions and false notions of the past. Scientists, such as chemists, physicists, biologists?one thinks of the work of Davy, Faraday, Tyndall, MEDICINE AND LITERATURE?CARTER 151

Kelvin and others?in ploughing their own furrows in natural philosophy, opened up the way for the great development in medicine, a development which their modern successors have recently marvellously augmented. Darwin's Origin of Species and other books, from which stemmed the writings of Huxley and Alfred Russell Wallace, shed much light in dark places. In the last century and a half medicine has evolved from an art to a science, but it will have to strain every nerve to keep pace with the life-destroying elements which equally emerge from intensive scientific work. From lay writers during this time censure has never ceased, nor has there been shortage of praise and appreciation, sometimes eloquence. Most of the poets have comments of some sort, from Tenynson's shot at experiments on animals to Henley's noble verses ; nor have the novelists been behind, and the best known doctor in modern fiction was born in 1852. His name was Watson, general practitioner and whetstone for Sherlock Holmes' mind. Dickens' doctors have provided more than one doctor with a subject for a lecture, and the finest portrait of an intellectual physician was drawn by in Middlemarcli. The century opened with I,aennec who laid the foundation of clinical medicine, discovering mediate auscultation in 1815, the year before Keats qualified. Ivaennec's treatise is now medical literature, and the man him- self is revivified with genius in Kipling's Marlake Witches in the book Rewards and Fairies. Kipling's association with Osier had something to do with the inspiration that produced this story and the one about Nicholas Culpeper (^1 Doctor of Medicine) in the same book. Kipling had much more to say about doctors in his Book of Words, a collection of his addresses. John Keats must surely head those qualified in medicine who have taken to literature. Half dreaming through an anatomy lecture he saw ^ery land in a sunbeam and floated away with Oberon, Titania and the rest. Only Shakespeare has exceeded him in the exquisite perfection of the words in which he clothes his thoughts. He was one of the greatest sons of medicine, but in youth he joined the Olympian Confraternity where there are no doctors, because none are needed. His early maturity was amazing. Very self-critical, he soon developed that marvellous purity aiid richness, which achieved perfection in a few odes and a handful of sonnets. But there is gold in all his work. Keats died of phthisis. Was the tubercle bacillus the energiser which drove his spirit to such lofty heights ? His death produced from Shelley one of the greatest elegies ever written ; but the lament was for the poet. There are no less than fifteen physicians and seven surgeons portrayed m the novels and stories of Charles Dickens. Some of them are merely sketched. Perhaps Sir Parker Peps, the Court physician, and Mr. Pilkins, ^rs. Dombey's doctors, are the most strongly marked. These descriptions is2 g'lAsgow MeMcAl Journal verge 011 carieature, but one can easily imagine Sir Parker pompously ' saying, as Punch had it, Grapes ??ye-es. Black ; 011 no account white.' Mrs. Dombey died nevertheless. In Pickwick Papers, Dr. Slammer, surgeon of the 97th Regiment, who was affronted over a lady by Mr. Jingle wearing Mr. Winkle's suit, cuts a ludicrous figure. The little fat blustering fellow, probably a recollection by the novelist of some officer he had known at Chatham barracks, is not elaborately drawn, but is fixed for all time in the illustration. His challenge to the bewildered Mr. Winkle 011 the morning ofter the ball at Rochester converted that mild-mannered sportsman into a quivering jelly of apprehension. In Pickwick too, are Bob Sawyer and Ben Alien, medical students of the day, whose eccentricities provide food for Sam Weller's wit, strange interest for Mr. Pickwick and much fun for the reader. Allan Wood court in Bleak House, who marries Esther Sunmiersou, is perhaps the kindest picture of a young surgeon, and he provides through Esther a line eulogy from a doctor's wife. Iu Dr. Jobling of Martin Chuzzlcwit we have a specimen of the brisk, hearty, business-like Victorian doctor. 1 )ickeus noticed the type. Almost all Dickens' characters are touched with caricature and the doctors do not escape ; but the burlesque is usually good-natured. It may be remembered also that Dickens pilloried the old inefficient charwoman-nurse in the unforgettable Sairey Gamp. Thackeray was no great user of the profession in his novels, but lie contributes a crafty doctor or two. He makes Major Pendenuis regret that a lady of his acquaintance i^ to marry a doctor, but neutralises this slur by having a few line paragraphs on the doctor's responsibilities to the patient's friends and relations. One of the profession who reached the first rank in literature was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Professor of Anatomy at Harvard, who coined ' ' ' the words anaesthesia and anaesthetic.' His delightful Breakfast Table series and his poems?one or two of them small masterpieces?are well known, but he also displayed mastery of the literary medium in Medical Essays and Over llie Teacups. Trollope drew a village doctor in Dr. Thunic, one of the most readable of the Bareliester novels, and Balzac, the master of a mixture of realism and romanticism, who saw everything, and certainly exploited the sordid side of life, gave the country doctor a place in his human comedy, immortalising him in his Lc Medecin dc Campagiic. He is said to have used Dupuytren as a model for his Dr. Desplein. The author of that rollicking book Mr. Midshipman Easy, in another of his novels describes how a beginner in surgery practised for venesection by puncturing the large veins of a cabbage leaf before making his first real attempt 011 his teacher. The prototype for George Eliot's physician Tertius Lydgate in is generaly supposed to owe a lot to Sir Clifford Allbutt MEDICINE AND LITERATURE?CARTER 153 whom she knew and at whose house in Leeds she once stayed. Allbutt's ' biographer, , says the circumstances and character of Lydgate certainly show resemblances to those of Allbutt,' but Osier's opinion was that Lydgate and Allbutt had nothing in common save their training and high ideals. Allbutt never denied the impeachment. Oscar Browning (the celebrated O.B.) obliquely suggested that he was the source of this character. Whatever the truth, George Eliot drew a fine portrait of an intellectual physician. Allbutt himself was a fine scholar and a master of English style. He contributed to the literature of Medicine in his erudite Greek Medicine in Rome and other works, including his monumental System of Medicine. Curiously, much later 011, Allbutt's old home became L,ord Moynihan's, and he in his turn was supposed to have been enshrined in a novel by Harold Begbie. There is con- siderable literary power in Moynihan's contributions to medical literature. Edinburgh gave us the successful physician, Dr. John Brown, author of Horae Subsccivae, which includes Rab and his Friends, and Marjorie Fleming. There is homour and pathos in Brown and a style which expresses the man. Another Edinburgh student of medicine was Samuel Warren, who later became a barrister and a Master in Lunacy. He practised medicine for only a few years and is remembered chiefly for his rather Gothic Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician, which first appeared in Blackwood and in book form has run through many editions. Osier, Allbutt's brother Regius Professor at Oxford during the later years of his life, was a great literary physician, a bibliophile and much Uiterested in medical history. His famous text-book of medicine and his niany essays, medical and medico-literary, are written in a style well adapted to his purpose. He was epigrammatic and often surprising ; he Was a master of apt quotation, especially from his favourite authors, the Bible, Bunyan, Burton, Browne and Montaigne. His personality is strongly marked in most of his voluminous output. Even when most scientific he is never dull or prosy. He collected books avidly and was proud of having almost all the editions of his beloved Sir Thomas Browne. His text-book gave rise to an examination paper in tlie maimer ?f Calverley's famous Pickwick examination paper. One question, According to Cusliing, was ' Who was Mephibosheth ? What parental superstition dates from ' his time ? Osier's writings are full of phrases that stick in the memory. One man and writer of later Victorian days, R. h- Stevenson, knew as much of doctors from the patient's viewpoint as any man ; and he Wrote one of the noblest tributes to the physician ever penned, in his dedication of his book of poems Underwoods, where he mentions ten of his doctors by name and says he forgets as many as he remembers. In (GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL

Jckyll and Hyde, his famous satire in the form of a thriller, no doubt a projection of the escape motive which had urged him in youth to flee at times from the up-town respectability to the dram-shops of the Edinburgh slums, he created the eminently respectable and successful physician Dr. Jekyll, who split his personality with a drug and revelled as the lower half, Mr. Hyde. This might be called a case of induced intermittent schizophrenia. He drew another doctor, some may remember ; Dr. Livesey in Treasure Island, a cool hand under all circumstances. ' ' Henley, vStevenson's friend, the Burly of R. Iv. S.'s essay Talk and ' Talkers, and sometime editor of the National Observer,' lias something to sav about his doctors. In his verses In Hospital written when lie lay in lister's wards in Edinburgh with a tuberculous ankle, he wrote vignettes of the medical and nursing staff and of some patients. Ivister lie etches as The Chief. ' His brow spreads large and placid, and his eye Is deep and bright, with steady looks that still.

Battling with custom, prejudice, disease, As once the son of Zeus with Death and Hell.'

He devotes other poems to the house-surgeon and the staff nurses. His descriptions of his sensations as he was waiting to be taken for operation, especially his anticipation of the anaesthetic, are very vivid, ' The sick sweet mystery of choloroform, The drunken dark, the little deatli-in-life.' He describes a bedside operation in Clinical and marks the hiss of the carbolic spray. Henley's verse is perhaps neglected today, but the man had poetry under his piratical demeanour. He is apt to bawl at times but there is masculinity in all he wrote. From remote times doctors and medicine have been derided by the laity, and most of the strictures and complaints are as old as the hills and just about as unchangeable. Probably, on the whole, the praise balances the censure. Abuse has come from educated and uneducated, and ardent support for nostrums and quackery has come, and still conies, from the most unexpected quarters. Southey, Sydney Smith, Byron, ' Christopher North,' Samuel Butler have all shot at us. liven Sir Walter thought we were bad guessers. Lloyd George was not complimentary, but strangely, Karl Marx praised us. In later days, G. B. S., hopelessly unscientific, roared to the attack in his plav The Doctor's Dilemma, of which he made Almroth Wright the hero. Not all the good advice of his medical friends could put Mr. Shaw' right, for he had another crack in Everybody's Political What's What- Are the sage's ninety years to be attributed to his abstinence from doctor's nostrums ? MEDICIN1i And LiTEkArXjldi?CyiRtkR J55

Humbert Wolfe wrote sniggering verses in Cursory Rhymes ; but perhaps they were written for children, in jest. Since the turn of the century doctors have increasingly taken to writing fiction and drama, and the doctor has proved of much value to writers, particularly to those specialising in crime fiction. We are familiar with the works of Maugham, Brett Young, Stacpoole, Warwick Deeping, Cronin (whose doctors seldom have a good time), Austin Freeman, H. C. Bailey and James Bridie. All but one of these are doctors and most have, at one time or another, drawn doctors at work or play. Freeman's Dr. Thorndvke, the austere, learned, medical jurist, is a creation to stand beside the incomparable Watson, without whose services Sherlock Holmes would have been lost, but it is doubtful if the fire-lit rooms in King's Bench Walk will ever be as famous as those in Baker Street. J liorndyke's laboratory assistant, Polton, is a detailed and living pre- sentment. H. C. Bailey's Mr. Fortune, surgeon, psychologist, pathologist, research worker, is almost too much of a good thing. His exploits as ' gourmet and gourmand give point to his favourite expression The mind is blank.' He really knows too much. None the less lie has many followers.

There seems to be no field of literature in which medical men have not adventured. They have produced excellent works of travel such as those ?f Treves ; biographies like Cusliing's Life of Osier. A modern physician ls ' an authority on pirates and buccaneers. Cavendish,' the author of a once famous classic 011 whist, Mrs. Battle's game, was a doctor. The last poet laureate, Robert Bridges, forsook medicine for poesy and became a considerable poet-philosopher and philologist. And many a lesser man has shown a pretty turn for verse. Poetry and physic have long been associated.

Nor have we been short of medical historians, writers of medico- historical studies or of essayists 011 medical themes who have clothed their facts in literary language, to charm their readers. Modern excursions into biological philosophy are represented by the profound writings of kir Charles Sherrington and others, and as has been shown, it has always happened that medical men have never been rigidly tied to the practice ?f their own professions, but have used their scientific attainments to embellish other spheres of intellectual activity.

It will now be obvious to readers than an inclusive title for this survey was a mistake : this record is brief and imperfect. There are many omissions, for the terrain is wide and has been unevenly explored. But the truth is that volumes might be written around the association of Medicine with literature. Literature exists to please, and there is much to lighten the burden of life, especially to medical minds, in the literature that surrounds medicine and in the harmonies that exist between them. 15(3 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Besides the works of writers quoted in the text, the following are some of the books consulted :? Cusliing, Harvey (1925). Life of Sir William Osier. Oxford : Clarendon Press Pulton, J. F. (1940). Harvey Cusliing. Oxford : Blackwell Garrison, F. H. (1917). (2nd ed.). Philadelphia and London : Saunders Hutchison, R. & Wauchope, G. M. (1935). For and against Doctors. London : Arnold & Co. Monro, T. K. (1933). The Physician as a Man of Letters, etc. Glasgow: Jackson, Wylie & Co. Rolleston, Sir Humphry (1929). Life of Sir Clifford Allbult. London : Macmillan Smith, W. F. (1918). Rabelais in his Writings. Cambridge Univ. Press