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THE DOCTOR ON THE STAGE MEDICINE AND MEDICAL MEN IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH DRAMA* By HERBERT SILVETTE, Ph.D. UNIVERSITY, VA PART III† Chapter IV Galen or Avicen; if herbs or drugs. Or minerals have any power to save. Great Men and Quacks Now let thy practice and their sovereign Puisque Hippocrate le dit, il faut le faire. use Moliere Raise thee to wealth and honour. Tourneur, Atheist's Tragedy, v, i. y THE beginning of the seven­ teenth century: They were, as Ben Jonson said, names to conjure with: Compass. The doctor is an ass then, if he The teachings of the Arabian- say so. BGreek authorities had been for And cannot with his conjuring names, centuries and were still held as infallible Hippocrates, dogma. The doctrines of medical science Galen, or Rasis, Avicen, Averroes, were a finished book, just as the authori­ Cure a poor wench’s falling in a swoon; ties of the Church were final—they might Which a poor farthing, changed into rosa be commented, expounded, interpreted soils. Or cinnamon water would. and taught, but not contradicted nor seri­ Magnetic Lady, Hi, ously questioned.^ Here the most learned of poets has The three rocks upon which these listed in true chronological order the medical doctrines were so firmly most famous names of ancient and founded were Hippocrates—the Father medieval medicine. A eulogy of Hip­ of Medicine, the Divine Old Man—, pocrates would be a presumption here. Galen and Avicenna. His sobriquets are sufficient unto them­ To the old physicians this Trinity selves, and when he died in 377 b.c. was hardly less revered than God the the apotheosis of Medicine had reached Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. its peak. Nor did worship of these iatric idols To Galen (130-200 a.d.) Hippoc­ stop with the medical men. Laymen rates and his contemporaries were “the also invoked their names as represent­ ancients”; and this Greek-speaking ing the apogee of the Healing Art. Roman, born in Asia Minor, with his D’Amville. Doctor, behold two patients in “imperious temper and tendency to whose cure self-glorification, ”2 became in turn the Thy skill may purchase an eternal fame. * From the Department of Physiology, University of Virginia Medical School. If thou’st any reading in Hippocrates, •f-Parts I and II appeared in Annals of Medical History, N. S. 8:520 (Nov.), 1936; 9:62 (Jan.), 1937. touchstone to which all medical theory important for the physician than seeing a was applied. The Greek mist does not thousand patients. cling to Galen. In him one can recog­ Rhazes himself, however, does not seem nize a later type of doctor in whom to have lived up to his sage advice, for genius, enthusiasm and ability are tem­ in erudition he was surpassed by both pered with more worldly qualities. Hip­ Avicenna and Averroes, while as a clini­ pocrates has become a myth; but let cian with diagnostic and therapeutic Galen change his terminology and toga skill he stands unsurpassed among his for polysyllabic English and a frock­ fellow-countrymen. coat and he might have been the most He lived, according to a report taken famous and fashionable physician of and transmitted cum grano salis by modern London or New York as he James Atkinson: was in the Rome of Marcus Aurelius’ day. one hundred and twenty years; be­ gan his medical tricks at thirty, turned Pursuivant. Good Mr. Doctor, quack or empiricus for forty years, and a Teach your Apothecary: Galen nor Hippocrates can perswade me from my rational being or physician, for forty duty. more, so that he was eighty years practis­ Love Will Find Out the Way, ii. ing physic, before he came to his senses, his medical senses.® Ferdinand. You are a brace of Quacks, That tie your knowledge unto dayes and The Persian “Prince of Physicians’’ houres was Avicenna (980-1038). He was the Mark’d out for good or ill i’ th’ Almanack. author of the renowned “Canon,” in Your best receipts are candy for a cold; which he expressed the quintessence of And Carduus Benedictus for an ague. Could you give life as Aesculapius Graeco-Arabian medicine in a compre­ Did to unjustly slaine Hippolitus, hensive system, and thereby established You could prescribe no remedy for me. medical thought upon foundations ap­ Goe study Gallen, and Hippocrates, parently immutable.^ But Avicenna And when your rare simplicies have found tinctured his scientific life with an im­ Simples to cure the Lunacy of Love, Compose a potion, and administer’t morality which today would have Unto the Family at Amsterdam. caused a sad clucking of academic Brome, Court Beggar, Hi, i. tongues. During the day he practiced and wrote, but each evening found him The medieval Arabs translated the sampling Bacchus and investigating works of the Greeks into their own lan­ Venus. Eventually wine and women guage and added to Hellenic theory a proved too much for him, and he died. mass of practical knowledge. Their Apparently he had not heard great compendiums were then recast into Latin by twelfth and thirteenth­ . wise Clearkes say, that Galen being century translators, and these con­ asked what dyet he used that he lyued so quered Europe as completely as the long, aunswered: I haue dronk no wine, I arms of the Crescent did in part. haue touched no woman, I haue kept my Rhazes (850-923 a.d.) , the Rasis of selfe warme. the poets, is the apocryphal author of Lyly, Euphues His England.’^ an aphorism which strikes the keynote But in answer Avicenna could have of medieval medicine: coined Rochefoucauld’s epigram six The study of a thousand books is more hundred years in advance: Preserving the health by too strict a wrights’ mind, even Hippocrates him­ regimen is a wearisome malady. self. Galen’s genius is not to be de­ Averroes (1126-1198) matched his nied, but forces greater even than this predecessor in knowledge—his complete operated to place the halo on his brow. system of medicine, the “Colliget,” His piety, monotheism and all-embrac­ had almost as much authority as the ing teleology appealed to the medieval “Canon”—but hardly in dissipation. Church, and his voluminous works For Averroes was a prodigious worker, were copied by the monks and dissemi­ and spent only two nights of his long nated, not only widely but with the life away from his books and quill. One apostolic blessing. Then, too, Galen was was the night of his father’s death, the not only omniscient, medically speak­ other that of his own wedding day. ing, but dogmatic about it. To a world The dramatists added other names imbued with respect for authority he to the Trinity, but more or less unsys­ offered the ultimate word. His name tematically, according to quaint lean­ sanctioned any medical custom and ings of their own. Richard Brome had sanctified every medical act, as in Dav- a fancy for Dioscorides (40-90 a.d.) , enant’s song: known to the historian as the Father Arise, arisel Your breakfast stays— of Pharmacy. Good water-gruel warm. Doctor. I will warrant Or sugar-sops, which Galen says His speedy cure without the help of Galen, With mace will do no harm. Hippocrates, Avicen, or Dioscorides. And Galen became synonymous with Antipodes, i, 6. Gospel: Strangelove. But let me tell you first, the Master Coursey. I like this notion. most learned Authors, that I can turn And it hath my consent, because my wife over, as Dioscorides, Avicen, Galen, Is sore infected and heart-sick with hate; and Hippocrates are much discrepant And I have sought the Galen of advice. in their opinions concerning the rem­ Which only tells me this same potion edies for his disease. To be most sovereign for her sickness’ cure. Court Beggar, Hi, i. Porter, Two Angry Women, ii, 4. Ben Jonson in another play turns It appears that at least one of the again to Rhazes in an illustration of poets had more than a nodding ac how deeply the legend of the famous quaintance with the Prince of Physi­ Arabs sank into even the inarticulate cians. John Shirley in “The Witty Fair life of the times: One” wrote {Hi, 4) : Clench. My god-phere was a Rabian or a Fowler, as if sick, upon a couch; and Jew, (You can tell, D’oge) they call’d Manly disguised as a Physician at­ un doctor Rasi. tending him: phials, etc., on a table. Scriben. One Rasis was a great Arabian Manly. For I observed, so soon as his doctor. searching eyes had fastened upon her, Clench. He was king Harry’s doctor, and his labouring pulse, that, through his my god-phere. Tale of a Tub, iv, 2. fever, did before stick hard, and fre­ quent, now exceeds in both these dif­ But it was “the huge, overshadowing ferences; and this Galen himself figure of Galen” which eclipsed every found true upon a woman that had other medical luminary in the play­ doted upon a fencer. This scene represents the ancient lit­ Modern physicians should approve erary device of a lover feigning illness Galen’s “control observations.” And while a confederate plays the doctor. psychiatrists can claim the now helpless The coy or unwilling inamorata never Galen as one of the first luminaries of penetrates the stratagem or the dis­ their art. guise, or perhaps she merely pretends Until the Renaissance Galen re­ not to. The physician has thus played mained the dictator of medicine and the pander in many a seventeenth-cen­ no physician dared oppose even the tury romance.

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