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a disappointing performance. She did not in the least appear really to enter into the notion of deceiving the young man who had invaded her father's house, but rather to look upon the accomplishment of her undertaking as an extremely serious matter, the failure of which would most likely involve the family in very awkward consequences. In Lydia Languish, an easier part, she was better; in Lady Teazle, a more difficult part, she was worse. But here it may be said-or repeated-that Lady Teazle is a terribly trying part to play. She is seen in so many entirely different aspects; and when we consider that her ladyship, despite her assumption of the airs and graces of quasihigh life, is in reality little more than a girl fresh from the country, whose original nature it must be supposed would occasionally crop out, the great difficulties of the part are at once apparent. Miss Robert

son has learned her art; her failure was not in making Lady Teazle complete and round, but in not making her complete and round enough. It was her ladyship painted in neutral colours. There was a want of depth and decision of outline, and it seemed like a representation of the genuine personage as she might be supposed to appear when convalescent, after a troublesome illness. Miss Robertson is weakest where Miss Cavendish is strongest; the former lady never seems as if she could really be sarcastic and bitter; the latter never seems as if she could ever be genial and tender. Miss Robertson's love is love; Miss Cavendish's is a mockery.

When Miss Robertson is within her limits, she is excellent. For a certain, and tolerably wide, range of parts, there is no more able exponent on the English stage, and few on the French.

A.

(To be continued.)

CONFESSIONS OF DOCTORS.

N going about the world it is

there is a kind of infallible pope set up in many families, who is none other than the family doctor. The family lawyer is an uninteresting and fossil sort of being to ladies and children. But the doctor is still Sir Oracle, and all Molière's gibes against his order are forgotten or unknown, and he often remains the family pope. Now I am not going to say anything against my excellent friends the doctors. They are very well able to take care of themselves. We may call them one-eyed, but we must admit that they are the oneeyed among ourselves who are the blind. Still I have the somewhat unamiable purpose of discussing some of their blunders on their own showing. I am going to deal a little recklessly with certain confessions that I find them making, either voluntarily or involuntarily, but, at the same time, I know how easily they could turn the tables by discussing the confessions of patients. They see a great deal of the worst of life; its meanness, selfishness, irritability, and cowardice. Indeed, when we satirise the doctors, we are mainly complaining of human nature itself. Their knowledge is little, because all human knowledge is little. During all these thousands of years we have not mastered the very alphabet words with which we might construct a science of the human body or of the human mind. So true is the complaint of the hero of 'Locksley Hall': 'Science moves but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point.' The public themselves compel the doctors to have a touch of humbug about them. A highly scientific friend has

VOL. XXV.—NO. CXLV.

been telling me that he is treating a particular patient with bread pills and coloured water; her chronic case requires incessant watching before he can determine the method of treatment. In the meantime he finds it necessary to satisfy her. The patient who calls in a doctor thinks nothing of him unless he will physic his dura ilia very stiffly then and there; and if he is truly a scientific man, and takes a long time for his diagnosis, the said patient puts him down as not knowing his business. If the public want to be deceived, deceived they must be.

I was talking one day with a medical friend. He complained that the public treated him very unfairly. They expect him, sir, to be omnipotent. They send for him in illness, and expect that a medical man will immediately be able to do everything. They forget that he has to watch the case and learn something of the constitution of the patient.' I was calling on another medical friend one day, and he was telling me something of some new cases. 'I am giving them a mixture of peppermint and water just nowthat will do them neither good nor harm-until I can find out what is the best for them. Besides, I am proposing to make some interesting experiments on them.' I thought of the experimentum in corpore vili. I mentally resolved that my own vile corpus should not, if I know it,' be experimented on. They say that every great orator is formed at the expense of his hearers, and perhaps it would not be too much to say that every great doctor is also formed at the expense of his patients.

E

It is often easy to detect the doctor in inaccuracies and carelessnesses. A doctor told me one day that I ought to take a course of Turkish baths. He was a man whose memory was not to be relied on. I asked him next day, 'Doctor, would not a Turkish bath be a good thing?' The doctor looked very solemn and said, 'A good thing, but not a good thing for you.' I once called in a doctor, who came down eight miles, examined me for eight minutes, and took his eight guineas. He gave me a most elaborate opinion, which turned out to be totally wrong. A doctor once forbade me to take beer; the next doctor I went to prescribed beer. You cannot go through life, you cannot get behind the scenes in medical life, you cannot take up a medical periodical or a medical book, but you see the absolute uncertainty that exists on what one would think the most elementary matters, the conflict of opinion on subjects that one might have expected to have had settled long ago. Every now and then some entirely new disease transpires, the account of the symptoms is published, there is no name for the case in any of the books, and everywhere from Europe and America come suggestions for the nomenclature or the treatment. Perhaps the patient little thinks that he has got into the case books, and is immortalised under some obscure initials. The probability is that the mystery of his case is never cleared up.

It is a great thing to meet with a medical man of genial nature and of candid mind, a man who understands that candour is dangerous, and yet chooses to be candid. He will discuss his kills and cures, his worries and successes, in the frankest possible way. His

'It

life is a campaign, and he will confess to a few casualties in the way of killed and wounded. is not so much, old fellow, that we ever directly kill a man off in the way of an overdose of poison. But sometimes a man makes an utter mistake. He has gone wrong in his diagnosis. His whole line of treatment has been a mistake. The terrible conviction comes over him that he has muddled the whole business, that if he had taken the right line he would have been all right, but that now the life is irretrievably lost.' Such mishaps are not necessarily those of ignorant and stupid men. The greatest surgeons have performed unnecessary amputations, and the greatest physicians have utterly mistaken symptoms. The greatness of a doctor, like that of a commander, consists in his making the smallest possible amount of blunders.

Even when a doctor understands you thoroughly he may not be a good doctor, after all. There was a great doctor who was a perfect hero at diagnosis. He could trace out the most difficult and obscure diseases. He discovered a new disease, which no one else had discovered all through the centuries in which people had had diseases. There were no pains that he would not take in order to arrive at the correct diagnosis of a case. The nurse in the hospital would be startled by his presence at midnight. After he had gone to rest thinking about a case, some point of detail which he thought of importance would present itself to his mind, and he would get up in the middle of the night in order to clear it up. He has been known, after seeing a patient eight or ten miles from town, as he was coming homewards to have been suddenly

struck with the idea that he had held him in abhorrence. The

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omitted some important inquiry, and to have gone back all the way in order to satisfy his mind. It is said of him that medicine was the one day-dream and nightdream of his existence. It might have been thought that a doctor so marvellous at diagnosis would have been most skilful in his treatment. But it was nothing of the kind. The diagnosis being accomplished, anybody might try any curative process. The case ceased to retain its interest. Listen to what his enthusiastic biographer says: We fear that the one great object being accomplished, the same energetic power was not devoted to its alleviation and cure. Without accusing him of a meditated neglect of therapeutics, we fancy we can trace the dallying with remedies,' and the words which he places on the lips of the great doctor, as representing his views, were-' I do not clearly see my way to the direct agency of special medicaments, but I must prescribe something for the patient, at least, to satisfy his or her friends.' The general interpretation of all this is that the greatest powers of doctors are, after all, extremely limited, and that the medical man who is extremely able in one department may be extremely weak in another, and, though he may know your illness, he may not know how to treat it. Medical men are very severe upon quacks. The scientific man abhors the empirical man. Yet it is impossible to look into medical literature without finding it replete with virtual confessions that medical men are immensely indebted to quacks and empirics. Take a point in surgery. Most surgeons have known of old Hutton the bone-setter, and have probably

provincial surgeon and the aboriginal bone-setter are frequently in collision. The bone-setter,will talk of a joint being out, and of putting a joint in, when such a feat is anatomically impossible. In fact, he does not know anatomy. But he sometimes has a curious art in manipulating joints which leaves trained professional skill in the despairing distance. Such a man was the famous, old Hutton. His cures are some of the most striking on record. Without any scientific training, he had acquired a subtlety, power, and precision of touch which enabled him to effect marvellous good. It was a peculiar trick of the wrist which he had. He said that his art lay not in the pulling, but the twist. It is empiric, if you like, but it effected cures which the science of the hospitals could not accomplish. An immense amount of the best medical practice is empiric. At last, a sensible surgeon thought it worth his while to cultivate old Hutton's acquaintance, watched his treatment, studied his method, imitated his touch, and has since written a book on the subject; a very remarkable one, no doubt, but, at the same time, a remarkable confession of the profession's indebtedness to empirics.

Radcliffe said that when he died he would leave behind him the whole mystery of physic on half a sheet of paper. The famous Cheyne says, in his Autobiography, that when he got to London the great thing was 'to be able to eat hastily, and to swallow down much liquor.' When Sir Richard Croft destroyed himself, after the death of the Princess Charlotte, it was a sort of confession that there had been some sort of incompetence. Sir Astley

Cooper is reported to have owned that his mistakes would fill a churchyard. A medical man once told me himself that he would rather see a patient die than call in another doctor when such a step might appear to imply any mistrust of his own abilities. Parish doctors, who are absurdly underpaid, must often be compelled to give pauper patients the less expensive medicines, rather than the more expensive, which their case might require, though I have repeatedly known such men give the best, and bear the cost. The general practitioner, in dealing with some case where a patient of doubtful solvency already owes him money, may be almost pardoned if he withholds cod-liver oil and administers quassia instead of quinine. There is another matter on which some medical men-I am thankful to say, very few-have nearly made a confession; and I am also thankful to say that such medical men represent only a very small portion of the profession. There are a great number of medical men who make up their own drugs, which they procure either directly from London, or from the best chemist in their locality. As a rule, it is calculated that about ten per cent. of the earnings of a general practitioner are expended in drugs. Some practitioners contrive, not by the most creditable means, to reduce this to five per cent. For instance, quinine is exceedingly expensive some eight shillings an ounceand so the medical man substitutes in his practice less expensive bitters, such as quassia and strychnine. It is interesting, also, to inquire how far the drugs furnished to provincial hospitals and infirmaries are in all cases of the best quality and properly tested by medical officers. It is not so much the medical men as

the committees that are to blame. If they refuse to pay chemists high prices for good articles, the chemist can only afford to send second-rate articles at second-rate prices. It is simply impossible, for instance, that good cod-liver oil can be sold at the low prices at which it is sometimes furnished to such institutions.

Another subject on which medical men will speak with much frankness is euthanasia. Medical men have told me that they have given their patients medicine to enable them to go off comfortably-' a good stiff dose of opium, or something of that kind.' It sounds rather horrid, but the subject really admits a good deal of argumentation. It is argued that it is a great mistake to keep a man alive, under great torture, and with immense expense and pains, when he must eventually die—is not worth the candle. If a dog has got hydrophobia he is killed at once; but if a man has got it, he lingers on in agonies to the last. Again, a pauper patient, who is an interesting scientific case, may have the value of hundreds spent upon him to save him from dying, but only five shillings to keep him alive. It is very hard to spell out the rights of things exactly. I hear, however, the judges would tell some advocates of euthanasia that wilful attempts to shorten life may, legally speaking, be considered wilful murder.

Sir Anthony Carlisle tells a story of inexcusable blundering by a medical man. Basil Montagu, the barrister, who was present when he told it, capped it by several others. A gentleman residing about a post stage from town met with an accident, which eventually rendered amputation of a limb indispensable. The surgeon alluded to was requested to per

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