In the eighth and ninth centuries surgery
and pharmacy began to decline in reputation.
The apothecary, said a Latin couplet, is the
physician's right hand, the surgeon his left
hand; but this meant that the physician was
the head and body of the whole profession,
with the hands entirely subject to his will.
At the same time there grew up among these
doctors paramount so strong a faith in
astrology, in charms and magical medicaments,
that it became necessary, as some
thought, to warn them lest they gave advice
destructive to the soul; since it is better for
us, as said Theodorus, to be always sick, than
sound by the contempt of God.

In an old historical account of the proceedings
of the College of Physicians against empirics
and unlicensed practitioners written by
Dr. Charles Goodall, a fellow of the said
college, we read how in King James's reign one
John Lambe, having acquired great fame by
his cures, was examined at the College of
Physicians by request of the Bishop of
Durham, and among the examination
questions put to him we find that,

"Being asked in Astrology what house he
looketh unto to know a disease, or the event
of it: and how the lord ascendant should
stand thereto?

"He answereth, he looks for the sixth
house: which being disproved, he saith he
understands nothing therein, but what he
hath out of Caliman: and being asked what
books he hath read in that art, he saith he
hath none but Caliman."

It was long, in fact, before the traces of these
false ideas of nature were removed from the
prescriptions of the doctors. Doctor Merrett,
in the year sixteen hundred and sixty-nine,
denounced the frauds of apothecaries who sell
to their patients sheep's lungs for fox lungs,
and the bone of an ox's heart for that of a
stag's heart; and, at about the same time,
Culpepper, in translating the Pharmacopœia,
or official catalogue of medicinal remedies
and preparations issued by the College of
Physicians, ridicules some of the contents in
a list like this, inserting his own comments
by parenthesis:

"The fat, grease, or suet of a duck, goose,
eel, boar, heron, thymallos " (if you know
where to get it), " dog, capon, beaver, wild cat,
stork, hedge-hog, hen, man, lion, hare, kite, or
jack" (if they have any fat I am persuaded
'tis worth twelve-pence the grain), "wolf,
mouse of the mountain " (if you can catch
them), " pardal, hog, serpent, badger, bear,
fox, vulture" (if you can catch them), "east
and west benzoar, viper's flesh, the brains of
hares and sparrows, the rennet of a lamb,
kid, hare, and a calf and a horse too " (quoth
the college). [They should have put the
rennet of an ass to make medicine for their
addle-brains.] "The excrement of a goose,
of a dog, of a goat, of swallows, of men, of
women, of mice, of peacocks," &c., &c.

Well might the founders in this country of
the science of physic speak even at a time
later than this with little reverence for the
learning supposed to be proper to their
craft.

"It is very evident," wrote Sir Richard
Blackmore in his treatise on the small-pox,
"that a man of good sense, vivacity, and
spirit, may arrive at the highest rank of
physicians without the assistance of great
erudition and the knowledge of books; and
this was the case of Dr. Sydenham, who
became an able and eminent physician,
though he never designed to take up the
profession till the civil wars were composed,
and then being a disbanded officer, he entered
upon it for a maintenance, without any
learning properly preparatory for the
undertaking of it. And to show the reader what
contempt he had for writings in physic, when
one day I asked him to advise me what books
I should read to qualify me for practice, he
replied, 'Read Don Quixote — it is a very
good book. I read it still.' So low an
opinion had this celebrated man of the learning
collected out of the authors, his
predecessors. And a late celebrated physician,
whose judgment was universally relied upon
as almost infallible in his profession, used to
say, as I am well informed, that when he
died he would leave behind him the whole
mystery of physic upon half a sheet of
paper."

He who said this was Doctor Radcliffe,
physician to King William the Third, the
most successful practitioner of his own day,
and one of the honoured patriarchs of the
London College of Physicians. It is requisite
thus far to understand what the physician
was during the years of which we now
proceed to speak. Up to the time when
Garth's Dispensary was published, there
continued to be much general truth in the
impression here conveyed. After that time, in
the days of Mead, the erudite physician, and
of Cheselden, the skilful surgeon, whom
Pope linked with each other in a line—
I'll try what Mead and Cheselden advise,
and who consulted together on the case of
Sir Isaac Newton, there began with us
another and a better epoch in the history of
medicine.

The first doctors in England were the
Druids, who, by-the-by, collected their own
mistletoe. The second race of doctors was
provided also by the religious orders; they
were the monks (whose practice the Pope
afterwards forbade); and there came next a
transition period, during which there was
much wavering between the two callings of
physic and divinity. Thus, among other
instances, we find that Richard, the son of
Nigel, Bishop of Ely, who is called, not the
physician, but the apothecary to King Henry
the Second and the two succeeding monarchs,
afterwards was created Bishop of London.
There was no College of Physicians then