Jasper County Democrat, Volume 2, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 July 1899 — OLD-TIME DOCTORS. [ARTICLE]

OLD-TIME DOCTORS.

There Was Little Rest Healing Virtue in All Their Me’dicatucnta. The Dutch West India Company, which colonized the island of Manhattan, enjoined upon the colonists to support a minister and a schoolmaster, and also to appoint Zieckeutroosters (comforters of the sick). Sometimes the offices of pedagogue and “comforter” were united in one person, be being “pious, well-qualified and diligent.” Usually the comforter of the sick was a safer attendant than the doctor of those days, whose conception of disease and remedies was a confused theory of humors, sympathetlcs and antagonlstlcs.

“The whole ground of physic,” say* a medical authority of 1657, “Is comprehended In these two words, sympathy and antipathy. The one cures by strengthening the parts of the body afflicted, the other by resisting the malady afflicting.” Certain simples and compounds, with a few mineral remedies, were made up Into unguents, plasters, liniments, pills, boluses and decoctions. Armed with these, and with herbs gathered at certain phases of the moon or conjunctions of the planets, and above all with the lancet, the seventeenth century doctors waged war with disease. They had no intelligent conception of the causes or processes of disease, nor of the true action of drugs; yet they thought they cured disease. No wonder the Dutch of New York appointed “comforters of the sick!”

The author of an essay entitled, “The Doctor in Old New York,” published in the “Half-Moon Papers,” himself n physician, says that the remedies of the most eminent physician of his time in Europe, whose patients were Henry IV. and Louis XIII. of France, and James I. and Charles I. of England, were calomel, sugar of lead, pulverized human bones, raspings of an nnburied human skull and a balsam of bats. We sneer at the remedies of Chinese doctors, whose error is that they stopped learning three hundred years ago, whereas their English brethren went on from one medical discovery to another, and often set aside the teachings which were twenty years old as obsolete. Doubtless the personality of these doctors had much more to do with their success, whatever it was, than tlielr practice had. They sought to make themselves Impressive; they carried gold-headed canes and wore wigs with two or three pigtails—so elaborately dressed that they went hatless to call on their patients. A silk coat and stockings, silver buckles and a muff were essential to a well-dressed doctor of the seventeenth century. “Up to the days of Charles 11. he made his visits on horseback, riding sideways, after the fashion of women; but after that time he rode In his coach drawn by two, and sometimes four or even six, horses.”

What Lincoln “Could Not Help.” In some interesting reminiscences of Lincoln, related by J. B. Montgomery, a story of Lincoln’s mercifulness, told by Gen. Moorhead of Pennsylvania, is repeated. As Gen. Moorhead was once entering the White House, he saw a woman, almost overcome with excitement, hurrying out. Within he found President Lincoln pacing his, room in a manner so distracted that the Congressman feared he had lost his reason. ‘Mr. President,” Gen. Moorhead exclaimed, “what is the matter?” “Matter enough!” answered Lincoln. “This is Black Friday; It is shooting day in the army. The boy of that woman who has just gone out was going to be shot to-day; he Avas found sleeping on his post. He ought never to have l>een enlisted; he was hardly sixteen years old. I pardoned him. I shall I>e denounced by the generals for demoralizing the army, but I could not help it—l could not help it!” There is a general agreement that Mr. Lincoln's frequent merciful interference with the disciplinary orders of the generals of the army did have a certain demoralizing effect, but it has not lowered the world’s estimation of him as a man, and It Is not likely, as Mr. Montgomery says In telling "this story, to count against him in “the great account.”