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He may feel our pulse-look wise -order conscience a purge and depart. But we, the poor miserable sinner, toss on our bed, give no sign, and die. Not a word more on that point. Fourthly, bad as the diseases of the soul arevery bad indeed-quite shocking—they seldom prove fatal; when they do, the patient lingers for a long time with a rueful countenance and seems neither the better nor the worse of all ghostly prescriptions. Nay, what Nay, what more common than a hoary-headed hale sinner of fourscore? But the diseases of the body, though sometimes mild and tedious, have a manifest tendency towards death, and therefore we take the alarm speedily, and long for the face of the physician. Fifthly, the diseases of the soul yield intensest pleasure deny it not-and the active sinner laughs the praying and preaching parson to scorn.

But the diseases

of the body twitch and twinge, and pinch, and tear, and squeeze, and stifle, and suffocate, and we cry out with a loud voice to be released from the stake in fire or flood.

For these, and a thousand other reasons, we are inclined, contrary to what might have been expected of us, to prefer the physician to the parson. Still the parson is dear to us-exceedingly dear. We have a most particular esteem for him in pulpit and in parlour in the pit of the General Assembly, or of the theatre-in peace or polemics exhausting topics or teinds -battling for the Bible-or against the Apocrypha. As a bottle-companion -a friend-nay, a brother, we love him; but when anything goes very wrong with our soul-when the prima via are obstructed-when we shiver in an ague—or in the delirium of fever, "see more devils than vast hell can hold,"-would you believe it ?--we give the servant orders to tell the minister that we are not at home, hide our heads below the bed-clothes, and remember indistinctly what Shakspeare says

"Therein the patient must minister to himself."

We have scarcely been able to bring ourselves to believe, that human beings are in general indifferent about the state either of their bodies or of their souls. It is the high-flown fashionable doctrine, however, at present, both in the Religious and Medical World. The soul may be sorrowfully VOL. XXIII.

and penitentially sensible of its sins, without wishing to obtrude its sufferings on the notice of all eyes,and a careless exterior may conceal a serious habit of inward self-meditation. That portion of the life of almost every individual that is visible and audible to the public eye and ear, is necessarily the least spiritual; and we can learn little or nothing of any man till we have been with him in his familiar privacy, and seen something of the chosen channels in which his thoughts and feelings love to travel, when his hearth is lighted and his house hushed. What false judgments does even the religious world pass,-and how slowly does it rescind or revoke them, even on new and full evidence, clear as the light of day! Charity is indeed then an angel, when she searches for, and sees, and believes, in the religion that lies hidden in almost all human hearts

unrepelled and unprovoked by differences in faith, creed, profession, pursuits, manners, or appearances, and still inspired in all her judgments of other human beings, by that meek yet lofty spirit of which the word "Christian" expresses the sacred signification.

We would almost venture to say, that many people are too anxious about the state of their souls, their anxiety making them selfish in all their religion. They deliver their consciences up into some saintly keeping, that it may be safe, and a look or a whisper from the mortal creature in whom they have put their trust, disturbs their serenity, and throws them before him almost upon their very knees. There is much Popery in our Protestant land; and the days are not yet gone by of auricular confession. Perhaps the people who speak least of their faith, have it deepest and most steadfast,-preserving its sanctity unprofaned by unseasonable colloquies,avowing it on the Sabbath before man as well as God in public worship,and to God alone every morning and every evening in the private chamber of their own thoughts. Yet may they be pronounced, by the rash judgments of the righteous overmuch, indifferent about the state of their souls!

Just so with that which we call our bodies. It is not possible that rational beings can be utterly careless about the health of their bodies any more

N

than of their souls. We all fear to die, and at the slightest tap from the finger of Death at the door of our earthly tabernacle, how we hurry to barricado it, and to fasten all the bolts and bars! True, that when that disturber of all our peace is thought to be at a distance, we forget how suddenly he can be with us, and through what a small cranny he can creep in! But in this case, too, we may be too anxious about this body of ours, and look now in the same sort of selfish superstition towards the physician, as we did then towards the priest,-beseeching and imploring him to keep our body from disease, terrified at the thought of its ceasing to breathe, and dropping and decaying into dust.

It is our belief, then, that people are, for the most part, far from being indifferent about the state either of their souls or bodies, although they are too often betrayed into fits of strange forgetfulness of the true interests of both, and into the adoption of the worst possible means for preserving their well-being; and this, we hope, will not be considered too serious matter for an introduction to an article which is intended to be, on the whole, of a facetious character-for mirth may be moral, and laughter as salutary as tears.

We have been very fortunate in our physicians that is to say, we have had them of all the Three Kinds-and yet are alive, and supped at Ambrose's on Thursday. First, we have had, and have now, your man of educationyour scholar and your gentleman who is as open, honest, and sincere at your bedside, as at your dinner-table, and who would be disinterestedly sorry were you, in spite of his efforts to detain you here, to go to another and a better world. Experience has strengthened and refined his sagacity into an instinct; and what skill and knowledge can do, he will do for us, should we, which may be highly probable, die tomorrow. He is no monger of mysterious monosyllables-no silent headshaker-no appalling mute, with one fearful fore-finger on your pulse, and two horrid eyes fixed on your face, till you are faint with the ticking of that accursed chronometer in your swimming brain-while you think you see visions of undertakers, saulies, a hearse, and many mourning coaches-a deepdug wet hole, much shovelling, the

sudden off-taking of hats, and the breaking up of anything but a convivial party, all discussing your character, and wondering if you have died rich or poor. Every smile on his face is worth a fee, and you set death and the devil at defiance, when he asks you "if you do not think the last an admirable Noctes, and Murray inimitable in Pong Wong?"

The Second Kind is your Old Woman. A pleasing imbecility reigns over face and figure-his speech is a trefoil of terror, stutter, and lisp; and he smiles so sweetly, that you pluck up courage to believe that you cannot possibly be near the last agonies. His sole anxiety is about your bowels-he beseeches you to keep quiet-administers his pill-tells you not to allow yourself to be flurried-and as he trips bustling away, and keeps talking to himself, and your housekeeper, all the way down stairs, and out of the streetdoor, you begin cautiously to put first one leg out of the bed, and then another, and having found your breeches secreted in your drawers, you apparel yourself in warm winter raiment, order dinner, and in a few hours are sitting with a friend, with your feet on the fender, and on your right hand a jug of hot toddy, a cheerful and chatty convalescent.

The Third Sort is your Quack-and from him Heaven preserve all the subscribers to this Magazine! Hard-hearted, coarse, vulgar, greedy, profligate, and unprincipled, in his unfearing ignorance, you see at once that he is the active partner in the firm of Mors, Morbus, and Co. He treats you as if you were a horse, and drenches you with drugs to death. Hence so many widows left with eight children-so many men six feet high on Monday, and only six feet long on the Saturday following-letters announcing the death of contributors on the eves of articles-in place of marriage-sheets, funeral-shrouds-instead of trips to the Trossachs in jaunting cars, rattling along eight miles an hour, journeys to the place of interment in the Grey Friars and the West Kirk churchyard, in a vehicle that, although drawn by six horses, goes nodding on at a snail's pace, and lands you in the dirt at last. The quack attends impatiently the patient corpse, in his own chariot, and then drives off to give the coup-degrace to another incumbent.

The house visited by the true physician is known from the aspect of its inmates-especially the children. There is an airy freedom in the figures of the family; a clear-skinned complexion of face, inclining to pinkiness; a laughing lustre of lip and eye, set off by the glitter of well-brushed hair; a taking tidiness about the dress of the creatures, as if health and happiness had stood behind them at the mirror. This you seldom or never meet with in a house annoyed by the Old Woman, or cursed by the Quack. Not that the Old Woman often does much serious mischief to the bairns; that is to say, she seldom either kills them outright (though such things occasionally happen), or for life ruins their constitution. But then she teaches them to have recourse, on the most insignificant occasions, to small bottles and boxes, so that not the slightest touch of a sore throat, a headach, or a colic, is suffered to go off of its own accord, but must be ejected by drop or pill; while the amiable patient appears with a yard of flannel round her pretty throat, or a cap on her curly head, and is treated perhaps for a whole week as a valetudinarian. The Old Woman frequently infects both parents with her own fiddle-faddle, and when there is unfortunately no illness of any kind in their own families, they are like people appointed to a Dispensary, and prescribe for all the paupers about the place. We know not how it is, but were we a young man, we should not-we could not-we would notmarry out of a family attended by an Old Woman. Certain habits are disgusting; and from young women, whose health has been under the care of old women, that sensitive and instinctive delicacy is not to be expected, which guards wedded life from all offence of coarseness, and preserves to the husband's eyes, the matron-wife pure and beautiful as the virgin-mis

tress.

As for the Quack, when he has fairly established himself in a house-farewell, domestic peace! He is a paid and privileged murderer. All your family, even when at their highest health, are more or less sick; when allowed to be ill, they are at death's door; and when they die, it is in some startling and shocking manner, enough to break your heart and turn your brain. Al

though two children are perhaps born to you in three years-your family never increases; and by the time that you and your wife are fifty, looking dismally about the house, you see yourselves to be childless, and feel yourselves to be old people.

There is, it must be confessed, something exceedingly perplexing in the medical profession. We are subject to a vast variety of diseases; and physicians, in order to cure them, study the art or science of medicine. By dint of extraordinary natural sagacity, great practice and experience, a physician becomes so wise in the knowledge of all diseases, and antidotes to death, that he acquires the character of a life-preserver. You see him driving about with supplies of health in his carriage, just like that neat cart-waggon with its Peebles ale, dropping comfort at every door. He dies; and in some half-dozen years or so, a physician whom he had long kept down, lifts up his now undepressed head, and gets into prodigious practice. He adopts a system diametrically opposite to that of his predecessor. That which the one said would kill, the other says will cure. Now, the question to be answered is, which of these two men is the murderer? If it indeed be within the power of medical treatment to put a patient to death, a hot close room, with a huge fire and nailed windows, and a cool airy room with no fire at all, and windows frequently open, cannot be equally good for a small child, with its face one blotch of small-pox. So on with all other complaints under the sun, moon, and stars. Fathers and mothers fall down on their knees before physicians, blessing them for having, under God, rescued a beloved child from the tomb; while, had they known the truth, as it is expounded by a future Hippocrates, they would have screamed him off the premises as an assassin. Yet the bills of mortality preserve a wonderfully nice equilibrium; and it would almost seem that both Life and Death laugh at the doctors. A patient labouring under a hereditary disease, say a cancer in the stomach, like Napoleon-or gout in the toe, like Christopher North-is puzzled, when told that at the very fewest, his father, grandfather, and great grandfather, have been murdered, and that he must submit to a new regimen, the result of

which said new regimen is, some hundred years afterwards, quoted to a generation yet unborn, as one of the most melancholy cases on record, of an invaluable life having been sacrificed to a mistaken policy of insurance. This is to us a riddle, which we wish the clever Sphynx would solve, since dipus is dead.

It is pleasing to think how very difficult it is to kill people by improper medical treatment. The doctors have, doubtless, doomed many millions to death-in their day-but many millions more have escaped scot-free from their most pernicious prescriptions, after having swallowed them with the most obedient and grateful simplicity, gulped them down with such monstrous ugly faces, that death most likely took fright and scampered off to do the job of less forbidding and formidable patients. Some people, indeed, there are, whom we defy you to kill by hook or crook-and who, like old castles that have stood sieges without end, will crumble at last into ruins. You do not so much wonder at their tenacity, or rather pertinacity of life, for they are lean, lank, bony, gaunt, grim, and ugly customers, of whom death cannot get a fair hold, when the two stand up to wrestle, and it is pronounced a dogfall-or a draw. But the persons worthy our unqualified admiration, are your poor, puny, slight, slim, slender billies, weighing barely seven stone, and whom Favonius might fit away with under his wing like a leaf -who, the moment they receive the smallest insult from any disease whatever-be he who he may-show fight, without minding the difference of weight, and often by a dexterous dig on the wind, floor the lubber, amid the uproarious applause of the ring. They then put on their clothes with the utmost sang-froid, and leave the ground without a scratch. We know several such prime bits of stuff-more especially one-a Highlander who was out in the Fifteen, then a mere boy, --and afterwards, of course, in the Forty-five, a growing lad of two score -and who, never measuring above five feet three, nor weighing above seven stone seven-was yesterdaywhen he came for his caulker-as fine a fellow of a hundred and twenty and upwards, as ever turned up his little finger, although independently of being riddled by balls and bayonets,

he ran the gauntlet in many fevers, scarlet, brain, rheumatic, and typhus, through Queensberry House and the Infirmary. Others again there arefine, straight, stout, jolly ruddy-faced fellows, such as you see in the Six-feet Club, who occasionally go off like the snuff of a candle, after the long wick has been hanging for an hour or two alongside of the melting tallow-or who first keep walking about weakly and weekly in great-coats-are next seen shivering on horseback with long hair to its heels-then observed with whitey-blue faces at the window of a glass coach-and finally-all within the month-are hearsed invisible to all eyes, and deposited beneath the galleries of the subterranean moudie

warp.

But to return-is the author of this medical work a Physician, an Old Woman, or a Quack? Or is he of the Composite Order? He is an Old Woman. The rustle of the petticoats is heard in the very preface. On his way up stairs, you hear that he and the old lady that used to edit my Grandmother's Review, are twins. His object is, to "impress people with the fact, that there are certain means of insuring a freedom from disease, and a long life.” He is such an extremely old woman himself-such a dowager Lady Raven-his origin stretches back into such a remote antiquity, that he has little allowance to make for those foolish persons who persist in dying at fourscore. Galen, he tells us, reached, by means of regimen, the great age of one hundred and forty, although his constitution had been much shattered before he had arrived at the twenty-eighth mile-stone on the road of life, not then Macadamized. The noble Venetian, Cornaro, half dead at forty, so restored himself to decent health as to outlive the century that was born along with him, and see it gathered unto its fathers; and there is an Admiral Henry, he tells us, of Rovelden, in Kent, who, till his sixtieth year, was a martyr to various chronic diseases, but who some years ago reached the age of ninety-one, and walked daily three miles, back and forward, to the neighbouring town of Tenterden without stopping or wetting his whistle.

"The Admiral,”

quoth he, "is, I believe, now living." No doubt he is, and the very expression, "I believe," seems to imply a

doubt that proves our friend the Doctor to be, after all, of a very incredulous and sceptical mind-for if such puny fellows as Galen and Cornaro so bearded Time, why may not gallant old Henry-true English heart of oak -live six hundred years or more, and be entitled to add CCCCC to Rear-Admiral? The only difficulty with most people is to get safely and stoutly on the weather-beam of a hundred. After that it is all plain sailing-and, were we not restrained by our veneration for old age, we should say that the man who dies at all after a hundred and forty, must be a sad old blockhead -entirely superannuated, and in the last stage of dotage.

Before we go farther, we wish, with all due respect, to ask this worthy Old Woman one single question. Why all this anxiety for a long life? Does she not know that since the Flood the term of human life has been fixed at about threescore and ten years? It is quite long enough. If a man will but be busy, and not idle away his time, he may do wonders within that period. Only think of Alexander the Great, who had conquered the world at thirty, and having nothing more to do, got dead drunk in Babylon. Think of Master Beattie, who was the Young Roscius at twelve. Remember the name -which we have forgotten-of that universal linguist, who hopped the twig before he had cut all his single teeth -or fairly given up sucking. Lord preserve us in this literary age-if people were to keep scribbling on for centuries! When, pray, would a man or woman be in the prime of life? We presume a maiden lady of sixty would be quite a tid-bit-and that it would be nuts to carry off the great-grandmother of a gentleman in extensive practice at the English bar, or haply Lord Chancellor, to Gretna Green. No-no-no-life is long enough as it is there is no occasion to stretch it to the crack of doom. Let us die at a moderate age and be thankful. Why this vain longing for longevity? Why seek to rob human life of its melancholy moral-namely, its shortnessand deprive flowers, grass, dew, smoke, vapours, clouds, and bubbles, of the poetry and passion now inherent in their names and natures, as natural emblems of the destiny of man?

Have you ever ruminated, our good Old Lady, on the consequences of the

prolongation of human life-free, too, from all those diseases which at present flesh is heir to? What would become of the University of Edinburgh? The medical school would be

knocked on the head-and instead of a hundred and thirty doctors per annum issuing out of its gates, you might as vainly look for a physician as for a phoenix-an arimaspian as an apothecary-a griffin as a graduate. If there were no sufferings of the body, there would be no paupers and no charity. Religion would be a luxury rather than a necessary of life

people in general would walk about counting their fingers ennui would cease to be fashionable, because epidemical-the most pathetic elegies would be poured over the interminable length and slowness of human life-and ten to one, there would be a violent re-action terminating in universal suicide.

Let us see, however, by what means our author proposes to add a century or so to the life of each purchaser of his volume. "I shall," says she, "proceed at once to point out the qualities of the chief articles used as food by man, both animal and vegetable, with the proper times for eating and drinking, and the quantity best adapted to the purposes of health and longevity; in order that those who are earnestly desirous of becoming acquainted with the art of living long and comfortably, and of adhering thereto, may not be at a loss on any point of consequence relating to so material a branch of that art as diet.' The "march of mind" now moves at double-quick time, awkward squad and all-and we look over our left shoulder, as we advance, with contemptuous pity, on our ances tors. They knew nothing, they could do nothing, and it is odd how they contrived to keep themselves out of the fire. Before their eyes, the road to their own mouths lay dim and uncertain, and they sorely lacked a fingerpost. Even now, it would appear from this book, that mankind, although, or rather because, an omnivorous animal, left to their uninstructed reason and instinct, are incapable of arriving at the discovery of the proper hour of the day at which they should all, as at the toll of one bell, or beat of one gong, sit down to dinner. It is now somewhere about six thousand years since man became an animal, or living crea

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