An Alabama student and other biographical essays

Preface

To a lifelong interest in biography as a recreation I have added a strong conviction of its value in education ; and so it has happened that for the occasional address a biographical subject was often chosen. Of those here collected, all of which have already appeared in the journals, more than half deal with aspects of the life of physicians in the United States. In what better way could I show gratitude for the extraordinary kindness experienced during twenty-one years than by a constant appeal to the students to take as their models the great men of the profession of their own country? In no age and in no land have the Hippocratic ideals been more fully realized than in some of the lives here portrayed. Pictures such as these, detached as many of them are from each other, have but one value to the student— to waken that precious quality of human sympathy which may enable him to appreciate that in the simple annals of such a career as the 'Alabama Student' a life may be as perfect as in a Harvey or a Locke.

WILLIAM OSLER.

Contents

PAGE

AN ALABAMA STUDENT ...... i

THOMAS DOVER, PHYSICIAN AND BUCCANEER . .19

II

At the head of the article by Dr. Bassett in the second volume of Fenner's Reports stands the quotation, ' Celsus thought it better, in doubtful cases, to try a doubtful remedy, than none at all'1; which he quotes only to condemn in the following vigorous style :

1 In giving my individual experience and opinions, I desire to censure none. In such cases the Dest informed fear the most, and experience but renders us charitable. I will therefore only say that I have been fortunate, in my own practice, in reversing the aphorism

at the head of this article. That rule of practice has found favour in the eyes of every generation of both doctors and patients, and it is not wonderful that the few able men of every age that have opposed it have warred in vain,— that the science of French expectancy, and the quackery of German homoeopathy, have alike failed ; dying men will have pills and parsons.

'When physicians were required, by public opinion, to follow the dictates of Hippocrates, ana his immediate successors, as closely as Christians now profess to follow the commandments of Moses and the prophets, they claimed a right to act boldly their faith irNthese authorities, and public opinion sustained them ; and however difficult the task, they found it much easier to understand the written language of Hippocrates than the yet more obscure teachings of Nature, between which and his followers he stood an infallible interpreter, making her mysteries so plain that wayfaring men, though fools, could not err therein. Hippocrates was but our fellow servant, and we are but ministers of Nature ; our whole art consists in understanding her language and laws ; our whole practice, in obeying her mandates : if we do not understand them, it is either our fault or misfortune ; to act as though we did is quackery. Celsus says of this bold practice of old, fere quos ratio non restituit temeritas adiuvat; but shrewdly remarks, that " Physicians of this sort diet other men's patients more happily than their own ". I doubt, however, if, in the present state of medicine, a thorough physician is ever, in any stage of any disease, so completely without rational education as to be thus nonplussed, and driven to the necessity of dealing a blow in the dark ; where there are no intelligible indications, it is clear there should be no action.

'Then, if I have not followed the advice of this master, it has not been lightly laid aside ; nor, as I have stated, without precedent ; and if I have, in a measure, adopted another of his rules, to make food physic (optimum vero medicamentum est cibus datus), it nas not been upon his mere authority. I revere authority, believing with the royal preacher, that "whoso breaketh a hedge, a serpent shall bite " ; yet I rejoice that its fetters are broken in medicine — that we no longer are hedged with the eternal cry of " Hippocrates and reason ". But if, in getting rid of the authority of the Ancients, we have discarded the example of their labour and learning, and turned a deaf ear to their opinions, it is easier to be lamented than corrected. If the unthinking part of the profession of old, that followed authority, and "on the first day of a fever loosened the belly, on the next opened a vein, on the third gave a bolus ", etc., are now represented by those who follow fashion, and give calomel, quinine, and codliver oil every day, we have but changed authority for fashion, and are yet in bondage ; but fashion, though indomitable, changes with the wind, and if for a time it carries the small craft, the weak or designing, in its current, it soon leaves them stranded, as landmarks, at which we can at least laugh, without fear of professional martyrdom.'

Rarely has the credo of a zealous physician been more beautifully expressed than in the following words :

' I do not say that the study of nature, human and comparative, as far as it relates to medicine, is an easy task; let any one undertake a foreign language, and when he thinks he has mastered it, let him go into its native country and attempt to use it among the polite and well-informed ; if he succeed, let him go among the illiterate and rude, where slang is current ; into the lunatic asylum, where the vernacular is babbled in broken sentences through the mouth of an idiot, and attempt to understand this ; should he again succeed he may safely say that he knows that language. Let him then set down and calculate the cost, in labour, time, and talent ; then square this amount and go boldly into the study of physiology ; and when he has exhausted his programme, he will find himself humbly knocking at the door of the temple, and it will be opened ; for diligence, like the vinegar of Hannibal, will make a way through frozen Alps ; it is the open sesame of our profession. When ne is satisfied with the beautiful proportions of the interior, its vast and varied dimensions, the intricate and astounding action of its machinery, obeying laws of a singular stability, whose very conflict produces harmony under the government of secondary laws — if there be anything secondary in nature ! — when he is satisfied (and such are not satisfied until informed), he will be led to his ultimate object, to take his last lessons from the poor and suffering, the fevered and phrenzied, from the Jobs and Lazaruses, — into the pesthouses and prisons, and here, in these magazines of misery and contagion, these Babels of disease and sin, he must not only take up his abode, but following the example of his Divine Master, he must love to dwell there ; — this is Pathology.

' When such an one re-enters the world, he. is a physician ; his vast labours have not only taught him now little he knows, but that he knows this little well. Conscious of this virtue, he feels no necessity of trumpeting his professional acquirements abroad, but with becoming modesty and true dignity, which constitute genuine professional pride, he leaves this to the good sense of his fellow citizens to discover.'

Dr. Bassett developed tuberculosis, and the last letter in the budget sent to me was dated April i6th, 1851, from Florida, whither he had gone in search of health. He died November 2nd of the same year, aged 46.

To a friend he writes on the date of April 5th :

'This world has never occupied a very large share of my attention or love. I have asked but little of it, and got but little of what I asked. It has for many years been growing less and less in my view, like a receding object in space ; but no better land has appeared to my longing vision ; what lies behind me has become insignificant, before me is a vast interminable void, but not a cheerless one, as it is full of pleasant dreams and visions and glorious hopes. I have covered it with the landscapes of Claude, and peopled it with the martyrs of science, the pioneers of truth, the hound-hunted and crucified of this world, that have earned and then asked for bread and received a serpent —all who have suffered for the truth. How glorious it is to contemplate in the future these time-buffeted at rest, with their lacerated feelings soothed as mine have been this day by the tender regard your wife has manifested for my future well-being.

The saddest lament in Oliver Wendell Holmes's poems is for the voiceless,

for those who never sing, But die with all their music in them.

The extracts which I have read show Dr. Bassett to have been a man of more than ordinary gifts, but he was among the voiceless of the profession. Nowadays environment, the opportunity for work, the skirts of happy chance carry men to the summit. To those restless spirits who have had ambition without opportunities, and ideals not realizable in the world in which they move, the story of his life may be a solace. I began by saying that I would tell you of a man of whom you had never heard, of a humble student from a little town in Alabama. What of the men whom he revered, and for whom in 1836 he left wife and children ? Are they better known to us ? To-day scarcely one of those whom he mentions touches us with any firmness from the past. Of a majority of them it may be said, they are as though they had not been. Velpeau, Andral, Broussais, the great teachers whom Bassett followed, are shadowy forms (almost as indistinct as the pupil), dragged out to the daylight by some laudator temporis acti, who would learn philosophy in history. To have striven, to have made an effort, to have been true to certain ideals — this alone is worth the struggle. Now and again in a generation, one or two snatch something from dull oblivion ; but for the rest of us, sixty years— we, too, are with Bassett and his teachers, and

No one asks

Who or what we have been, More than he asks what waves, In the moonlit solitudes mild Of the midmost ocean, have swelled, Foam'd for a moment, and gone.

As Sir Thomas Browne remarks in the Hydriotaphia : ' The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.' Thus it happens that Thomas Dover, the Doctor, has drifted into our modern life on a powder label (to which way of entering the company of posterity, though sanctified by Mithridates, many would prefer oblivion, even to continuous immortality on a powder so potent and palatable as the Pulvis Ipecacnanhae composittts) ; while Thomas Dover, the Buccaneer, third in command, one of the principal owners, and president of the Council of the Duke and Duchess— privateers of the ancient and honourable city of Bristol — discoverer of Alexander Selkirk (the original Robinson Crusoe), in spite of more enduring claims on our gratitude, has been forgotten.

Of the facts of Dover's life very little is known. Munk (Roll of the Royal College of Physicians, vol. ii) states that he was born in Warwickshire about 1660, that he was a Bachelor of Medicine of Cambridge, on the authority of the author of i\\e.Athenae Cantabrigienses, but that his name does not occur on the roll of the graduates. After taking his degree he settled in Bristol,

1 Read at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Historical Club, January, 1895. Reprinted from the Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, No. 58, January, 1896.

C 2 and having made money, joined with some merchants in a privateering expedition. 'On Dover's return to England he resumed practice at Bristol, and from the number of patients he says he visited each day during an epidemic of the fever, he must have obtained the confidence of the inhabitants of that city.' In 1721 he settled in London, and was admitted a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians. He resided in Cecil Street, Strand, but in the latter part of 1728 he removed to Gloucestershire, where he lived for four or five years; finally he settled in London, at first in Lombard Street, and afterwards in Arundel Street, Strand, where he died probably in the latter part of 1741 or the beginning of 1742. Essentially the same details are given by Dr. Norman Moore in the Dictionary of National Biography.

In his work, The Ancient Physicians Legacy, he often speaks with veneration of Sydenham as his Master; and in his description of the small- pox he says, 'whilst I lived with Dr. Sydenham/ so that he was probably a house pupil of the great physician, who was at the height of his fame at the very time we may suppose Dover to have been a student of medicine. On the title-page of the first edition of the Legacy, 1732, he speaks of forty-nine years of practice, so that he probably took his degree in 1683. Apparently he never proceeded to a doctor's degree, since he speaks of himself as a ' poor Bachelor of physic '. On the title-page of the first edition, however, the letters M.D. occur after his name.

We know really nothing of Dover's life until he appears as one of the promoters of a privateering expedition to the South Seas in 1708. In this he was associated with a group of Bristol merchants, among whom were Alderman Bachelor and Sir John Hawkins. Two ships, the Duke and the Duchess, were fitted out with great care. Dover went as third in command, being styled Captain Dover, and as owner of a very considerable share of both vessels he was president of the Council, and had a double voice in the deliberations. The days of the buccaneers were almost numbered, but there was in Bristol at this time one of the last and one of the most famous of the old South Sea captains, William Dampier, a man who knew more of the Spanish Main and of the Pacific than anyone living. He had returned recently from a disastrous voyage, and agreed to accompany Captain Woodes Rogers as pilot of the expedition. In October, 1708, the ships

. . . sailed against the Spaniard with his hoard of

plate and gold, Which he wrung with cruel torture from the Indian

folk of old—

in which words Charles Kingsley well expresses the feelings which animated these highwaymen of the sea. The narrative of the voyage is told by Captain Woodes Rogers in A Cruising Voyage Round the World, 1708- 77/7, London, 1712.

The expedition was rendered memorable by the discovery of ' Robinson Crusoe ', which is thus told in the words of Captain Rogers :

'We arrived at the Island of Juan Fernandez on the first of February, 1710, and having a good observation the day before when we found our latitude 34° 10' S. In the afternoon we hoisted out our pinnance, in which Captain Dover set off to go on shore, though not less than four leagues from the ship. As it grew dark we observed a light on shore, which some were of the opinion was from our boat, but it was evidently too large for that, and we hung up a light to direct our boat, firing our quarter gun, and showing lights in our mizen and fore snrouds, that our boat might find us, as we had fallen to leeward of the island. Our boat came aboard again about two in the morning, haying turned back on seeing the light ashore when within a league, and we were glad they had got off so well, as it now began to blow. We were all convinced that the light which we had seen was from the shore, and therefore prepared our ships for an engagement, supposing it might proceed from some French ships at anchor, which we must either fight or want water. All this stir and apprehension, as we afterwards found, arose from one poor man, who passed in our imagination for a Spanish garrison, a body of Frenchmen, or a crew of pirates, and it is incredible what strange notions some of our people entertained about this light ; yet it served to show their tempers and spirits, and enabled us to guess how our men would behave in case there really were enemies in the island.

'While under these apprehensions we stood to the back of the island in order to fall in with the southerly wind till we were past the island ; then we stood back for it again, and ran close aboard the land that begins to form its NE. side. The flaws came heavily off the land, and we were forced to reef our top-sails when we opened the middle bay, where we expected to find our enemy, but all was clear and no ships either there or in the other bay near the NE. end. These are the only bays in which ships can ride that come here for refreshments, the middle one being the best. We now conjectured that there had been ships here, but that they had gone away on seeing us.

'About noon of the 2nd of February we sent our yawl on shore, in which was Captain Dover, Mr. Fry, and six men, all armed; and in the meantime we and the Duchess kept turning in, and such heavy squalls came off the land that we had to let fly our top-sail sheets, keeping all hands to stand by our sails, lest the winds should blow them away. These flaws proceed from the land, which is very high in the middle of the island ; but when they passed by we had little or no wind. As our yawl did not return, we sent the pinnance well armed to see what had occasioned the yawl to stay, being afraid there might be a Spanish garrison on the island, who might have seized her and our men. Even the pinnance delayed returning, on which we put up the signal for her to come back, when she soon came off with abundance of crayfish, bringing also a man clothed in goat skins, who seemed wilder than the original owners of his apparel. His name was Alexander Selkirk, a Scotsman, who had been left here by Captain Stradling of the Cinque-Ports, and had lived alone on the island for four years and four months. Captain Dampier * told me he had been Master of the Cinque-Ports, and was the best man in that vessel ; so I immediately agreed with him to serve as a mate on theJDuke. During his stay he had seen several ships pass by, but only two came to anchor at the island, which he found to be Spanish, and therefore retired from them, on which they fired at him, but he escaped into the woods. Had they been French he would have surrendered to them ; but chose rather to run the risk of dying alone on the island than fall into the hands of the Spaniards, as he suspected they would either put him to death, or make him a slave in their mines. The Spaniards had landed before he knew what they were, and came so near him that he had much ado to escape ; for they not only shot at him, but pursued him into the woods, where he climbed up a tree, at the foot of which some of them made water and killed several goats, yet went away without discovering him.

' He told us he was born in Largo, in the county of Fife, Scotland, and was bred a sailor from his youth. The reason of his being left there was a difference with Captain Stradling, which, together with the ship being leaky, made him at first rather willing to stay here than to continue in the ship ; and when at last he was inclined to have gone, the captain would not receive him. He had been at the island before to wood and water, when two of the men were left upon it for six months, the ship being chased away by two French South Sea ships; but the Cinque-Ports returned and took them off, at which time he was left. He had with

1 Selkirk had been sailing-master under Captain Dampier in his expedition which left in May, 1703, and had been put ashore on the island at his own request. Dampier's expedition was unsuccessful, and ' the merchants were so sensible of his want of conduct, that they resolved never to trust him any more with a command '.

him his clothes and bedding, with a firelock and some powder and bullets, some tobacco, a knife, a kettle, a bible, with some other books, and his mathematical instruments. He diverted himself and provided for his sustenance as well as he could ; but had much ado to bear up against melancholy for the first eight months, and was sore distressed at being left alone in such a desolate place. He built himself two huts of pimento trees, thatched with long grass and lined with goat skins, killing goats as he needed them with his gun so long as his powder lasted, which was only about a pound at first. When all this was spent he procured fire by rubbing two sticks of pimento wood together. He slept in his larger hut and cooked his victuals in the smaller, which was at some distance, and employed himself in reading, praying, and singing; psalms, so that he said he was a better Christian during his solitude than he ever had been before, and than, as he was afraid, he would ever be again.

4 At first he never ate but when restrained by hunger, partly from grief, and partly for want of bread and salt. Neither did he then go to bed till he could watch no longer, the pimento wood serving him both for fire and candle, as it burned very clear and refreshed him by its fragrant smell. He might have had fish enough, but would not eat them for want of salt, as they occasioned a looseness ; except crayfish, which are as large as lobsters and are very good. These he sometimes boiled, and at other times broiled, as he did his goat's flesh, of which he made good broth, for they are not so rank as our goats. Having kept an account, he said he had killed 500 goats while on the island, besides having caught as many more, which he marked on the ear and let them go. When his powder failed he ran down the goats by speed of foot ; for his mode of living with continual exercise of walking and running cleared him of all gross humours, so that he could run with wonderful swiftness through the woods and up the hills and rocks, as we experienced in catching goats for us. We had a bull-dog which we sent along with several of our nimblest runners to help in catching the goats, but he outstripped our dog and men, caught the goats, and brought them to us on his back. On one occasion his agility in pursuing a goat nearly cost him his life ; as while pursuing it with great eagerness he caught hold of it on the brink of a precipice, of which he was not aware, being concealed by bushes, so that he fell with the goat down the precipice to a great depth, and was so bruised and stunned by the fall that he lay senseless, as he supposed, for twenty-four hours, and when he recovered his senses found the goat dead under him. He was then scarcely able to crawl to his hut about a mile distant, and could not stir out again for ten days.

' He came at length to relish Jiis meat well enough without bread and salt. In the proper season he had plenty of good turnips, which had been sowed there by Captain Dampier's men, and had now spread over several acres of ground. He had also abundance of cabbage from the cabbage-palms, and seasoned his food with the fruit of the pimento, which is the same with Jamaica pepper, and has a fine flavour. He found also a species of black pepper called malageta, which was good for expelling wind and curing gripes.

' He soon wore out his shoes and other clothes by running in the woods, and being forced to shift without them, his feet became so hard that he ran about everywhere without inconvenience, and it was some time after he came to us before he could wear shoes, as his feet swelled when he first began to wear them.

' After he had got better of his melancholy he sometimes amused himself with carving his name on the trees, together with the date of his being there, and the time of his solitary residence.

'At first he was much distressed with cats and rats, which had bred there in great numbers from some of each species which had got on shore from ships that had wooded and watered at the island. The rats gnawed his feet and clothes when he was asleep, which obliged him to cherish the cats by feeding them with goat's flesh, so that many of them became so tame that they used to lie beside him in hundreds, and soon delivered him from the rats. He also tamed some kids, and for his diversion would at times sing and dance with them and his cats ; so that by the favour of Providence and the vigour of his youth — for he was now only thirty years of age — he came at length to conquer all the inconveniences of his solitude and to be quite easy in his mind.

'When his clothes were worn out he made himself a coat and a cap of goat skin, which he stitched together with thongs of the same, cut out with his knife.'

Subsequently the expedition sacked the two cities of Guaiaquil, in the assault on which Dover led the van. They took several prizes and cruised about the coast from Peru to California waiting for treasure ships. Of one of the largest prizes, which they named the Bachelor, after the Bristol Alderman doubtless, Dover took command as chief captain. They then sailed across the Pacific to Batavia, where they refitted, and in October, 1710, sailed for England, which was reached in 1711.

Captain Thomas Dover returned from the South Seas a wealthy man ; the expedition had been unusually successful, having realized the enormous sum of £1 70,000. To Dover, who is stated to have been the owner of a very considerable part of both ships, fell a considerable share of the spoils. Alexander Selkirk as mate received £800 prize-money.

Harris (Voyages, &c.) makes the following comments on the voyage : 'It has been universally allowed by such as are proper judges of such expeditions that there never was any voyage of this nature so happily adjusted, so well provided in all respects, or in which the accidents that usually happen in Privateers were so effectually guarded against.' This he attributes to the abilities of the gentlemen of Bristol, and remarks that it was owing to this expedition that the spirit of privateering in the South Seas was not totally lost in England. The large sums realized had evidently made an enduring impression, and Harris adds, ' I might, perhaps, go too far should I assert that this voyage gave rise to the South Sea Company, but this much I can safely say, that the success of this voyage was what the patrons of that Company chiefly insisted upon in their defence, when the plan of it was attacked as insufficient and chimerical.'

In 1712 Dover must have been fifty years of age, and quite ready to enjoy a period of leisure. Where he settled or what he did we do not know, but it is certain that three years such as he had spent at sea were no preparation for practice. Possibly he travelled, and in the introduction to The Ancient Physician's Legacy he scoffs at the doctors who have travelled ' far at home ' ; 'Let them take a trip to Hungary and see the mines,' speaking, and describing scenes, as though he had been there himself. He refers not infrequently to his wide knowledge of the globe, and in one place says, ' if travelling be necessary to make an accomplished physician, I am very sure that I have travelled more than all the physicians of Great Britain put together.'

In 1721, as mentioned by Munk, he was admitted Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians, a qualification which enabled a man at that time to practise in and six miles round Westminster. It is doubtful how long he remained at this time in London ; at any rate he states (A. P. L.) that he lived in Gloucestershire in the years 1728 and 1729. None of the cases which he mentions in his books are of this period. His permanent settlement dates from about 1731. In a 1733 edition of the A. P. L., in replying to certain strictures on the use of quicksilver, he says, ' I challenge you to show when I have lost three patients for the past five years, when I was first called either in acute or chronic cases (though I have settled in town about eighteen months).' At this time Dover was well on in years, about or above seventy, a late age at which to begin practice in London.