by Richard Sugg
This and a good deal more of the play’s satire plainly hinged on an inferred general hostility to physicians. One did not write or adapt a popular play without a good sense of popular attitudes. We will see in a few moments that the implied image problem of élite medicine was quite closely linked to the attempts of some physicians to distance themselves from corpse medicine, and other now seemingly dubious or arcane ingredients of the Pharmacopeias. What needs emphasising most of all about Miller’s play, however, is just that one basic detail of the chief physician’s stage identity. For what seems to have been the first time ever, a physician is parodically labelled ‘Dr Mummy’.94 At one level, this again assumes the ready complicity of London audiences. It is obvious what this will mean to them: if you want to create a stock physician, and shade a little more darkly the penumbra of disrepute which he naturally attracts, then associate him precisely with one of the more disreputable medicines of his trade. Indeed, if Miller was assuming a rough equation between the easy identity of the apothecary (Galleypots) and that of the physician, then the axiomatic ease of the link between mummy and dubious physic becomes all the stronger.95
At the level of longer historical perspective, the name could hardly be more apt (even if an astute cultural critic had invented it himself). For decades physicians had by various means kept themselves at a certain distance from corpse medicines. Just occasionally, as in some of Fuller’s sharper outbursts, that distance seemed at risk of collapse. In the later seventeenth century, popular perceptions threatened to roughly shove physicians and mummy into uncomfortably intimate proximity. The repeated ‘beating to mummy’ of literature and drama must ultimately have reflected a public attitude which saw physicians in nearer physical contact with such substances, simply pounding human matter, where once they had stood back behind a veil of learned theories. No less aptly, it was at this time that mummy began, effectively, to merge with the bodies of those who were at least potential clients of it. The aged in particular now become mummy, or mummies. Finally, having managed with remarkable adroitness to keep out of these grubby jokes for so long, the physician himself merges, in 1734, with that substance he had kept at such a convenient distance. Again, the slow process of osmosis is itself neatly symbolic. Just as mummy did not immediately ‘become merchandise’, so physicians prescribed and profited from corpse medicines many decades before the association stuck too tightly and too negatively to their personae. And we will now see that Miller’s label evidently had an importance as much practical as symbolic.
Horrid Medicines: Reason, Disgust and Enlightenment
We met the physician Robert James earlier, as a supporter of the use of human fat. In his Pharmacopeia Universalis: or, a New Universal English Dispensatory of 1747, James drily notes what he considers to be a popular superstition: namely, the belief that human skull renders the body ‘so impenetrable as not to be pierced with a musket bullet’. He then alludes to the opinion of a German physician named Rieger on the moss of the skull, and emphatically agrees with him that there is ‘no necessity why a physician should disgrace his profession by prescribing it’. James does not deny that usnea actually works. But, he insists, other substances work equally well. And these, he adds, ‘no patient will refuse on account of the horror and nausea they produce’.96
In 1751 this stance is broadly echoed by the physician and botanist John Hill. Hill’s Materia Medica openly laments that ‘we cannot be content with medicines without running to our own bodies for them’; and he, unlike James, does deny the efficacy of skull-moss, asserting that the moss of the human skull ‘possesses no more virtues than that which grows on a stick or a stone’. Delusions about its powers are themselves, however, ‘less shocking, than the swallowing the flesh and bones of our fellow creatures’. ‘The mummy and the skull alone of all these horrid medicines retain their places in the shops’, Hill adds, ‘and it were much to be wished they were rejected too’.97 Hill reiterates this attitude in his Useful Family Herbal of 1754. ‘There is not’, he asserts, ‘any particular kind of moss growing upon the human skull, nor does any moss by growing upon it acquire any particular virtues, whatever fanciful people may have imagined’.98 Three years later, publishing under the name of Christian Uvedale, Hill’s tone is yet stronger: ‘their folly is hardly less than their beastliness, who expect good from the dung of animals, from rotten human skulls, from the moss that has grown upon them, or from the ill-preserved remains of human carcasses, which they call mummy. Reason banishes these detestable medicines, which decent delicacy should never have admitted. They were always shocking to the imagination; and they are now known to be void of efficacy’.99
1755 brings us not a medical landmark, but a literary one: the publication of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary. Johnson’s entry for ‘mummy’ quotes at some length from Hill’s opinions of 1751. In doing so, it gives a quite thorough description of two different types of the drug and their respective qualities and textures. Although the entry edits out some of Hill’s more indignant comments, it condemns trade in mummy as generally disreputable, given that ‘what our druggists are supplied with is the flesh of executed criminals, or any other bodies the Jews can get’ – these being treated with common bitumen and baked in ovens so as to resemble embalmed corpses. Johnson’s entry then goes on to insist that ‘at present, we are wise enough to know, that the virtues ascribed to the parts of the human body, are all either imaginary, or such as may be found in other animal substances’. And it concludes with yet more emphatic condemnation, quoting Hill’s statement, ‘the mummy and the skull alone of all these horrid medicines retain their places in the shops’.100 By 1782 the physician William Black seems, if possible, still more emphatic than Johnson or Hill, as he celebrates the professional discrediting of ‘loathsome or insignificant’ remedies such as ‘Egyptian mummies’ and ‘dead men’s skulls powdered’. These ‘and a farrago of such feculence, are all banished from the pharmacopeias’.101
This brief overview of the eighteenth-century opposition to corpse medicines encapsulates all the key themes of the new hostility. Such substances, James asserts, disgrace the medical profession. Secondly, they are disgusting: ‘shocking’, ‘loathsome’, ‘beastly’; an offence against ‘decent delicacy’ – or, in Black’s especially memorable phrase, ‘a farrago of … feculence’. Thirdly, they do not work. Any supposed efficacy is a result of the ‘fanciful’ imaginations of patients or practitioners. A fourth key point is hinted at by Hill and Johnson: ‘at present, we are wise enough to know, that the virtues ascribed to the parts of the human body, are all either imaginary, or such as may be found in other animal substances’. The ‘present’ wisdom of the Enlightenment features frequently in attacks on corpse medicines, and is very much in evidence when Hill triumphantly asserts: ‘reason banishes these detestable medicines … ’, writing a kind of unofficial motto for later-eighteenth-century attitudes. Often, as we will see, the antipathy of Reason to such alleged Superstitions is so great that it prompts the ultimately irrational rewriting of medical history.
The Medical Profession
I have selected these four authors partly because of their weight of influence across the mid- and later eighteenth century. But there is also another reason. Johnson produced what is now recognised as the first substantial dictionary of the English language. Despite its not containing an entry for that much loved English comestible, the sausage, this work naturally became a standard point of reference for many educated people of the day. We have to ask ourselves, then, how far Johnson artificially accelerated the early opposition to corpse medicines. If you were, say, merely ambivalent about such substances, might you not become fixedly hostile on reading what seemed to be the authoritative stance of the great doctor? The reason for raising that point here is that Johnson was also a friend of that other key early opponent, William James. Although Johnson does not openly cite James, this may in part be just because Hill is slightly fiercer in his condemnation. If James did influence Johnson, then in th
at early phase of antipathy, we find a very tight-knit cluster of powerful authorities, whose views were at once potent, and (arguably) less than wholly representative.
It is important to emphasise that James, whatever his influence, has a different tone to that of Hill. He begins with droll irony toward superstitions about the human skull, rather than the apparent moral indignation of Hill, for whom such therapies are ‘shocking’. And his chief concern is that a physician should not ‘disgrace his profession’. With this crucial notion of ‘disgrace’, James signals a very different idea of what medicine is – or, at least, what it should become. Where Hill is emotionally disturbed, James is cannily pragmatic. At one level, he is concerned for the image of the medical ‘profession’ just because – as historians have shown – this now widely accepted entity was, at that time, still struggling to establish itself.102 As Gay and Miller both made amply clear, physicians were an easy, indeed natural, target for abuse, resentment, and satire.
And James himself was in many ways a perfect example of the kind of selfish drive for personal gain which we saw Culpeper attacking decades earlier, and Miller echoing in 1734. As T.A.B. Corley emphasises, the most famous (or notorious) thing about James was his invention and personal monopoly of ‘James’s fever powder’. Although numerous practitioners had attempted to fence off the profits of their supposed panaceas, the scale of James’s success makes him an interesting forerunner of those global medical corporations who now patent and monopolise cures which might otherwise be available to the sick poor of the developing world. ‘Having taken out a patent, in 1747 James furnished the court of chancery with a description of the contents and the method of manufacture; yet experts soon found these could not make the kind of powder being sold, and indeed the doses varied in quality over time’. Corley here shows that James was at once eager to monopolise all profits via an official patent, whilst unofficially refusing to make clear to anyone what was in his miraculous powder. Although Corley adds that results of the powders were mixed, and that ‘James’s reputation as a doctor was diminished by his … strenuous claims for the powders’, overall the patent clearly brought James great wealth: ‘a veritable pantheon of authors lauded them and their efficacy, Thomas Gray and William Cowper demurely, Horace Walpole ecstatically, and Richard Cumberland in many stanzas of inflated verse’. They were used by George III, and ‘as late as the 1860s they were to be found in Queen Victoria’s medicine chest’.
It perhaps hardly needs stressing that James’s concern for the image of the medical profession was largely selfish, rather than altruistic or public-spirited. Like modern corporations, James probably assumed that ‘public image’ might be conveniently detached from actual practice. What you do matters less than what you seem to do, or what you say. Indeed, Corley further notes that, although (according to Johnson), James ‘never drew a sober breath during the final twenty years of his life’, ‘this scarcely impaired his medical practice as he was extremely adept at concealing’ his actual condition. Ultimately, the kind of personal eccentricity or arrogance which are sniped at in The Doctor the Disease were stronger in James than was his superficial concern about corporate public image. This is confirmed generally by his opportunism in plundering wholesale from numerous authors, in order to concoct the various books that went under his name.103 And, in particular, James in fact cited Johann Schroeder at great length in 1747, giving no personal comment or hint of opposition when listing over a page of substances drawn from the human body.104
James’s seeming inconsistency only confirms that his brief, arguably atypical hostility to skulls and skull-moss was coolly pragmatic. Yet, if James was not sufficiently angry or unnerved about corpse medicines to avoid such inconsistencies, others clearly were. Of fifteen hostile references to these remedies in the eighteenth century, only three occur before 1734. Is this merely coincidence? Influential physicians or scientists often lived in London, and were often (like James) jovial men about town. It seems unlikely that those working in the capital could have been unaware of Miller’s comedy of 1734. Opening at the New Theatre in the Haymarket on 12 February, the play was still running (now at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane) come June 1736.105 There must, accordingly, be a strong chance that here (not for the first or last time) life imitated art. It was one thing for people to be occasionally, covertly ambivalent about physicians and their use of human skull or blood or flesh. It was quite another for a physician to be publically labelled as ‘Doctor Mummy’, with this long-used remedy now clinging to him like an unwanted garment as he was mocked upon the common stage. Once literature had caught up with you in this embarrassingly public way, it was time to move on, extricating your would-be ‘profession’ from the muck of the past, and remaking it in the cool light of reason and progress.
This brings us back to John Hill. Not only was Hill notable for vigorously attacking corpse medicine three times before 1760; he was also, in every sense, a man of many parts. As Barry O’Connor explains, ‘Hill’s fascination with the theatre’ vied ‘with his interest in botany as chief among his lifelong preoccupations’. Although the report that Hill ‘was a strolling player from 1730 to 1735’ remains unsubstantiated, Hill definitely was acting various roles from the late 1730s onwards. Initially engaged by ‘the second duke of Richmond, Lennox, and Aubigny … to collect specimens for him from England and Wales’ in 1739, Hill went on to take up residence at Richmond’s Sussex seat, Goodwood House, where he ‘met a number of the theatrical community including Owen MacSwinney, David Garrick (then at the beginning of his career), and Peg Woffington’, and acted on Goodwood’s private stage. O’Connor adds that, whilst Hill’s 1750 treatise The Actor drew heavily on a French original, the work was nonetheless ‘the first English acting treatise to discuss the personal and emotional attributes of the actor rather than the rhetorical conventions of performance that had characterized earlier acting manuals’.106 Add to all this the fact that Hill ‘was apprenticed to the London apothecary Edward Angier in 1730–31’, and we realise that he was in every way suited to be the reactive agent between Miller’s play and the world of élite London medicine.107 Whether or not Hill was acting himself by this time, he could scarcely have failed to be aware of the ludicrous physicians paraded at the Haymarket’s New Theatre from 12 February 1734.
William Black would have missed out on this, as he was born only in 1749. But for Black, the recent existence of corpse medicines (surviving, he admits, into ‘part of the present’ century) was plainly a source of outrage, rather than merely a matter of pragmatic concern.108 His remarks are telling not just for their obviously emotive language, but also because ‘loathsome and insignificant’ is an arguably contradictory phrase. The latter term may be another way of saying that these things did not work, but the two words so close together do look odd: these cures were not so ‘insignificant’ that they failed to generate violent feelings in Black’s mind. As so often, eighteenth-century opponents of corpse medicine feel very strongly about it, but do not entirely know what their feelings are. Although Black does not openly talk, like James, about such ingredients disgracing the ‘medical profession’, the very nature of his book makes it clear that he is keenly interested in this emergent entity. The work’s full title is ‘An Historical Sketch of Medicine and Surgery, from Their Origin to the Present Time; and of the Principal Authors, Discoveries, Improvements’. Black is writing an early form of medical history. As will become all too clear in a few moments, for many of those working in this field in the twentieth century, corpse medicine was so appalling that it was all but written out of the history books. Black is less dishonest about medicinal cannibalism than many of those later authors, or than certain of his peers. But it is telling that, when seeking to explain how now discredited ingredients had survived so long, he cites an earlier doctor, Robert Pitt. Pitt picks chiefly on the apothecaries rather than the physicians, claiming that the former were simply trying to increase their profits by selling unnecessary substances, shrouded in what
Black terms ‘mystery and pomposity’.109
Just a few years after Black, in 1789, the eminent Royal Physician William Cullen cites ‘cranium humanum’ as one of various ingredients which, ‘if they were to appear in prescription, would, in Britain at least, effectually disgrace a practitioner’.110 Cullen had links with the medical or scientific societies of Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen, Dublin and Philadelphia.111 In the passage in question he discusses some now generally discredited cures which are still accepted only in Paris, and it may be that it is France to which he implicitly opposes the changed attitude of the British public. Given its enduring reputation as an importer of human skulls, Germany is another possibility. Whoever this backward nation (or nations) may be, Cullen’s basic stance is clear. He does not personally register disgust, and in fact does not directly question the efficacy of human skull. His concern seems to be solely the public image of the ‘medical profession’ in Britain.112
Disgust
We saw that disgust was not a known English word at the start of the seventeenth century. Even in following decades, it was evidently not an influential one in the field of medicine. But in the later eighteenth century, many of the words flung so violently at corpse medicine are sharply spiced with this special human emotion. Black’s authority Pitt gets in surprisingly early, when in 1703 he laments the fact that ‘mummy had the honour to be worn in the bosom next the heart’ (presumably, as an amulet) ‘by the kings and princes and all others who could then bear the price, in the last age, in all the courts of Europe’. Pitt’s biographer M.P. Earles states that this physician and anatomy lecturer was noted for a general ‘desire to reform the practice of medicine’. This drive led Pitt to attack various ingredients beside human ones (and especially those which were exotic or expensive). He does not especially single out human substances, and interestingly, on the page on which he derides mummy, it is actually the hearts, skins, guts and lungs of various animals which, he believes, ‘ought to be rejected as loathsome and offensive’. Similarly, his attack on ‘the famed skulls of a dead man’ is embedded amidst derision of elk’s, rhinoceros’, and unicorn’s horns, and swallows’ nests and snake skins. Yet Pitt does preface his discussion of mummy with an assault on those who ‘thrust into the stomach of their patients, not only the most loathsome, but the parts of animals’ which, being dead, are merely ‘a dry and unactive earth’, and it is telling that, in this early manifesto for reform, the word ‘loathsome’ appears a number of times.113