devil playing a game of chess with a young man for his soul, an angel looking on). A modern satirical cartoon by "Cynicus" (Martin Anderson) represents "Death and the Doctor" playing cards over a coffin. The rather corpulent doctor, seated in a comfortable armchair, plays deliberately without the least appearance of excitement, whilst Death seems eager to finish the game. On the coffin are bags of gold, suggesting the financial importance of the result to the doctor.293 The idea of the life of man as a cheating game of cards with Fortune-at which "Death is it That lastly cuts, and makes his hit "is expressed in an epigram by Thomas Bancroft (about 1633), quoted in Dodd's Epigrammatists, London, 1870, p. 236. Amongst the very large number of satirical designs (sketches, engravings, coloured prints, &c.) in dispraise of physicians, surgeons, apothecaries (and naturally also of quacks and charlatans), several which are figured in Dr. Eugen Holländer's work, Die Karikatur und Satire in der Medizin (Stuttgart, 1905), suggest that the drugs and medical treatment, and not the diseases, kill the patients. There is, for instance, a sketch (Holländer, op. cit., p. 223) of the famous "Dr. Requiem, who cured all those that died"; there is the caricature of a charlatan (ibid., p. 162), exhibiting triumphantly the hide of his "last radically cured patient"; there is Daumier's (modern) design of a doctor wondering why all his patients leave him, whilst "imagination" shows a queer procession of imps carrying coffins and the dead bodies of his patients, headed by Death (see ibid., p. 173). Then there is W. Hogarth's The Company of Undertakers" (1736), also called "The Undertakers' Arms," with the crowded caricature 293 Cartoon No. 22 of Cartoons, Social and Political, by Cynicus, published at 59, Drury Lane, London, 1893. portraits of doctors and quacks of the time, and the motto, "Et plurima mortis imago" (Virgil, Aen., lib. ii. 369), between two pairs of crossed bones (see ibid., p. 179). An older print (ibid., p. 178), shows a doctor inspecting the urine of a dead patient, illustrating the saying, “ Après la mort, le médecin." A lithograph by Adolf von Menzel, of about 1832 (ibid., p. 290)-"The Difference between Allopathy and Homoeopathy "-shows the allopath and the homoeopath both holding banners with the device of a skull and crossed bones; between them are Mephistopheles and Death, the latter grasping both the banners and saying, "Seid einig einig einig!" Another caricature (ibid., p. 337), by Th. Heine, shows two very modernlooking ghosts floating over a cemetery. One of them apparently is saying, "That's all the difference: With homoeopathy one dies of the disease, with allopathy one dies of the treatment." A little German painting (now in the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum) shows a doctor studying in a room overlooking a crowded graveyard. Death (a skeleton) is visiting the doctor as a friend and colleague, and (according to the paper which he holds) is saying, "Mein lieber Herr Collaborator, Sie sind gar zu fleissig," referring doubtless to the over-full grave-yard towards which his left hand is turned. By D. N. Chodowiecki (1726-1801), who likewise made a series of "Dance of Death" designs, there is a small engraving of Death appearing to a medical student, with the following inscription underneath, which is what the student is supposed to be saying in order to be spared: "De grâce épargne moi, je me fais médecin, Tu recevras de moi la moitié des malades." One of Thomas Rowlandson's "English Dance of Death" series (first volume, London, 1815) shows Death and the quack doctor "Nostrum," outside the shop of the undertaker, "Ned Screwtight"; and the letterpress (by William Combe, the author of "Doctor Syntax ") describes how grieved the undertaker was when his friend Nostrum died so suddenly at his door. His wife explained that it was another job for him, and nothing to be sorry about, but— "You foolish woman,' he replied, Old Nostrum, there, stretched on the ground, Similar allusions to the undertaker are of course very frequent. Thus, in "The Apothecary's Prayer," by G. M. Woodward (engraved by Thomas Rowlandson in 1801, and published by R. Ackermann, at 101, Strand, London), the Apothecary prays to Aesculapius that people may be ill and require medicines, and mentions. that his neighbour, Crape, the Undertaker, is suffering considerably by his (the Apothecary's) want of practice. I have seen two little English engravings, signed "W. E. G.," not dated, but probably of the early part of the nineteenth century, which might be mentioned in this connexion. One of them depicts an apothecary on a rather sorry hack, which is apparently running away and knocking people over. The inscription below is, "What can be expected of a horse with an apothecary on his back?" Below this are the words Newcastle Apothecary. The other shows a huge widely-open mouth, into which a funeral procession of (death-bringing) good friends, and chatting with each other. The title, "A Medical Allegory," is inscribed below this print, on a medicine-bottles is entering; at the rear of this procession come little figures of Death and the Doctor, apparently FIG. 36.-"A Medical Allegory." (Wellcome Historical Medical Museum.) " 294 a mortar made out of a human skull with a long bone in it "It was, indeed, a very sorry hack; For what's expected from a horse With an Apothecary on his back?" In Robert Burns's "Death and Doctor Hornbook," a poem which is illustrated by a small wood-carving in the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum (London), Death gives no flattering account of the skilful doctor in question:"That's just a swatch o' Hornbook's way; Thus goes he on from day to day, Thus does he poison, kill an' slay, An's weel paid for't! Yet stops me o' my lawfu' prey, Wi' his damn'd dirt." I must here refer also to the following stanza in “The Devil's Walk" or "The Devil's Thoughts," a poem apparently partly by Robert Southey and partly by S. T. Coleridge, though by some it was thought to have been originated by the witty Richard Porson (1759–1808), Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge: "A 'pothecary on a white horse Rode by on his vocations, And the Devil thought of his old friend 29 The poem is included in Colman's Broad Grins, fifth edition, London, 1811, pp. 27-34. 295 The allusion is to Revelation vi. 8: " And I looked, and behold, a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed." |