What Killed Jane Austen?: And Other Medical Mysteries (8 page)

Inscribed on the carved headboard was the legend: ‘It is a sad thing if a rich man has no heir to his property.’ You might think Graham could have done better than that, but perhaps if you were paying a hundred 18th-century pounds for a night of bliss (which you were), mottos chiselled on the woodwork would be about the last thing on your mind. The bed itself is said to have cost £60,000 and had a mirror-lined dome above, coloured sheets and a mattress ‘filled with the strongest, most springy hair, produced at vast expense from the tails of English stallions’.

Despite all the hype, it came to pass, as day follows night, that Graham died in poverty in a lunatic asylum.

Why did people visit such charlatans? Well, they were not all clearly defined as such. There was no doubt about the difference between the itinerant pedlar in the marketplace and the MD of Oxford. But until the Apothecaries Act of 1815 and the Medical Registration Act of 1858, the term ‘qualified medical practitioner’ had no precise meaning or limits, and differences between quack and doctor were fuzzy. So the reasons for their popularity are complex.

For the poor, the fairground quack was available and cheap. But the wealthy and educated also flocked in droves to their favourite pseudologist. Did they have a positive faith in the seemingly magical procedures? Possibly, but it is more likely that they attended after regular medical men had failed with their admittedly pretty thin therapeutic armoury. They marketed themselves well, and the medicines they dispensed—which often contained brandy and opium—were very patientacceptable. If none of the proffered concoctions, unadulterated or sinister, is going to do any good, then you might as well take the one which makes you at peace with the world. On the other hand, quacks would have poisoned quite a few with the large doses of antinomy and heavy metals which were commonly used.

Down the years those who function outside the main stream of medicine have had a popular appeal when orthodoxy seems to have faltered. According to where you stand, they have been described as effective and efficient, or vulgar and dangerous, or natural and harmless. Doctors complain that the mistakes of quacks are not given the same full glare of publicity from which they themselves suffer in similar circumstances. True enough, many quacks have proved to be grasping opportunists, but many have not; the same can be said of ‘regular’ doctors, for the division between the two is not always easily defined.

(JL)

Throughout time, people have used urine in various ingenious ways. They have studied it to diagnose illness, applied it as a salve and drunk it as a tonic.

In ancient Babylon, India and Egypt, healers assessed their patients by looking at their urine. So did the Sumerians, who called their doctors ‘those who know water’.

In 1090, the Jerusalem Code decreed that any physician who didn’t examine a patient’s urine should be publicly whipped.

At the medieval medical school of Salerno in Italy, uroscopy (inspecting and testing urine) went to astonishing lengths, including the degree of urine’s concentration, its colour and smell, whether it was transparent or cloudy, and so on.

The urine flask or
matula
became the badge of physicians. In fact, paintings of Cosmas and Damian, the patron saints of physicians, often show them with a
matula
.

Some famous physicians depended on uroscopy so much that they treated patients without seeing them. Charlatans naturally followed suit. Calling themselves water-casters, water-diviners, urinarians or even doctors of urine, they flourished in most of Europe. Critics called them piss-prophets.

Many charlatans had an assistant chat up patients in the waiting-room. Behind a thin wall with a peep-hole the piss prophet himself would listen. Then he would leave the house quietly by the back and come bustling in the front door. Now he could simply glance at a specimen and tell patients that their husband had back pains, or that their mistress was pregnant.

Other assistants marked the flasks with codes for their master to read.

Some patients had tricks of their own. In the 10th century, Duke Henry of Bavaria sent urine from a pregnant woman to a Swiss uroscopist for testing, saying it was his own. But there were no flies on this piss-prophet (also monk and physician), for Notken tested it and declared: ‘God is about to produce a miracle, for within 30 days, our Duke will be suckling a child born of his own belly.’

In London, the College of Physicians condemned those practising uroscopy without seeing the patient; a 16th-century statute also forbade the practice. But all to little effect.

One sceptic is on record as having sent a specimen of his gelding’s urine which he purported was that of his wife. Unfortunately for the cynic, part of the quack’s stock in trade was to keep himself informed on the ills of the district, and thus appear to have second sight at the psychological moment. So, having waxed eloquent about the lady’s known gynaecological maladies, the quack concluded by saying: ‘I grant that I may do your gelding good, if not your wife’.

A well-known uroscopist of the 18th century, at the high-water mark, so to speak, of such folderols, was Dr Theodor von Myersbach. He took up the art in the improbable circumstance of having been adjudged too short to be a rider in an equestrian circus. A doctorate of medicine was purchased at Erfurt in Germany and he was in business. Myersbach moved from place to place on the Continent, usually at night to be just one step ahead of the law, eventually to fetch up in London. There he rapidly acquired an up-market following, with such classy people as David Garrick and the Duke and Duchess of Richmond in his thrall.

His consulting rooms were in Berwick Street, Soho, and he charged half a guinea for a consultation. It must have been regarded as money well spent, for he is said to have seen up to 200 people a day. (They are the kind of numbers which can support a very large overdraft.) However, his carping detractors put this figure down to the fact that he had only charmed, rather than cured, hypochondriacal High Society ladies such as ‘Lady Hysteric’, ‘Lady Credulous’ and the ‘Hon Miss Pregnant’. No doubt you can put up with a lot of hypochondria for 100 guineas a day.

He diagnosed by gazing at the subject’s urine or allowing his hands to hover over the patient’s body, crying: ‘It’s here, it’s here,’ when the vibes were right. Outstretched hands just about cover an average-sized abdomen, and if you move quickly enough you have a fair chance of being right, and in truth, ‘it would be there’. Location of the trouble was followed by suitably vague diagnoses such as ‘disorder of the womb’ or ‘slime in the blood’.

Suspicion was aroused concerning the effectiveness of his ‘green drops’, ‘silver pills’ and the like when a proper doctor, John Coakley Lettsom, detected poisoning in some of his own patients who had sneaked off to be treated by Myersbach. Analysis of the quack’s prescriptions showed lead acetate in many, and in doses which would calm the colic all right, but only just before it killed the patient. Other medications were found to be water in which toast had been steeped—at least they would do no harm.

When Myersbach was presented with another sample of urine (actually port wine), he attributed the colour to a severely diseased uterus. The next specimen, cow’s urine, showed ‘too great a pleasure in women’.

Lettsom wrote pamphlets about what he described as ‘this outbreak of urinomania’, and sent letters to the Press to expose the charlatan. The public took sides, and a wearisome and vituperative slanging match unfolded. Myersbach upped sticks and returned to Germany, but he came back to London the following year and quickly regained his former popularity.

Indeed, it was because of such charlatans that uroscopy—which had been a respectable diagnostic procedure since ancient times—fell into disrepute, to be revived in the 20th century.

Over the centuries, many people have applied urine as a salve and even drunk it as a tonic.

Ancient Egyptian physicians treated sore eyes with the urine of a faithful wife. Chinese warriors would pause during battle to urinate on the wounds of their comrades to help them heal.

In ancient times, the fly agaric mushroom (
Amanita muscaria
) was a popular hallucinogen in Europe and Asia. Its active compound, muscarine, is passed unchanged in the urine. So poor people wanting to be ‘as drunk and jovial as their betters’ drank the urine of the rich.

The famous physician and anatomist Thomas Willis (1622-75) described the urine in diabetes as being ‘wonderfully sweet as if it were imbued with Honey or Sugar.’ Of course, he was tasting for the presence of diabetes, rather than advocating drinking it.

However, a standard 17th-century authority recommended several glasses of urine each morning for gout, bowel obstruction and hysterical vapours. People drank urine for ‘Epilepsies, Vertigoes, Apoplexies, Convulsions, Lythargies, Migraine, Palsie, Lameness, and Numbness’.

Those with toothache rubbed it into their gums. It was also rubbed onto chilblains and chapped hands. Women drank it to restore their periods.

Russians used to sell urine to the French, who used it to make hormonal soaps and face-creams. A French dentist made a fortune selling urine as a mouthwash. Better still, he proclaimed, people rubbing it their body could lose lots of weight!

One Yorkshireman not only drank urine to cure his cancer, but also used it as an aftershave!

Early in the 20th century, a Mr J.W. Armstrong wrote a best seller,
The Water of Life
. He assured his readers that drinking urine could cure cancer, leukaemia, syphilis, nephritis, heart failure, malaria, swollen testicles, bedwetting, and even the common cold.

Clearly Mr Armstrong looked on the bright side of life. He found the taste of morning urine ‘merely somewhat bitter and salty; not nearly as objectionable as, say, Epsom salts’.

(GB & JL)

It would only be fair to mention a couple of practitioners who were regarded as quacks at the time, but who are now held in some esteem, if not reverence.

The Chamberlen family fell into this category. At the end of the 16th century Peter Chamberlen and his brother, also called Peter, invented the obstetrical forceps. The way in which the handles locked was kept a secret in the family for over 100 years. Because they would not share the mystery, and as one of the hallmarks of quackery is keeping knowledge to oneself, they were branded charlatans by their contempories. Eventually the secret was sold and the locking device was seen to be effective. Their invention came to be generally accepted by the medical profession and is used to this day.

The second family whose members were looked upon with some suspicion in their time was the Thomas family. In 1740 two small boys were washed ashore on the coast of Anglesey in North Wales. They were, it was said, the only survivors of a shipwreck. Both were adopted by a Mr Thomas. The elder boy, whom Mr Thomas named Evan, showed a singular aptitude for treating injured animals. That skill, plus the improbable story of his arrival, was enough to make the medical establishment purse their lips and wrinkle their noses in bristling disapproval. However, it was this very same magical and mysterious aura which made the villagers take him to their collective bosom.

To cut a long story short, this healing gift, used in both animals and humans, was passed down through the generations. The grandson, also called Evan, spread his wings and settled in Liverpool to become the ‘bonesetter of Crosshall Street’ (later used as the name of a play about the family and presented in the 1950s).

Naturally he incurred the wrath of the local doctors, and three times in the 1840s Thomas was charged with neglecting a patient. On each occasion he was acquitted, the last time being carried from the court on the shoulders of a rapturous crowd, given a hero’s dinner and presented with a testimonial. He was regarded as the saviour of the local dock workers, for they knew that if they landed in hospital with a broken limb they stood a good chance of it being amputated. If they went to Thomas, however, he would manipulate rather than amputate. His ability to set bones with consummate skill gained him considerable kudos among the less well-to-do.

Evan Thomas recognised, however, that the medical establishment was powerful, so he arranged that his three sons had a formal medical training. The eldest, Hugh Owen Thomas, was to emerge as the greatest of all the Thomases.

Hugh worked first with his father in the city of Liverpool and then as an osteopath in the dock area of the port. As time went on he became outspoken and a mite too forthright for the medical establishment. Although he obtained remarkable results in straightening and lengthening limbs, the medical establishment was very suspicious of the young upstart, for did he not fulfil one of the main criteria of a charlatan in that he was denigrating of others, especially doctors?

What the surgeons either did not realise, or, more likely, chose to ignore, was that he was one of their own, having qualified at University College Hospital, London, in 1857. He never had access to any hospital beds, yet managed to leave the profession two legacies, one of which is used to this day—the famous Thomas Splint for fractured legs. The other is the rather gruesome Thomas Wrench for straightening bones, and long since abandoned.

Hugh Owen Thomas died childless in 1891 aged 57, and although his funeral was attended by thousands, many in tears, it was not until years later that he was eventually recognised as the father of orthopaedic surgery, and one who had metamorphosed the treatment of diseases of the joints.

Who can tell which of the eccentrics of today may not become pillars of the establishment tomorrow?

(JL)

The historian Hendrik van Loon described Napoleon Bonaparte as having an ego ‘so great that he needed an entire planet … for his ambitions’. But when he died in 1821, he was in exile on the British colony of St Helena, a small island 200 kilometres west of Africa.