The (very slow) downfall of the upstart chymist

These are the rather surprisingly good woodcuts for The devil upon Dun: or The downfall of the upstart chymist: being the second edition of a late song: to the tune of Smoak us, and choak us, a single-sheet drinking song of 1672.

On the left, the ‘chymist’ stands at his pestle and mortar, preparing his elixir by pulverizing the bones his has on the table before him, labeled ‘the matter’. “More bones”, he says.

In the middle pane, he is assisted by a devil in distilling his preparation, which he hails as “The Grand Elixir”. As the liquor flows, the devil cries that “The Spirits are mine”.

In the right-hand panel (which is really two scenes in one), we see the effect upon the patient. A man who is unwell lies in bed, and receives the preparation from the chemist, who assures him of its safety and curative power (“I warrant you”). But the effect of the touted elixir is rapid death: two mourners for the late patient react: “Sumus fumus” (‘We are but smoke’) and the wry “Thankes to the Chymist”, while a third, his elbow on the catafalque, concludes sorrowfully “Not by art but Chymicallie”.

The verses accompanying the picture are less impressive:

'Mongst all Professions in the Town,
Held most in renown,
From th’Sword to the Gown,
The upstart Chymist rules the Roast;
For He with his Pill
Does ev’n what he will,
Employing his skill,
Good Subjects to kill,
That he of his dang’rous Art may boast,
O 'tis the Chymist, that man of the fire,
Who by his Black Art
Does Soul and Body part:
He smoaks us, and choaks us,
And leaves us like Dun in the mire.

A subsequent stanza in which the chemical doctor miraculously silences two disputing parsons contains a solid OED antedating:

As for the Parsons, both Pro and Con,
Dispute, and Objection,
Can’t save them, th’Chymist anon
With th’Elixir can soon end the strife,
Straight silence them both,
Who t’agree are loth,
For th’Ginny-pigs sake, though
Their quarrels give th’Old Cause new life.

If this is a clumsy joke on that newly-named animal, the guinea pig, with “jocular or contemptuous applications with allusions to the coin”, the OED does not have this till

1821, in W. Combe’s Third Tour Dr. Syntax: ‘Oh! oh!’ cried Pat, ‘how my hand itches, Thou guinea pig, in boots and breeches, To trounce thee well.’

The verses go on in a ragged fashion: here’s a stanza about the response of the orthodox medical profession:

The College Doctors with great heat,
Do very much brow-beat
So desp’rate a cheat,
Using prov’d methods safe to cure;
Yet these Chymists cry,
Who dares it deny?
At easy rates they’ll make all sure.
O 'tis the Chymist, &c.

Here the writer declares that the elixir is in fact a good means of domestic murder:

If Wife of Husband, or Husband of Wife,
By reason of strife
Are weary, Or Fathers life
Hinders th’Heir; his Laboratory
Can perform with hast,
Without much distaste,
What Indian poison can’t supply.
O 'tis the Chymist, that man of the fire,
Who by his Black Art
Does Soul and Body part:
He smokes us, and chokes us,
And leaves us like Dun in the mire.

He wishes all the ‘chymists’ sent to Algiers, to kill the population there, leaving England’s population free to grow:

Then may New Troy with Citizens fill,
Being secur’d from ill;
Then no printed Bill,
No Almanac; no Tradesman’s Shop
Shall th’Elixir vent,
To make Experiment
On liege people, killing with one drop.
O 'tis the Chymist, &c.

No printed adverts, or adverts in almanacs will sell this deadly elixir in this future ‘New Troy’ (or London).

The famous elixir just on the market had been announced in 1670 by Anthony Daffy: Direction given by me (Anthony Daffy, student in physic) for taking my safe, innocent and successful cordial drink, elixir salutis; proper to the cure of each distemper (in the printed sheet of its virtues mentioned,) and suited unto the patients several ages, sexes and constitution.

The ‘chymist’ in the woodcut may be just a generic figure, but might well have been Anthony Daffy himself. The original mixture for the elixir was apparently formulated by his uncle. Here’s the Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daffy%27s_Elixir

This gives some idea of the ingredients. They varied over time, but certainly would have had a laxative effect. The writer of the entry has Anthony Daffy move to London from Nottingham in the 1690’s: but he can be seen calling himself ‘of London, citizen and student in physick’ in 1675.

The success of the preparation he marketed was such that rival ‘elixirs’ were quickly concocted, and promoted with materials copied from his own pamphlets (as he complains). By 1675 he was putting into print Daffy’s original elixir salutis, vindicated against all counterfeits, &c. or, An advertisement by mee, Anthony Daffy, of London, citizen and student in physick by way of vindication of my famous and generally approved cordial drink, (called elixir salutis) from the notoriously false suggestions of one Tho. Witherden of Bear-steed in the county of Kent, Gent. (as pretended), Jane White, Robert Brooke, apothecary, and Edward Willet.

 Despite the poem announcing Daffy's downfall, it was a long time coming. ‘Daffy’s Elixir’ is advertised all the way through the 18^thand 19^th centuries: 2,188 hits are returned by the gale 18^thcentury newspaper database, 5,522 hits by the Gale 19^th century newspapers database. In the Protestant (Domestick) Intelligence or News Both from City and Country (London, England), Tuesday, March 16, 1680, Daffy lets it be known that he is still alive (counter to the reports of those who counterfeit his preparation), that he has enjoyed the benefits of the elixir for above twenty years, and that the real things can only be got from him or from the authorized outlets he had advertised in print.

The elixir makes itself familiar in literature: Pope tells the reader of the Dunciad that ‘the Balm of Dulness’ “is a Sovereign remedy, and has its name from the Goddess herself. Its ancient Dispensators were her Poets; but it is now got into as many hands as Goddard’s Drops or Daffy’s Elixir.”

Thackeray makes the best use of it, accurately capturing that tension between the generations over infant care:
“Between Mrs. Sedley and her daughter there was a sort of coolness about this boy, and a secret jealousy---for one evening, in George’s very early days, Amelia, who had been seated at work in their little parlour scarcely remarking that the old lady had quitted the room, ran up stairs instinctively to the nursery at the cries of the child, who had been asleep until that moment---and there found Mrs. Sedley in the act of surreptitiously administering Daffy’s Elixir to the infant. Amelia, the gentlest and sweetest of every-day mortals, when she found this meddling with her maternal authority, thrilled and trembled all over with anger. Her cheeks, ordinarily pale, now flushed up, until they were as red as they used to be when she was a child of twelve years old. She seized the baby out of her mother’s arms, and then grasped at the bottle, leaving the old lady gaping at her, furious, and holding the guilty tea-spoon. Amelia flung the bottle crashing into the fire-place. “I will not have baby poisoned, Mamma,” cried Emmy, rocking the infant about violently with both her arms round him, and turning with flashing eyes at her mother. “Poisoned, Amelia!” said the old lady; “this language to me?” “He shall not have any medicine but that which Mr. Pestler sends for him. He told me that Daffy’s Elixir was poison.” “Very good: you think I’m a murderess, then,” replied Mrs. Sedley. “This is the language you use to your mother.”
The elixir – and later rivals like Holloway’s ointment – was the recourse of those obliged to try ‘self-doctoring’. Doctors would always have dismissed it as poison, but they wanted their fees.

Stroked by Valentine: shamanistic healing in London, 1666

Valentine Greatrakes was born on St Valentine’s Day, 1629 (and hence his name). He was Irish, a Protestant, served as a lieutenant in the Cromwellian army in Ireland for six years, then ‘betook my self to a Country life, and lived at Affane the habitation of my Ancestors, where I have continued ever since, and got by my Industry a livelihood out of the bowels of the Earth’.

Then a message from heaven changed his life, and propelled him into short blaze of fame: “About four years since I had an Impulse, or a strange persuasion in my own mind (of which I am not able to give any rational account to another) which did very frequently suggest to me that there was bestowed on me the gift of curing the Kings-Evil: which, for the extraordinariness of it, I thought fit to conceal for some time, but at length I communicated this to my Wife”.

In scrofula he had chosen an illness which, from what one has read about cures or amelioration after ‘the royal touch’, could see some patients respond well to a charismatic healer. It was also a condition that, because of its main recognized form of treatment, made his act latently political, an encroachment upon a special preserve of those who were absolutely his social superiors. Greatrakes would be reviled because he was perceived to have infringed, to have intervened repeatedly in matters that were, properly, far beyond him. Peter Elmer’s ODNB life of Greatrakes endorses a political motive, either in Greatrakes or his backers, suggesting (to paraphrase loosely) that there was an implicit rebuke to King Charles II in Greatrakes so conspicuously surpassing the monarch in this role of ‘touching’, alongside his carefully advertised piety and moderation.

The ODNB life covers the biography (obviously), but this emphasis leaves one far short of appreciating what Greatrakes did, the hysteria and squalor around the hard-pressed, sometimes revolted, but heroic and sincere thaumaturge. This is my emphasis here: in late 17^th century London – a society that considered itself Christian through-and-through - a reappearance of Shamanism.

As soon as Greatrakes was persuaded that he could also touch for the King’s-Evil, a potential patient, in a desperate condition, was found him (he reamrks elsewhere that God always found him patients promptly after his latest healing power had been imparted): “Margaret Macshane of Ballinecly … who had the Evil 7 years and upwards, which had spread it self from the bottom of her stomach upwards, all over to her throat, neck, and nose, and so all over her back, shoulders and arm-pits, so that I could not see one place free from the Evil, where you might put a sixpence, and to speak the truth she looked so dreadfully, and stunk so exceedingly.”

What he was up against is partly caught in the photograph of a sufferer here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculous_cervical_lymphadenitis

Greatrakes says he was (understandably) squeamish about many of his clients. But he was astonishingly successful: “My hand suppurated the Nodes, and drew and healed the Sores, which formerly I could not have endured the sight of, nor smell, nor touched them without vomiting; so great an aversion had I naturally to all wounds and sores: so that the poor woman (i.e., Macshane) about six weeks afterwards came perfectly well to my house.”

A year later further divine assurance came to Greatrakes that he must use the same cure-by-touching for the ague (there was a large local outbreak, and Greatrakes was always sincere in his sense of mission). Now the ague is an intermittent disease (malaria), and, like the successes Greatrakes would soon have with people suffering from falling sickness (epilepsy), the natural course of the condition would favour him with the appearance of success. Both Greatrakes and his supporters acknowledged that some of his clients did relapse, though this usually happened after a longer remission than was normal for them. Finally, word came to him from heaven that he could cure all most ailments. A correspondent of Joseph Granvill’s explains that Greatrakes doubted this, until one night when one of his hands was “struck dead”. But stroking this hand with his other returned it to “its former liveliness”. This experience was repeated over several nights, until Greatrakes was finally convinced of his general gift. He treated people without personally taking any money (his opponent David Lloyd asserts that his minders did take money for access to him), and the greater part of those he touched early in his career trudged back off into obscurity. Follow-up care after a miracle cure is hardly to be expected.

Large numbers flocked to Greatrakes as his fame spread. People – including the young John Flamsteed - were crossing the Irish Sea to get to him, and he was soon brought to England to attempt a cure for the migraines and general debilitating pain suffered by Lady Conway (Anne Finch, the thinker). The attempted cure failed, but with other local English clients, Greatrakes continued to have miraculous successes. He did cures in Warwickshire, and through Berkshire. Anthony a Wood says that he was finally summoned to Whitehall by the King. Now Greatrakes does not mention this himself, nor did his supporter in print, Henry Stubbe. According to Elmer (ODNB), Charles was not impressed by his emulator, so perhaps this was an aspect of his career Greatrakes wanted to pass over. Charles apparently had Sir John Denham seek a cure for his lameness, but the stroking cure failed.

In London, Greatrakes published, or there was published about him, a single sheet flier, The great cures and strange miracles performed by Mr. Valentine Gertrux who restoreth the blind to sight, the deaf to hearing, the lame to strength, and cripples to walk without crutches: as also, he cureth all manner of diseases, with a stroak of his hand and prayer.

It sounds very good: “He takes away all sorts of pain and old Aches, though of twelve, sixteen or twenty years continuance, or longer, only with stroking and smoothing the party grieved with his Hand: for immediately upon laying his Hand upon the part grieved, the pain removes; and if at any time they feel it sensibly in another part of the body; as, from the back to the breast, from thence into the Legs and Arms, or other extreme parts, and when the party telleth him where it is removed, he followeth it with his hand, which driveth it out, sometimes at the fingers ends, sometimes at the Toes, other times at the Crown of the Head, and sometimes at the Mouth; and when the person saith, it is gone, and he feeleth no more pain, He biddeth him be gone, and glorifie GOD, and forsake his sins.”

One can understand the appeal. A qualified 17^th century doctor would want high fees for a painful regime of phlebotomy and brutal purges. But even in this brief account of Greatrakes with a patient undergoing treatment, one can see that both are sharing a view of pain that is conceptually based on demonic possession. The pain is chased by Greatrakes from one part of the body to another (he explains that he relies on the patient to tell him where the pain has shifted to, he cannot drive it, only follow it). Once the pain has no retreat to the torso, Greatrakes can get it to leave via an extremity. Rather original in him are recurrent cures where the pain finally leaves by the tongue of the patient, and the tongue is discovered to be left as cold as ice.

Greatrakes is quite candid about this, he clearly regards demonic possession as a valid diagnosis for some of the afflictions he has treated: “my Experience inclines me to believe, in saying that I have met with several Instances which seemed to me to be Possessions by dumb Devils, deaf Devils, and talking Devils … many, when they have but heard my voice, and have been tormented in so strange a manner that no one that has been present could conceive it less then a Possession”.

Look how in these sentences an initial ‘somewhat within her’ becomes an ‘it’ that seems to have its own volition and malignity: “as I will instance in one at York-house … who had somewhat within her which would swell her Body to that excessive degree on a sudden as if it would burst her; and then as soon as I put my hand on that part of her Body where it did rise up, it would fly up to her Throat (or some other place), and then it would cause her neck to swell half so big again, and then almost choke her, then blind her, and make her dumb and foam … I oftentimes brought it up into her Tongue … which it has swollen in an instant nigh as big again, and has been seen plainly to play from place to place, and at length with great violence of belching … it went forth, and so the Woman went away well. Whether this were a natural Distemper, let any one judge that is either a Divine, a Philosopher, or Physician.”

He even has the same motive as the John Darrel type of renegade protestant exorcist: “God may, to abate the pride of the Papists (that make Miracles the undeniable Manifesto of the truth of their Church) make use of a Protestant to do such strange things in the face of the Sun, which they pretend to do in Cells.” Greatrakes was only an ordinary man of his time. The afflictions are as mysterious to him as his power to cure. These are essentially supernatural encounters, the power that came to him from heaven against the afflicting force.

Greatrakes does not mention any other local or family traditions of healing that might have provided other models. He presents his career as simply following the divine inspirations that came to him, but as he progressed, he become more confident, and more experienced at what had to be done. He then seems to have been more willing to undertake what must have been standard procedures of incisions and lancings. He was always going to collide with the medical profession, and he duly did, both in Ireland and in England: “Then the Judge asked me, where is your Licence for practising, as all Physitians and Chirurgeons ought to have from the Ordinary of the Diocese? my answer was, that I knew no reason I had to take a Licence, since I took no Reward from any one, and that I knew no Law of the Nation, which prohibited any person from doing what good he could to his Neighbours.”

This was in Ireland; I have possibly made a small discovery about Greatrakes in associating with his London career with a set of verses published as RUB for RUB: OR, AN ANSWER TO A PHYSICIANS PAMPHLET, STYLED, The Stroker stroked. The author here, a supporter, is writing to answer a (lost) verse attack on Greatrakes penned by a qualified physician. Now Greatrakes’ modus operandi obviously involved a lot of touching. His opponent could not resist making imputations about this (the italicized lines are clearly quotations), but was effectively answered by having this represented as products of his own lechery (a bawdy anecdote is told about the doctor administering ‘oil of man’ to a female client):

What if he clip’d and clap’d, what’s that to you?
You’ve clip’d and clap’d, and have been clap’d too …
Your foul report betrays you, and in truth,
I fear the Doctor hath a liquorish Tooth.
Her Stocking off, he strokes her Lilly-foot,
What then? The Doctor had a mind to do’t.
Her Legs, her Knees, her Thighs, a little higher.
And there’s the Doctors Center of Desire…

The sense of Greatrakes as an exorcist appears here too:

His hand is truly powerful whose stroke
Twice dispossessed and made the Devil smoke.

Greatrakes had many supporters: his ‘Brief Account’ of himself and his blameless activities is bulked out by many testimonials and witnesses, some of them gentry, some clerics. He was also susceptible to being recruited to other people’s agendas. Joseph Glanvill could use him to vapour on about latter-day apparent miracles. The unpredictable Henry Stubbe wrote the longest defence: The miraculous conformist, or, An account of severall marvailous cures performed by the stroking of the hands of Mr. Valentine Greatarick with a physicall discourse thereupon.

The title is telling. Stubbe set out to defend Greatrakes’ orthodoxy: “It may seeme equitable that I tell you why I call the Gentleman the Miraculous Conformist: many strange reports have and do run of him; but he is reclaimed from all that is fanatique; and this gift of Healing was bestowed on him, since the Restoration of his Sacred Majesty, and the restitution of the Doctrine and Discipline of the English Church”. The sensitivity concerns Greatrakes as a throw-back to the ‘fanatic’ times of the interregnum. But even as Stubbe defends by citing gentry and clerics who endorsing the cures as valid, he strays into making Greatrakes sound too Christ-like: “An infinite number of the Nobility, Gentry, and Clergy of Warwick-shire and Worcestershire, persons too understanding to be deceived, and too Honourable and Worthy to deceive, will avow, that they have seen him publicly cure the lame, the blind, the deaf, the perhaps not unjustly supposed Daemoniacks, and Lepers.”

The ‘physical discourse’ in Stubbe is just that, an attempt to apply some Royal Society-style investigative rigour in place of the possession model. Robert Boyle was interested enough to be the addressee of both Stubbe and Greatrakes, the former angling his speculations about how the cures were effected towards further investigation by the Royal Society, and though Boyle actually had objections to Stubbe’s rationalizing conclusions, he apparently attended sixty stroking sessions. Glanvill’s correspondent does the same, ingeniously speculating that what Greatrakes did was transmit a “sanative contagion” – instead of catching a disease off him, you could catch health (in A philosophical endeavor in the defence of the being of witches and apparitions, 1668). Glanvill also warmly recommends Greatrakes to scrutiny by the Royal Society.

Stubbe gave a lot of attention to Greatrakes’ own body. He was closely observed: that he was not putting some undisclosed and highly effective ointment on his hands is sagely noted, he did his cures absolutely bare handed. He had a distinctive personal odour, not unpleasant, but, again, his hands did not smell. The attempt to account for it all rationally led Stubbe into speculations about the ‘crasis’ of Greatrake’s body, in his case a perfect humoral balance and temperament. It’s not very far from seeing him as a living, breathing philosophers’ stone. “It seems to me very imaginable that there may be given by God such a Natural Crasis and Effluvia consequential thereunto, that the stroking with his Hand for some space so as to communicate the Virtue may restore the Blood and Spirits to that vigour and strength which is natural to them, and resuscitate the contracted imbecility of any part.”

Meanwhile, at his over-crowded places of practice, the curative power of Greatrake’s body was eagerly believed. We lurch backwards into the abyss of time: the Royal Society competes with diabolism for an explanation, but rearing up from the dim and distant past comes Shamanism. He imparted his touch. His saliva was used by way of finishing touch to any minor surgery he had performed. Whether his gloves had the same power, through their close contact with the wonder-working hands was investigated, and they did. But a napkin that had merely been rubbed on his chest, or his shirt, did not transmit his ‘crasis’ to the sufferer.

Either in his desperation to cope with the crowds seeking contact with him, or in his growing belief in his own powers, Greatrakes started taking along his own bottled urine for distribution as some kind of lotion (it was noted to smell like violets). This too was eagerly consumed, and was equally effective: “Eleanor Dickinson, aged 45 years, had a Dropsy 12 years in her belly … was stroked by Mr. Greatrakes about 16 days since, at 7. a clock at night, and drank at the same time about 6 spoonfuls of his water, and rubbed some of it on her body, which she did of her own accord: the same night she felt a queasiness in her stomach”. Her own testimonial brings us closer to the chaos around Greatrakes: “not being able to come near him by reason of the throng, she snatched some of his urine and drank it, some of which she also put into her ears, which were so stopped she could not hear, and immediately she heard the noise of the people all round about her: Then going home, some hours after the same urine began to work in her belly…”

This is Shamanistic healing: the body fluids of the healer being consumed, a belief that the healer is a conduit for a supernatural force that he allows you to access, his body processing the occult power into something that you can use for a cure.

With chaotic scenes like these taking place in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Greatrakes was attracting so much attention that attacks on his methods and character was inevitable. We have seen that there was a verse attack by a jealous doctor. David Lloyd’s Wonders no miracles overflows with indignation and paranoia. Lloyd was a chaplain at the Charter House, where Greatrakes had both performed cures and had a bad failure. Lloyd sees that Greatrakes has a popular following for what people think he can do, and professes alarm that soon he might start being followed for what he tells people. For Lloyd, it’s an imperative that Greatrakes be disbelieved, as he represents “An opportunity in distracted and divided Times, to broach strange and dangerous Opinions. For if a man can but prevail with the People, to believe that God assists him, to Effect new and extraordinary things; he may easily persuade them, that the same God inspires him to speak new and extraordinary Opinions; when they see God in what he doth, they will easily believe he is in what he saith; and where they observe omnipotence, there they will believe infallibility: and if the man saith now, I received a voice from Heaven, bidding me Cure all Diseases; he may if this take, say anon, I am Commissioned by a Voice from Heaven, to reduce the World to the unity of the Roman Church, to teach the infallibility of the Pope, to reveal a Messiah to come, a fifth Monarchy, and what not?”

Lloyd is either not interested in, or incapable of a reasoned or balanced response. Greatrakes was obviously hurt by the imputations made about his character, and, well accustomed to getting testimonials, produced witnesses to attest otherwise (and they seem convincing). Henry Stubbe’s work was also prompted by Lloyd’s vitriolic hatred. Lloyd, for instance, was willing to see Greatrakes as under diabolical guidance: “In a word, should a man have familiarity and make a compact with Satan, and should the Lord permit Satan to work some strange things, not that Satan can do any thing above nature; but that he may do many things that seem to us above nature, because above our understanding, it might exercise and try our Faith” and a harbinger to a diabolic attempt to overthrow the Church of England.

Probably the overtures made by Greatrakes and Stubbe to Robert Boyle were an attempt to find shelter and, ideally, legitimization. Boyle’s brother has been an early patron of Greatrakes over in Ireland. But protection does not seem to have come quickly enough. London gave just too much publicity, and no chance to control the nature of the stories getting out. Anthony a Wood said Greatrakes went to “Whitehall by command from his Majesty and performing several cures there and in London, but more mistakes”. And David Lloyd scores a shrewd hit about Greatrakes’ star waning: “they follow him not in any place so eagerly at first, as they leave him discontentedly at last: He is not so much cried up in the places where he comes, as he is cried down in the places where he hath been”.

Greatrakes, Elmer says, had gone back to Ireland by May 1666. He continued to stroke away ailments, but without publicity.

The staggering name to see as testifying to two of his cures is Andrew Marvell. The shrewd, cautious Marvell, attending Shamanistic séances!

(Greatrakes’ story is also told in the biographical dictionary issued by the subject of my previous post, James Granger, who ends by saying that Greatrakes stroked his female patients in a rather different way to his male patients, though it’s hard to tell whether this is exoneration or insinuation.)

‘So learned and Poly-daedalous a Narration’: Daniel Lakin and the Prussian Knife Swallower

This chap, fortunate to be alive (and perhaps rather gentrified in his moment of celebrity) was the Prussian knife swallower, and that’s the sharp knife he accidentally swallowed shown down the right of the woodcut: it “was just in length ten fingers breadth”.

He was “a rusticke young man by name Andrew Grunheide” and on the morning of May 29^th 1635, having perhaps overdone the beer the night before, and apparently accustomed to doing this, he decided he’d be better off if he vomited. His clumsy efforts ended in the knife going down rather than his stomach contents coming up:

“as it was his wont, endeavouring to procure it himself, with the haft of his knife provoked the Gorge, and vomit not presently following did thrust in his knife a little deeper, which partly by the violence, and partly by its own weight so let down and comprehended within the jaws, escaped the extremities of his singers, and by little and little tends to the ventricle.”

Understandably alarmed at what he had just done to himself, he tried a few contortions to reverse the trick: “although the Swallow-knife being somewhat terrified, did by bowing his body downwards, assay the regress of the knife, yet was it all in vain”.

So off he went, and found himself referred on to “the renowned and famous Dan. Swaben, a Chyurgion Physitian, cutter of Ruptures, and an Oculist”. Swaben was among the retinue of “the most Soveraign King of Poland, Vladislaus the 4^th “because of an excellent and singular skill in his liberal Art”.

A numbers of doctors gathered to discuss this interesting case. Their decisions, and the operation they performed (successfully) on Grunheide were written up in a German pamphlet, which was translated into English by a sometime ship’s surgeon, Daniel Lakin (with some help from his brother, he says). Grunheide’s situation made him a case that the doctors could both perhaps treat, and learn from.

In the first place, good sense was shown: the lengthy pamphlet, which uses all occasions for medically informative digression, shows that the doctors were well aware of a ‘melancholy’ which might cause someone to claim to have ingested something preposterous. They know, also, about pica, compulsive ingestion of unusual things. Along with these medical cases, demoniacs who vomit up stones, rings, hair and the like transmitted into their body by witchcraft are discussed.

But the decision was that Grunheide had no signs of melancholy (beyond apprehension about the ordeal ahead of him), and that he had swallowed his knife as he claimed.

Grunheide is plied with oils to cleanse his stomach. They decide they must operate while he is still in his strength of health, but first assay the use of a magnetic plaster. This involves pulverizing a magnet, and mixing the filings up in an ointment. Gilbert’s opinion (a real scientific observation, of course) that this destroys all polarity and force in the magnet is known to them, but they are strongly possessed by the hope that such a preparation will attract the metal object towards the point of incision they have decided upon. So the magnetic plasters are applied, and even though after section they have to fish about with a bent needle through the incision to locate the knife, they believe that the usefulness of a magnetic dressing has been confirmed. They interpret the evidence according to their preconception, and what it comes down to in the end was, as ever, authority trumping observation: magnetic ‘emplasters’ work because people you trust say they work: “Ninthly, because in vain had the most famous and expert Physitians framed the Magnetical Emplasters, and from the Load-stone assigned them the denomination, if no faculty of Attraction were thence further to be expected”. I like that very 17^th century ‘ninthly’: a former colleague teaching Milton’s prose once suddenly perceived that his class had all since long fallen fainting by the wayside as he reached Milton’s ninth cogent argument for something.

Anyway, here’s how the pamphlet describes the big operation – the prayers beforehand, the patient strapped down, the spectators applauding. I especially like Grunheide confirming to the triumphant operating team that, yes, that’s the very knife he had swallowed - as though by some other means others items from the canteen might have found their way inside him. I rather doubt, on various evidence, that Grunheide was all that bright. Brave and robust, though:

“When all things therefore were ready at hand as well external and internal Cordials, as other Chyrurgicalls, the Divine Assistance and Benediction being first invoked, the Rustic who with an undaunted courage waited the Section, was bound to a wooden Table, and the place being marked out with a Coal, the incision was made towards the left side of the Hypochondrium some two fingers breadth under the short Ribs, according to the direction, and first the skin and that fleshy pannicle (there was no fat seen) and then the subjected Muscles, as also the Peritonaeum was cut and opened. And although the Ventricle did somewhat sink down, and evading our fingers ends did not so presently admit of apprehension, and a little staid the Operator and standers by, yet at length attracted and contracted with a small needle crooked, it showed that the knife was there, which being laid hold on, and the point brought upwards, the Ventricle above the same was a little incised, and the knife successfully extracted, which was viewed by all that were standing by, and greatly applauded both by them and the Patient himself, who professed that this was the very knife he some few days before had swallowed, but the wound it self when the knife was drawn forth was quickly allayed.”

The aftercare of the patient recalls Gloucester in King Lear: “The Knife being successfully brought forth, and the Patient eased of his bands, the wound was in that manner as was fitting cleansed, and the Abdomen that was incised, closed up with 5. Sutures, but by their interstices the Balsam was infused warm, and Tents impregnated with Balsam laid thereon, and then a Cataplasm of Bole, the white of an egg, and Alum to avert all inflammation laid upon that.” Egg whites seem bacterially hazardous, but the albumen would have had some coagulant effect.

Over the next days, Grunheide is carefully observed, with the usual emphasis on urine and stools. The original pamphlet is keen to report one of their important deductions:

“Position 8 … the excretion of clotted blood by Urine is to be reckoned for a benefit of a provident nature.” Most important of all, is the deduction that the operation - opening the body and then cutting into the stomach - is worth trying, rather than simply deciding that the patient is going to die: “wounds that pierce the substance of the Ventricle, the Chyrurgeon shall not let them alone as deplorable and remediless, yea nor spare labour nor industry in the sedulous Curation of them, for a doubtful hope is better then a certain desperation.”

“And so by the grace and clemency of the Omnipotent Jehovah, and supreme Director, and with the singular industry and dexterity of the Physitians and Chyrurgion, our Rustic Swallow-knife was restored to very good health, who now complains not any thing of any dolours of the Ventricle, but being returned to his accustomed diet and ordinary calling, with us gives thanks to the immortal God. To him therefore bee the glory, praise, and honour for ever and ever, Amen.”

The English translator of all this, Daniel Lakin, had an eventful life. In 1632 he was apparently a ship’s surgeon on a warship called the Hector, and he tells of his own cure of Richard Partridge, quartermaster on the ship, who was wounded by a dagger thrust through the stomach wall during a fight on board.

Partridge “lived about a year and a half after, till he perished under the burthen of a sorrowful Captivity, wherein I did partake with many other…” The ship and his crew were captured by Turks, and Lakin’s own survival was probably down to his useful skills as surgeon. He was in captivity in Constantinople, until the English ambassador there, Peter Witch, either ransomed him, or protected him once Lakin had fled to his embassy. Lakin had a spell he describes as his “time of my service to the Emperor of Morocco”. He was present at a defeat of the Emperor in the Atlas mountains “many Moors there dangerously hurt, and with myself by flight escaping visited me, at my house in the City of the Jews (where all Christians have residence) imploring Cure, I receiving some that I judged curable though not profitable, into my care.”

Lakin had all too much opportunity to study the effect of dangerous wounds, and his translation advertises this: “In my Travailes, by observation, experience, & conversation with both Jewish, Arabian, Italian, Spanish, and Greeke Physitians, I have attained unto many worthy secrets.” He condemns other less experienced practitioners such as “tooth-drawers, Mathematical Fortune-tellers, and that rabble of women, which strut up and down with their skill in their pockets, which they purchased from the Chirurgions boy for some Garment trifle.” He was sceptical about magnetic dressings, and many other aspects of the Prussian doctors. No doubt his translation won him some extra clients.

[From A miraculous cure of the Prusian swallow-knife being dissected out of his stomack by the physitians of Regimonto, the chief city in Prusia (1642).]

'A worm the author of this book': William Ramesey's 'Helminthologia'

This chap is William Ramesey, and the amazing bonnet he is wearing was probably designed as an extra container or sump for the overflow of dotty notions stemming from his brain. Or there may be some ceremonial aspect to it: Patrick Curry’s ODNB life of Ramesey mentions that while he was born in Scotland into a family called Ramsey, he later changed his name because he had an idea of his Egyptian descent. He probably thinks of the hat as being like the crown of Upper Egypt Rameses the Great would have worn. This whole bogus Egyptian connection primarily suggests his inheritance from Ptolemy the Great, for Ramesey’s first obsession was astrology.

He was, however, an astrologer with a marked reluctance about making specific predictions. Ramesey was a royalist, and really didn’t want to make trouble for himself, so he keeps lapsing into this mode: ‘I could say somewhat of (Jupiter) … but I passe it over in silence, knowing it is neither safe nor fitting that the truth should be spoken always’ (Vox stellarum, 1651, p. 86). Ramesey hardly dares say anything particular about the fate ‘our Rulers or Grandees’ (pp. 97-8), but he looked to 1652 as a time when the nation might see ‘the pale Horse and his Rider as it were preparing for his march’ (p. 90). Ramesey duly called on England to ‘repent, repent … God is angry with thee’ (p. 88). Elsewhere in this astrological work, Ramesey seems unduly excited about Venus’s influence, and women in general, who are so threatened by pox (during 1652) that he says he will have nothing to do with women in the summer quarter, at least, ‘(as near as I can)’ (p. 108).

He became a physician, even court physician to Charles II, who would (as he famously said) die with the help of too many men like this. The major medical text by Ramesey is Helminthologia, or, Some physical considerations of the matter, origination, and several species of wormes (1668). It’s a work perhaps advisedly ignored by the compilers of the OED, whose references to things ‘helminthous’ are far later in date.

This is a book which sets off well, with its eye on the subject matter: “Worms the Subject, and worms the readers, and a worm the Author of this Book” (p. 8, and the formal beginning of his text after the prefatory material). “Infinite multitudes … die by them, under the notion of feavers of all sorts, Pleurisies, and most other Distempers”, he asserts. To believe that people die of little creatures living in them does seem to be thinking along the right lines. At times, the “Rational and Learned Physician” he saw himself to be flickers into view:

“ ‘view any corrupt blood with a * Microscope where they shall plainly perceive innumerable vermines’ * By which Instrument fitted with glasses at each end, the smallest mite will appear in that magnitude as you may discover every part thereof.”

But his topic wriggles away from him uncontrollably. Worms, he explains, are the product of ‘putrid, vitious and gross, viscid, corrupt matter’. As such, anything that upsets the perfect bodily regime can produce worms: God, his angels, the devil and his imps, witches and witchcraft, air, water, the planets, food, passions, retention of semen (Ramesey shifts into decorous Latin). Ramesey has his full say about witchcraft and the diabolic pact (being a Scot, he once saw “nine burnt at one time in Leith-Links”), about diet, planetary influences, anything. Worms, we realise, are to him what melancholy was for Robert Burton, and he palpably has his eye on Burton’s book, even writing about ‘Air rectified’ as part of a salubrious regime.

Ramesey was not, as his choice of headgear shows, overburdened with a sense of the ridiculous. He also can write like this, in apparent seriousness:

‘That my Reader may be Encincted with Reason able to Renix the Halucinations of that Panenerical evil of Envy and Ignorance, which is a Cacoethick Malady; But especially that he may injoy an Orthostadian Judgement, and not be Depsect with that Truculent Credulity which proves Sontick to most men, and an assured Prodromos of Ruine, I thought it not amiss here to aedepize some things, and Indigitate thee, wherefore others in this Book are handled in that manner they are…’

Credulous about all tales which seemed relevant to his maggoty notions, Ramesey cannot perceive irony in his sources: Erasmus’s story of an Italian, living in Germany and fluent in the language, whose helminthous  problems were so extreme that he behaved like a man possessed, until a wise physician treated him for worms, and simultaneously purged from him both the wriggling cause of his problems and all his grasp of the German language: this cock-and-bull story Ramesey tells twice (pages 42 and 312).

 He has much to say about the effects of milk, and again can be caught retailing as true a gosh-wow-fancy-that yarn: ‘A Slut at Packwood near Knole in Warwick-shire, did put a nurse-by-blow-child [he means, a bastard child, a ‘by-blow’, that has been put out to nurse] often to suck a Mastive Bitch, who at the same instant had Puppies, the Child throve well enough, but shewed the fruits and disposition of his Nurse, as he grew bigger, by his churlish behaviour, and never could sit or lie down, without turning two or three times round’. It seems a plausible story about squalor and neglect in early modern life, until that last couple of clauses.

Under diet, we learn about a Duke of Brunswick bursting after a surfeit of strawberries, and about King James’s opinion of ling, salt cod: ‘a dish for the devil’- Ramesey agrees: ‘they that eat ling, may as well eat a worse thing, and drink Piss’. He is insistent about the dangers of sea food: ‘We may absolutely condemn, and explode the Periwinkle, Cockle, Muscle, as dangerous food, offending the Brain’, and has stories of people who by eating too many cockles became natural fools.

All oddities of diet interest him. He writes about cases of pica, and one of his sources fills him in on what happens to you if you happen to consume cat’s blood: ‘a remarkable story of a maid, who by drinking of cats-blood, degenerated into the disposition and nature of a Cat, and by fits, would imitate a Cat, both in Actions and Voice; and in private would catch Mice, and contract herself so, (which was strange) to pass through holes, that no body else of her bigness could’. (She sounds to me like an entertainer whose spurious back-story has got garbled.)

Notice that none of this discussion has any notion of parasites being transmitted. Sea food, for instance, in itself upsets the bodily regime, and leads to worms spontaneously generating in any part of the body.

Ramesey produces this splendid illustration of the varieties of internal parasite, though the numbers do not key to specific discussions in the text, that would be too limiting. That’s a flat worm 300 feet long that he has picked up report of, and that weasel is a worm shaped just like a weasel, which was found when a pox-ridden gentleman was trepanned, and from his brain, a worm was “taken away, which was on the Dura Mater, in the form of a weasel”. He also reports how in October 1637, Dr May found a worm in the left ventricle of Mr John Pennat, aged 21 (and dead) ‘splendent as if it had been varnished’.

When Ramesey does finally get off the causes of worms to worms themselves, his account of the symptoms (p. 297ff) is horribly graphic and convincing. To that extent, he knew what he was talking about. His account of the treatment for worms retreats into Latin, as his medicine (a highly technical matter of purges and enemas) is something only the educated can practice. Writing of ‘The force of the imagination’ as a possible cause of worms, Ramesey instances the power of the imagination by referring to it ‘all Cures done by silly Women’.

I was disappointed that Ramesey did not have more to say about sex as a cause of worms, for Vox stellarum seemed to show that he was anxious about sexual matters. He does, however, come out strongly for eugenic practices, which among other things will eradicate left-handedness:

‘Sots as we are, in this most weighty matter we are too remiss, marrying any deformed unwholesome piece of mortality for a little money, when we are curious of the strain of our Horses, Doggs, Pigeons, game-Cocks; and so frequently, we leave a Crook-Back’d, Flat-nos’d, Bow-leg’d, Squnit-Ey’d, Left-handed, ugly, infirm, Weesle-fac’d, Diseased, half-Witted, Hair-brain’d, Nonsensical, Goos-cappical and Coxcombical, Worm-eaten Idiot, not only to possess our Estates, but our Names, and to build up our Families…’

To end with, here’s a tale he has of someone offering a toast to the devil during the civil war: ‘Or that of a mad fellow, in the time of our uncivill Wars at Salisbury, who being drunk, in a Bravado, drank an health to the Devil, saying, that if he did not come and pledge him, he would not believe there was either a Devil or a GOD, his Associates trembling at his expressions, retired into another Room, and left him, and never saw him more; for immediately the Devil came and carried him away, as it is thought out of the Window, the Bar thereof being bowed.’

The mad house poems of James Carkesse

‘To a Lady, who was very kind to him in the place.’

Madam, when first your Beauty shin’d

Into my Cell, on me confin’d,

I grew in Love with my dark Cloister;

Slighted (poor and hungry) Pearl and Oyster:

The Apricots which you me threw,

The thoughts of Paradise renew;

In Eden’s Garden sure they grew,

Transplanted to Moorfields by you.

You gave me Silver; whence I hold,

I ought not to Envy Danae’s Gold;

For though on her Jove rain’d a Shower,

'Twa’nt real, but Poetic Ore.

You me with Paper, Pen, and Ink,

Madam, suppli’d, as well as Chink;

This my Muse studies to requite

In part, to you when she does Write.

Your Charity sent me a Shirt, each thread

Whereof, to you me fast does Wed;

And thus from your extended hand,

The Shirt in mine, turns to a Band.

At Night in Straw, Lying a-long,

To th’Oaten Pipes this was my Song.

A search on EEBO for early works on, about, or treating of madness (prompted by the mad-house in The Changeling) led me to James Carkesse’s Lucida intervalla, containing divers miscellaneous poems, written at Finsbury and Bethlem by the Doctors patient extraordinary (1679). Carkesse, who brought all his troubles upon himself, was incarcerated in Bedlam in 1678, and wrote his book of verses there (and at Finsbury). He probably experienced madness; he certainly experienced the treatment of the insane meted out by the Bedlam regime.

In the poem above, we see some of the inhumanities which his poems complain of at large: being kept in the dark, with nothing to do (when Carkesse wanted to write his way out of confinement, by addressing versified complaints to former patrons and protectors), sleeping in straw, and naked: “Without either Shirt, or Cloaths, / I lodg’d my merry Mad Youth”, another poem has his doctor gloat.

His lady visitor seems to be on the cusp between visiting Bedlam for the old reason of idle amusement, and an age of sensibility, visiting to perform charity. She was probably one of Carkesse’s supporters, as her gifts met all his needs: writing materials, money, a shirt, and throwing him the apricots as a change of diet.

Other poems reveal more about the regime: the vermin (“In a place I did him stow, /

Where Rats and Mice do swarm”, a poem makes his doctor say). “I’m opprest with cold”, says another. He was chained up: “Iron locks my Leg fast”, and beaten if he resisted treatment.

The brief ODNB entry on Carkesse says that by the standards of the time, the doctor in charge, Thomas Allen, introduced a relatively thoughtful regime in Bedlam. Purgings and phlebotomy were the medical norms for just about all ailments, and the inmates were subjected to both. Carkesse says he resisted as best he could. In the poem written to be voiced by Thomas Allen, the doctor complains about his patient:

My Chirurgeon he fiercely withstood,

And he led him such a Dance;

That to let this same Gown-man Blood,

A Sword was more fit than a Lance.

I order’d his Keeper, at Large,

On occasion to ply him with Blows,

That what Jugular did not discharge,

The mad Blood might come out at his Nose.

I can imagine copious blood-letting might have kept the wretched inmates quiet. More specific as a treatment was Allen’s notion that an infantile diet might reduce his mad patients to a more docile condition:

His Diet was most of it Milk,

To reduce him again to a Child;

And Butter as soft as Silk,

To smooth the Fierce and the Wild.

My Potions he turn’d into Drenches,

For he freely would take ne’re a jot;

But by Thomas and the Wenches,

They were forced down his Throat.

The potions Carkesse threw down would have been purgatives and emetics.

Here’s another complete poem – it uses the conceits of a love poem to express gratitude to another lady visitor:

On the Ladies looking into his Cell.

When Doctor Mad-Quack me I’th’Dark had put,

And a close Prisoner in my Cloyster shut;

A Lady chanc’d peep in, whose Beauty bright

Enlarg’d the crannies, and let in new light:

Quack, I'm now pleas’d, without the Sun, confin’d

See how he Blushes, by my Star, out-shin’d.

Throughout his ‘Lucid Intervals’, Carkesse maintains that he has been thrown into Bedlam by the contrivance of his enemies:

Satan’s Agents, my false Friends, combine

A Minister to Silence and confine.

I’m forc’d (though Sober) Bedlam to inherit,

When they, who put me here, the Prison merit;

For they’re possest, not I, by th’Evil Spirit…

These enemies seem to include, interestingly, Samuel Pepys, who had caught Carkesse peculating at the Navy Office, and had him dismissed from office:

… Mr. Pepys, who hath my Rival been

For the Duk’es favour, more than years thirteen:

But I excluded, he High and Fortunate…

Elsewhere, he blames his wife: “me to be Tam’d, / My Shrewish Wife and her Relations send”.

His actual confinement seems to have been prompted by an outrage against the Dissenters. Carkesse fancied himself to be a parson. “I am a Minister of God’s holy Word”, says the poem he addressed to the King (the ODNB entry says there is no evidence to suggest that this was true), and to have a divine mission. The revealing poem title is ‘On his being Seiz’d on for a Madman, only for having endeavoured to reduce Dissenters unto the CHURCH.’

“Whether Carkesse was incarcerated for a specific offence is difficult to determine” says the ODNB. It may not be quite so obscure a matter as this makes it sound. One has to imagine that there was at the time a pretty broad tolerance for attacks upon dissenters, but he seems to have gone just too far. In a poem in which he imagines himself in self-defensive dialogue with his doctor, we learn that Carkesse went dressed as a parson to a ‘Conventicle’, where he seems to have torn his parson’s gown. He was probably doubly drunk on zeal and spirits. His poem tries to explain these circumstances away: “in a Conventicle, / Who Sober would wear a Gown?” The Dissenters seem to have locked him out, so Carkesse tried to break in: “Oh but, Parson, you break the Wall, / And Burglary you commit”. Carkesse does not think that these charges warrant defending:

“the way to Build up the Church,

Is to pull down the Chapel o’th’Devil.

Then throw the House out at Window,

And lay it flat with the Ground.”

In other poems Carkesse suggests that he had also strongly taken to the taint of madness about the ‘Popish Plot’: “Titus destroy’d Jerusalem; and Rome / Her self, from Titus, may expect her doom. / Grow, Titus Oates, and thriving in this Land, / A Promise of our future Triumph, stand.” Jesuits and the Dissenters both set him off.

At other moments in the ‘Lucid Intervals’, he tries to assert that the whole incident was a feigned enragement, a piece of devout acting: “Madness in Masquerade …A Mad-man I have Acted, as a Feat”. Perhaps this half admits that he was merely dressed as a parson, and tore up the robe on being challenged about his right to wear it. Carkesse makes allusions to plays like The Humorous Lieutenant and The Mad Lover, in which insanity is performed by the actor in the role, rather than a medical condition.

But the self-exposing ‘On his being Seiz’d on for a Madman, only for having endeavoured to reduce Dissenters unto the CHURCH’ indicates that Carkesse was taken straight off to the asylum after his attack on the ‘Conventicle’, looking very much like a dangerous maniac, but (from his point of view) on his dignity and determined to make it look as though he went without constraint:

as I did pass,

I arm’d my hands in Coach with broken Glass;

Threatning the Slaves, which waited on my wheel,

That if they touch’d me, they should find 'twas steel,

Th’affrighted multitude observe their distance,

Without their help I enter, or my resistance:

But the great Tumult, and such solemn state,

Amus’d the Officers of Bedlam-Gate:

So well I Acted, that they did not stick,

Me to receive as their Arch-Lunatic…

The old print DNB apparently said that Carkesse ended up as a Catholic. The current ODNB says this is not evidenced. But he was, to say the least, unstable, and may have ended up in one of the churches he had previously attacked. My image is of course one of Goya’s mad houses.