Shakespeare’s maladies are many and the symptoms very well defined.
Diseases of the nervous system seem to have been a favorite study,
especially insanity; Lear, Timon, and Hamlet being excellent examples.
And he * * * (a short tale to make),
Fell into a sadness; then into a fast;
Thence to a watch; thence into a weakness;
Thence to a lightness; and, by this declension
Into the madness wherein now he raves.
Hamlet, Act II., Sc. II.
He took me by the wrist and held me hard;
Then goes he to the length of all his arm;
And with his other hand thus o’er his brow,
He falls to such perusal of my face,
As he would draw it. Long stay’d he so;
At last,—a little shaking of mine arm,
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,
He raised a sigh so piteous and profound,
That it did seem to shatter all his bulk,
And end his being: That done, he lets me go:
And, with his head o’er his shoulder turn’d,
He seem’d to find his way without his eyes;
For out o’ doors he went without their help,
And, to the last, bended their light on me.
Hamlet, Act II., Sc. I.
Alas, how is it with you,
That you do bend your eye on vacancy,
And with the incorporal air do hold discourse?
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep;
And, as the sleeping soldiers in the alarm,
Your bedded hair, like life in excrements,
Starts up, and stands on end.
Hamlet, Act III., Sc. IV.
O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, scholar’s, soldier’s, eye, tongue, sword:
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers,—quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck’d the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth,
Blasted with ecstasy.
Hamlet, Act III., Sc. I.
There’s something in his soul,
O’er which his melancholy sits on brood;
And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose,
Will be some danger.
Hamlet, Act III., Sc. I.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d;
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;
Raze out the written troubles of the brain;
And, with some sweet oblivious antidote,
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
Macbeth, Act V., Sc. III.
* * * * * * Infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.
Remove from her the means of all annoyance,
And still keep eyes upon her.
Macbeth, Act V., Sc. I.
Infirmity doth still neglect all office,
Whereto our health is bound; we are not ourselves,
When nature, being oppress’d, commands the mind
To suffer with the body: I’ll forbear;
And am fall’n out with my more headier will,
To take the indispos’d and sickly fit
For the sound man.
King Lear, Act II., Sc. IV.
This is in thee a nature but infected;
A poor unmanly melancholy, sprung
From change of fortune.
Timon of Athens, Act IV., Sc. III.
The mere want of gold, and the falling-from of his friends,
drove him into this melancholy.
Timon of Athens, Act IV., Sc. III.
Tell him * * * * * *
* * * that his lady mourns at his disease:
Persuade him that he hath been a lunatic.
Taming of the Shrew, Ind., Sc. I.
* * * Being lunatic
He rush’d into my house, and took perforce
My ring away.
Comedy of Errors, Act IV., Sc. III.
These dangerous unsafe lunes.
Winter’s Tale, Act II., Sc. II.
With great imagination,
Proper to madmen, led his powers to death,
And, winking, leap’d into destruction.
Henry IV—2d, Act. I., Sc. III.
Oft the eye mistakes, the brain being troubled.
Venus and Adonis.
To see his nobleness!
Conceiving the dishonour of his mother,
He straight declin’d, droop’d, took it deeply;
Fasten’d and fix’d the shame on’t in himself;
Threw off his spirit, his appetite, his sleep,
And downright languish’d.
Winter’s Tale, Act II., Sc. III.
His siege is now
Against the mind, the which he pricks and wounds
With many legions of strange fantasies,
Which, in their throng and press to that last hold,
Confound themselves.
King John, Act V., Sc. VII.
Shakespeare certainly had the true idea of the great value of sleep,
and he also knew of its importance in the treatment of brain diseases.
Sleep serves as an excellent stimulant, promoting the growth of the
brain. The infant, during the first ten weeks of its life, sleeps most
of the time and hence during that period its brain is overdeveloped in
proportion to its size.
Our foster-nurse of nature is repose,
The which he lacks; that to provoke in him,
Are many simples operative, whose power
Will close the eye of anguish.
King Lear, Act IV., Sc. IV.
O sleep, gentle sleep,
Nature’s soft nurse,
King Henry IV—2d, Act III., Sc. I.
Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher of life’s feast.
Macbeth, Act II., Sc. I.
Oppressed nature sleeps:—
This rest might yet have balm’d thy broken senses,
Which, if convenient will not allow,
Stand in hard cure.
King Lear, Act III., Sc. VI.
Man’s rich restorative; his balmy bath,
That supplies, lubricates and keeps in play
The various movements of that nice machine,
Which asks such frequent periods of repair.
Young’s Night Thoughts.
Music was held as one of the remedies in the treatment of insanity. It
plays an important part in King Lear, (IV-VII), and finds mention as a
remedy in other plays.
This music mads me, let it sound no more;
For, though it have holp madmen to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad.
Richard II., Act V., Sc. V.
Let there be no noise made, my gentle friends;
Unless some dull and favourable hand
Will whisper music to my weary spirit.
Henry IV—2d, Act IV., Sc. IV.
Your honour’s players, hearing your amendment,
Are come to play a pleasant comedy,
For so your doctors hold it very meet.
Seeing too much sadness hath congeal’d your blood,
And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy;
Therefore, they thought it good you hear a play,
And frame your mind to mirth and merriment,
Which bars a thousand harms, and lengthens life.
Taming of the Shrew, Ind., Sc. II.
Your physicians have expressly charg’d,
In peril to incur your former malady,
That I should yet absent me from your bed.
Taming of the Shrew, Ind., Sc. II.
This closing with him fits his lunacy:
Whate’er I forge to feed his brain-sick fits,
Do you uphold and maintain in your speeches.
Titus Andronicus, Act V., Sc. II.
Dispute not with her, she is lunatic.
Richard III., Act I., Sc. III.
* * Deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do.
As You Like It, Act III., Sc. II.
Why have you suffer’d me to be imprison’d,
Kept in a dark house?
Twelfth Night, Act V., Sc. I.
It is the mynde that makes good or ill,
That maketh wretch or happie, rich or poore.
Spenser—Færie Queene, XI-IX.
Yet they do act
Such antics and such pretty lunacies
That spite of sorrow they make you smile.
Dekker.
Grows lunatic and childish for his son.
Kyd.
When slow Disease, and all her host of pains,
Chills the warm tide which flows along the veins;
When Health, affrighted, spreads her rosy wing,
And flies with every changing gale of Spring:
Not to the aching frame alone confined,
Unyielding pangs assail the drooping mind.
Byron—Childish Recollections.
The accuracy with which Shakespeare has written of apoplexy is justly
alluded to in Bell’s Principles of Surgery, (1815, Vol. II, p. 557):
“My readers will smile, perhaps, to see me quoting Shakespeare among
physicians and theologists; but not one of all their tribe, populous
though it be, could describe so exquisitely the marks of apoplexy,
conspiring with the struggles for life, and the agonies of suffocation,
to deform the countenance of the dead: so curiously does our poet
present to our conception all the signs from which it might be inferred
that the good duke Humfrey had died a violent death.”
See, how the blood is settled in his face!
Oft have I seen a timely-parted ghost,
Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale, and bloodless,
Being all descended to the labouring heart;
Who, in the conflict that it holds with death,
Attracts the same for aidance ’gainst the enemy;
Which with the heart there cools, and ne’er returneth
To blush and beautify the cheek again.
But see, his face is black and full of blood;
His eye-balls further out than when he liv’d,
Staring full ghastly like a strangled man:
His hair uprear’d, his nostrils stretch’d with struggling;
His hands abroad display’d, as one that grasp’d
And tugg’d for life, and was by strength subdu’d.
Look on the sheets, his hair, you see, is sticking;
His well-proportion’d beard made rough and rugged,
Like to the summer’s corn by tempest lodg’d.
It can not be but he was murder’d here;
The least of all these signs were probable.
Henry VI—2d, Act III., Sc. II.
Suddenly a grievous sickness took him,
That made him gasp, and stare, and catch the air.
Henry VI—2d, Act III., Sc. II.
Falstaff. And I hear moreover, his highness is fallen into
this same whoreson apoplexy.
Ch. Just. Well, heaven mend him! I pray let me speak with you.
Falstaff. This apoplexy is, as I take it, a kind of lethargy,
an’t to please your lordship; a kind of sleeping in the blood,
a whoreson tingling.
Ch. Just. What tell you me of it? Be it as it is.
Falstaff. It hath its original from much grief; from study
and perturbation of the brain.
Henry IV—2d, Act I., Sc. II
War. Be patient, princes; you do know, these fits
Are with his highness very ordinary.
Stand from him, give him air; he’ll straight be well.
Clar. No, no; he can not long hold out these pangs:
The incessant care and labour of his mind
Hath wrought the mure, that should confine it in,
So thin, that life looks through, and will break out.
P. Humph. This apoplexy will certain be his end.
Henry IV—2d, Act IV., Sc. IV.
Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible.
Coriolanus, Act IV., Sc. V.
Dick. Why dost thou quiver, man?
Say. The palsy and not fear provokes me.
Cade. Nay, he nods at us, as who should say,
I’ll be even with you.
Henry VI—2d, Act IV., Sc. VII.
With a palsy-fumbling on his gorget,
Shake in and out the rivet.
Troilus and Cressida, Act I., Sc. III.
How quickly should this arm of mine,
Now prisoner to the palsy, chastise thee.
Richard II, Act II., Sc. III.
Flat on the ground and still as any stone,
A very corpse, save yielding forth a breath.
Sackville.
How concisely he describes epilepsy, giving the most prominent symptoms.
Casca. He fell down in the market-place, and foamed at
mouth, and was speechless.
Bru. ’Tis very like,—he has the falling sickness.
Casca. * * * * * When he came to himself again, he said,
If he had done or said anything amiss, he desired their
worships to think it was his infirmity.
Julius Cæsar, Act I., Sc. II.
Julius Cæsar was the only epileptic among his characters: Othello is
spoken of as being one, but this is merely Iago’s lie to Cassio, which
is clearly shown in Othello’s conversation after the trance, it being a
continuation of the former subject, which is never the case in epilepsy.
Iago. My lord is fall’n into an epilepsy:
This is his second fit; he had one yesterday.
Cas. Rub him about the temples.
Iago.No, forbear;
The lethargy must have his quiet course;
If not, he foams at mouth, and by and by
Breaks out to savage madness.
Act IV., Sc. I.
A plague upon your epileptic visage!
King Lear, Act. II., Sc. II.
He takes some notice of the other affections classed under nervous
diseases.
Which of your hips has the most profound sciatica?
Measure for Measure, Act I., Sc. II.
Thou cold sciatica,
Cripple our Senators, that their limbs may halt
As lamely as their manners!
Timon of Athens, Act IV., Sc. I.
Lord, how my head aches! what a head have I!
It beats as it would fall in twenty pieces.
Romeo and Juliet, Act II., Sc. V.
When your head did but ache
I knit my handkerchief about your brows.
King John, Act IV., Sc. I.
Oth. I have a pain upon my forehead here.
Des. Why, that’s with watching; ’t will away again.
Othello, Act III., Sc. II.
Let our finger ache, and it indues
Our other healthful members even to a sense
Of pain.
Othello, Act III., Sc. IV.
Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had
turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for good
youth he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and being
taken with the cramp, was drowned.
As You Like It, Act IV., Sc. I.
The aged man that coffers-up his gold
Is plagu’d with cramps, and gouts and painful fits.
Lucrece.
* * * Shorten up their sinews
With aged cramps.
Tempest, Act IV., Sc. I.
To-night thou shalt have cramps,
Side stitches that shall pen thy breath up.
Tempest, Act I., Sc. II.
I’ll rack thee with old cramps,
Fill all thy bones with aches.
Tempest, Act I., Sc. II.
Thy nerves are in their infancy again
And have no vigour in them.
Tempest, Act I., Sc. II.
Hysteria, in Shakespeare’s time, was considered a disease common to
both sexes, and was known as “Hysterica passio,” or more popularly
termed “the mother.”
O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Hysterica passio—down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element ’s below! Where is this daughter?
King Lear, Act II., Sc. IV.
Percy thinks that Shakespeare read of this disease in Harsnet’s
“Declaration of Popish Impostures” while he was looking up material for
his character of Tom of Bedlam. The following is taken from (p. 25) the
work referred to: “Ma: Maynie had a spice of the Hysterica passio as
seems from his youth, hee himself termes it the Moother, and saith
that hee was much troubled with it in Fraunce, and that it was one of
the causes that mooved him to leave his holy order whereinto he was
initiated and to returne into England.”
Diseases of the nervous system have not been overlooked by other
writers. How excellently we have described the chief symptom of
locomotor ataxia:
Obliquely waddling to the mark in view.
Pope.
And Byron well portrays vertigo.
Her cheek turn’d ashes, ears rung, brain whirl’d round,
As if she had received a sudden blow,
And the hearts dew of pain sprang fast and chilly
O’er her fair front, like morning’s on a lily.
Although she was not of the fainting sort,
Baba thought she would faint, but there he err’d—
It was but a convulsion, which, though short,
Can never be described; we all have heard,
And some of us have felt thus “all amort,”
When things beyond the common have occurr’d.
Don Juan, Canto VI., Verse CV.
That old vertigo in his head
Will never leave him, till he’s dead.
Swift.
Of all mad creatures, if the learned are right,
It is the slaver kills and not the bite.
Pope.
Loss!—such a palaver,
I’d inoculate sooner my wife with the slaver
Of a dog when gone rabid, than listen two hours
* * * * * *
Byron—The Blues.
The sot,
Hath got blue devils for his morning mirrors:
What though on Lethe’s stream he seem to float,
He can not sink his tremors or his terrors;
The ruby glass that shakes within his hand,
Leaves a sad sediment of Time’s worst sand.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto XV., Verse IV.
Taking up diseases of the circulatory system next we find Shakespeare
displaying considerable knowledge in regard to them. The extended
impulse of the heart under intense excitement is nicely shown in the
Rape of Lucrece.
His hand, that yet remains upon her breast,—
Rude ram, to batter such an ivory wall!
May feel her heart,—(poor citizen!) distress’d.
Wounding itself to death, rise up and fall,
Beating her bulk, that his hand shakes withal.
Again,
I fear’d thy fortune, and my joints did tremble.
My boding heart pants, beats, and takes no rest,
But, like an earthquake, shakes thee on my breast.
Venus and Adonis.
I have tremor cordis on me,—my heart dances.
Winter’s Tale, Act I., Sc. II.
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature?
Macbeth, Act I., Sc. III.
Death from “broken heart,” caused by excessive grief, finds mention in
several plays.
Woe the while!
O, cut my lace; lest my heart, cracking it,
Break too!
Winter’s Tale, Act III., Sc. II.
The grief that does not speak,
Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.
Macbeth, Act IV., Sc. III.
Shall split thy very heart with sorrow.
Richard III., Act I., Sc. III.
Dyer in his “Folk-Lore of Shakespeare” quotes the following from Mr.
Timb’s “Mysteries of Life, Death, and Futurity,” (1861, p. 149.) “This
affection (broken heart) was, it is believed, first described by
Harvey; but since his day several cases have been observed. Morgagni
has recorded a few examples: among them, that of George II., who died
in 1760; and, what is very curious, he fell a victim to the same
malady. Dr. Elliotson, in his Lumleyan Lectures on Diseases of the
Heart, in 1839, stated that he had only seen one instance; but in
the ‘Cyclopædia of Practical Medicine’ Dr. Townsend gives a table of
twenty-five cases, collected from various authors.”
A very good case of syncope is presented in Pericles. “The cases of
apparent death, in which it is believed that premature interment
sometimes takes place, are of this kind. Instances have occurred in
which the pulse, respiration and consciousness have been absent for
several days, and yet the patient has ultimately recovered. The system
is in a sort of hybernation, in which vitality remains, though the
vital functions are suspended. It is probable that, in such cases, a
very careful auscultation might detect a slight sound in the heart.”
(Dr. George B. Wood’s Practice. 1858. Vol. II., p. 211.)
Make a fire within;
Fetch hither all my boxes in my closet.
Death may usurp on nature many hours,
And yet the fire of life kindle again
The o’erpress’d spirits. I have heard
Of an Egyptian that had nine hours lien dead,
Who was by good appliance recovered.
* * * * * the fire and cloths—
The rough and woeful music that we have,
Cause it to sound, ’beseech you.
The viol once more; * * *
* * * I pray you, give her air;
This queen will live; nature awakes; a warmth
Breathes out of her: She hath not been entranc’d
About five hours. See how she ’gins to blow
Into life’s flower again!
Hush, my gentle neighbors!
Lend me your hands; to the next chamber bear her.
Get linen; now this matter must be looked to,
For her relapse is mortal. Come, come,
And Æsculapius guide us!
Act III., Sc. II.
Take thou this phial, being then in bed,
And this distilled liquor drink thou off:
When, presently, through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humour, for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease,
No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou liv’st;
The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To paly ashes; thy eyes’ windows fall,
Like death, when he shuts up the day of life;
Each part, depriv’d of supple government,
Shall, stiff, and stark, and cold, appear like death:
And in this borrow’d likeness of shrunk death
Thou shalt continue two and forty hours,
And then awake as from a pleasant sleep.
Romeo and Juliet, Act IV., Sc. I.
Why does my blood thus muster to my heart,
Making both it unable for itself,
And dissposessing all my other parts
Of necessary fitness?
So play the foolish throngs with one that swoons;
Come all to help him, and so stop the air
By which he should revive.
Measure for Measure, Act II., Sc. IV.
Many will swoon when they do look on blood.
As You Like It, Act IV., Sc. III.
No damsel faints when rather closely press’d,
But more caressing seems when most caress’d;
Superfluous hartshorn, and reviving salts,
Both banish’d by the sovereign cordial “waltz.”
Byron—The Waltz.
Some attention has been paid to chlorosis:
Out, you green-sickness carrion! Out, you baggage,
You tallow-face!
Romeo and Juliet, Act III., Sc. V.
Pand. The pox upon her green sickness for me.
Bawd. Faith, there’s no way to be rid on ’t, but by the
way to the pox.
Pericles, Act IV., Sc. VI.
There’s never any of these demure boys come to any proof; for
thin drink doth so overcool their blood, and making many
fish-meals, that they fall into a kind of male green sickness;
they are generally fools and cowards.
Henry IV—2d, Act IV., Sc. III.
Lepidus,
Since Pompey’s feast, as Menas says, is troubled
With the green sickness.
Antony and Cleopatra, Act III., Sc. II.
Ben Jonson in writing of this disease has happily and properly
recommended marriage as an important step toward recovery.
He would keep you * * * not alone without a husband,
But with a sickness; ay, and the green sickness,
The maiden’s malady; which is a sickness,—
A kind of a disease, * * * * *
And like the fish our mariners call remora.
I say remora,
For it will stay a ship that’s under sail;
And stays are long and tedious things to maids!
And maids are young ships that would be sailing
When they be rigg’d. * * * * *
The stay is dangerous.
I can assure you from the doctor’s mouth,
She has a dropsy, and must change the air
Before she can recover.
Give her vent.
If she do swell. A gimblet must be had;
It is a tympanites she is troubled with.
There are three kinds: the first is anasarca,
Under the flesh a tumor; that’s not hers.
The second is ascites, or aquosus,
A watery humour; that is not hers neither;
But tympanites, which we call the drum.
A wind-bombs in her belly, must be unbraced,
And with a faucet or a peg, let out,
And she’ll do well: get her a husband.
Magnetic Lady, Act II., Sc. I.
My nose fell a-bleeding on Black-Monday last.
Merchant of Venice, Act II., Sc. V.
Diseases of the respiratory system were quite overlooked by Shakespeare.
Consumption catch thee!
Timon of Athens, Act IV., Sc. III.
There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous
pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption!
King Lear, Act IV., Sc. VI.
Thy food is such
As has been belch’d on by infected lungs.
Pericles, Act IV., Sc. VI.
But I’m relapsing into metaphysics,
That labyrinth, whose clue is of the same
Construction as your cures for hectic phthisics,
Those bright moths fluttering round a dying flame.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto XII., Verse LXXII.
Love is riotous, but marriage should have quiet,
And, being consumptive, live on a milk diet.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto XV., Verse XLI.
For goodness, growing to a plurisy,
Dies in his own too-much.
Hamlet, Act IV., Sc. VII.
A whoreson cold, sir; a cough, sir; which I caught with
ringing in the king’s affairs, upon his coronation day.
Henry IV—2d, Act III., Sc. II.
’Tis dangerous to take a cold.
Henry IV., Act II., Sc. III.
The tailor cries, and falls into a cough.
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II., Sc. I.
Coughs will come when sighs depart.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto X., Verse VIII.
Who, * * * but would much rather
Sigh like his son, than cough like his grandfather?
Byron—Don Juan, Canto X., Verse VI.
He has not forgotten the diseases affecting the digestive organs.
An old superstition regarding toothache was that it was caused by a
small worm, formed like an eel, which bored a hole into the tooth, and
various methods were employed to remove it. Dyer notes the fact that
John of Gatisden, one of the oldest medical authorities, attributed
decay of the teeth to this cause.
Don Pedro. What! sigh for the toothache?
Leon. Where is but a humour or a worm?
Much Ado, Act III., Sc. II.
He that sleeps feels not the toothache.
Cymbeline, Act V., Sc. IV.
Being troubled with a raging tooth,
I could not sleep.
Othello, Act III., Sc. III.
There was never yet philosopher,
That could endure the toothache patiently.
Much Ado, Act V., Sc. I.
She shall be buried with her face upwards;
Yet this is no charm for the toothache.
Much Ado, Act III., Sc. II.
Bene. I have the toothache.
D. Pedro. Draw it.
Much Ado, Act III., Sc. II.
Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour.
Richard II., Act I., Sc. III.
A surfeit of the sweetest things
The deepest loathing to the stomach brings.
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II., Sc. II.
Like a sickness, did I loath this food:
But, as in health, come to my natural taste,
Now do I wish it, love it, long for it. * *
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV., Sc. I.
She gallops night by night. * *
O’er ladies lips, who straight on kisses dream;
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are.
Romeo and Juliet, Act I., Sc. IV.
Fat paunches have lean pates, and dainty bits
Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act I., Sc. I.
Say, can you fast? Your stomachs are too young;
And abstinence engenders maladies.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act IV., Sc. III.
Unquiet meals make ill digestions.
Comedy of Errors, Act V., Sc. I.
A sick man’s appetite, who desires most that
Which would increase his evil.
Coriolanus, Act I., Sc. I.
Do not turn me about; my stomach is not constant.
Tempest, Act II., Sc. II.
For, ever and anon comes indigestion.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto XI., Verse III.
When a roast and a ragout,
And fish and soup, by some side-dishes back’d,
Can give us either pain or pleasure, who
Would pique himself on intellects, whose use
Depends so much upon the gastric juice?
Byron—Don Juan, Canto V., Verse XXXII.
He ate and he was well supplied; and she
Who watch’d him like a mother, would have fed
Him past all bounds, because she smiled to see,
Such appetite in one she had deem’d dead:
But Zoe, being older than Haidee,
Knew (by tradition, for she ne’er had read),
That famish’d people must be slowly nursed,
And fed by spoonfuls, else they always burst.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto II., Verse CLVIII.
Why look you pale?
Seasick, I think, coming from Muscovy.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act V., Sc. II.
The shepherd’s daughter * * * who began to be much seasick.
Winter’s Tale, Act V., Sc. II.
——the impatient wind blew half a gale:
High dash’d the spray, the bows dipp’d in the sea,
And seasick passengers turn’d somewhat pale.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto X., Verse LXIV.
Now we’ve reached her, lo! the captain,
Gallant Kidd, commands the crew;
Passengers their berths are clapt in,
Some to grumble, some to spew.
“Help!”—“a couplet?”—“no, a cup
Of warm water.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Zounds! my liver’s coming up;
I shall not survive the racket
Of this brutal Lisbon Packet.”
Byron—Poems.
Love’s a capricious power; I’ve known it hold
Out through a fever caused by its own heat,
But be much puzzled by a cough or cold,
And find a quinsy very hard to treat;
Against all noble maladies he’s bold,
But vulgar illnesses don’t like to meet,
Nor that a sneeze should interrupt his sigh,
Nor inflammations redden his blind eye.
But worst of all it’s nausea, or a pain
About the lower regions of the bowels;
Love who heroically breathes a vein,
Shrinks from the application of hot towels,
And purgatives are dangerous to his reign,
Seasickness death.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto II., Verse XXII.
Like wind compress’d and pent within a bladder,
Or like a human colic which is sadder.
Byron—Vision of Judgment.
When will your constipation have done, good madame?
Cartwright.
Diseases of the secretory system have not escaped his eagle eye.
A fat old man * * * that swoln parcel of dropsies.
Henry IV., Act II., Sc. IV.
The dropsy drown this fool!
Tempest, Act IV., Sc. I.
It is a dropsied honour.
All’s Well, Act II., Sc. III.
Fal. You make fat rascals, mistress Doll.
Doll. I make them! gluttony and disease make them.
Henry IV—2d, Act II., Sc. IV.
Leprosy was sometimes called measles, from the French of leper,
meseau or mesel. This is the sense in which Shakespeare uses the
word measles—an entirely different one from that now in vogue. The
word “hoar,” occurring in several of the quotations, refers to the
white spots so characteristic of the disease.
As for my country I have shed my blood,
Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungs
Coin words till their decay against those measles,
Which we disdain should tetter us, yet sought
The very way to catch them.
Coriolanus, Act III., Sc. I.
Gold! * * * * * *
This yellow slave will make the hoar leprosy ador’d.
Timon of Athens, Act IV., Sc. III.
Hoar the flamen,
That scolds against the quality of flesh,
And not believes himself.
Timon of Athens, Act IV., Sc. III.
Itches, blains,
Sow all the Athenian bosoms, and their crop
Be general leprosy!
Timon of Athens, Act IV., Sc. I.
Diseased nature oftimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions.
Henry IV., Act III., Sc. I.
For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,
For ending thee no sooner.
Measure for Measure, Act III., Sc. I.
Now the dry serpigo on the subject!
Troilus and Cressida, Act II., Sc. III.
A tailor might scratch her where ’er she did itch.
Tempest, Act II., Sc. II.
In the midland counties of England a pimple was frequently called “a quat.”
I have rubb’d this young quat almost to a sense,
And he grows angry.
Othello. Act V., Sc. I.
Rubbing the poor itch,
* * * Make yourselves scabs.
Coriolanus, Act I., Sc. I.
I would thou didst itch from head to foot, and I had the
scratching of thee;
I would make thee the loathsomest scab in Greece.
Troilus and Cressida, Act II., Sc. I.
My elbow itched; I thought there would a scab follow.
Much Ado, Act III., Sc. III.
Scratching her legs that one shall swear she bleeds.
Taming of the Shrew, Ind., Sc. II.
Full of unpleasing blots and sightless stains.
King John, Act III., Sc. I.
Dro. S. She sweats—a man may go over shoes in the grime of it.
Ant. S. That’s a fault that water will mend.
Dro. S. No, sir, ’tis in grain.
Comedy of Errors, Act III., Sc. II.
I had rather heat my liver with drinking.
Antony and Cleopatra, Act I., Sc. II.
Let my liver rather heat with wine,
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.
Merchant of Venice, Act I., Sc. I.
Were my wife’s liver
Infected as her life, she would not live
The running of one glass.
Winter’s Tale, Act I., Sc. II.
What grief hath set the jaundice on your cheeks?
Troilus and Cressida, Act I., Sc. III.
All seems infected that the infected spy,
And all seems yellow to the jaundiced eye.
The liver is the lazaret of bile,
But very rarely executes its function,
For the first passion stays there such a while
That all the rest creep in and form a junction.
Like knots of vipers on a dunghill’s soil,
Rage, fear, hate, jealousy, revenge, compunction,
So that all mischiefs spring up from this entrail,
Like earthquakes from the hidden fire call’d “central.”
Byron—Don Juan, Canto III., Verse CCXV.
The examination of the urine as an aid to diagnosis has been
resorted to for many centuries, but the processes of to-day are, of
course, vastly different from and hardly to be compared with those
of earlier times, when blind ignorance caused urine-examining, or
“water-casting,” to be a mere mockery. The practice, says Dr.
Bucknill, arose “like the barber surgery, from the ecclesiastical
interdicts upon the medical vocations of the clergy. Priests and
monks, being unable to visit their former patients, are said first to
have resorted to the expedient of divining the malady, and directing
the treatment upon simple inspection of the urine.” The College of
Physicians, in an old statute, denounced it as belonging only to
charlatans, and members were not allowed to give advice on inspection
only. Shakespeare has frequently referred to it, as have also many
others of the old writers, who condemn strongly what was then a shallow
deception, but what has now become, by the light of knowledge, one of
the most important diagnostic aids to many diseases.
Host. Thou art a Castilian, king urinal!
* * * Pardon, a word, monsieur, mock-water.
Dr. Caius. Mock-vater! vat is dat?
Merry Wives, Act II., Sc. III.
If thou could’st, doctor, cast
The water of my land, find her disease,
And purge it to a sound and pristine health,
I would applaud thee to the very echo.
Macbeth, Act V., Sc. III.
Carry his water to the wise woman.
Twelfth Night, Act III., Sc. IV.
Falstaff. What says the doctor to my water?
Page. He said, sir, the water itself was a good healthy
water; but, for the party that owed it, he might
have more diseases than he knew for.
Henry IV—2d, Act I., Sc. II.
Others, when the bagpipe sings i’ the nose
Cannot contain their urine: for affection,
Master of passion, sways it to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes.
Merchant of Venice, Act IV., Sc. I.
Macd. What three things does drink especially provoke?
Port. Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine.
Macbeth, Act II., Sc. II.
When he makes water, his urine is congealed ice.
Measure for Measure, Act III., Sc. II.
Fevers and other general diseases are often referred to and very many
excellent allusions have been made to them.
He is so shaked of a burning quotidian tertian, that it is most
lamentable to behold.
Henry V., Act II., Sc. I.
If all the wine in my bottle will recover him, I will help
his ague.
Tempest, Act II., Sc. II.
A lunatic lean-witted fool,
Presuming on an ague’s privilege,
Dar’st with thy frozen admonition
Make pale our cheek; chasing the royal blood,
With fury, from his native residence.
Richard II., Act II., Sc. I.
But now will canker sorrow eat my bud,
And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
And he will look as hollow as a ghost,
As dim and meagre as an ague’s fit,
And so he’ll die.
King John, Act III., Sc. IV.
Here let them lie till famine and the ague eat them up.
Macbeth, Act V., Sc. V.
An untimely ague
Stay’d me a prisoner in my chamber.
Henry VIII., Act I., Sc. I.
My wind * * * would blow me to an ague.
Merchant of Venice, Act I., Sc. I.
He had a fever when he was in Spain,
And, when the fit was on him, I did mark
How he did shake; ’tis true, this god did shake:
His coward lips did from their colour fly;
And that same eye whose bend did awe the world
Did lose his lustre: I did hear him groan:
Ay, and that tongue of his, that bade the Romans
Mark him, and write his speeches in their books,
Alas! it cried, Give me some drink, Titinius,
As a sick girl.
Julius Cæsar, Act I., Sc. II.
Home without boots, and in foul weather too!
How ’scapes he agues?
Henry IV., Act III., Sc. I.
Danger, like an ague, subtly taints
Even then when we sit idly in the sun.
Troilus and Cressida, Act III., Sc. III.
All the infections that the sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him
By inch-meal a disease!
Tempest, Act II., Sc. II.
It is not for your health thus to commit
Your weak condition to the raw cold morning.
Julius Cæsar, Act II., Sc. I.
I asked the doctors after his disease—
He died of the slow fever called the tertian,
And left his widow to her own aversion.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto I., Verse XXXIV.
His feelings had not those strange fits, like tertians
Of common likings, which make some deplore
What they should laugh at—the mere ague still
Of men’s regards, the fever or the chill.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto XIII., Verse XVII.
Plague has been alluded to frequently, but generally only the symptoms
of carbuncles and the petechiæ are mentioned. As the latter only
occur in very bad cases, they were called “God’s tokens,” and their
appearance denoted a fatal termination of the disease. Hence the home
of the patient was closed and “Lord have mercy on us” placed upon the door.
Write Lord have mercy on us on those three;
They are infected, in their hearts it lies;
They have the plague and caught it of your eyes.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act V., Sc. II.
He is so plaguy-proud, that the death tokens of it cry—
No recovery.
Troilus and Cressida, Act II., Sc. III.
Enobarbus. How appears the fight?
Scarus. On our side like the token’d pestilence,
Where death is sure
Antony and Cleopatra, Act III., Sc. X.
Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome,
And occupations perish!
Coriolanus, Act IV., Sc. I.
The searchers of the town,
Suspecting that we both were in a house
Where the infectious pestilence did reign,
Sealed up the doors and would not let us forth.
Romeo and Juliet, Act V., Sc. II.
Thou art a boil,
A plague sore, an embossed carbuncle,
In my corrupted blood.
King Lear, Act II., Sc. IV.
Boils and plagues
Plaster you o’er; that you may be abhorr’d
Further than seen, and one infect another
Against the wind a mile!
Coriolanus, Act I., Sc. IV.
Men take diseases, one of another:
Therefore, let men take heed of their company.
Henry IV—2d, Act V., Sc. I.
Being sick * * * * * *
And as the wretch, whose fever-weaken’d joints,
Like strengthless hinges, buckle under life.
Henry IV—2d, Act I., Sc. I.
We are all diseas’d; and
Have brought ourselves into a burning fever,
And we must bleed for it.
Henry IV—2d, Act IV., Sc. I.
This fever, that hath troubled me so long,
Lies heavy on me. * * * *
This tyrant fever burns me up,
And will not let me welcome this good news.
King John, Act V., Sc. III.
What’s a fever but a fit of madness?
Comedy of Errors, Act V., Sc. I.
At this instant he is sick, my lord,
Of a strange fever.
Measure for Measure, Act V., Sc. I.
My heart beats thicker than a feverous pulse.
Troilus and Cressida, Act III., Sc. II.
Sickness is catching.
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act I., Sc. I.
Thus saith the preacher: “Nought beneath the sun,
Is new,” yet still from change to change we run:
What varied wonders tempt us as they pass!
The cow-pox, tractors, galvanism, and gas,
In turns appear, to make the vulgar stare,
Till the swoln bubble bursts—and all is air!
Byron—Eng. Bards and Scotch Reviewers.
Vaccination certainly has been
A kind antithesis to Congreve’s rockets,
With which the Doctor paid off an old pox,
By borrowing a new one from an ox.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto I., Verse CXXIX.
I don’t know how it was, but he grew sick;
The empress was alarm’d, and her physician
(The same who physick’d Peter), found the tick
Of his fierce pulse betoken a condition
Which augur’d of the dead, however quick
Itself, and show’d a feverish disposition;
At which the whole court was extremely troubled,
The sovereign shock’d, and all his medicines doubled.
Low were the whispers, manifold the rumours:
Some said he had been poison’d by Potemkin;
Others talked learnedly of certain tumours,
Exhaustion, or disorders of the same kin;
Some said ’twas a concoction of the humours,
With which the blood too readily will claim kin;
Others again were ready to maintain,
“’Twas only the fatigue of last campaign.”
But here is one prescription out of many:
“Sodæ-sulphat. 3. VI. 3. S. mannæ optim.
Aq. fervent. F. 3. iss. 3. ij tinct, sennæ
Haustus,” (and here the surgeon came and cupp’d him),
R. Pulv. com. gr iii. Ipecacuanhæ,
(With more besides, if Juan had not stopp’d ’em).
“Bolus potassæ sulphuret, sumendus,
Et haustus ter in die capiendus.”
This is the way physicians mend or end us,
Secundum artem. * * * * *
Byron—Don Juan, Canto X., Verse XXXIX.
Rheumatic diseases do abound:
And through this distemperature, we see
The seasons alter.
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II., Sc. I.
This raw rheumatic day.
Merry Wives, Act III., Sc. I.
Is Brutus sick,—and is it physical
To walk unbraced, and suck up humours
Of the dank morning? What, is Brutus sick,
And will he steal out of his wholesome bed,
To dare the vile contagion of the night,
And tempt the rheuma and unpurged air
To add unto his sickness?
Julius Cæsar, Act II., Sc. I.
Is this the poultice for my aching bones?
Romeo and Juliet, Act II., Sc. V.
A coming shower your shooting corns presage,
Old aches will throb, your hollow tooth will rage.
Swift.
Yet am I better
Than one that’s sick o’ the gout, since he had rather
Groan so in perpetuity, than be cur’d
By the sure physician, death.
Cymbeline, Act V., Sc. IV.
A rich man that hath not the gout.
As You Like It, Act III., Sc. II.
His grace was rather pained
With some slight, light, hereditary twinges
Of gout, which rusts aristocratic hinges.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto, XVI., Verse XXXIV.
It is a hard, although a common case,
To find our children running restive—they
In whom our brightest days we would retrace,
Our little selves reform’d in finer clay;
Just as old age is creeping on apace,
And clouds come o’er the sunset of our day,
They kindly leave us, though not quite alone,
But in good company—the gout and stone.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto III., Verse LIX.
Life’s thin thread ’s spun out
Between the gaping heir and gnawing gout.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto XIII., Verse XL.
Dear honest Ned is in the gout.
Lies racked with pain, and you without:
How patiently you hear him groan!
How glad the case is not your own!
Yet should some neighbor feel a pain
Just in the parts where I complain,
How many a message would he send!
What hearty prayers that I should mend!
Inquire what regimen I kept?
What gave me ease, and how I slept?
And more lament when I was dead,
Than all my snivellers round my bed.
Swift—“Death of Dr. Swift.”
Diseases of the absorbent system are well represented by scrofula, or
“King’s evil,” as it was known in Shakespeare’s time. This disease,
so called on account of the supposed power of cure being invested in
the handling and prayers of the king, was first so treated by Edward
the Confessor, in 1058, and by all the succeeding rulers until William
III., who refused. Queen Anne resumed the practice, but King George I.
put an end to it. During the twenty years following 1662 upwards of
100,000 persons were touched for the malady.
Malcolm. Comes the king forth I pray you?
Doctor. Ay, sir; there are a crew of wretched souls
That stay his cure; their malady convinces
The great assay of art; but, at his touch,
Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand,
They presently amend.
Malcolm. I thank you, doctor.
Macduff. What’s the disease he means?
Malcolm. ’Tis call’d the evil
A most miraculous work in this good king:
Which often, since my here-remain in England,
I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven,
Himself best knows: but strangely-visited people,
All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,
The mere despair of surgery, he cures;
Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,
Put on with holy prayers; and ’tis spoken,
To the succeeding royalty he leaves
The healing benediction.
Macbeth, Act IV., Sc. III.
On the action of medicines he has given us abundant cause to think he
was much better informed than the average man of his time.
Cleo. Give me to drink mandragora
Char. Why, madame?
Cleo. That I might sleep out this great gap of time,
My Antony is away.
Antony and Cleopatra, Act I., Sc. V.
Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever med’cine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou ow’dst yesterday.
Othello, Act III., Sc. III.
Cupid’s cup
With the first draught intoxicates apace—
A quintessential laudanum or “black drop”
Which makes one drunk at once, without the base
Expedient of full bumpers.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto IX,. Verse LXVII.
——like an opiate which brings troubled rest,
Or none,
Byron—Don Juan, Canto XVI., Verse X
The drug he gave me, which, he said, was precious
And cordial to me, have I not found it
Murderous to the senses?
Cymbeline, Act IV., Sc. II.
Have we eaten of the insane root,
That takes the reason prisoner?
Macbeth, Act I., Sc. III.
Commentators think that Shakespeare found the name
of this root in Bateman’s Commentary on Bartholeme de Propriet Rerum:
“Henbane (Hyoscyamus) is called Insana, mad, for the use thereof
is perillous; for if it be eate or drunke, it breedeth madnesse, or
slow lykenesse of sleepe. Therefore this hearb is called commonly
Mirilidium, for it taketh away wit and reason.”
Lib. XVII., Ch. 87.
Thy uncle stole,
With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,
And in the porches of mine ears did pour
The leperous distilment; whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man,
That, swift as quicksilver, it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body;
And with a sudden rigour, it doth posset
And curd, like sour droppings into milk,
The thin and wholesome blood: so did it mine,
And a most instant tetter bark’d about,
Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust,
All my smooth body.
Hamlet, Act I., Sc. V.
It would indeed be interesting to know the source of Shakespeare’s
knowledge on the physiological action of this alkaloid of tobacco. Most
true it is that he has selected an excellent drug for his purpose in
taking up the crude oil—Nicotia nin (hebenon). Birds will fall dead as
they approach it; one drop is sufficient to kill a dog; and man dies
in from two to five minutes after taking a poisonous dose: but the
drug produces death by the failure of respiration, not by its direct
action on the blood. “In nicotia-poisoning the blood is, however, not
perceptibly affected. The amount of the alkaloid necessary to take
life is exceedingly small, and although death by asphyxia causes the
vital fluid to be everywhere dark, yet the microscope reveals only
normal corpuscles. Moreover, Krocker has found that the dark blood
rapidly assumes an arterial hue when shaken in the air, and that its
spectrum is normal.” (H. C. Wood’s Toxicology, 1882, p. 370.) It is
thought by many that Shakespeare did not intend “hebenon” to mean the
alkaloid of tobacco, and very plausible arguments have been brought
forward to show that he meant hebon or the juice of the yew. Dyer, in
his chapter on plants, gives the following extract of a paper read by
Rev. W. A. Harrison before the New Shakespeare Society in 1882: “It
has been suggested that the poison intended by the Ghost in ‘Hamlet,’
(I-V.), when he speaks of the ‘juice of cursed hebenon,’ is that of
the yew, and is the same as Marlowe’s ‘juice of hebon.’ (Jew of Malta,
III-IV.) The yew is called hebon by Spenser and by other writers of
Shakespeare’s age; and in its various forms of eben, eiben, hiben,
etc., this tree is so named in no less than five different European
languages. From medical authorities, both of ancient and modern times,
it would seem that the juice of the yew is a rapidly fatal poison;
next, that the symptoms attending upon yew-poisoning correspond, in a
very remarkable manner, with those which follow the bites of poisonous
snakes; and, lastly, that no other poison but the yew produces the
lazar-like ulcerations on the body, upon which Shakespeare, in this
passage, lays so much stress.” From these arguments there seems to be
every reason for believing that Shakespeare did mean the juice of the
yew, and it is to be hoped that the continual harping on this subject,
as an evidence of his medical ignorance, will soon cease.
Recovered again with aquavitæ, or some other hot infusion.
Winter’s Tale, Act IV., Sc. III.
I must needs wake you: * * * *
Alas! my lady’s dead! * * * * *
* * * * * some aquavitæ, ho!
Romeo and Juliet, Act IV., Sc. V.
The second property of your excellent sherris is—the
warming of the blood; which, before cold and settled, left
the liver white and pale, * * * but the sherris warms it,
and makes it course from the inwards to the parts extreme.
Henry IV—2d, Act IV., Sc. III.
The rapidity with which aconite, in poisonous doses, acts, is forcibly
shown in the comparison of it with gunpowder.
A hoop of gold to bind thy brothers in,
That the united vessel of their blood,
Mingled with venom of suggestion,
(As, force perforce, the age will pour it in,)
Shall never leak, though it do work as strong
As aconitum, or rash gunpowder.
Henry IV—2d, Act IV., Sc. IV.
Let me have
A dram of poison; such soon-speeding gear
As will disperse itself through all the veins,
That the life-weary taker may fall dead;
And that the trunk may be discharg’d of breath
As violently, as hasty powder fir’d
Doth hurry from the fatal cannon’s womb.
Romeo and Juliet, Act V., Sc. I.
The curative properties of balm or balsam have been known and
valued for ages past.
But, saying thus, instead of oil and balm,
Thou lay’st in every gash that love hath given me
The knife that made it.
Troilus and Cressida, Act I., Sc. I.
Is this the balsam that the usuring senate
Pours into captain’s wounds? Banishment!
Timon of Athens, Act III., Sc. V.
My pity hath been balm to heal their wounds.
Henry VI.—3d, Act IV, Sc. III.
A solution of gold was supposed to possess great medical power; even
the actual contact of the pure metal, according to their belief,
kept the wearer ever in good health. Dyer quotes from John Wight’s
translation of the “Secrets of Alexis,” in which is given a receipt
“to dissolve and reducte golde into a potable licour which conserveth
the youth and healthe of a man, and will heale every disease that is
thought incurable in the space of seven daies at the furthest.” The
term “grand liquor,” as it appears in Shakespeare, refers to this solution.
Coming to look on you, thinking you dead,
(And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,)
I spake unto the crown, as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: The care on thee depending,
Hath fed upon the body of my father;
Therefore, thou, best of gold, art worst of gold;
Other, less fine in carat, is more precious,
Preserving life in med’cine potable.
Henry IV—2d, Act IV., Sc. IV.
Plutus himself,
That knows the tinct and multiplying medicine,
Hath not in nature’s mystery more science
Than I have in this ring.
All’s Well, Act V., Sc. III.
Find this grand liquor that hath gilded ’em.
Tempest, Act V., Sc. I.
We sicken to shun sickness when we purge.
Sonnets, CXVIII.
What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug,
Would scour these English hence?
Macbeth, Act V., Sc. III.
Let’s purge this choler without letting blood:
This we prescribe, though no physician;
Our doctors say, this is no month to bleed.
Richard II., Act I., Sc. I.
That gentle physic, given in time, had cur’d me;
But now I am past all * * *
Henry VIII., Act IV., Sc. II.
’Tis time to give ’em physic, their diseases
Are grown so catching.
Henry VIII., Act I., Sc. III.
He brings his physic
After his patient’s death.
Henry VIII., Act III., Sc. II.
I will not cast away my physic, but on those that are sick.
As You Like It, Act III., Sc. II.
To jump a body with a dangerous physic
That’s sure of death without it.
Coriolanus, Act III., Sc. I.
Doctors give physic by way of prevention.
Swift.
The ignorant and superstitious were of the opinion that poisons could
be prepared so that the effect could be produced at certain periods
after their ingestion. They were also in error in the thought that
poisons caused great swelling of the body.
She did confess she had
For you a mortal mineral; which, being took,
Should by the minute feed on life, and, lingering,
By inches waste you.
Cymbeline, Act V., Sc. V.
All three of them are desperate: their great guilt,
Like poison given to work a great time after,
Now ’gins to bite the spirits.
Tempest, Act III., Sc. III.
Hubert. The king, I fear, is poison’d by a monk:
I left him almost speechless. * * *
Bastard. How did he take it? who did taste to him?
Hubert. A monk, I tell you; a resolved villain,
Whose bowels suddenly burst out: the king
Yet speaks, and, peradventure, may recover.
King John, Act V., Sc. VI.
You shall digest the venom of your spleen,
Though it do split you!
Julius Cæsar, Act IV., Sc. III.
If they had swallow’d poison ’t would appear
By external swelling: but she looks like sleep.
Antony and Cleopatra, Act V., Sc. II.
K. John. There is so hot a summer in my bosom,
That all my bowels crumble up to dust:
I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen
Upon a parchment; and against this fire
Do I shrink up.
P. Henry. How fares your majesty?
K. John. Poison’d,—ill fare; dead, forsook, cast off:
And none of you will bid the winter come,
To thrust his icy fingers in my maw;
Nor let my kingdom’s rivers take their course
Through my burn’d bosom; nor entreat the north
To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips,
And comfort me with cold: I do not ask you much,
I beg cold comfort; and you are so strait,
And so ingrateful, you deny me that. * * *
Within me is a hell; and there the poison
Is, as a fiend, confin’d to tyrannize
On unreprievable condemned blood.
King John, Act V., Sc. VII.
Within the infant rind of this weak flower
Poison hath residence, and medicine power:
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Romeo and Juliet, Act II., Sc. III.
Like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards.
Othello, Act II., Sc. I.
I bought an unction of a mountebank,
So mortal, that but dip a knife in it,
Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare
Collected from all simples that have virtue
Under the moon, can save the thing from death
That is but scratch’d withal.
Hamlet, Act IV., Sc. VII.
A few miscellaneous quotations referring to medical subjects must here
find a place.
The more one sickens the worse at ease he is.
As You Like It, Act III., Sc. II.
He fell sick suddenly, and grew so ill
He could not sit his mule.
Henry VIII., Act IV., Sc. II.
——the sun is a most glorious sight,
I’ve seen him rise full oft, indeed of late
I have set up on purpose all the night,
Which hastens, as physicians say, one’s fate;
And so all ye, who would be in the right
In health and purse, begin your day to date
From day-break, and when coffin’d at fourscore,
Engrave upon the plate you rose at four.
Byron—Don Juan, Canto II., Verse CXL.
So much was our love,
We would not understand what was most fit;
But, like the owner of a foul disease,
To keep it from divulging, let it feed
Even on the pith of life.
Hamlet, Act IV., Sc. I.
Diseases desperate grown,
By desperate appliance are reliev’d
Or not at all.
Hamlet, Act IV., Sc. III.
His dissolute disease will scarce obey this medicine.
Merry Wives, Act III., Sc. III.
O vanity of sickness! fierce extremes,
In their continuance, will not feel themselves.
Death, having prey’d upon the outward parts,
Leaves them insensible.
King John, Act V., Sc. VII.
What a catalogue have we here:
Now the rotten diseases of the south, the
guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs, loads o’ gravel i’ the back,
lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, wheezing
lungs, bladders full of imposthume, sciaticas, lime-kilns i’ the palm,
incurable bone-ache, and the rivelled fee-simple of tetter, take and
take again such preposterous discoveries!
Troilus and Cressida, Act V., Sc. I.
As burning fevers, agues pale and faint,
Life-poisoning pestilence, and frenzies wood,
The marrow-eating sickness, whose attaint
Disorder breeds by heating of the blood:
Surfeits, imposthumes, grief and damn’d despair,
Swear nature’s death for framing thee so fair.
Venus and Adonis.
How nicely does he describe the decay of man, the second childhood, the
wasting away of the organism:
The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice
Turning again towards childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
As You Like It, Act. II., Sc. VII.
Again:
Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written
down old with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye?
a dry hand? a yellow cheek? a white beard? a decreasing leg? an
increasing belly? Is not your voice broken? your wind short? your chin
double? your wit single? and every part of you blasted with antiquity;
and will you yet call yourself young?
Henry IV—2d, Act I., Sc. II.
The satirical rogue says here, that old men have grey beards; that
their faces are wrinkled; their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree
gum; and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most
weak hams.
Hamlet, Act II., Sc. II.
A good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; a black beard will
turn white; a curled pate will grow bald; a fair face will wither; a
full eye will wax hollow. * * *
Henry V., Act V., Sc. II.
Were I hard-favour’d, foul, or wrinkled-old,
Ill-natur’d, crooked, churlish, harsh in voice,
O’er worn, despised, rheumatic, and cold,
Thick-sighted, barren, lean, and lacking juice,
Then might thou pause. * * *
Venus and Adonis.
Let them die, that age and sullens have;
* * * both become the grave.
Richard II., Act II., Sc. I.
Thus, methinks, I hear them speak,
See, how the Dean begins to break!
Poor gentleman! he droops apace!
You plainly find it in his face.
That old vertigo in his head
Will never leave him, till he’s dead.
Besides, his memory decays:
He recollects not what he says:
He can not call his friends to mind;
Forgets the place where last he dined;
Plies you with stories o’er and o’er;
He told them fifty times before.
How does he fancy we can sit
To hear his out-of-fashion wit?
But he takes up with younger folks,
Who for his wine will bear his jokes.
Faith, he must make his stories shorter,
Or change his comrades once a quarter.
Swift—“Death of Dr. Swift.”
Thus Swift predicted his own end as early as 1731. History mournfully
testifies that his candle burnt out as he anticipated. “Fits of lunacy
were succeeded by the dementia of old age. For three years he uttered
only a few words and broken interjections. He would often attempt to
speak, but could not recollect words to express his meaning, upon
which he would sigh heavily. Babylon in ruins (to use a simile of
Addison’s), was not a more melancholy spectacle than this wreck of a
mighty intellect! In speechless silence his spirit passed away October
19, 1745.” (Chamber’s Eng. Lit.)
Manhood declines—age palsies every limb:
He quits the scene—or else the scene quits him;
Scrapes wealth, o’er each departing penny grieves,
And avarice seizes all ambition leaves;
Counts cent. per cent., and smiles or vainly frets,
O’er hoards diminish’d by young Hopeful’s debts;
Weighs well and wisely what to sell or buy,
Complete in all life’s lessons—but to die;
Peevish and spiteful, doting, hard to please,
Commending every time, save times like these;
Crazed, querulous, forsaken, half forgot,
Expires unwept—is buried—let him rot!
Byron—Hints from Horace.
The signs of a probable fatal termination are most beautifully
portrayed by Shakespeare. The death of Falstaff can not fail to be
regarded by the profession as an excellent description of approaching
dissolution.
’A made a finer end, and went away, an it had
been any christom child; ’a parted even just between twelve and one,
even at the turning of the tide: for after I saw him fumble with the
sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his finger’s ends, I
knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and ’a
babbled of green fields. * * * ’A bade me lay more clothes on his feet:
I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were ’as cold as any
stone; then I felt to his knees, and so upwards, and upwards, and all
was as cold as any stone.
Henry V., Act II., Sc. III.
Clarence. Lord! Methought, what pain it was to drown!
What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!
What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!
Brakenbury. Had you such leisure in the time of death,
To gaze upon these secrets of the deep?
Clarence. Methought I had; for still the envious flood
Kept in my soul and would not let it forth
To seek the empty, vast, and wand’ring air;
But smother’d it within my panting bulk,
Which almost burst to belch it in the sea.
Richard III., Act I., Sc. IV.
How oft when men are at the point of death,
Have they been merry! which their keepers call
A lightning before death.
Romeo and Juliet, Act V., Sc. III.
Out, alas! she’s cold;
Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff;
Life and these lips have long been separated:
Death lies on her like an untimely frost
Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.
Romeo and Juliet, Act IV., Sc. V.
Do you notice
How much her grace is alter’d on the sudden?
How long her face is drawn? how pale she looks,
And of an earthy cold! Mark her eyes.
* * * She is going.
Henry VIII., Act IV., Sc. II.
Her physician tells me
She hath pursu’d conclusions infinite
Of easy ways to die.
Antony and Cleopatra, Act V., Sc. II.
Bid a sick man in sadness make his will:—
A word ill urg’d to one that is so ill.
Romeo and Juliet, Act I., Sc. I.
By his gates of breath
There lies a downy feather, which stirs not:
Did he suspire, that light and weightless down
Perforce must move.
Henry IV—2d, Act IV., Sc. IV.
Lend me a looking-glass;
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why then she lives.
King Lear, Act V., Sc. III.
Death, on a solemn night of state,
In all his pomp of terror sate:
The attendants of his gloomy reign,
Diseases dire, a ghastly train!
Crowded the vast court. With hollow tone,
A voice thus thundered from the throne:
“This night our minister we name;
Let every servant speak his claim;
Merit shall bear this ebon wand.”
All, at the word, stretched forth their hand.
Fever, with burning heat possessed.
Advanced, and for the wand addressed:
“I to the weekly bills appeal;
Let those express my fervant zeal;
On every slight occasion near,
With violence I persevere”
Next Gout appears with limping pace,
Pleads how he shifts from place to place;
From head to foot how swift he flies,
And every joint and sinew plies;
Still working when he seems supprest,
A most tenacious stubborn guest.
A haggard spectre from the crew
Crawls forth, and thus asserts his due:
“’Tis I who taint the sweetest joy,
And in the shape of love destroy.
My shanks, sunk eyes, and noseless face,
Prove my pretension to the place.”
Stone urged his overgrowing force;
And, next consumption’s meagre corse,
With feeble voice that scarce was heard,
Broke with short coughs, his suit preferred:
“Let none object my lingering way;
I gain, like Fabius, by delay;
Fatigue and weaken every foe
By long attack, secure, though slow.”
Plague represents his rapid power,
Who thinned a nation in an hour.
All spoke their claim and hoped the wand.
Now expectation hushed the band,
When thus the monarch from the throne:
“Merit was ever modest known.
What! no physician speak his right?
None here! but fees their toil requite.
Let, then, Intemperance take the wand,
Who fills with gold their zealous hand.
You, Fever, Gout, and all the rest—
Whom wary men as foes detest—
Forego your claim. No more pretend
Intemperance is esteemed a friend;
He shares their mirth, their social joys,
And as a courted guest destroys.
The charge on him must justly fall,
Who finds employment for you all.”
Gay—“Court of Death.”
