Physicians From England

"The anarchist-feminists' denial of gender-based distinctions precluded their use of many of the arguments for equality utilized by the mainstream feminists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, the followers of Catharine Beecher could demand access to the teaching profession on the grounds that the female nurturing instinct made women biologically better suited than men to educate the young. Elizabeth Blackwell sometimes used similar arguments in her attempts to open the medical profession to women."

"If an idea, I reasoned, were really a valuable one, there must be some way of realising it. The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed great attraction for me."

"For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes, by virtue of their common womanhood, the property of all women."

"The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honourable term 'female physician' should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women."

"It was at this time that the suggestion of studying medicine was first presented to me, by a lady friend. This friend finally died of a painful disease, the delicate nature of which made the methods of treatment a constant suffering to her. She once said to me,'You are fond of study, have health and leisure; why not study medicine? If I could have been treated by a lady doctor, my worst sufferings would have been spared me.' But I at once repudiated the suggestion as an impossible one, saying that I hated everything connected with the body, and could not bear the sight of a medical book. ... My favourite studies were history and metaphysics, and the very thought of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments filled me with disgust."

"The people of Henderson were all very friendly to me personally, and my relations always pleasant with them; but the injustice of the state of society made a gradually deepening impression on my mind. The inhabitants lived in constant fear of an outbreak among the slaves. Women did not dare to walk in the pleasant woods and country around the village, for terror of runaway slaves. Painful social contrasts constantly forced themselves on my notice."

"In carrying on the grand work of improving national health, extirpating loathsome disease, discovering and removing the causes of disease, the distinction must be carefully drawn between the object to be accomplished and the means by which it shall be attained. The object is a grand one; the method of accomplishing it must be equally so, i.e., it must be guided by moral principle."

"The essence of all religions is the recognition of an Authority higher, more comprehensive, more permanent than the human being. The characteristic of Christian teaching, however, is the faith that this Supreme Authority is beneficent as well as powerful. The Christian believes that the Creative Force is a moral force, of more comprehensive morality than the human being that it creates. Under the symbol of a wise and loving parent—the most just, efficient, and attractive image that we know of—we are encouraged to regard this unseen Authority as being in direct relation with every atom of creation, and as desirous of drawing each atom into progressively higher forms of existence."

"Every physician knows the numerous sources of error that may lead an able advocate to wrong conclusions. The difficult art of statistics, which is no simple arrangement of numbers, but often requires very elaborate calculations, may lend itself to error; the neglect of some facts, or the undue prominence of others, the comparison of dissimilar conditions, or observations made on too short a scale or for too short a period—all these various conditions must be considered as sources of possible error."

"In the fourth century there were not a few eminent physicians in Byzantium, Alexandria, and Asia Minor; still on the whole the Byzantine system stifled mental activity, and medical literature was represented only by such encyclopedias as those of Oribasius, Aetius, and Paul of Aegina, compilations which notwithstanding, by salvage of writings which might otherwise have been utterly lost, did priceless service to the historian. And, beside these, the endless succession of herbaries, recipe books, and antidotariums, like lower organisms, propagated their futile kind."

"Nothing is so conducive to a right appreciaton of the truth as a right appreciation of the error by which it is surrounded. The successful investigator must bring to test statements and conceptions which have been too long accepted on faith, habit, or good-nature. He must look boldly behind certain large words which are now too often the shelter of ignorance, and he must satisfy himself whether they have any definite value or not. When it is seen how much our current language really signifies, and when all technicalities, which took their rise in old and false methods, have been swept out of sight, we shall feel, perhaps, a little bare, but at any rate we shall have open field for our new researches."

"Education, as contrasted with instruction, is a drawing forth of faculties, a quickening, enlarging, and refining of them when brought out, and an establishment of them in habits; so that virtue and reason become easy and pleasant to us."

"... Palissy—like his contemporary Gilbert, and like Galileo who came very soon after him—was one of the chief engineers of the new paths of knowledge, and was in France the chief engineer. Indeed, astronomy and mathematics apart, he with Dodoens and Gesner were the first in Europe since Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Pliny, to pursue modern scientific methods in the worlds of geology, botany, and zoology, and to work and teach from and with the natural objects themselves."

"There is no section of the people of Afghanistan which has a greater influence on the life of the people than the Mullahs, yet it has been truly said that there is no priesthood in Islam. According to the tenets of Islam, there is no act of worship and no religious rite which may not, in the absence of a Mullah, be equally well performed by any pious layman; yet, on the other hand, circumstances have enabled the Mullahs of Afghanistan to wield a power over the populations which is sometimes, it appears, greater than the power of the throne itself. For one thing, knowledge has been almost limited to the priestly class, and in a village where the Mullahs are almost the only men who can lay claim to anything more than the most rudimentary learning it is only natural that they should have the people of the village entirely in their own control. Then, the Afghan is a Muhammadan to the backbone, and prides himself on his religious zeal, so that the Mullah becomes to him the embodiment of what is most national and sacred. The Mullahs are, too, the ultimate dispensers of justice, for there are only two legal appeals in Afghanistan—one to the theological law, as laid down by Muhammad and interpreted by the Mullahs; the other to the autocracy of the throne—and even the absolute Amir would hesitate to give an order at variance with Muhammadan law, as laid down by the leading Mullahs. His religion enters into the minutest detail of an Afghan's everyday life, so that there is no affair, however trivial, in which it may not become necessary to make an appeal to the Mullah.44"

"…The two greatest social evils from which the Afghan women suffer are the purchase of wives and the facility of divorce. I might add a third—namely, plurality of wives; but though admittedly an evil where it exists, it is not universally prevalent, like the other two—in fact, only men who are well-to-do can afford to have more than one wife."

"The more fanatical of these Mullahs do not hesitate to incite their pupil [talibs] to acts of religious fanaticism, or ghaza, [jihad operation] as it is called. The ghazi [jihadist] is a man who has taken an oath to kill some non-Muhammadan, preferably a European, as representing the ruling race; but, failing that, a Hindu or a Sikh is a lawful object of his fanaticism. The Mullah instills into him the idea that if in so doing he loses his own life, he goes at once to and enjoys the special delights of the houris and the gardens which are set apart for religious martyrs. When such a disciple has been worked up to the degree of religious excitement, he is usually further fortified by copious draughts of bhang, or Indian hemp, which produces a kind of intoxication in which one sees everything red, and the bullet and the bayonet have no longer any terror for him. Not a year passes on the frontier but some young officer falls a victim to one of these ghazi fanatics. Probably the ghazi has never seen him his life, and can have no grudge against him as a man; but he is a “dog and a heretic,” and his death a sure road to Paradise.45"

"The Afghan noblemen maintain the strictest parda, or seclusion, of their women, who pass their days monotonously behind the curtains and lattices of their palace prison-houses, with little to do except criticize their clothes and jewels and retail slander.…The poorer classes cannot afford to seclude their women, so they try to safeguard their virtue by the most barbarous punishments, not only for actual immorality, but for any fancied breach of decorum. A certain trans-frontier chief that I know, on coming to his house unexpectedly one day, saw his wife speaking to a neighbour over the wall of his compound. Drawing his sword in a fit of jealousy, he struck off her head and threw it over the wall, and said to the man: “There! you are so enamoured of her, you can have her.” The man concerned discreetly moved house to a neighbouring village.…The recognized punishment in such a case of undue familiarity would have been to have cut off the nose of the woman and, if possible, of the man too. This chief, in his anger, exceeded his right, and if he had been a lesser man and the woman had had powerful relations, he might have been brought to regret it. But as a rule a woman has no redress; she is the man's property, and a man can do what he likes with his own. This is the general feeling, and no one would take the trouble or run the risk of interfering in another man's domestic arrangements. A man practically buys his wife, bargaining with her father, or, if he is dead, with her brother; and so she becomes his property, and the father has little power of interfering for her protection afterwards, seeing he has received her price."

"It is my purpose in writing these Memoirs to adhere rigidly to truth, at least in its essence. Should I succeed in this, my work would be a very remarkable one, almost unique."

"I remember well the time when no gentleman was supposed to smoke; the habit was fit only for the vulgarian."

"The more a writer deviates from simplicity, the less sincere he appears."

"I thought no one ever could paint a woman's eyes like Rossetti. There was a softness, a delicacy, a life, a soul in them, never seen elsewhere, but in living beings, and that how rarely!"

"If one looks back, one perceives that the majority of our poetic authors owed their success to patrons who made their works a fashion. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, had noble or royal patrons; Milton there was no one to patronize, whence the market value of "Paradise Lost" rose only to ten pounds. Dryden belonged to the upper class, so he had a patron in himself; Pope was made a fashion through patronization: Bolingbroke alone would have sufficed to lift him up into fame."

"A poem, of whatever length, should start vividly, so as to wind up the ear and set the mind ticking."

"There is something very dry in family history, because no one cares for other people's relations."

"Doth Nature know our dream, or is the mind A passing breath her beauty leaves behind?"

"Nothing that has been and has died out, will be revived. The skeleton, an osseous Apollo, will remain, and that is all."

"In those days, and long after, an English clergyman dressed like a gentleman; he now wears a black livery, and he looks like a bishop's footman, in mourning, with his master, for some dead archbishop."

"It may be boasted that free-trade in physic came before free-trade in corn, and from that time medical science began to flourish in this country."

"... Mr. Nussey, the king's apothecary, ... whom I knew very intimately later in life, told me that the king confided to him all his secrets, and the knowledge, if written down, would set all England in a blaze. He was with the royal patient to the last, the king never letting go of his hand for twenty-four hours, which gave him an agony of cramp all but insupportable."

"Dr. Thomas Young, the illustrious inventor of the Undulatory Theory of Light, was then a physician at St. George's. I used to go round the wards with him. He was thought to be very undecided in his opinions of a case; the fact is, medicine is so uncertain a science, it was not good enough for such an intellect as his to work on."

"Taking, then, this fact as established, it suggests itself as probable that circumcision was by Divine command made obligatory upon the Jews, not solely as a religious ordinance, but also with a view to the protection of health.... One is led to ask, witnessing the frightful ravages of syphilis in the present day, whether it might not be worth while for Christians to adopt the practice."

"Every … element, whether mineral or organic, which is required for nutrition is found in the vegetable kingdom."

"The same nutritive elements exist in both vegetable and animal foods, and … within certain limits, the two classes of food are interchangeable."

"As a general definition, it may be stated that a food is a substance which, when introduced into the body, supplies material which renews some structure or maintains some vital process; and it is distinguished from a medicine in that the latter modifies some vital action, but does not supply the material which sustains such action."

"The Viper has always been so remarkable for its venom, that the most remote antiquity made it an emblem of what is hurtful and destructive. Nay, so terrible was the nature of these creatures, that they were very commonly thought to be sent as executioners of divine vengeance upon mankind for enormous crimes, which had escaped the common course of justice."

"Venomous animals, when they bite or sting, inflict a wound, and instil into it a drop or more of liquor, which infects the fluid of the nerves, and by this means inflames the membranes: hereupon a swelling arises, sometimes to a degree of mortification, which spreads to the neighbouring parts."

"We resolved to end our poison-enquiries by tasting the venomous liquor. According, having diluted a quantity of it, with a very little warm water, several of us ventured to put some of it upon the tip of our tongues. We all agreed, that it tasted very sharp and fiery, as if the tongue had been struck through with something scalding or burning. This sensation went off in two or three hours: and one gentleman, who would not be satisfied without trying a large drop undiluted, found his tongue swelled with a little inflammation and the soreness lasted two days. But neither his nor our boldness was attended with any ill consequence."

"Those things, which are experienced to be in their whole nature, or in their most remarkable properties, so contrary to animal life, as in a small quantity to prove destructive to it, are called Poisons: whether they are hurtful by being taken inwardly at the mouth, or communicated to the body externally by a wound."

"In the year 1721, his present Majesty, then Prince of Wales, ordered Dr. MEAD to assist at the Inoculation of some condemned criminals, intending afterwards to recommend the practice of it to the people by the illustrious example of his own Royal Family; our ingenious Physician, not content with examining all of the effects of the Circassian operation upon six of the prisoners, caused the Chinese method likewise to be tried on the seventh. The success of these experiments is universally known ..."

"Some persons in Europe carry their notions about cruelty to animals so far as not to allow themselves to eat animal food. Many very intelligent men have, at different times of their lives, abstained wholly from flesh; and this too with very considerable advantage to their health. … The most attentive research which I have been able to make into the health of all these persons induces me to believe that vegetable food is the natural diet of man; I tried it once with very considerable advantage: my strength became greater, my intellect clearer, my power of continued exertion protracted, and my spirits much higher than they were when I lived on a mixed diet. I am inclined to think that the inconvenience which some persons experience from vegetable food is only temporary; a few repeated trials would soon render it not only safe but agreeable, and a disgust to the taste of flesh, under any disguise, would be the result of the experiment. The Carmelites and other religious orders, who subsist only on the productions of the vegetable world, live to a greater age than those who feed on meat, and in general herbivorous persons are milder in their dispositions than other people. The same quantity of ground has been proved to be capable of sustaining a larger and stronger population on a vegetable than on a meat diet; and experience has shewn that the juices of the body are more pure and the viscera much more free from disease in those who live in this simple way. All these facts, taken collectively, point to a period, in the progress of civilization, when men will cease to slay their fellow mortals in the animal world for food, and will tend thereby to realize the fictions of antiquity and the Sybilline oracles respecting the millennium or golden age."

"Physiologists have usually represented that our species holds a middle rank, in the masticatory and digestive apparatus, between the flesh-eating and the herbivorous animals; — a statement which seems rather to have been deduced from what we have learned by experience on this subject, than to result fairly from an actual comparison of man and animals. … The teeth of man have not the slightest resemblance to those of the carnivorous animals, except that their enamel is confined to the external surface. He possesses, indeed, teeth called canine, but they do not exceed the level of the others, and are obviously unsuited to the purposes which the corresponding teeth execute in carnivorous animals. … Thus we find that, whether we consider the teeth and jaws, or the immediate instruments of digestion, the human structure closely resembles that of the simiæ; all of which, in their natural state, are completely herbivorous."

"All the bloodshed caused by the warlike disposition of Napoleon is as nothing compared to the myriads of persons who have sunk into their graves through a misplaced confidence in the value of beef tea."

"Carry a stout stick. I recommend carrying a stick even if you don't need it for support. Sticks are good for hitting and prodding people who have annoyed or patronised you."

"Coleman's explanation suggests he has an oddly polarised view of gender - but then this is a man whose very fixed ideas about women are not noticeably informed by feminism. In People Watching (1995), women are not only warned away from big cars, but advised to "carry a small handbag to give an impression of helplessness. A large handbag will give the impression that you are totally independent and do not need to be protected by a male." In 1987 he said it was a "tragedy" that by the year 2000 half of all doctors qualifying from medical school would be women. "I thnk that is an appalling prospect... Women make wonderful nurses-they make rotten doctors." The main problem, he explained, was that neither male nor female nurses liked taking orders from women doctors: "Because they feel inferior they feel the need to push that little bit harder than anyone else.""

"[Editors had asked him to tone down his columns] I shout at them. They shout at me. I resign and stamp my feet. I'm terrible — probably the most difficult columnist in Britain to deal with."

"[From full-page advertisements placed by Coleman for his book Oil Apocalypse] This isn't a script for a horror movie [...] The lorry that collects your rubbish won't be running. Streetlights won't burn. Hospitals will have to close . . . There won't be any more television programmes. You won't be able to charge your mobile telephone. Within a generation, five out of six people on the planet will be dead. I'll repeat, five out of six people on the planet will be dead."

"You must prepare yourself for a different world. A world in which the rich ride horses, the middle classes use bicycles and the poor walk. If you are planning for the long-term - and in this scenario, five years is long-term - don't buy a house that relies on you having petrol for your car. You want a house in a town with a small garden where you can grow vegetables, and you want to be relatively close to railways, hospitals, shops, and libraries. The government shutting down local post offices is an enormously stupid thing to do."

"The bloody minded live longer – especially if they are marooned in one of those appalling places we call hospitals. Complain a good deal and ask as many questions as you can. Make a fuss and remind everyone in a uniform or a white coat that you are a human being."

"I suppose I try and write in blood a lot of the time. I suppose a lot of it is violent in that if I get angry about something, I don't try to hide it."

"THE central figure of Rosicrucian literature, towering as an intellectual giant above the crowd of souffleurs, theosophists, and charlatanic professors of the magnum opus, who, directly or otherwise, were connected with the mysterious Brotherhood, is Robertus de Fluctibus, the great English mystical philosopher of the seventeenth century, a man of immense erudition, of exalted mind, and, to judge by his writings, of extreme personal sanctity. Ennemoser describes him as one of the most distinguished disciples of Paracelsus, but refuses to number him with "those consecrated theosophists who draw all wisdom from the fountain of eternal light." He does not state his reasons for this depreciatory judgment, and the brief and inadequate notice which he gives of Fludd's system displays such a cursory acquaintance with the works in which it is developed, that it is doubtful whether he had taken pains to understand his author."