SHAKESPEARE IN HEDICINE. 
BV <’ 
WM. B. CLARKE, M.D. [FAC SIMILE. 1 
Vol. XXIV. 
No. 24. 
tTbc Bmerican Ibomeopatbist. 
NEW YORK, DECEMBER 15, 1898. 
FRANK KRAFT, M.D., CLEVELAND, OHIO, EDITOR, 
course, by the wonderful genius of his brain, 
as giving his rich and musical style, delicate 
tracery, beautiful imagery, unequaled sagacity, 
and massive intellectual creative power, that in 
his writings he could cover every field of hu- 
man endeavor and thought and strike a respon- 
sive chord in every human heart as no other 
writer has ever done, and which has made this 
permanent influence of this myriad-minded 
man over mankind so infinitely greater than 
that of any other man who has yet lived. It is 
a trite saying that the thoughts and expressions 
of Shakespeare permeate all English writing 
since his time, and scintillate in all the effusions 
of the lawyer, doctor and divine, and illumi- 
nate the pages of the wit, poet, fictionist and 
general literature the world over. Indeed, it 
seems that there is not an emergency, incident 
or occasion possible in human life but what 
might be mottoed with a quotation from 
Shakespeare, while his images, metaphors, com- 
parisons, similes and all other figures of speech 
are so varied and numerous as to render him 
liable, more than any other writer, to be 
quoted, copied and imitated. Emerson best 
and most briefly expressed this thought when 
he wrote, “Literature, philosophy and thought 
are Shakespearized.” Shakespeare had almost 
no model to work by, and is yet unapproachable 
by any author, even with his own great work 
and the extraneous aid furnished by 300 years 
of subsequent writing as examples, though 
many have tried to imitate his style by produc- 
ing similar plays, the most pretentious being 
Tennyson’s “Queen Marv” and Addison’s 
“Cato.” How well they have failed or succeed- 
ed I leave for you to judge. 
It is true that of late years a spirited discus- 
sion has arisen as to the real authorship of the 
writings generally attributed to Shakespeare. 
On only one point are these opposing advo- 
cates agreed, and that is the surpassing merit 
WM. B. CLARKE, M.D. 
SHAKESPEARE IN MEDICINE. 
WM. B. CLARKE, M.D., 
Ind anapctts, Ind. 
Read before the Iniianapo'is Homeopathic Medical 
Society, December, 1898. 
Shakespeare thoroughly knew nature, God’s 
great alchemist and chemist, in all her many 
and intricate manifestations—indeed, “no man 
ever laid his head so close upon the great heart 
of Nature, and heard so clearly the mighty 
fhrob of her deep pulses”—and it was largely 
because of this intimate knowledge and true 
depiction, whether in passion, romance, phil- 
osophy or history, seemingly done with con- 
summate and marvelous ease, dominated, of 378 
THE AMERICAN HOMEOPATHIST. 
of the works under discussion. As for my 
humble self, I am so loyal in the belief that 
Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare that it would 
take “confirmations strong as proofs of holy 
writ” to establish even a doubt of it in my mind. 
It is enough for me to know that this question 
was not raised until after the death of the 
immortal bard, and that his contemporaries— 
Jonson, Spenser, Chettle, Marlowe, Green 
and others, including Ward, the Vicar of Strat- 
ford—write of him and his works, the former, 
rare P>en Jonson, saying, “He was not of an 
age, but for all time.” 
A pretentious volume could be built up of 
quotations confined to either medicine or law, 
for wdth rare professional acumen, he found, as 
he puts in the mouth of the Duke, in “As You 
Like It,”act 2, scene 1, “tongues in trees, books 
in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and 
good in every thing.” While at first sight this 
may not seem to be a quotation having medical 
application, read between the lines it is essen- 
tially so, as a hint to study the earth and nature 
and by no means get our education entirely 
from our books. It will be our pleasant duty 
this evening to review7 and enjoy a few of the 
notable gems that sparkle amid such a pro- 
fusion of others which show his wrondertul 
familiarity with that subject nearest to our 
hearts and wdiich we have made our life-study 
—medicine. 
To first quote, he tells us to study our pro- 
fession, and that even in its very selection it 
must be a congenial one, thus, spoken by 
Tranio, in “Taming of the Shrew,” 1, 1: 
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en; 
In brief, sir, study what you most affect. 
Thus we become worthy the station drawn 
by Lucrece: 
Give physic to the sick, ease to the pain’d, 
The poor, lame, blind, halt, creep, cry out for thee. 
If all the members of our noble profession 
can feel the thrill of the high pride and exulta- 
tion in the acquirement and possession of 
knowledge pertaining to it voiced by Cerimon, 
in “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” 3, 2, then is its 
future safe: 
’Tis known I ever 
Have studied physic, through which secret art, 
By turning o’er authorities, I have 
(Together with my practice) made familiar 
To me and to my aid the bless’d infusions 
That dwell in vegetives, metals, stones; 
And I can speak of the disturbances 
That Nature works, and of her cures—which 
doth give me 
A more content in course of true delight 
Than to be thirsty after tottering honor, 
Or tie my treasure up in silken bags 
To please the fool and death. 
Shakespeare’s verified writings aire com- 
prised in thirty-seven plays and five miscella- 
neous poems, and a search through these for 
quotations bearing on the practice of medicine 
reveals his great familiarity with the Escula- 
pian art of his day, and in notable instances he 
is far in advance of it, as I hope to be able to 
show. As he was born in 1564 and died in 
1616, he may have written at least one of these 
notable quotations 300 years ago this very day. 
(And this year is also the 300th anniversary 
of the issuance of the edict of Nantes by Henry 
IV., which secured to Protestants in France 
the right to meet for worship and to exercise 
religious privileges.) As his elder and favorite 
daughter, Susanna, married a physician, Dr. 
John Hall, he may have taken much interest 
in medicine because of this. Certain it is, he 
clearly wove in threads representing anatomy, 
physiology, chemistry, organology, etiology, 
dermatology, psychology, neurology, pharma- 
cology, obstetrics and surgery. Of these he 
took special interest in obstetrics though but 
little in surgery, the latter because the surgery 
of the day did not amount to much, because of 
the ignorance of anesthetics—though all must 
admit that in many of his plays he was a great 
shedder of blood. 
His depiction of insanity was eminently true 
to nature. Few are fitted by study and obser- 
vation of the paranoiac, or partially insane per- 
son, to detect slight mental aberrations and 
point out delicate variations from normality in 
the unfortunates of the living and enlightened 
present, but what shall be said of the psychi- 
atric ability that can perform such distin- 
guished service for characters in plays written 
300 years ago? Shakespeare makes insane 
people talk, walk and act as insane people do, 
and presents them varying in degree from 
slight mental obliquity from drink or disease 
to the raving maniac—and this is something 
that the dramatists since his time have hardly 
dared to even attempt. Psychology, in the 
broadest acceptation of the term, means the 
science of the intellectual and moral faculties, 
but of late years the term has been freely used 
to denote or include aberrant phenomena in 
connection with mental conditions. Dr. 
Bucknill, of England, forty years ago wrote: 
“Shakespeare not only possesses more psycho- 
logical insight than all other poets, but more 
>than all other writers.” There was in all Eng- 
land in Shakespeare’s time but one small, poor- 
ly-ordered insane charity. This was the THE AMERICAN HOMEOPATHIST. 
original Bedlam, Bethlehem Hospital, in 
Bishopgate street, London, with a capacity of 
50 patients, established in 1537 (Encyc. Brit.). 
We have to conclude, then, because of his limit- 
ed chance to study this subject, that Shakes- 
peare gained most of his knowledge in this 
field, as in many others, by intuition rather than 
by study. 
While he made what we may call mistakes, 
the exigencies of the play or the subtlety of a 
character often required the result arrived at 
or the action laid down. Of such, for instance, 
was the death of Desdemona. Probably he 
knew as well as we that a person is not 
smothered who revives enough to speak, as 
she does to declare her own and Othello’s 
innocence. He makes characters speak of 
clocks (in “Julius Gesar”), cannon (in “Mac- 
beth”), spectacles (in King Lear"), etc., before 
these articles were known, drove the ship in 
“Winter’s Tale,” on the coast of Bohemia, 
though Bohemia has no coast, and put lions in 
the English Forest of Arden. He sent Hamlet 
to the University of Wittenberg at a time the 
university did not exist, and perpetrated many 
anachronisms, such as putting words of Aris- 
totle in the mouth of Hector, in “Troilus and 
Cressida,” though he lived 800 years before 
the former, and had Menenius. in “Coriola- 
nus,” speak of Galen, though he lived 600 
years before Galen was born. But he made his 
characters talk right. Shakespeare never let 
a rebellion succeed. But he lived in the 
Elizabethan, royal, age, and was politic. He 
could not do differently then, but would prob- 
ably do differently now. But we have neither 
time nor desire to pick or magnify flaws. He 
felt privileged in such matters, as we see by 
what Gower says in “Pericles,” 4, 4: 
We commit no crime 
To use one language in each several clime 
Where our scenes seem to live. 
And he probably had in mind Aristotle's 
dictum: “Nothing is called a fault in poetry 
but what is against the art; therefore a man 
may be an admirable poet without being an 
exact chronologist.” 
I said he had depicted all phases of human 
life, and so he did, all but two. He had no 
children in his plays, that is, little more than a 
suggestion of them. Though he rose superior 
to them, I can but believe he made a mistake, 
for a man. whatever his mental powers, can 
take delight in the society of a child, when a 
person of intellect far more matured, but in- 
ferior to his own, would be simply insufferable. 
But how beautifully he describes the death of 
the doughty warrior, Falstaff, and sent him 
back to childhood, when “ ’a babbled of green 
fields.” And out of the mouth of Constance 
he thus dqpicts the power of children and the 
strength of our love for them: 
Grief fills the room up of my absent child, 
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me; 
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, 
Remembers me of all his gracious parts, 
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form. 
O. lorai my boy, my Arthur, my fair son! 
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world! 
Constance, in King John, 3, 4. 
Yet if we analyze the action of this character 
we find the passionate utterances of this 
mother to be due more to wounded pride, dis- 
appointed ambition and indignation for her 
supplanted prince than to motherly love. In- 
deed, there is not, strange to say, a real mother 
in Shakespeare. There are queens and wives, 
but no ideal mother. “Though he has sounded 
with the plummet of his genius all the depths 
of woman’s love as wife, daughter, sister, ser- 
vant and friend, he left unexplored that mighty 
power of motherhood, which is one of the 
great elemental forces of the world.”—Mary 
B. Whiting. 
Reference to the physician is frequently 
made by Shakespeare, though comparatively 
few of the quotations we shall use are spoken 
by medical men. He presents several doctors 
in character, notably the astute and careful 
Cornelius, in “Cymbeline,” who by substitu- 
tion thwarts the Queen’s request for poisons, 
which he says “She ’ll prove on cats and dogs, 
then afterward up higher.” The Doctor in 
“Macbeth” is wise and conservative in his 
handling of the difficult case of the somnam- 
bulistic and conscience-stricken murderess 
Lady Macbeth, and the Doctor in “King 
Lear” shows excellent skill in his treatment 
of the unfortunate, buffeted and weather-beaten 
old King Lear. We have Dr. Butts, in 
“Henry VIII,” who acted a contemptible part 
toward Cranmer, whom he disliked, and Dr. 
Cains, who talks French in “The Merry 
Wives of Windsor,” who Sir Hugh avowed 
had “no more knowledge of Hibbocrates and 
Galen, and he is a knave besides,” but to whom 
the FTost (act 2, scene 3) once says, “Bless thee, 
bully doctor,” and Shallow, at the same place, 
says: “You have showed yourself a wise phy- 
sician.” Dr. Shaw, in “Richard III,” is a 
political intriguer only, and Dr. Peace, in 
“Henry VIII,” was ousted from a good place 
by Cardinal Wolsey. Helena, in “All’s Well 
that Ends Well,” might be mentioned for her THE AMERICAN HOMEOPATHIST. 
praise of her dead father’s ability as a physi- 
cian, and for her own work as well. And 
priests and noblemen sometimes acted as phy- 
sicians, as Friar Laurence in “Romeo and 
Juliet,” and Cerimon in “Pericles.” 
Shakespeare was not averse to giving the 
physician a sly dig once in a while, whence, I 
suppose, has come the similar, but now, of 
course, indefensible practice of to-day. For 
instance, Pericles says, i, 2: 
Thou speak’st like a physician, Helicanus; 
Who minister’st a potion unto me 
That thou wouldst tremble to receive thyself. 
And this from Lucrece: 
The patient dies while the physician sleeps. 
Nay, will you cast away your child on a fool 
and a physician? 
Mrs. Quickly, in Merry Wives of Windsor, 3, 4. 
A poor physician’s daughter my wife! Disdain 
rather corrupt me ever. 
Bertram, in All’s Well That Ends Well, 2, 3. 
And the following from the vindictive 
l'imon to Banditti may have been applicable 
to his time: 
Trust not the physician; 
His antidotes are poison, and he slays 
More than you rob. 
Timon, in Timon of Athens, 4, 3. 
Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow 
Upon thy foul disease. 
Kent, in King Lear, 1, 1. 
And the line in “Henry VIII,” 3, 2, by 
Chamberlain: 
He brings his physic after his patient s death, 
may refresh your memory of just such an 
occurrence, but not, I hope, as has happened to 
me several times on a first visit, to the extent 
that the funeral director’s dead-wagon has 
beaten you to the house. 
He pays his respects to the Allopathy of the 
day with this from Menenius, in “Coriolanus,” 
2, 1: 
The most sovereign prescription in Galen is but 
empiricutic, and to this preservative of no 
better repute than a horse-drench. 
To jump a body with a dangerous physic 
That’s sure of death without it. 
Coriolanus, in Coriolanus, 3, 1. 
We sicken to shun sickness when we purge. 
Sonnets. 
And perhaps 1 may be allowed to remark 
that we do only the first third of the same 
when we vaccinate. 
The old-time old school physician, the 
fighting kind (whose successor now hides his 
animosity to newer schools “in smiles and 
affability”), had his course thus mapped out for 
him, and usually followed it: 
Re fire with fire; 
Threaten the threat’ner, and outface the brow 
of bragging horror. 
Faulconbridge, in King John, 5, 1. 
And this for the quacks: 
A good wit will make use of anything: 
I will turn diseases to commodity 
Falstaff, in Henry IV. 2d, 1, 2. 
Thou art always figuring diseases in me; 
But thou art full of error; I am sound. 
First Gentleman, in Measure for Measure, 1, 2. 
Seemingly unmindful of the Homeopathic 
principle, and strictly in accordance with old- 
time practice, he said: 
Diseases, desperate grown, 
By desperate appliance are relieved, 
Or not at all. The King, in Hamlet, 4, 3. 
But through his writings, as in those of a 
few others, we here and there get flash-light 
glimpses of the shimmer of the silver thread 
which was to lead up to the grandest discovery 
vet made in medicine, announced by Dr. Sam- 
uel Hahnemann under the formula similia 
similibus cukantur—let likes be by 1 kes 
—now known not only as the guiding principle 
of the successful system of medicine popularly 
known as Homeopathy, but as Nature’s law 
of cure, under which all drugs or medicines 
act remedially, by whatsoever system, sect, 
method or school administered. But Shakes- 
peare did not quite gather up the gossamer 
clew which the less imaginative but more logi- 
cal Hahnemann clutched, and with this slen- 
der but all-sufficient thread drew the medical 
world from its Cimmerian, pyramid-like dark- 
ness, for Shakespeare’s allusions, though dan- 
gerously near Homeopathy, are really 
Isopathy, or same, not like, as we shall see, as 
follows: 
Great griefs, I see, medicine the less. 
Belarius, in Cymbeline, 4, 2. 
It easeth some, though none it ever cured, 
To think their dolour others have endured. 
Lucrece. ■ 
One fire burns out another’s burning, 
One pain is lessen'd by another’s anguish. 
Benvolio, in Romeo and Juliet, 1, 2. 
One fire drives out one fire, one nail, one nail; 
Rights by rights founder, strengths by strengths 
do fail. Aufidius, in Coriolanus, 4, 7. 
And falsehood falsehood cures, as fire cools fire 
within the scorched veins of one new burn’d. 
Pandulph, in King John, 3, 1. 
And the introduction of the nosodes may 
have been presaged by the Duke in “As You 
Like It,” 2, i: 
Sweet are the uses of adversity, 
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, 
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head. 
Those health officers of to-day who fondly 
imagine that their pets, quarantine, isolation 
and pest-houses, are modern expedients only 
can here read their mistake: 
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. 
Friar John, in Romeo and Juliet, 5, 2. THE AMERICAN HOMEOPATHIST. 
And this act cost the lives of Paris, Romeo 
and Juliet. 
Pursue him to his house and pluck him thence, 
Lest his infection, being of catching nature, 
spread further. Brutus, in Coriolanus, 3, 1. 
And as to more reason for this action, 
through the contagiousness of disease, we 
read: 
Sickness is catching. 
Helena, in Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1, 1. 
Men take diseases one of another; 
Therefore, let men take heed of their company. 
Falstaff, In Henry IV. 2d, 5, 1. 
Perhaps some of you who have had a good 
deal of unremunerative professional and other 
work callously piled upon you may feel in your 
declining years like rebelling and saying, with 
the Senator, in “Timon of Athens,” 2, i: 
I must not break my back to heal his finger. 
In our discussion of the subject of cancer, 
last winter, when I said that cancer was a quite 
modern disease, possibly induced by vaccina- 
tion, a member spoke of Shakespeare’s 
allusion to the disease, using the word canker. 
This is purely an error of interpretation, since 
Shakespeare’s allusion to canker related to the 
floral kingdom, as, for instance, when Titania 
gives her orders to her train of fairies: 
Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds. 
Titania. in Midsummer Night's Dream, 2, 3 
In the sweetest bud the eating canker dwells. 
Proteus, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, I, 1. 
I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose 
in his grace. 
Don John, in Much Ado About Nothing, 1, 3. 
Now will canker sorrow eat my bud. 
Constance, in King John, 3, 4. 
The most forward bud is eaten by the canker 
’ere it blow. 
Valentine, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1, 1. 
The kind of a thing that makes business 
good for the genial gy-ne-col-o-gist, or guinea- 
cologist, as they say in England, indeed,makes 
business possible for him, is thus portrayed: 
A woman, that is like a German clock, 
Still a repairing; ever out of frame, 
And never going aright; being a watch. 
But being watched that it may still go right! 
Biron, in Love's Labor’s Lost, 3, 1. 
While disclaiming the least desire to detract 
one iota from the splendid fame of Dr. William 
Harvey in his great discovery of the circula- 
tion of the blood, worked out logically and 
persistently, I must confess that to me there is 
a great fascination in tracing in Shakespeare’s 
writings how nearly their author is entitled to 
at least “honorable mention” along this same 
line of research, for he antedated Harvey. 
Harvey became a doctor in 1602, and 14 years 
after (the very year of Shakespeare’s death, 
years, his collected works being first published 
the latter having then ceased writing for four 
in 1623,) first announced some views on the 
movement of the heart and blood, enunciating 
them for several years thereafter in college 
lectures, and finally, in 1628, publishing his 
famous treatise, “Exercitatio de Motu Cordis 
et Sanguinis.” It is not necessary to here re- 
view the crude conceptions which at or before 
this time*obtained regarding the circulation of 
the blood, and I will only ask you how could 
Shakespeare have written the following if he 
had not had a correct or nearly correct idea of 
the circulation of the blood: 
There was a time when all the body’s members 
Rebelled against the belly. * * * * 
Your most grave belly was deliberate, 
Not rash like his accusers, and thus answered: 
True is it, my incorporate friend, quoth he, 
That I receive the general food at nrst 
Which do you live upon; and fit it is, 
Because 1 am the store-house and the shop 
Of the whole body; but if you do remember, 
I send it through the rivers of your blood, 
Even to the court the heart—to the’ seat o’ the' 
brain; 
And, through the cranks and offices of man, 
The strongest nerves, and small inferior veins, 
From me receive that natural competency 
Whereby they live. 
Menenius, In Coriolanus, 1, 1. 
See how the blood is settled in his face. 
Oft have 1 seen a timely-parted ghost 
Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale, and bloodless 
Being all descended to the laboring 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’re 
returneth 
To blush and beautify the cheek again. 
But see his face is black and full of blood. 
Warwick, in Henry VI. 2d, 3, 2. 
(The rest of this quotation is classed by Bell 
in his Principles of Surgery, London, 1815, as 
the finest extant description of a death from 
apoplexy, though pictured as the violent death 
of Humphrey.) 
The tide of blood in me 
Hath proudly fioiwed in vanity, till now; 
Now doth it turn and ebb back to the sea, 
Where it shall mingle with the state of floods, 
And flow henceforth in formal majesty. 
King Henry V, in Henry IV, 2d, 5, 2. 
Why does my blood thus muster to my heart, 
Making both it unable for itself, 
And dispossessing all my other parts of neces- 
sary fitness? 
Bo play the foolish throngs with one that 
swoons; 
Come all to help him, and so stop the air 
By which he should revive. 
Angelo, in Measure for Measure, 2. * 
You are my true and honorable wife, 
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops 
That visit my sad heart. 
Brutus, in Julius Caesar, 2, 1. 
Though there are many other strong pas- 
sages relative here, lack of time will prevent 
their presentation. But another singular coin- 
cidence concerning Harvey and Shakespeare 
should be mentioned. In Timb’s Mysteries of 
Life, Death and Futurity are mentioned sev- 
eral instances of death from broken heart, and 
the statement that Dr. Harvev was the first 382 
THE AMERICAN HOMEOPATHIST. 
to describe the affection. But Shakespeare, 
who antedated him, wrote: 
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not 
speak 
Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it 
break. Malcolm, in Macbeth, 4, 3. 
Shall split thy very heart with sorrow. 
Queen Margaret, in Richard III, 1, 3. 
O, cut my lace, lest my heart, cracking it, break 
too. • Paulina, in Winter’s Tale, 3, 2. 
The first instance of kindness to the insane 
I have been able to find recorded in literature 
is the treatment accorded the demented Lear 
by Cordelia and the Physician, in act 4, scene 
7, of “King Lear,” unless you prefer to cite the 
case where jesus cast out the devils which 
afterward caused such a commotion among 
the swine, described in the eighth chapter of 
Matthew. But the physician’s part and words 
are very brief. “King Lear” was published 
in 1608, and we wait 184 years, or until 1792, 
only 106 years ago, before we find the first real 
recorded instance of kindness to the insane by 
a physician. Here again Dr. Samuel Hahne- 
mann furnishes the shining example, as in 
17Q2 he cured the previously brutally treated 
Chancellary Secretary, Klockenbring, of in- 
sanity, writing as follows, Ameke’s History of 
Homeopathy, p. 67: “I never allow an insane 
person to be punished either by blows or any 
Other kind of corporal chastisement, because 
there is no punishment where there is no re- 
sponsibility, and because these sufferers 
deserve only pity, and are always rendered 
worse by such treatment and never improved.” 
At this time it was thought necessary to treat 
insane people as wild animals, and cow and 
terrify them, so that a madhouse became a 
veritable torture chamber. Immediately fol- 
lowing Hahnemann’s example came Pinel, 
who took charge of Bicetre, Paris, and struck 
the chains from its unfortunate inmates, while 
the true Friend, Tuke, performed a like service 
in York Retreat, York, England, about the 
same time. But ever remember that our 
revered Hahnemann was the first, though 
psychiatry had taken many steps in this cen- 
tury before his example was generally fol- 
lowed. One quotation from Shakespeare will 
show how it was in his time: 
Love is merely a madness, and I tell you deserves 
a dark house and a whip as mad men do. 
Rosalind, in As You Like It, 3, 2. 
While this evening we cannot far accompany 
the great naturalist of the soul in his treatment 
of the subject of insanity, mention of some of 
those “troubled with thick-coming fancies,” 
as was Lady Macbeth, 5, 3, should be made. 
Let us hope that none of us may “eat of the 
insane root that takes the reason prisoner/' 
Banquo, in Macbeth, i, 3, and let us all be care- 
ful to remember that “melancholy is the nurse 
of-frenzy,” Servant, in “Taming of the Shrew,” 
Ind., 2. And King Lear tells us, 2, 4: “We are 
not ourselves, when nature, being oppressed, 
commands the mind to suffer with the body.” 
But, as the unfortunate Ophelia, 4, 5, says, 
“We know what we are, but know not what 
wre may be.” Hers was a typical case of hvs- 
tero-tnania, and finally suicide for loss of father 
and lover. Hear her description earlier in the 
play “Hamlet,” 3, 1, of the Prince’s supposed 
condition: 
O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! 
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason. 
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh. 
Macbeth asks the Doctor, 5, 3: 
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? 
And he replies: 
Therein the patient 
Must minister to himself. 
Macbeth’s ejaculation: 
Throw physic to the dogs, I’ll none of it, 
so often flung at our profession oppro- 
briously, is thus shown to be a cry of despair 
coming after an honest doctor’s opinion con- 
scientiously rendered. That Macbeth did not 
really reject physic we plainly see, for almost 
in the next breath he says: 
If thou coulds’t, doctor, find her disease, 
And purge it to a sound and pristine nealth, 
I would applaud thee to the very echo. 
Shakespeare placed a true estimate on the 
value of sleep in mental and physical troubles, 
thus: 
O, sleep, O, gentle sleep, Nature’s soft nurse, 
how have I frighted thee? * * * 
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. 
King Henry, in Henry IV 2d, 3, 1. 
Sleep, that sometimes knits up sorrow’s eye. 
Helena, in Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3, 2. 
Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care, 
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath. 
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second 
course, 
Chief nourisher in life’s feast. 
Macbeth, in Macbeth, 2, 2. 
He gives us a hint of the vis medicatrix 
natune thus: 
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie which we 
ascribe to heaven. 
Helena, in All’s Well That Ends Well, 1, 1. 
The conventional consultation is well des- 
scribed: THE AMERICAN HOMEOPATHIST. 
When our most learned doctors leave us and 
The congregated college have concluded 
That laboring art can never ransom nature 
From her inaldable estate. 
King, in All’s Well That Ends Well, 2, 1. 
The toxic agents of Shakespeare’s fertile 
imagination were of a potent quality. What 
expert materia medicist of to-day can duplicate 
Friar Laurence’s feat in aid of Juliet—counter- 
feiting death for “two and forty hours”—or 
the “juice of cursed hebenon” poured in Ham- 
let’s father’s ears? We could dispatch Romeo 
wTh anhydrous hydrocyanic acid as quickly 
as the poverty-stricken Apothecary’s “soon- 
speeding gear” did, and perhaps our curare 
would have rung down the final curtain in 
“Harn’et” as well as the poison had in mind by 
Shakespeare. The good and cautious Doctor 
Cornelius, “Cymbeline,” i, 6, supplied the 
homicidal Queen with a supposed poison by 
her command and then soliloquizes: “’Twill 
stupefy and didl the senses awhile; * * but 
there is no danger in what show of death it 
makes, more than the locking up of the spirits a 
time”—a surprisingly close picture of the 
action of our modern chloroform. 
That over-doughtv v’arrior Falstaff gives us 
the etiology of apoplex\ thus: 
This apoplexy * * * hath its original from 
much grief, from study and perturbation 
of the brain; I have seen the cause of its 
effects in Galen. 
Falstaff, in Henry IV. 2d, 1, 2. 
And because of the meriy and fat old rascal 
Jack Falstaff, one of Shakespeare’s greatest 
characters, and who speaks more lines than 
any other, we know that some kind of urine 
analysis was in vogue in his time. He asks, 
and is answered by Page: 
What says the doctor to my water? 
lie said, sir, the water itself was a good healthy 
He said, sir, the wrater itself was good, healthy 
water; but, for the party that owed it, he 
might have more diseases than he knew 
for. Henry IV 2d, 1, 2. 
He it was who said that honor hath no skill 
in surgery, and cannot set a leg or an arm. And 
of his end Sir Walter Scott wrote: “the death- 
bed scene of poor old Jack Falstaff is the most 
pathetic and pitiful death-scene ever written,” 
as described by Mrs. Quickly, in “Henry V,” 
2, 2. 
Of suicide by weapons many examples are 
given, such as the terrific throat-cutting of 
Othello and the startling hari kari of Cassius 
and Brutus, and the daggers of Juliet, Lucrece 
and Goneril, the latter after having poisoned 
her sister. Hamlet hints at it in the very first 
-act. scene 2, where he says: 
O, that this too, too-solid flesh would melt, 
Thaw, and dissolve itself into a dew! 
Or that the Everlapting had not fixed 
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! 
And again in the great “To be,or not to be” 
soliloquy in the tirst scene of the third act, 
“When lie himself might his quietus make 
with a bare bodkin.” The mistaken and too- 
prcvious Romeo uses poison, however, paying 
40 ducats for a dram. But Egypt’s voluptu- 
ous queen, Cleopatra, was the only one to make 
a study of the matter, Caesar saying, “For her 
physician tells me she hath pursued conclu- 
sions infinite of easy ways to die.” She says, 
“I have immortal longings in me!” and applies 
two small serpents to her flesh. She was evi- 
dently posted on narcotics also, as she says, 
act 1. scene 5. “Give me to drink mandragora, 
that I might sleep this great gap .of time my 
Antony is away.” And that honest villain, 
Iago, was also posted in them when he shows 
shows how the newly-awakened jealousy will 
affect Othello: 
Not poppy nor mandragora, 
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, 
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep 
Which thou ow'dst yesterday. 
Iago, in Othello, 3, 3. 
The patent medicine advertisement writers 
of to-day must have taken their cue from 
Shakespeare, who first “promoted” this indus- 
try, which has now assumed such gigantic 
proportions and soars so altitudinously in the» 
empyrean realms of imagination, and whose 
labors finally furnish the more plodding mem- 
bers of our profession with so many good but 
tough propositions yclept patients. The King, 
in “All’s Well That Ends Well,” has a fistula, 
and the old lord Lafeu says to him, 1,2: 
I have seen a medicine 
That’s able to breathe life into a stone, 
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary, 
With spritely fire and motion; whose simple 
touch 
Ts powerful to arise King Pepin, nay, 
To give great Charlemain a pen in his hand, 
And write to her a love-line. 
He then introduces Helena, who speaks of 
a prescription highly prized by her father, a 
skilled physician, now dead, urging him to use 
it: 
» 
Ere four and twenty times the pilot's glass 
Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass, 
What is infirm in your sound parts shall fly, 
Health shall live free, and sickness freely die. 
The time-honored but insane and now-ob- 
solete practice of free bleeding as the treatment 
for all diseases is thus hinted at: 
Let’s purge this choler without letting blood; 
This we prescribe, though no physician. 
********* 
Our doctors say there is no time to bleed. 
King Richard, in Richard II, 1 , 1. 384 
THE AMERICAN HOMEOPATHIST. 
And the action of aconite on the hearty 
arteries and blood is clearly shown: 
That the united vessel of their blood 
Shall never leak, though it do work as strong 
As aconitum or rash gunpowder. 
King Henry, in Henry IV 2d, 4, 4. 
place these quotations together to remind 
you that the abolition of the practice of bleed- 
ing as the treatment for diseases was brought 
about by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, the founder 
of Homeopathy, who was the first physician 
to raise his voice against it, and also that he 
was the first to reveal to the medical world 
the true virtues of aconite, since wittily called 
“the Homeopathic lancet.” But this is a long- 
story to tell, especially as I have already told 
it in Homeopathic League Tract No. 36, pub- 
lished in London in 1891, copied from the Chi- 
cago Medical Current, November, 1890. • 
The drug store of to-day, with its soda- 
water and patent medicine attachments, its 
gin and gimcracks, its garish lights, fine dis- 
play of the cabinet maker’s art and big force of 
prescribing clerks, is not much like the shop 
of the apothecary of Mantua you will find 
described in “Romeo and Juliet,” act 5, scene 
1, nor will you therein recognize its proprietor. 
Modern travelers by the “morphine route,” as 
the daily paper reporters coarsely put it, can 
get their euthanasia easier than Romeo did, 
for then, as the Apothecary said, 5, 1: 
l 
Such mortal drugs 1 have; but Mantua’s law 
Is death to any he that utters them. 
In this respect we have progressed back- 
ward, for, in this State, at least, thanks to 
vetoes by two Governors, any one can unques- 
tioned buy anything in any drug store. 
The term physic is frequently used, but only 
a few examples in addition to the ones already 
cited will be given: 
Take physic, pomp. 
Lear, in King Lear, 3, 4. 
’Tis a physic that's bitter to sweet end. 
Isabella, in Measure for Measure, 4, 6. 
’Tis time to give ’em physic. 
Sands, in Henry VIII, 1, 3. 
The labor we delight in physics pain. 
Macbeth, in Macbeth, 2, 3. 
The ridiculous belief in “love potions” exists 
to this day as it did in Shakespeare’s time: 
If the rascal have not given me medicines to 
make me love him I’ll be hanged. 
Falstaff, in Henry IV 1st, 2, 2. 
Toothache was the same then as now, with- 
out our means of palliation, though all too 
often cold steel yet remains the only remedy: 
Being troubled with a raging tooth, 
1 could not sleep. 
lago, in Othello, 3, 3. 
For there was never yet philosopher 
That could endure the toothache patiently. 
Leonato, in Much Ado About Nothing, 5, 1. 
Sweet poison for the age's tooth. 
Faulconbridge, in King John. 1, 1 
A case of suspended animation after child- 
birth is well shown in “Pericles,” Thasia being 
coffined and thrown into the sea, in response 
to the demand of the superstitious sailors, in 
act 3, scene i, and resuscitated by Cerimon in 
scene 2. 
Palsy is mentioned several times, but his 
only epileptic is the great Julius Caesar, who 
had “the falling sickness,” and who “fell down 
in the market-place and foamed at the mouth, 
and was speechless.” Othello had a fit, but it 
was of rage, not weakness. 
This for our pharmacist herb-gatherers, 
without whom the country physician of to-day 
would be far more of a mechanician than he is: 
In such a night 
Medea gathered the enchanted herbs 
That did renew old Aeson. 
Lorenzo, in Merchant of Venice, 5, 1. 
The poisonous simple sometimes is compacted 
In a pure compound; being so applied, 
His venom in effect is purified. 
Tarquin. 
Certain “zymotic” diseases are thus alluded 
to: 
Like the owner of a foul disease, 
• To keep it from divulging, let it feed 
Even on the pith of life. 
King, in Hamlet, 4, 1, 
His dissolute disease will scarce obey this 
medicine. 
Mrs. Page, in Merry Wives of Windsor, 3, 3. 
I had thought to here put in one paragraph 
the names of all the diseases mentioned by 
Shakespeare, but, as it will look too much like 
an index to a work on practice, will instead use 
but two quotations, one of which is probably 
fuller of them than any other in his writings: 
The aged man that coffers up his gold 
Is plagued with cramps, and gouts, and painful 
fits, 
And scarce hath eyes his treasures to behold. 
Lucrece. 
Now the rotten disease of the south, the guts- 
griping, ruptures, catarrh, loads of gravel in 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! 
Thersites, in Troilus and Cressida, 5, 1 1 
He gives this sound marriage advice: 
Let still the woman take an elder than herself. • 
* Duke, in Twelfth Night, 2, 4 
From time immemorial the question of the 
determination of sex before birth, or rather, the 
production of either sex at will, has excited 
the interest and curiosity of mankind, and in 
many families, even of low rank, as titles go; 
it has been an absorbing passion. The Schertck THE AMERICAN HOMEOPATHIST. 
385 
theory of sex production at will, or some other 
equally good, was in his mind when he makes 
Macbeth say to his ambitious spouse, 1, 7: 
Bring forth men-children only! 
For thy undaunted mettle should compose 
Nothing but males, 
And then he makes Antonio, in “The Mer- 
chant of Venice,” 1, 3, when speaking of Jacob 
and Laban's Bible-story sheep, upset all theo- 
ries : 
A thing not in his power to bring to pass, 
But sway'd and fashion’d by the hand of 
Heaven. 
Deformities, etc., are thus mentioned: 
Sent before my time into this breathing world, 
scarce half made up. 
Richard, in Richard III, 1, 1. 
Worse than a * * * birth hour’s blot; 
For marks descried in men’s nativity 
Are nature’s faults, not their own infamy. 
Lucrece. 
Wise observations follow: 
I am sure care’s an enemy to life. 
Sir Toby Belch, in Twelfth Night, 1, 3. 
A merry heart goes all the day; 
Your sad tires in a mile-a. 
Autolycus, in Winter’s Tale, 4, 2. 
The miserable have no other medicine but only 
hope. „ „ 
Claudio, in Measure for Measure 3, 1. 
Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead, 
excessive grief the enemy to the living. 
Lafu, in All’s Well That Ends Well, 1, 1. 
But we must hurry on, as our time limit is 
reached, though we have but dipped into the 
ocean of quotations available. A few more 
will be appended without comment: 
Now good digestion wait on appetite, and health 
on both. Macbeth, in Macbeth, 3, 4. 
Unquiet meals makes ill digestions. 
Abbess, in Comedy of Errors, 5, 1. 
They are as sick that surfeit with too much, as 
they that starve with nothing. 
Nerissa, in Merchant of Venice, 1, 2. 
’Tis dangerous to take a cold. 
Hotspur, in Henry IV., 1st, 2, 8. 
When I was sick you gave me bitter pills. 
Proteus, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2, 4. 
I have tremor cordis on me; my heart dances. 
Leontes, in Winter’s Tale, 1, 2. 
To see the salve doth make the wound ache 
more. Lucrece. 
lago—What, are you hurt, lieutenant? 
Cassio—Ay. past all surgery. Othello, 2, 3. 
The pleasing punishment that women bear. 
Aegeon, in Comedy of Errors, 1, 1. 
Memory, the warder of the brain. 
Lady Macbeth, in Macbeth, 1, 7. 
And this for banquet-goers : 
These are begot in the ventricle of memory, 
nourished in the womb of pia mater, and 
delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. 
Holofernes, in Love’s Labor’s Lost, 4, 2. 
And now of death, for. as the Queen, in 
“Hamlet,” i, 2. says. 
All that lives must die, 
Passing through nature to eternity. 
It is too late; the life of all his blood is touch'd 
corruptibly; and his pure brain doth by the 
idle comments that it makes fortell the end- 
ing of mortality. 
Prince Henry, in King John, 5, 6- 
They say the tongues of dying men 
Enforce attention, like deep harmony; 
When words are scarce they’re seldom spent 
in vain; 
For they breathe truth, that breathe their words 
in pain. 
Gaunt, in Richard II, 2, 1. 
And then that beautiful painting, which all 
admire, and which may be called the founda- 
tion of the agnostics’ creed, if they may 
properly be said to have any creed, spoken by 
Prospero, in “The Tempest,” 4, 1: 
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, 
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and 
Are melted into air, into thin air: 
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself. 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, 
And like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on; and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep. 
And now we come to Jaques, the philosophic 
Jaques, who says: 
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, 
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot, 
leading up to his famous and oft-quoted Seven 
Ages of Man, “As You Like It,” act 2, scene 
7, beginning: 
All the world's a stage, 
And all the men and women merely players, 
and ending: 
Last scene of all, 
That ends this strange eventful history, 
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion; 
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every- 
thing. 
But fail not to observe that this is the 
utterance of a cynic and hypochondriac. To 
me there is a no more beautiful picture, with 
its frame of purest silver, than the benign coun- 
tenance of the aged man or woman who has 
learned the great lesson of life, to grow old 
gracefully, and who can say, with Dr. Holmes, 
I’d rather be seventy years young than forty 
years old. Let this, then, be our lesson and 
our ambition, and if we succeed we and the 
world will be the happier for our having done 
our part. And 
So live that when thy summons comes to join 
The innumerable caravan which moves 
To that mysterious realm where each shall take 
His chamber in the silent halls of death 
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night. 
Scourged to thy dungeon, but, sustained and 
soothed 
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave 
Like one that wraps the drapery of his couch 
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. 
Bryant’s Thanatopsis.