Self Help by Samuel Smiles (desktop ebook reader txt) 📖

was unable

either to verify or refute. But the best answer to his assailants

was the success of his practice. The wounded soldiers called out

everywhere for Pare, and he was always at their service: he tended

them carefully and affectionately; and he usually took leave of

them with the words, “I have dressed you; may God cure you.”

 

After three years’ active service as army-surgeon, Pare returned to

Paris with such a reputation that he was at once appointed surgeon

in ordinary to the King. When Metz was besieged by the Spanish

army, under Charles V., the garrison suffered heavy loss, and the

number of wounded was very great. The surgeons were few and

incompetent, and probably slew more by their bad treatment than the

Spaniards did by the sword. The Duke of Guise, who commanded the

garrison, wrote to the King imploring him to send Pare to his help.

The courageous surgeon at once set out, and, after braving many

dangers (to use his own words, “d’estre pendu, estrangle ou mis en

pieces”), he succeeded in passing the enemy’s lines, and entered

Metz in safety. The Duke, the generals, and the captains gave him

an affectionate welcome; while the soldiers, when they heard of his

arrival, cried, “We no longer fear dying of our wounds; our friend

is among us.” In the following year Pare was in like manner with

the besieged in the town of Hesdin, which shortly fell before the

Duke of Savoy, and he was taken prisoner. But having succeeded in

curing one of the enemy’s chief officers of a serious wound, he was

discharged without ransom, and returned in safety to Paris.

 

The rest of his life was occupied in study, in self-improvement, in

piety, and in good deeds. Urged by some of the most learned among

his contemporaries, he placed on record the results of his surgical

experience, in twenty-eight books, which were published by him at

different times. His writings are valuable and remarkable chiefly

on account of the great number of facts and cases contained in

them, and the care with which he avoids giving any directions

resting merely upon theory unsupported by observation. Pare

continued, though a Protestant, to hold the office of surgeon in

ordinary to the King; and during the Massacre of St. Bartholomew he

owed his life to the personal friendship of Charles IX., whom he

had on one occasion saved from the dangerous effects of a wound

inflicted by a clumsy surgeon in performing the operation of

venesection. Brantome, in his ‘Memoires,’ thus speaks of the

King’s rescue of Pare on the night of Saint Bartholomew—“He sent

to fetch him, and to remain during the night in his chamber and

wardrobe-room, commanding him not to stir, and saying that it was

not reasonable that a man who had preserved the lives of so many

people should himself be massacred.” Thus Pare escaped the horrors

of that fearful night, which he survived for many years, and was

permitted to die in peace, full of age and honours.

 

Harvey was as indefatigable a labourer as any we have named. He

spent not less than eight long years of investigation and research

before he published his views of the circulation of the blood. He

repeated and verified his experiments again and again, probably

anticipating the opposition he would have to encounter from the

profession on making known his discovery. The tract in which he at

length announced his views, was a most modest one,—but simple,

perspicuous, and conclusive. It was nevertheless received with

ridicule, as the utterance of a crack-brained impostor. For some

time, he did not make a single convert, and gained nothing but

contumely and abuse. He had called in question the revered

authority of the ancients; and it was even averred that his views

were calculated to subvert the authority of the Scriptures and

undermine the very foundations of morality and religion. His

little practice fell away, and he was left almost without a friend.

This lasted for some years, until the great truth, held fast by

Harvey amidst all his adversity, and which had dropped into many

thoughtful minds, gradually ripened by further observation, and

after a period of about twenty-five years, it became generally

recognised as an established scientific truth.

 

The difficulties encountered by Dr. Jenner in promulgating and

establishing his discovery of vaccination as a preventive of smallpox, were even greater than those of Harvey. Many, before him, had

witnessed the cow-pox, and had heard of the report current among

the milkmaids in Gloucestershire, that whoever had taken that

disease was secure against smallpox. It was a trifling, vulgar

rumour, supposed to have no significance whatever; and no one had

thought it worthy of investigation, until it was accidentally

brought under the notice of Jenner. He was a youth, pursuing his

studies at Sodbury, when his attention was arrested by the casual

observation made by a country girl who came to his master’s shop

for advice. The smallpox was mentioned, when the girl said, “I

can’t take that disease, for I have had cow-pox.” The observation

immediately riveted Jenner’s attention, and he forthwith set about

inquiring and making observations on the subject. His professional

friends, to whom he mentioned his views as to the prophylactic

virtues of cow-pox, laughed at him, and even threatened to expel

him from their society, if he persisted in harassing them with the

subject. In London he was so fortunate as to study under John

Hunter, to whom he communicated his views. The advice of the great

anatomist was thoroughly characteristic: “Don’t think, but TRY; be

patient, be accurate.” Jenner’s courage was supported by the

advice, which conveyed to him the true art of philosophical

investigation. He went back to the country to practise his

profession and make observations and experiments, which he

continued to pursue for a period of twenty years. His faith in his

discovery was so implicit that he vaccinated his own son on three

several occasions. At length he published his views in a quarto of

about seventy pages, in which he gave the details of twenty-three

cases of successful vaccination of individuals, to whom it was

found afterwards impossible to communicate the smallpox either by

contagion or inoculation. It was in 1798 that this treatise was

published; though he had been working out his ideas since the year

1775, when they had begun to assume a definite form.

 

How was the discovery received? First with indifference, then with

active hostility. Jenner proceeded to London to exhibit to the

profession the process of vaccination and its results; but not a

single medical man could be induced to make trial of it, and after

fruitlessly waiting for nearly three months, he returned to his

native village. He was even caricatured and abused for his attempt

to “bestialize” his species by the introduction into their systems

of diseased matter from the cow’s udder. Vaccination was denounced

from the pulpit as “diabolical.” It was averred that vaccinated

children became “ox-faced,” that abscesses broke out to “indicate

sprouting horns,” and that the countenance was gradually

“transmuted into the visage of a cow, the voice into the bellowing

of bulls.” Vaccination, however, was a truth, and notwithstanding

the violence of the opposition, belief in it spread slowly. In one

village, where a gentleman tried to introduce the practice, the

first persons who permitted themselves to be vaccinated were

absolutely pelted and driven into their houses if they appeared out

of doors. Two ladies of title—Lady Ducie and the Countess of

Berkeley—to their honour be it remembered—had the courage to

vaccinate their children; and the prejudices of the day were at

once broken through. The medical profession gradually came round,

and there were several who even sought to rob Dr. Jenner of the

merit of the discovery, when its importance came to be recognised.

Jenner’s cause at last triumphed, and he was publicly honoured and

rewarded. In his prosperity he was as modest as he had been in his

obscurity. He was invited to settle in London, and told that he

might command a practice of 10,000l. a year. But his answer was,

“No! In the morning of my days I have sought the sequestered and

lowly paths of life—the valley, and not the mountain,—and now, in

the evening of my days, it is not meet for me to hold myself up as

an object for fortune and for fame.” During Jenner’s own lifetime

the practice of vaccination became adopted all over the civilized

world; and when he died, his title as a Benefactor of his kind was

recognised far and wide. Cuvier has said, “If vaccine were the

only discovery of the epoch, it would serve to render it

illustrious for ever; yet it knocked twenty times in vain at the

doors of the Academies.”

 

Not less patient, resolute, and persevering was Sir Charles Bell in

the prosecution of his discoveries relating to the nervous system.

Previous to his time, the most confused notions prevailed as to the

functions of the nerves, and this branch of study was little more

advanced than it had been in the times of Democritus and Anaxagoras

three thousand years before. Sir Charles Bell, in the valuable

series of papers the publication of which was commenced in 1821,

took an entirely original view of the subject, based upon a long

series of careful, accurate, and oft-repeated experiments.

Elaborately tracing the development of the nervous system up from

the lowest order of animated being, to man—the lord of the animal

kingdom,—he displayed it, to use his own words, “as plainly as if

it were written in our mother-tongue.” His discovery consisted in

the fact, that the spinal nerves are double in their function, and

arise by double roots from the spinal marrow,—volition being

conveyed by that part of the nerves springing from the one root,

and sensation by the other. The subject occupied the mind of Sir

Charles Bell for a period of forty years, when, in 1840, he laid

his last paper before the Royal Society. As in the cases of Harvey

and Jenner, when he had lived down the ridicule and opposition with

which his views were first received, and their truth came to be

recognised, numerous claims for priority in making the discovery

were set up at home and abroad. Like them, too, he lost practice

by the publication of his papers; and he left it on record that,

after every step in his discovery, he was obliged to work harder

than ever to preserve his reputation as a practitioner. The great

merits of Sir Charles Bell were, however, at length fully

recognised; and Cuvier himself, when on his deathbed, finding his

face distorted and drawn to one side, pointed out the symptom to

his attendants as a proof of the correctness of Sir Charles Bell’s

theory.

 

An equally devoted pursuer of the same branch of science was the

late Dr. Marshall Hall, whose name posterity will rank with those

of Harvey, Hunter, Jenner, and Bell. During the whole course of

his long and useful life he was a most careful and minute observer;

and no fact, however apparently insignificant, escaped his

attention. His important discovery of the diastaltic nervous

system, by which his name will long be known amongst scientific

men, originated in an exceedingly simple circumstance. When

investigating the pneumonic circulation in the Triton, the

decapitated object lay upon the table; and on separating the tail

and accidentally pricking the external integument, he observed that

it moved with energy, and became contorted into various forms. He

had not touched a muscle or a muscular nerve; what then was the

nature of these movements? The same phenomena had probably been

often observed before, but Dr. Hall was the first to apply himself

perseveringly to the investigation of their causes; and he

exclaimed on the occasion, “I will never rest satisfied until I

have found