Volume I Part 22 (2/2)
Another more polished poet penned these neat lines:
”While you, great George, for knowledge hunt, And sharp conductors change for blunt, The Empire's out of joint.
Franklin another course pursues And all your thunder heedless views By keeping to the point.”
If we may believe Franklin, Sir John held the efficacy of the healing art in very moderate esteem. The reader has already been told of the humorous manner in which he let it be known that, in his opinion, of the two cla.s.ses of pract.i.tioners, old women and regular physicians, the former had done the most to save the honor of the profession. Franklin also informed Dr. Rush that Sir John ”once told him 92 fevers out of 100 cured themselves, 4 were cured by Art, and 4 proved fatal.” But many people must have had a more favorable opinion of the professional value of Sir John than Sir John himself had, for his ”Conversations” were in high repute. On this point, there is some evidence in a letter from Franklin to Dr. Thomas Bond, who was desirous of giving his son Richard the benefit of a foreign medical education. Referring to Sir John, Franklin wrote:
Every Wednesday Evening he admits young Physicians and Surgeons to a Conversation at his House, which is thought very improving to them. I will endeavour to introduce your Son there when he comes to London. And to tell you frankly my Opinion, I suspect there is more valuable knowledge in Physic to be learnt from the honest candid Observations of an old Pract.i.tioner, who is past all desire of more Business, having made his Fortune, who has none of the Professional Interest in keeping up a Parade of Science to draw Pupils, and who by Experience has discovered the Inefficacy of most Remedies and Modes of Practice, than from all the formal Lectures of all the Universities upon Earth.
That Dr. John cured at least one patient, we are told by Dr. Rush on the authority of Franklin, but it was Only himself of a tremor, and that by simply ceasing to take snuff. Dr. Pringle and himself, Franklin told Dr.
Rush, observed that tremors of the hands were more frequent in France than elsewhere, and probably from the excessive use of snuff. ”He concluded,”
says Dr. Rush, ”that there was no great advantage in using tobacco in any way, for that he had kept company with persons who used it all his life, and no one had ever advised him to use it. The Doctor in the 81st year of his age declared he had never snuffed, chewed, or smoked.”
Among the persons who sought Sir John's professional advice was Franklin himself. It was in relation to a cutaneous trouble which vexed him for some fourteen years, and broke out afresh when he was in his eighty-third year.
But the best medicine that Franklin ever obtained from Sir John was his companions.h.i.+p upon two continental tours, one of which was inspired by the latter's desire to drink the waters at Pyrmont, and the other by the attractions of the French capital. When the news of Sir John's death reached Franklin at Pa.s.sy he paid the usual heartfelt tribute. ”We have lost our common Friend,” he wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, ”the excellent Pringle. How many pleasing hours you and I have pa.s.s'd together in his Company!”
Another English physician, for whom Franklin entertained a feeling of deep affection, was the Quaker Dr. John Fothergill. After the death of this friend, in a letter to Dr. John Coakley Lettsom, still another friend of his, and one of the famous English physicians of the eighteenth century, he expressed this extraordinary opinion of Dr. Fothergill's worth: ”If we may estimate the goodness of a man by his disposition to do good, and his constant endeavours and success in doing it, I can hardly conceive that a better man has ever existed.” No faint praise to be uttered by the founder of the Junto and one who valued above all things the character of a doer of good! Like Sir John Pringle, Dr. Fothergill belonged to the cla.s.s of physicians who pursued medicine, as if it were a mistress not to be wooed except with the favor of the other members of the scientific sisterhood. He was an ardent botanist, and his collection of botanical specimens and paintings on vellum of rare plants was among the remarkable collections of his age. Two of his correspondents were the Pennsylvania botanists, John Bartram and Humphrey Marshall, who brought to his knowledge a flora in many s.h.i.+ning instances unknown to the woods and fields of the Old World.
His medical writings were held in high esteem, and were published after his death under the editorial supervision of Dr. Lettsom.
As a pract.i.tioner, he was eminently successful, and numbered among his patients many representatives of the most powerful and exclusive circles in London. What the extent of his practice was we can infer from a question put to him by Franklin in 1764.
By the way [he asked], when do you intend to live?--_i.
e._, to enjoy life. When will you retire to your villa, give yourself repose, delight in viewing the operations of nature in the vegetable creation, a.s.sist her in her works, get your ingenious friends at times about you, make them happy with your conversation, and enjoy theirs: or, if alone, amuse yourself with your books and elegant collections?
To be hurried about perpetually from one sick chamber to another is not living. Do you please yourself with the fancy that you are doing good? You are mistaken.
Half the lives you save are not worth saving, as being useless, and almost all the other half ought not to be saved, as being mischievous. Does your conscience never hint to you the impiety of being in constant warfare against the plans of Providence? Disease was intended as the punishment of intemperance, sloth, and other vices, and the example of that punishment was intended to promote and strengthen the opposite virtues.
All of which, of course, except the suggestion about retirement, which was quite in keeping with Franklin's conception of a rational life, was nothing more than humorous paradox on the part of a man who loved all his fellow-creatures too much to despair of any of them.
When Franklin himself was seized with a grave attack of illness shortly after his arrival in England on his first mission, Doctor Fothergill was his physician, and seems to have cupped and physicked him with drastic a.s.siduity. The patient was not a very docile one, for he wrote to Deborah that, too soon thinking himself well, he ventured out twice, and both times got fresh cold, and fell down again; and that his ”good doctor” grew very angry with him for acting contrary to his cautions and directions, and obliged him to promise more observance for the future. Always to Franklin the Doctor remained the ”good Doctor Fothergill.” Even in a codicil to his will, in bequeathing to one of his friends the silver cream pot given to him by the doctor, with the motto ”Keep bright the chain,” he refers to him by that designation.
Nor were his obligations as a patient the only obligations that Franklin owed to this friend. When his early letters on electricity were sent over to England, only to be laughed at in the first instance, they happened to pa.s.s under the eye of the Doctor. He saw their merit, advised their publication, and wrote the preface to the pamphlet in which they were published by Cave. But the things for which Franklin valued the Doctor most were his public spirit and philanthropy. He was well known in Philadelphia, and, when Franklin arrived in London in 1757, he was actively a.s.sisted by the Doctor in his effort to secure a settlement of the dispute over taxation between the Pennsylvania a.s.sembly and the Proprietaries.
Afterwards, when Franklin's second mission to England was coming to an end, the Doctor was drawn deeply into a vain attempt made by Lord Howe and his sister and David Barclay, another Quaker friend of Franklin, to compose the American controversy by an agreement with Franklin. For this business, among other reasons, because of ”his daily Visits among the Great, in the Practice of his Profession,” of which Franklin speaks in his history of these negotiations, he would have been a most helpful ally; if the quarrel had not become so embittered. But, as it was, the knot, which the negotiators were striving to disentangle, was too intricate for anything but the edge of the sword. When the negotiations came to nothing, the good Doctor, who knew the sentiments of ”the Great” in London at that time, if any private person did, had no advice to give to Franklin except, when he returned to America, to get certain of the Doctor's friends in Philadelphia, and two or three other persons together, and to inform them that, whatever specious pretences were offered by the English ministry, they were all hollow, and that to obtain a larger field, on which to fatten a herd of worthless parasites, was all that was regarded. It was a bad day, indeed, for England when one of the best men in the land could hold such language.
The silk experiment in Pennsylvania furnished still another congenial field for the co-operation of Franklin and Doctor Fothergill; and, in a letter to Franklin, the latter also declared in startlingly modern terms that, in the warmth of his affection for mankind, he could wish to see ”the inst.i.tution of a College of Justice, where the claims of sovereigns should be weighed, an award given, and war only made on him who refused submission.”
”Dr. Fothergill, who was among the best men I have known, and a great promoter of useful projects,” is the way in which Franklin alludes to the Doctor in the _Autobiography_. He then states in the same connection the plan that he submitted to the Doctor for ”the more effectual cleaning and keeping clean the streets of London and Westminster”; but this plan, though not unworthy of the public zeal and ingenuity of its author, is too embryonic, when contrasted with modern munic.i.p.al methods, and too tamely suggestive of the broom and dust-pan of ordinary domestic housekeeping, to deserve detailed attention.
Franklin was eminently what Dr. Johnson called a ”clubable” man. When in England, he often dined at the London Coffee House in Ludgate Hill with the group of scientific men and liberal clergymen, who frequented the place, and of whom he spoke on one occasion as ”that excellent Collection of good Men, the Club at the _London_.” He also sometimes dined at St.
Paul's Coffee House and the Dog Tavern on Garlick Hill, and with the Society of Friends to the Cause of Liberty at Paul's Head Tavern, Cateaton Street, where, upon every 4th day of November, the landing of King William and the Glorious Revolution were enthusiastically toasted. When he ate or drank at a club, he liked to do so in an atmosphere of free thought and free speech. Religion, spiced with heresy, and Politics flavored with liberalism, were the kinds of religion and politics that best suited his predilections. It was at St. Paul's Coffee House that he became acquainted with Dr. Richard Price, the celebrated clergyman and economist, who was then preaching every Sunday afternoon at Newington Green, where Franklin advised Sir John Pringle to go to hear in the Doctor a preacher of _rational_ Christianity. It is probable that Sir John, in inquiring of Franklin where he could go to hear such a preacher, was moved rather by curiosity than piety; for Franklin wrote to Dr. Price: ”At present I believe he has no view of attending constantly anywhere, but now and then only as it may suit his convenience.”
The acquaintance between Franklin and Doctor Price, once formed, became a deeply-rooted friends.h.i.+p, and on Franklin's part it was accompanied by a degree of admiration for the Doctor's abilities which hurried him on one occasion into language that had little in common with the sober language in which his judgments were usually p.r.o.nounced. Of Doctor Price's _Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the National Debt_, he wrote to the author in the most enthusiastic terms, ”it being in my Opinion,” he said, ”consider'g the profound Study, & steady Application of Mind that the Work required, & the sound Judgment with which it is executed, and its great and important Utility to the Nation, the foremost Production of human Understanding, that this Century has afforded us.” And to Franklin on one occasion this friend wrote that he considered his friends.h.i.+p one of the honors and blessings of his life.
When the American controversy arose, Dr. Price zealously espoused the cause of the Colonies, and this still further strengthened the friends.h.i.+p between the two. For his _Observations on Civil Liberty and the Justice and Policy of the War with America_, the City of London presented him with the freedom of the city in a gold box of fifty pounds value; and so outspoken was he in the expression of his political convictions that Franklin wrote to John Winthrop in 1777 that ”his Friends, on his Acct, were under some Apprehensions from the Violence of Government, in consequence of his late excellent Publications in favour of Liberty.” Indeed, so near was he to making the American cause absolutely his own that Congress, while the American War was still raging, even invited him to become an American citizen and to a.s.sist in regulating the American finances, but that was one step further than he was willing to go. In a letter to Joseph Priestley, shortly after the Battle of Bunker's Hill, Franklin makes an amusing allusion to the mathematical genius of Dr. Price which was equal to the abstrusest problems involved in the calculation of annuities.
Britain [he said], at the expense of three millions, has killed one hundred and fifty Yankees this campaign, which is twenty thousand pounds a head; and at Bunker's Hill she gained a mile of ground, half of which she lost again by our taking post on Ploughed Hill. During the same time sixty thousand children have been born in America. From these _data_ his (Dr. Price's) mathematical head will easily calculate the time and expense necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole territory.
Always in the American controversy, Franklin relied upon the loins as well as the hands of the Colonists for the final victory.
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