Penny Magazine

No. 229 - THE PENNY MAGAZINE - Oct. 31, 1835

DEATHS OF EMINENT PERSONS OF MODERN TIMES.

IT is the custom for a paper to be read at the soirees of the College of Physicians; and as the first meeting of every season is attended not only by the heads of the medical profession, but by the most distinguished luminaries of the church and the law, by statesmen and men of letters, it naturally follows that it is desirable that the opening paper should be capable of interesting the philosopher and the historian as well as the mere practitioner. Those only who have tried heir hand at a composition of this kind can justly appreciate the difficulty of being popular without being trivial, and instructive without technicality.

On the last occasion of this kind (26th of January, 1835) Sir Henry Halford took for his subject the deaths of some eminent persons of modern times, beginning with Henry VIII. In giving an account of it we shall not trust our memory, but take advantage of the printed essay which has since appeared. Sir Henry observes that when this prince ascended the throne at the age of twenty, he is said to have been one of the handsomest men of his time,--an assertion which is confirmed by Holbein's pictures of him at Windsor, and a full length portrait at Belvoir Castle. As life advanced he became unwieldy in size, of a gross habit, was covered with sores, and he died of a dropsy at the age of fifty-six. "Henry's state of health in the decline of his life made him a great dabbler in physic, and the king not only offered medical advice on all occasions which presented themselves, but made up the medicines himself, and administered them. We find in that curious magazine of materials for history--the British Museum--a volume containing a large collection of recipes for plaisters, spasmadraps (dipped plaisters), ointments, waters, lotions, and decoctions, devised and made by the king himself and his physicians, applicable, perhaps, amongst other diseases, to that which had been imported some twenty-five years before from Naples; and in Sir Henry Ellis's most interesting collection of original letters, we read one from Sir Byran Tuke to Cardinal Wolsey, giving an account of an interview with the king, in which his Majesty prescribed for Sir Bryan, and sent also some excellent instructions to Cardinal Wolsey how he might avoid the infection of the sweating sickness, and how he should treat the disease should it attack him."

It is far from improbable that the Cardinal himself studied medicine, not only because almost all the learning of the land was then confined to ecclesiastics, but because then, and long afterwards, practitioners of physic were licensed by the bishops. His dying speech indeed would seem to show something of the kind. "Nay, in good sooth, Master Kingston, my disease is such that I cannot live; for I have had some experience in physic. Thus it is: I have a flux with a continued fever, the nature whereof is, that if there be no alteration of the same within eight days, either must ensue excoriation of the entrails, or delirium, or else present death. And, as I suppose, this is the eighth day, and if ye see no alteration in me, there is no remedy. Death, which is the least of these three, must follow. Farewell! I can say no more, but wish, ere I die, all the king's affairs to have good success. My time draweth on fast; I may not tarry with you. But forget not what I have said and charged you withal: for when I am dead ye shall, peradventure, remember my words better." The disease of which he died was dysentery.

Edward VI. died of inflammation of the lungs after measles.

Queen Mary was always of weak and unpromising health, for which frequent bleedings and exercise on horseback were prescribed. Aloes and chalybeates would probably have been preferable. She died of dropsy, a disease easily brought on in sickly constitutions by repeated venesection.

Dr. Bate, one of the physicians of Oliver Cromwell, has given an account of his last sickness in the work entitled 'Elenchus Motuum Nuperorum in Anglia.' The Protector, encouraged by the assurances of this chaplains, imagined to the last that he should recover, and, with this expectation, consented to be removed from Hampton Court to London. On examination, there was increased vascularity of the brain and slight inflammation of the lungs, but the spleen was a mass of disease, and filled with matter like the lees of oil.

There is a report of the last illness of Charles II., drawn up by his first physician, Sir Charles Scarborough, deposited in the library of the Antiquarian Society. The fatal disease was a fit of apoplexy, under which he lingered for four days with the insensibility which forms a part of the malady. This will account for his making no answer to the religious exhortations addressed to him; a fact which seems to have surprised Bishop Burnet, who attributes it to anything but the plain obvious reason, the stupefaction of apoplexy.

The immediate cause of the death of William III. was a fall from his horse in Hampton Court Park, by which he not only broke his collar-bone, but detached an old adhesion of the lungs to the pleura. This occasioned inflammation and suppuration, which terminated fatally.

Queen Mary, his consort, died of the small-pox. Bishop Burnet attributes the fatal termination of the case to the negligence or unskilfulness of Dr. Radcliffe, but, in Sir Henry Halford's opinion, without any reason.

Dryden appears to have died of senile gangrene,--a mortification occurring in the extremities of aged persons from ossification of the arteries. His body lay in state at the College of Physicians for ten days.

Sir Henry thinks that Swift's irritability was of that peculiar nature which accompanies palsy. In his youth he suffered from head-ache, dizziness, and deafness; afterwards from a plethoric state of the cerebral vessels; and he finally died of effusion of water into the ventricles of the brain, or serious apoplexy.

George I. and II. both died suddenly; the former of apoplexy, in his carriage, the latter of a rupture of the right ventricle of the heart. The disease which terminated the life of the Duke of Gloucester was seated in the liver, and produced such extreme irritability of the stomach as to incapacitate it from receiving the smallest nourishment. Sir Henry Halford concludes by requesting his auditors to read history, "not with that total disbelief of it which Sir Robert Walpole is said to have expressed when a volume of history was offered him for his amusement, after his retirement from public life, but with some mistrust and reserve, recollecting how difficult it is to develop the motives of human conduct;--how easily the spirit of party insinuates itself into the historian's mind and colours his narrative;--and how almost impossible it is for an unprofessional writer to appreciate fully the effect of diseases of the body upon the minds and actions of men."