Volume 1

The healing art, or, Chapters upon medicine, diseases, remedies, and physicians, historical, biographical and descriptive.

Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The healing art, or, Chapters upon medicine, diseases, remedies, and physicians, historical, biographical and descriptive. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    Queen to understand that nothing but death could release his Royal Highness from the pangs he was afflicted with; that tho' it might be a rule amongst surgeons to apply caustics to such as were burned or scalded, it was very irregular among physicians to drive and expel watery humours from the body by draughts of the same element] and that the prince had been so tampered with, that nothing in the art of physic could keep him alive more than six days/' The doctor's prediction was fulfilled. Pittis, Eadcliffe's earliest biographer, has a quaintly- written account of the great physician's mode of dealing both with patients and the friends of patients when decision was necessary. The Duke of Beaufort having been seized with the small-pox, Radcliffe was sent for, and found his Grace's window-shutters closed up in such a manner by the old lady duchess his grandmother's order, that not a breath of air could come into the room, which almost deprived the Duke of the very means of respiration. This method had been observed by the physicians in her Grace's youthful days; and this she was resolved to abide by as the most proper in this conjuncture, being fearful that her grandson might otherwise catch cold, and, by the means of it, lose a life that was precious to her and the whole nation. She had also taken a resolution to give her attendance upon the Duke in person during his sickness, and was in the most violent consternation and passion imaginable when Dr. Radcliffe, at his first visit, ordered the curtains of the bed to be drawn open and the light to be let in as usual into his bedroom. 'How,' said the Duchess, 'have you a mind to kill my grandson? Is this the tenderness and affection you have always expressed for his person ? 'Tis most certain his grandfather and I were used after another manner; nor shall he be treated otherwise than we were, since we recovered, and lived to a great age, without any such dangerous experiments.' ' All this may