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The Medical Clergyman
Who do you go to when you’ve got a fever or broken limb? Your local vicar probably wouldn’t be the first person you would think of. Before the year 1858, medicine could be practised by a wide variety of people. A scientifically minded clergyman was one of them. In this extract from Caves, Coprolites, and Catastrophes, historian Allan Chapman explores this time in history.
Purges from the parson: the medical clergyman
It may strike one as incongruous today to think of the local vicar (or his wife) as the person to whom you might go if you were feeling ill – and go, moreover, not only for spiritual comfort, but also for physical help. Indeed, medicine was another subject actively cultivated by numerous clergy. Yet before the Medical Registration Act of 1858, medicine was practised by a wide variety of people. I am not talking here of quacks and charlatans, for at a time when formally-trained medical men, be they physicians, surgeons or apothecaries, were scarce outside the main towns – expensive of access and incapable of curing many diseases anyway – your best option of finding relief was to seek a scientifically-minded clergyman. After all, an Oxbridge Master of Arts in good academic standing, widely read in ancient and modern medicine, an astute observer and good with his hands, was likely to provide comfort much more cheaply in rural England than purchasing the nostrums of the fairground mountebank. And especially so if his medical calling had led him to obtain an Archdeacon’s or Bishop’s licence to practise – invariably free of charge – in a diocese or archdeaconry. Natural science, Natural Theology, cure of body and cure of soul came together in the priest-doctor, often wedding intellectual curiosity to wider Christian ministry and practical help, and it is likely that Buckland would have met and known such men in his extensive geological travels around Britain.
Stephen Hales not only ‘physicked’ his ailing parishioners when they were unwell, but also, along with his chemical and natural history research, made major discoveries in experimental physiology. His Haemostaticks (‘Blood Measurements’) of 1733 described meticulous experiments aimed at measuring and quantifying blood flow, and also reported his elegantly-conducted experiments on what we now call ‘blood pressure’, when he discovered that the cardiac pumping force was greater in the arteries than in the veins: the systolic and diastolic pressures, as a modern doctor would call them. But let us not forget that the Revd Mr Hales was an FRS, after all.
Many parts of eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Britain were less well-drained than they are today, and in consequence, mosquitos abounded, making a type of malaria common: the ‘quakes’, ‘shakes’ or ‘agues’ referred to in the literature of the period. Quinine, or Peruvian bark from South America, was an excellent ‘fever-breaker’, but was very expensive. And this is where another parson scientist came in. The Revd Edward Stone, an Oxfordshire vicar and Wadham College, Oxford, graduate, moved in scientific as well as clerical circles and knew the Earl of Macclesfield, then President of the Royal Society. In addition to his published works on astronomy, Stone had heard of willow bark as a folk cure for the ‘ague’ and began to perform quantitative tests on 50 of his sick parishioners, giving them carefully measured doses of dried and powdered willow bark and recording their effect. He published his clinical trial results – which were spectacularly successful – in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1763). Stone also made the observation that willow trees liked damp ground, the very places that bred ‘agues’, as it was believed in that pre-bacterial age. So, was it not a mark of providence that God had placed the means of cure adjacent to the source of the disease?
What Stone had discovered was crude aspirin, the active ingredient of which is salicylic acid, from salix, the Latin for willow. Pure salicylic acid was isolated by nineteenth-century organic chemists and could also be extracted from the plant meadowsweet, known in Latin as spiraea – hence the name ‘aspirin’ (Latin a means ‘from’). The drug itself came on to the market in our now familiar tablet form after being developed and tested by German scientists in 1900.
The Revd Dr Sydney Smith, whom we met briefly above, was a celebrated wit, writer, ecclesiastical politicker, careerist and place-seeker. Yet he was not only a popular priest in his Foston, north Yorkshire parish, but was also a skilled and courageous unofficial medical practitioner, who had previously attended lectures in anatomy and medicine at both the University of Oxford and Edinburgh University. When a deadly fever hit his parish in 1816, he dosed and tended his poor parishioners as well as any doctor. Throughout his rural ministry, indeed, Smith continued to dispense proper medicines (by the standards of the day) from the vicarage door to all and sundry – free of charge and out of his own pocket. To some preparations he gave amusing and non-frightening names, such as ‘Rub-a-Dub’.
In this brilliantly entertaining, colourful biography – the first to be written for over a century – Buckland’s fascinating life is explored in full. From his pioneering of geology and agricultural science to becoming Dean of Westminster, this is a captivating story of an exceptional and eccentric scientist whose legacy extends down to this day.
