An Instance of the Fingerpost Read online

  ‘I must hasten to remind you I have not yet been found guilty of any crime, let alone condemned, and I am convinced I will shortly regain my freedom. Should I be wrong then I might entertain your proposal, but even then I doubt whether I will be able to oblige you. My mother would have the gravest objections.’

  This, I suppose, was the time for Lower to return to his theme, but his enthusiasm seemed to have waned. Perhaps he thought the young man’s mother would regard being jointed and pickled as bringing still further shame on his name. He nodded regretfully and stood up, thanking the youth for having listened to his request.

  Prestcott told him to think nothing of it and, when asked if he needed anything to improve his condition, asked if Lower could deliver a message to a Dr Grove, one of his former tutors, requesting him to be good enough to visit. He had need of spiritual comfort, he said. Another gallon of wine would be well received also. Lower promised and I offered to deliver the wine, as I felt sorry for the fellow; and this I did as my friend went off to an appointment with a new patient.

  ‘Well, it was worth trying,’ he said in a disappointed tone when we met later on, and I noticed that the rebuff had quite dissolved his cheerful mood of earlier in the day.

  ‘What did he mean about his family having shame enough?’

  Lower was lost in contemplation, however, and ignored my remark while he dwelt on his failure. ‘What was that?’ he said abruptly when his attention returned. I repeated myself.

  ‘Oh. No more than the truth. His father was a traitor, who fled abroad before he could be held. He would have been executed as well, had the chance arisen.’

  ‘Quite a family.’

  ‘Indeed. It seems that the son takes after the father in more than looks, alas. It is a damnable shame, Cola. I need a brain. Several brains, and I am hindered and obstructed at every turn.’ Then, after a long silence, he asked what I thought the chances were of Sarah Blundy’s mother pulling through.

  Rather foolishly, I imagined that he wanted a detailed account of the case and the treatment I had provided, so I told him about the nature of the wound, the way I had set the bone and cleaned the flesh, and of the salve I had used.

  ‘Waste of time,’ he said loftily. ‘Tincture of Mercury is what you need.’

  ‘You think? Perhaps. But I decided that in this case, considering the aspect of Venus, she stood a much better chance with a more orthodox remedy . . .’

  And then came the first serious indication of the darkness in my friend I have mentioned, for I could not even finish my reply before he exploded with rage, in full public, swinging round to face me, his face darkening.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so stupid,’ he shouted. ‘The aspect of Venus! What magical nonsense is that? Dear God, are we still Egyptians that we should pay attention to such rubbish?’

  ‘But Galen . . .’

  ‘I don’t give a hoot for Galen. Or Paracelsus. Or any foreign magus with his slobberings and mumblings. These people are the merest frauds. As are you, sir, if you drivel on in such a way. You should not be let loose among the sick.’

  ‘But, Lower . . .’

  ‘More orthodox remedy,’ he said, mimicking my accent cruelly. ‘I suppose some gibbering priest told you that, and you do as you’re told? Eh? Physick is too important to be left to the dabblings of a rich man’s son like you, who could no more cure a cold than you could a broken leg. Stick to counting your money and your acres, and leave serious matters to people who care for them.’

  I was so shocked by this outburst, so unforeseen and so very violent, that I said nothing at all in reply, except that I was doing my best and that no one better qualified had offered their services.

  ‘Oh, get out of my sight,’ he said with the most terrible contempt. ‘I will have none of you. I have no time for quacks and charlatans.’

  And he abruptly turned on his heel and marched away, leaving me standing in the street in shock, my face burning red with anger and embarrassment, conscious above all that I had provided cheap entertainment for the mob of shopkeepers all around me.

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  I RETURNED TO my room in deep distress to consider what I should do next, and try to understand how I had caused such offence, for I am one of those who naturally assumes the fault lies in himself first of all, and my lack of understanding of English ways had greatly heightened my uncertainty. Even so, I was convinced that Lower’s shocking outburst was excessive, but the temper of the country then cast all opinions in extremes.

  So I sat by the little fireplace in my cold room, with the feelings of desperation and loneliness, so recently banished, coming back to plague me once again. Was my acquaintanceship at an end so soon? Certainly in Italy no relation could survive such behaviour, and under ordinary circumstances we would now be preparing to duel. I intended to do no such thing, of course, but did briefly consider whether it would be better to leave Oxford, for my association with Boyle might well become intolerable, and then I would be friendless once again. But where could I go? There seemed little point in returning to London, and less in staying where I was. I was fixed in my irresolution when feet on the stairs, and a heavy pounding on the door roused me from my dreary thoughts.

  It was Lower. With a grave look on his face, he marched determinedly in, and placed two bottles on the table. I regarded him coldly and cautiously, expecting another round of abuse, and determined that he should speak first.

  Instead, he ostentatiously sank to his knees, and clasped his hands together.

  ‘Sir,’ he said with a gravity which had more than a touch of the theatrical in it, ‘how can I ask you to forgive me? I have behaved with the manners of a tradesman, or worse. I have been inhospitable, unkind, unjust and grossly ill-mannered. I offer you my humblest apologies on my knees, as you see, and beg for a forgiveness which I do not deserve.’

  I was as astonished by his behaviour now as I was before, and could find no suitable reply for this contrition, which was every bit as excessive as his violence an hour or so previously.

  ‘You cannot forgive,’ he continued with an ostentatious sigh as I remained silent. ‘I cannot blame you. Then there is no choice. I must kill myself. Please tell my family that my gravestone should read, “Richard Lower, physician, and wretch”.’

  Here I burst out laughing, so absurd was his behaviour and, seeing that he had cracked my resolve, he grinned back.

  ‘Truly, I am most gigantically sorry,’ he said in a more moderate tone. ‘I don’t know why, but sometimes I become so angry that I cannot stop myself. And my frustrations over these corpses is so very great. If you knew the torments I go through . . . Do you accept my apology? Will you drink from the same bottle as me? I will not sleep or shave until you accept, and you don’t want to be responsible for me having a beard down to my ankles, do you?’

  I shook my head. ‘Lower, I do not understand you,’ I said frankly. ‘Or any of your countrymen. So I will assume this is part of your nation’s manner, and that it is my fault for having so little understanding. I will drink with you.’

  ‘Thank heavens for that,’ he said. ‘I thought I had foolishly thrown away a valued friend through my own stupidity. You are goodness indeed to give me a second chance.’

  ‘But please explain. Why did I make you so angry?’

  He waved his hand. ‘You didn’t. It was my misunderstanding, and I was upset over losing Prestcott. Not long ago I had a violent row with someone over astrological prediction. The College of Physicians is wedded to it and this man threatened to keep me out of practice in London because I disdain it in public and advocate the new mineral physick. It is a battle between new knowledge and the dead hand of old. I know you did not mean it like that, but I’m afraid the fight I had is too fresh in my mind. The sound of you, of all people, taking their part was too much to bear, so highly do I value you. Unforgivable, as I say.’

  He had a way of turning insult into compliment which I was ill equipped to handle; we Venetia
ns have a reputation for the elaborate nature of both our courtesies and our insults, but they are so formal there is no chance of misunderstanding even the most opaque remark. Lower, and the English in general, had the unpredictability of the uncivilised; their genius is as uncontrolled as their manners, and can make them great or mad. I doubt that foreigners will ever know them, or truly trust them. But an apology was an apology, and I had rarely received such a handsome one; I shook his hand; we bowed solemnly, and toasted each other to bring the argument to a formal conclusion.

  ‘Why do you want Prestcott so much and so urgently?’

  ‘My brains, Cola, my brains,’ he said with a loud groan. ‘I have anatomised and drawn as many as I can lay my hands on, and I will soon be finished. I have devoted years to the task, and it will make my name when it is done. The spinal cord, in particular. Fascinating. But I cannot finish without some more, and unless I can finish I cannot publish my work. And there is a Frenchman who I know is doing much the same work. I will not be beaten by some snivelling papist . . .’

  He paused, and realised he had mis-spoken again. ‘Apologies, sir. But so much depends on this, and it is heartbreaking to be denied by such stupidities.’

  He opened the second bottle, took a long draught from the open neck and handed it to me. ‘So there you are. The reasons for my incivility. They combine, I must admit, with an overly wayward temperament. I am choleric by nature.’

  ‘So much for the man who rejects traditional medicine.’

  He grinned. ‘True enough. I speak metaphorically.’

  ‘Did you mean it about the stars? You think it is nonsense?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I really don’t. Are our bodies a microcosm of all creation? Can we discern movements of the one from studying the other? Probably. It makes perfect sense, I suppose, but no one has ever given me a good and unassailable method to do it by. All this star-gazing the astronomers do seems very thoughtless stuff, and they will wrap it up so in nostrums and gabblings. And they will keep on finding more of them with these telescopes of theirs. All very interesting, but they become so enthusiastic they’ve all but forgotten the reason why they’re looking. But do not start me on that. I will lose my temper for the second time in the day. So, can we start again?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Tell me about your patient, that most strange widow Anne Blundy. I will give the matter my full attention, and any suggestions I make will be without the slightest taint of criticism.’

  I was still chary of taking such a risk and so hesitated until Lower sighed and made an elaborate preparation to go back down on his knees.

  ‘All right,’ I said, holding up my hands and trying to stop myself laughing once more. ‘I surrender.’

  ‘Thank heavens,’ he said. ‘For I’m sure I will be rheumatic when I’m old. Now, if I’m right, I believe you said the wound was not knitting?’

  ‘No. And it will turn putrid very rapidly.’

  ‘You’ve tried exposing it to the air, rather than keeping it bandaged?’

  ‘Yes. It is making no difference.’

  ‘Fever?’

  ‘Surprisingly not. Not yet, but it must come.’

  ‘Eating?’

  ‘Nothing, unless her daughter has managed to feed her some gruel.’

  ‘Piss?’

  ‘Thin, with a lemony aroma and astringent taste.’

  ‘Hmm. Not good. You’re quite right. Not good.’

  ‘She will die. I want to save her. Or at least I did. I find the daughter intolerable.’

  Lower ignored the last remark. ‘Any sign of gangrene?’

  I told him no, but that there was again every likelihood it might appear.

  ‘D’ye think she would be interested in advancing . . .?’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly.

  ‘What about the daughter? If I offered her a pound for the remains?’

  ‘You have met the girl, I believe.’

  Lower nodded, and sighed heavily. ‘I tell you, Cola, if I should die tomorrow, you have my full permission to anatomise me. Why it causes such upset I do not know. After all, they’re buried eventually, aren’t they? What does it matter how many pieces they’re in, as long as they die with the blessings of religion? Do they think the Good Lord is incapable of reassembling them in time for the Second Coming?’

  I replied that it was the same in Venice; for whatever reason, people did not like the idea of being cut up, whether they were dead or alive.

  ‘What do you intend to do with the woman?’ he asked. ‘Wait till she dies?’

  It was then that I had an idea and instantly decided to share it. Such was my trusting nature that it never occurred to me not to do so.

  ‘Hand me that bottle again,’ I said, ‘and I’ll tell you what I’d like to do, if I were only able.’

  He did so at once, and I briefly considered the momentous step I was about to take. I was hardly in an equable frame of mind; my distress at the bruising I had received, and the relief at his apology, were so great that my judgement was unbalanced. I do believe I would never have drawn him into my confidence had his loyalty and friendship been unquestioned; now it had been placed in doubt, the wish to please him and demonstrate my seriousness swept all before it.

  ‘Please forgive the clumsy way I express this,’ I said, when he was leaning back on my truckle bed as comfortably as was possible. ‘The idea came to me only when we were watching that dove in the vacuum pump. It is about the blood, you see. What if, by accident, there is not enough blood to carry the nutrient? Could a loss of blood mean that there is insufficient to vent the excess heat from the heart? Might that not be a cause of fever? Also, I have wondered for some years whether the blood gets old with the rest of the body. Like a canal with stagnant water in it, where everything starts to die, because the passageway becomes clogged.’

  ‘Certainly, if you lose blood, you die.’

  ‘But why? Not from starvation, nor from excess heat, either. No, sir. It is the draining or occlusion of the life spirit present in the blood that causes death. The blood itself, I am convinced, is merely the carrier for this spirit. And it is the decay of that spirit which causes old age. That, at least, is my theory, and it is one where the traditional knowledge you disdain, and the experimental knowledge you applaud, are in perfect agreement.’

  ‘At which point, we connect your theoretical preliminary with the practicalities of your case, is that not so? Tell me how you would proceed.’

  ‘If you think about it simply, it is very straightforward. If we are hungry, we eat. If we are cold, we approach heat. If our humours are unbalanced, we add or create some more to recreate equilibrium.’

  ‘If you believe that nonsense.’

  ‘If you do,’ I said. ‘If you do not, and you believe in the elemental theories, then you rebalance the body by strengthening the weakest of the three elements. That is the essence of all medicine, old and new: to restore equilibrium. Now, in this case, taking away more blood by leeching or scarifying the patient would only make matters worse. If her life spirit is diminished, reducing it still further cannot help her. This is Sylvius’s theory, and I believe he is correct. Logically, instead of taking blood away, the only answer should be . . .’

  ‘To add some more,’ Lower said quickly, leaning forward in his seat with sudden eagerness as he finally grasped what I was talking about.

  I nodded enthusiastically. ‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘that’s it exactly. And not just more, but young blood, fresh, new and unclogged, with the vitality of youth in its essence. Maybe that would allow an old person to repair a wound. Who knows, Lower,’ I said excitedly, ‘it might be the elixir of life itself. It is thought, after all, that merely getting a child to share a bed can benefit the health of an elderly person. Just think what their blood might do.’

  Lower leant back in his chair and took a deep draught of ale as he thought about what I had said. His lips moved as he held a silent conversation with
himself, going over in his mind all the possibilities. ‘You have fallen under the influence of Monsieur Descartes, have you not?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘You have constructed a theory, and that leads you to recommend a practice. You have no evidence that it would work. And, if I may say so, your theory is confused. You argue by analogy – using a humoral metaphor you do not actually believe in – to conclude that supplying an absence is a solution. That is, adding vital spirit, the existence of which is conjectural.’

  ‘Though not disputed even by yourself.’

  ‘No. That is true.’

  ‘Do you dispute my theory, though?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And is there any way of finding out whether I am correct except by testing it against result? That is surely the basis of experimental philosophy?’

  ‘That is Monsieur Descartes’s basis,’ he said, ‘if I understand him correctly. To frame a hypothesis, then amass evidence to see if it is correct. The alternative, proposed by my Lord Bacon, is to amass evidence, and then to frame an explanation which takes into account all that is known.’

  In retrospect, looking back over the conversation which I noted diligently in the book which was with me on my travels and which I now re-read for the first time in many years, I see many things which were obscured from my understanding then. The English detestation of foreigners leads very swiftly to a wish to ignore any advance which stems from what they consider faulty methods, and allows this proudest of people to claim all discoveries as their own. A discovery based on faulty premises is no discovery: all foreigners influenced by Descartes employ faulty premises, and therefore . . . Hypotheses non fingo. No hypotheses here: is that not the trumpet blast of Mr Newton as he assails Leibniz as a thief for having the same ideas as himself? But at that time I merely thought my friend was using argument as a means of furthering our knowledge.

  ‘I believe your summary of Monsieur Descartes does him scant justice,’ I said, ‘but no matter. Tell me how you would you proceed.’