Let us end with another philosophical reflection. _Facts are more astounding than fiction_, as we will show by two facts. Gaboriau’s novel ’La Dégringolade’ (The Downfall), in one of its earliest chapters describes the opening of a grave in the Parisian cemetery of Montmartre, to discover whether it contains the body of a certain person or not. The coffin is found to be empty. This is a fiction, but are we not likely to see its realization shortly? Paul Féval’s romance ’Les Mystères de Londres’ gives a long account of the fictitious attempt of some villains to get at the treasures in the cellars of the Bank of England by digging a tunnel under Threadneedle Street; they are, of course, foiled in the end. But now, according to accounts published at the end of the month of November, 1898, in the _Daily Mail_, the tunnel is actually dug by a railway company, and so close to the walls of the Bank as to actually compel its governors and directors to call in the assistance of Sir John Wolfe Barry to advise means to avert the danger which threatens the building, already affected by the excavations. Truly _fact is stranger than fiction_.
The lines of modern doctors have fallen in pleasant places. Their position is certainly somewhat different from what it was in the days when they were contemptuously called leeches, when their scientific investigations exposed them to persecution and death. Vesalius, the father of modern anatomy, was condemned to death by the Inquisition for dissecting a human body, but by the intervention of King Philip II., whose physician he was, the punishment was reduced to a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; on his return the ship was lost on the island of Zante, where he perished of starvation in 1564. Now Government licenses doctors to practise vivisection! At Dijon, in 1386, a physician was fined by the bailiff fifty golden francs, and imprisoned for not having completed the cures of some persons whose recovery he had undertaken. In a schedule of the offices, fees, and services which the Lord Wharton had with the Wardenry of the city and castle of Carlisle in 1547, a trumpeter was rated at 16d. per day, and a surgeon only at 12d. Edward III. granted Counsus de Gangeland, an apothecary of London, 6d. a day for his care and attendance on him while he formerly lay sick in Scotland. A knowledge of astrology was in those days requisite for a physician; the herbs were not to be gathered except when the sun and the planets were in certain constellations, and certificates of their being so were necessary to give them reputation. Sometimes patients applied to astrologers, who were astrologers only, whether the constellations were favourable to the doctor’s remedies. Then, if the man died, the astrologer ascribed the death to the inefficacy of the remedies, while the doctor threw the blame on the astrologer, he not having properly observed the constellations. Then the latter would exclaim that his case was extremely hard; if he made a mistake, his calculation being wrong, heaven discovered it, whilst if a physician was guilty of a blunder, the earth covered it. Even then doctors were considered like the potato plant, whose fruit is underground. To see the doctor’s carriage, whose motto should be ’Live or die,’ or ’Morituri te salutant,’ attending a funeral, reminds a cynic of a cobbler taking home his work.