The service that I did was the more meritorious, it seems to me, in that I was not at the time my father’s son, nor under any obligation to undertake the case; I was independent of him, a mere stranger; the natural bond had been snapped. Yet I was not indifferent; I came as a volunteer, uninvited, at my own instance. I brought help, I persevered, I effected the cure, I restored him, thereby securing myself at once a father and an acquittal; I conquered anger with kindness, disarmed law with affection, purchased readmission to my family with important service, proved my filial loyalty at that critical moment, was adopted (or adopted myself, rather) on the recommendation of my art, while my conduct in trying circumstances proved me a son by blood also. For I had anxiety and fatigue enough in being always on the spot, ministering to my patient, watching for my opportunities, now humouring the disease when it gathered strength, now availing myself of a remission to combat it. Of all a physician’s tasks the most hazardous is the care of patients like this, with the personal attendance it involves; for in their moments of exasperation they are apt to direct their fury upon any one they can come at. Yet I never shrank or hesitated; I was always there; I had a life- and-death struggle with the malady, and the final victory was with me and my drugs.
Now I can fancy a person who hears all this objecting hastily, ‘What a fuss about giving a man a dose of medicine!’ But the fact is, there are many preliminaries to be gone through; the ground has to be prepared; the body must first be made susceptible to treatment; the patient’s whole condition has to be studied; he must be purged, reduced, dieted, properly exercised, enabled to sleep, coaxed into tranquillity. Now other invalids will submit to all this; but mania robs its victims of self-control; they are restive and jib; their physicians are in danger, and treatment at a disadvantage. Constantly, when we are on the very point of success and full of hope, some slight hitch occurs, and a relapse takes place which undoes all in a moment, neutralizing our care and tripping up our art.
Now, after my going through all this, after my wrestle with this formidable disease and my triumph over so elusive an ailment, is it still your intention to support him in disinheriting me? Shall he interpret the laws as he will against his benefactor? Will you look on while he makes war upon nature? I obey nature, gentlemen of the jury, in saving my father from death, and myself from the loss of him, unjust as he had been. He on the contrary defers to law (he calls it law) in ruining and cutting off from his kin the son who has obliged him. He is a cruel father, I a loving son. I own the authority of nature: he spurns and flings it from him. How misplaced is this paternal hate! How worse misplaced this filial love! For I must reproach myself — my father will have it so. And the reproach? That where I should hate (for I am hated), I love, and where I should love little, I love much. Yet surely nature requires of parents that they love their children more than of children that they love their parents. But he deliberately disregards both the law, which secures children their family rights during good behaviour, and nature, which inspires parents with fervent love for their offspring. Having greater incentives to affection, you might suppose that he would confer the fruits of it upon me in larger measure, or at the least reciprocate and emulate my love. Alas, far from it! he returns hate for love, persecution for devotion, wrong for service, disinheritance for respect; the laws which guard, he converts into means of assailing, the rights of children. Ah, my father, how do you force law into your service in this battle against nature!
The facts, believe me, are not as you would have them. You are a bad exponent, sir, of good laws. In this matter of affection there is no war between law and nature; they hunt in couples, they work together for the remedying of wrongs. When you evil entreat your benefactor, you are wronging nature; now I ask, do you wrong the laws as well as nature? You do; it is their intention to be fair and just and give sons their rights; but you will not allow it; you hound them on again and again upon one child as though he were many; you keep them ever busy punishing, when their own desire is peace and goodwill between father and son. I need hardly add that, as against the innocent, they may be said to have no existence. But let me tell you, ingratitude also is an offence known to the law; an action will lie against a person who fails to recompense his benefactor. If he adds to such failure an attempt to punish, he has surely reached the uttermost limits of wrong in this sort. And now I think I have sufficiently established two points: first, my father has not the right, after once exerting his parental privilege and availing himself of the law, to disinherit me again; and secondly, it is on general grounds inadmissible to cast off and expel from his family one who has rendered service so invaluable.
Let us next proceed to the actual reasons given for the disinheritance; let us inquire into the nature of the charge. We must first go back for a moment to the intention of the legislator. We will grant you for the sake of argument, sir, that it is open to you to disinherit as often as you please; we will further concede you this right against your benefactor; but I presume that disinheritance is not to be the beginning and the ending in itself; you will not resort to it, that is, without sufficient cause. The legislator’s meaning is not that the father can disinherit, whatever his grievance may be, that nothing is required beyond the wish and a complaint; in that case, what is the court’s function? No, gentlemen, it is your business to inquire whether the parental anger rests upon good and sufficient grounds. That is the question which I am now to put before you; and I will take up the story from the moment when sanity was restored.
The first-fruits of this was the withdrawal of the disinheritance; I was preserver, benefactor, everything. So far my conduct is not open to exception, I take it. Well, and later on what fault has my father to find? What attention or filial duty did I omit? Did I stay out o’ nights, sir? Do you charge me with untimely drinkings and revellings? Was I extravagant? Did I get into some disreputable brawl? Did any such complaint reach you? None whatever. Yet these are just the offences for which the law contemplates disherison. Ah, but my step-mother fell ill. Indeed, and do you make that a charge against me? Do you prefer a suit for ill health? I understand you to say no.
What is the grievance, then?-That you refuse to treat her at my bidding, and for such disobedience to your father deserve to be disinherited. — Gentlemen, I will explain presently how the nature of this demand results in a seeming disobedience, but a real inability. Meanwhile, I simply remark that neither the authority which the law confers on him, nor the obedience to which I am bound, is indiscriminate. Among orders, some have no sanction, while the disregard of others justifies anger and punishment. My father may be ill, and I neglect him; he may charge me with the management of his house, and I take no notice; he may tell me to look after his country estate, and I evade the task. In all these and similar cases, the parental censure will be well deserved. But other things again are for the sons to decide, as questions of professional skill or policy — especially if the father’s interests are not touched. If a painter’s father says to him, ‘Paint this, my boy, and do not paint that’; or a musician’s, ‘Strike this note, and not the other’; or a bronze-founder’s, ‘Cast so-and-so’; would it be tolerable that the son should be disinherited for not taking such advice? Of course not.
But the medical profession should be left still more to their own discretion than other artists, in proportion to the greater nobility of their aims and usefulness of their work; this art should have a special right of choosing its objects; this sacred occupation, taught straight from Heaven, and pursued by the wisest of men, should be secured against all compulsion, enslaved to no law, intimidated and penalized by no court, exposed to no votes or paternal threats or uninstructed passions. If I had told my father directly and expressly, ‘I will not do it, I refuse the case, though I could treat it, I hold my art at no man’s service but my own and yours, as far as others are concerned I am a layman’ — if I had taken that position, where is the masterful despot who would have applied force and compelled me to practise against my will?
The appropriate inducements are request and entreaty, not laws and browbeating and tribunals; the physician is to be persuaded, not commanded; he is to choose, not be terrorized; he is not to be haled to his patient, but to come with his consent and at his pleasure. Governments are wont to give physicians the public recognition of honours, precedence, immunities and privileges; and shall the art which has State immunities not be exempt from the patria fotestas?
All this I was entitled to say simply as a professional man, even on the assumption that you had had me taught, and devoted much care and expense to my training, that this particular case had been within my competence, and I had yet declined it. But in fact you have to consider also how utterly unreasonable it is that you should not let me use at my own discretion my own acquisition. It was not as your son nor under your authority that I acquired this art; and yet it was for your advantage that I acquired it — you were the first to profit by it — , though you had contributed nothing to my training. Will you mention the fees you paid? How much did the stock of my surgery cost you? Not one penny. I was a pauper, I knew not where to turn for necessaries, and I owed my instruction to my teachers’ charity. The provision my father made for my education was sorrow, desolation, distress, estrangement from my friends and banishment from my family. And do you then claim to have the use of my skill, the absolute control of what was acquired independently? You should be content with the previous service rendered to yourself, not under obligation, but of free will; for even on that occasion nothing could have been demanded of me on the score of gratitude.
My kindness of the past is not to be my duty of the future; a voluntary favour is not to be turned into an obligation to take unwelcome orders; the principle is not to be established that he who once cures a man is bound to cure any number of others at his bidding ever after. That would be to appoint the patients we cure our absolute masters; we should be paying them, and the fee would be slavish submission to their commands. Could anything be more absurd? Because you were ill, and I was at such pains to restore you, does that make you the owner of my art?
All this I could have said, if the tasks he imposed upon me had been within my powers, and I had declined to accept all of them, or, on compulsion, any of them. But I now wish you to look further into their nature. ‘You cured me of madness (says he); my wife is now mad and in the condition I was in (that of course is his idea); she has been given up as I was by the other doctors, but you have shown that nothing is too hard for you; very well, then, cure her too, and make an end of her illness.’ Now, put like that, it sounds very reasonable, especially in the ears of a layman innocent of medical knowledge. But if you will listen to what I have to say for my art, you will find that there are things too hard for us, that all ailments are not alike, that the same treatment and the same drugs will not always answer; and then you will understand what a difference there is between refusing and being unable. Pray bear with me while I generalize a little, without condemning my disquisition as pedantic, irrelevant, or ill-timed.
To begin with, human bodies differ in nature and temperament; compounded as they admittedly are of the same elements, they are yet compounded in different proportions. I am not referring at present to sexual differences; the male body is not the same or alike in different individuals; it differs in temperament and constitution; and from this it results that in different men diseases also differ both in character and in intensity; one man’s body has recuperative power and is susceptible to treatment; another’s is utterly crazy, open to every infection, and without vigour to resist disease. To suppose, then, that all fever, all consumption, lung-disease, or mania, being generically the same, will affect every subject in the same way, is what no sensible, thoughtful, or well-informed person would do; the same disease is easily curable in one man, and not in another. Why, sow the same wheat in various soils, and the results will vary. Let the soil be level, deep, well watered, well sunned, well aired, well ploughed, and the crop will be rich, fat, plentiful. Elevated stony ground will make a difference, no sun another difference, foothills another, and so on. Just so with disease; its soil makes it thrive and spread, or starves it. Now all this quite escapes my father; he makes no inquiries of this sort, but assumes that all mania in every body is the same, and to be treated accordingly.
Besides such differences between males, it is obvious that the female body differs widely from the male both in the diseases it is subject to and in its capacity or non-capacity of recovery. The bracing effect of toil, exercise, and open air gives firmness and tone to the male; the female is soft and unstrung from its sheltered existence, and pale with anaemia, deficient caloric and excess of moisture. It is consequently, as compared with the male, open to infection, exposed to disease, unequal to vigorous treatment, and, in particular, liable to mania. With their emotional, mobile, excitable tendencies on the one hand, and their defective bodily strength on the other, women fall an easy prey to this affliction.
It is quite unfair, then, to expect the physician to cure both sexes indifferently; we must recognize how far apart they are, their whole lives, pursuits, and habits, having been distinct from infancy. Do not talk of a mad person, then, but specify the sex; do not confound distinctions and force all cases under the supposed identical title of madness; keep separate what nature separates, and then examine the respective possibilities. I began this exposition with stating that the first thing we doctors look to is the nature and temperament of our patient’s body: which of the humours predominates in it; is it full- blooded or the reverse; at, or past, its prime; big or little; fat or lean? When a man has satisfied himself upon these and other such points, his opinion, favourable or adverse, upon the prospects of recovery may be implicitly relied upon.
It must be remembered too that madness itself has a thousand forms, numberless causes, and even some distinct names. Delusion, infatuation, frenzy, lunacy — these are not the same; they all express different degrees of the affection. Again, the causes are not only different in men and women, but, in men, they are different for the old and for the young; for instance, in young men some redundant humour is the usual cause; whereas with the old a shrewdly timed slander, or very likely a fancied domestic slight, will get hold of them, first cloud their understanding, and finally drive them distracted. As for women, all sorts of things effect a lodgement and make easy prey of them, especially bitter dislike, envy of a prosperous rival, pain or anger. These feelings smoulder on, gaining strength with time, till at last they burst out in madness.
Such, sir, has been your wife’s case, perhaps with the addition of some recent trouble; for she used to have no strong dislikes, yet she is now in the grasp of the malady — and that beyond hope of medical relief. For if any physician undertakes and cures the case, you have my permission to hate me for the wrong I have done you. Yet I must go so far as to say that, even had the case not been so desperate — had there been a glimmer of hope — even then I should not have lightly intervened, nor been very ready to administer drugs; I should have been afraid of what might happen, and of the sort of stories that might get about. You know the universal belief that every step-mother, whatever her general merits, hates her step-sons; it is supposed to be a feminine mania from which none of them is exempt. If the disease had taken a wrong turn, and the medicine failed of its effect, there would very likely have been suspicions of intentional malpractice.
Your wife’s condition, sir — and I describe it to you after close observation — , is this: she will never mend, though she take ten thousand doses of medicine. It is therefore undesirable to make the experiment, unless your object is merely to compel me to fail and cover me with disgrace. Pray do not enable my professional brethren to triumph over me; their jealousy is enough. If you disinherit me again, I shall be left desolate, but I shall pray for no evil upon your head. But suppose — though God forbid! — suppose your malady should return; relapses are common enough in such cases, under irritation; what is my course then to be? Doubt not, I shall restor
e you once more; I shall not desert the post which nature assigns to children; I for my part shall not forget my descent. And then if you recover, must I look for another restitution? You understand me? your present proceedings are calculated to awake your disease and stir it to renewed malignancy. It is but the other day that you emerged from your sad condition, and you are vehement and loud — worst of all, you are full of anger, indulging your hatred and appealing once more to the law. Alas, father, even such was the prelude to your first madness.
THE PASSING OF PEREGRINUS — Περὶ τῆς Περεγρίνου Τελευτῆς
Translated by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler
THE DEATH OF PEREGRINE
Lucian to Cronius. Greeting.
Poor dear Peregrine — or Proteus, as he loved to call himself, — has quite come up to his namesake in Homer. We have seen him under many shapes: countless have been his transformations for glory’s sake; and now— ’tis his last appearance — we see him in the shape of fire. So vast was his ambition. Yes, Cronius; all that is left of the best of men is a handful of ashes. It’s just like Empedocles; only with a difference. That philosopher would fain have sneaked into his crater unobserved: not so our high-souled friend. He bides his time till all Greece is mustered in full force — constructs a pyre of the largest dimensions — and jumps on top in the eyes of all the world, having briefly addressed the nation a few days before on the subject of his daring enterprise! I fancy I see you chuckling away at the old dotard; or rather I hear you blurting out the inevitable comments— ‘Mere imbecility’— ‘Mere clap-trap’-’Mere ...’ everything else that we are accustomed to attribute to these gentry. But then you are far enough off to be comparatively safe: now I made my remarks before a vast audience, in the very moment of cremation (and before it for that matter), exciting thereby the indignation of all the old fool’s admirers, though there were a few who joined in the laugh against him. I can tell you, I was within an ace of being torn limb from limb by the Cynics, like Actaeon among the dogs, or his cousin Pentheus among the Maenads. — But I must sketch you the whole drama in detail. As to our author, I say nothing: you know the man, you know the sublime utterances that marked his earthly course, out-voicing Sophocles and Aeschylus.
Delphi Complete Works of Lucian Page 79
