DR. MILLIGEN'S CURIOSITIES OF MEDICAL LX PE R IE NC

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OF this agreeably learned book we have only received an incomf plete copy ; but as the entire work must eJusist of a number o complete and independent sections, its scope and character can easily be determined from the parts we have read. The title of the work must be taken in a peculiar sense. The Curiosities which Dr. Mi LLIGEN has collected, are not the results of his li.iperience, or indeed of the experience of the whole army of doctors who have ever lived; fiar many of the opinions he has brought together are false ; and where the fiwts narrated are true, the effects have often been attributed to false causes. The subjects of the book are the deviations from health, the various phmnomena and some of the inure marked diseases to which the human system is exposed, as well as the morbid idiosyncracies, both bodily and mental, which individuals and occasionally classes have displayed ; intermixed with miscellaneous matters relating to medicine. The treatment is in a measure dependent upon the subject: but it mainly consists in giving a concise view of the most received or most striking theories upon the origin of this and that disorder- and the different modes of cure that have been recommended, toge, ther with brief and curious anecdotes of the most singular cases on record. In such matters as Obesity, the Plague, Insanity, and Love Philtres and Potions, this method is fully followed out. The virtues, real or supposed, of some medicine formerly fashionable— the origin of the burial of the dead in churches, and the evils which arise from the practice—the rationale of flagellation, enthu- siasm, mid medical fees—with other subjects of a somewhat ana- lagous kind, of course modify their treatment by their own nature. In the view of the various races of mankind, and the account of be doctrines of Homeopathy, Dr. M1LLIGEN adopts, as is fitting, a purely didactic manner. .

In deciding upon the merits of such a book, we must judge it by what it does, not by what it leaves undone. The Curiosities of Medical Experience is neither intended to instruct us in medi- cal science nor to give a connected history of medicine. The ob- ject of the author, we take it, has been to amuse the reader by a selection of some of the most singular natural facts and mental delusions and absurdities, at the same time making hint ac- quainted with the leading points in the practice of the art in dif- • ferent ages, and giving some general views on physic. itself. All this is accomplished, and very agreeubly. Yet it must be whispered, that his learning Seems frequently second-hand ; that his views are not always philosophical ; and that some el his papers possess a bre- vity that approaches the superticial,—as in his chapter on Quackery, a subject which might of itself have filled a volume, being dis- missed with a scornful account of a few of the arts of cmpiries. But it probably was tender ground ; for a true list of quacks would contain a long list of 1 he additions they have made to me- dical munitions; and Dr. Mt ssicssr, throughout his book, ap- pears to have a morbid sensitiveness in favour of the pure prac- titioner.

1Vith the description already given of the character of the book, the extracts may be taken as they come, without the formality of noting the chapters they Came from.

G REAT MEN.

At !Linton, there died in IS16, Samuel Sugars, aged fifty-two; and his body, with a siegle coffin, weighed fifty stone. In 1754 died, Mr. Jacob Powell, Of Subbing, in Essex. His body was above five yards in circumference, and weighed live huuffied and sixty pounds; re• Tilting sixteen men to bear him to Ins grave. III 1775. Mr. Spooner, of Skilliogtoo, near Tani-worth, weighed, a short time before his death, fotty stone and time pinatas, aod uner-tucal four feet three inches act (ass dm shoulders.

Kessler mentions a young man in Lincoln, who ate eir,hteen pounds of be,,e daily, and died in I 7:24, in the twenty eighth year of his age, weighing live hundred and thirty pounds. A baker in Pyc Cerner weighed thirty-four stone, and would frequently eat a small shoulder of mutters, baked ia his oven, awl weighing five pounds ; he however, persisted for one year to live upon water-gruel and brown bread, by NVIliCh be lost two hundred pounds of his Wk.

Mr. Collett, master of the Evesham Academe, weighed upwards of twenty-

stone. When twelve yeats old, he was neatly as large as:at the time of his d ' eath. At two years of age he required two muses ti, lift him in and out of ; one of whom, in a fit of auger, he felled to the floor with a blow of his hand.

At Trenaw, in Cornwall, there was a man, known by the name of Grant Chillcot, wilt.) weighed four hundred and sixty pauuds; one of his stockings could (=Min six gallons of wheat.

USES OF FLOGGING.

Various expedients, in addition to a better diet, have been resotted to to re- store lean persons to a better case ; but amongst the most singular that we have on record, is that of flagellation. Galen says that horse-dealers having been observed to fatten horses for sale by flogging them, an analogous method might be useful with spare persons who wish to become stouter. Ile also mentions slave•dealers who employed similar means. Suetonitie informs us, that Musa, the favourite physician of Augustus, used to fustigate bins, not only to cure him of a sciatica, but to keep him plump. Meibomiue pretends that nurses whip little children to fatten them, that they may appear healthy and chubby to their mothers. No doubt but flagellation determines a gteater influx of blood to the surface, and mar thus tend to increase the circuladiou and give tone to parts which would otherwise be languid. With this intention, hrticatio, or whipping with nettles, has been frequently used in medical practice with great advantage. Xenophon thawed his frozen soldiers by flagellation. In amorous despondency and grief, Coilius Aurelianus recommended this process ; and Elitheus Paduanus preconizes it to bring out tardy eruptions. The most singular effect of this castigation is recorded by Mcibomius, in his work De Flayrarune Usa, Ste. dedicated to a councillor of the Bishop of Lubeck, with the following epi- graph—

" Delicias parinnt Veneri erndelia Duni mod. illa jos at ; dam juvat, ewe nocet." CASES OF LEANNESS.

A remarkable case of leanness is mentioned by Lorry, in a priest who became so thin and dry in all his articulations, that at last he was unable to go through the celebtation of mass, as his joints and spine would crack in en loud and strange a manner at every genuflexion, that the faithful were terrified and the faithless laughed. One of these miserable laths once undertook a long journey to consult a learned physician on his sad condition ; and having begged to know, in a most piteous tone, the cause of his dessication, was favouted with the following luminous answer : " Sir, there is a predisposition in your consti- tution to make you lean, and a dieposition in your constitution to keep you so." Another meagre patient, being told that the celebrated Hunter had fattened a dog by removing his spleen, exclaimed, with a deep sigh, "0, Sir, I wish Mr. Ruiner had mine."

HEIGHT OF THE PATRIARCHS.

An infallible philosopher informs us that Adam's stature was one hundred and twenty 'three feet nine inches ; Eve's, one bundled anti eighteen feet nine inches and three quarters ; Noah's, twenty feet short of Adam's ; Abraham's, twenty.eight feet ; Moses', thirteen ; and Hercules', ten.

JUVENILE MONSTERS.

Dwarfs generally die from reanature old age, and giants from exhaustion. A curious instance of marvellous growth is recorded in a tract called Prodi- giutn Willinghamense, or an account of a surprising boy who was horn at Willingham, near Cambridge, and upon whom the following epitaph was written : " Stop, traveller, and wondering, know, here buried lie the remains of Thomas, son of Thomas and Margatet Hall, who, not one year old, bad the signs of manhood ; at three, was almost four feet high, endued with uncommon strength, a just proprtion of parts, and a stupendous voice; before six, he cl;ed, as it were at an advanced age." Mr. Dawker, a surgeon of St. Ives, Hunt- ingdon, w ho published this account, viewed him after death, and the corpse ex- hibited all the appearances of decrepit old age. This is a confirmation of the -case of the boy of Salamis, mentioned by Pliny as being four feet high, and laving reached puberty at the age of these; and may also confirm the account

of the man seen by Cratere. the rother of Antigomis, who in seven years was an infant, a youth, an adult, a father, an old man, and a corpse. COINCIDENCES IN ESTABLISHMENTS.

Regarding unlawful cures, have we not seen vaccination, when first intro- duced, condemned front the very pulpit as an impious interference in a disease which seemed to have been assigned to mankind by the Creator as an inevitable doom ? Did not these desperate bigots even pronounce that we were not war- ranted to seek in the brute creation a human remedy or preservative? Vi'hat is still more worthy of remark, is the coincidence of a similar idea in India, where the greatest obstacle vaccination encountered arose from a belief that the natural small.pox was a dispensation of a malicious deity called Mah•ry- Unona, or rather, that the disease was an incarnation of the goddess herself into the person wbo was affected by it : the fear of irritating her, and of ex- posing themselves to I,er resentment, necessarily rendered the natives averse to vaccination, until it was impressed upon their easy belief that Millt-ry- UM7lia had alteled her mind, and chosen this new and milder mode of manifesting her visits to her votaries.

VARIETIES OF LANGUAGE.

The attempts that have !wen made to trace the origin of languages to the varieties of our species, or to the influence of climate, have hitherto been fruit. less, and the doett hies Inoached on the obscure subject refuted by observation. Mr. Jefferson states that there are twenty radical languages in America fur one in Asia ; more than twenty languages, he adds, are still spoken in the kingdom of Mexico, most of whieb are at least as different from one another as the Greek and the German, the French and the Polish. The variety of idioms spuken by the people of the new continent, and which, without the least exaggeration, may be stated at some hundreds, offer a very striking photnomenan, ',ardent trly when we compare it to the few lauguages spoken in Asia and in Europe. V .ter also informs us, that in ;Mexico where the causes producing insulation of the several tribes have been for a long time in a course of diminution, Clavigero re- cognized thirty•tive different 'menages. Some of these words are rather of ditti:ult pronunciation ; and Humboldt tells mis that Nothzontahoiztespiawatat.. zin is the term of respect with which they addressed their priests. Dining the French Revolution, a learued Jacobin discovered that the early Peruvians adored a divinity who patronized the Sans-collides of their day, and who was named 64»wilze-qllos, I. e. without breeches. Such b trb woos words do not con- stitnte that engaging tongue that Shaldspeare calls speaki )) g holyday," but rather confirm Byron's ideas of the Russians' difficult expression, which no man has leisura to pronounce except on high. lays and holydays.

" TRUTH SEVERE IN FAIRY' FICTION DREST."

There is an Eastern story of ricertain wince who had received from a fairy the faculty ef wit oaly assuming whatever appearance he thought proper, but of diseeraffig the wandering spirits of the departed, I Iii ball long laboured wider a painful elnonie disease, that none of tlic court physicians, ordinary or extraordinny, could relieve; and he resolved to wander about the streets of his capital mail he could find some one, regular or irregular, who could alleviate his sufferings. For this purpose be thinned the garb and appearance of a dervish. As lie v..as passing through one of the principal streets, he was stir- 1 wised to see it sl so thronged with ghost, that, had tiny been still inhabitants of their former earthly tenements, thee must have obstructed the thoroughfare. But what was; his amazement and dismay when he saw that they were all grouped with anxious Male round the dour of his royal father's physician, haunting, no doubt, tie man to whom they attributed their untimely doom. Shocked with the sight, he hurried to anothar part of the city, where resided another physician uf the court, holding the second rank in fashionable estima- tion. Alas ! his gateway was also surrounded with reproavhful departed pa- tients. Thunderstruck at such a discovery, and returning thanks to the Pro- phet that lac was still in lacing, despite the practise of these great men, he re- solved to submit all the other renowned practitioners to a similar visit, and be was grieved to rind that the scale of ghosts kept pace with the scale of their rank. Heartbroken, and despairing of a cure, he was slowly saunter- ing back to the palace, when, in an obscure street, and on the door of a humble dwelling, he read a doctor's name. One single,/ poor,I solitary ghost, lean- ing his despondent cheek upon his fleshless hand, was seated on the doc- tor's steps. " Alas !" exclaimed the prince, " it is then too true that humble merit withers in the shade, while ostentatious ignorance inhabits golden mansion. This poor neglected doctor, who has but one unlucky case to la- ment, is then the only man in whom I ean place confidence." Ile rapped ; the dour was opened bv the doctor himself, a venerable out man, not rich enough perhaps to keep a domestic to answer his unfrequent calla. His white locks and flowing beard added to the confidence which his situation had inspired. The elated youth then related at full length all his complicated ailments, anti the still more complicated treatment to which be had in vain been submitted. Ths sapient physician wn+ not illiberal enough to say that the prince's atten- dants had all been in error, since all mankind may err ; but his scarcastic smile, the ettrl of his lip., awl the dubious shake of his hoary head, most eloquently told the anxious patient that Le considered his former physicians as an ignorant, murderous set of upstarts, only fit to depopulate a community. With a tri- umphant look he promised a cure, and gave his overjoyed client a much-valued prescription, which he carefully confided to his bosotn ; after which he ex- pressed his gratituth: by pouring upon the doctor's table a purse of golden sequins, which made the old man's blinking eyes shine as bright as the coin he beheld in wondrous delight. his joy gave suppleness to his rigid spine, and, after bowing the prince out in the most obsequious manner, he ventured to ask him one humble question : " By what good luck, by what kind planet, had he been recommended to seek his advice?" The prince naturally asked for the reason if so strange a question, to which the worthy doctor replied, with eyes brimful with tears of gratitude, " Oh, Sir' because I considered myself the most unfortunate man in Bagdad until this happy moment ; for I have been settled in this noble and wesithy city for these last fifteen years, and have only been ahle to obtain one .single patient." " Alt!" cried the piece in despstr, " then it must he that pour, solitary, unhappy looking ghost that is now sitting on your steps."

As we have not received the preface, we are not told whether the whole of these papers are now published for the first time. If we can trust to an indistinct impression, we should say that some of them have followed the fashion of the day, and already ap- peared in a periodical publication. But no matter. They deserve collecting, and of course will bear a reperusal.