C. MacLaurin

“ The sentimental and journalistic Nordic nations, such as the English and Germans, muttered the horrified name “Black Death,” afraid to give the thing a name, just as to-day they talk about the “Red Plague” or “a certain loathsome disease” when they mean to say syphilis; but the more clear-sighted and logical Mediterranean peoples knew that the thing certainly killed them, though they did not know what it was, so they simply called it La Grande Mortelaga—the Great Mortality, which it assuredly was. We prosaic moderns simply call it the plague, whose dread name even to-day makes us shudder. ”

“ It has been very well said that whenever one feels a conviction of absolute certainty approximating to the divine, one is probably listening to the still small voice of the “herd” speaking through one’s unconscious memory; and common experience is that the herd generally speaks most emphatically through the dulcet tones of that dear old lady, that real transmitter of the herd ideas of past generations, the grandmother. She, not Spinoza, nor Nietzsche, nor Darwin, nor Schopenhauer, has been the real maker of thought to the present day. ”

“ When he was about two, his father, the king, used to take his little son in his arms and stand at the window to show the multitude how bravely his boy was fighting life; and the crowd would clap and cheer for joy, for King Henry VIII was still beloved, and the Tudor succession was at every Englishman’s heart; the awful mental and physical degeneration in the king was still to come, and there is no more delightful scene in Henry VIII’s life than that of him standing at the window holding up his son to be cheered by the crowd. How little we really know of our public men! ”

“ The Black Death revived that strange and mournful sect of the flagellants, the Brotherhood of the Cross. The spirit of man, which is capable of such wonders, must needs bow before that shadow of itself which it has projected into the infinite, and ask pardon of its anthropomorphic fourteenth-century God for the fancied sins which had brought these horrors upon the world. The quaint figures of the flagellants wandered, cross on breast, in doleful procession all over Europe, chanting dolorous hymns of misery that bore the seeds of rebellion against that very God whom they affected to supplicate. ”

“ It is no wonder that with all his faults he is one of the heroes of France. Then Parma, finding that the Parisians hated Spanish pride more than they hated French Protestants, went away with his invincible army; and as soon as his back was turned Henri resumed the siege. Parma had proved, if nothing more, that he was a better strategist than Henri Quatre; but Paris returned to the old misery of starvation and disease, a misery that it has so often braved nobly. ”

“ And this discovery of the wrong dating of one of the most remarkable things that Boswell tells of him only makes his conduct more heroic; for if what I surmise is true, Miss Williams must have been alive and quarrelsome, ready to give Sam the rough side of her tongue for daring to carry home a woman of abandoned character. Cynics have said that to marry a woman is to marry a conscience; but it is even more terrible when the woman is not a man’s wife, but, old, blind, deaf, and quarrelsome, is dependent on his generosity for a living. ”

“ Those people whose hearts the war has left bruised and broken are fortunate if they can still believe what they learned at their mother’s knee. She, dear, simple, lovable soul, knew nothing about the unconscious mind, nor physiology, nor historical criticism, nor Spinoza and his majestic pantheism. All she knew was that her sons were unhappy, and she must comfort them as best she [291] could. Men have always been unhappy, and women have always tried to comfort them according to their sons’ needs. All good men have the same religion, and they have all learned it at their mother’s knee. ”

“ The rest of the story of Ivan the Terrible—it is strange that history has not yet called him Ivan the Great—is not very interesting, except for two shocking incidents that we shall relate in their turn. It is simply the record of a man with an Oriental mind, maddened by syphilis, abandoning himself to the most ruthless cruelty, experimenting as if to plumb the depths of human wickedness. ”

“ As the doctrine of evolution has cast a doubt amounting to certainty upon the story of creation, so Spinoza, by reason of his intellectual love of God, has cast a doubt upon the theory of a personal God, of an all-wise and all-loving Father. The existence of evil in the world, so ever-present, so clamant, so insistent, by itself disproves the existence of such a personality. ”

“ If we are to remember her as the man-struck old maid who philandered with and petted her favourites, it is equally well for us to remember her as the intellectual woman who was able to translate a deep philosophical work. The extremely intellectual qualities that one finds in Elizabeth are sometimes forgotten in the whirlwind of sectarian slander and patriotism that had centred itself on her head. ”

“ But nobody who has ever seen the disgusting spectacle of a man dying of general paralysis, demented, helpless, lying bestial, an obscene body that has long survived its soul, deserted by every one but his mother and his old aunts, could ever look at the portrait of the dying Nietzsche, gazing so wistfully into the setting sun, and say that Nietzsche died of general paralysis. ”

“ The first epidemic of which we have detailed knowledge is the great plague of Athens in the Peloponnesian War about which there can be very little doubt, for it was described by one of the greatest literary artists of Greece, who saw it all with his own eyes, and suffered from it. Thucydides was not a doctor, but like Cervantes he had the eye and mind of a doctor; and he could describe a disease so plainly that many other ancient and even mediæval historians have taken their descriptions of their own epidemics straight from his with never an acknowledgment. ”

“ I have no doubt whatever that it was while Spinoza was watching the spiders at their cannibalistic love-making that the amazing [276] spectacle of the presence of so much cruelty in Nature thrust itself before his mind, and led him to speculate why he, too, a man so good and virtuous, who had never harmed a single living creature in his life, should yet be so ill and coughing and sweating and spitting and falling away to a shadow. It was then probably that he evolved his stately system of pantheism that has so impressed the scientific world. ”

“ But Schopenhauer, while escaping the more serious nervous, bone and skin manifestation of syphilis, evidently did not escape the psychasthenic troubles, the obsessions and imperative ideas—the phobias; and syphilophobia had him in its grip till the end of his life. In this strange condition the patient becomes possessed by an undue terror of syphilis and its results; and often the fear of syphilis becomes transferred to the fear of every other infectious disease until his life becomes a burden to him as he walks perpetually in the presence of evil spirits which ache to devour him. ”

“ Her intelligence and great fondness for reading probably did not make Henri love her any better, because he could never finish a serious book. She said about her brother Henri III that if all the treachery in the world should perish Henri III had enough to restock it; so it is clear that brother and sister did not really love one another; and probably Marguerite could not resist the temptation to make a scathing epigram.
But Joan need not have been so perturbed over her son falling into the hands of the satanic Marguerite, for, if all tales were true, she was no great saint herself. ”

“ But Johnson’s argument is the sort of bluff obvious thing that so appeals to a common-sense person like John Bull. And doubtless that is why Johnson has so appealed to John Bull that he has almost been elevated to the pinnacle of a national hero. Full of rats, poor old gentleman; yet one can’t help loving him for his rats.
As woman seldom stammers, so she is seldom afflicted by psychasthenia, which, being a variation, appears to be almost confined to the male, like genius. Woman is seldom “ratty”; she has far too much hard common sense. ”

“ The Marxian materialist view of history grows rather attractive when it is applied to people who have been dead three thousand years.
Quite apart from the murderous sectarian squabbles, which have been dignified by the name of religious wars, the life of Henri Quatre, very properly classed as one of the heroes of France, is extraordinarily interesting to a doctor. But in many ways the most interesting thing about him was his relations with women. Henri may have had some conscience about religion—though I doubt it—but, like our own Charles II, he had absolutely no conscience about women. ”

“ We are making a mistake in concentrating on the search for the discovery of the will-o’-the-wisp cause of cancer, which, though a very terrible and horrible disease, possibly associated into the very mystery of life itself, has probably less important social effects than either syphilis or malaria. I do not merely refer to the actual death-rate from these diseases, though it is probable that syphilis indirectly causes more deaths than cancer, tuberculosis or overeating. ”

“ Eternity, according to Spinoza, is not merely a long time: it is really a mode of thought, and cannot be reduced to measurements of time. That is strangely like what one hears from countless pulpits to-day, if the occupants thereof have opened their ears to modern thought. We are living in eternity to-day, and should act as if our actions were to be eternal. Still speaking mystically, heaven is to be a good man ”

“ However deeply a man may speculate upon “God, Man, and his well-being”—to name only one of his works—the tubercle bacillus takes no heed of motives, and will ever be ready to attack him if he denies himself food and fresh air. Thus it was that his friends of The Hague went quietly to church one afternoon, doubtless thinking nothing of the troublesome cough from which he had suffered for so long; and that when they returned they did not hear his cheerful voice, for he was lying dead at his spectacle grinding. ”

“ It was the custom in Russia for the Tsar, when he wanted a wife, to collect all the most beautiful women from whom he should make his choice; and in 1570 he, in need of another wife, collected no less than 2,000 girls; them he kept in captivity for more than a year, treating them as he would, ruthlessly and relentlessly, a symptom truly characteristic of cerebral syphilis in a man untroubled by restraints, moral or legal. From these he chose another wife for himself and one for his son, that the great name of Ivan should not perish from the earth. ”

“ When the civil war broke out Henri of Navarre took the lead with furious energy on the Protestant side; and it was then that he won his reputation for soldiering and for romance. The white plume of Navarre has been an oriflamme for many a novelist ever since. And it was more than romance, though treated romantically by Macaulay in his Battle of Ivry. Henry had bound upon his head a great plume of white peacock feathers just before the battle. “Should the standards fall,” he cried, “rally round the white plume of Navarre. I promise you that it shall be found in the thickest of the fighting.” ”

“ But he was full of phobias and obsessions. And the best thing we read about him was his genuine love for Beethoven. Often he would sit and listen to a symphony, dreaming with his eyes shut; and, the last divine chords sounded, he would leave his seat rudely, lest some lesser music should blur the impression.
I have often thought of writing a history of the effect of syphilis upon the history of the world; but the difficulties appal me. We now know that syphilis is less a disease of skin and bone, than a very grim disease of the nervous system ”

“ As He is infinite He must be coterminous with the universe in which there can be nothing else but God. In fact, God is reality. God is the universe. Christ, in Spinoza’s view, is a mystical conception Who includes all the gentleness, all the wisdom, all the loving-kindness, of the world. He is the method by which God communicated His will to man. Putting it briefly, Spinoza was a complete monist, who made no distinction whatever between spirit and matter. ”

“ Possibly his enlarged heart and swollen tongue, together with his vast overeating and drinking, may have meant that King James I had chronic Bright’s disease.
How far the drunken wet-nurse may have influenced his later life no one can say; but it is quite possible that the unconscious infant may have felt a disgust that went far to cause that nervousness and lack of dignity of which his subjects complained. But how could any man be dignified when he was suffering constantly from gravel and the other tormenting, itching, weakening, and ignoble trouble? ”

“ But people love to hug their little delusions, and so long as they cling to the idea that it is only a “loathsome disease,” so long will syphilis continue to destroy the flower of the human race—hard-working intellectual middle-aged men who once upon a time were very human youths.
And there seems to be a misconception about its hereditary nature. The child of a syphilitic may be apparently healthy in appearance, though its resistance to other diseases may be low; it would need a blood examination by Wassermann’s test to make sure that its troubles were really syphilitic. ”

“ Queer things happen in dropsy, and even such a pseudo-miracle as Johnson’s is not unknown. Once water-logged with dropsy, legs, belly, lungs and all, it would have seemed to require a miracle to get him emptied, and miracles seldom happen.
The really wonderful thing is, however, that a man of so gloomy a temperament as the Great Cham should have retained such comparative cheerfulness of spirits as he had even after an experience so depressing as an attack of aphasia. He must have been a remarkably brave old man, which is quite in accordance with his strongly masculine character. ”

“ What we gain from Spinoza then—and the best of men, the best of the clergy, agree—is that eternity is a state of mind; that is to say, it is a purely human conception. Perhaps if we go further and say that good and evil, instead of being attributes of the infinite God, are also purely human conceptions, we shall come still nearer to absolute truth. ”