CHAPTER CCXVII.
SOME ACCOUNT OF D. OLIVA SABUCO'S MEDICAL THEORIES AND PRACTICE.
_Yo—volveré A nueva diligencia y paso largo, Que es breve el tiempo, 's grande la memoria Que para darla al mundo está á mi cargo._
BALBUENA.
Carew the poet speaking metaphorically of his mistress calls her foot,
the precious root On which the goodly cedar grows.
Doña Oliva on the contrary thought that the human body might be called a tree reversed, the brain being the root, and the other the bark. She did not know what great authority there is for thinking that trees stand upon their heads, for though we use vulgarly but improperly to call the uppermost of the branches the top of a tree, we are corrected, the learned John Gregory tells us, by Aristotle in his books _De Animâ_,[1] where we are taught to call the root the head, and the top the feet.
[Footnote 1: Quære? Lib. ii. c. ii. § 6. _αἱ δὲ ρἵζαι τῷ στόματι ἀνάλογον κ. τ. ἑ._]
The _pia mater_ according to her theory diffuses through this bark by the nerves that substance, moisture, sap, or white chyle which when it flows in its proper course, preserves the human vegetable in a state of well being, but when its course is reverted it becomes the cause of diseases. This nervous fluid, the brain derived principally from the air, which she held to be water in a state of rarefaction, air being the chyle of the upper world, water of the inferior, and the Moon with air and water, as with milk, feeding like a nursing mother, all sublunary creatures, and imparting moisture for their increase, as the Sun imparteth heat and life. Clouds are the milk of the Moon, from which, if she may so express herself, she says it rains air and wind as well as water, wind being air, or rarefied water rarefied still farther. The mutation or rarefaction of water into air takes place by day, the remutation or condensation of air into water by night: this is shown by the dew and by this the ebbing and flowing of the sea are caused.
In the brain, as in the root of the animal tree, all diseases, according to Doña Oliva, had their origin. From this theory she deduced a mode of practice, which if it did not facilitate the patient's recovery, was at least not likely to retard it; and tended in no way to counteract, or interfere with the restorative efforts of nature. And although fanciful in its foundation, it was always so humane and generally so reasonable as in a great degree to justify the confidence with which she advanced it. She requested that a board of learned men might be appointed, before whom she might defend her system of philosophy and of therapeutics, and that her practice might be tried for one year, that of Hippocrates and Galen having been tried for two thousand with what effect was daily and miserably seen, when of a thousand persons there were scarcely three who reached the proper termination of life and died by natural decay, the rest being cut off by some violent disease. For, according to her, the natural termination of life is produced by the exhaustion of the radical moisture, which in the course of nature is dried, or consumed, gradually and imperceptibly; death therefore, when that course is not disturbed, being an easy passage to eternity. This gradual desiccation it is which gives to old age the perfection of judgment that distinguishes it; and for the same reason the children of old men are more judicious than others, young men being deficient in judgment by reason of the excess of radical moisture, children still more so.
She had never studied medicine, she said; but it was clear as the light of day that the old system was erroneous, and must needs be so, because its founders were ignorant of the nature of man, upon which being rightly understood the true system must, of necessity, be founded. Hope is what supports health and life; fear, the worst enemy of both. Among the best preservatives and restoratives she recommended therefore cheerfulness, sweet odours, music, the country, the sound of woods and waters, agreeable conversation, and pleasant pastimes. Music, of all external things, she held to be that which tends most to comfort, rejoice and strengthen the brain, being as it were a spiritual pleasure in which the mind sympathizes; and the first of all remedies, in this, her true system of medicine, was to bring the mind and body into unison, removing thus that discord which is occasioned when they are ill at ease; this was to be done by administering cheerfulness, content, and hope to the mind, and in such words and actions as produced these, the best medicine was contained. Next to this it imported to comfort the stomach, and to cherish the root of man, that is to say the brain, with its proper corroborants, especially with sweet odours and with music. For music was so good a remedy for melancholy, so great an alleviator of pain, such a soother of uneasy emotions, and of passion, that she marvelled wherefore so excellent a medicine should not be more in use, seeing that undoubtedly many grievous diseases, as for example epilepsy, might be disarmed and cured by it; and it would operate with the more effect if accompanied with hopeful words and with grateful odours, for Doña Oliva thought with Solomon that “pleasant words are as an honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.”
Consequently unpleasant sounds and ill smells, were, according to her philosophy injurious. The latter she confounded with noxious air, which was an error to be expected in those days, when nothing concerning the composition of the atmosphere had been discovered. Thus she thought it was by their ill odour that limekilns and charcoal-fires occasioned death; and that owing to the same cause horses were frequently killed when the filth of a stable was removed, and men who were employed in cleaning vaults. Upon the same principle, in recommending perfumes as alexipharmic, she fell in with the usual practice. The plague according to her, might be received not by the breath alone, but at the eyes also, for through the sight there was ready access to the brain; it was prudent therefore to close the nostrils when there might be reason to apprehend that the air was tainted; and when conversing with an infected person, not to talk face to face, but to avert the countenance. In changing the air with the hope of escaping an endemic disease, the place to go to should be that from whence the pestilence had come, rather than one whither it might be going.
Ill sounds were noxious in like manner, though not in like degree, because no discord can be so grating as to prove fatal; but any sound which is at once loud and discordant she held to be unwholesome, and that to hear any one sing badly, read ill, or talk importunately like a fool was sufficient to cause a defluxion from the brain; if this latter opinion were well founded, no Speaker of the House of Commons could hold his office for a single Session without being talked to death. With these she classed the sound of a hiccup, the whetting of a saw, and the cry of bitter lamentation.
Doña Oliva it may be presumed was endued with a sensitive ear and a quick perception of odours, as well as with a cheerful temper, and an active mind. Her whole course of practice was intended to cheer and comfort the patient, if that was possible. She allowed the free use of water, and fresh air, and recommended that the apartments of the sick should be well ventilated. She prescribed refreshing odours, among others that of bread fresh from the oven, and that wine should be placed near the pillow, in order to induce sleep. She even thought that cheerful apparel conduced to health, and that the fashion of wearing black which prevailed in her time was repugnant to reason. Pursuing her theory that the brain was the original seat of disease, she advised that the excessive moisture which would otherwise take a wrong course from thence, should be drawn off through the natural channels by sneezing powders, or by pungent odours which provoke a discharge from the eyes and nostrils, by sudorifics also, exercise, and whatever might cause a diversion to the skin. When any part was wounded, or painful, or there was a tumour, she recommended compression above the part affected, with a woollen bandage, tightly bound, but not so as to occasion pain. And to comfort the root of the animal tree she prescribes scratching the head with the fingers, or combing it with an ivory comb,—a general and admirable remedy she calls this, against which some former possessor of the book who seems to have been a practitioner upon the old system, and has frequently entered his protest against the medical heresies of the authoress, has written in the margin “bad advice.” She recommended also cutting the hair, and washing the head with white wine, which as it were renovated the skin, and improved the vegetation.
But Doña Oliva did not reject more active remedies, on the contrary she advised all such as men had learnt from animals, and this included a powerful list, for she seems to have believed all the fables with which natural history in old times abounded, and of which indeed it may almost be said to have consisted. More reasonably she observed that animals might teach us the utility of exercise, seeing how the young lambs sported in the field, and dogs played with each other, and birds rejoiced in the air. When the stomach required clearing she prescribed a rough practice, that the patient should drink copiously of weak wine and water, and of tepid water with a few drops of vinegar and an infusion of camomile flowers; and that he should eat also things difficult of digestion, such as radishes, figs, carrots, onions, anchovies, oil and vinegar, with plenty of Indian pepper, and with something acid the better to cut the phlegm which was to be got rid of; having thus stored the stomach well for the expenditure which was to be required from it, the patient was then to lay himself on a pillow across a chair, and produce the desired effect either by his fingers or by feathers dipt in oil. After this rude operation which was to refresh the brain and elevate the pia mater, the stomach was to be comforted.
To bathe the whole body with white wine was another mode of invigorating the pia mater; for there it was that all maladies originated, none from the liver; the nature of the liver, said she, is that it cannot err; _es docta sin doctor._
The latter treatises in her book are in Latin, but she not unfrequently passes, as if unconsciously, into her own language, writing always livelily and forcibly, with a clear perception of the fallacy of the established system, and with a confidence, not so well founded, that she had discovered the real nature of man and thereby laid the foundation of a rational practice, conformable to it.