A Proficiency of Insult: a Biting Poem on the Medical Profession, 1736

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"For even they who compose treatises of medicine or natural philosophy in  verse are denominated poets…” Aristotle's Poetics [Translated by Thomas Twining, New York 1957]

Edward Baynard (1641-1719) of  London must have been a pinchy/gouty  physician.  Or not.  Perhaps he was an overdressed, deeply-dimpled fop.  Or perhaps he was skinnily invisible, a plain, vanishing custard of a man, scrupulously clean and who saved all money, deeply in love with his chambermaid, sleeping on a mattress of gold. 

But what he was a definite cynic, occasionally cranky to his own reaching profession.  His poem, Health, a Poem, Shewing How to Procure, Preserve and Restore It, was a best-selling book, reaching at least ten editions during his lifetime.   It evidently contained a number of frugal dispensations on achieving health, most of which involved  purging. Or sweating.  Or vomiting.  Such was the state of the art, much like our own when viewed from the year 2109.  (I overheard a conversation this morning in a hot dusty field, a physician saying that we would never simply ingest a plil that would render us a new liver.  Well.  How would the contemporaries of the newly discovered X-Ray have viewed the peek into the future of the “discovery” of DNA in 1953, only 59 years later?  And what about the enormous difference in the state of medicine and imaging capacities in the 56 years since then?  Phenomenal.  It would be nearly impossible to say what developments in medicine await the grandkids in their late years?  Or in 300 years?  Hypo-livers in Dixie  cups, I say.)

Returning to Dr. Baynard—he summarized the ten most important words and concepts in medicine in the second  poem of his book, as follows.  He held little in reserve.

“For some of the ten are always advised:

Piss, spew and spit

Perspiration and sweat

Purge, bleed and blister

Issues and clyster

These few enunciations

Cure all the doctor’s patients

If rightly applied

By a wise physic guide”

Indeed. 

[“Clyster” is an enema;  “an  ‘issue’ refers to the Galenic practice of creating an infection at some designated spot on the body because of the belief that some kind of ‘sympathy’ between the illness and the localized pool of pus would draw the illness out of the body”. ]