AN ACCOUNT OF THE SICKNESS AND DEATH OF DR. W-DW-RD; AS ALSO OF WHAT APPEARED UPON OPENING HIS BODY. SIR, In a letter to a friend in the country. BY DR. TECHNICUM1. Vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras. I heartily condole with you and the rest of the literati, on the death of our dear friend Dr. W[oo]dw[a]rd, and have transmitted, according to your desire, a brief account of his illness and behaviour before he died, and the most remarkable phenomena upon dissection. When he first published his State of Physic, &c.2, no man was more vivacious and alert; from a keen appetite and a good digestion, he entertained the hopes of a long life, and promised himself that his lacteals were very numerous. On the other hand he was satisfied, from the redundancy of his discoveries, that he was the Columbus of the faculty, and the greatest genius that ever appeared in it; that he should have statues erected to him, and his works be translated into all languages. But when he found, poor gentleman, his mistake; that his writings were the jest of the town and country, and admitted even into the farce of Harlequin and Scaramouch, he began to lose, in some measure, his indelible 1 See page 95. The State of Physic was written in reply to Dr. Freind's Hippocratis de morbis popularibus, &c. Among the subsequent pamphlets against Woodward were A Letter to the learned Dr. Woodward, by Dr. Byfield, and A Letter from the facetious Dr. Andrew Tripe. Among the answers from 3 An allusion, apparently, to Harlequin Hydaspes, or, The Greshamite, a mock opera acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1719. sort of kindness for the children of his brain, and to lament the unhappiness of distressed merit. I observed that Garth's Dispensary, which he quoted at random in his illness, was of mighty consolation to him, not upon the account of the morality of the piece, but because it highly delighted him to consider that if a satire was levelled against the whole profession, any single member might endure it with greater patience and resignation. However, that the Doctor might not stand alone in a controversy, he and I composed a little tract, which we thought would have demolished the triumvirate: for though neither of us alone were able to encounter our antagonists, yet the cause must necessarily be successful, from such a formidable confederacy of wit, from the united talents of a mathematical divine, and a fossilistical practitioner. But this stratagem failing also, and the pamphlet being returned on our hands by the bookseller, the Doctor grew immediately chagrin and melancholy. I cannot say, indeed, but after the first attack of his disease, he would show, at intervals, in conversation, a serenity of temper entirely dispassionate, which might be construed by his enemies perhaps the most consummate impudence. In company with his own fraternity he carried on the same air of unconcern, took place of his juniors, as he has confessed, and seemed extravagantly full of glee that he was arrived in a circle, as it were, to his old station, and likely to rejoice again in the capacity of a foreman. But his distemper grew upon him by degrees, and began to be attended with phenomena that were not genuine and usual. What to call it I could not learn from his physicians, nor is it at all material; for all diseases arising from an exuberance of the biliose salts, there is no occasion for divisions; nor is there any difference, according to the notions of our departed friend, between the cause of an apoplexy, or furor uterinus. It is plain that, by his over-great solicitude and grief, the salts, which served for his digestion, were otherwise employed; and the phlegm becoming stagnate, the salts increased in number, and by the steam of their colluctations occasioned an inflation of the stomach. According, therefore, as the organs were incommoded and embarrassed, he was affected with a variety of symptoms; sometimes he would have a faintness and swooning on him, and be pusillanimous and dejected: I have seen him throw himself into a difficulty of breathing, by pouring forth a torrent of rugged epithets upon his adversaries; but upon an accidental closure of the upper H h orifice of the stomach, he would begin to whoop and hiccough. and be troubled with chokings, startings, and strangulations. The fur and foulness of his tongue were remarkable, and his belchings were sour, noisome, and foetid, though generally nothing else but wind. His aspect was convulsed into a grimace, yet the heat and flushing of his face was never intense enough, as I perceived, to make him blush. The salts indeed, being a little over-heated, excited something bordering upon that harsh, uneasy, and offensive sensation, called a fever: and in fine, Sir, the bile being highly vitiated, annoyed the organs, indisposed the frame, and made such a confusion and perturbation in his brain, as to bring on madness and deliria. His power of thinking was so depraved, perverted, and confounded that everything he uttered for the last ten days was nothing else but the confused images of things and persons he had been engaged with. Laughing, weeping, anxiety, and suspicion, were the kindest symptoms; for he would frequently foam at mouth, bite and bark like a mad dog. Dr. Byfield, Dr. Tripe, Elkanah Settle, and my Lord Peterborough, were mostly the objects of his rage; but if he spoke a line of sense, he would run immediately into a hotch-potch, as he used to call it, concerning graduates, creeds, processions. relics, extreme unction, Gotham correspondence, Father Grueber, the Devil, and the Pretender. While he retained his senses he would be satisfied with nothing but his own method, and he had, every day, for about twenty days together, a clyster, a purge, and a quart or two of oil'. His physicians, as he approached his latter end, directed him some other medicines, which he sometimes took, but even in his ravings he would call aloud for an emetic, and be impatiently craving after oil. He took a vomit the very day he died, nay, almost the very minute; and, as he was expiring, let fall the large cockle-shell of sack-whey out of which he used to drink. I have been, Sir, more particular in this relation, to obviate the misrepresentations of two different sorts of people. Some there are, who have had the folly to declare that the Doctor died immediately of a fright at the appearance of the late meteor; others again, with an impudence never to be paralleled, affirm him now to be alive. To the first I answer, that it is irrational to suppose such a phenomenon could be terrible to 'Cf. Woodward's prescription for Steele (Aitken's Life of Steele, II. 201`. . one who has been always prying into grottos and volcanos, and the wonders of the creation. It is true he saw it, but at that time was incapable of giving any tolerable account of it. In short, he was out of our order long before, and departed this life on the first instant, which, whether ominous or not, I shall not take upon me to determine. To the second there is nothing scarcely can be said; for a man must be lost to all modesty and common sense, who will affirm a thing which, if he'll but go to Gresham, is in his power to contradict. With these very eyes, I declare to you, I saw him make his exit, which I will attest upon oath, if required but I need not, Sir, be at the pains to convince you, or any man who is acquainted with my character, and knows what regard the Court of Equity has for my veracity. I speak this with the more warmth, because I am satisfied, notwithstanding our verbum sacerdotis is pawned for it, that there are some who will still insist upon his being now living; and I design to caution a certain bookseller near St. Paul's, who, I hear, has more than once reported it; for as I am his executor, I am told it will bear an action. What will still indeed confirm the world in this notion, is that some about him who thought everything he said must necessarily be good, have already printed all the rhapsody of his deliria. This however is my comfort, though I shall see him personated, and several pieces published under his name, yet, as his language and ideas are inimitable, the wiser part of mankind must discover the imposture. I shall give you a full account of his works in a little time; I am scarce, as yet, master enough of his physic, in which he mostly followed the Germans: this I am sure, he was a good naturalist, and very communicative of his fossils : in his religion I had, you know, well grounded him, and he seemed to exceed myself in the belief of those principles I had instilled. He was a true philosopher in temper, and as he desired not to want, so he never abounded in his circumstances. I shall get but a very trifle by his kindness to me; I believe his knicknackatory may defray the expenses of his funeral, and pay the druggist for ipecacuanha; and I hope the chariot and horses will discharge the other lesser matters. His oilman (for an apothecary he seldom used) ought to be very reasonable in his bill, considering what advantages accrued to him from his recommendation. I heard him say not long ago (and no man was more punctual in his arithmetic) that in the course of his practice he had administered 20473 vomits, 756 hogsheads, four gallons, and a pint of sack-whey, and above 50 ton of oil. But before I take leave, it will be expected I should say something for the satisfaction of the ladies, who will be inquisitive of what sex he died; the account of his dissection will inform them in that particular; and although from the softness of his voice something may have been suggested to his disadvantage in their esteem, yet I know not whether that constitution is not more eligible that inclines one to the gout of Italy and Spain, and gives a man a stronger relish for the more manly pleasures of those warmer climates. His body pursuant to his own desire was opened by Mr. Marten, in the presence of three or four foreign virtuosos: the complexion of the skin was parti-coloured, and had something of the tarnish and sully natural to a jaundice. We first viewed the abdomen: the musculus rectus continued fleshly to the very middle of the sternum before it began to be tendinous, as is observed in the simia1; which contrivance of nature no doubt facilitates the wriggling motion of that animal. The omentum, the main fund of the fat, which should have been the guard against the attacks of the biliose salts, was perished, dissolved, and quite gone. The stomach appeared extremely inflated, and plainly made such a pressure upon the curb of the aorta, that there was scarce any passage left through the descending trunk. In the cavity of the stomach, as an ocular proof of his doctrine, presented itself an incredible quantity of bile sufficient to produce that modulation upon the brain which he gave the first hint of to the world. The inner surface was entirely smooth, not a footstep of the velvet tunicle remaining : this was perhaps from the constant use of drinking gallons of sack-whey with his vomits. The aperture of the pylorus was very extraordinary, 'twas big enough to admit a man's thumb: and indeed while he continued sensible, he often said, so it would be found upon dissection: for in all that time he observed, that the pylorus never would close, so as to give him the refreshment even of a slumber. Towards the pylorus within the stomach was placed a fleshy substance, resembling, though set at a greater distance, that in the hog-kind2; to which species, especially the tajacu or opossum, this phenomenon is so peculiar. Anatomists look upon this as a stopple, which is of 1 Blasius, de Anatom. Simiae. 2 Grew's Comparat. Anatom. Bla sius, de Anatom. Porci. 3 Dr. Tyson, Phil. Transact. n. 153. |