The Doorway

Which book have you read more than any other?

Wednesday, the 13th of July, 1664

Hear me. I would have you hear me, for I am not so far undone that I cannot yet speak plain sense to those who will attend to it, though God knows there be fewer and fewer of that number with every passing day.

It is Mercury’s day, and I trust that planet looks upon his servants with more charity than they deserve, for I have seen precious little of his gifts this midsummer morning. Wit, they say, is his province; learning, commerce, the quick and ready mind. Where, then, is he? Where is his influence upon these wretches who pass beneath my hands and yet will not be guided by them?

The heat lies upon this city like a judgement. You can feel it in the very stones of the street, in the air you draw into your lungs, and any honest physician can tell you what such heat portends. These are the dies caniculares, the dog days, when Sirius climbs with the sun and the air grows thick and prone to corruption. Yellow bile rises with the heat; choler breeds in the body as mould breeds upon stale bread left too long in the July sun. I know this. I have known it since I was first set to read, and have confirmed it in practice these many years. And yet I am surrounded by men and women who refuse to know it, who will not be persuaded by what every sound authority tells them, and who stare at me as though I were the absurd one, the man contrary to right reason and good order, when it is they, they, who are the very embodiment of that absurdity: a thing most discordant, most violently set against the natural law that God hath woven into the fabric of creation.

This morning, I shall speak of it plainly, for it wants speaking of. I attended upon a man whom I have warned these three weeks past against the eating of flesh in such heat, against strong ale, against all those meats that inflame the blood and stir the choleric humour into a frenzy. Three weeks have I counselled him. Three weeks of patient instruction. And how do I find him this day? Flushed as a furnace, his pulse high and rapid beneath my fingers, his tongue coated, his breath corrupt as a ditch in August. He has eaten beef. He has drunk himself near to insensibility. And when I press him upon it, he tells me, and I will have you mark this well, he tells me that the beef did him no harm last summer and he sees no reason why it should harm him now.

No reason. No reason, says he.

Is it not then absurd? Is it not a thing most contrary to right order, that a man should take the counsel of his own belly above that of one who hath studied physick these twenty years? The humours are not subject to what a man wisheth them to be. The heat of midsummer doth not relent because a man hath decided, in his sovereign ignorance, that it poses him no danger. God hath set an order upon things, a natural law that is not within a man’s power to wish away by stubbornness alone.

And yet I own, I will confess it here, since there is none present to find sport in it, I own that my anger at this man is not unmixed with anger at myself. For when I stood at his bedside this morning with my case before me, weighing whether to purge him now or to bleed him first, or to prepare a decoction of cooling simples and wait upon the matter, I stood too long. I am not ignorant of my failing in this. I know what it is to stand in the doorway of a decision and find the door too narrow. Every remedy I turned over in my mind had some imperfection, some want, some risk I could not fully reckon with. The purge might weaken him before the fever broke. The bloodletting might take more from him than the heat had already stolen. The decoction, if prepared without the finest election of herbs precisely suited to his constitution, what then? What then?

I have always held that I would rather do nothing than do a thing badly. Prudence is my governor; I do not act where the risk of acting wrongly outweighs the benefit of acting at all. This is sound doctrine. It is the counsel of every wise practitioner who hath not the rashness of the common empirick, that hedge-row mountebank who will pour any vile compound down a patient’s throat without a moment’s consideration, and congratulate himself when the man doth not immediately die of it.

But I confess there are mornings, and this is one of them, when prudence and the desire for perfection between them leave me standing still, while the patient lies before me wanting something, anything, that might be of service. It is a hard thing to acknowledge. I do not make a habit of it.

My hands know more than I sometimes allow them to do. That is a thought I shall not pursue too far.

Let me speak instead of this. You ask me, or I ask myself, which is much the same thing, which book I have read more than any other in all my years? I have read many. I have gone to Galen as a young man goes to his father, seeking instruction and finding it, though not always comfortable instruction. I have consulted Hippocrates in translation. I have worn the pages thin upon Culpeper’s herbal, that great plain-spoken compendium of simples which, whatever the learned physicians of the College may say against it, hath done more to put sound medicine within the reach of ordinary men than all their Latin treatises laid end to end. I am not ashamed to own it.

But the book I have read more than any other, the book I return to when the humours of my mind grow disordered, when choler mounts and phlegm deserts me and I am left in some dry and bilious waste between good sense and rash action, is the Scripture. The Book of Job, above all. Not because I seek comfort in it, mark you. I do not read Job for comfort. I read it because it is the most honest account I have yet encountered, in any tongue, under any cover, of a man contending with the nature of things as they truly are. Here is a man upon whom every ill is heaped: a righteous man, not a sinner grasping for what he hath not earned, but a man of upright life, brought low by degrees and then lower still. And he demands to know the reason. He will have an accounting.

I understand that demand. I understand it in my blood and in my bones.

God’s answer to him, as you will recall, is not what a man might hope for. There is no neat ledger presented, no sum balanced and shown. There is only the whirlwind, and a voice from within it, asking: Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Which is to say: you are not the measure of this. You were not present at the making of it. Your reason, such as it is, cannot comprehend the whole of what hath been fashioned.

In my worse moments, I find that answer insufficient. In my better moments, I know it to be the only honest answer that could have been given.

Today, I am not in a better moment.

The heat presses on. Somewhere in this street there is a man eating beef again, I have no doubt of it. The Dutch make ready their guns and our ships make ready theirs, and no man who is honest with himself can tell you with any certainty which side God favours in that quarrel. The Conventicle Act stops the mouths of those who would gather and pray as their consciences direct them, which I think an absurdity of a most political and man-made kind, and not within my province to say more upon. Disorder is everywhere the fashion this year. Everything runs contrary to what right reason would ordain, and a man of careful mind and measured habit finds himself at every turn made the fool by the impatience and the wilfulness of others.

And here I stand in my shop, among my jars and my drying herbs and my copper vessels, a man of twenty years’ study and careful practice, a man who hath read more than most and thought more than many, who knows the influence of every planet upon the body and the virtue of every common simple that grows in an English field, and I cannot for the life of me determine whether to act or to withhold, to purge or to wait, to spend my anger or to swallow it down with the rest.

Prudence says: wait. Consider. Do not move in haste, for the error made in haste cannot always be unmade, and a healer who harms his patient through rashness is worse than no healer at all.

And choler says: do something, man. For the love of God and all His angels, do something.

I shall steep the wormwood. I shall prepare the cooling draught and take it to him before the evening turns. It is not a perfect remedy; no draught ever is, and a man who waits for the perfect remedy will wait until his patient is beyond all remedies whatsoever. I know this. I have always known this.

Knowing a thing and doing it, I find, are matters of an altogether different kind. And it is the distance between those two things, that miserable and familiar distance, that hath made this the longest morning of the year.