Gatherings From Spain

The foundling hospitals were, when we last examined them, scarcely better managed than the lunatic asylums; they are called casas de espositos, houses of the exposed – or la Cuna, the cradle, as if they were the cradle, not the coffin, of miserable infants. Most large cities in Spain have one of these receptacles; the principal being in the Levitical towns, and the natural fruit of a rich celibate clergy, both regular and secular. The Cuna in our time might have been defined as a place where innocents were massacred, and natural children deserted by their unnatural parents were provided for by being slowly starved. These hospitals were first founded at Milan in 787, by a priest named Datheus. That of Seville, which we will describe, was established by the clergy of the cathedral, and was managed by twelve directors, six lay and six clerical; few, however, attended or contributed save in subjects. The hospital is situate in the Calle de la Cuna; near an aperture left for charitable donations, is a marble tablet with this verse from the Psalms, inscribed in Latin, “When my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me in.”

FOUNDLING HOSPITAL AT SEVILLE

A wicket door is pierced in the wall, which opens on being tapped to admit the sinless children of sin; and a nurse sits up at night to receive those exposed by parents who hide their guilt in darkness.

“Toi que l’amour fit par un crime,Et que l’amour défait par un crime à son tour,Funeste ouvrage de l’amour,De l’amour funeste victime.”

Some of the babies are already dying, and are put in here in order to avoid the expense of a funeral; others are almost naked, while a few are well supplied with linen and necessaries. These latter are the offspring of the better classes, by whom a temporary concealment is desired. With such the most affecting letters are left, praying the nurses to take more than usual care of a child which will surely be one day reclaimed, and a mark or ornament is usually fastened to the infant, in order that it may be identified hereafter, if called for, and such were the precise customs in antiquity. Every particular regarding every exposed babe is registered in a book, which is a sad record of human crime and remorse.

Those children which are afterwards reclaimed, pay about sixpence for every day during which the hospital has maintained them; but little attention is paid to the appeals for particular care, or to the promise of redemption, for Spaniards seldom trust each other. Unless some name is sent with it, the child is baptized with one given by the matron, and it usually is that of the saint of the day of its admission. The number was very great, and increased with increasing poverty, while the funds destined to support the charges decreased from the same cause. There is a certain and great influx nine months after the Holy week and Christmas, when the whole city, male and female, pass the night in kneeling to relics and images, &c.; accordingly nine months afterwards, in January and November, the daily numbers often exceed the usual average by fifteen to twenty.

FOUNDLING HOSPITAL AT SEVILLE

There is always a supply of wet nurses at the Cuna, but they are generally such as from bad character cannot obtain situations in private families; the usual allotment was three children to one nurse. Sometimes, when a respectable woman is looking out for a place as wet-nurse, and is anxious not to lose her breast of milk, she goes, in the meanwhile, to the Cuna, when the poor child who draws it off plumps up a little, and then, when the supply is withdrawn, withers and dies. The appointed nurses dole out their milk, not according to the wants of the infants, but to make it do for their number. Some few are farmed out to poor mothers who have lost their own babe; they receive about eight shillings a month, and these are the children which have the best chance of surviving, for no woman who has been a mother, and has given suck, will willingly, when left alone, let an infant die. The nurses of the Cuna were familiar with starvation, and even if their milk of human kindness were not dried up or soured, they have not the means of satisfying their hungry number. The proportion who died was frightful; it was indeed an organized system of infanticide. Death is a mercy to the child, and a saving to the establishment; a grown-up man’s life never was worth much in Spain, much less that of a deserted baby. The exposure of children to immediate death by the Greeks and Romans, was a trifle less cruel than the protracted dying in these Spanish charnel-houses. This Cuna, when last we visited it, was managed by an inferior priest, who, a true Spanish unjust steward, misapplied the funds. He became rich, like Gil Blas’s overseer at Valladolid, by taking care of the property of the poor and fatherless; his well-garnished quarters and portly self were in strange contrast with the condition of his wasted charges. Of these, the sick and dying were separated from the healthy; the former were placed in a large room, once the saloon of state, whose gilded roof and fair proportions mocked the present misery. The infants were laid in rows on dirty mattresses along on the floor, and were left unheeded and unattended. Their large heads, shrivelled necks, hollow eyes, and wax wan figures, were shadowed with coming death. Called into existence by no wish or fault of their own, their brief span was run out ere begun, while their mother was far away exclaiming, “When I have sufficiently wept for his birth, I will weep for his death.”

FOUNDLING HOSPITAL AT SEVILLE

Those who were more healthy lay paired in cradles arranged along a vast room; but famine was in their cheeks, need starved in their eyes, and their shrill cry pained the ear on passing the threshold; from their being underfed, they were restless and ever moaning. Their existence has indeed begun with a sob, with El primer sollozo de la Cuna, the first sigh of the cradle, as Rioja says, but all cry when entering the world, while many leave it with smiles. Some, the newly exposed, just parted from their mother’s breast, having sucked their last farewell, looked plump and rosy; they slept soundly, blind to the future, and happily unconscious of their fate.

About one in twelve survived to idle about the hospital, ill clad, ill fed, and worse taught. The boys were destined for the army, the girls for domestic service, nay, for worse, if public report did not wrong their guardian priest. They grew up to be selfish and unaffectionate; having never known what kindness was, their young hearts closed ere they opened; “the world was not their friend, nor the world’s law.” It was on their heads that the barber learned to shave, and on them were visited the sins of their parents; having had none to care for them, none to love, they revenged themselves by hating mankind. Their occupation consisted in speculating on who their parents may be, and whether they should some day be reclaimed and become rich. A few occasionally are adopted by benevolent and childless persons, who, visiting the Cuna, take a fancy to an interesting infant; but the child is liable ever after to be given up to its parents, should they reclaim it. Townshend mentions an Oriental custom at Barcelona, where the girls when marriageable were paraded in procession through the streets, and any desirous of taking a wife was at liberty to select his object by “throwing his handkerchief.” This Spanish custom still prevails at Naples.

Such was the Cuna of Seville when we last beheld it. It is now, as we have recently heard with much pleasure, admirably conducted, having been taken in charge by some benevolent ladies, who here as elsewhere are the best nurses and guardians of man in his first or second infancy, not to say of every intermediate stage.

MEDICAL PRETENSIONS

Our readers will concur in deeming that wight unfortunate who falls ill in Spain, as, whatever be his original complaint, it is too often followed by secondary and worse symptoms, in the shape of the native doctor; and if the judgment passed by Spaniards on that member of society be true, Esculapius cannot save the invalid from the crows; the faculty even at Madrid are little in advance of their provincial colleagues, nay, often they are more destructive, since, being practitioners in the only court, the heaven on earth, they are in proportion superior to the medical men of the rest of the world, of whom of course they can learn nothing. They are, however, at least a century behind their brother professors of England. An unreasonable idea of self-excellence arises both in nations and in individuals, from having no knowledge of the relative merits of others, and from having few grounds or materials whereon to raise comparison; it exists therefore the strongest among the most uninformed and those who mix the least in the world. Thus in spite of manifold deficiencies, some of which will be detailed, the self-esteem of these medical men exceeds, if possible, that of the military; both have killed their “ten thousands.” They hold themselves to be the first sabreurs, physicians, and surgeons on earth, and the best qualified to wield the shears of the Parcæ. It would be a waste of time to try to dispel this fatal delusion; the well-intentioned monitor would simply be set down as malevolent, envious, and an ass; for they think their ignorance the perfection of human skill. Few foreigners can ever hope to succeed among them, nor can any native who may have studied abroad, easily introduce a better system: his elder brethren would make common cause against him as an innovator; he would be summoned to no consultations, the most lucrative branch of practice, while the confessors would poison the ears of the women (who govern the men) with cautions against the danger to their souls, of having their bodies cured by a Jew, a heretic, or a foreigner, for the terms are almost convertible.

MEDICAL EDUCATION

Meanwhile, as in courts of justice and other matters in Spain, all sounds admirably on paper– the forms, regulations, and system are perfect in theory. Colleges of physicians and surgeons superintend the science, the professors are members of infinite learned societies, lectures are delivered, examinations are conducted, and certificates duly signed and sealed, are given. The young Galenista is furnished with a licence to kill, but what is wanting from beginning to end, to practitioner and patient, is life. The medical men know, nevertheless, every aphorism of the ancients by rote, and discourse as eloquently and plausibly on any case as do their ministers in Cortes. Both write capital theories and opinions extemporaneously. Their splendid language supplies words which seem to have cost thought. What is deficient is that clinical and best of education where the case is brought before the student with the corollary of skilful treatment: accidental deaths are consequently more common than cures.

Dissection again is even now repulsive to their Oriental prejudices; the pupils learn rather by plates, diagrams, models, preparations, and skeletons, than from anatomical experiments on a subject. As among the ancients and in the East to this day an idea is prevalent among the masses in Spain, that the touch of a dead body pollutes; nor is the objection raised by the clergy, that it savours of impiety to mutilate a form made in the image of God, yet exploded. It will be remembered by our medical readers, if we have any, that Vezalius, the father of modern anatomy, when at Madrid was demanded by the Inquisition from Philip II., to be burnt for having performed an operation. The king sent him to expiate his sin by a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; he was shipwrecked, and died of starvation at Zante.

Can it be wondered at, with such a theoretical education, that practice should continue to be antiquated, classical, and Oriental, and necessarily very limited? In difficult cases of compound fracture, gun-shot wounds, the doctors give the patient up almost at once, although they continue to meet and take fees, until death relieves him of his complicated sufferings. In chronic cases and slighter fractures they are less dangerous; for as their pottering remedies do neither good nor harm, the struggle for life and death is left to nature, who sometimes works the cure. In acute diseases and inflammations they seldom succeed; for however fond of the lancet, they only nibble with the case, and are scared at the bold decided practice of Englishmen, whereat they shrug up shoulders, invoke saints, and descant learnedly on the impossibility of treating complaints under the bright sun and warm air of Catholic Spain, after the formulæ of cold, damp, and foggy, heretical England.

FAMILY PHYSICIAN

Most Spaniards who can afford it have their family or bolster doctor, the Medico de Cabecera, and their confessor. This pair take care of the bodies and souls of the whole house, bring them gossip, share their puchero, purse, and tobacco. They rule the husband through the women and the nursery, nor do they allow their exclusive privileges to be infringed on. Etiquette is the life of a Spaniard, and often his death, since every one has heard (the Spaniards swear it is all a French lie) that Philip III. was killed, rather than violate a form. He was seated too near the fire, and, although burning, of course as king of Spain the impropriety of moving himself never entered his head, and when he requested one of his attendants to do so, none, in the absence of the proper officer whose duty it was to superintend the royal chair, ventured to take that improper liberty. In case of sudden emergencies among her Catholic Majesty’s subjects, unless the family doctor be present, any other one, even if called in, generally declines acting until the regular Esculapius arrives. An English medical friend of ours saved a Spaniard’s life by chancing to arrive when the patient, in an apoplectic fit, was foaming at the mouth and wrestling with death; all this time a strange doctor was sitting quietly in the next room smoking his cigar at the brasero, the chafing-dish, with the women of the family. Our friend instantly took 30 ounces from the sufferer’s arm, not one of the Spanish party even moving from their seats. Thus Apollo preserved him! The same medical gentleman happened to accidentally call on a person who had an inflammation in the cornea of the eye: on questioning he found that many consultations had been previously held, at which no determination was come to until at the last, when sea-bathing was prescribed, with a course of asses’ milk and Chiclana snake-broth; our heretical friend, who lacked the true faith, just touched the diseased part with caustic. When this application was reported at the next consultation, the native doctors all crossed themselves with horror and amazement, which was increased when the patient recovered in a week.

MEDICAL COSTUME

As a general rule at the first visit, they look as wise as possible, shake their heads before the women, and always magnify the complaint, which is a safe proceeding all over the world, since all physicians can either cure or kill the patient; in the first event they get greater credit and reward, while in the other alternative, the disease, having been beyond the reach of art, bears the blame. The medicos exhibit considerable ingenuity in prolonging an apparent necessity for a continuance of their visits. A common interest induces them to pull together – a rare exception in Spain – and play into each other’s hands. The family doctor, whenever appearances will in anywise justify him, becomes alarmed, and requires a consultation, a Junta. What any Spanish Junta is in affairs of peace or war need not be explained; and these are like the rest, they either do nothing, or what they do do, is done badly. At these meetings from three to seven Medicos de apelacion, consulting physicians, attend, or more, according to the patient’s purse: each goes to the sick man, feels his pulse, asks him some questions, and then retires to the next room to consult, generally allowing the invalid the benefit of hearing what passes. The Protomedico, or senior, takes the chair; and while all are lighting their cigars, the family doctor opens the case, by stating the birth, parentage, and history of the patient, his constitution, the complaint, and the medicines hitherto prescribed. The senior next rises, and gives his opinion, often speaking for half an hour; the others follow in their rotation, and then the Protomedico, like a judge, sums up, going over each opinion with comments: the usual termination is either to confirm the previous treatment, or make some insignificant alteration: the only certain thing is to appoint another consultation for the next day, for which the fees are heavy, each taking from three to five dollars. The consultation often lasts many hours, and becomes at last a chronic complaint.

PRESCRIPTIONS

It must be said, in justice to these able practitioners, that as a body they are careful in their dress: external appearance, not to say finery in apparel, raises in the eyes of the many, a profession which here is of uncertain social standing. On the same principle how careful is the costume, how brilliant are the shirt-studs of foreign fiddlers when in England! The worthy Andalucian doctor of our Spanish family, and an efficient one, as two of his patients now at rest could testify, never paid a visit except when gaily attired. So the Matador, when he enters the arena to kill the bull, is clad as a first-rate dandy majo. This attention to person arises partly from the Moro-Ibero love of ostentation, and partly from sound Galenic principles and a high sense of professional duty. The ancient authorities enforced on the practitioner an attention to everything which created cheerful impressions, in order that he might arrive at the patient’s pillow like a messenger of good tidings, and as a minister of health, not of death. They held that a grave costume might suggest unpleasant associations to the sick man. Raven-coloured undertaker tights, and a funereal, cadaverous look to match, are harbingers of blue devils and black crape, which no man, even when in blessed health, contemplates with comfort; while the effect of such a facies hippocratica staring in the face of a poor devil whose life is despaired of, must be fatal.

DRUGGISTS

The prescriptions of these well-dressed gentlemen are somewhat more old-fashioned than their coats. Their grand recipe in the first instance is to do nothing beyond taking the fee and leaving nature alone, or, as the set phrase has it, dejar á la naturaleza. The young and those whose constitutions are strong and whose complaints are weak, do well under the healing influence of their kind nurse Nature, and recover through her vis medicatrix, which, if not obstructed by art, everywhere works wonderful cures. The Sangrado will say that a Spanish man or woman is more marvellously made than a clock, inasmuch as his or her machinery has a power in itself to regulate its own motions, and to repair accidents; and therefore the watchmaker who is called in, need not be in a hurry to take it to pieces when a little oiling and cleaning may set all to rights. The remedies, when the proper time for their application arrives, are simple, and are sought for rather among the vegetables of the earth’s surface than from the minerals in its bowels. The external recipes consist chiefly of papers smeared with lard, applied to the abdomen, sinapisms and mustard poultices to the feet, fomentations of marsh-mallows or camomile flowers, and the aid of the curate. The internal remedies, the tisanes, the Leches de Almendras, de Burras, decoctions of rice, and so forth, succeed each other in such regular order, that the patient scholar has nothing to do but repeat the medical passages in Horace’s ‘Satires.’ In no country, however, can all the sick be always expected to recover even then, since “Para todo hay remedio, sino para la muerte” – “There is a remedy for everything except death.” If by chance the patient dies, the doctor and the disease bear the blame. Perhaps the old Iberian custom was the safest; then the sick were exposed outside their doors, and the advice of casual passengers was asked, whose prescriptions were quite as likely to answer as images, relics, snake-soup, or milk of almonds or asses: —

“And, doctor, do you really thinkThat asses’ milk I ought to drink?It cured yourself, I grant, is true,But then ’twas mother’s milk to you.”SNAKE-BROTH

Nor, if the doctors knew how to prescribe them, are the nicer and most efficacious remedies, the preparations of modern chemical science, to be procured in any except the very largest towns; although, as in Romeo’s apothecary, “the needy” shelves are filled with empty boxes “to make a show.” The trade of a druggist is anything but free, and the numbers are limited; none may open a Botica without a strict examination and licence; although, of course, this is to be had for money. None may sell any potent medicine, except according to the prescription of some local medical man; everything is a monopoly. The commonest drugs are often either wanting or grossly adulterated, but, as in their arsenals and larders, no dispenser will admit such destitution; hay de todo, I have every thing, swears he, and gallantly makes up the prescription simply by substituting other ingredients; and as the correct ones nine times out of ten are harmless, no great injury is sustained. There is nothing new in this, for Quevedo, in his Zahurdas de Pluton, or Satan’s Pigsties, introduces a yellow-faced bilious judge scourging Spanish apothecaries for doing exactly the same, “Hence your shops,” quoth he, for he both preached and flogged, “are arsenals of death, whose ministers here get their pills (balls rather) which banish souls from the earth;” but these and other things have been long done with impunity, as Pliny said, no physician was ever hung for murder. One advantage of general distrust in drugs and doctors is, that the great masses of the people think very little about them or their complaints: thus they escape all fancied and imaginary complaints, which, if indulged in, become chronic, and more difficult to cure than those afflicting the body – for who can minister to a mind diseased? Again, from this want of confidence in remedies, very little physic at all is taken; owing to this limited demand, druggists’ shops are as rare in Spain as those of booksellers. No red, green, or blue bottles illuminate the streets at night, and there are more of these radiant orbs in the Fore street of the capital of the west of England, than in the whole capital of the Spains, albeit with a population six times greater. It is true that, at Madrid, feeding on plum-pudding, diluted with sour cider and clotted cream, is not habitual.

Many of the prescriptions of Spain are local, and consist of some particular spring, some herb, some animal, or some particular air, or place, or bath, is recommended, which, however, is said to be very dangerous, unless some resident local medico be first consulted. One example is as good as a thousand: near Cadiz is Chiclana, to which the faculty invariably transport those patients whom they cannot cure, that is, about ninety-five in the hundred; so in chronic complaints sea-bathing there, is prescribed, with a course of asses’ milk; and if that fail, then a broth made of a long harmless snake, which abounds in the aromatic wastes near Barrosa. We have forgotten the generic name of this valuable reptile of Esculapius, one of which our naturalists should take alive, and either breed from it in the Regent’s Park, or at least investigate his comparative anatomy with those exquisite vipers which make, as we have shown, such delicious pork at Montanches.

SALVE FOR KNIFE-CUTS

We cannot refrain from giving one more prescription. Many of the murders in Spain should rather be called homicides, being free from malice prepense, and caused by the readiness of the national cuchillo, with which all the lower classes are armed like wasps; it is thus always at hand, when the blood is most on fire, and before any refrigeratory process commences. Thus, where an unarmed Englishman closes his fist, a Spaniard opens his knife. This rascally instrument becomes fatal in jealous broils, when the lower classes light their anger at the torch of the Furies, and prefer using, to speaking daggers. Then the thrust goes home; and however unskilled the regular Sangrados may be in anatomy and handling the scalpel, the universal people know exactly how to manage their knife and where to plant its blow; nor is there any mistake, for the wound, although not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, “’t will serve.” It is usually given after the treacherous fashion of their Oriental and Iberian ancestors, and if possible by a stab behind, and “under the fifth rib;” and “one blow” is enough. The blade, like the cognate Arkansas or Bowie knife of the Yankees, will “rip up a man right away,” or drill him until a surgeon can see through his body. The number killed on great religious and other festivals, exceeds those of most Spanish battles in the field, although the occurrence is scarcely noticed in the newspapers, so much is it a matter of course; but crimes which call forth a second edition and double sheet in our papers, are slurred over on the Continent, for foreigners conceal what we most display.