The Professional Man

Compare this Picture with That

As to rich and powerful clients, what can we say here, while the daily press is full of the most disheartening and disgraceful tales of peculation, fraud, and even forgery committed by men,—whose profession gives them the rank of gentlemen, but whose deeds show them to be worse than the felons they defend or help in bringing to punishment?

Is it not a terrible arraignment of so noble a profession to hear it daily said, by the organs of public opinion, in a free country, that some of our courts of justice seem only to be organized for the purpose of permitting lawyers to absorb the entire fortune of their ill-starred clients during the slow process of a suit? that neither the judges on the bench, nor the Bar as a body, will dare or care to interfere to prevent the enormous and ruinous fees levied on the wretched contestants? that men standing high in their profession are almost weekly discovered to have betrayed the trust of the widow, the orphan, the minor, or the too-confiding client, by using the property of the latter for their own personal profit?

And then, the odious spectacle presented in certain criminal as well as in certain civil suits, where the life and reputation of the living,—even when compelled to give their testimony as witnesses, are searched and held up to the prurient curiosity of the sight-seers in the court and of the expectant millions outside! the souls of the innocent and the sensitive, because they are forced to testify, being put to tortures that would shame all the judges and satellites of the most barbarous inquisitions of bygone ages! crimes and hideous details of secret and most loathsome guilt rehearsed again and again before judge and jury and listening public, and borne by the press all over the land like the seeds of the most destructive pestilence, to fall on the minds and hearts of all-reading youth and childhood? And we wonder at the alarming growth of precocious depravity and premature crime,—as if any other reaping could be expected from such sowing! Even in the age of Cicero, as the great lawyer and orator tells us, to good men like Piso, the atmosphere of law-courts became intolerable because unwholesome to the moral sense. Hominum ineptias ac stultitias, quæ devorandæ nobis sunt, non ferebat: “He (Piso) could not endure the improprieties and follies committed by the men of our profession, and which we had to swallow patiently.”¹³13Cicero, “Brutus,” n. 67. What would both Piso and Cicero have thought of the degrading and corrupting spectacle offered by our law-courts daily for months and months in succession, as certain infamous trials dragged their loathsome length along, or, as at this moment, a certain contestation over a wretched millionaire’s will enables the lawyers of his unnatural sons to exhibit to the foul taste of reporters and readers every hideous detail of their dead parent’s moral, mental, and bodily infirmities!

We heard a lawyer express his conviction that such trials with their protracted displays of moral turpitude were as useful and as necessary to the young practitioner as the lessons and exercises of the anatomical amphitheater were to the surgeon and physician. We beg to differ with him, knowing that we have on our side the ripest talent and most honored names of the American Bar. Of the courts of justice dishonored by such practice, and of the wisdom therein acquired, we think with the illustrious Roman orator, “that it were hard to say whether such a school for legal training, or the men who go thither to learn, or the odious nature of the lessons there taught, contributes most to pervert and corrupt the mind of youth.”¹⁴14Non facile dixerim; utrumne locus ipse, an condiscipuli, an genus studiorum plus mali ingeniis adferant.—De Officiis, ii. xiv.

The Judiciary

It is to the upright and eminent men who grace the judgment-seat as well as their high calling, that we must look for a remedy.

Passing over the necessities or political expediences which have led to making the judiciary elective in so many of our States,—lest we should for a moment allow the suspicion of partisan prejudice to rest on our teaching,—we hasten to say, that it is in the power of our judges to do much, very much, to purify their own profession from these increasing abuses, and to promote the most vital interests of the nation by guarding carefully the sacredness of the legislator’s trust and of their own office.

In the examples quoted in this chapter,—in the lives especially of such men as St. Ivo and President Langlois, every true man who has at heart the immaculate honor of his place and the purest interests of justice, will find an ideal,—the loftiest and the most ennobling.

There are, we would fain believe, few, if any, among our judges, who are not thoroughly acquainted with the life and writings of the great magistrates who shed such immortal luster on the ancient administration of justice in France, and did such glorious service in promoting various important legal reforms as well as in withstanding the arbitrary acts of those in power. Think of the great Chancellor D’Aguesseau (died 1751), who was, according to Voltaire himself, “the most learned magistrate that France ever possessed;” and who, “independently of his thorough acquaintance with the laws of his country, understood Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.” But far more precious to his memory and important for our purpose, is the fact that, according to the Duke de St. Simon, his moral character was a happy blending into one harmonious whole of “gravity, justice, piety, and purity of manners.” Would you hear what he did or attempted to do in the cause of justice and good government? “He employed his authority as Procureur Général in most cases wisely and honestly. He reformed the system of the management of public hospitals; improved the discipline of courts of justice; and instituted a quicker mode in the investigation of criminal cases previous to their being brought to judgment. D’Aguesseau aspired through life to the high but difficult reputation of a legal reformer;—and it is in this particular that his reputation has the greatest claim upon our respect.... His praiseworthy attempts were resisted, no doubt, by all those whose mistaken interests suggested to them that the attainment of justice ought to be kept expensive and uncertain, instead of being rendered cheap and secure. He is said to have confessed that he did not go so far as he wished, because he did not like to reduce the profits of his professional brethren. This was a mistake even in mere worldly policy; for when law, as well as any other article of exchange, is dear and worthless, the purchasers will be few.”

This fault he nobly redeemed when raised to the office of Chancellor of France, in 1717. He opposed with inflexible firmness the schemes introduced by the political economist Law “for substituting fictitious wealth for real capital.” As this fatal financial policy prevailed at court, the Chancellor who opposed it was dismissed and exiled. Two years afterward, when the bubble had burst, the Chancellor was recalled. “His high sense of integrity and justice would not allow him to hear of a national bankruptcy: he insisted on making good the government obligations, or at least allowing those who held its paper to lose only a proportionate part; and, by thus preventing a bankruptcy, he contributed in some degree toward restoring general confidence.”¹⁶16See biographical article in “Penny Cyclopædia.”

Surely here is a noble model for our most enlightened and most exalted magistrates. And yet France can boast of still loftier instances of learning and virtue in her chancellors. The family of Séguier alone from 1460 to 1789 could boast of sixty-eight of its members filling the highest dignities in the magistracy,—a glory within their profession to which nothing similar is found in history. Ah, would to God that distinguished lawyers among us could inspire their sons with such an admiration of their own calling and a devotion to it, that every succeeding generation of their descendants would aim solely at surpassing their parents in eminence of ability and integrity of life. Pierre Séguier, who held the office of Chancellor in 1635, seemed to unite in his person every merit. He braved Richelieu when that minister was all-powerful, and resisted alternately, during the long minority of Louis XIV., the power of every faction that swayed either the court, the nobles, or the popular masses. It was only when such incorruptible magistrates were no longer found to oppose the progress of absolute power, that the will of such men as Louis XIV., the Regent D’Orleans, and Louis XV., became the supreme law in the State. Séguier, however, was so much above court and nobility, army and politicians, that he was sent alone and unarmed to quell a formidable insurrection in Normandy, and succeeded in bringing back the rebels to obedience by the sheer ascendency of his “sacerdotal gravity and fervor.” In an age preeminent for its intellectual culture, the Chancellor was so distinguished for learning and devotion to letters, that he not only had a principal part in organizing the French Academy, but he was chosen to be its president, and declared its protector, while in his house, for thirty years, were held the sittings of that celebrated body. Need we remind our readers that, from these great and proud families devoted from father to son to the profession of the law, have sprung most of the men who have shed on French letters such transcendent glory?

We shall hope that our lawyers and magistrates, by cherishing such ideals as these, and by loving to walk in these ancient paths of learning, honor, and integrity, may be ever able to say to their descendants:

II. The Physician

It was Homer who sang of the Physician so many ages before the Christian era,

Machaon, of whom the poet here speaks, and his brother Podaleirios, were reputed to be sons of Esculapius,—and therefore held to be demi-gods,—on account of their admirable skill in the healing art, much more than by their rank among the Grecian princes. “In Herodotus we see how the physician Democedes was honored by kings and nations.... The Thracian physician in the army, who told Socrates what he had learned from Zamolxis, seems to have had a profound sense of the dignity of his art when he said, that as you cannot cure the eyes without curing the head, nor the head without healing the body; so neither can you cure the body without curing the soul. Another of these wise physicians, unlike the wretched impostors from the Jewish university of Salerno, was the sage who recalled St. Augustine from the vain study of astrology. Tertullian called medicine “the sister of philosophy.” In the eighth century a school of philosophy was opened in the monastery of Monte Cassino. In the early ages, the monks and hermits practiced through charity the cure of diseases. They were our first and best physicians... well skilled

The Benedictine monks had always schools of medicine. They studied Hippocrates, Celsus, and Galen, whose science is the astonishment even of our age. Saints Cosmas and Damian, who are daily commemorated by the Church,¹⁸18In the Canon of the Mass,—a most extraordinary distinction. were eminent physicians, who suffered martyrdom about the year 303. Never taking any fee, they were styled by the Greeks Anargyri (from the Greek ἀνάργυρος, costing no money).”¹⁹19Digby, “Orlandus,” ii. 259, 260.

The Church’s Equal Love for both Professions

It were hard to say which of these two great professions—Law and Medicine—was held in greatest estimation by the Church, so carefully did she from the very beginning train both lawyer and physician to the highest skill in their calling and the most scrupulous discharge of their duties. St. Luke was by profession a physician, the favorite companion of the great St. Paul in his apostolic labors, one of the four inspired historians of our Lord, besides being the author of the only inspired history of the infant Church (the “Acts of the Apostles”). The traditions of these first ages affirm that he was also a painter of more than ordinary skill, and hence he has been chosen by Christian artists as their protector and special patron. That this accomplished man—a converted Gentile—should have been chosen by St. Paul to be his associate in the apostolic ministry, laboring with the great founder of the Grecian and Macedonian churches during so many years, would prove that his heart was as pure and beautiful as his mind was cultivated.

Ever since his day the great schools of medicine, placed under the immediate control of the Church, have aimed at fostering in the souls of their pupils that deep spirit of faith and piety, that innocence of soul and purity of life,—which can alone enable the physician to be what he ought ever to be,—the second minister of God’s mercy and healing power at the sick-bed and in the bosom of Christian families. Hence the Christian religion has ever labored to impress on the minds both of physicians and surgeons that they are the custodians of the bodily health and temporal honor of individuals and families, just as the priest is the guardian of the soul’s welfare, the healer of its wounds, its divinely appointed guide in the paths of spiritual health and perfection.

The physician, in all Catholic countries, is considered to be the conscientious assistant of the priest by the sick-bed and in the hour of mortal danger, prompting the patient to be reconciled with God, and—in urgent cases—refusing the ministry of his profession to the sick or dying person till the latter had complied with the divine commands and placed the soul’s interests in perfect security. In thus aiding the priest in his most sacred functions, and helping the operation of God’s most merciful ordinances for the soul’s salvation,—the physician also finds, by experience, that he is mightily furthering the success of his own salutary art, and promoting the cure of the body. For beside the natural connection between peace of conscience and the subsidence of physical pain and irritation,—there is a special promise annexed to the reception of the last sacraments of alleviation from suffering and restoration to health, when God’s fatherly providence deems it best for the sufferer.

The Physician’s Angelic Model and Patron

Before the age in which Christ and His apostles lived, there had been, in the annals of God’s people, a most memorable example of the union of this twofold healing power, in the person of the Archangel Raphael (“The divine healer”). One of the most beautiful, touching, and instructive books of the Old Testament,—that of Tobias,—relates how God sent from on high His messenger to bestow the rarest blessings on two widely separated branches of a Hebrew family living in exile, and distinguished for exalted virtue. To the head of one household eyesight is restored, and to the other the grace of being freed from the obsession of an evil spirit, while both are bound more firmly together in living faith and fruitful charity by the nuptials of their children, brought about by their angelic benefactor.

Thus Raphael became to the early Christians what he had been for the Jewish people in exile and since their restoration,—the ideal of the true physician, acting under the divine guidance, and seeking the cure of the sick soul while laboring to heal the body. How many imitators of Raphael and Luke, and Cosmas and Damian, have not the Christian ages beheld since the beginning! The history of every country in Christendom, during the middle ages, is filled with the most instructive and edifying anecdotes concerning the devotion of physicians to their twofold task of promoting every good work, while laboring constantly for the advancement of the sciences pertaining to their own calling. The Church showed her care for this professional excellence by founding central schools of medicine and raising some of them to the rank of a university, as well as by her liberality in promoting the splendor and efficiency of the medical schools existing in such great centers of learning as Paris, Montpellier, Bologna, Pavia, Padua, Venice, Florence, and Rome.

The honor too in which she held physicians soon led to their rising in popular estimation. In the Italian Republics they formed a most honorable class, whose members not only attained great wealth, but very often wielded the highest offices in the State. Just as, all through these ages of faith, the lawyers were encouraged to form separate guilds and confraternities devoted not only to self-protection and mutual encouragement, but to all sorts of works of charity, even so and much more so did the members of the medical profession unite for the like purpose. The deep and sudden changes effected in Catholic countries by modern revolutions have not altogether blotted out these admirable unions. Even where they have fallen asunder, the best elements of them have gone over to other newer and more active bodies,—like that of St. Vincent of Paul in France.

Apostolic Spirit of Modern Physicians

And this must remind our readers of some of the most glorious and touching incidents connected with the revival of faith and charity in the France of our day. Foremost among the noble men whose deeds of piety and beneficence have contributed so much to preserve and propagate religion in the Kingdom of St. Louis, are to be found physicians. The long struggle they had undergone to rise to distinction in their profession, and the manifold opportunities furnished by it for mixing with all classes of men and women poisoned with the Voltairian unbelief,—they only considered to be the providential means of doing their duty by the sick souls brought under their influence.

During the months of March and April, 1862, the author had been sent by his ecclesiastical superiors to preach the Lenten Station in Coulommiers, some fifty miles to the east of Paris, in the diocese of Meaux. This portion of Bossuet’s ancient diocese, as well as the entire territory surrounding the capital of France, is a moral waste over which the skepticism of the eighteenth century had first swept like a terrible frost over an orchard in full bloom, killing not only the fair blossoms but the trees themselves to the heart’s core: and then to the blight had succeeded the earthquake convulsing the entire region and upsetting all the mighty monuments of existing civilization.

The city itself was filled with a hard-working population, doubly wretched in that they wrought unceasingly for insufficient wages, and had lost all their ancestral faith, having ceased to look forward to the eternal rest and bliss as a compensation for present ills.

Noble Christian men resided in their midst who made continual efforts to relieve both their moral and corporeal distress, such as their Mayor,—a most admirable man,—and the Chevalier des Mousseaux, so well known for his writings on Spiritualism. But local prejudices and bitter political antagonisms marred all the good work done by such as they. And bad as was the city folk, the surrounding peasantry were even worse. Their religion was a blind hatred of all religion, superadded to their inveterate envy of all wealth and superiority. The few churches which the Revolution had spared were left free to the women, very many, if not most, of whom did not dare to go to confession or communion through fear of their husbands. Indeed the men, as a general rule, only appeared in church twice a year, at Christmas and on Palm Sunday,—impelled thereto by some traditional custom or some strange superstition.

How Magistrate and Physician can Work Together

Every Sunday, however, the members of the Society of St. Vincent of Paul in Paris, sent some of their associates to go publicly to confession and communion at Coulommiers, in order to encourage the lukewarm and vacillating Christians among the bourgeoisie and the laboring classes to imitate their example and practice openly the religion of their fathers.

Among those who came thus weekly to fulfill their share of this apostolate of good example, we remember a magistrate, still young, but much admired for his learning and eloquence. He was wont to go quietly on these errands of truest charity, at great inconvenience to himself, and at the sacrifice of his home-comforts with wife and children on his only day of rest. But he knew for whom he was making the sacrifice, and deemed it of little account in the great crusade which he and his associates were thus silently carrying on. There was a young physician also,—though it may be that some of our readers will not deem a man of near forty young; and his was a most beautiful and most heroic soul. From him we learned many most interesting details about the share which physicians and medical students had in bringing home to the needy and suffering poor as well as to their wealthy, enlightened, and aristocratic neighbors,—the sweet light of faith and charity,—and, with these, the long-vanished hope of another and a better life.

Since then, as the whole world knows, what heroic examples of patriotic devotion and Christian charity did these same men,—lawyers and physicians and students, members of the Societies of St. Vincent of Paul, of St. Francis Xavier, and St. Francis Regis,—display on the field of battle, in the crowded hospitals, during the horrors of more than one siege, and while their country was at the darkest hour of its destiny!

Of the like services rendered to Religion by English, Irish, and Scotch medical men, we can make but brief mention. Everybody knows how high is their standard of professional knowledge, and how well merited the elevated social position ever held by physicians in all the three kingdoms. Our own personal memories recall, among other pleasant and edifying things, the modest figure of more than one distinguished London physician coming daily into the Sacristy of Farm Street church to serve Holy Mass, and, not unfrequently, serving several in succession. We know them to be, on both sides of the Irish Channel, not only foremost in the ranks of modern science as well as in all that pertains to their own calling, but foremost also in every association and good work aiming to elevate the laboring man, or to promote education and charity. In furthering all these great social and religious objects physicians and lawyers go hand in hand with the priest.

Most happy should we be to cite instances of professional excellence and devotion. But obedience to religious authority only permitted us a brief glance at the dear old land of our birth, leaving behind a craving which we still hope may be satisfied ere we die. And, besides, it is beyond our purpose and scope to recite the many glorious examples of indomitable courage and professional faithfulness to duty recorded of physicians and surgeons in the dark, trying days of famine and pestilence, on the battle-fields of Europe, Asia, and Africa, during the last fifty years. Our own Civil War,—were we to enter into such details,—would furnish us materials for an entire volume, if we would recount the merits of American surgeons; while the terrible scourge, the Yellow Fever, now desolating our fairest Southern cities, places once more in conspicuous light the heroism of our physicians, our priests, and our Sisters of Charity.

It is heroism displayed in the performance of DUTY; and duty is to God. He alone can praise and reward it fitly. We can only show how glorious and praiseworthy it is to live and die faithful to it. And this brings us to our concluding observation.

Why the Physician should be thoroughly Skilled in his Profession, and thoroughly Conscientious

Men of the highest culture and widest experience will bear us out in the assertion, that no professional man should possess in a superior degree to the physician absolute thoroughness in theoretic and practical knowledge, a deep devotion to his calling, a living faith, and unblemished reputation.

His scientific acquirements are needful to the firm confidence which he must have in himself and in his ability to deal with the most serious dangers to the health and life of his patients; his reputation for solid piety, high principle, and conscientious devotion to duty, is needful to the absolute confidence which his patients must repose in him.

Consequences of a Surgeon’s Intemperance

We can never forget one tragic occurrence of very many years ago, that may serve to point our meaning here. A clergyman had been summoned in haste at midnight to the bedside of a young lady in imminent danger of death. During nearly forty-eight hours, previously, the utmost skill of two good physicians had been unavailing to give her relief, and a third,—an eminent practitioner, but a man, unhappily, of dissipated habits,—had been sought in vain, and came in while the priest was preparing the sufferer for the worst. His arrival inspired all present with new hope and gave courage to the exhausted young mother. The priest withdrew to allow the three physicians to hold a hurried consultation. Presently the young lady’s husband came to say that his wife was dying. She was in a death-like swoon, from which she was only recalled by the most powerful restoratives. When the soul thus fluttering between life and death was able to address both her tearful husband and the physician of the soul,—she motioned to all but them to leave the sick-room; and then addressing the priest, “Oh, Father,” said she—“Doctor———is not sober, and I must die.”... It was even so, the surgeon so superior in skill to all his peers, far and near, had been for several days in a deep debauch, and was still under its influence. The poor sufferer, who had looked forward to his coming as to her only chance of life, had no sooner perceived from his appearance, his trembling hands, and foul breath, that he was not master of himself,—then she felt all hope forsaking her and swooned away. In vain did the priest, as briefly and eloquently as the urgency of the case demanded, endeavor to raise her courage and exhort her to put her trust in the Great Giver of life and strength,—she begged to be allowed to retain the Crucifix that he presented to her lips, and with that in her clasped hands, she expired, while the priest and the household were praying together in an adjoining room. The shock received by the refined, gentle, sensitive, young creature after all her terrible suffering, prostrated her utterly; and with her perished her babe.

It was hard to persuade the young husband whose heart was thus crushed and whose beautiful home was left desolate and childless, that Doctor———had not killed both his wife and his child, by presuming to show himself to her in a state bordering on delirium tremens. Nor did the other physicians attempt to palliate what was utterly inexcusable. How far this sad case injured the reputation and practice of the offender himself, or whether the indignation of the public and of his medical brethren induced him to change his ways, we cannot say, nor would it further our purpose to make it known to the reader.

The case,—an exceptional one,—is mentioned to show how much above these low habits and degrading excesses should be physicians, clergymen, and lawyers,—all men who are liable to be called at any hour of the night or day to the sick-bed, to save from the most serious peril the life of the body or the life of the soul, or to settle,—in presence of a near Eternity and of the God who dispenses its rewards and punishments,—the most momentous questions of worldly interest, involving the peace and welfare of families. We who are expected and bound to be the light and guides of others, should ever be ready to render them the full benefit of our ministry,—and, at what time soever we are summoned to the bed of sickness, it should truly be said that, on our appearance,

To the worth of medical men we bear a willing and well-deserved testimony of respect and affection, founded on long acquaintance and the experience of uniform professional skill and personal virtues. In how many of them,—as we now look back and recall their manifold merits,—did we not find verified every word of the beautiful eulogy passed on a saint by a mediæval writer?

The true Christian who feels himself honored in filling the office of God’s instrument for the preservation of life, the increase of health, the happiness of families, and the welfare of the whole community,—will ever bear it in mind, especially where there is danger of death,—that the interests of the soul are dearer to God than bodily life or health.