Charles Dickens and his doctors

Charles Dickens, one the greatest authors in the English language, featured in his novels medical doctors, students, and related professionals. They do not play an important role in his plots, but are interesting because they exemplify how medical practice was conducted two hundred years ago. Some of his doctors were benevolent and generous, others incompetent, self-serving, and greedy.

1. Dr. Manette in A Tale of Two Cities

Dr. Alexandre Manette is the victim of the unchecked abuses of the Ancien Régime. Kept in solitary confinement in the Bastille for eighteen years, he loses all memory and contact with reality, and spends his days making shoes. When released, he recovers his memory and participates in some of the events of the French Revolution.

2. Dr. Haggage in Little Dorrit

Dr. Haggage is the doctor of the Marshalltown debtors’ prison. He once was a sea captain but is now reduced to being “amazingly shabby,” wearing a torn sea jacket with holes at the elbows, no buttons, dirty white trousers, slippers, and no visible linen. He does not wash himself but uses a comb kept in the chimney to stick his hair upright and transform himself into a “ghastly medical scarecrow.” He delivers baby Dorrit, whose first draught of air is “tinctured” with his brandy.

3. Dr. Woodcourt in Bleak House

Generous and loyal, Dr. Allan Woodcourt is a young surgeon who dedicates his life to caring for the poor and has little interest in money. He is in love with Esther Summerson, and his love for her remains strong even when he returns from overseas and finds her face scarred by smallpox. He calls her “the beloved of his life,” and towards the novel’s end marries her and takes a job that offers “a great amount of work and a small amount of pay” at a hospital in Yorkshire.

Also featured in the book is Richard Carston, a ward of the court in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, at one time apprenticed to a surgeon, but, feeling “languid about the profession,” he abandons his studies. Then there is Harold Skimpole, a charming but lazy parasite who “had been educated for the medical profession” but had never been able to prescribe with the requisite accuracy for detail.

4. An unnamed parish surgeon, and also Dr. Losberne, in Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist is delivered in a workhouse by a parish surgeon who “works by contract.” This saved his life, for we are told in the book that had he been cared for by devoted grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of profound wisdom, he would inevitably have been killed in no time. The poor mother dies, but eventually things work out well for Oliver, and more immediately for the surgeon, who we are reassured walks away to dinner.

Dr. Losberne is the family physician who cares for Oliver after he is wounded by a gunshot. Later, he cares for Rose when she is struck by a fever. He is a hot-tempered but good-hearted old bachelor and becomes a part of the family.

5. Dr. Slammer in The Pickwick Papers

Mr. Samuel Pickwick “bursts like another sun from his slumbers” and travels with his companions to Rochester. There, they attend a fashionable ball where they meet Dr. Slammer, a bumbling and incompetent little fat man with a ring of upright black hair around his head and an extensive bald patch on top of it. Dr. Slammer, a surgeon in the 97th Regiment, takes snuff and chats with everybody, laughs, dances, makes jokes, and plays whist. He also pays attention to a little old widow who has the potential of increasing a limited income. An evening of heavy drinking ensues, resulting in a case of mistaken identity. The following day, the pompous little doctor challenges one of the Pickwickians to a duel, but eventually it all gets straightened out.

Also featured in the book are two medical students, one of whom enters practice and uses various stratagems to make his name known but concludes that the only way to achieve financial success is to marry money. Also described is the famous Fat Boy of the Pickwickian syndrome, who is obese, sleepy, difficult to arouse, and snores during dinner.

6. Dr. Jobling in Martin Chuzzlewit

Dr. John Jobling is a popular physician employed as medical officer by Tigg for the fraudulent Anglo-Bengalee company. He examines people to determine if they qualify for their insurance policies. He is money-hungry but has a good bedside manner and always tells his patients that he does not know much about the business outside of his realm, yet he indirectly encourages them to invest in the company.

We also meet the kindly Dr. Evan, “who seldom or rarely practiced,” and Dr. Lewsome, bred as a surgeon and who, as a medical assistant, unintentionally assists Jonas in trying to poison his father. Most memorable is the Cockney nurse Sairey Gamp, who never drinks alcohol but has a very red nose and keeps a bottle of gin on the mantlepiece in case she needs to put it to her lips.

7. The “doctor” in Doctor Marigold:

Dr. Marigold is not a doctor but a street hawker who adopts a deaf and mute girl, invents a system of sign language for her, and teaches her to read and communicate.

8. On Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop:

Little Nell receives medical attention from a “red-nosed gentleman” who took “his seat by the bedside…drew out his watch, and felt her pulse. Then he looked at her tongue, then he felt her pulse again….‘I should give her,’ said the doctor at length, ‘a teaspoonful, every now and then, of hot brandy and water.’”

9. Mr. Chillip in David Copperfield

Mr. Chillip is a kind, timid general practitioner who attended Mrs. Copperfield at David’s birth and remained a counselor and friend into David’s adulthood. He comforted David on the death of his mother.

10. Dr. Peps in Dombey and Son

Dr. Parker Peps, “one of the Court Physicians and a man of immense reputation,” assists with the birth of Paul Dombey. Known for having aristocratic and wealthy patients, he pompously confuses Mrs. Dombey’s name with the names of the distinguished people whom he has treated. Mr. Pilkins, a general practitioner, attends Paul during his childhood; Dr. Blimber is a non-medical doctor who runs a school with his wife and with Mr. Feeder, an assistant described as a human barrel-organ who plays the same tunes over and over again.

11. On Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol

“He bore a little crutch and had his limbs supported by an iron frame!” There has been controversy about what illness he had, with some authors suggesting it was Pott’s disease (tuberculosis of the spine and hip joints) or renal tubular acidosis.

Conclusion

Dickens described many syndromes. He promoted the treatment of children and helped establish shelters for women, of the first pediatric hospital in the United Kingdom, and of the development of orthopedics. He drew attention to the plight of the poor, the deformed, and the crippled. Writing to the Lancet in 1866, he pointed out that his knowledge of the general condition of the sick and poor in workhouses was not of yesterday and that few anomalies in the land were so horrible as the existence of the many shameful sick wards for paupers who were expected there to fester, rot, and die.

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