NA TURE 



;6i 



THURSDAY, MAY 26, 1910. 



THE LAST DAYS OF CHARLES IL 

 The Last Days of Charles IL Bv Dr. Ravmond 

 Crawfurd. Pp. 80. (Oxford : Clarendon 'Press, 

 1909.) Price 55. net. 

 r^ HARLES II. died at midday on Friday, February 

 ^^ 6, 1685, at the age of fifty-three. His last illness 

 seemed to his courtiers to begin on the morning of 

 Monday, February 2, with an attack of convulsions. 

 He was bled, and became conscious and able to 

 speak; on Thursday had more convulsions, with in- 

 tervals of consciousness, and on Friday morning, after 

 an attack of breathlessness, gradually became in- 

 sensible, and so died without further convulsion. His 

 body was examined after death; the blood-vessels of 

 the brain were found distended, there was an excess 

 of serum in the cerebral ventricles, the heart was large 

 and firm, and, except an old pleural adhesion on the 

 left side and a general engorgement of the Uver, spleen, 

 and kidneys, there were no other signs of disease. 

 From these facts, as set forth in detail in contemporarv 

 evidence, Dr. Crawfurd arrives at the conclusion "that 

 his death was due to chronic granular kidney (a form 

 of Bright 's disease) with uraemic convulsions." 



Dr. Crawfurd 's interesting book begins with an 

 account of the authorities. These are the memoirs 

 of Thomas, Lord Ailesbury, who was in waiting upon 

 the king; the despatches of Barillon, the French 

 Ambassador; those of the Dutch .rVmbassador ; 

 the diary and letters of Philip, Earl of Chester- 

 field; a letter to Mr. Roper, a fellow of the 

 College of St. John the Evangelist; the life of James 

 n., based on his memoirs; the narrative of Father 

 Hudleston, the priest who was brought in to the 

 dying king; and the account of the illness written by 

 Sir Charles Scarburgh, the learned royal physician. 

 Scarburgh had received one of the highest honours 

 which a physician could attain in that century, the 

 friendship of Harvey, and his account of the progress 

 of the illness and of each consultation, of the treat- 

 ment and of the autopsy are unexceptionable evidence. 

 Of equal value as regards truthfulness, though look- 

 ing at what passed in an entirely different way, is 

 the simple narrative of Father Richard Hudleston, a 

 Benedictine to whom, by some slip of memory, Lord 

 Macaulay has attributed a want of education which 

 the narrative alone is sufficient to disprove. The 

 accounts of Lord Ailesbury, Lord Chesterfield, and 

 James II. , and of Barillon, who were all present, 

 supply further and, in the main, trustworthy details! 

 The letter of the Rev. Francis Roper is less impor- 

 tant, but shows the feeling of the time. 



The king had excellent medical advice. Edmund 

 King, who took the first step in treatment, was a 

 man of great experience in all parts of his profession 

 and had a scientific mind ; Dr. Richard Lower was one 

 of the first discoverers of the nature of dropsv; Dr. 

 Frazier had been attached to the king, and attended 

 him in poverty and exile as well as in prosperity; Dr. 

 Walter Charleton had lived a long life among the 

 teamed; Dr. Martin Lyster had a mind attentive to 

 every part of science, and a most tender heart; Sir 

 NO. 21 17, VOL. S;^'] 



Thomas Witherby was the president of the College 

 of Physicians. The greatest of English physician* 

 thought so well of Dr. Thomas Short that he dedi- 

 cated to him his treatise on gout and dropsy. Dr. 

 Edmund Dickenson was a man of great general Iearn*> 

 ing who had spent much time in chemical studies. 

 Dr. Edward Browne had been trained from boyhood in 

 literature, philosophy, and medical observation by his 

 celebrated father. Sir Thomas Browne. Sydenham, in 

 his account of the irregular smallpox, speaks of 

 Millington as his friend and as a learned and candid 

 physician, and Garth says of him — 



" At your approach the baffled tyrant Death 



Breaks his keen shaft and grinds his clashing teeth." 

 Barwick was devoted to the royal family, and was a 

 very competent physician. Thus the king had the 

 good fortune to be treated by a group of learned men, 

 among whom were several first-rate observers. 



At the present day, if the fourteen most distin- 

 guished physicians of the College were at the bedside 

 of a patient afflicted by the convulsions which often 

 terminate diabetes, the knowledge which they could 

 bring to bear upon the problem of treatment before 

 them would be but little more than that which their 

 fourteen predecessors possessed of the last illness of 

 Charles IL Since 1685 Blackall and Bright, and 

 many other investigators, have made clear the whole 

 morbid anatomy, and something of the pathology and 

 treatment, of chronic granular kidney and uraemic con- 

 vulsions, and thus Dr. Crawfurd is able to give good 

 reasons for his opinion of the cause of the king's 

 death. His hypothesis explains satisfactorily the 

 king's interv-als of consciousness, and is further con- 

 firmed by the entire absence in the accounts of the 

 eye-witnesses of any evidence of paralysis such as, 

 would almost certainly have been noticeable had 

 cerebral haemorrhage been the cause of death. 



Dr. Crawfurd shows that the facial paralysis 

 imagined by Sir Henry Halford to be represented in 

 the wax figure of Charles 1 1, at Westmin- 

 ster is not present. He is, perhaps, not quite 

 just to the attainments of Wellwood as shown 

 by his " Banquet of Xenophon " and other 

 writings, and by the general opinion of his 

 contemporaries. He is also unintentionally unjust 

 to one of the physicians who signed the prescriptions 

 given in the account of Scarburgh, which he has 

 printed in full. This is Dr. Christian Harel, manager 

 of the Royal Laboratory, whose acquaintance Charles 

 probably made at Aix-la-Chapelle, and who was a man 

 of great perseverance and some abilit)\ His name is 

 erroneously transcribed C. Farwell, E. Farrell, C. 

 Farel, and C. Farell. He afterwards became physician 

 to Queen Mar}'. 



MECHANICAL LITERATURE OF THE NINE- 

 TEENTH CENTURY. 



Royal Society of London. Catalogue of Scientifie 

 Papers, 1800-1900. Subject Index, Vol. ii.. 

 Mechanics. Pp. lxxiii + 355. (Cambridge: Univer- 

 sity Press, 1909.) Price 155. net. 

 THIS second volume of the Royal Societj^'s subject 

 index illustrates the difficulties, as well as the 

 merits, of the undertaking. The vagueness of the 



