Alternative medicine

There is more to life than medicine for many people. Steve Ainsworth takes a look at the alternative careers of some famous doctors

Rabelais rouser

Medicine may be a wonderful career, but many doctors, ranging from favourite philosopher of the 4th century BC Aristotle to the mirthful medic of the 21st century AD, Phil Hammond, have found themselves successfully pursuing other careers too. In the 20th century, we had Roger Bannister, whose fame as a record breaking runner far eclipsed any contribution he may have made to medicine. The 19th century gave us Edinburgh doctor Thomas Bowdler who introduced the world to a new verb--to bowdlerise--after publishing his revised versions of Shakespeare and Gibbon's Decline and Fall with all the naughty bits cut out.

Doctors, however, have not merely restricted themselves to rewriting the books and plays of others: the Russian writer and doctor Anton Chekhov found time to write his own material. And, as in the arts, so with science: the 16th century Polish part time astronomer Nicolas Copernicus spent his spare time working out that the earth moved around the sun rather than vice versa.

The Catholic church was not too happy with Copernicus and his theory. But the church did at least contain some thinkers of its own, men such as Rene Descartes, a doctor whose services to medicine have been utterly forgotten, though his contribution of the phrase "cogito ergo sum" to the T shirt industry has made him immortal.

Other doctors meanwhile have spent their spare time proving that humans are all too mortal. Writing about murder though is more profitable than the act; indeed sometimes far more profitable than medicine, something that the underworked general practitioner Arthur Conan Doyle was to discover when he introduced the literary world to Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.

Dealing out death within the pages of books is one thing, but other doctors fed up with medicine have not been content with anything less than the real thing. One of those was Richard J Gatling whose 350 rounds a minute machine gun did so much to ensure that the death toll in the final year of the American civil war in the mid-19th century was larger, and achieved more quickly, than in any preceding war.

Machine guns however do not seem to have worried Jameson Leander Starr Jameson, who in 1895 led his armed, and strictly unofficial, incursion into the Transvaal--an event which almost prematurely kick started the Boer war. Starr was a man who did not subscribe to lexicographer Dr Johnson's dictum that it is cowardice which keeps the peace.

Sherlock Holmes inspecting his mgnifying glass

Not long after the bloodshed of the Boer war, in 1907, doctor turned crusading health food entrepreneur Harvey Kellogg changed breakfast time by inventing novelty food cornflakes. Crusaders and zealots probably do not mind too much what they eat. Curiously no one recorded what French revolutionary Jean Paul Marat, formerly a practising doctor in St Andrews, Scotland, had for his breakfast before he was dramatically stabbed to death in his bath in 1793.

Perhaps a more gentle political career, such as that pursued by UK politician David Owen, would have suited Marat better: the Liberal party is quite unlikely to vote for the guillotine, except as a parliamentary procedure.

Francois Rabelais, doctor, priest, and belly busting satirist was amusing enough to even give his name to a particular brand of robust comedy. "Rabelaisian"--according to Peter Mark Roget, who not only founded Manchester Medical School but also more memorably published his collection of synonyms in his thesaurus--is racy, bawdy, and ribald.

But it is hard to imagine that the Alsatian missionary Albert Schweitzer would have found Rabelais amusing. Dr Schweitzer would surely have found more in common with Thomas Young, who in his spare time managed to translate the Rosetta Stone and opened up the world of Egyptian hieroglyphics for our enjoyment and instruction.

My favourite amongst those doctors who found fame in careers other than medicine however must be Thomas Dover (1660-1742), captain of the privateer the Duke. When Dover rescued the marooned pirate Alexander Selkirk from the Juan Fernandez archipelago, the event inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe. But, despite accumulating enough money to make him rich, Dover grew tired of seafaring and went back to his medical practice in Bristol. Once home, Dover made another fortune from his powders, cure all medicines made up of opium, ipecacuanha, and potassium sulphate. The nostrum was still being prescribed in the 20th century.

It is odd to think that, although bored doctors today may fantasise about a shiver me timbers second career on the Spanish Main, a real buccaneer, Thomas Dover, spent his seafaring days dreaming of sitting in the surgery prescribing leeches and laxatives.

Steve Ainsworth freelance journalist, Halifax
Email: sainsworth@aol.com


studentBMJ 2004;12:1-44 February ISSN 0966-6494