surcoat and blue white-furred hood; nor, by the way, may this portrait
itself be altogether without its use as throwing some light on the
helplessness of fourteenth-century medical science. For though in all
the world there was none like this doctor to SPEAK of physic and of
surgery;--though he was a very perfect practitioner, and never at a
loss for telling the cause of any malady and for supplying the patient
with the appropriate drug, sent in by the doctor's old and faithful
friends the apothecaries;--though he was well versed in all the
authorities from Aesculapius to the writer of the "Rosa Anglica" (who
cures inflammation homeopathically by the use of red
draperies);--though like a truly wise physician he began at home by
caring anxiously for his own digestion and for his peace of mind ("his
study was but little in the Bible"):--yet the basis of his scientific
knowledge was "astronomy," i.e. astrology, "the better part of
medicine," as Roger Bacon calls it; together with that "natural magic"
by which, as Chaucer elsewhere tells us, the famous among the learned
have known how to make men whole or sick. And there was one specific
which, from a double point of view, Chaucer's Doctor of Physic esteemed
very highly, and was loth to part with on frivolous pretexts. He was
but easy (i.e. slack) of "dispence":--

He kepte that he won in pestilence.
For gold in physic is a cordial;
Therefore he loved gold in special.

Meanwhile the ruling classes seem to have been left untouched in heart
by these successive ill-met and ill-guarded trials, which had first
smitten the lower orders chiefly, then the higher with the lower (if
the Plague of 1349 had swept off an archbishop, that of 1361 struck
down among others Henry Duke of Lancaster, the father of Chaucer's
Duchess Blanche). Calamities such as these would assuredly have been
treated as warnings sent from on high, both in earlier times, when a
Church better braced for the due performance of its never-ending task,
eagerly interpreted to awful ears the signs of the wrath of God, and by
a later generation, leavened in spirit by the self-searching morality
of Puritanism. But from the sorely-tried third quarter of the
fourteenth century the solitary voice of Langland cries, as the voice
of Conscience preaching with her cross, that "these pestilences" are
the penalty of sin and of naught else. It is assuredly presumptuous
for one generation, without the fullest proof,