description of the "Doctor of Physic," the grave graduate in purple
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).