Rara avis

I’m going to claim this as a Christmas blog on the basis that it features the word Magi. But moving quickly on before a pedant corrects that to “Epiphany blog,” I’m really sharing my attempts to contextualize another intriguing late-nineteenth-century Latin poem.

In this poem a patient is thanking his doctor after successful treatment:

“CONOLLY’S THANKS TO SWAN: Swan, a rare bird among doctors, and a remarkable man,/ has the nous to hit the nail on the head with Conolly./ Sick for so many, many years, Conolly was heading straight for the Underworld/ downcast, disease rampant throughout his bones./ From his weary head to his weary heels he was suffering,/ his weary body and weary brain together were in agony./ The whip-wielding Furies left the depths of Tartarus/ and ruined an undeserving heart with bitterness and fear./ Out shot Swan—no other such bird more dear/ to the goddess Health has sailed the watery springs—/ out shot Swan the bringer of cinchona; out shot/ draughts to be taken at their proper hour, out shot pills./ Out shot Swan, and deep peace possessed my brain,/ overcome, my body obeyed the Sorcerer’s order./ Out shot Swan, and straightaway the Fury returned/ to her old home, and Pain and Suffering to their Stygian lair./ Long life to you, Swan! May the divine Health you have given me,/ brilliant man, be yours for all your prosperous days.”

The patient in this case is Edward Conolly (1844-1897), and this poem is included in a posthumous collection of Conolly’s Latin poetry, Nugae Latinae, edited by the Rev. Thomas Leslie Papillon, who had perhaps been Conolly’s tutor at Merton College, Oxford, and published in 1908. A brief introduction to the anthology by Papillon and a note he appends to this poem reveal more about its rather melancholy circumstances.

“As a child he was small in frame and delicate, and of a highly nervous temperament. His aptitude for learning, and especially for the classics, was marked from early years, and was well developed at Cheltenham College and Oxford, where he was ‘Jackson Scholar’ at Merton, 1864-7. He became a member of the Inner Temple, and lived for some years in London. But his health, never robust, gradually weakened; at last atrophy of the spine set in, and for the last sixteen years of his life he was an invalid, unable even to stand without support. His mind, however, never weakened; and many are the testimonies that could be given–a few are subjoined–to his intellectual powers. He spent the last fifteen winters of his life on the Riviera and died at Cannes on February 9, 1897, aged 52.” (Nugae p. 6)

A note under the poem (Nugae p. 62) reads: “‘Canuleius,’ i. e. Conolly; ‘Cycnus,’ Dr Swan, from whose treatment he had received benefit.”

The relief provided by Dr. Swan’s treatment was evidently and unfortunately temporary. But this finely crafted poem is a good illustration of the distraction from his poor health that Papillon suggests Conolly found in composing Latin verse. A poem celebrating a man called Swan opens wittily with a version of Juvenal’s influential statement of the rarity of a good wife, rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cycno, “A rare bird in the world, much like a black swan.” And it continues in that less-than-wholly-serious vein, while communicating very clearly how much Conolly had been suffering.

A question that inevitably occurred to me about the poem was the identity of the “Dr. Swan” to whom Conolly credits his recovery. The date of the poem is irrecoverable, which doesn’t help. I can find very few Dr. Swans in the second half of the nineteenth century either in London or Cannes, and I’m wondering if one who is quite prominent elsewhere might be the object of Conolly’s praise. What follows is strictly speculative, and I’d be delighted if anyone could find a more likely Dr. Swan for me.

Dr. Samuel Swan of New York (1815-1893) was a practitioner of homeopathy of some celebrity, his remedies available by mail-order. Three things, none of them remotely decisive either individually or as a group, incline me to wonder if this is the Swan of Conolly’s poem.

One is the term cinchoniger, “bearer of cinchona.” Cinchona bark is the source of quinine, a long-standing treatment for malaria, and is where homeopathy began, since the originator of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, conceived his theory similia similibus curentur, “Let like be cured by like,” after consuming cinchona bark and experiencing feverish symptoms as an apparent consequence. The second is attention to pills, trochi, and to doses taken at particular times, which perhaps corresponds to homeopathic practice in its methods of delivery.

Entirely flimsy, as I say, and the third is no better. It is that word Magus which Conolly uses of Swan. This is probably just what you say of a doctor who has “magically” restored you to health. But there is a very esoteric character to homeopathy, allied (it has to be said) with a very poor control of Latin, which I can illustrate from the accounts in Swan’s own catalogue of some of the materials from which treatments were derived:

“Fel Gryllus Americana: Brazilian Cricket. Suppression of urine with or without pain. A boy who had chills and fever swallowed a live cricket, and never had a chill afterward.”

“Lachryma Filia: Tears of a young girl in great grief and suffering.”

“Malandrinum: Grease from a horse’s hoof.”

“Seriaca Barlowii: From a silk handkerchief eaten by a cow, and taken from the stomach in a hard ball. During the three years she never had a calf.”

Magus does seem the mot juste for a medical practitioner who presents his art this way. Meanwhile homeopathy, to most of us (and to many of Dr. Swan’s contemporaries) a byword for charlatanry, could presumably have seemed more plausible before the big medical breakthroughs of the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and to a man who had evidently been failed by the conventional treatment of the day.

No, I’m not convinced either. Happy Christmas, in any case.