Half-Seas-Over
A doctor is wondering how to apologise for being drunk on the job, when he receives a letter from his patient.
before 1802
King George III 1760-1820
A doctor is wondering how to apologise for being drunk on the job, when he receives a letter from his patient.
before 1802
King George III 1760-1820
George Fordyce (1736-1802), an eminent Scottish physician on the staff at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, did not often make house calls — not, at any rate, twice at the same address. But Samuel Rogers, a friend of Byron, recalled one occasion when luck was very much on his side.
DOCTOR Fordyce sometimes drank a good deal at dinner.* He was summoned one evening to see a lady patient, when he was more than half-seas-over,* and conscious that he was so. Feeling her pulse, and finding himself unable to count its beats, he muttered, “Drunk, by God!”
Next morning, recollecting the circumstance, he was greatly vexed: and just as he was thinking what explanation of his behaviour he should offer to the lady, a letter from her was put into his hand. “She too well knew,” said the letter, “that he had discovered the unfortunate condition in which she was when he last visited her; and she entreated him to keep the matter secret in consideration of the enclosed (a hundred-pound bank-note).”*
George Fordyce was a very eminent medical man, a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians who was elected in 1770 as a physician to St Thomas’s Hospital, and who lectured in medicine for thirty years. But as one writer put it in The Georgian Era’ (ed. William Clarke and Robert Shelton Mackenzie), “Notwithstanding the acknowledged talent of Dr Fordyce, he had but little private practice as a physician; neither his manners being so refined, nor his dress so becoming, as to make a patient desire a repetition of his visits.” He had too often stayed up all night drinking, and gone to work in yesterday’s clothes.
A now dated euphemism for being merry on alcohol, but no more. For a Victorian song all about it, see ‘Songs and Verses, Social and Scientific’ (1869). One verse is excerpted at ‘17 of the Finest Words for Drinking’ (Merriam-Webster).
A very considerable sum of money. In the mid 1790s, a farm labourer in Lancashire (where wages were relatively good) might get about 10s a week, or £26 a year. See Men, Women and Property in England (2009) by R. J. Morris, p. 41. The anecdote throws an unflattering light on the different and unequal standards expected of men and women in Georgian society.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
What made Dr Fordyce realise he was in no condition to examine his patient?