'The Patient Must Minister to Himself'

Boswell reports that eight or ten days before Dr. Johnson’s death, in a state “low and desponding,” his friend was visited by his physician, Dr. Richard Brocklesby. Johnson tells the doctor, “I have been as a dying man all night” and then “emphatically broke out in the words of Shakespeare”: 

“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?”

 

This is Macbeth speaking to the doctor in Act V, Scene 2. “To which,” Boswell writes, “Dr. Brocklesby readily answer’d, from the same great poet”: “Therein the patient / must minister to himself.” Johnson was pleased: “[H]e expressed himself much satisfied with the application.”

 

In the play, Macbeth had asked for a report on his wife’s medical condition, and the doctor tells him: “Not so sick, my lord, / As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies / That keep her from her rest.” In other words, Lady Macbeth, tormented by guilt for the crimes she and her husband have committed, is going nuts, which suggests she might actually have a conscience. Meanwhile, the camouflaged Scottish rebels and Malcolm’s army advance on Dunsinane.

 

Some would find Johnson quoting Macbeth on his deathbed pedantic or pretentious, I suppose. He had edited the plays and cited Shakespeare more than any other writer in his Dictionary. Finger-tip quotability came to him naturally. He had what the poet Wiley Clements called a “Bodleian mind.” That’s what’s meant by this blog’s motto: “the intersection of books and life.” A serious reader has a long memory and doesn’t think of a book as quarantined from the rest of life. My middle son has been reading The Gulag Archipelago, which reminds me of what Solzhenitsyn had to say about Shakespeare's villains in the first volume:

 

“Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s villains stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

 

“Ideology—that is what gives villainy its long-sought justification and gives the villain the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience villainy on a scale calculated in the millions.”

Johnson died on this date, December 13, in 1784 at age seventy-five.