Genre:

Novel, Serial, Abstract

Publications abstracted:

Hawthorne 1850

Subjects:

Medical Practitioners, Medical Treatment, Heterodoxy, Alchemy, Eschatology, Religion

People mentioned:

Kenelm Digby

    This installment details the career of an old physician, Roger Chillingworth. Notes that after his studies, Chillingworth found employment in Boston—the New England Puritan town where medical matters were controlled by 'an aged deacon and apothecary' and a barber-surgeon. Chillingworth introduced to the town remedies consisting of 'a multitude of far-fetched and heterogeneous ingredients'—remedies that he had learnt 'in his Indian captivity'. (135) The people of Boston considered Chillingworth's arrival in their town in time to attend the sickly young Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale to be mysterious and perhaps heaven-sent. Dimmesdale refuses to accept Chillingworth's medicine, content that his imminent death was 'God's will', but accepts Chilingworth as his 'medical adviser', friend, and somebody who enabled him to see the universe in a refreshing way. (136–37) Describes how Chillingworth sought to probe the character of his patient 'before attempting to do him any good' (137). Despite 'a kind of intimacy' growing up between 'these two cultivated minds [...] no secret ever stole out of the minister's consciousness'. Goes on to describe how the physician and the pastor stayed together in a 'pious widow's' house, where the physician 'arranged his study and his laboratory' so that he had 'the means of compounding drugs and chemicals, which the practised alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose'. (138) Later, rumours spread that the pastor is 'haunted by Satan himself, or Satan's emissary', Chillingworth, who had associated with conjurors and 'savage priests' and whose laboratory fire was fuelled 'from the lower regions' (139). Notes Chillingworth's growing desire to dig into 'the poor clergyman's heart', and that his attempts to steal the 'treasure' in the 'minister's dim interior' were thwarted by the minister's 'spiritual intuition' (139–40). Later, Dimmesdale challenges Chillingworth's claim that some dark-leafed herbs around a tombstone grow from a 'buried heart, to make manifest an unspoken crime' (141). Chillingworth maintains that the 'guilty ones' can reveal their secrets before the 'last day' and engages with Dimmesdale in a theological discussion about this issue (142).