A Book About Doctors

At the summit of his success, Davy was morbidly sensitive of the humility of his extraction. That his father had been a respectable mechanic—that his mother, on her husband's death, had established herself as milliner in Penzance, in order to apprentice her son to an apothecary in that town—that by his own intellects, in the hard battle of life, he had raised himself from obscure poverty to a brilliant eminence—were to him facts of shame, instead of pride. In contradiction to this moral cowardice, there was in him, on some points, an extravagant eccentricity, which, in most men, would have pointed to imperviousness to ridicule. The demands of society, and the labours of his laboratory, of course left him with but little leisure. He, however, affected not to have time enough for the ordinary decencies of the toilet. Cold ablutions neither his constitution nor his philosophic temperament required, so he rarely washed himself. And, on the plea of saving time, he used to put on his clean linen over his dirty—so that he has been known to wear at the same time five shirts and five pairs of stockings. On the rare occasions when he divested himself of his superfluous integuments, he caused infinite perplexity to his less intimate friends, who could not account for his rapid transition from corpulence to tenuity.

The ludicrousness of his costume did not end there. Like many other men of powerful and excitable minds, he was very fond of angling; and on the banks of the Thames he might be found, at all unsuitable seasons, in a costume that must have been a source of no common merriment to the river nymphs. His coat and breeches were of green cloth. On his head he wore a hat that Dr. Paris describes as "having been originally intended for a coal-heaver, but as having, when in its raw state, been dyed green by some sort of pigment." In this attire Davy flattered himself that he resembled vegetable life as closely as it was possible for mortal to do.

But if his angling dress was droll, his shooting costume was more so. His great fear as an angler was that the fish should escape him; his greatest anxiety as a bearer of a gun was to escape being shot. In the one character, concealment was his chief object—in the other, revelation. So that he might be seen from a distance, and run fewer chances of being fired into by accident, he was accustomed on shooting excursions, to crown himself with a broad-brimmed hat, covered with scarlet. It never struck him that, in our Protestant England, he incurred imminent peril of being mistaken for a cardinal, and knocked over accordingly.

Naturally, Davy was of a poetical temperament; and some of his boyish poetry possesses merit that unquestionably justifies the anticipation formed by his poet-friends of the flights his more mature muse would take. But when his intellect became absorbed in the pursuits by which he rendered inestimable service to his species, he never renewed the bright imaginings of his day-spring.

On passing (in 1809) through the galleries of the Louvre, he could find nothing more worthy of admiration than the fine frames of the pictures. "What an extraordinary collection of fine frames!" he observed to the gentleman who acted as his guide, amidst the treasures of art gathered from every part of the Continent. His attention was directed to the "Transfiguration"; when, on its being suggested to him that he was looking at a rather well-executed picture, he said, coldly, "Indeed! I am glad I have seen it." In the same way, the statues were to him simply blocks of material. In the Apollo Belvidere, the Laocoon, and the Venus dei Medici, he saw no beauty; but when his eyes rested on the Antinous, treated in the Egyptian style, and sculptured in alabaster, he made an exclamation of delight, and cried, "Gracious powers, what a beautiful stalactite!"

More amusing than even these criticisms, is a story told of Lady Davy, who accompanied her husband to Paris. She was walking in the Tuileries garden, wearing the fashionable London bonnet of the day—shaped like a cockle-shell. The Parisians, who just then were patronizing bonnets of enormous dimensions, were astounded at the apparition of a head-dress so opposed to their notions of the everlasting fitness of things; and with the good breeding for which they are and have long been proverbial, they surrounded the daring stranger, and stared at her. This was sufficiently unpleasant to a timid English lady. But her discomfort had only commenced. Ere another minute or two had elapsed, one of the inspectors of the garden approached, and telling her Ladyship that no cause of rassemblement could be permitted in that locality, requested her to retire. Alarmed and indignant, she appealed to some officers of the Imperial Guard, but they could afford her no assistance. One of them politely offered her his arm, and proposed to conduct her to a carriage. But by the time she had decided to profit by the courtesy, such a crowd had gathered together, that it was found necessary to send for a guard of infantry, and remove la belle Anglaise, surrounded with bayonets.

CHAPTER V.

THE APOTHECARIES AND SIR SAMUEL GARTH.

Baldwin Hamey, whose manuscript memoirs of eminent physicians are among the treasures of the College, praises Winston because he treated his apothecary as a master might a slave. "Heriliter imperavit," says the Doctor. The learned Thomas Winston, anatomy lecturer at Gresham College, lived to the age of eighty years, and died on the 24th of October, 1655. He knew, therefore, apothecaries in the day of their humility—before prosperity had encouraged them to compete with their professional superiors.

The apothecaries of the Elizabethan era compounded their medicines much as medicines are compounded at the present—as far as manipulation and measuring are concerned. Prescriptions have altered, but shop-customs have undergone only a very slight change. The apothecaries' table of weights and measures, still in use, was the rule in the sixteenth century, and the symbols (for a pound, an ounce, a drachm, a scruple, a grain, &c.) remain at this day just what they were three hundred years ago.

Our good friend, William Bulleyn, gave the following excellent rules for an apothecary's life and conduct:—

"THE APOTICARYE.

"1.—Must fyrst serve God, forsee the end, be clenly, pity the poore.

"2.—Must not be suborned for money to hurt mankynde.

"3.—His place of dwelling and shop to be clenly to please the sences withal.

"4.—His garden must be at hand with plenty of herbes, seedes, and rootes.

"5.—To sow, set, plant, gather, preserve and kepe them in due tyme.

"6.—To read Dioscorides, to know ye natures of plants and herbes.

"7.—To invent medicines to chose by coloure, tast, odour, figure, &c.

"8.—To have his morters, stilles, pottes, filters, glasses, boxes, cleane and sweete.

"9.—To have charcoals at hand, to make decoctions, syrupes, &c.

"10.—To kepe his cleane ware closse, and cast away the baggage.

"11.—To have two places in his shop—one most cleane for the phisik, and a baser place for the chirurgie stuff.

"12.—That he neither increase nor diminish the physician's bill (i. e. prescription), and kepe it for his own discharge.

"13.—That he neither buy nor sel rotten drugges.

"14.—That he peruse often his wares, that they corrupt not.

"15.—That he put not in quid pro quo (i. e., use one ingredient in the place of another, when dispensing a physician's prescription) without advysement.

"16.—That he may open wel a vein for to helpe pleuresy.

"17.—That he meddle only in his vocation.

"18.—That he delyte to reede Nicolaus Myrepsus, Valerius Cordus, Johannes Placaton, the Lubik, &c.

"19.—That he do remember his office is only to be ye physician's cooke.

"20.—That he use true measure and waight.

"21.—To remember his end, and the judgment of God: and thus I do commend him to God, if he be not covetous, or crafty, seeking his own lucre before other men's help, succour, and comfort."

The apothecaries to whom these excellent directions were given were only tradesmen—grocers who paid attention to the commands of physicians. They were not required to have any knowledge of the medical science, beyond what might be obtained by the perusal of two or three writers; they were not to presume to administer drugs on their own judgment and responsibility—or to perform any surgical operation, except phlebotomy, and that only for one malady. The custom was for the doctors to sell their most valuable remedies as nostrums, keeping their composition a secret to themselves, and themselves taking the price paid for them by the sick. The commoner drugs were vended to patients by the drug-merchants (who invariably dealt in groceries for culinary use, as well as in medicinal simples), acting under the directions of the learned graduates of the Faculty.

In the fourth year of James I., a charter was obtained, that "Willed, ordained, and granted, that all and singular the Freemen of the Mystery of Grocers and Apothecaries of the City of London ... should and might be ... one body corporate and politique, in deed, fact, and name, by the name of Warden and Commonalty of the Mystery of Grocers of the City of London." But in the thirteenth year of the same king, the apothecaries and grocers were disunited. At the advice of Theodore de Mayerne and Henry Atkins, doctors in physick, another charter was granted, constituting drug-venders a distinct company. Amongst the apothecaries mentioned in this charter are the names of the most respectable families of the country. Gideon de Laune, one of this first batch of apothecaries, amassed a very large fortune in his vocation, and founded a family at Sharsted, in Kent, from which several persons of distinction draw part of their origin; and not a few of De Laune's brethren were equally lucky.

At their first foundation as a company the apothecaries were put completely under control of the College of Physicians, who were endowed with dangerous powers of inspecting their wares and punishing their malpractices. But before a generation had passed away, the apothecaries had gained such a firm footing in society that the more prosperous of them could afford to laugh at the censures of the College; and before the close of a century they were fawned upon by young physicians, and were in a position to quarrel with the old.

The doctors of that day knew so little that the apothecaries found it easy to know as much. A knowledge of the herbals, an acquaintance with the ingredients and doses of a hundred empirical compounds and systems of maltreating eruptive fevers, gout, and consumption, constituted all the medical learning of such men as Mayerne or Gibbons. To pick up that amount of information was no hard task for an ambitious apothecary.

Soon the leading apothecaries began to prescribe on their own responsibility, without the countenance of a member of the College. If they were threatened with censure or other punishment by a regular physician, they retorted by discontinuing to call him in to consultations. Jealousies soon sprang up. Starving graduates, with the diplomas of Oxford and Cambridge and the certificates of the College in their pockets, were embittered by having to trudge the pavements of London, and see the mean medicine-mixers (who had scarce scholarship enough to construe a Latin bill) dashing by in their carriages. Ere long the heartburnings broke out in a paper warfare, as rancorous and disreputable as any squabble embalmed in literature. The scholars called the rich tradesmen thieves, swindlers, and unlettered blockheads. The rich tradesmen taunted the scholars with discontent, falsehood, and ignorance of everything except Latin and Greek.

Pope took the side of the physicians. Like Johnson, Parr, and all men of enlightenment and sound scholarship, he had a high opinion of the Faculty. It is indeed told of him, on questionable authority, that on his death-bed, when he heard the bickerings of Dr. Burton and Dr. Thompson, each accusing the other of maltreating his patient, he levelled with his last breath an epigram at the two rivals—

To Dr. Arbuthnot he wrote—

His feeble health, making his life a long disease, never allowed him vigour and confidence enough to display ingratitude to the Faculty, and illustrate the truth of the lines—

His habitual tone, when speaking of the medical profession, was that of warm admiration and affection. In the "Imitations of Horace" he says—

It is true that he elsewhere ridicules Mead's fondness for rare books and Sloane's passion for butterflies; but at the close of his days he wrote in a confidential letter to a friend of the Faculty, "They are in general the most amiable companions and the best friends, as well as the most learned men I know."

In the protracted dissensions between the physicians and the apothecaries Pope was a cordial supporter of the former. When he accused, in the "Essay on Criticism," the penny-a-lining critics of acquiring their slender knowledge of the poetic art from the poets they assailed, he compared them to apothecaries whose scientific information was pilfered from the prescriptions they were required to dispense.

The origin of the memorable Dispensarian Campaign between the College of Physicians and the Company of Apothecaries is a story that can be briefly told. The younger physicians, impatient at beholding the prosperity and influence of the apothecaries, and the older ones indignant at seeing a class of men they despised creeping into their quarters and craftily laying hold of a portion of their monopoly, concocted a scheme to reinstate themselves in public favour. Without a doubt many of the physicians who countenanced this scheme gave it their support from purely charitable motives; but it cannot be questioned that as a body the dispensarians were actuated in their humanitarian exertions by a desire to lower the apothecaries, and raise themselves in the eyes of the world. With all its genuine and sterling benevolence, the medical profession, by the unworthy and silly conduct of its obscure members, has repeatedly laid itself open to the charge of trading on its reputation for humanity. In Smollett's time, as his novels show, the recognized mode employed by unknown doctors to puff themselves into notoriety and practice, was to get up little hospitals and infirmaries, and advertise to the charitable for aid in the good task of ameliorating the condition of the poor. And half the peddling little charitable institutions, infirmaries, dispensaries, or hospitals, that at the present time rob the rich and do harm to the poor in every quarter of London, originated in "the friends" of young physicians and surgeons conspiring together to get them "the position of being attached to an hospital staff." In 1687, the physicians at a college-meeting, voted "that all members of the College, whether Fellows, Candidates, or Licentiates, should give their advice gratis to all their sick neighbouring poor, when desired, within the city of London, or seven miles round."

To give prescriptions to the very poor, unaccompanied with the means of getting them dispensed, is of little use. Sir Astley Cooper used to see in the vicinity of his residence the slips of paper, marked with his pen, which it was his wont to distribute gratuitously to indigent applicants. The fact was, the poor people, finding it beyond their means to pay the druggist for dispensing them, threw them away in disgust. It was just the same in 1687. The poor folk carried their prescriptions to the apothecaries, to learn that the trade charge for dispensing them was beyond their means. The physicians asserted that the demands of the drug-venders were extortionate, and were not reduced to meet the finances of the applicants, to the end that the undertakings of benevolence might prove abortive. This was of course absurd. The apothecaries knew their own interests better than so to oppose a system which at least rendered drug-consuming fashionable with the lower orders. Perhaps they regarded the poor as their peculiar field of practice, and felt insulted at having the same humble people—for whom they had pompously prescribed and put up boluses at two-pence apiece—now entering their shops with papers dictating what the two-penny bolus was to be composed of. But the charge preferred against them was groundless. Indeed, a numerous body of the apothecaries expressly offered to sell medicines "to the poor within their respective parishes, at such rates as the committee of physicians should think reasonable."

But this would not suit the game of the physicians. "A proposal was started by a committee of the College, that the College should furnish the medicines of the poor, and perfect alone that charity which the apothecaries refused to concur in; and after divers methods ineffectually tried, and much time wasted in endeavouring to bring the Apothecaries to terms of reason in relation to the poor, an instrument was subscribed by divers charitably disposed members of the College, now in number about fifty, wherein they obliged themselves to pay ten pounds apiece towards the preparing and delivering medicines at their intrinsic value." Such was the version of the affair given by the College apologists. The plan was acted upon; and a dispensary was eventually established (some nine years after the vote of 1687) in the College of Physicians, Warwick Lane, where medicines were vended to the poor at cost price.

This measure of the College was impolitic and unjustifiable. It was unjust to that important division of the trade who were ready to vend the medicines at rates to be fixed by the College authorities—for it took altogether out of their hands the small amount of profit which they, as dealers, could have realized on those terms. It was also an eminently unwise course. The College sank to the level of the Apothecaries' Hall, becoming an emporium for the sale of medicines. It was all very well to say that no profit was made on such sale—the censorious world would not believe it. The apothecaries and their friends denied that such was the fact, and avowed that the benevolent dispensarians were bent only on underselling and ruining them.

Again, the movement introduced dissension within the walls of the College. Many of the first physicians, with the conservatism of success, did not care to offend the apothecaries, who were continually calling them in, and paying them fees. They therefore joined in the cry against the dispensary. The profession was split up into dispensarians and anti-dispensarians. The apothecaries combined and agreed not to recommend the dispensarians. The anti-dispensarians repaid this ill service by refusing to meet dispensarians in consultation. Sir Thomas Millington, the president of the College, Edward Hulse, Hans Sloane, John Woodward, Sir Edmund King, and Samuel Garth were amongst the latter. Of them the last-named was the man who rendered the most efficient service to his party.

Garth is perhaps the most cherished by the present generation of all the physicians of Pope's time. He was a Whig without rancour, and a bon-vivant without selfishness. Full of jest and amiability, he did more to create merriment at the Kit-Kat club than either Swift or Arbuthnot. He loved wine to excess; but then wine loved him too, ripening and warming his wit, and leaving no sluggish humour behind. His practice was a good one, but his numerous patients prized his bon-mots more than his prescriptions. His enemies averred that he was not only an epicure, but a profligate voluptuary and an infidel. Pope, however, wrote of him after his death, "If ever there was a good Christian, without knowing himself to be so, it was Dr. Garth." Pope had honoured him when alive by dedicating his second pastoral to him.

A good picture of Garth the politician is found in the "Journal to Stella." "London, Nov. 17, 1711," writes Swift—"This is Queen Elizabeth's birthday, usually kept in this town by apprentices, &c.; but the Whigs designed a mighty procession by midnight, and had laid out a thousand pounds to dress up the pope, devil, cardinals, Sacheverel, &c., and carry them with torches about and burn them. They did it by contribution. Garth gave five guineas; Dr. Garth I mean, if ever you heard of him. But they were seized last night by order from the Secretary.... The figures are now at the Secretary's Office at Whitehall. I design to see them if I can."

A Whig, but the friend of Tories, Garth cordially disliked Sir Richard Blackmore, a member of his own profession and political party. Blackmore was an anti-dispensarian, a bad poet, and a pure and rigid moralist. Naturally Garth abominated him, and sneered at him for his pomposity and bad scholarship. It is to be regretted that Garth, with the vulgarity of the age, twitted him with his early poverty, and with having been—a schoolmaster. To ridicule his enemy Garth composed the following verses:—

"TO THE MERRY POETASTER, AT SADLER'S HALL, IN CHEAPSIDE.

Garth's death, as described by William Ayre, was characteristic. He was soon tired of an invalid's suffering and helplessness, the ennui and boredom of the sick-room afflicting him more than the bodily pain. "Gentlemen," said he to the crowd of weeping friends who stood round his bed, "I wish the ceremony of death was over." And so, sinking lower in the bed, he died without a struggle. He had previously, on being informed that his end was approaching, expressed pleasure at the intelligence, because he was tired of having his shoes pulled off and on. The manner of Garth's exit reminds one of the death of Rabelais, also a physician. The presence of officious friends troubled him; and when he saw his doctors consulting together, he raised his head from his pillow and said with a smile, "Dear gentlemen, let me die a natural death." After he had received extreme unction, a friend approached him, and asked him how he did. "I am going on my journey," was the answer—"they have greased my boots already."

Garth has, apart from his literary productions, one great claim on posterity. To him Dryden owed honourable interment. When the great poet died, Garth caused his body to be conveyed to the College of Physicians, and started a public subscription to defray the expenses of the funeral. He pronounced an oration over the deceased at the College in Warwick Lane, and then accompanied it to Westminster Abbey.

Of the stories preserved of Garth's social humour some are exquisitely droll. Writing a letter at a coffee-house, he found himself overlooked by a curious Irishman, who was impudently reading every word of the epistle. Garth took no notice of the impertinence, until he had finished and signed the body of the letter, when he added a postscript, of unquestionable legibility: "I would write you more by this post, but there's a d—— tall impudent Irishman looking over my shoulder all the time."

"What do you mean, sir?" roared the Irishman in a fury. "Do you think I looked over your letter?"

"Sir," replied the physician, "I never once opened my lips to you."

"Ay, but you have put it down, for all that."

"'Tis impossible, sir, that you should know that, for you have never once looked over my letter."

Stumbling into a Presbyterian church one Sunday, for pastime, he found a pathetic preacher shedding tears over the iniquity of the earth.

"What makes the man greet?" asked Garth of a bystander.

"By my faith," was the answer, "and you too would greet if you were in his place and had as little to say."

"Come along, my dear fellow," responded Garth to his new acquaintance, "and dine with me. You are too good a fellow to be here."

At the Kit-Kat he once stayed to drink long after he had said that he must be off to see his patients. Sir Richard, more humane than the physician, or possibly, like the rest of the world, not disinclined to be virtuous at another's expense, observed, "Really, Garth, you ought to have no more wine, but be off to see those poor devils."

"It's no great matter," Garth replied, "whether I see them to-night or not, for nine of them have such bad constitutions, that all the physicians in the world can't save them; and the other six have such good constitutions, that all the physicians in the world can't kill them."

Born of a respectable north-country family, Garth was educated first at a provincial school, and then at Cambridge. He was admitted a Fellow of the College of Physicians on June 26, 1692, just when the quarrel of the Physicians and Apothecaries was waxing to its hottest, i. e. between the College edict of 1687, ordaining gratuitous advice, and the creation of the dispensary in 1696. As a young man he saw that his right place was with the dispensarians—and he took it. For a time his great poem, "The Dispensary," covered the apothecaries and anti-dispensarians with ridicule. It rapidly passed through numerous editions—in each of which, as was elegantly observed, the world lost and gained much. To say that of all the books, pamphlets, and broad-sheets thrown out by the combatants on both sides, it is by far the one of the greatest merit, would be scant justice, when it might almost be said that it is the only one of them that can now be read by a gentleman without a sense of annoyance and disgust. There is no point of view from which the medical profession appears in a more humiliating and contemptible light than that which the literature of this memorable squabble presents to the student. Charges of ignorance, dishonesty, and extortion were preferred on both sides; and the dispensarian physicians did not hesitate to taunt their brethren of the opposite camp with playing corruptly into the hands of the apothecaries—prescribing enormous and unnecessary quantities of medicine, so that the drug-venders might make heavy bills, and, as a consequence, recommend in all directions such complacent superiors to be called in. Garth's poem, unfair and violent though it is, seldom offends against decency. As a work of art it cannot be ranked high, and is now deservedly forgotten, although it has many good lines, and some felicitous satire. Johnson rightly pointed to the secret of its success, though he took a one-sided and unjust view of the dissensions which called it forth. "The poem," observes the biographer, "as its subject was present and popular, co-operated with passions and prejudices then prevalent; and, with such auxiliaries to its intrinsic merit, was universally and liberally applauded. It was on the side of charity against the intrigues of interest, and of regular learning against licentious usurpation of medical authority."

Sir Samuel Garth (knighted by the sword of Marlborough) died January 18, 1718-19, and was buried at Harrow-on-the-Hill.

But he lived to see the apothecaries gradually emancipate themselves from the ignominious regulations to which they consented, when their vocation was first separated from the grocery trade. Four years after his death they obtained legal acknowledgment of their right to dispense and sell medicines without the prescription of a physician; and six years later the law again decided in their favour, with regard to the physicians' right of examining and condemning their drugs. In 1721, Mr. Rose, an apothecary, on being prosecuted by the College for prescribing as well as compounding medicines, carried the matter into the House of Lords, and obtained a favourable decision. And from 1727, in which year Mr. Goodwin, an apothecary, obtained in a court of law a considerable sum for an illegal seizure of his wares (by Drs. Arbuthnot, Bale, and Levit), the physicians may be said to have discontinued to exercise their privileges of inspection.

Arbuthnot did not exceed Garth in love to the apothecaries. His contempt for, and dislike of, the fraternity, inspired him to write his "Essay on an Apothecary." He thinks it a pity that, to prevent the country from being overrun with apothecaries, it should not be allowed to anatomize them, for the improvement of natural knowledge. He ridicules them for pedantically "dressing all their discourse in the language of the Faculty."

"At meals," he says, "they distributed their wine with a little lymph, dissected a widgeon, cohobated their pease-porridge, and amalgamated a custard. A morsel of beef was a bolus; a grillard was sacrificed; eating was mastication and deglutition; a dish of steaks was a compound of many powerful ingredients; and a plate of soup was a very exalted preparation. In dress, a suit of cloaths was a system, a loophole a valve, and a surtout an integument. Cloth was a texture of fibres spread into a drab or kersey; a small rent in it was cutaneous; a thread was a filament; and the waistband of the breeches the peritoneum."

The superior branch of the Faculty invited in many ways the same satire. Indeed, pedantry was the prevalent fault of the manners of the eighteenth century. The physician, the divine, the lawyer, the parliament-man, the country gentleman, the author by profession—all had peculiarities of style, costume, speech, or intonation, by which they were well pleased they should be recognised. In one respect, this was well; men were proud of being what they were, and desired to be known as belonging to their respective vocations. They had no anxiety to be free from trade-marks. The barrister's smirk, the physician's unctuous smiles, the pedagogue's frown, did not originate in a mean desire to be taken for something of higher mark and esteem than they really were.

From the time when Bulleyn called him the physician's cook, down to the present, generation, the pure apothecary is found holding a very subordinate position. His business is to do unpleasant drudgery that a gentleman finds it unpleasant to perform, but which cannot be left to the hands of a nurse. The questions to be considered previous to becoming an apprentice to an apothecary, put in Chemberlaine's "Tyrocinium Medicum," well describe the state of the apothecary's pupil. "Can you bear the thoughts of being obliged to get up out of your warm bed, on a cold winter's night, or rather morning, to make up medicines which your employer, just arrived through frost and snow, prescribes for a patient taken suddenly or dangerously ill?—or, supposing that your master is not in sufficient business to keep a boy to take out medicines, can you make up your mind to think it no hardship to take them to the patient after you have made them up?" &c., &c. When such services were expected from pupils studying for admittance to the craft, of course boys with ample means, or prospects elsewhere, did not as a rule desire to become apothecaries.

Within the last fifty years changes have been affected in various departments of the medical profession, that have rendered the apothecary a feature of the past, and transferred his old functions to a new labourer. Prior to 1788, it is stated on authority there were not in all London more than half-a-dozen druggists who dispensed medicines from physicians' prescriptions. Before that time, the apothecaries—the members of the Apothecaries' Company—were almost the sole compounders and preparers of drugs. At the present time it is exceptional for an apothecary to put up prescriptions, unless he is acting as the family or ordinary medical attendant to the patient prescribed for. As a young man, indeed, he sometimes condescends to keep an open shop; but as soon as he can get on without "counter" business, he leaves the commercial part of his occupation to the druggist, as beneath his dignity. The dispensing chemists and druggists, whose shops, flashing with blue bottles (last remnant of empiric charlatanry), brighten our street corners and scare our horses at night, are the apothecaries of the last century. The apothecary himself—that is, the member of the Company—is hardly ever found as an apothecary pur et simple. He enrolls himself at "the hall" for the sake of being able to sue ungrateful patients for money due to him. But in the great majority of cases he is also a Fellow or Member of the College of Surgeons, and acts as a general practitioner; that is, he does anything and everything—prescribes and dispenses his prescriptions; is at the same time physician, surgeon, accoucheur, and dentist. Physic and surgery were divided at a very early date in theory, but in practice they were combined by eminent physicians till a comparatively recent period. And yet later the physician performed the functions of the apothecary, just as the apothecary presumed to discharge the offices of physician. It was not derogatory to the dignity of a leading physician, in the reign of Charles the Second, to keep a shop, and advertise the wares vended in it, announcing in the same manner their prices. Dr. Mead realized large sums by the sale of worthless nostrums. And only a few years since, a distinguished Cambridge physician, retaining as an octogenarian the popularity he had achieved as a young man, in one of our eastern counties, used to sell his "gout tincture"—a secret specific against gout—at so many shillings per bottle. In many respects the general practitioner of this century would consider his professional character compromised if he adopted the customs generally in vogue amongst the physicians of the last.

CHAPTER VI.

QUACKS.

"So then the subject being so variable, hath made the art by consequence more conjectural; an art being conjectural hath made so much the more place to be left for imposture. For almost all other arts and sciences are judged by acts or masterpieces, as I may term them, and not by the successes and events. The lawyer is judged by the virtue of his pleading, and not by the issue of the cause. The master of the ship is judged by the directing his course aright, and not by the fortune of the voyage. But the physician, and perhaps the politician, hath no particular acts demonstrative of his ability, but is judged most by the event; which is ever but as it is taken: for who can tell, if a patient die or recover, or if a state be preserved or ruined, whether it be art or accident? and therefore many times the impostor is prized, and the man of virtue taxed. Nay, we see the weakness and credulity of men is such, as they will often prefer a mountebank or witch before a learned physician."—Lord Bacon's "Advancement of Learning."

The history of quackery, if it were written on a scale that should include the entire number of those frauds which may be generally classed under the head of humbug, would be the history of the human race in all ages and climes. Neither the benefactors nor the enemies of mankind would escape mention; and a searching scrutiny would show that dishonesty has played as important, though not as manifest, a part in the operations of benevolence, as in the achievements of the devil. But a more confined use of the word must satisfy us on the present occasion. We are not about to enter on a philosophic inquiry into the causes that contributed to the success of Mahomet and Cromwell, but only to chronicle a few of the most humorous facts connected with the predecessors of Dr. Townsend and Mr. Morrison.

In the success that has in every century attended the rascally enterprises of pretenders to the art of medicine, is found a touching evidence of the sorrow, credulity, and ignorance of the generations that have passed, or are passing, to the silent home where the pain and joy, the simplicity and cunning, of this world are alike of insignificance. The hope that to the last lurks in the breast of the veriest wretch under heaven's canopy, whether his trials come from broken health, or an empty pocket, or wronged affection, speaks aloud in saddest tones, as one thinks of the multitudes who, worn with bodily malady and spiritual dejection, ignorant of the source of their sufferings, but thirsting for relief from them, have gone from charlatan to charlatan, giving hoarded money in exchange for charms, cramp-rings, warming-stones, elixirs, and trochees, warranted to cure every ill that flesh is heir to. The scene, from another point of view, is more droll, but scarcely less mournful. Look away for a few seconds from the throng of miserable objects who press round the empiric's stage; wipe out for a brief while the memory of their woes, and regard the style and arts of the practitioner who, with a trunk full of nostrums, bids disease to vanish, and death to retire from the scenes of his triumph. There he stands—a lean, fantastic man, voluble of tongue, empty-headed, full of loud words and menaces, prating about kings and princes who have taken him by the hand and kissed him in gratitude for his benefits showered upon them—dauntless, greedy, and so steeped in falsehood that his crazy-tainted brain half believes the lies that flow from his glib tongue. Are there no such men amongst us now—not standing on carts at the street-corners, and selling their wares to a dingy rabble, but having their seats of exchange in honoured places, and vending their prescriptions to crowds of wealthy clients?

In the feudal ages medicine and quackery were the same, as far as any principles of science are concerned. The only difference between the physician and the charlatan was, that the former was a fool and the latter a rogue. Men did not meddle much with the healing art. A few clerks devoted themselves to it, and in the exercise of their spiritual and medical functions discovered how to get two fleeces from a sheep at one shearing; but the care of the sick was for the most part left to the women, who then, as in every other period of the world's history, prided themselves on their medical cunning, and, with the exception of intrigue, preferred attending on the sick to any other occupation. From the time of the Reformation, however, the number of lady doctors rapidly diminished. The fair sex gradually relinquished the ground they had so long occupied, to men, who, had the monastic institutions continued to exist, would have assumed the priestly garb and passed their days in sloth. Quackery was at length fairly taken out of the hands of women and the shelter of domestic life, and was practised, not for love, and in a superstitious belief in its efficacy, but for money, and frequently with a perfect knowledge of its worthlessness as a remedial system.

As soon as the printing-press had become an institution of the country, and there existed a considerable proportion of the community capable of reading, the empirics seized hold of Caxton's invention, and made it subservient to their honourable ends. The advertising system was had recourse to in London, during the Stuart era, scarcely less than it is now. Handbills were distributed in all directions by half-starved wretches, whose withered forms and pallid cheeks were of themselves a sufficient disproof of the assertions of their employers.

The costume, language, style, and artifices of the pretenders to physic in the seventeenth century were doubtless copied from models of long standing, and differed little in essentials from those of their predecessors. Professions retain their characteristics with singular obstinacy. The doctor of Charles the Second's London transmitted all his most salient features to the quack of the Regency.

Cotgrave, in his "Treasury of "Wit and Language," published 1655, thus paints the poor physician of his time:—

This picture would serve for the portrait of Dr. Pulsefeel in the eighteenth and nineteenth, as well as the seventeenth century. How it calls to mind the image of Oliver Goldsmith, when, with a smattering of medical knowledge, a cane, and a dubious diploma, he tried to pick out of the miseries and ignorance of his fellow-creatures the means of keeping body and soul together! He too, poet and scholar though he was, would have sold a pot of rouge to a faded beauty, or a bottle of hair-dye, or a nostrum warranted to cure the bite of a mad dog.

A more accurate picture, however, of the charlatan, is to be found in "The Quack's Academy; or, The Dunce's Directory," published in 1678, of which the following is a portion:—

"However, in the second place, to support this title, there are several things very convenient: of which some are external accoutrements, others internal qualifications.

"Your outward requisites are a decent black suit, and (if your credit will stretch so far in Long Lane) a plush jacket; not a pin the worse though threadbare as a tailor's cloak—it shows the more reverend antiquity.

"Secondly, like Mercury, you must always carry a caduceus or conjuring japan in your hand, capt with a civet-box; with which you must walk with Spanish gravity, as in deep contemplation upon an arbitrament between life and death.

"Thirdly, a convenient lodging, not forgetting a hatch at the door; a chamber hung with Dutch pictures, or looking-glasses, belittered with empty bottles, gallipots, and vials filled with tapdroppings, or fair water, coloured with saunders. Any sexton will furnish your window with a skull, in hope of your custom; over which hang up the skeleton of a monkey, to proclaim your skill in anatomy.

"Fourthly, let your table be never without some old musty Greek or Arabick author, and the 4th book of Cornelius Agrippa's 'Occult Philosophy,' wide open to amuse spectators; with half-a-dozen of gilt shillings, as so many guineas received that morning for fees.

"Fifthly, fail not to oblige neighbouring ale-houses, to recommend you to inquirers; and hold correspondence with all the nurses and midwives near you, to applaud your skill at gossippings."

The directions go on to advise loquacity and impudence, qualities which quacks of all times and kinds have found most useful. But in cases where the practitioner has an impediment in his speech, or cannot by training render himself glib of utterance, he is advised to persevere in a habit of mysterious silence, rendered impressive by grave nods of the head.

When Dr. Pulsefeel was tired of London, or felt a want of country air, he concentrated his powers on the pleasant occupation of fleecing rustic simplicity. For his journeys into the provinces he provided himself with a stout and fast-trotting hack—stout, that it might bear without fatigue weighty parcels of medicinal composition; and fleet of foot, so that if an ungrateful rabble should commit the indecorum of stoning their benefactor as an impostor (a mishap that would occasionally occur), escape might be effected from the infatuated and excited populace. In his circuit the doctor took in all the fairs, markets, wakes, and public festivals; not, however, disdaining to stop an entire week, or even month, at an assize town, where he found the sick anxious to benefit by his wisdom.

His plan of making acquaintance with a new place was to ride boldly into the thickest crowd of a fair or market, with as much speed as he could make without imperilling the lives of by-standers; and then, when he had checked his steed, inform all who listened that he had come straight from the Duke of Bohemia, or the most Serene Emperor of Wallachia, out of a desire to do good to his fellow-creatures. He was born in that very town,—yes, that very town in which he then was speaking, and had left it when an orphan child of eight years of age, to seek his fortune in the world. He had found his way to London, and been crimped on board a vessel bound for Morocco, and so had been carried off to foreign parts. His adventures had been wonderful. He had visited the Sultan and the Great Mogul. There was not a part of the Indies with which he was not familiar. If any one doubted him, let his face be regarded, and his bronze complexion bear witness of the scorching suns he had endured. He had cured hundreds—ay, thousands—of emperors, kings, queens, princes, margravines, grand duchesses, and generalissimos, of their diseases. He had a powder which would stay the palsy, jaundice, hot fever, and cramps. It was expensive; but that he couldn't help, for it was made of pearls, and the dried leaves of violets brought from the very middle of Tartary; still he could sell a packet of the medicine for a crown—a sum which would just pay him back his outlaid money, and leave him no profit. But he didn't want to make money of them. He was their fellow-townsman; and in order to find them out and cure them he had refused offers of wealth from the king of Mesopotamia, who wanted him to accept a fortune of a thousand gold pieces a month, tarry with the Mesopotamians, and keep them out of Death's clutches. Sometimes this harangue was made from the back of a horse; sometimes from a rude hustings, from which he was called mountebank. He sold all kinds of medicaments: dyes for the hair, washes for the complexion, lotions to keep young men youthful; rings which, when worn on the fore-finger of the right hand, should make a chosen favourite desperately in love with the wearer, and when worn on the same finger of the left hand, should drive the said favourite to commit suicide. Nothing could surpass the impudence of the fellow's lies, save the admiration with which his credulous auditors swallowed his assertions. There they stood,—stout yeomen, drunken squires, merry peasant girls, gawky hinds, gabbling dames, deeming themselves in luck's way to have lived to see such a miracle of learning. Possibly a young student home from Oxford, with the rashness of inexperience, would smile scornfully, and in a loud voice designate the pretender a quack—a quacksalvar (kwabzalver), from the liniment he vended for the cure of wens. But such an interruption, in ninety and nine cases out of every hundred, was condemned by the orthodox friends of the young student, and he was warned that he would come to no good if he went on as he had begun—a contemptuous unbeliever, and a mocker of wise men.

The author of the "Discourse de l'Origine des Mœurs, Fraudes, et Impostures des Ciarlatans, avec leur Découverte, Paris, 1662," says, "Premièrement, par ce mot de Ciarlatans, j'entens ceux que les Italiens appellent Saltambaci, basteleurs, bouffons, vendeurs de bagatelles, et generalement toute autre personne, laquelle en place publique montée en banc, à terre, ou à cheval, vend medecines, baumes, huilles ou poudres, composées pour guerir quelque infirmité, louant et exaltant sa drogue, avec artifice, et mille faux sermens, en racontant mille et mille merveilles.

"Mais c'est chose plaisante de voir l'artifice dont se servent ces medecins de banc pour vendre leur drogue, quand avec mille faux sermens ils affirment d'avoir appris leur secret du roi de Dannemarc, au d'un prince de Transilvanie."

The great quack of Charles the Second's London was Dr. Thomas Saffold. This man (who was originally a weaver) professed to cure every disease of the human body, and also to foretell the destinies of his patients. Along Cheapside, Fleet-street, and the Strand, even down to the sacred precincts of Whitehall and St. James's, he stationed bill-distributors, who showered prose and poetry on the passers-by—just as the agents (possibly the poets) of the Messrs. Moses cast their literature on the town of Queen Victoria. When this great benefactor of his species departed this life, on May the 12th, 1691, a satirical broadsheet called on the world to mourn for the loss of one—