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The Æsculapian Labyrinth Explored; Or, Medical Mystery Illustrated cover

The Æsculapian Labyrinth Explored; Or, Medical Mystery Illustrated

Chapter 2: TO THE COLLEGE OF WIGS.
By William Taplin
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About This Book

A satirical handbook directed at physicians, surgeons, accouchers, apothecaries, and druggists that mixes mock instructions with risible anecdotes to lampoon medical pretension and commercial practice. Sections mimic earnest professional advice—on cultivating reputation, managing poor patients, extracting fees, and assuming an authoritative demeanour—while humorous episodes expose hypocrisy, showmanship, and routine errors. The pieces alternate instruction and comedy to scrutinize the gap between learned appearance and actual care, highlighting how social standing, publicity, and financial motives shape medical behaviour.

TO THE COLLEGE OF WIGS.

“Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors,
“My very noble and approved good” Doctors.

The solemnity of your somniferous aspects, no less than the professional gravity of your external ornaments, lay claim to a bow of obedient recollection in passing through W—— k-lane to public inspection. As one of the most popular descendants from your great progenitor, permit me to acknowledge, I revere the vast extent of your medical abilities; that I feel most forcibly the enormous weight of your accumulated learning, and tremble at the very idea of your experimental abilities.

Condescend, dread Sirs, to sanction this analization of Æsculapian imposition and medical mystery, with such proof of approbation, as the dignity of a diploma, and the muscular rigidity of physical countenance will permit you to bestow; nor let it be the less entitled to your favor, that a long list of valetudinarians (to whom you are daily pensioners) become partakers of the banquet of mirth; or the small fry of pharmacopolists (your humble dependents) for once permitted to take a seat at the same table with yourselves.

Anxiously solicitous to obtain belief, that

“I shall nothing extenuate,
“Nor set down aught in malice,”

you may in justice conclude me,

Sage Sirs!

Your very candid,

And obedient representative,

GREGORY GLYSTER.