A Book about Doctors Part 6

The history of quackery, if it were written on a scale that should include the entire number of those frauds which may be generally cla.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed, or are pa.s.sing, 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 mult.i.tudes 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 h.o.a.rded 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 pract.i.tioner 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 grat.i.tude 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 s.e.x gradually relinquished the ground they had so long occupied, to men, who, had the monastic inst.i.tutions continued to exist, would have a.s.sumed the priestly garb and pa.s.sed 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 superst.i.tious 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 inst.i.tution 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 a.s.sertions 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:--

"My name is Pulsefeel, a poor Doctor of Physick, That does wear three pile velvet in his hat, Has paid a quarter's rent of his house before-hand, And (simple as he stands here) was made doctor beyond sea.

I vow, as I am right wors.h.i.+pful, the taking Of my degree cost me twelve French crowns, and Thirty-five pounds of b.u.t.ter in Upper Germany.

I can make your beauty, and preserve it, Rectifie your body and maintaine it, Clarifie your blood, surfle your cheeks, perfume Your skin, tinct your hair, enliven your eye, Heighten your appet.i.te; and as for Jellies, Dentifrizes, Dyets, Minerals, Frica.s.ses, Pomatums, Fumes, Italia masks to sleep in, Either to moisten or dry the superficies, Faugh! Galen Was a goose, and Paracelsus a Patch, To Doctor Pulsefeel."

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 t.i.tle, 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 j.a.pan 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-gla.s.ses, belittered with empty bottles, gallipots, and vials filled with tapdroppings, or fair water, coloured with saunders. Any s.e.xton 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 s.h.i.+llings, 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 pract.i.tioner 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 a.s.size 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 d.u.c.h.esses, 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 surpa.s.s the impudence of the fellow's lies, save the admiration with which his credulous auditors swallowed his a.s.sertions. 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 M?urs, Fraudes, et Impostures des Ciarlatans, avec leur D?couverte, Paris, 1662," says, "Premi?rement, 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 mont?e en banc, ? terre, ou ? cheval, vend medecines, baumes, huilles ou poudres, compos?es pour guerir quelque infirmit?, 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 pa.s.sers-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--

"So skilled in drugs and verse, 'twas hard to show it, Whether was best, the doctor or the poet."

The ode continues:--

"Lament, ye damsels of our London city, (Poor unprovided girls) tho' fair and witty, Who, maskt, would to his house in couples come, To understand your matrimonial doom; To know what kind of men you were to marry, And how long time, poor things, you were to tarry; Your oracle is silent, none can tell On whom his astrologick mantle fell: For he when sick refused all doctors' aid, And only to his pills devotion paid!

Yet it was surely a most sad disaster, The saucy pills at last should kill their master."

EPITAPH.

"Here lies the corpse of Thomas Saffold, By death, in spite of physick, baffled; Who, leaving off his working loom, Did learned doctor soon become.

To poetry he made pretence, Too plain to any man's own sense; But he when living thought it sin To hide his talent in napkin; Now death does doctor (poet) crowd Within the limits of a shroud."

The vocation of fortune-teller was exercised not only by the quacks, but also by the apothecaries, of that period. Garth had ample foundation, in fact, for his satirical sketch of Horoscope's shop in the second canto of "The Dispensary."

"Long has he been of that amphibious fry, Bold to prescribe and busie to apply; His shop the gazing vulgars' eyes employs, With foreign trinkets and domestick toys.

Here mummies lay most reverendly stale, And there the tortoise hung her coat of mail.

Not far from some huge shark's devouring head The flying fish their finny pinions spread; Aloft in rows large poppy-heads were strung, And near a scaly alligator hung; In this place, drugs in musty heaps decay'd, In that, dry'd bladders and drawn teeth were laid.

"An inner room receives the num'rous shoals Of such as pay to be reputed fools; Globes stand by globes, volumes by volumes lye, And planetary schemes amuse the eye.

The sage, in velvet chair, here lolls at ease, To promise future health for present fees.

Then, as from Tripod, solemn shams reveals, And what the stars know nothing of reveals.

"One asks how soon Panthea may be won, And longs to feel the marriage fetters on; Others, convinced by melancholy proof, Enquire when courteous fates will strike them off; Some by what means they may redress the wrong, When fathers the possession keep too long; And some would know the issue of their cause, And whether gold can solder up its flaws.

"Whilst Iris his cosmetick wash would try, To make her bloom revive, and lovers die; Some ask for charms, and others philters choose, To gain Corinna, and their quartans lose."

Queen Anne's weak eyes caused her to pa.s.s from one empiric to another, for the relief they all promised to give, and in some cases even persuaded that they gave her. She had a pa.s.sion for quack oculists; and happy was the advertising scoundrel who gained her Majesty's favour with a new collyrium. For, of course, if the greatest personage in the land said that Professor Bungalo was a wonderful man, a master of his art, and inspired by G.o.d to heal the sick, there was no appeal from so eminent an authority. How should an elderly lady with a crown on her head be mistaken? Do we not hear the same arguments every day in our own enlightened generation, when the new Chiropodist, or Rubber, or inventor of a specific for consumption, points to the social distinctions of his dupes as conclusive evidence that he is neither supported by vulgar ignorance, nor afraid to meet the most searching scrutiny of the educated? Good Queen Anne was so charmed with two of the many knaves who by turns enjoyed her countenance, that she had them sworn in as her own oculists in ordinary; and one of them she was even so silly as to knight. This lucky gentleman was William Reade, originally a botching tailor, and to the last a very ignorant man, as his "Short and Exact Account of all Diseases Incident to the Eyes" attests; yet he rose to the honour of knighthood, and the most lucrative and fas.h.i.+onable physician's practice of his period. Surely every dog has his day. Lazarus never should despair; a turn of fortune may one fine day pick him from the rags which cover his nakedness in the kennel, and put him to feast amongst princes, arrayed in purple and fine linen, and regarded as an oracle of wisdom. It was true that Sir William Reade was unable to read the book which he had written (by the hand of an amanuensis), but I have no doubt that many worthy people who listened to his sonorous voice, beheld his lace ruffles and gold-headed cane, and saw his coach drawn along to St. James's by superb horses, thought him in every respect equal, or even superior, to Pope and Swift.

When Sir William was knighted he hired a poet, who lived in Grub Street, to announce the fact to posterity and "the town," in decasyllabic verse. The production of this bard, "The Oculist, a Poem," was published in the year 1705, and has already (thanks to the British Museum, which like the nets of fishermen receiveth of "all sorts") endowed with a century and a half of posthumous renown; and no one can deny that so much fame is due, both to the man who bought, and the scribbler who sold the following strain:--

"Whilst Britain's Sovereign scales such worth has weighed, And Anne herself her smiling favours paid, That sacred hand does your fair chaplet twist, Great Reade her own ent.i.tled Oculist, With this fair mark of honour, sir, a.s.sume No common trophies from this s.h.i.+ning plume; Her favours by desert are only shared-- Her smiles are not her gift, but her reward.

Thus in your new fair plumes of Honour drest, To hail the Royal Foundress of the feast; When the great Anne's warm smiles this favourite raise, 'Tis not a royal grace she gives, but pays."

Queen Anne's other "sworn oculist," as he and Reade termed themselves, was Roger Grant, a cobbler and Anabaptist preacher. He was a prodigiously vain man, even for a quack, and had his likeness engraved in copper. Impressions of the plate were distributed amongst his friends, but were not in all cases treated with much respect; for one of those who had been complimented with a present of the eminent oculist's portrait, fixed it on a wall of his house, having first adorned it with the following lines:--

"See here a picture of a brazen face, The fittest lumber of this wretched place.

A tinker first his scene of life began; That failing, he set up for cunning man; But wanting luck, puts on a new disguise, And now pretends that he can mend your eyes; But this expect, that, like a tinker true, Where he repairs one eye he puts out two."

The charge of his being a tinker was preferred against him also by another lampoon writer. "In his stead up popped Roger Grant, the tinker, of whom a friend of mine once sung.--

"'Her Majesty sure was in a surprise, Or else was very short-sighted; When a tinker was sworn to look after her eyes, And the mountebank Reade was knighted.'"

This man, according to the custom of his cla.s.s, was in the habit of publis.h.i.+ng circ.u.mstantial and minute accounts of his cures. Of course his statements were a tissue of untruths, with just the faintest possible admixture of what was not altogether false. His plan was to get hold of some poor person of imperfect vision, and, after treating him with medicines and half-crowns for six weeks, induce him to sign a testimonial to the effect that he had been born stone-blind, and had never enjoyed any visual power whatever, till Providence led him to good Dr. Grant, who had cured him in little more than a month. This certificate the clergyman and churchwardens of the parish, in which the patient had been known to wander about the streets in mendicancy, were asked to attest; and if they proved impregnable to the cunning representations of the importunate suitors, and declined to give the evidence of their handwriting, either on the ground that they had reason to question the fact of the original blindness, or because they were not thoroughly acquainted with the particulars of the case, Dr.

Grant did not scruple to sign their names himself, or by the hands of his agents. The _modus operandi_ with which he carried out these frauds may be learned by the curious in a pamphlet, published in the year 1709, and ent.i.tled "A Full and True Account of a Miraculous Cure of a Young Man in Newington that was Born Blind."

But the last century was rife with medical quacks. The Rev. John Hanc.o.c.ke, D.D., Rector of St. Margaret's, Lothbury, London, Prebendary of Canterbury, and chaplain to the Duke of Bedford, preached up the water-cure, which Pliny the naturalist described as being in his day the fas.h.i.+onable remedy in Rome. He published a work in 1723 that immediately became popular, called "Febrifugum Magnum; or, Common Water the best Cure for Fevers, and probably for the Plague."

The good man deemed himself a genius of the highest order, because he had discovered that a draught of cold water, under certain circ.u.mstances, is a powerful diaph.o.r.etic. His pharmacopeia, however, contained another remedy--namely, stewed prunes, which the Doctor regarded as a specific in obstinate cases of blood-spitting. Then there was Ward, with his famous pill, whose praises that learned man, Lord Chief Baron Reynolds, sounded in every direction. There was also a tar-water mania, which mastered the clear intellect of Henry Fielding, and had as its princ.i.p.al advocate the supreme intellect of the age, Bishop Berkeley. In volume eighteen of the _Gentleman's Magazine_ is a list of the quack-doctors then practising; and the number of those named in it is almost as numerous as the nostrums, which mount up to 202. These accommodating fellows were ready to fleece every rank of society. The fas.h.i.+onable impostor sold his specific sometimes at the rate of 2_s._ 6_d._ a pill, while the humbler knave vended his boluses at 6_d._ a box. To account for society tolerating, and yet more, warmly encouraging such a state of things, we must remember the force of the example set by eminent physicians in vending medicines the composition of which they kept secret. Sir Hans Sloane sold an eye-salve; and Dr. Mead had a favourite nostrum--a powder for the bite of a mad dog.

The close of the seventeenth century was not in respect of its quacks behind the few preceding generations. In 1789 Mr. and Mrs.