University of Virginia Library

29. CHAPTER XXIX.

Vide Voices of Natural History.—Vol. X.

Not many weeks after Hunting-shirt-Andy's visit, a
very great and yet very little stranger, for some time expected,
arrived at Glenville. Hername not before, but after
this arrival, was Elizabeth Carlton: and she bounced
in among us, after all, by surprise, and about two o'clock

one morning. A curious figure somewhere had been
missed, and the young lady gave an unexpected notice in
some mysterious way of her intention to join our colony,
precisely one week too soon: a common case I am informed
with all that have the right of primogeniture;
others, are better arithmeticians.

It had been arranged that our worthy friend Dr. Sylvan
of Woodville, should honour Glenville with a visit on this
occasion: but now, about nine o'clock, P. M., Dick was
scampering away at the nominal rate of six miles per hour,
towards Spiceburgh, with a pressing invitation for the company
of the learned Professor Pillbox, a member of the
faculty, and who boarded with our friend Josey, P. M.[22]
This change of medical gentlemen arose from the urgency
of the case, as Spiceburgh was not so far as Woodville.
No one in this very enlightened era can possibly think we
trusted Dick to deliver the request—(although if a four-legged
being could have done so, Dick was he or it)—but
still, to prevent misapprehension and the sarcasm of the
increasing critical acumen of the times, we now state that
John Glenville went with Dick; and hence, about three
o'clock in the morning, they returned, having secured the
professor and another horse.

This person—(of course, the doctor)—not being honoured
with any other skin or parchment than the one he was
born in, we, like the Great Unknown, the North American
College of Health of Yankeysville, do, by the native right
of every white-born American, our ownselves dignify with
the title of Professor. And never was title more appropriate,
as he professed even more than Brandreth's Pills! He
could cure warts!—eradicate corns!—remove pimples!—
and obliterate moles and freckles. He knew how to destory

beards so as to prevent shaving—and how to fertilize
the most barren skull till it would produce a large crop of
black hair, in case you perferred that to red, yellow, or
flaxy! Ay, he had never-failing remedies for fevers of
every type, grade, and colour—intermittent, remittent, nonitent,
bilious, antibilious, rebellious, red, saffron and yellow!
Hence, the Professor utterly and most indignantly scouted
Thompsonianism and all other loud-screaming quackeries of
our quacking epoch:—and setting the highest value on
number one, he cared not for number six.

His language, in bold contrast to his figure, was by that
very comparison heightened in its magniloquence; we
mean his medical diction, for other he rarely indulged in,
because language about common affairs was too small for his
large utterance. His were lofty words, and demanded a
lofty subject; and that his profession was, and admitted an
amazing technical grandiloquence. Professor Pillbox, M. D.,
was exactly one yard, one foot and ten inches—low. The
Professor's horse, on the contrary, was remarkably high,
large and spirited. When, therefore, the Professor was
seated on his saddle, and safely ensconced between two
hugeous leathern cartouch-boxes made for bottles, barks,
lint, forceps, &c., and above all, for the pills and powders,
and the like cartridges, for his principal execution, he seemed
not dissimilar to a monkey-shaped excrescence growing
to the back of the steed! Now his modus loquendi was
truly gigantic! and not only did he always spout forth the
hardest technicalities, but even these laden with additimentalities
and elongated elaborifications of sesquipedalia:
which last he would freely have bought of us if not for silver,
yet for trade and in exchange for what he always
styled his “medicamentums!”

Poultices, with Professor Pillbox, were always cataplasms
—and the patient who had only barked his shins, was always
greatly terrified on hearing that “there was manifest

symptomatic manifestationst hrough the outer exterior epidermis
of his having infracted the tibia!”—for the poor
wretch at once gave over his legs as ruined after that awful
sentence on them! Doses of salts were never mixed
with water and swallowed in our Professor's practice, but
he “prepared an aquatical solution of the sulphate of magnesia,
and then—exhibited it!”—i. e. made the patient
look at it before he drank. In this way the disagreeable
taste was properly increased, and so, to speak in style, the
“medicamentum seemed to act with still greater potential
efficacity:”—for indeed, some robustious stomachs out there
that would never have budged at the plain dose, were pretty
well stirred by “an aquatical solution!”—proving the virtue
of words.

Our friend never bled a man—he only “opened a vein!”
—nor did he ever feel a pulse without parading a huge
silver watch, and seeming, with the care-worn and ominous
brow of Jupiter, (in Virgil,) to be counting the motions of
the second hand:—a curious contrast to Death with an
hour-glass! although to some nervous patients nearly as
frightful.

One of our neighbour women, who was often ailing, used
to send for Aunt Kitty to tell her what the Doctor meant;
whence Aunt Kitty came to be regarded nearly as “high
larn'd as the little doctur hisself,” and was elsewhere in
demand as “the little doctur's intarpretur:” but she always
resisted persuasions “to set up docterin” herself, telling
the folks “one old woman was enough in the Purchase.”

An honest woodsman went once with a severe tooth-ache
to Spiceburgh, when the Professor, after a long examination
of the patient's mouth, declared with a very solemn little
phiz that, “an operation in dental surgery seemed necessary
in order to extract two of the principal molares!”—
At which the affrighted sufferer said, “he was in powerful
pain, and didn't kere to let the Doctur pull out a couple

of his darn'd rottin back 'teeth—but he'd rather bear the
tooth-ache a hull year nor have the dentul suggery or the
principul mol'lerees ither done on his mouth.”[23]

The Professor did not rely on symtoms in the morbid
body itself: for instance, he rested not satisfied with the
inspection of the tongue, which he always had protruded
instead of vulgarly put-out of the mouth; but he wisely
kept two keen eyes out on the watch for external symptoms,—being
well disposed to that way of judging, which
determines, if a saddle is under the bed, that the person in
the bed is sick, or dead, from eating the horse. Hence, on
the present occasion, he came at once to a very infallible
judgment of the case, wholly by external symptoms; for
on hearing an infantile cry, which had commenced just an
hour before his arrival, and broken out at intervals since,
he instantly concluded, and without feeling any body's
pulse,or inspecting any body's tongue, or asking a question,
but with a very grand and imposing air, said—“that the
lady was as well as could be expected!” But he learned,
however, a very useful piece of knowledge, viz.—that
there is at least another thing beside time and tide that
waits for nobody.

Still, it was quite edifying to witness the anxious bustling,
and to hear the learned remarks of our dwarf Esculapius;
who, among other things, was constrained to acknowledge
that—“unassisted nature had yet mighteous
potential efficacity of her own intrinsic internal force, and
that she sometimes required only the co-elaborative aid of
a skilful practitioner to conduct to a felicitary tendency
her wonderful designs!” Hence “he would only order
now the exhibition of a few grains of his soporific sleep-producing
powder, to induce a state of somnorific quiescence!!”—because

he was decidedly of opinion that “with
proper care and no misfortunate reactions, the lady would
without dubiety become convalescent in the ordinary
time!!!”

And, would you believe it, dear reader?—all came to
pass precisely as he predicted!—and stranger yet to tell,
without the aid of the soporific powder! For that, by a
a blameable negligence, Mr. C. himself, who was charged
with—the exhibition, never mixed!! But then to atone
and for fear some living creature might accidentally swallow
the exhibition all at once, and so sleep too long, we
very considerately the next day put the whole paper of
somnorific quiescence into the fire.

In the morning, after a very early breakfast, Professor
Pillbox, having received the usual fee for his invaluable
aid in enliving the western solitudes, leaped with amazing
agility on his mountainous horse; which he, indeed, styled
“a quadrupedal conveyancer;” and was quickly peering
over his cartouch-boxes on the way to Spiceburgh.

But, reader!—beware of calling this mighty little personage
a quack: for he had, if not a diploma from a college,
a regular license from the State! Oh! the potential efficacity
of a true Republican legislature! What can it not
achieve? By a mere vote, or a legal wish and volition, it
can out of nothing—yes, ex-nihilo!—or next to nothing
create any and every man a lawyer—a physician!—a
teacher!—or even a Jack-ass!! And these creations all
become the greatest of their sorts!—greater even than the
very legislators that first made them!—streams getting
higher than their fountain!

No, no, reader, our Professor, like others of the kind,
had so great an abhorrence of quackery, that he would not
allow Josey Jackson, his landlord, to keep a single duck!
And two years after the Hon. J. Glenville's services ended,
when Professor Pillbox himself was sent to the House, he

had influence sufficient to procure by a unanimous vote,
the passage of the following resolution, and which remained
in full force when we left the Purchase:—viz.

“Resolved:—that no quacks but those that are licensed,
shall recover the amount of their medical fees by law.”

Vide Journals of the House, VI. Fol. p. 95.