University of Virginia Library

LETTER XLII.
Medical, mechanical, and culinary quacks.

THERE is no order of men more uniformly
the objects of ridicule, among the
English, than quack doctors, and yet
there is no people more constantly the
dupes of their artifice; they are held up
to contempt on the stage—the regular
physicians are embodied against them—
the prejudicial and deleterious effects of
their nostrums are exposed in the daily
papers, and every decent man you converse
with affects to despise them. The
confidence reposed in them, by the common
people, is a subject of frequent lamentation

with the learned, which they
attribute to every cause but the right.
The fact is, the belief in panaceas is a national
weakness. In analogy to the maxim
of the English common law, that there is
no possible injury without a remedy, so
they conceive there is no bodily ill without
a nostrum; and most nostrums, like the
philosopher's stone which was imagined
to turn all metals into gold, are supposed
to convert all diseases into health. It is
not the common people alone who give
credit to these pernicious whimsicalities.
The celebrated Berkley, Bishop of Cloyne,
known with us by the epithet Immaterial,
published a treatise on the virtues of tar-water.
This nauseating beverage was to
eradicate disease, and stock the British
isles with Methuselahs. The English
read the prelate's book with rapture—
every house was furnished with a tar-bucket—the
people drank copiously, and
fancied they quaffed immortality. To this
whim succeeded the filings of steel. Now
we hear little of chalybeates, but fixed air
is to conquer disease, and set death at
defiance. It is not a century since the
parliament voted a national premium to a
physician, for the invention of a wonder-working
fever powder, the basis of which,
by chymical analysis, has since been discovered
to be arsenic. Should the English
literati, then, be surprised at the credulity
of their common people when their men
of science have promulgated nostrums,
and their national legislature sanctioned
empiricism? But to whatever cause this
national weakness may be imputed, certain
it is that these infallible medicines
are no longer vended to the mere vulgar,
as in the days of their ancestors, in six-penny
packets from the stage of the
mountebank; but quackery has now its
wholesale stores, and the nation for its
customers—and these wise people are content
to risk life, or, at least, jeopardize
health, upon the uncertain operation of
nostrums, which, if, possibly, efficacious
in some diseases, and in some habits of
body, are, probably, highly injurious or
deleterious in others: but the infatuated
Englishman reads a forged list of cures,
and parts with his money and health for
the dose, although the quack, in his
printed bill, candidly cautions him
“against counterfeits, as such are abroad.”

But there are, in London, a species of
mechanical quacks, who do not intermed-dle
with disease, but profess to supply the
deficiencies of the human frame. They
undertake to furnish the blind with artificial
eyes, and the cripple with arms and
legs, which, with grave effrontery, they
assure you are superior to the natural. In
passing the street, this morning, I had a
handbill of a celebrated optical quack
thrust into my hand—I shall bring it home
with me for your amusement. He describes
and magnifies the excellences of
his artificial eyes, and asserts that they
excel the natural in displaying the finer
and nobler emotions of the soul; he

boasts of a number of belles and beaux
who, by the aid of his optics, have made
wonderful havoc in the wars of Venus—
and then, in imitation of the vendors of
patent medicine, he introduces the certificates
of sundry ladies and gentlemen to
the praise of his wares, sworn to, in form,
before the Lord Mayor and other city
magistrates, and forwarded to him upon a
mere impulse of gratitude. One of these
certificates is so ludicrous that I cannot,
now, determine whether the writer meant
it seriously, or as a satire upon the medical
quacks.

“John Maylem swears that he is a man
“of independent fortune; that at Bath,
“the last season, one morning at the
“pump-room, he was struck with the
“charms of a most enchanting young
“lady. Amidst the blaze of her beauty
“he felt himself peculiarly impressed
“with the fascinating glances of her bril
“liant eyes: upon after acquaintance,
“although he was not insensible to the

“expression and good sense which beam
“ed from her right eye, yet, the mild
“serenity of the left gave such happy
“presage of that suavity of temper which
“promised a plenteous harvest of conju
“gal peace, that he prosecuted his suit,
“and has now the felicity to subscribe
“himself the happy husband of one of
“the best wives in England.