Radcliffe had practised what he preached. Though mean and penurious, he could not brook meanness in others.
The rich miser, John Tyson, approximating his end, magnanimously resolved to pay two of his three million guineas to Dr. Radcliffe for medical advice. The miserable old man, accompanied by his wife, came up to London, and tottered into the doctor’s office at Bloomsbury Square.
“I wish to consult you, sir; here are two guineas.”
“You may go, sir,” exclaimed Radcliffe.
The old miser had trusted that he was unknown, and he might pass for a poor wretch, unable to pay the five guineas expected from the wealthy, as a single consultation fee.
“You may go home and die, and be d——d; for the grave and the devil are ready for Jack Tyson of Hackney, who has amassed riches out of the public and the tears of orphans and widows.”
As the miserable old man turned away, Radcliffe exclaimed, “You’ll be a dead man in less than ten days.”
It required little medical skill, in the feeble condition of the old man, in order to give this correct prognosis.
Radcliffe was the Barnum of doctors. “Omnia mutantur, et nos mutamus in illis,” exclaimed Lotharius the First. But that “all things are changed, and we change with them,” did not apply to medical humbugs during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—no, nor in the nineteenth century, as we will show, particularly in our articles on Quacks and Patent Medicines.
