THE MISER OUTWITS HIMSELF.
The requisites essential to success are amusingly described by a writer of the former time, as follows:—
First. A decent black suit, and (if your credit will stretch so far), a plush jacket, not a pin the worse if threadbare as a tailor’s cloak—it shows the more reverend antiquity.
Second. You must carry a caduceus, or cane, like Mercury, capped with a civet-box (or snuff-box like Sir Richard’s), and must walk with becoming gravity, as if in deep contemplation upon an arbitrament between life and death.
Third. You must hire convenient lodgings in a respectable neighborhood, with a hatch[1] at the door; have your reception-room hung with pictures of some celebrated physicians, ancient historical scenes, and anatomical plates, and the floor belittered with gallipots and half-empty bottles. Any sexton will furnish your window with a skull, in hope of your custom.
Fourth. Let your desk never be without some old musty Greek and Arabic authors, and on your table some work on anatomy, open at a picture page, to amuse, if not astonish spectators, and carelessly thrown on the same a few gilt shillings, to represent so many guineas received that morning as fees.
Fifth. Fail not to patronize neighboring alehouses, which may, in turn, recommend you to inquirers; and hold correspondence with all the nurses and midwives whose address you may obtain, to applaud your skill at gossiping.
Sixth. Be not over modest in airy pretensions, not forgetting that loquaciousness and impudence are essentials to gaining a fool’s confidence. In case you are naturally backward in language, or have an impediment of speech, you are recommended to persevere in a habit of mysterious and profound silence before patients, rendered impressive by grave nods and ahems.
Early French Physicians.
From what meagre biographies we have of French doctors of the past, we are led to believe that, as at the present time, the humbugs outnumbered the honest medical practitioners. In the days of Clovis and the great Charlemagne, before the power of Rome was broken, before Russia was a nation, and when England was subject to the caprices of many masters, there were many surgeons employed in the armies of these kings, but the priests and wizards were the physicians to the great public. The surgeons possessed all the knowledge there was to be attained at that distant day; yet they made the heart, not the brain, the centre of thought, and “the palace of the soul,” knew little of anatomy, and nothing of the circulation of the blood.