“O, sir,” he exclaimed, in agony of soul, while the tears coursed freely down his cheeks, and fell upon the coffin,—“O, sir, God only knows what the poor thing suffered. Dr. Youran said the spatting and cold water treatment would save her, and I was anxious to try it, and did, till the poor, dear soul begged us, with tearful eyes, not to punish her further, but to let her die in peace.”
The ignorant scoundrel is still at large, preying upon the invalid public. It is a burning shame that the laxity of our laws permits such ignorant, heartless wretches to go about the country, imposing upon the credulity of invalidity.
The invalids, as we said in our opening, expect to be humbugged, and will believe no honest statement of a case and its probabilities, but will too often swallow the lies and braggadocio, and finally the prescriptions, of ignorant charlatans and impostors.
DR. PULSFEEL LEAVING TOWN.
Mr. Jeaffreson, in the “Book about Doctors,” before often quoted, says of the English travelling doctor of the last century,—
“When Dr. Pulsfeel was tired of London, or felt the want of country air, he adopted the pleasant occupation of fleecing rustic simplicity. For his journeys he provided himself with a stout and fast-trotting hack—stout, that it might bear weighty parcels of medical composition; fast, that in case the ungrateful rabble should commit the indecorum of stoning their benefactor as an impostor,—a mishap that would occasionally occur,—escape might be effected.
“In his circuit the doctor took in all the fairs, markets, wakes, and public festivals, not disdaining to stop an entire week, or even month, at an assize town, where he found the sick anxious to benefit by his marvellous wisdom.
“His manner of making himself known in a new place was to ride boldly into the thickest crowd of a town, and inform his listeners that he had come straight from the Duke of So-and-so, or the Emperor of Wallachia, out of an innate desire to do good to his fellow-creatures. He was born in that very town. He had left it when an orphan boy, to seek his fortune in the great world. His adventures had been wonderful. He had visited the Sultan and the Great Mogul; and the King of Mesopotamia had tried to persuade him to tarry and keep the Mesopotamians out of the devil’s clutches by the offer of a thousand pieces of gold a month. He had cured thousands of emperors, kings, queens, princes, grand duchesses, and generalissimos. He sold all kinds of medicaments—dyes for the hair, washes for the complexion, lotions, rings, and love charms, powders to stay the palsy, fevers, croup, and jaundice. His powder was expensive; he couldn’t help that; it was made of pearl-dust and dried violet leaves from the middle of Tartary. Still, he would sell his friends a package at bare cost,—one crown,—as he did not want to make money out of them.
“Nothing could surpass the impudence of the fellow’s lies, save the admiration with which his credulous auditors swallowed his assertions. There they stood—stout yeomen, drunken squires, gay peasant girls, gawky hinds and gabbling crones, deeming themselves in luck to have lived to behold such a miracle of wisdom. Possibly a young student, home from Oxford, with the rashness of inexperience, would smile scornfully, and cry out, ‘Quack!’ (quack-salver, from the article he used to cure wens); but such interruption was usually frowned down by the orthodox friends of the student, and he was warned that he would come to no good end, if he went on as he had begun, a contemptuous unbeliever, and a mocker of wise men.”