“It would have been happy for the nation had you, sir (to Hannes), been bred a basket-maker, and you, sir (to Blackmer), remained a country schoolmaster, rather than have ventured out of your reach in the practice of an art to which you are an utter stranger, and for your blunders in which you ought to be whipped with one of your own rods.”
As the case was simply one of rash, none of them had much to boast of.
A Horse Doctor.
There have been, and still are, thousands in the various walks of life, who, at some period, have attempted the practice of medicine. Among the hundreds whom our colleges “grind out” annually, not more than one in twenty succeeds in medical practice so far as to gain any eminence, or the competence of a common laborer.
Marat was a horse doctor.
The most remarkable thing respecting this noted man occurred at his birth. He was born triplets!
Yes, though “born of parents entirely unknown to history,” three different places have claimed themselves, or been claimed, as his birthplace.
Before his energies became perverted to political aims, he had endeavored to rise, by his own talent and energies, through the sciences.
The year 1789 found him in the position of veterinary surgeon to the Count d’Artois, thoroughly disgusted with his failure to rise in society with the “quacks,” as he termed them, “of the Corps Scientifique.”
Miss Mühlbach, in her “Maria Antoinette and her Son,” presents Marat in conversation with the cobbler, Simon, as follows:—