E’en from Land’s End to John o’Groats,
I’d rede ye tent it;
A chiel’s amang you taking notes,
And faith he’ll prent it:”
and that no threats or intimidations of “actions” and “reparations due to the wounded feelings of gentlemen,” shall deter me from my duty. If I should offend, of course the courts of justice are open to every injured man, and he will most assuredly receive his due measure of justice there; but should I give that offence for which the “law of the land” affords no redress, the man of honourable feelings and conduct shall never have to complain of my backwardness to give a most prompt and satisfactory reparation; but, at the same time, I wish that those who have been privy, whether by overt or covert acts—whether from their love of “filthy lucre,” or their natural propensity to fraud—to the destruction of the lives or health of their fellow-creatures, to recollect that I shall be prepared to treat them with the scorn and contempt which their conduct and their misdeeds may merit.
It has been well said that it is not easy to determine whether the fraud and impudence of the empiric or nostrum-monger, or the folly and credulity of the sufferer, are the greater. But the fact is that quacks and impostors of all kinds, whether medical or political, pædagoguecal or corporational, live and thrive on the infernal popish maxim, that ignorance is the mother of devotion, that is, in plainer phrase—of gullibility. But to the case of the quacks.—It surely indicates no ordinary share of dupery, to believe that one and the same nostrum can cure all and every disorder contained in the long catalogue of human woes and miseries; such a belief must incline the victim of its hallucination to suppose an exact similarity of symptoms and a perfect identity of nature in all the disorders to which the frailty of our common nature has rendered us subject. On this momentous subject few persons have written more forcibly than the admirable author of the “Manual for Invalids.” May the following quotation from that valuable work awaken the attention of those who foolishly confide their health and lives to the care of quacks, nostrum-mongers, jugglers, and impostors![O]
“Where dwells the boasted march of intellect when the understanding is continually insulted with the most impudent and daring pretensions of impostors, who, while they pretend to restore your health, are making a direct attack upon your credulity and your purse. What encouragement exists for the well educated men, regular graduates of Universities, of high classical and literary attainments, who have chosen the profession of medicine or surgery as a business of life, and in order to practice with credit and character, have directed their attention, their time, and their property to its studies,—who have made the nature of diseases and the efficacy of remedies a study of life—when they find themselves completely superseded by some inspired pretender—some ignorant quack. Lord Bacon has long since said, in his work on the advancement of learning, ‘If the same honours and rewards are given to fools, which ought to be awarded to the wise, who will labour to be wise?’ That the ignorant pretender should be encouraged by the public, is a reproach to the understanding of any people; but that the revenue of any country should be supplied by a stamp duty[P] on empirical nostrums, instead of the government taking measures either of prevention or punishment, can only be explained by exhibiting similar acts of atrocity on the sentiments of nature; but the truth is, the auri sacra fames has the power of making that appear relatively right, which is absolutely wrong.”[Q]
“Beware of hypocrisy of every description,” adds the same excellent writer; “you may as well believe that the Pope can send you to perdition, as that an advertising charlatan can, by any empirical nostrum, restore you to health.”
But, unhappily, it appears that poor John Bull and “his hopeful family” are not gifted with the power of being “beware of hypocrisy,” “advertising charlatans” and “empirical nostrums;” but that through their proneness to gullibility and the love of the marvellous, the trade of quackery is daily increasing, and that hundreds of quacks swarm in every quarter of the metropolis, and fatten on the murders which they are constantly perpetrating with their poisons; and to add to the monstrous combination against the lives and health of the community, that the aid of even the pulpit is invoked to further the propagation of the imposture! Instances are on record where mercenary preachers have been wicked enough to sermonize and expatiate on the miraculous virtues and benefits of the poisonous nostrums[R] and remedies of the mountebank jugglers and impostors.
But humbug and imposture, as it has been truly said, is a many-headed monster, and is of very catching influence; it has worshippers at the corner of every street; hordes of the most ignorant vagabonds and jugglers are engaged in its propagation, and announce their impostures as “prepared and sanctioned by His Majesty’s august authority;” but to waste my pages with the mention of the “ladies’ fever” doctors Lamert, Peede, Davis, Eady, Caton, Courtenay, (alias Messrs. Currie and Co.) Fiedeberg (alias Sloane and Co. alias Jones and Co.);—the surreptitious knights, His Carpentership, Sir Gully Daniels, and his Plastership, White Arsenic Sir Cancer Aldis;—the firm of Goss and Company, the consulting Surgeons of Ægis and Hygeiene notoriety;—the miniature painter, “the learned and celebrated” artful artist and curer of consumption, Long St. Long,—the crazy chap who entitles himself the “hygeist”[S]—Taylor and Son, the Leake’s pill-men,—Samuel, the syphilis-pill-man,—the old canting staymaker and life-guardsman, Gardner, who can manufacture tape-worms wholesale and of a league in length from the intestines of cats and chickens,—the piddle-taster, or morning water-doctor, Cameron (alias Crumples,) as also all other quacks, whether of the masculine or feminine gender, who cure by proxy, or by simply pronouncing that the disease shall be cured, (for there have been impostors impudent enough to make such pretensions;) or by any art or delusion, and who by chalk, chuckling, and chicanery are battening on the vitals of society, would be an insult to the understanding of my readers, further than to say that each of those worthies, as well as their honourable compeers the balsam of Rackasiri vagabonds and impostors, can, no doubt, recognize the reality of their deeds in the following quotation from the pages of Hudibras: