“Nor doctor epidemic.
Stored with deletery med’cines,
(Which whosoever took, is dead since,)
E’er sent so vast a colony
To both the under worlds as he.”
Perhaps a few words said on the subject of the former occupations of some of the mountebank impostors, who are practising, and have practised their frauds and villanies on the community, may tend to open the eyes of this very gullable nation as to the extent and quality of their medical knowledge, unless it should be supposed that they acquired it by miraculous inspiration or divine influence, to which high pretensions, indeed, many of the vermin have had the audacity to lay claim, well knowing that the bolder their assertions were, the more gullable they would find their ninny patients.
Know then that the “groundly learned physicians” —“of superior skill and judgement”—high character and situation,” the Doctors Mordecai J. and C. Jordan, were Jew pedlars; (and here, reader, recollect that more than one half of the mountebanks and impostors who have gulled and laughed at our gullable nation, are or were circumcised Jews, either of native or of foreign breed;)—the renowned Doctor Eady, of cyprianic memory, and who owed his reputation to the joint exertions and recommendation of the saints of Providence Chapel, and the coal-heaving-preaching-and-praying-sinner-saved Huntingdon, was a bumpkin haberdasher and retailer of small wares in an obscure country village;—Monsieur John St. John Long, the celebrated curer of consumption, was a dauber in the miniature-line;—the once celebrated, and now warmly nestled and scoffing Doctors Brodum and Solomon were, by turns, porters either in a drug warehouse or Jew pedlars; the canting worm manufacturer in Long Acre was a staymaker and life-guardsman;—Yankee noodle do Whitlaw and Don celestial Graham filled the honourable posts of a day labourer and tom-fool to a strolling company of players;—and many of the by-gone mountebank vagabonds were cobblers, tailors, weavers, footmen, blacking-makers, cat’s-meat men, &c. &c. &c.: but they all, during their tremulous career of iniquity and canting,
“———— Making sanctity the cloak of sin,
Laugh’d at the fools on whose credulity
They fattened.”——