A Bishop looks after our souls, but how odd is
The sneer that's implied at the curers of bodies.
For surely it would be no hard task to fish up,
A hundred brave Doctors as good as the Bishop.
Cremation and Comprehension
Punch, it will be remembered, had been a caustic critic of medical students of the Bob Sawyer type in the 'forties. But he made his amende handsomely in 1886, when he acknowledged the change in the type and contrasted the serious and frugal modern student with the rowdy, bibulous sawbones of forty years before. Of irregular practitioners Punch had always been a hostile critic, and even the orthodox members of the profession did not always escape a certain amount of genial satire, as when, in 1886, an eminent physician, feeling ill, declines to call in any doctor because "we all go in for thinking each other such humbugs." In this context it may be permissible to add to what has already been said on the subject of cremation, and Punch's support of Sir Henry Thompson, that in 1874 there appeared the following mock "Grave-digger's Remonstrance" with that eminent surgeon:—
Who are you to be thieving
The poor sexton's bread?
How can we earn our living
If you urn our dead?