After this had been published once or twice, the advertiser, who could hardly have taken so much trouble out of pure gratitude, inserted another notice in the form of an affidavit, containing the foregoing and other particulars, the most important of which is that which discovers her sex. At least we presume that Bridget was a woman’s name in 1734. The difficulties between the doctors and apothecaries—the latter, when not quacks themselves, being their special agents—and the demand made for the far-famed Jesuits’ Bark, are both shown in the following handbill, which is of about the same date as the foregoing:—
WHEREAS it has been of late the Endeavour of several Members of the Physicians College, to reform the Abuses of the Apothecaries, as well in the Prizes as in the Composition of their Medicines, This is to give Notice for the public Good, that a superfine Sort of Jesuits Bark ready powder’d and paper’d into Doses, with or without Directions for the Use of it, is to be had at Dr. Charles Goodal’s at the Coach and Horses, in Physician’s Colledge in Warwick Lane, at 4s. per Ounce, or for a Quantity together at £3 per Pound; for the Reasonableness of which Prizes, (considering the Loss and Trouble in powdering) we appeal to all the Druggists and Apothecaries themselves in Town, and particularly to Mr. Thair, Druggist in Newgate Street, to whom we paid full 9s. per Pound for a considerable Quantity for the Use of our self and our friends.
And for the Excellency and Efficacy of this particular Bark enquire of Dr. Morton in Grey Friars.
I am to be spoken with at Prayers at S. Sepulchre’s every Day, but the Lord’s Day, at Seven in the Morning, and at Home from Eight in the Morning till Ten at Night.
The Poor may have Advice (that is, Nothing) for Nothing.
“Nothing for nothing” is a rate of exchange which is current even to this day, and was very likely known long before the time of this physician, whose effort could hardly have been expected to prove disastrous to the empirics, as he, among other peculiarities, regards what should have been his strong point of dissimilarity from them as “nothing.” Another bill of the same period is noticeable for the explicitness of the address given in it:—
When you are in Baldwin’s Gardens, that you may not mistake, ask for Leopard’s Court, and there at the Sign of the Moon and Stars, you will find the Louvain Doctor from 8 in the Morning till 7 at Night. As you pass by the end of Leopard’s Court you may see the Sign of the Moon and Stars, which, pray, observe, least you mistake: for there are several Pretenders, therefore keep this bill. Baldwin’s Gardens are near Holborn.
Baldwin’s Gardens would hardly be a good address in these times for even the veriest quack. It is now about the foulest specimen extant of that kind of backslum or alley where, a generation back, according to Hood, pigs and Irish were wont to rally. The pigs, except in the form of hocks, “Jerry Lynch” heads, and other portions of bacon, have been removed by Act of Parliament since the poet sang his simple lay of “The Lost Child,” but the Irish have increased and multiplied with an activity unknown to them in other pursuits. The powers of the finest peasantry in the world are undoubted in one particular of philoprogenitiveness under any circumstances, and they seem to exert them to the utmost when least required and most inconvenient—when they are “pigged up” in small rooms and festering courts, and when every fresh birth is an outrage upon the sanatory laws supposed to govern us, and upon their own sense of decency. We are in the habit of hearing most of our domestic and civic misfortunes ascribed to the higher wages and increased leisure of the labouring classes of the present, as compared with those of twenty or thirty years back. Is this the case with regard to the rapid development of inhabitants for Baldwin’s Gardens, Leather Lane, Saffron Hill, and neighbouring purlieus? There may be increased leisure there, but if the wages are higher now than they were, in proportion to the higher price of provisions, they must have suffered worse than starvation in years gone by. So unhealthily crowded—in fact, pestilent—is the neighbourhood we have mentioned, that no number of quacks could have done more to shorten life than the inhabitants now do for themselves. But even these poor wretches are made the groundwork for a new system of quackery—the quackery of the mock philanthropist, who builds model lodging-houses, ostensibly and with much flourishing of trumpets, for the very poor, and then lets them to people who never did dwell in rookeries; to those people who can afford to pay good rents, and so keep up the dividends which are the modern reward of so-called charity.
Notwithstanding the many stirring events of the early part of the last century, there is little or nothing to read in any of the papers. This may be accounted for by the difficulty of obtaining news from distant or even from any parts a hundred and thirty years or so back; but whatever the reason, this is certain, the advertisements are by far the best reading in the journals, daily or weekly. Though the newspapers were to our notions wonderfully small, their editors seem to have had the greatest difficulty in filling the little space they had at command with news, and provincial journals were sometimes put to strange shifts, even the now common work of the liner, that of inventing facts, being then unknown. It is by no means unusual to find a chapter of the Bible put in to fill up the columns; and even as late as 1740 the London and County Journal gratified its readers with the History of the Old and New Testaments, while other papers filled up their front pages with occasional extracts from the histories of England and other countries, or selections from books of travel. Singular as this may seem, it is true. Its truth is perhaps the most singular thing about it.
Among the many specifics of the last century was snuff, which in various forms is advertised as possessing the power not only of curing all bodily but many mental evils. In the General Advertiser for June 21, 1749, there is an advertisement of a snuff which was supposed to cure lunacy. Certainly it has an effect on the ideas with regard to the construction of sentences, as the proprietor himself shows:—