A Book About Doctors

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

As it was late on Saturday when the verdict was given, the judge deferred passing sentence till the following Monday. At the opening of the court on that day a yet greater crush of the beau monde was present; and the judge, instead of awarding a term of imprisonment to the guilty man, condemned him merely to pay a fine of £250, or to be imprisoned till such fine was paid. Mr. St. John Long immediately took a roll of notes from his pocket, paid the mulct, and leaving the court with his triumphant friends, accepted a seat in Lord Sligo's curricle, and drove to the west end of the town.

The scandalous sentence was a fit conclusion to the absurd scenes which took place in the court of the Old Bailey, and at the coroner's inquest. At one or the other of these inquiries the witnesses advanced thousands of outrageous statements, of which the following may be taken as a fair specimen:—

One young lady gave evidence that she had been cured of consumption by Mr. Long's liniment; she knew she had been so cured, because she had a very bad cough, and, after the rubbing in all the ointment, the cough went away. An old gentleman testified that he had for years suffered from attacks of the gout, at intervals of from one to three months; he was convinced Mr. Long had cured him, because he had been free from gout for five weeks. Another gentleman had been tortured with headache; Mr. Long applied his lotion to it—the humour which caused his headache came away in a clear limpid discharge. A third gentleman affirmed that Mr. Long's liniment had reduced a dislocation of his child's hip-joint. The Marchioness of Ormond, on oath, stated that she knew that Miss Cashin's back was rubbed with the same fluid as she and her daughters had used to wash their hands with; but she admitted that she neither saw the back rubbed, nor saw the fluid with which it was rubbed taken from the bottle. Sir Francis Burdett also bore testimony to the harmlessness of Mr. Long's system of practice. Mr. Wakley, in the Lancet, asserted that Sir Francis Burdett had called on Long to ask him if his liniment would give the Marquis of Anglesea a leg, in the place of the one he lost at Waterloo, if it were applied to the stump. Long gave an encouraging answer; and the lotion was applied, with the result of producing not an entire foot and leg—but a great toe!

Miss Cashin's death was quickly followed by another fatal case. A Mrs. Lloyd died from the effects of the corrosive lotion; and again a coroner's jury found St. John Long guilty of manslaughter, and again he was tried at the Old Bailey—but this second trial terminated in his acquital.

It seems scarcely creditable, and yet it is true, that these exposures did not have the effect of lessening his popularity. The respectable organs of the Press—the Times, the Chronicle, the Herald, the John Bull, the Lancet, the Examiner, the Spectator, the Standard, the Globe, Blackwood, and Fraser, combined in doing their best to render him contemptible in the eyes of his supporters. But all their efforts were in vain. His old dupes remained staunch adherents to him, and every day brought fresh converts to their body. With unabashed front he went everywhere, proclaiming himself a martyr in the cause of humanity, and comparing his evil treatment to the persecutions that Galileo, Harvey, Jenner, and Hunter underwent at the hands of the prejudiced and ignorant. Instead of uncomplainingly taking the lashes of satirical writers, he first endeavored to bully them into silence, and swaggering into newspaper and magazine offices asked astonished editors how they dared to call him a quack. Finding, however, that this line of procedure would not improve his position, he wrote his defence, and published it in an octavo volume, together with numerous testimonials of his worth from grateful patients, and also a letter of cordial support from Dr. Ramadge, M.D., Oxon., a fellow of the College of Physicians. In a ridiculous and ungrammatical epistle, defending this pernicious quack, who had been convicted of manslaughter, Dr. Ramadge displayed not less anxiety to blacken the reputation of his own profession, than he did to clear the fame of the charlatan whom he designated "a guiltless and a cruelly persecuted individual!!!" The book itself is one of the most interesting to be found in quack literature. On the title-page is a motto from Pope—"No man deserves a monument who could not be wrapped in a winding-sheet of papers written against him"; and amongst pages of jargon about humoral pathology, it contains confident predictions that if his victims had continued in his system, they would have lived. The author accuses the most eminent surgeons and physicians of his time of gross ignorance, and of having conspired together to crush him, because they were jealous of his success and envious of his income. He even suggests that the same saline draught, prescribed by Sir Benjamin Brodie, killed Miss Cashin. Amongst those whose testimonials appear in the body of the work are the then Lord Ingestre (his enthusiastic supporter), Dr. Macartney, the Marchioness of Ormond, Lady Harriet Kavanagh, the Countess of Buckinghamshire, and the Marquis of Sligo. The Marchioness of Ormond testifies how Mr. Long had miraculously cured her and her daughter of "headaches," and her youngest children of "smart attacks of feverish colds, one with inflammatory sore throat, the others with more serious bad symptoms." The Countess of Buckinghamshire says she is cured of "headache and lassitude"; and Lord Ingestre avows his belief that Mr. Long's system is "preventive of disease," because he himself is much less liable to catch cold than he was before trying it.

Numerous pamphlets also were written in defence of John St. John Long, Esq., M.R.S.L., and M.R.A.S. An anonymous author (calling himself a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Member of the Middle Temple), in a tract dated 1831, does not hesitate to compare the object of his eulogy with the author of Christianity. "But who can wonder at Mr Long's persecutions? The brightest character that ever stept was persecuted, even unto death! His cures were all perverted, but they were not the less complete; they were miraculous, but they were not the less certain!"

To the last St. John Long retained his practice; but death removed him from the scene of his triumphs while he was still a young man. The very malady, his control over which he had so loudly proclaimed, brought his career—in which knavery or self-delusion, doubtless both, played a part—to an end. He died of consumption, at the age of thirty-seven years. Even in the grave his patients honoured him, for they erected an elegant and costly monument to his memory, and adorned it with the following inscription.

"It is the fate of most men
To have many enemies, and few friends.
This monumental pile
Is not intended to mark the career,
But to shew
How much its inhabitant was respected
By those who knew his worth,
And the benefits
Derived from his remedial discovery.
He is now at rest,
And far beyond the praises or censures
Of this world.
Stranger, as you respect the receptacle of the dead
(As one of the many who will rest here),
Read the name of
John Saint John Long
without comment."

Notwithstanding the exquisite drollery of this inscription, in speaking of a plebeian quack-doctor (who, by the exercise of empiricism, raised himself to the possession of £5000 per annum, and the intimate friendship of numbers of the aristocracy) as the victim of "many enemies and few friends," it cannot be said to be open to much censure. Indeed, St. John Long's worshippers were for the most part of that social grade in which bad taste is rare, though weakness of understanding possibly may not be uncommon.

The sepulchre itself is a graceful structure, and occupies a prominent position in the Kensal Green cemetery, by the side of the principal carriage-way, leading from the entrance-gate to the chapel of the burial-ground. Immediately opposite to it, on the other side of the gravel drive, stands, not inappropriately, the flaunting sepulchre of Andrew Ducrow, the horse-rider, "whose death," the inscription informs us, "deprived the arts and sciences of an eminent professor and liberal patron." When any cockney bard shall feel himself inspired to write an elegy on the west-end grave-yard, he will not omit to compare John St. John Long's tomb with that of "the liberal patron of the arts and sciences," and also with the cumbrous heap of masonry which covers the ashes of Dr. Morrison, hygeist, which learned word, being interpreted, means "the inventor of Morrison's pills."