In the feudal ages medicine and quackery were the same, as far as any principles of science are concerned. The only difference between the physician and the charlatan was, that the former was a fool and the latter a rogue. Men did not meddle much with the healing art. A few clerks devoted themselves to it, and in the exercise of their spiritual and medical functions discovered how to get two fleeces from a sheep at one shearing; but the care of the sick was for the most part left to the women, who then, as in every other period of the world's history, prided themselves on their medical cunning, and, with the exception of intrigue, preferred attending on the sick to any other occupation. From the time of the Reformation, however, the number of lady doctors rapidly diminished. The fair sex gradually relinquished the ground they had so long occupied, to men, who, had the monastic institutions continued to exist, would have assumed the priestly garb and passed their days in sloth. Quackery was at length fairly taken out of the hands of women and the shelter of domestic life, and was practised, not for love, and in a superstitious belief in its efficacy, but for money, and frequently with a perfect knowledge of its worthlessness as a remedial system.
As soon as the printing-press had become an institution of the country, and there existed a considerable proportion of the community capable of reading, the empirics seized hold of Caxton's invention, and made it subservient to their honourable ends. The advertising system was had recourse to in London, during the Stuart era, scarcely less than it is now. Handbills were distributed in all directions by half-starved wretches, whose withered forms and pallid cheeks were of themselves a sufficient disproof of the assertions of their employers.
The costume, language, style, and artifices of the pretenders to physic in the seventeenth century were doubtless copied from models of long standing, and differed little in essentials from those of their predecessors. Professions retain their characteristics with singular obstinacy. The doctor of Charles the Second's London transmitted all his most salient features to the quack of the Regency.
Cotgrave, in his "Treasury of "Wit and Language," published 1655, thus paints the poor physician of his time:—
"My name is Pulsefeel, a poor Doctor of Physick,
That does wear three pile velvet in his hat,
Has paid a quarter's rent of his house before-hand,
And (simple as he stands here) was made doctor beyond sea.
I vow, as I am right worshipful, the taking
Of my degree cost me twelve French crowns, and
Thirty-five pounds of butter in Upper Germany.
I can make your beauty, and preserve it,
Rectifie your body and maintaine it,
Clarifie your blood, surfle your cheeks, perfume
Your skin, tinct your hair, enliven your eye,
Heighten your appetite; and as for Jellies,
Dentifrizes, Dyets, Minerals, Fricasses,
Pomatums, Fumes, Italia masks to sleep in,
Either to moisten or dry the superficies, Faugh! Galen
Was a goose, and Paracelsus a Patch,
To Doctor Pulsefeel."
This picture would serve for the portrait of Dr. Pulsefeel in the eighteenth and nineteenth, as well as the seventeenth century. How it calls to mind the image of Oliver Goldsmith, when, with a smattering of medical knowledge, a cane, and a dubious diploma, he tried to pick out of the miseries and ignorance of his fellow-creatures the means of keeping body and soul together! He too, poet and scholar though he was, would have sold a pot of rouge to a faded beauty, or a bottle of hair-dye, or a nostrum warranted to cure the bite of a mad dog.
A more accurate picture, however, of the charlatan, is to be found in "The Quack's Academy; or, The Dunce's Directory," published in 1678, of which the following is a portion:—
"However, in the second place, to support this title, there are several things very convenient: of which some are external accoutrements, others internal qualifications.
"Your outward requisites are a decent black suit, and (if your credit will stretch so far in Long Lane) a plush jacket; not a pin the worse though threadbare as a tailor's cloak—it shows the more reverend antiquity.
"Secondly, like Mercury, you must always carry a caduceus or conjuring japan in your hand, capt with a civet-box; with which you must walk with Spanish gravity, as in deep contemplation upon an arbitrament between life and death.