A Book About Doctors

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

When Sir William was knighted he hired a poet, who lived in Grub Street, to announce the fact to posterity and "the town," in decasyllabic verse. The production of this bard, "The Oculist, a Poem," was published in the year 1705, and has already (thanks to the British Museum, which like the nets of fishermen receiveth of "all sorts") endowed with a century and a half of posthumous renown; and no one can deny that so much fame is due, both to the man who bought, and the scribbler who sold the following strain:—

"Whilst Britain's Sovereign scales such worth has weighed,
And Anne herself her smiling favours paid,
That sacred hand does your fair chaplet twist,
Great Reade her own entitled Oculist,
With this fair mark of honour, sir, assume
No common trophies from this shining plume;
Her favours by desert are only shared—
Her smiles are not her gift, but her reward.
Thus in your new fair plumes of Honour drest,
To hail the Royal Foundress of the feast;
When the great Anne's warm smiles this favourite raise,
'Tis not a royal grace she gives, but pays."

Queen Anne's other "sworn oculist," as he and Reade termed themselves, was Roger Grant, a cobbler and Anabaptist preacher. He was a prodigiously vain man, even for a quack, and had his likeness engraved in copper. Impressions of the plate were distributed amongst his friends, but were not in all cases treated with much respect; for one of those who had been complimented with a present of the eminent oculist's portrait, fixed it on a wall of his house, having first adorned it with the following lines:—

"See here a picture of a brazen face,
The fittest lumber of this wretched place.
A tinker first his scene of life began;
That failing, he set up for cunning man;
But wanting luck, puts on a new disguise,
And now pretends that he can mend your eyes;
But this expect, that, like a tinker true,
Where he repairs one eye he puts out two."

The charge of his being a tinker was preferred against him also by another lampoon writer. "In his stead up popped Roger Grant, the tinker, of whom a friend of mine once sung.—

"'Her Majesty sure was in a surprise,
Or else was very short-sighted;
When a tinker was sworn to look after her eyes,
And the mountebank Reade was knighted.'"

This man, according to the custom of his class, was in the habit of publishing circumstantial and minute accounts of his cures. Of course his statements were a tissue of untruths, with just the faintest possible admixture of what was not altogether false. His plan was to get hold of some poor person of imperfect vision, and, after treating him with medicines and half-crowns for six weeks, induce him to sign a testimonial to the effect that he had been born stone-blind, and had never enjoyed any visual power whatever, till Providence led him to good Dr. Grant, who had cured him in little more than a month. This certificate the clergyman and churchwardens of the parish, in which the patient had been known to wander about the streets in mendicancy, were asked to attest; and if they proved impregnable to the cunning representations of the importunate suitors, and declined to give the evidence of their handwriting, either on the ground that they had reason to question the fact of the original blindness, or because they were not thoroughly acquainted with the particulars of the case, Dr. Grant did not scruple to sign their names himself, or by the hands of his agents. The modus operandi with which he carried out these frauds may be learned by the curious in a pamphlet, published in the year 1709, and entitled "A Full and True Account of a Miraculous Cure of a Young Man in Newington that was Born Blind."

But the last century was rife with medical quacks. The Rev. John Hancocke, D.D., Rector of St. Margaret's, Lothbury, London, Prebendary of Canterbury, and chaplain to the Duke of Bedford, preached up the water-cure, which Pliny the naturalist described as being in his day the fashionable remedy in Rome. He published a work in 1723 that immediately became popular, called "Febrifugum Magnum; or, Common Water the best Cure for Fevers, and probably for the Plague."

The good man deemed himself a genius of the highest order, because he had discovered that a draught of cold water, under certain circumstances, is a powerful diaphoretic. His pharmacopeia, however, contained another remedy—namely, stewed prunes, which the Doctor regarded as a specific in obstinate cases of blood-spitting. Then there was Ward, with his famous pill, whose praises that learned man, Lord Chief Baron Reynolds, sounded in every direction. There was also a tar-water mania, which mastered the clear intellect of Henry Fielding, and had as its principal advocate the supreme intellect of the age, Bishop Berkeley. In volume eighteen of the Gentleman's Magazine is a list of the quack-doctors then practising; and the number of those named in it is almost as numerous as the nostrums, which mount up to 202. These accommodating fellows were ready to fleece every rank of society. The fashionable impostor sold his specific sometimes at the rate of 2s. 6d. a pill, while the humbler knave vended his boluses at 6d. a box. To account for society tolerating, and yet more, warmly encouraging such a state of things, we must remember the force of the example set by eminent physicians in vending medicines the composition of which they kept secret. Sir Hans Sloane sold an eye-salve; and Dr. Mead had a favourite nostrum—a powder for the bite of a mad dog.

The close of the seventeenth century was not in respect of its quacks behind the few preceding generations. In 1789 Mr. and Mrs. Loutherbourg became notorious for curing people without medicine. God, they proclaimed, had endowed them with a miraculous power of healing the impoverished sick, by looking upon them and touching them. Of course every one who presumed to doubt the statement was regarded as calling in question the miracles of holy writ, and was exclaimed against as an infidel. The doctor's house was besieged with enormous crowds. The good man and his lady refused to take any fee whatever, and issued gratuitous tickets amongst the mob, which would admit the bearers into the Loutherbourgian presence. Strange to say, however, these tickets found their way into the hands of venal people, who sold them to others in the crowd (who were tired of waiting) for sums varying from two to five guineas each; and ere long it was discovered that these barterers of the healing power were accomplices in the pay of the poor man's friend. A certain Miss Mary Pratt, in all probability a puppet acting in obedience to Loutherbourg's instructions, wrote an account of the cures performed by the physician and his wife. In a dedicatory letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Miss Pratt says:—"I therefore presume when these testimonies are searched into (which will corroborate with mine) your Lordship will compose a form of prayer, to be used in all churches and chapels, that nothing may impede or prevent this inestimable gift from having its free course; and publick thanks may be offered up in all churches and chapels, for such an astonishing proof of God's love to this favoured land." The publication frankly states that "Mr. De Loutherbourg, who lives on Hammersmith Green, has received a most glorious power from the Lord Jehovah—viz. the gift of healing all manner of diseases incident to the human body, such as blindness, deafness, lameness, cancers, loss of speech, palsies." But the statements of "cases" are yet more droll. The reader will enjoy the perusal of a few of them.