Physicians now to quiet pain
Stick lancet in the patient's vein
That burns with feverish heat:
The next contend, they're wholly wrong,
That life will leak away ere long
If thus the case they treat.
Meantime a practice gets about,
Perhaps to make some doctors pout:
Old Shelah, with her herbs and teas,
And scarce a shilling for her fees,
In many instances, at least,
When deaths and funerals increased,
Did more to dispossess the fever,
Did more from dying beds deliver
Than all the hippocratian host
Could by the lancet's virtue boast;
To which, I trow, full many a ghost
Will have a grudge forever.
[130] From the edition of 1815. The yellow fever epidemic of 1797 created more than usual consternation. It was supposed to be of a more deadly type than that of 1793. The medical profession was divided as to the treatment of the disease. "Two hostile schools sprang up. At the head of one was William Currie. Benjamin Rush led the other. The Currie men declared the fever was imported and contagious. The Rush school maintained that it was not. Filthy streets, they held, and loathsome alleys had much to do with the sickness, and they urged the use of mercurial purges and the copious letting of blood."—McMaster.
THE BOOK OF ODES[131]
[131] These odes first appeared in the Time-Piece, where they were published in rapid succession between October 16 and November 13, 1797. Three of them—the fourth, sixth, and eleventh—were republished, greatly revised, in the edition of 1809. The eighth, tenth, and thirteenth were used in revised form in the 1815 edition. The others are here republished for the first time.
The first ode, which is manifestly an adaptation of Dr. Watts' well-known hymn, seems to have been objected to in some quarters, for in the Time-Piece for December 22 appeared the following:
"Some serious animadversions appear in the Connecticut Courant on the first number of the Book of Odes, published in the Time-Piece of the 14th ult. being a profane parody, as the writer insinuates, on the first Psalm of David—where the aristocrat corresponds with the saint in the psalm, and the democrat with the impenitent sinner. These gentlemen writers ought to consider that the parody in question (as they choose to call it) was not meant to be sung through a deacon's nose, to the sound of the organ: nor yet to the timbrel of seven strings: it was merely intended to be harped upon out of doors, for the benefit of all good democrats, and the utter astoundment and confusion of the contrary character. In the name of common sense how did the printers of the Connecticut Courant dare to act so irreverantly as to place the parody before the psalm? Are they trampling on all sanctity; or what do they mean? Let them beware—serious times are coming on, gentlemen:
'Your life is but a vapour, sure,
A mere old woman's qualm—
And good king David's lyric harp,
May close it—with a psalm.'"