JAUNT DOWN A PATIENT’S THROAT.
“Two of a trade can ne’er agree,
No proverb e’er was juster;
They’ve ta’en down Bishop Blaize, d’ye see,
And put up Bishop Bluster.”
Dr. Mansel, on Bishop Watson’s head becoming
a signboard, in Cambridge, in lieu of the
ancient one of Bishop Blaize.—Facetiæ
Cant., p. 7.
Sir Isaac Pennington and Sir Busick Harwood were cotemporary at Cambridge. The first as Regius Professor of Physic and Senior Fellow of St. John’s College, the other was Professor of Anatomy and Fellow of Downing College. Both were eminent in their way, but seldom agreed, and held each other’s abilities pretty cheap, some say in sovereign contempt. Sir Busick was once called in by the friends of a patient that had been under Sir Isaac’s care, but had obtained small relief, anxious to hear his opinion of the malady. Not approving of the treatment pursued, he inquired “who was the physician in attendance,” and on being told, exclaimed—“He! If he were to descend into a patient’s stomach with a candle and lantern, he would not have been able to name the complaint!”
THIS DIFFERENCE OF OPINION
Was hit off, it is supposed, not by Dean Swift or wicked Will Whiston, but by Bishop Mansel, as follows:—
Sir Isaac,
Sir Busick;
Sir Busick,
Sir Isaac;
’Twould make you and I sick
To taste their physick.
Another, perhaps the same Cambridge wag, penned the following quaternion on Sir Isaac, which appeared under the title of
AN EPIGRAM ON A PETIT-MAITRE PHYSICIAN.
When Pennington for female ills indites,
Studying alone not what, but how he writes,
The ladies, as his graceful form they scan,
Cry, with ill-omen’d rapture, “killing man!”