Towards the close of the sixteenth century, France was invaded by a horde of mountebanks in showy and fantastic garb, who went from one town to another, loudly and with brazen effrontery proclaiming in the market-places their ability to cure every kind of ailment. And the people, then as now easily duped, lent willing ears to these wily pretenders, and bought freely of their marvellous pills and pellets.[219:1]
The prevalence of quackery in England is shown by a preamble to a statute of Henry VIII, as follows: "Forasmuch as the science and cunning of Physic and Surgery are daily, within this Realm, exercised by a great number of ignorant persons, of whom the greater part have no insight in the same, nor in any other kind of learning. Some also ken no letters on the book; so far forth that common artificers, as smiths, weavers and women, boldly and accustomably take upon them great cures, in which they partly use scorcery and witchcraft, and partly apply such remedies to the disease as being very noxious and nothing meet; to the high displeasure of God, great infamy to the Faculty, and the grievous damage and destruction of divers of the King's people, most especially of them that cannot discern the cunning from the uncunning."
Probably Dr. Gilbert Skeene, of Aberdeen, Scotland, had in mind such pretenders, when he wrote, in a treatise on the Plague, published in 1568, that "Medicineirs[219:2] are mair studious of their ain helthe nor of the common weilthe."
A statute of the thirty-fourth year of Henry VIII (1543) contains the statement that although the majority of the members of the craft of chirurgeons had small cunning, yet they would accept large sums of money, and do little therefor; by reason whereof their patients suffered from neglect.
At about this period, many were the marvellous remedies which were advertised, and keen was the rivalry among empirics, in their efforts to outdo their brethren in the selection of high-sounding names for their vaunted panaceas. Among the latter were to be found such choice nostrums as rectifiers of the vitals, which were warranted to supply the places of all other medicines whatsoever.
Other pleasing remedies rejoiced in the names of vivifying drops, cephalic tinctures, gripe-waters, and angelical specifics.
"The Anatomyes of the True Physition and Counterfeit Mounte-banke" (imprinted at London, 1605) contains an enumeration of some of the classes of people wherefrom recruits were drawn to swell the ranks of charlatans in England some three centuries ago. Such were:
Runagate Jews, the cut-throats and robbers of Christians, slow-bellied monks, who have made escape from their cloisters, simoniacal and perjured shavelings, busy Sir John lack-Latins, thrasonical and unlettered chemists, shifting and outcast pettifoggers, light-headed and trivial druggers and apothecaries, sun-shunning night-birds and corner-creepers, dull-pated and base mechanics, stage-players, jugglers, peddlers, prittle-prattling barbers, filthy graziers, curious bath-keepers, common shifters and cogging cavaliers, bragging soldiers, lazy clowns, one-eyed or lamed fencers, toothless and tattling old wives, chattering char-women and nurse-keepers, long-tongued midwives, 'scape-Tyburns, dog-leeches, and such-like baggage. In the next rank, to second this goodly troupe, follow poisoners, enchanters, wizards, fortune-tellers, magicians, witches and hags. Now, if you take a good view of these sweet companions, you shall find them, not only dolts, idiots and buzzards; but likewise contemners and haters of all good learning.
For the greater part of them disdain book-learning, and never came where learning grew. . . . They are such as cannot abide to take any pains or travel in study. They reject incomparable Galen's learned Commentaries, as tedious and frivolous discourses, having found through Paracelsus's Vulcanian shop, a more short way to the Wood. . . . Others are so notoriously sottish, that being over head and ears in the myrie puddle of gross ignorance, yet they will by no means see or acknowledge it.