Lady Wortley Montagu's Remark upon Credulity.—Superstitions of the English respecting the Cure of Diseases.—Sickness and Healing connected with Superstition.—Wesley's Primitive Physic.—Quacks.—Dr Graham.—Tractors.—Magnetic Girdles.—Quoz.—Quack Medicines.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the best letter-writer of this or of any other country, has accounted for the extraordinary facility with which her countrymen are duped by the most ignorant quacks, very truly and very ingeniously. "The English," she says, "are more easily infatuated than any other people by the hope of a panacea, nor is there any other country in the world where such great fortunes are made by physicians. I attribute this to the foolish credulity of mankind. As we no longer trust in miracles and relics, we run as eagerly after receipts and doctors, and the money which was given three centuries ago for the health of the soul, is now given for the health of the body, by the same sort of people, women and half-witted men. Quacks are despised in countries where they have shrines and images."
How much to be lamented is the perversion of a mind like hers, which, had it not been heretical, would have been so truly excellent! She perceives the truth; but having been nursed up in a false religion, and afterwards associated with persons who had none, she does not perceive the whole truth, and confounds light and darkness. The foolish credulity of mankind!—To be without faith and hope is as unnatural a state for the heart as to be without affections. Man is a credulous animal; perhaps he has never yet been defined by a characteristic which more peculiarly and exclusively designates him, certainly never by a nobler one; for faith and hope are what the heretics mean by credulity. The fact is, as she states it. Infidelity and heresy cannot destroy the nature of man, but they pervert it; they deprive him of his trust in God, and he puts it in man; they take away the staff of his support, and he leans upon a broken reed.
In the worst sufferings and the most imminent peril a true catholic never needs despair; such is the power of the saints, and the infinite mercy of God and the most holy Mary: but the heretics in such cases have only to despair and die. They have no saint to look to for every particular disease, no faith in relics to make them whole. If a piece of the true cross were brought to a dying Englishman, though its efficacy had been proved by a thousand miracles, he would reject it even at the last gasp; such is the pride and obstinacy of heresy, and so completely does it harden the heart.
There are a thousand facts to verify the remark of Lady Wortley. The boasted knowledge of England has not sunk deep; it is like the golden surface of a lackered watch, which covers, and but barely covers, the base metal. The great mass of the people are as ignorant, and as well contented with their ignorance, as any the most illiterate nation in Europe: and even among those who might be expected to know better, it is astonishing how slowly information makes way to any practical utility. In domestic medicine for instance;—a defluxion is here called a cold, and therefore for its name's sake must be expelled by heat. Oil is employed to soften a hard cough, and lemon juice to cut it; because in English sourness is synonymous with sharpness, and what is sharp must needs cut. But it is of superstition that I am to speak, and perverted credulity.
The abracadabra of the old heretics was lately in use as a charm for the ague, and probably still is where the ague is to be found, for that disease has almost wholly disappeared within the last generation. For warts there are manifold charms. The person who wishes to be rid of them takes a stick, and cuts a notch in it for every wart, and buries it, and as it rots the warts are to decay. Or he steals a piece of beef and rubs over them, and buries it in like manner. Or stealing dry peas or beans, and wrapping them up, one for each wart, he carries the parcel to a place where four roads meet, and tosses it over his head, not looking behind to see where it falls; he will lose the warts, and whoever picks it up will have them. But there are gifted old women who have only to slip a thread over these excrescencies, or touch them with their saliva, and they dry away.
It is a truth, that we have but too many such superstitious follies; with us, however, there is always some mixture of devotion in them, and the error, though it be an error, and as such deservedly discouraged, is at least pious. He who psalms a sick man, or fancies that the oil from his saint's lamp will heal him of all his complaints, errs on the safe side. Here none of these palliations are to be found; the practices have not merely no reference to religion, but have even the characters of witchcraft. The materials for the charm must be stolen to render them efficacious, secrecy is enjoined, and it is supposed that the evil is only to be got rid of by transferring it to another. In Catholic countries the confessor commands the thief to make restitution,—here the person who has been robbed repairs to a witch or wizard to recover the loss, or learn who the criminal is, by means of a familiar spirit! A Cunning-Man, or a Cunning-Woman, as they are termed, is to be found near every town, and though the laws are occasionally put in force against them, still it is a gainful trade. This it is to deprive credulity of its proper food.
None suffer so severely from this as they who are labouring under diseases; if money is to be gotten, such is the spirit of trade, neither the dying nor the dead are spared, and quackery is carried to greater perfection of villainy here than in any other part of the world. Sickness humbles the pride of man; it forces upon him a sense of his own weakness, and teaches him to feel his dependence upon unseen Powers: that therefore which makes wise men devout, makes the ignorant superstitious. Among savages the physician and the conjurer are always the same. The operations of sickness and of healing are alike mysterious, and hence arises the predilection of many enthusiasts for quackery, and the ostentation which all quacks make of religion, or of some extraordinary power in themselves. The favourite assertion formerly in all countries was, that of an innate gift as a seventh son, I know not on what superstition founded, and of course augmented seven fold in due proportion, if the father had been a seventh son also, or even the mother a seventh daughter, for in this case there is no Salic law. Another has claimed the same privilege because he was born deaf and dumb, as if nature had thus indemnified him for the faculties of which he was deprived. The kings of England long since the schism, though the practice is now disused, have touched for the evil, and used to appoint a day in the Gazette for publicly doing it. Where this divine property has not been ascribed to the physician it has been imputed to the medicine. The most notorious of these worthies who flourishes at present calls his composition the Cordial Balm of Gilead, and prefaces every advertisement with a text from Jeremiah, "Is there no Balm in Gilead? is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?"—Thus the Arabs attribute the virtue of their balm to the blood of those who were slain at Beder. We see among ourselves but too many scandalous proofs of this weakness. A Cistercian historian assures us that he was cured of an obstinate illness by taking a pill of the earth of the pit in which God made Adam: and at this day the rinsings of the cup are eagerly sought after by the sick, notwithstanding the prohibition of the church.
Perhaps we are indebted to the Jews for the vulgar feeling of the divine origin of the healing art. They will have it that Adam had an intuitive knowledge of medicine, and that Solomon's Book of Trees[15] and Herbs was written by inspiration. The founder of the Quakers was in danger of taking to the practice of physic from a similar notion. He fancied that he was in the same state as Adam before the fall, and that the nature and virtues of all things were opened to him, and he was at a stand, as he says, whether he should practise physic for the good of mankind.
Wesley went beyond him, and published what he called Primitive Physic, fancying himself chosen to restore medicine as well as religion, and to prescribe both for body and soul, like St Luke. The greater number of his remedies are old women's receipts, neither good nor ill; but others are of a more desperate nature. For a cold in the head he directs you to pare an orange very thin, roll it up inside out, and put a plug in each nostril; for the wind colic, to eat parched peas; for the gout, to apply a raw beef-steak to the part affected; for raving madness, to set the patient with his head under a great waterfall as long as his strength will bear it; and for asthma and hypochondriasis, to take an ounce of quicksilver every morning! If all his prescriptions had been like this last, his book might have been entitled, after the favourite form of the English, Every Man his own Poisoner. In general they are sufficiently innocent; which is fortunate, for I have selected these instances from the twenty-first edition of his work, and no doubt the purchasers place in it implicit confidence.