My hours are from nine till twelve in the morning, and from two in the afternoon till nine at night, every day in the week, except on the real christian sabbath, called Saturday.
It may be of use to keep this advertisement.
This, gentlemen, is an exact copy of my bill, which has been carefully distributed all over this populous city, pasted upon the chief gates and churches; and since dispersed by two running messengers, Theophrastus Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa, all over king Pluto’s dominions. I forgot to tell you, that finding it absolutely necessary to take me a wife, (the women in certain cases that shall be nameless, being unwilling to consult any but those of their own sex) I was advised by some friends to make my applications to the famous Cleopatra queen of Egypt, who being a person of great experience, and notably well skill’d in the Arcana’s of nature, would in all probability make me an admirable spouse. In short, after half a dozen meetings, rather for form sake than any thing else, the bargain was struck, and a match concluded between her Alexandrian majesty and myself; cardinal Wolsey, who is now curate of a small village, to the tune of four marks per annum, and the magnificent perquisites of a bear and fiddle, perform’d the holy ceremony: Amphion of Thebes diverted us at dinner with his crowd, and all the while Molinos, the quietist, danced a Lancashire jigg. Sir Thomas Pilkington, who, as I told you in my last, is become a most furious rhime-tagger or versificator, composed the epithilamium; and Sardanapalus, Caligula, Nero, Heliogabalus, and pope Alexander VII. were pleas’d to throw the stocking. Her majesty, to do her a piece of common justice, proves a most dutiful and laborious wife, spreads all my plaisters, makes all my unguents, distills all my waters, and pleases my customers beyond expression.
Thus, gentlemen, you see my bill, by which you may guess whether I don’t infinitely surpass those empty pretending quacks of your world, who confine their narrow talent to one distemper, which they cure but by one remedy; whereas all diseases are alike to me, and I have a hundred several ways to extirpate them. I shall now trespass so far upon your patience, as to present you with the catalogue of my cures, which being somewhat singular, and out of the way, I have the vanity to believe will not be unwelcome to you——
A true and faithful Catalogue of some remarkable Cures perform’d in the other World, by the famous Signior Giusippe Hanesio, High-German Doctor and Astrologer.
By Pluto’s Authority.
Hic est quam legis, ille quam requiris,
Totis notus in inferis Josephus.
BEcause I am so much a person of honour and integrity, that even in this lower world I would not forfeit my reputation, I desire my incredulous adversaries (of which number, being a stranger to this place, I presume I have but too many) to get if they can to the upper regions, and satisfy themselves of the truth of my admirable performances. To begin then with those of quality.
Pope Innocent the eleventh was so strangely over run with a complication of Jansenism, Quietism, and Lutheranism, that not only his nephew, Don Livio Odeschalchi, but the whole sacred consistory despaired of his recovery; I so mundify’d his intellectuals with my catholick essence of Hellebore, that he continued rectus in cerebro many years after; and if the French ambassador, by making such a hubbub about his quarters, occasion’d old infallibility to relapse, Loüis le Grand must answer for it, and not signior Giusippe.
I cured the late Sophy of Persia, Shaw Solyman by name, of a Febris Tumulenta, so that he could digest the exactions and blood of a whole province, hold his hand as steady as Harry Killegrew after a quart of surfeit water in a morning; and if he dy’d presently after, let his eunuchs and whores look to that, if one with their politicks, and the other with their tails, spoil’d the operation of my Elixir magnum stomachicum.