“How best to fill his purse, and thin the town;”
this powerful instrument of offensive and defensive warfare, has ever, with becoming vigilance, guarded its post against Perkinean invaders, and suffered no occasion to pass without a squirt of the Gallic acid of satire, when there was deemed a possibility of blackening the common enemy.
I can never sufficiently express my approbation of the Carthagenian cunning with which this journal has been conducted. Dr B. professing great impartiality, in an early number, (see vol. ii. p. 85) invited communications on the subject of the tractors. Subsequent management evidently showed a slight omission in the doctor’s notice, and that he meant communications on one side only; for he has omitted no pains to procure and publish whatsoever could be suggested against the tractors; but though reports of cases in their favor, and all the publications of the patentee have been before him, not a syllable of these was ever noticed by that gentleman; neither has it ever appeared by his journal that such facts ever existed.
By every nostrum, save thine own.
I appeal to any of my brethren who have been gratified, as I often have been, with the Demosthenes-like torrent which has been so frequently poured forth, in our medical societies, by this “child and champion” of the Galenical throng, against quackery and all its appurtenances, whether it were fair to surmise, as some unconscionable rogues have done, that Dr B. has absolutely himself become the proprietor of a quack medicine. The fire of eloquence with which Perkinism, that most atrocious kind of quackery, has been so frequently, and so effectually assailed by the learned doctor at the medical society, at Guy’s, the Lyceum Medico Londinensis, &c. &c. &c. ought to have ensured Dr B. so much of the gratitude of the profession, that, although he should himself choose to become one of the most arrant quacks in the kingdom, he might depend on your support of his reputation, and your exertions to uphold him. No subsequent apostacy on his part, I maintain, will justify a dereliction of him.
Recal to your recollection, gentlemen, the denunciations he has so often made against every medical practitioner who should presume, either directly or indirectly, to offer any patronage to remedies which bore even the most distant resemblance to a nostrum. How often have the walls of the medical theatres of Saint Thomas’s hospital, and Windmill street, echoed loud responses to his declamations against the varlets, who should dare to recommend means, in the profits of the consumption of which the whole profession could not participate? How often have you received his invitations to send him your effusions and declamations against quackery, to receive an efficient publication in his journal? and what number of that journal has appeared without performing his promise, by honoring those effusions with a place in its immortal pages?
Lest even these most important considerations should still find you inexorable, I trust I can show, by examining his conduct in regard to the quack medicine in question, that, if it be not praise-worthy, it is, at least, defensible.
The title of the nostrum which has had the assistance of Dr B. in being introduced to the notice of a grateful public, is “A NEW MEDICINE FOR THE GOUT.” The pretended discoverer of this specific is, for very commendable, or, which is the same thing, very prudent reasons, kept behind the curtain. I wish, however, to express my utter disbelief that either Dr Brodum or Dr Solomon is the happy mortal, however similar the style of the pamphlet, announcing this new medicine, may be to their erudite writings, and the pretensions of the said medicine to “balms of Gilead” and to “nervous cordials.”