The mountebank has long fallen from his former high estate. The quack may still be found vending his pills in the open-air markets of Yorkshire and Lancashire; but he does not mount a stage, and resembles his predecessors of the last century only in the fluency and volubility of his discourse on the virtues of his potions, pills, and plasters. The author of the paper on mountebanks in the “Book of Days” (edited by Robert Chambers), states that he saw one at York about 1860, who “sold medicines on a stage in the old style, but without the Merry Andrew or the music,” and adds that “he presented himself in shabby black clothes, with a dirty white neck-cloth.” Even the name had long before that time ceased to be connected with the vending of medicines, and had come to be applied to those itinerant circus companies who gave gratuitous performances in the open air, making their gains by the sale of lottery tickets. The present writer remembers seeing the circus company of John Clarke performing on a piece of waste ground at Lower Norwood, when the clown of the show went among the spectators selling tickets at a shilling each, entitling the holder to participate in a drawing, the prizes in which were Britannia metal tea pots and milk ewers, papier maché tea trays, cotton gown pieces, etc. That must have been about 1835, or within a year or two of that time.
Only a few years later, a lottery in sixpenny shares was similarly conducted at Alfreton, in Derbyshire, and probably in many other places, though contrary to the provisions of the Lottery Act.
The mountebank doctor of former times, with his carriage, his zany, and his musicians, can now only be met with in the provincial towns of France and Italy, and even there but seldom. Thirty or forty years ago, there was a man who, in a carriage drawn up behind the Louvre, used to practise dentistry and advertise his father, who had a flourishing dentist’s practice in one of the narrow streets near the cathedral of Notre Dame. Another of this fraternity was seen at Marseilles by an English tourist a few years later, and in this instance some musicians accompanied the mountebank’s phaeton, and drowned the cries of the suffering patients with the crash of a march. But these survivals remind us rather of Belphegor, in the pathetic drama of that name, than of Dulcamara in the opera of L’Elisor d’Amore, with his gorgeous equipage and his musical attendants, as old play-goers remember the personation of the character by the famous Lablache.
The Strange Story of the Fight with the Small-Pox.
By Thomas Frost.
When, at the present day, we hear of an epidemic of small-pox in some town where the practice of vaccine inoculation has been neglected, it is both instructive and consolatory to turn our thoughts back to the time, before the introduction of that practice, when that horrible disease caused ten per cent, of all the deaths in excess of those occurring in the ordinary course of nature. This statement, startling as it may seem to the present generation, may be verified by reference to the annual bills of mortality of the city of London. This fearful state of things had prevailed in England from the time of the Plantagenets, when, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, a gleam of light was flashed upon the medical darkness of western Europe from the east. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writing from Adrianople to a lady friend in the spring of 1717, flashed that light in the concluding portion of her letter, as follows:—
“Apropos of distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that will make you wish yourself here. The small-pox, so fatal and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless, by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give it. There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together), the old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what vein you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch), and puts into the vein as much matter as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after that binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell, and in this manner opens four or five veins.
... Every year thousands undergo this operation; and the French ambassador says pleasantly, that they take the small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries. There is no example of any one that has died in it; and you may believe I am well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to try it on my own little son.”