We are told of a patient who, instead of the medicine prescribed, swallowed the prescription! and Punch records an extraordinary case of a voracious individual who bolted a door, and threw up a window!
Sydney Smith, on being told by his doctor to take a walk on an empty stomach, asked—“Upon whose!” But a truce to stories suggested by the queer nostrums of quacks.
Empirics, however, often believed in their nostrums, and were, sometimes, amiable and unselfish.
In the year 1776, we are told, there lived a German doctor, who styled himself, or was called, “the Rain-water doctor;” all the diseases to which flesh is heir he professed to cure by this simple agent. Some wonderful cures were, it is said, achieved by means of his application of this fluid, and his reputation spread far and wide; crowds of maimed and sickly folk flocked to him, seeking relief at his hands. What is yet more remarkable still, he declined to accept any fee from his patients!
Dr. Haygarth, of Bath, had a pair of wooden tractors made in precisely the same shape and appearance as Perkin’s metallic ones; and the same results followed as when the others, which cost five guineas a pair, were used.
The story is well known of the condemned criminal in Paris, who was laid on a dissecting table, strapped down, with his eyes bandaged, and slightly pricked, when streamlets of water set a-trickling made him think, as he had been told, that he was being bled to death. His strength gradually ebbed away, and he actually died, although he did not lose a drop of blood.
I knew of a gentleman who, when pills to procure sleep were ordered to be discontinued, lay awake. The doctor made up a box of bread pills, which were administered as the others had been, and the patient slept, and recovered rapidly.
A young medical man fell in love with a young lady patient, and, when he had no longer any pretext for continuing his visits, he sent her a present of a pair of spring ducks. Not reciprocating his attentions, she did not acknowledge the present, upon which he ventured to call, asking if the birds had reached her. Her reply was—“Quack, quack!”
Dr. Lettsom, a quaker in the time of George III., near the close of the last century, had such an extensive practice that his receipts in some years were as much as £12,000; and this although half his services were entirely gratuitous, and rendered with unusual solicitude and care to necessitous clergymen and literary men. Generosity was the ruling feature of his life. On one occasion he attended an old American merchant whose affairs had gone wrong, and who grieved over leaving the trees he had planted. The kind hearted doctor purchased the place from the creditors, and presented it to his patient for life.
Pope, a few days before his decease, bore the following cordial testimony to the urbanity and courtesy of his medical friends:—“There is no end of my kind treatment from the Faculty; they are in general the most amiable companions, and the best friends, as well as the most learned men I know.”