John Cordy Jeaffreson

“ Not the creator, the soul, the preserver of this world alone—or of any of those which we have seen roll with uninterrupted harmony for so many thousands of years!—not the God of the millions of myriads of worlds, of systems, and of various ranks and orders of beings and intelligences which probably compose the aggregate of the grand, the vast, the incomprehensible system of the universe!—but the eternal, infinitely wise, and infinitely powerful, infinitely good God of the whole—the Great Sun of the Universe! ”

“ The hope that to the last lurks in the breast of the veriest wretch under heaven's canopy, whether his trials come from broken health, or an empty pocket, or wronged affection, speaks aloud in saddest tones, as one thinks of the multitudes who, worn with bodily malady and spiritual dejection, ignorant of the source of their sufferings, but thirsting for relief from them, have gone from charlatan to charlatan, giving hoarded money in exchange for charms, cramp-rings, warming-stones, elixirs, and trochees, warranted to cure every ill that flesh is heir to. ”

“ What an indignant oath and scream of ridicule didst thou give, when an attorney (Sir Oracle of "the board") endeavoured to instil into thy mind the first principles of supply and demand, and that grandest law of political economy—to wit, if there are too many poor people in a neighbourhood, they must be starved out of it into one where they will not be in the way; and if there are too many poor people in the entire world, they must be starved out of that also into another, where there'll be more room for them! ”

“ Chevalier's oration to the university of Oxford, which is still extant, began thus:—
"The eye, most illustrious sons of the muses, most learned Oxonians, whose fame I have heard celebrated in all parts of the globe—the eye, that most amazing, that stupendous, that comprehending, that incomprehensible, that miraculous organ, the eye, is the Proteus of the passions, the herald of the mind, the interpreter of the heart, and the window of the soul. The eye has dominion over all things. The world was made for the eye, and the eye for the world. ”

“ His sincere admiration of classic literature and art and manners was regarded by the coarse herd of rich and stupid Londoners as so perfectly ridiculous, that when Smollett had the bad taste to introduce him into Peregrine Pickle, as the physician who gives a dinner after the manner of the ancients, the applause was general, and every city tradesman, with scholarship enough to read the novel, had a laugh at the expense of a man who has some claims to be regarded as the greatest literary genius of his time. ”

“ This discovery was a source of great surprise, and also of enlightenment to the numerous high-born and richly-endowed ladies who had made overtures of marriage to the idolized quack, and, much to their surprise, had had their advances adroitly but firmly declined.
There are yet to be found in English society, ladies—not silly, frivolous women, but some of those on whom the world of intellect has put the stamp of its approval—who cherish such tender reminiscences of St. John Long, that they cannot mention his name without their eyes becoming bright with tears. ”

“ Good Queen Anne was so charmed with two of the many knaves who by turns enjoyed her countenance, that she had them sworn in as her own oculists in ordinary; and one of them she was even so silly as to knight. This lucky gentleman was William Reade, originally a botching tailor, and to the last a very ignorant man, as his "Short and Exact Account of all Diseases Incident to the Eyes" attests; yet he rose to the honour of knighthood, and the most lucrative and fashionable physician's practice of his period. Surely every dog has his day. Lazarus never should despair ”

“ The miserable old man came up with his wife from Hackney, and tottered into the consulting-room in Bloomsbury Square, with two guineas in his hand—
"You may go, sir," exclaimed Radcliffe, to the astonished wretch, who trusted he was unknown—"you may go home, and die, and be ——, without a speedy repentance; for both the grave and the devil are ready for Tyson of Hackney, who has grown rich out of the spoils of the public and the tears of orphans and widows. You'll be a dead man, sir, in ten days." ”

“ Long before animal magnetism was a stock subject of conversation at dinner-parties, there was a vague knowledge of its pretensions floating about society; and a curiosity to know how far its principles were reconcilable with facts, animated men of science and lovers of the marvellous. Had not this been the state of public feeling, the sensations created by Sir Kenelm Digby's sympathetic cures, Greatrake's administrations, Leverett's manual exercises, and Loutherbourg's manipulations, would not have been so great and universal. ”

“ Such was the appearance of Jenner, as he galloped across the vale of Gloucester, visiting his patients. There is little to remind us of such a personage as this in the statue in Trafalgar Square, which is the slowly-offered tribute of our gratitude to Edward Jenner for his imperishable services to mankind. The opposition that Jenner met with in his labours to free our species from a hideous malady that, destroying life and obliterating beauty, spared neither the cottage nor the palace, is a subject on which it is painful to reflect. ”

“ Kemp, a grave and reverend Æsculapius, punctilious in etiquette, with an imposing formality of manner, accurate in costume, in every respect a courtier of the old school. Holmnook is an antique market-town, square and compact, a capital in miniature, lying at the foot of an old feudal castle, in which the Bigods once held sway. That stronghold of moated towers was three centuries since the abode of a mighty Duke; Surrey, the poet earl, luckless and inspired, was born within its walls. The noble acres of the princely house fell into the hands of a parvenu—a rich, grasping lawyer;—that was bad. ”

“ Long as a footman's stick, smooth and varnished, with a heavy gold knob or cross-bar at the top, it was an instrument with which, down to the present century, every prudent aspirant to medical practice was provided. The celebrated "gold-headed cane" which Radcliffe, Mead, Askew, Pitcairn and Baillie successively bore is preserved in the College of Physicians, bearing the arms which those gentlemen assumed, or were entitled to. In one respect it deviated from the physician's cane proper. It has a cross-bar almost like a crook; whereas a physician's wand ought to have a knob at the top. ”

“ Brocklesby, on the occasion of giving evidence in a trial, had the ill fortune to offend the presiding judge, who, amongst other prejudices not uncommon in the legal profession, cherished a lively contempt for medical evidence. "Well, gentlemen of the jury," said the noble lawyer in his summing up, "what's the medical testimony? First we have a Dr. Rocklesby or—Brocklesby. What does he say? First of all he swears—he's a physician."
Abernethy is a by-word for rudeness and even brutality of manner; but he was as tender and generous as a man ought to be, as a man of great intelligence usually is. ”

“ It is not once in awhile, but daily, that a physician of any large charitable institution of London reads a pathetic tale of struggle and defeat, of honest effort and bitter failure, of slow descent from grade to grade of misfortune—in the tranquil dignity, the mild enduring quiet, and noiseless gratitude of poor sufferers—gentle once in fortune, gentle still in nature. ”

“ Now dead men's ghosts are getting out of their graves, and there comes the ghost of a doctor in a white sheet to wait upon you. Your Tokay is got into my head and your love into my heart, and they both join to club their thanks for the pleasantest day I have spent these seven years; and to my comfort I find a man may be in love, and be happy, provided he does not go to book for it. ”

“ Kemp was an important personage in Holmnook and its vicinity. An éclat was his that a country doctor does not usually possess. For he was of gentle blood, being a cadet of an old and wealthy family on the other side of the country, the representative of which hailed him "cousin," and treated him with the intimacy of kinship—the kinship of 1790.
Michael Kemp's youth had been spent away from Holmnook. Doubtless so polite and dignified a gentleman had once aimed at a brighter lot than a rural physician's. Doubtless he had a history, but he kept it to himself. He had never married! ”

“ As we have already stated, duels have been rare in the medical profession. Like the ladies, physicians have, in their periods of anger, been content with speaking ill of each other. That they have not lost their power of courteous criticism and judicious abuse, any one may learn, who, for a few hours, breathes the atmosphere of their cliques. It is good to hear an allopathic physician perform his duty to society by frankly stating his opinion of the character and conduct of an eminent homœopathic practitioner. ”

“ It is a rash thing for a young man to start his carriage, unless he is sure of being able to sustain it for a dozen years. To drop it is sure destruction. We remember an ambitious Phaeton of Hospitals who astonished the world—not only of his profession, but of all London—with an equipage fit for an ambassador—the vehicle and the steeds being obtained, like the arms blazoned on his panels, upon credit. ”

“ I asked immediately, 'What young heir, or lover, owned that glittering equipage!' But my companion interrupted, 'Do not you see there the mourning Æsculapius?' 'The mourning!' said I. 'Yes, Isaac,' said Pacolet, 'he is in deep mourning, and is the languishing, hopeless lover of the divine Hebe, the emblem of Youth and Beauty. That excellent and learned sage you behold in that furniture is the strongest instance imaginable that love is the most powerful of all things. ”

“ In the success that has in every century attended the rascally enterprises of pretenders to the art of medicine, is found a touching evidence of the sorrow, credulity, and ignorance of the generations that have passed, or are passing, to the silent home where the pain and joy, the simplicity and cunning, of this world are alike of insignificance. ”

“ Look away for a few seconds from the throng of miserable objects who press round the empiric's stage; wipe out for a brief while the memory of their woes, and regard the style and arts of the practitioner who, with a trunk full of nostrums, bids disease to vanish, and death to retire from the scenes of his triumph. ”

“ Loutherbourg became notorious for curing people without medicine. God, they proclaimed, had endowed them with a miraculous power of healing the impoverished sick, by looking upon them and touching them. Of course every one who presumed to doubt the statement was regarded as calling in question the miracles of holy writ, and was exclaimed against as an infidel. The doctor's house was besieged with enormous crowds. The good man and his lady refused to take any fee whatever, and issued gratuitous tickets amongst the mob, which would admit the bearers into the Loutherbourgian presence. ”

“ For a time his great poem, "The Dispensary," covered the apothecaries and anti-dispensarians with ridicule. It rapidly passed through numerous editions—in each of which, as was elegantly observed, the world lost and gained much. To say that of all the books, pamphlets, and broad-sheets thrown out by the combatants on both sides, it is by far the one of the greatest merit, would be scant justice, when it might almost be said that it is the only one of them that can now be read by a gentleman without a sense of annoyance and disgust. ”

“ An admirable servant—honest and well-intentioned at all times—just then confused and loquacious—John remembered him how often his master had impressed upon him that it was his duty not to gossip about the places he stopped at in his rounds, as professional secrecy was a virtue scarcely less necessary in a doctor's man-servant than in a doctor. ”