The doctors of the previous two centuries were mostly Sangrados, who bled and purged their patients most unmercifully; but we must say this to their credit, they did not descend to the sublime atrocity of microbes, bacilli, and all the other horrors of the microscopic mania now sending unnumbered nervous people into lunatic asylums. And so they had not, like their modern compeers, the chance of amusing themselves and paying one another professional compliments by sending glass tubes, filled with the deadly spawn, from one country to another by ship and rail. Fancy one of those tubes getting accidentally broken, or being intentionally smashed for a lark on board a passenger steamer. Why, this would speedily become a vessel laden with corpses! At least, according to modern teaching, which, _entre nous_, we have no more faith in than we have in many other medical dicta. A man is ill from over gorging or drinking, a child ails from a surfeit of sweets or from catching a disease playing with other children in the streets or at school. The doctor is called in, and instead of telling the man, ’You have made a beast of yourself,’ or correctly indicating the cause of the child’s illness, he sniffs about and says: ’There is something the matter with your drains: I can smell sewer-gas.’ And presently the sanitary inspector arrives, and orders the pulling up and renewal of the drains, and for days the house is filled with the effluvia supposed to be poisonous. How is it the whole family do not die off? Well, scavengers who daily deal with offal and garbage of the most offensive kind, the men who work down in the sewers, enjoy robust health; the latter only suffer when they are suddenly plunged into an excess of sewer-gas, but it is the quantity and not the quality that injures.
The excessive treacliness of modern doctors, as we have just shown, is as objectionable as was the brimstone treatment of some of their predecessors. A principle with modern doctors is never to acknowledge themselves nonplussed. The old doctors now and then confessed themselves beaten. Said an Æsculapius who had been called in to prescribe for a child, after diagnosing, as the ridiculous farce of tongue-speering and pulse-squeezing is called: ’This here babe has got a fever; now, I ain’t posted up in fevers, but I will send her something that will throw her into fits, and I’m a stunner on fits.’ And modern doctors, indeed, have no occasion to admit ignorance since the invention of the liver. When they cannot tell what is the matter with a man, or they are too urbane to reproach him with his excesses, his liver is out of order—and that is an organ which cannot possibly be examined and its condition be verified so as to prove or disprove the practitioner’s assertion. I assume that nine out of ten people don’t know where or what the liver is—I’m sure I don’t, and don’t want to; but as Sancho Panza blessed the man who invented sleep, the doctors should bless their colleague who invented the liver! Abernethy, of whom more hereafter, with all his eccentricity, was honest enough to confess that he never cured or pretended to cure anyone, which only quacks did. He despised the humbug of the profession, and its arts to mislead and deceive patients. He only attempted to second Nature in her efforts. He admitted that he could not remove rheumatism, that opprobrium of the faculty, and no doctor can; a residence in a warm and ever sunny clime, or a long course of Turkish baths, can do it. Hence sings Allan Ramsay’s ’Gentle Shepherd’: