Dr. Garth, the author of the ’Dispensary,’ a poem directed against the Apothecaries and Anti-Dispensarians, a section of the College of Physicians, was very good-natured, but too fond of good living. One night, when he lingered over the bottle at the Kit-Kat Club, though patients were longing for him, Steele reproved him for his neglect of them. ’Well, it’s no great matter at all,’ replied Garth, pulling out a list of fifteen, ’for nine of them have such bad constitutions that not all the physicians in the world can save them, and the other six have such good constitutions that all the physicians in the world cannot kill them.’ The doctor here plainly admitted the uselessness of his supposed science, as in his ’Dispensary’ he admitted drugs to be not only useless, but murderous.
’High where the Fleet Ditch descends in sable streams, To wash the sooty Naiads in the Thames, There stands a structure[#] on a rising hill, Where Tyros take their freedom out to kill.’
[#] Apothecaries’ Hall. A doctor, I forget his name, having obtained some mark of distinction from the Company of Apothecaries, mentioned at a party that the glorious Company of Apothecaries had conferred much honour on him. ’But,’ said a lady, ’what about the noble army of martyrs of patients?’
In Blenheim Street lived Joshua Brookes, the famous anatomist, whose lectures were attended by upwards of seven thousand pupils. His museum was almost a rival of that of John Hunter, and was liberally thrown open to visitors. One evening a coach drew up at his door, a heavy sack was taken out and deposited in the hall, and the servants, accustomed to such occurrences, since their master was in the habit of buying subjects, were about to carry it down the back-stairs into the dissecting-room, when a living subject thrust his head and neck out of one end and begged for his life. The servants in alarm ran to fetch pistols, but the subject continued to beg for mercy in such tones as to assure them they had nothing to fear from him. He had been drunk, and did not know how he got into the sack. Dr. Brookes ordered the sack to be tied loosely round his chin, and sent him in a coach to the watch-house. How he got into the sack may easily be surmised: Some body-snatchers, a tribe then very much to the fore, had no doubt found the man dead drunk in the street, and knowing the doctor to be a buyer of subjects, had taken him there, in the hope that the doctor might begin operating on the body before it recovered consciousness, so as to enable them afterwards to claim the price. In the days when there were dozens of executions in one morning at Newgate, the doctors had a good time of it, for the bodies of the malefactors were handed over to them for dissection. In fact, under the steps leading up to the front-door of Surgeons’ Hall, a handsome building which stood next to Newgate Prison, there was a small door, through which the corpses were introduced into the building. Surgeons’ Hall was pulled down in 1809, to make room for the new Sessions House.