In England the medical profession rose in public estimation from the time when Henry VIII., with that view, incorporated several members of the profession into a body, community, and perpetual college, since called the College of Physicians. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their opposite characteristics of vulgarity and romance, of squalor and luxury, of ignorance and grand discoveries in science, of prejudice and intelligence, were highly conducive to the formation and cultivation of individualism and originality of character; hence those two centuries abounded in ’oddities’ and ’eccentricities,’ and in no section of society more than in the medical. The members of that profession could very readily and appropriately then be divided into two great schools—the Rough and the Smooth, the fierce dispensers of Brimstone and the gentle administrators of Treacle. The present century, with its levelling tendencies, opposed to all originality and so-called eccentricity in speech, custom, and costume, reducing all gentlemen in full dress to the rank of waiters, has nearly abolished the sulphury Galen; in fact, he would scarcely be tolerated now. People submit to certain foolish pretensions now, such as those of thought-reading and pin-hunting cranks, and similar mental eccentricities; but they must be administered mildly, there must be a treacly flavour about them, for—
’This is an age of flatness, dull and dreary, Society is like a washed-out chintz, Which scandal renders somewhat foul and smeary; And yet, without its malice, lies, and hints, E’en fashion’s children would at last grow weary Of looking at the faded cotton prints To which respectability subdues Our uncontrolled imagination’s hues.’
Hence the medical showmen of the present day must accompany the ’exhibition’ of their nostrums with dulcet sounds and honeyed speeches, especially when treating those nursed in the lap of affluence; and, accustomed as they are to adulation, the medico who can condescend to feed them with well-disguised flattery, or assume the tone of abject servility, has too often the credit of possessing superior skill and science. And the patients, in the words of Byron, travestied—
