"Empirics and charlatans are the excrescences of the medical profession; they have obtained in all ages, yet the healing art is not necessarily the occasion for deception; nor the operations of witchcraft, charms, amulets, astrology, alchemy, necromancy, or magic; although it has its mysteries like other branches of occult science."
Paracelsus, the prince of charlatans, styled himself "King of Physic," but, though he professed to have discovered the _elixir of life_, he humbly died at the early age of forty-eight years.
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.