Recal to your recollection, gentlemen, the denunciations he has so often made against every medical practitioner who should presume, either directly or indirectly, to offer any patronage to remedies which bore even the most distant resemblance to a nostrum. How often have the walls of the medical theatres of Saint Thomas’s hospital, and Windmill street, echoed loud responses to his declamations against the varlets, who should dare to recommend means, in the profits of the consumption of which the whole profession could not participate? How often have you received his invitations to send him your effusions and declamations against quackery, to receive an efficient publication in his journal? and what number of that journal has appeared without performing his promise, by honoring those effusions with a place in its immortal pages?
Lest even these most important considerations should still find you inexorable, I trust I can show, by examining his conduct in regard to the quack medicine in question, that, if it be not praise-worthy, it is, at least, defensible.
The title of the nostrum which has had the assistance of Dr B. in being introduced to the notice of a grateful public, is “A NEW MEDICINE FOR THE GOUT.” The pretended discoverer of this specific is, for very commendable, or, which is the same thing, very _prudent_ reasons, kept behind the curtain. I wish, however, to express my utter disbelief that either Dr Brodum or Dr Solomon is the happy mortal, however similar the style of the pamphlet, announcing this new medicine, may be to their erudite writings, and the pretensions of the said medicine to “balms of Gilead” and to “nervous cordials.”
’Gainst Belgraves, Colquhouns, Wilberforces!
What business had these fellows to intrude their noses into the concerns of the Westminster infirmary? Brother B. had an undoubted right to manage, or _mis_manage, the funds of a _medical_ institution, as best suited his own convenience, without their troublesome interference.
I hereby enter a protest against any one of my commentators, whether he be Vanscanderdigindich the elder, or Hansvanshognosuch, his cousin _German_ (two _Dutch_ geniuses, who have promised to furnish the next edition of this my pithy poem with a whole ass-load of annotations) or any other gentlemen critics or reviewers of equal profoundity, presuming to intimate, that I intend, by this passage, the smallest disrespect to your _pedestrian_ physicians. Far from that; I know that many good and great men (like myself for example) cannot even pay a shilling for hackney-coach hire. No, gentlemen; I have two great objects in view, to wit: