Robert Southey

Lady Wortley Montagu's Remark upon Credulity.—Superstitions of the English respecting the Cure of Diseases.—Sickness and Healing connected with Superstition.—Wesley's Primitive Physic.—Quacks.—Dr Graham.—Tractors.—Magnetic Girdles.—Quoz.—Quack Medicines.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the best letter-writer of this or of any other country, has accounted for the extraordinary facility with which her countrymen are duped by the most ignorant quacks, very truly and very ingeniously. "The English," she says, "are more easily infatuated than any other people by the hope of a panacea, nor is there any other country in the world where such great fortunes are made by physicians. I attribute this to the foolish credulity of mankind. As we no longer trust in miracles and relics, we run as eagerly after receipts and doctors, and the money which was given three centuries ago for the health of the soul, is now given for the health of the body, by the same sort of people, women and half-witted men. Quacks are despised in countries where they have shrines and images."

How much to be lamented is the perversion of a mind like hers, which, had it not been heretical, would have been so truly excellent! She perceives the truth; but having been nursed up in a false religion, and afterwards associated with persons who had none, she does not perceive the whole truth, and confounds light and darkness. The foolish credulity of mankind!—To be without faith and hope is as unnatural a state for the heart as to be without affections. Man is a credulous animal; perhaps he has never yet been defined by a characteristic which more peculiarly and exclusively designates him, certainly never by a nobler one; for faith and hope are what the heretics mean by credulity. The fact is, as she states it. Infidelity and heresy cannot destroy the nature of man, but they pervert it; they deprive him of his trust in God, and he puts it in man; they take away the staff of his support, and he leans upon a broken reed.

In the worst sufferings and the most imminent peril a true catholic never needs despair; such is the power of the saints, and the infinite mercy of God and the most holy Mary: but the heretics in such cases have only to despair and die. They have no saint to look to for every particular disease, no faith in relics to make them whole. If a piece of the true cross were brought to a dying Englishman, though its efficacy had been proved by a thousand miracles, he would reject it even at the last gasp; such is the pride and obstinacy of heresy, and so completely does it harden the heart.

There are a thousand facts to verify the remark of Lady Wortley. The boasted knowledge of England has not sunk deep; it is like the golden surface of a lackered watch, which covers, and but barely covers, the base metal. The great mass of the people are as ignorant, and as well contented with their ignorance, as any the most illiterate nation in Europe: and even among those who might be expected to know better, it is astonishing how slowly information makes way to any practical utility. In domestic medicine for instance;—a defluxion is here called a cold, and therefore for its name's sake must be expelled by heat. Oil is employed to soften a hard cough, and lemon juice to cut it; because in English sourness is synonymous with sharpness, and what is sharp must needs cut. But it is of superstition that I am to speak, and perverted credulity.

The abracadabra of the old heretics was lately in use as a charm for the ague, and probably still is where the ague is to be found, for that disease has almost wholly disappeared within the last generation. For warts there are manifold charms. The person who wishes to be rid of them takes a stick, and cuts a notch in it for every wart, and buries it, and as it rots the warts are to decay. Or he steals a piece of beef and rubs over them, and buries it in like manner. Or stealing dry peas or beans, and wrapping them up, one for each wart, he carries the parcel to a place where four roads meet, and tosses it over his head, not looking behind to see where it falls; he will lose the warts, and whoever picks it up will have them. But there are gifted old women who have only to slip a thread over these excrescencies, or touch them with their saliva, and they dry away. It is a truth, that we have but too many such superstitious follies; with us, however, there is always some mixture of devotion in them, and the error, though it be an error, and as such deservedly discouraged, is at least pious. He who psalms a sick man, or fancies that the oil from his saint's lamp will heal him of all his complaints, errs on the safe side. Here none of these palliations are to be found; the practices have not merely no reference to religion, but have even the characters of witchcraft. The materials for the charm must be stolen to render them efficacious, secrecy is enjoined, and it is supposed that the evil is only to be got rid of by transferring it to another. In Catholic countries the confessor commands the thief to make restitution,—here the person who has been robbed repairs to a witch or wizard to recover the loss, or learn who the criminal is, by means of a familiar spirit! A Cunning-Man, or a Cunning-Woman, as they are termed, is to be found near every town, and though the laws are occasionally put in force against them, still it is a gainful trade. This it is to deprive credulity of its proper food.

None suffer so severely from this as they who are labouring under diseases; if money is to be gotten, such is the spirit of trade, neither the dying nor the dead are spared, and quackery is carried to greater perfection of villainy here than in any other part of the world. Sickness humbles the pride of man; it forces upon him a sense of his own weakness, and teaches him to feel his dependence upon unseen Powers: that therefore which makes wise men devout, makes the ignorant superstitious. Among savages the physician and the conjurer are always the same. The operations of sickness and of healing are alike mysterious, and hence arises the predilection of many enthusiasts for quackery, and the ostentation which all quacks make of religion, or of some extraordinary power in themselves. The favourite assertion formerly in all countries was, that of an innate gift as a seventh son, I know not on what superstition founded, and of course augmented seven fold in due proportion, if the father had been a seventh son also, or even the mother a seventh daughter, for in this case there is no Salic law. Another has claimed the same privilege because he was born deaf and dumb, as if nature had thus indemnified him for the faculties of which he was deprived. The kings of England long since the schism, though the practice is now disused, have touched for the evil, and used to appoint a day in the Gazette for publicly doing it. Where this divine property has not been ascribed to the physician it has been imputed to the medicine. The most notorious of these worthies who flourishes at present calls his composition the Cordial Balm of Gilead, and prefaces every advertisement with a text from Jeremiah, "Is there no Balm in Gilead? is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?"—Thus the Arabs attribute the virtue of their balm to the blood of those who were slain at Beder. We see among ourselves but too many scandalous proofs of this weakness. A Cistercian historian assures us that he was cured of an obstinate illness by taking a pill of the earth of the pit in which God made Adam: and at this day the rinsings of the cup are eagerly sought after by the sick, notwithstanding the prohibition of the church.

Perhaps we are indebted to the Jews for the vulgar feeling of the divine origin of the healing art. They will have it that Adam had an intuitive knowledge of medicine, and that Solomon's Book of Trees[15] and Herbs was written by inspiration. The founder of the Quakers was in danger of taking to the practice of physic from a similar notion. He fancied that he was in the same state as Adam before the fall, and that the nature and virtues of all things were opened to him, and he was at a stand, as he says, whether he should practise physic for the good of mankind.

Wesley went beyond him, and published what he called Primitive Physic, fancying himself chosen to restore medicine as well as religion, and to prescribe both for body and soul, like StLuke. The greater number of his remedies are old women's receipts, neither good nor ill; but others are of a more desperate nature. For a cold in the head he directs you to pare an orange very thin, roll it up inside out, and put a plug in each nostril; for the wind colic, to eat parched peas; for the gout, to apply a raw beef-steak to the part affected; for raving madness, to set the patient with his head under a great waterfall as long as his strength will bear it; and for asthma and hypochondriasis, to take an ounce of quicksilver every morning! If all his prescriptions had been like this last, his book might have been entitled, after the favourite form of the English, Every Man his own Poisoner. In general they are sufficiently innocent; which is fortunate, for I have selected these instances from the twenty-first edition of his work, and no doubt the purchasers place in it implicit confidence.

Any scientific discovery is immediately seized by some of the numerous adventurers in this country, who prey upon the follies and the miseries of their fellow-creatures. The most eminent quack of the last generation was a Doctor Graham, who tampered with electricity in a manner too infamous to be reported, and for which he ought to have received the most exemplary public punishment. This man was half mad, and his madness at last, contrary to the usual process, got the better of his knavery. His latest method of practice was something violent; it was to bury his patients up to the chin in fresh mould. J. saw half a score of them exhibited in this manner for a shilling:—a part of the exhibition was to see them perform afterwards upon shoulders of mutton, to prove that when they rose from the grave they were as devouring as the grave itself. The operation lasted four hours: they suffered, as might be seen in their countenances, intensely from cold for the first two, during the third they grew warmer, and in the last perspired profusely, so that when they were taken out the mould reeked like a new dunghill. Sailors are said to have practised this mode of cure successfully for the scurvy. The doctor used sometimes to be buried himself for the sake of keeping his patients company: one day, when he was in this condition, a farmer emptied a watering-pot upon his head to make him grow. When J. saw him he was sitting up to the neck in a bath of warm mud, with his hair powdered and in full dress. As he was haranguing upon the excellent state of health which he enjoyed from the practice of earth-bathing, as he called it, J. asked him, Why then, if there was nothing the matter with him, he sate in the mud? The question puzzled him.—Why, he said,—why—it was—it was—it was to show people that it did no harm,—that it was quite innocent,—that it was very agreeable: and then brightening his countenance with a smile at the happiness of the thought, he added, "It gives me, sir, a skin as soft as the feathers of Venus' dove." This man lived upon vegetables, and delighted in declaiming against the sin of being carnivorous, and the dreadful effects of making the stomach a grave and charnel-house for slaughtered bodies. Latterly he became wholly an enthusiast, would madden himself with ether, run out into the streets, and strip himself to clothe the first beggar whom he met.

Galvanism, like electricity, was no sooner discovered than it was applied to purposes of quackery. The credit of this is due to America; and it must be admitted that the inventor has the honour of having levied a heavier tax upon credulity than any of his predecessors ever dared attempt: in this respect he is the Mr Pitt of his profession. For two pieces of base metal, not longer than the little finger, and not larger than a nail, he is modest enough to charge five guineas. These Tractors, as they are called, are to cure all sores, swellings, burns, tooth-ache, &c. &c.: and that the purchasers may beware of counterfeits, which is the advice always given by this worshipful fraternity, a portrait of the tractor is engraved upon his hand-bills, both a front view and a back one, accompanied with a striking likeness of the leathern case in which they are contained. Many cures have certainly been performed by them, and how those cures are performed has been as certainly exemplified by some very ingenious experiments which were made at Bath and Bristol. Pieces of wood, and others of common iron, shaped and coloured like the tractors, were tried there upon some paralytic patients in the Infirmary. The mode of operating consists in nothing more than in gently stroking the part affected with the point of the instrument, and so, according to the theory, conducting off into the atmosphere the galvanic matter of pain! It is impossible that where there is no sore, this can give any pain whatever,—yet the patients were in agonies. One of them declared that he had suffered less when pieces of the bone of his leg had been cut out,—and they were actually enabled to move limbs which before were dead with palsy.—False relics have wrought true miracles.

Another gentleman quacks with oxygen, and recommends what he calls vital wine as a cure for all diseases. Vital wine must be admitted to be something extraordinary; but what is that to a people for whom solar and lunar tinctures have been prepared! Another has risen from a travelling cart to the luxuries of a chariot by selling magnetic girdles; his theory is, that the magnetic virtue attracts the iron in the blood, and makes the little red globules revolve faster, each upon its own axis, in the rapidity and regularity of which revolutions health consists,—and this he proves to the people by showing them how a needle is set in motion by his girdles. But magnetism has been made the basis of a far more portentous quackery, which is in all its parts so extraordinary that it merits a full account, not merely in a Picture of England, but also in the history of the century which has just expired. My next shall develop this at length.

The reason why these scoundrels succeed to so much greater an extent in England than in any other country, is because they are enabled to make themselves so generally known by means of the newspapers, and, in consequence of the great internal commerce, to have their agents every where, and thus do as much mischief every where, as if the Devil had endowed them with a portion of his own ubiquity. Not only do the London papers find their way over the whole kingdom, but every considerable town in the provinces has one or more of its own, and in these they insert their long advertisements with an endless perseverance which must attract notice, and make them and their medicines talked of. How effectually this may be done, I can illustrate by an odd anecdote. Some twelve or fifteen years ago a wager was laid between two persons in London, that the one would, in the course of a few weeks, make any nonsensical word, which the other should choose to invent, a general subject of conversation. Accordingly he employed people to write in chalk upon all the walls in London the word Quoz. Every body saw this word wherever they went staring them in the face, and nobody could divine its meaning. The newspapers noticed it,—What can it be? was the general cry, and the man won his wager.

Upon this system the quacks persist in advertising at an enormous expense, for which, however, they receive ample interest,—and which indeed they do not always honestly pay. Part of their scheme is to advertise in newspapers which are newly set up, and which, therefore, insert their notices at an under price; and one fellow, when he was applied to for payment, refused, saying that his clerk had ordered the insertion without his knowledge. To go to law with him would have been a remedy worse than the disease.

is true here as well as in other countries.

These wretches know the sufferings and the hopes of mankind, and they mock the one and aggravate the other. They who suffer, listen gladly to any thing which promises relief; and these men insert such cases of miraculous cures, signed and sworn to and attested, that they who do not understand how often the recovery may be real and the cure imaginary,—the fact true and the application false,—yield to the weight of human testimony, and have faith to the destruction of their bodies, though they will have none to the salvation of their souls.

Attestations to these cases are procured in many ways. A quack of the first water for a long time sent his prescriptions to the shop of some druggists of great respectability. After some months he called there in his carriage, and introduced himself, saying that they must often have seen his name, and that he now came to complain of them, for unintentionally doing him very serious mischief. "Gentlemen," said he, "you charge your drugs too low. As medical men yourselves you must know how much depends upon faith, and people have no faith in what is cheap,—they will not believe that any thing can do them good unless they pay smartly for it. I must beg you to raise your prices, and raise them high too, double and treble what they now are at least,—or I really must send my patients elsewhere." This was strange, and what they were requested to do was not after the ordinary custom of fair trading;—but as it did not appear that there could be any other advantage resulting to him from it than what he had stated, they at last promised to do as he desired. This visit led to some further acquaintance; and after another long interval, they were persuaded one day to dine with their friend the Doctor. During dinner the servant announced that a person from the country wished to see the Doctor, and thank him for having cured him. "Oh," said he, "don't you know that I am engaged? These people wear me out of my very life! Give the good man something to eat and drink, tell him I am very glad he is got well, and send him away." The servant came in again,—"Sir, he will not go,—he says it is a most wonderful cure,—that you have raised him from the dead, and he cannot be happy till he has seen you and thanked you himself. He is come a long way from the country, sir." "Gentlemen," said the Doctor, "you see how it is. I do not know how to get rid of him, unless you will have the goodness to allow him just to come in, and then he will be satisfied and let us alone. This is the way I am plagued!" In came the countryman, and began to bless the Doctor, as the means under God, of snatching him from the grave; and offered him money tied up in a leathern bag, saying it was all the compensation he could make; but if it were ten times as much it would be too little,—the Doctor crying, "Well, well, my friend, I am glad to see you so well," and refusing to take his money. Still the man persisted, and would tell the company his case,—he could not in conscience be easy if he did not,—and he began a long story, which the Doctor first attempted to stop, and then affected not to listen to,—till at length, by little and little, he began to give ear to it, and seemed greatly interested before he had done, and interrupted him with questions. At last he called for pen and ink, saying—"This is so very extraordinary a case that I must not lose it;" and making the man repeat it as he wrote, frequently said to his visitors, "Gentlemen, I beg you will take notice of this,—it is a very remarkable case:" and when he had finished writing it, he said to them, "You have heard the good man's story, and I am sure can have no objection to subscribe your names as witnesses." The trick was apparent, and they begged leave to decline appearing upon the occasion. "Why, gentlemen," said he, "you and I had better continue friends. You must be sensible that I have been the means of putting very great and unusual profits into your hands, and you will not surely refuse me so trifling a return as that of attesting a case which you have heard from the man himself, and can have no doubt about!" There was no remedy: they were caught, felt themselves in his power, and were obliged to submit to the mortification of seeing themselves advertised as witnesses to a cure which they knew to be a juggle.

This same man once practised a similar trick in such a way that the wit almost atones for the roguery. Some young men of fashion thought it would be a good joke to get him to dinner and make him drunk, and one of them invited him for this purpose. The Doctor went, and left his friend the countryman to follow him, and find him out;—of course it was still better sport for them to hear the case. But the next morning it appeared in the newspapers with the names of the whole party to attest it.

Government gives an indirect sort of sanction to these worst of all impostors. They enter the receipt of their medicines as a discovery, and for the payment of about 100l. sterling, take out a privilege, which is here called a patent, prohibiting all other persons from compounding the same; then they announce their discoveries as by the king's authority, and thus the ignorant are deceived. The Scotch[17] Universities also sell them degrees in medicine without the slightest examination,—this trade in degrees being their main support,—and they are legally as true Doctors in medicine as the best of the profession. This infamous practice might soon be put a stop to. Their medicines may be classed under three heads; they are either such as can do no good, but produce immediate exhilaration, because they contain either laudanum or spirits; or they are well-known drugs given in stronger doses than usual, so as to be sure of producing immediate good at the probable chance of occasioning after mischief; or they are more rarely new medicines, introduced before the regular practitioners will venture to employ them. In this way arsenic was first employed. The famous fever powder of Dr James is of this description; he knew it would be adopted in general practice, and, to secure the profits to his representatives after the term of his privilege should have expired, had recourse to means which cannot be justified. Every person upon taking out a patent is obliged to specify upon oath the particular discovery on which he grounds his claim to it. He entered a false receipt: so that, though the ingredients have been since detected by analysis, still the exact proportions and the method of preparation are supposed to be known only to those who have succeeded to his rights, and who in consequence still derive an ample income from the success of this artifice.

There is yet another mystery of iniquity to be revealed. Some of the rascals who practise much in a particular branch of their art are connected with gamblers. They get intimate with their young moneyed patients, and as they keep splendid houses, invite them to grand entertainments, where part of the gang are ready to meet them, and when the wine is done with the dice are produced.