Note O — PART II. (continued 2)

That the ignorant, the thoughtless, and the “fashionable,” should become the dopes of mountebank-imposture is not much to be wondered at; but that persons of respectability and character, the heads of the Church and of the State, (I have not yet ascertained that that sly old beldam “The Law” has stupified herself so much as to lend her countenance to the imposture,) should give their sanction and support, and endanger their health and lives, by either patronizing or using the deleterious compounds of mountebanks, and thus becoming the dupes of the most groveling imposture and the vilest quackery, cannot really be reasonably accounted for. The old worm-mountebank in Long Acre boasts that he has a list of fifteen hundred “Clergymen” who can give testimony of the virtues of his nostrums. The miraculous powers of Barclay’s Antibilious Pills, Ching’s Worm Lozenges, and some other articles in the list of quack medicines, are attested by some “Right Reverend Fathers in God!” Nor was that notorious and impudent mountebank “le Docteur” James Graham, who cured patients by only breathing the air of his “Apollo” hall or chamber in the Adelphi, which was always impregnated (as he said) with celestial æther and influences, without noble and reverend patrons. But the consummation of dupery was most powerfully displayed in the case of the old New England quack, Cherokee Whitlaw. In the case of this Yankee quondam gardener, “Royals” (as well of native as of foreign breed), “right honourables,” “reverends,” “SENATORS,” and even some gentle “ladyships,” were his patrons, and those of his mountebank-asylum at Bayswater, and the recommenders of his “American Herb Extracts,” which were a compound of cabbage water, treacle, turpentine, and Epsom salts, and for a pint of which the canting old varlet was barefaced enough to demand eight shillings in lawful British specie, though the cost price of the mixture did not exceed three half-pence-farthing. But it is a lamentable fact, as Dr. Morrison observes in his well-intentioned little work, entitled “Medicine No Mystery,” that in nineteen cases out of twenty (and this, he emphatically remarks, is the proportion that ignorance bears to knowledge,) the charlatan, with his mysterious phrases and gestures, is more sought after and more prized than the accomplished and experienced physician; “so much of the leaven of the old idea of the connexion between physic and occult and mysterious sciences still subsists,—of those days when physicians pretended to judge of their patients’ diseases by seeing their urine; when the stars were consulted before a dose of physic was taken; when the king’s evil was supposed to be cured by royal touch; when women flocked to surround the body of the executed criminal, and rubbed his hands to their breasts as a cure for cancer or epilepsy, &c.”

The mock philanthropy of the contemptible quack Whitlaw, and the blasphemous, the monstrously blasphemous and diabolical effrontery of the conventicle and meeting pulpit-charlatans, (the vile tools of harpyism and religious knavery,) who puffed off this “threadbare juggler’s” disgusting impostures by an odious comparison of his selfish and detestable tricks with the enlarged and godlike benevolence and charity of the Saviour of mankind, deserve the severest reprobation and chastisement, though sanctioned by the weak and culpable patronage of royals, nobles, statesmen, M.P.’s, and divines, and swallowed by the gaping mouths of the ignorant,—of foolish women, and half witted men. But of the two species of imposture, the pulpit charlatanry of ignorant and selfish empirics is the most disgusting. The diabolical farces of those wolves in sheep’s clothing—their ignorant and designing perversion of the plain practical morality laid down by the Saviour of mankind in the gospel,—the brain-turning and mind-deranging fanaticism they inculcate, and which they profanely and audaciously call soul-searching and sinner-awakening doctrines, and other like unmeaning and abominable stuff which they inculcate under the evident chieftainship of the devil, loudly demands some legislative interference. It has been well observed, that though the benign spirit of toleration has permitted religious empiricism—though folly and ignorance have countenanced medical quackery and imposture—and though there are persons weak enough to entrust their lives and health, as well as their moral and religious instruction, to enthusiastic cobblers and tailors; yet considering the strange infatuation of mankind, and the proneness of human nature to delusion and imposture, it is the duty of every wise and paternal government to protect the weak and uninformed from the designs of the devil’s agents, who, in order to practise their selfish villanies on their unsuspecting victims, become, to use the words of Dr. Robertson the historian, “outrageously Christian” in their professions.