Note 10 — Chapter V

The influence of physicians over the persons of their female patients is not less remarkable than true. This is very well, when trust is placed in such as are truly virtuous and honorable; but when otherwise, beware of a dangerous villain. It is almost a physiological impossibility for a young woman (however virtuously disposed) to resist the improper familiarities of an unprincipled physician. She may, indeed, hesitate and wonder at first, but the glisters and squills which he will administer, as indispensably necessary for the preservation of health, are charged with those drugs which excite the animal passions to an uncontrollable degree, and in this state they are a sure prey to the rapacious maw of a medical buzzard. This peace-destroying practice is carried on to an extent which almost baffles credulity. Our wives and daughters cannot be too often or too earnestly warned against employing any physician who is not known to possess the highest moral rectitude. Very old physicians should certainly be preferred; and those young bucks whose diploma is a distended pair of nostrils, should as certainly be avoided. Especially would we particularize, as one of the latter class, a pedantic simpleton, with a Scotch name, at the West End, in Boston! Shun that fellow as you would a pestilence!

To our New York readers we would instance a long-shanked, black-haired whiskerando, who hails (or did, in 1844,) from a respectable boarding-house on Lispenard street, in that city. He sports an “M.D.” and a cane, is as silly a mountebank as you will meet in many a summer’s day. His “importance” and gasconade are insufferable, and his character is a blight to all that is decent or endearing.