sex. To be spoken with,’ &c.
‘An experienced physician, who has long studied the doctrine of
antidotes against all sorts of poison and infection, has, after forty
years’ practice, arrived to such skill as may, with God’s blessing, direct
persons how to prevent their being touched by any contagious
distemper whatsoever. He directs the poor gratis.’
I take notice of these by way of specimen. I could give you two or
three dozen of the like and yet have abundance left behind. ‘Tis
sufficient from these to apprise any one of the humour of those times,
and how a set of thieves and pickpockets not only robbed and cheated
the poor people of their money, but poisoned their bodies with odious
and fatal preparations; some with mercury, and some with other things
as bad, perfectly remote from the thing pretended to, and rather
hurtful than serviceable to the body in case an infection followed.
I cannot omit a subtility of one of those quack operators, with which
he gulled the poor people to crowd about him, but did nothing for
them without money. He had, it seems, added to his bills, which he
gave about the streets, this advertisement in capital letters, viz.,
‘He gives advice to the poor for nothing.’
Abundance of poor people came to him accordingly, to whom he
made a great many fine speeches, examined them of the state of their
health and of the constitution of their bodies, and told them many
good things for them to do, which were of no great moment. But the
issue and conclusion of all was, that he had a preparation which if
they took such a quantity of every morning, he would pawn his life
they should never have the plague; no, though they lived in the house
with people that were infected. This made the people all resolve to
have it; but then the price of that was so much, I think ’twas half-a-
crown. ‘But, sir,’ says one poor woman, ‘I am a poor almswoman and
am kept by the parish, and your bills say you give the poor your help
for nothing.’ ‘Ay, good woman,’ says the doctor, ‘so I do, as I published
there. I give my advice to the poor for nothing, but not my physic.’
‘Alas, sir!’ says she, ‘that is a snare laid for the poor, then; for you give
them advice for nothing; that is to say, you advise them gratis, to buy
your physic for their money; so does every shop-keeper with his
wares.’ Here the woman began to give him ill words, and stood at his
door all that day, telling her tale to all the people that came, till the
doctor finding she turned away his customers, was obliged to call her
upstairs again, and give her his box of physic for nothing, which
perhaps, too, was good for nothing when she had it.
But to return to the people, whose confusions fitted them to be
imposed upon by all sorts of pretenders and by every mountebank.
There is no doubt but these quacking sort of fellows raised great gains
out of the miserable people, for we daily found the crowds that ran
after them were infinitely greater, and their doors were more thronged
than those of Dr Brooks, Dr Upton, Dr Hodges, Dr Berwick, or any,
though the most famous men of the time. I And I was told that some
of them got five pounds a day by their physic.
But there was still another madness beyond all this, which may
serve to give an idea of the distracted humour of the poor people at
that time: and this was their following a worse sort of deceivers than
any of these; for these petty thieves only deluded them to pick their
pockets and get their money, in which their wickedness, whatever it
was, lay chiefly on the side of the deceivers, not upon the deceived.
But in this part I am going to mention, it lay chiefly in the people
deceived, or equally in both; and this was in wearing charms, philtres,
exorcisms, amulets, and I know not what preparations, to fortify the
body with them against the plague; as if the plague was not the hand