harm. That is as far from being true as their knowledge is far from truth. To inspect Reece or Buchan, and administer whatever chance, or the cook dictates, is their only rule. They do not know or reflect that it is the disease, not the medicine, which is to be known, that in no two stages does the same disease admit the same remedies, that a name is not a disease, that the same named disease is not the same disease, even in two individuals, and that, even were all this so, they have not the means of knowing one disease from another. If the books of Buchan, Reece, and the rest, had been burned by the common hangman, it would have been an act worthy of the law which sets up to regulate the practice of physic as a profession, and leaves all interlopers and dilettantes free to commit murder at pleasure. If the Bountifuls do no harm, they need not do any thing: if their medicines are neutral, they are useless. But even neutral medicines, bread-pills if they please, do harm, if they divert the patient from attending to an insidious disease, and keep off the only advice that ought to be sought. The fact itself is matter of daily occurrence. There is a colic, perhaps, (we must illustrate at the risk of professional language) and my lady administers peppermint. By to-morrow, the apothecary, who ought to have been seat for yesterday, is called in, and mortification has commenced. The patient dies, and the Bountiful continues the same career. As to the facts, the truth of all this, and much more, of all that we have said and much that we might have said, we leave it to the experience of those who have had experience in the Bountiful practice. We have seen mothers kill their children, as effectually as if they had administered poison; and this, even in defiance of advice and caution. We could name an instance where a mother exterminated in succession her whole family, of seven children; and it is an instance not known to ourselves alone. The truth is, that instead of being innocent, their practice is often extremely and dangerously active. When they take to the lancet, they will complete it. In a minor way, perhaps, it is notorious to the whole world, that the great mass of failures in vaccination has arisen from the interference of women and country curates, or of others attempting what they could not understand. Thus chiefly has discredit been brought on this useful discovery. And thus also does a collateral mischief arise from the prevalence of this dilettante vanity and conceit. Every woman, and now most men, have learned to read their prescriptions, and to reason in their own way about them, with numerous evil results. As far as the power of medicine influences the disease through the imagination, it is often rendered useless or pernicious. Thus also they decline that, of which they pretend to judge better than the practitioner, or alter or increase the doses, or, to use a fashionable phrase, cheat the doctor, forgetting that it is themselves they are cheating. Thus also a physician is often deterred from the use of a powerful or a probable remedy, knowing that the blame of failure will be laid on himself and the medicine, not on the disease; and thus also any bad change in its symptoms or progress, is attributed to the medicine administered, to the loss of the physician's reputation. And now perhaps we might leave the Lady Bountifuls to God and their own consciences, did we think they possessed any in this matter. As far as relates to their own personal self-practice, we would rather try to influence them by assuring them that they ruin, by their calomel and salts, the beauty which they are so anxious to preserve and improve. We would try to influence them in this also, by telling them that they render themselves odious to our sex; peevish, fretful, anxious, gloomy, and irascible. We might tell them that they become nervous, and that there is nothing which man so abhors as a nervous woman. We might also tell them, that, to practice physic, is a masculine assumption which a man detests; that to practice on themselves, to frequent Cheltenham and to talk of its necessity; that to be acquainted with medical terms, and to talk, or even insinuate, physic, in any of its forms or modes, is nauseating and disgusting; and that love flies, as it did from Celia, at the repulsive notions excited by physic, apothecaries, calomel, and the whole detestable jargon. BUTLERIANA, FROM UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS. No. III. [WE continue our extracts from the singular hoard of similes, allusions, and reasonings, which the author of Hudibras was in the habit of accumulating in his common-place book. The present selection is made from a mass of the same kind, under the head of ASTROLOGY. We have avoided such as the author had used in his admirable poem.-ED.] How planets in conjunction, ev'ry minute Are chopt and chang'd, yet do their bus'ness in it: While those that since the world's original Have been unfix'd, yet never could forestall. As 'tis impertinent for cheats to fix Among the understanders of their tricks But rather strive to change the air and stroll To catch the ignorant, unwary fool. Whence 'tis the stars that dwell in th' upper æther, Have all their interests only in the weather: As their influences are said by some To give us what they never had at home: So all their other operations tend To as ridiculous and vain an end. For there's no other work of nature else The ancients held no omen was so dire As to spill water when they talk'd of fire. And that the certain'st schemes they had of thieves Believ'd the stars knew less of our affairs, Or how so many mortals upon their centres Should be hang'd up with all their weights like tenters. The sun and moon in heaven, at so vast Do of a seeming magnitude appear. Some make the sun to the under-earth draw near So many scores of his diameter, But cannot tell if the ancient's days and hours Whether the fix'd stars are but holes, to pass Had sunk in the air and founder'd down to Nadir. Were ignorant of what themselves had done Can take the height of stars, yet do not know Have beat their brains, about a freak and worm, For he that only looks among the stars For those are frequent'st by the star's detected And if the Heavens be but one constellation For tradesmen and mechanicks are the primest The most profound and deep astrologer; As those that buy a salmon draught, The effect, of this, or that erection When all your several ways of virtuosing The factories of folly and imposture, That with the weak and ignorant pass muster: JAN. 1826. That serve for nothing, if they should be true, All meant for scarecrows false and counterfeit, Are no more reverend, than the beards of warts. To deal in love and news, and weather, For witches are no sooner taken As Empson with the sieves he wrought, One night the sun far more obscures, The moon herself does never steal the light The sea itself, throws up the beach and sand, Did not Menippus mounted in the moon, Or, she at the entrance of the eclipse, foreshow And did not only make the dire portent But was the real cause of the event, For the ancient Romans, only by their cunning For he that for his profit's brought t'obey Hudibras. |