scientific history, not a controversial history,
not even a professional history, but a history
for the vulgar—a history of the doctor in all
ages in his habit as he has lived. Surely,
if the different schools of philosophy, poetry,
music, and painting have found their
historians; if Dr. Johnson could propose,
even, a biography of Eminent Scoundrels;
if insects have their historiographers,
and the beasts that perished and
the reptiles that crawled before the Flood
their annalists; if we have memoirs of
celebrated printers, celebrated quakers,
celebrated pirates, celebrated criminals,
celebrated children, celebrated Smiths, we have
surely a right to expect a popular
biography of celebrated doctors. Let us have
The Faculty—its curiosities, eccentricities, its
lights and shadows; its virtues and faults,
from Avicenna to Abernethy, from Ambrose
Paré to Astley Cooper, from Cardan to
Clarke, from Rondelet to Ricord, from Sir
Thomas Browne the learned knight of Norwich
to Sir Benjamin Brodie, the more
learned baronet of Savile Row.

The history of medical quackery and
imposture alone would fill a spacious library,
supplementary to that of The Faculty, and be
a rich boon to the reading public. From the
charms and philters and dried eelskins
of the old half-conjurors, half-doctors, to
those more learned yet mistaken men, who
as late as the days of the knight of Norwich
believed in the efficacy of Misraïm for curing
wounds, and sold Pharaoh for balsam;
maintaining subtle controversies as to the virtues
of powdered unicorn's horn, dried mermaid's
scales, and the ashes of a phœnix sublimated
and drunk in wine of canary thrice boiled, to
later believers in the cure of the king's evil
by the king's touch;—from these gropers in
the labyrinth of error to the more ignorant,
more pretentious, more versatile, more
successful quacks of modern times, the Sangrados;
the disciples of Molière's Sganarelle whose
panacea for all human ailments was a lump of
cheese; the Katterfeltos, with their hair on
end, wondering at their own wonders; the
Dulcamaras in scarlet coat, top-boots and
powdered hair going about to fairs and
markets with merryandrews and big drums;
the mystic Dr. Graham, with his goddess
Hygeia (in the likeness of a Royal Academy
model); the famous and erudite Dr. Lettsom,
whose confession of faith is said to
have been

          When people's ill they comes to I.
              I purges, bleeds, and sweats 'em;
          Sometimes they live, sometimes they die ;
              What's that to I?
                                          I. Lettsom.

—from the memoirs of these worthies, to the
swarming professors, old and young doctors,
Licentiates of the University of Trincomalee,
Duly Qualified Surgeons, Medical Herbalists
and advertising pill and ointment
impostors of the present day, who clear their
thousands annually by the sale of
nostrums to a besotted and credulous public,
we might at least learn that whilst in
all ages the average of human folly and
credulity has been pretty nearly equal, still, that
side by side with quackery and knavery
that great edifice of science adorned with
probity, and science softened by humanity,
has grown up, which, though far from
complete, is yet an honour and glory to this
century and generation,—I mean the medical
profession of to-day—in short, the
Faculty.

Yes; we want a cunning hand to draw
us the doctor ancient and modern,
nothing extenuating, nor setting down aught in
malice. We want to know all about the
ancient disciples of Galen and Hippocrates;
how they worshipped Esculapius, and whether
the cock they sacrificed to him was a Cochin-
China or a bantarn. We desire acquaintance with
the Arabian Hakim, with his talismans and
amulets; with the despised Jew leech of the
Plantagenet kings, trembling while he
prescribed, and oft paying for the loss of a
diseased life with his own healthy life;
persecuted, reviled, yet with a mine of
learning beneath his gaberdine and greasy
head-dress. We crave to know more of
those jovial practitioners and dispensers, the
monks of old; and whether they took the
same kind of physic themselves that they
dispensed so liberally to the sick at the gates
of their monasteries, or limited their pharmacopœia
to the rich wine which they are said
to have quaffed so frequently, and with so
many ha-has! We seek introduction to the
medieval doctor, riding gravely upon a mule,
with his whole apparatus of surgical
instruments hung at the crupper; his quaint skull
cap, his learned spectacles, his bulky Latin
folios, none of which could save him from the
suspicion of dealing with the devil, or from the
temptation of occasionally wasting his fees
in the purchase of stuffed monsters and dried
reptiles, with perhaps a neat apparatus of
crucibles and alembics for purposes of
alchemy. We call for the doctor of the
seventeenth century, still a learned man, with
square cut cap and falling bands, but with
some glimmerings of facts and science
breaking through the haze of his book-laden brains
—full of mummy and Misraïm, unicorn's horn
and golden water of life yet, but not quite so
confident about them as heretofore—
meditating perchance upon the antiquated
prejudices and pedantries of medicine, much as a
Major General Sir Peregrine Pigtail of the
present day may look upon tight stocks and
bearskin caps and flint locks. Then would
we be eager for a knowledge of the doctor of
the Georgian era, in his square-cut coat,
flapped waistcoat, huge cuffs, powdered wig,
ruffles, three-cornered hat, and sapient
gold-headed cane complete. So on and on till
the doctor of to-day grows upon us, learned,
skilful, knighted, broughamed, degreed,