Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 February 1884 — Old-Fgshioned Doctors and Their Quack Remedies. [ARTICLE]

Old-Fgshioned Doctors and Their Quack Remedies.

It is hard to realize the fact that the healing art ym never in so advanced or so hopeful a condition m it is at present; and that man was never so little foolish in the matter of taking medicine as he is now. There are old men in Europe who remember when barbers did most of the common doctoring, such as drawing teeth, bleeding, and giving physic. A “course of medicine,’ at least onoe a year, and sometimes twice, or even four times in a year, was once considered by prudent parents as essential to the family health. Whole households, as well as whole regiments, took simultaneous medicine. The custom lingered as late as the time of Nicholas Nickleby, who saw Mrs. Squeers ladle out brimstone and molasses to all the pupils in Dotheboys Hall before breakfast, to curb their impetuous appetites. Indeed, I am not sure there are not persons who still adhere to the practice. Until quite recently bleeding was practiced for almost every complaint One of the first men in this country to perceive the folly of this practice was Thomas Jefferson, who, as early as 1765, used te give directions to his overseers when he left home to “never bleed a negro.” Although much laughed at by his neighbors for his new-fangled notion, he lived to see it on the way to general adoption. \ He used to relate an incident that occurred when he was Vice President, on one of his journeys home from Philadelphia, then the national capital. The landlady of a hotel where he stayed had just returned from the funeral of a young relative. “But, Mr. Jefferson,” said she, “we have one comfort in our affliction. We have the consolation of knowing that everything was done for him that could be done. He was bled, sir, six and twenty times. ” We read in old newspapers high ecomiums upon persons who, happening to be near when some one was seized by violent disease, or fell down in a fit, had the presence of mind to open a vein instantly, and thus save the sick man’s life. It is only within a few years that people have begun to use their reason in applying remedies for sickness. When Walter Scott was a little and a weakly boy, he was taken into the country in order that he might be wrapped every morning in a sheep skin, warm from the sheep’s back. The only healing property in the sheep skin was the warmth, and this he could have had without going into the country or into the skin for it. An enterprising man in London used to advertise that he had magnetic beds of such powerful healing force that a diseased person by sleeping in oije of them a single night would be restored to the health and vivacity of youth. He prudently charged 50 guineas for such night’s lodging, and it is highly probable that he had patients, for, as old Pliny remarked in the first century of the Christian era: “The medical is the only one of all the arts in which the moment a man declares himself to be an adept, he is at once believed; while there is at the same time no imposture the results of which are more fraught with peril.”— James Parton, in Youth’s Companion.