Catherine, the Empress of Russia, was even more munificent than the West Indian planter. When Dr. Dimsdale, for many years a Hertford physician, and subsequently the parliamentary representative of that borough, went over to Russia and inoculated the Empress and her son, in the year 1768, he was rewarded with a fee of £12,000, a pension for life of £500 per annum, and the rank of Baron of the Empire. But if Catherine paid thus handsomely for increased security of life, a modern emperor of Austria put down a yet more royal fee for his death-warrant. When on his death-bed the Emperor Joseph asked Quarin his opinion of his case, the physician told the monarch that he could not possibly live forty-eight hours. In acknowledgment of this frank declaration of the truth, the Emperor created Quarin a Baron, and gave him a pension of more than £2000 per annum to support the rank with. A goodly collection might be made of eccentric fees given to the practitioners of the healing art. William Butler, who, in his moroseness of manner, was the prototype of Abernethy, found (_vide_ Fuller's "English Worthies") more pleasure in "presents than money; loved what was pretty rather than what was costly; and preferred rarities to riches." The number of physicians is large who have won the hands of heiresses in the discharge of their professional avocations. But of them we purpose to speak at length hereafter. Joshua Ward, the Thames Street drysalter, who made a fortune by his "Drop and Pill," "Of late, without the least pretence to skill, Ward's grown a famed physician by a pill," was so successfully puffed by Lord Chief Baron Reynolds and General Churchill, that he was called in to prescribe for the king. The royal malady disappeared in consequence, or in spite, of the treatment; and Ward was rewarded with a solemn vote of the House of Commons, protecting him from the interdictions of the College of Physicians; and, as an additional fee, he asked for, and obtained, the privilege of driving his carriage through St. James's Park.