In the feudal ages medicine and quackery were the same, as far as any principles of science are concerned. The only difference between the physician and the charlatan was, that the former was a fool and the latter a rogue. Men did not meddle much with the healing art. A few clerks devoted themselves to it, and in the exercise of their spiritual and medical functions discovered how to get two fleeces from a sheep at one shearing; but the care of the sick was for the most part left to the women, who then, as in every other period of the world's history, prided themselves on their medical cunning, and, with the exception of intrigue, preferred attending on the sick to any other occupation. From the time of the Reformation, however, the number of lady doctors rapidly diminished. The fair sex gradually relinquished the ground they had so long occupied, to men, who, had the monastic institutions continued to exist, would have assumed the priestly garb and passed their days in sloth. Quackery was at length fairly taken out of the hands of women and the shelter of domestic life, and was practised, not for love, and in a superstitious belief in its efficacy, but for money, and frequently with a perfect knowledge of its worthlessness as a remedial system. As soon as the printing-press had become an institution of the country, and there existed a considerable proportion of the community capable of reading, the empirics seized hold of Caxton's invention, and made it subservient to their honourable ends. The advertising system was had recourse to in London, during the Stuart era, scarcely less than it is now. Handbills were distributed in all directions by half-starved wretches, whose withered forms and pallid cheeks were of themselves a sufficient disproof of the assertions of their employers. The costume, language, style, and artifices of the pretenders to physic in the seventeenth century were doubtless copied from models of long standing, and differed little in essentials from those of their predecessors. Professions retain their characteristics with singular obstinacy. The doctor of Charles the Second's London transmitted all his most salient features to the quack of the Regency. Cotgrave, in his "Treasury of "Wit and Language," published 1655, thus paints the poor physician of his time:--