Medicine -- Anecdotes; Physicians -- Great Britain
To make his name known Hannes used to send his liveried footmen
running about the streets with directions to put their heads into
every coach they met and inquire, with accents of alarm, if Dr. Hannes
was in it. Acting on these orders, one of his fellows, after looking
into every carriage between Whitehall and the Royal Exchange, without
finding his employer, ran up Exchange Alley into Garraway's
Coffee-house, which was one of the great places of meeting for the
members of the medical profession. (Apothecaries used regularly to
come and consult the physicians, while the latter were over their
wine, paying only half fees for the advice so given, without the
patients being personally examined. Batson's coffee-house in Corn-hill
was another favourite spot for these Galenic re-unions, Sir William
Blizard being amongst the last of the medical authorities who
frequented that hostelry for the purpose of receiving apothecaries.)
"Gentlemen, can your honours tell me if Dr. Hannes is here?" asked the
man, running into the very centre of the exchange of medicine-men.
"Who wants Dr. Hannes, fellow?" demanded Radcliffe, who happened to be
present. "Lord A---- and Lord B----, your honour!" answered the man.
"No, no, friend," responded the doctor slowly, and with pleasant
irony, "you are mistaken. Those lords don't want your master--'tis he
who wants them."
But Hannes made friends and a fine income, to the deep chagrin of his
contemptuous opponent. An incessant feud existed between the two men.
The virulence of their mutual animosity may be estimated by the
following story. When the poor little Duke of Gloucester was taken
ill, Sir Edward Hannes and Blackmore (famous as Sir Richard Blackmore,
the poet) were called in to attend him. On the case taking a fatal
turn, Radcliffe was sent for; and after roundly charging the two
doctors with the grossest mismanagement of a simple attack of rash,
went on, "It would have been happy for this nation had you, sir, been
bred up a basket-maker--and you, sir, had remained a country
schoolmaster, rather than have ventured out of your reach, in the
practice of an art which you are an utter stranger to, and for your
blunders in which you ought to be whipped with one of your own rods."
The reader will not see the force of this delicate speech if he is not
aware that Hannes was generally believed to be the son of a
basket-maker, and Sir Richard Blackmore had, in the period of his
early poverty, like Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, been a teacher of
boys. Whenever the "Amenities of the Faculty" come to be published,
this consultation, on the last illness of Jenkin Lewis's little
friend, ought to have its niche in the collection.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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