But, though medical practitioners have dealt in sayings like these, to do them bare justice, it must be admitted that their preaching has generally been contradicted by the practice. When medicine remained very much in the hands of the ladies, the composition of remedies, and the making of dinners, went on in the same apartment. Indeed hunger and thirst were but two out of a list of diseases that were ministered to by the attendants round a kitchen table. The same book held the receipts for dishes and the recipes for electuaries. In many an old hall of England the manual still remains from which three centuries ago the lady of the house learned to dress a boar's head or cure a cold. Most physicians would now disdain to give dietetic instruction to a patient beyond the most general directions; but there are cases where, even in these days, they stoop to do so, with advantage to themselves and their patients. "I have ordered twelve dinners this morning," a cheery little doctor said to the writer of these pages, on the white cliffs of a well-known sea-side town. "Indeed--I did not know that was your business." "But it is. A host of rich old invalids come down here to be medicinally treated. They can't be happy without good living, and yet are so ignorant of the science and art of eating, that they don't know how to distinguish between a luxurious and pernicious diet, and a luxurious and wholesome one. They flock to the 'Duke's Hotel,' and I always tell the landlord what they are to have. Each dinner costs three or four guineas. They'd grudge them, and their consciences would be uneasy at spending so much money, if they ordered their dinners themselves. But when they regard the fare as medicine recommended by the doctor, there is no drawback to their enjoyment of it. Their confidence in me is unbounded." The bottle and the board were once the doctor's two favourite companions. More than one eminent physician died in testifying his affection for them. In the days of tippling they were the most persevering of tavern-haunters. No wonder that some of them were as fat as Daniel Lambert, and that even more died sudden deaths from apoplexy. The obesity of Dr. Stafford was celebrated in an epitaph:-- "Take heed, O good traveller, and do not tread hard, For here lies Dr. Stafford in all this churchyard." Dr. Beddoes was so stout that the Clifton ladies used to call him their "walking feather-bed." Dr. Flemyng weighed twenty stone and eleven pounds, till he reduced his weight by abstinence from the delicacies of the table, and by taking a quarter of an ounce of common Castile soap every night. Dr. Cheyne's weight was thirty-two stone, till he cured himself by persevering in a temperate diet. Laughing at two unwieldly noblemen whose corpulence was the favourite jest of all the wits in the court, Louis XV. said to one of them, "I suppose you take little or no exercise."