Clergymen and Doctors: Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches.Anonymous
History
Clergymen and Doctors: Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches.
Anonymous
Clergy; Medicine -- Anecdotes; Medicine -- Humor; Pastoral theology -- Anecdotes; Physicians
While Sir Busick Harwood was Professor of Anatomy at Cambridge, he was
called in, in a case of some difficulty, by the friends of a patient,
who were anxious for his opinion of the malady. Being told the name of
the medical man who had previously prescribed, Sir Busick exclaimed,
"He! if he were to descend into the patient's stomach with a candle and
lantern, when he ascended he would not be able to name the complaint!"
HOUR-GLASSES IN CHURCH.
To restrain over-eloquent or over-zealous preachers in the length of
their discourses, hour-glasses were introduced in churches about the
period of the Reformation. In the frontispiece prefixed to the Bible of
the Bishops' Translation, printed in 1569, Archbishop Parker is
represented with an hour-glass standing on his right hand. Clocks and
watches being then but rarely in use, the hour-glass was had recourse
to as the only convenient public remembrancer which the state of the
arts could then supply. The practice of using them became generally
prevalent, and continued till the period of the Revolution. The
hour-glass was placed either on the side of the pulpit, or on a stand
in front. "One whole houre-glasse," "one halfe houre-glasse," occur in
an inventory taken about 1632 of the properties of the church of All
Saints at Newcastle-on-Tyne. Daniel Burgess, a Nonconformist preacher
at the commencement of last century, alike famous for the length of his
pulpit harangues and the quaintness of his illustrations, was once
vehemently declaiming against the sin of drunkenness. Having exhausted
the customary time, he turned the hour-glass, and said, "Brethren, I
have somewhat more to say on the nature and consequences of
drunkenness; so let's have _the other glass and then_--" The jest,
however, seems to have been borrowed from the frontispiece of a small
book, entitled _England's Shame, or a Relation of the Life and Death of
Hugh Peters_, published in 1663; where Peters is represented preaching,
and holding an hour-glass in his left hand, in the act of saying, "I
know you are good fellows; so let's have another glass."
THE METHODIST DOG.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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