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
Howell Davies, who was Whitfield's Welsh coadjutor, walking one Sunday
morning to preach, was accosted by a clergyman on horseback, who was
bound on the same errand, and who complained of the unprofitable
drudgery of his profession, saying that he could never get more than
half-a-guinea for preaching. The Welshman replied that he for his part
was content to preach _for a crown_. This so offended the mounted
priest, that he upbraided the pedestrian for disgracing his cloth.
"Perhaps," said Davies, "you will hold me still cheaper when I inform
you that I am going nine miles to preach, and have only seven-pence in
my pocket to bear my expenses out and in. But the crown for which I
preach is a crown of glory."
SHEDDING HIS BLOOD FOR HIS COUNTRY.
Lord Radnor, who lived in the middle of last century, had a singular
liking for the amateur employment of the lancet on the veins of his
friends, or of persons whom he induced by gifts of money to allow him
to display his skill upon them. It is told of Lord Chesterfield, that,
desiring the vote of Lord Radnor in some division impending in the
House of Lords, he went to him, and by and by, in the course of
indifferent conversation, complained that he was suffering from a bad
headache. Lord Radnor leaped at the opportunity of indulging his
predilection for phlebotomy on such a _corpus nobile_; he told Lord
Chesterfield that he ought to lose blood at once. "Do you indeed think
so, my dear Lord? Then do me the favour to add to the service of your
advice that of your skill. I know that you are a clever surgeon." In a
moment Lord Radnor had pulled out his lancet case, and opened a vein in
his visitor's arm; who subsequently, when the bandage was being put on,
as if casually, asked the operator, "By the by, does your Lordship go
down to the House to-day?" Lord Radnor answered that he had not
intended going, not having information enough as to the question that
was to be debated; "But on what side will you, that have considered the
matter, vote?" Lord Chesterfield stated his views to his amateur
surgeon, whose vanity he had so cleverly flattered; and left the house
with the promise of Lord Radnor's vote--having literally, as he told an
intensely amused party of his friends the same evening, "shed his blood
for the good of his country."
DR. KIRWAN, DEAN OF KILLALA.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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