“Where dwells the boasted march of intellect when the understanding is continually insulted with the most impudent and daring pretensions of impostors, who, while they pretend to restore your health, are making a direct attack upon your credulity and your purse. What encouragement exists for the well educated men, regular graduates of Universities, of high classical and literary attainments, who have chosen the profession of medicine or surgery as a business of life, and in order to practice with credit and character, have directed their attention, their time, and their property to its studies,—who have made the nature of diseases and the efficacy of remedies a study of life—when they find themselves completely superseded by some inspired pretender—some ignorant quack. Lord Bacon has long since said, in his work on the advancement of learning, ‘If the same honours and rewards are given to fools, which ought to be awarded to the wise, who will labour to be wise?’ That the ignorant pretender should be encouraged by the public, is a reproach to the understanding of any people; but that the revenue of any country should be supplied by a stamp duty[P] on empirical nostrums, instead of the government taking measures either of prevention or punishment, can only be explained by exhibiting similar acts of atrocity on the sentiments of nature; but the truth is, the auri sacra fames has the power of making that appear relatively right, which is absolutely wrong.”[Q] “Beware of hypocrisy of every description,” adds the same excellent writer; “you may as well believe that the Pope can send you to perdition, as that an advertising charlatan can, by any empirical nostrum, restore you to health.” But, unhappily, it appears that poor John Bull and “his hopeful family” are not gifted with the power of being “beware of hypocrisy,” “advertising charlatans” and “empirical nostrums;” but that through their proneness to gullibility and the love of the marvellous, the trade of quackery is daily increasing, and that hundreds of quacks swarm in every quarter of the metropolis, and fatten on the murders which they are constantly perpetrating with their poisons; and to add to the monstrous combination against the lives and health of the community, that the aid of even the pulpit is invoked to further the propagation of the imposture! Instances are on record where mercenary preachers have been wicked enough to sermonize and expatiate on the miraculous virtues and benefits of the poisonous nostrums[R] and remedies of the mountebank jugglers and impostors.