But humbug and imposture, as it has been truly said, is a many-headed monster, and is of very catching influence; it has worshippers at the corner of every street; hordes of the most ignorant vagabonds and jugglers are engaged in its propagation, and announce their impostures as “prepared and sanctioned by His Majesty’s august authority;” but to waste my pages with the mention of the “ladies’ fever” _doctors_ Lamert, Peede, Davis, Eady, Caton, Courtenay, (alias Messrs. Currie and Co.) Fiedeberg (alias Sloane and Co. alias Jones and Co.);—the surreptitious knights, His Carpentership, Sir Gully Daniels, and his Plastership, White Arsenic Sir Cancer Aldis;—the firm of Goss and Company, the consulting Surgeons of Ægis and Hygeiene notoriety;—the miniature painter, “the learned and celebrated” artful artist and curer of consumption, Long St. Long,—the crazy chap who entitles himself the “hygeist”[S]—Taylor and Son, the Leake’s pill-men,—Samuel, the syphilis-pill-man,—the old canting staymaker and life-guardsman, Gardner, who can manufacture tape-worms wholesale and of a league in length from the intestines of cats and chickens,—the piddle-taster, or morning water-doctor, Cameron (alias Crumples,) as also all other quacks, whether of the masculine or feminine gender, who cure _by proxy_, or by simply pronouncing that the disease shall be cured, (for there have been impostors impudent enough to make such pretensions;) or by any art or delusion, and who by chalk, chuckling, and chicanery are battening on the vitals of society, would be an insult to the understanding of my readers, further than to say that each of those worthies, as well as their honourable compeers the balsam of Rackasiri vagabonds and impostors, can, no doubt, recognize the reality of their deeds in the following quotation from the pages of Hudibras: “Nor doctor epidemic. Stored with deletery med’cines, (Which whosoever took, is dead since,) E’er sent so vast a colony To both the under worlds as he.” Perhaps a few words said on the subject of the former occupations of some of the mountebank impostors, who are practising, and have practised their frauds and villanies on the community, may tend to open the eyes of this very gullable nation as to the extent and quality of their medical knowledge, unless it should be supposed that they acquired it by miraculous inspiration or divine influence, to which high pretensions, indeed, many of the vermin have had the audacity to lay claim, well knowing that the bolder their assertions were, the more gullable they would find their ninny patients.