When he was ill, the Londoner had as many nostrums and infallible medicines as his successor of the present day. We have our effervescent drinks, our pills, our ointments—so had our ancestor. First of all, the pharmacopœia included an immense quantity of herbs, specifics for this and the other; their names still preserve some of their supposed qualities—such as fever few, eye-bright, etc. Thus, walnut water was supposed to be good for sore eyes. The apothecary understood how to cover a pill with sugar so as to make it tasteless; and his pills were great boluses which we should now find it hard indeed to swallow. The physicians prescribed potions fearfully and wonderfully made, some containing thirty, forty, or even seventy ingredients. Such was “Mithidate” or “Mithridates,” as a common medicine was called. For fevers they prescribed a “cold water affusion,” with drinking of asses’ milk. When the Queen was ill in 1663 they shaved her head and applied pigeons to her feet. When a man fell down in a fit, they treated him vigorously. No half measures were allowed. They boxed and cuffed his ears, pulled his nose, threw a bucket of cold water into his face, and pinched and kneaded the nape of his neck. Powdered mummy for a long time was held to be a specific against I know not what diseases. It is said that the reason why it went out of use was that Jews took to embalming bodies and then sold them for genuine ancient mummies. If a dentist was wanted he was sought in the street; he was an itinerant tooth drawer, and he went his regular round, carrying with him his “dentist’s key” and decorated with strings of teeth, while he bawled his calling and offered his services. Ben Jonson ridicules the pretences and pretensions of the quacks of his time when he puts the following extravagance into the mouth of Bobadil:— “Sir, believe me, upon my relation for what I tell you, the world shall not reprove. I have been in the Indies, where this herb grows, where neither myself, nor a dozen gentlemen more of my knowledge, have received the taste of any other nutriment in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks but the fume of this simple only; therefore, it cannot be, but ’tis most divine. Further, take it in the nature, in the true kind: so, it makes an antidote, that, had you taken the most deadly poisonous plant in all Italy, it should expel it, and clarify you, with as much ease as I speak. And for your green wound—your Balsamum and your St. John’s wort, are all mere gulleries and trash to it, especially your Trinidado: your Nicotian is good too. I could say what I know of the virtue of it, for the expulsion of rheums, raw humours, crudities, obstructions, with a thousand of this kind, but I profess myself no quacksalver. Only this much: by Hercules, I do hold it, and will affirm it before any prince in Europe, to be the most sovereign and precious weed that ever the earth tendered to the use of man.”