The excessive treacliness of modern doctors, as we have just shown, is as objectionable as was the brimstone treatment of some of their predecessors. A principle with modern doctors is never to acknowledge themselves nonplussed. The old doctors now and then confessed themselves beaten. Said an Æsculapius who had been called in to prescribe for a child, after diagnosing, as the ridiculous farce of tongue-speering and pulse-squeezing is called: ’This here babe has got a fever; now, I ain’t posted up in fevers, but I will send her something that will throw her into fits, and I’m a stunner on fits.’ And modern doctors, indeed, have no occasion to admit ignorance since the invention of the liver. When they cannot tell what is the matter with a man, or they are too urbane to reproach him with his excesses, his liver is out of order—and that is an organ which cannot possibly be examined and its condition be verified so as to prove or disprove the practitioner’s assertion. I assume that nine out of ten people don’t know where or what the liver is—I’m sure I don’t, and don’t want to; but as Sancho Panza blessed the man who invented sleep, the doctors should bless their colleague who invented the liver! Abernethy, of whom more hereafter, with all his eccentricity, was honest enough to confess that he never cured or pretended to cure anyone, which only quacks did. He despised the humbug of the profession, and its arts to mislead and deceive patients. He only attempted to second Nature in her efforts. He admitted that he could not remove rheumatism, that opprobrium of the faculty, and no doctor can; a residence in a warm and ever sunny clime, or a long course of Turkish baths, can do it. Hence sings Allan Ramsay’s ’Gentle Shepherd’: ’I sits with my feet in a brook, And if they ax me for why, In spite of the physic I took, It’s rheumatiz kills me, says I.’[#] [#] In searching for material for these pages I had occasion to read the lives of a good many doctors; half of them, I should say, died of rheumatism and gout. This was the desperate remedy taken by Caroline, Queen of that brute George II., when he expected her to take her usual walk with him, though both her feet were swollen with rheumatism. She plunged them in a bath of cold water, and managed to go out with him that afternoon.