But to come down to more recent times, in 1700 one John Pechey, living at the Angel and Crown, in Basing Lane, an Oxford graduate and member of the College of Physicians, London, advertised that all sick people might for sixpence have a faithful account of their diseases and plain directions for their cure, and that he was prepared to visit any sick person in London for 2s. 6d.; and that if he were called by any person as he passed by, he would require but one shilling for his advice. A physician who in our day advertised like this would be deprived of his diploma. In 1734 one Joshua Ward became a celebrity even among quacks by his pills, which he extensively advertised, and which were patronized by the Queen herself. There was a rhyming quack, Dr. Hill, who also wrote a farce, and wanted Garrick to produce it, till the latter published the following distich on him: ’For farces and physic his equal there scarce is, His farces are physic, his physic a farce is.’ A Dr. Hannes, a contemporary of Dr. Radcliffe, ordered his servant to stop a number of coaches between Whitehall and the Royal Exchange, and to inquire at each whether it belonged to Dr. Hannes, as he was called to a patient. Entering Garraway’s Coffee-House, the servant put the same question. Dr. Radcliffe happening to be there, he asked who wanted Dr. Hannes. The servant named several lords who all wanted him. ’No, no, friend,’ said Radcliffe; ’Dr. Hannes wants the lords.’ Quacks were never more flourishing than they are now, and they always will be, for the public like mysterious remedies, and are anxious to recommend them and to force them on their friends. In nothing is a little knowledge more dangerous than in medicine; mothers and nurses especially, who have acquired some smattering of it from their conversations with doctors, may do a lot of mischief. To them are due nearly all so-called diseases of children—as if children must necessarily have diseases—a superstition which is shared by some doctors, who also encourage the reading of their books. The reading of those books has physically the same effect on the body that the reading or hearing of ghost stories has morally on the mind: the reader or hearer everywhere feels dis-ease and sees ghosts; _ergo_ beware of medical books and goblin stories—both are unwholesome. Modern invalids are fortunate in escaping the tortures inflicted on patients in earlier days. Edmund Verney thus writes concerning his father, Sir Ralph Verney, of Claydon House, in 1686: ’He hath been blooded, vomited, blistered, cupt and scarified, and hath three physicians with him, besides apothecary and chirurgian.’ And then he wonders that ’he still continues very weak.’ The marvel was that he survived at all. Had not Molière a few years before the above date said: ’You must not say that a man died of such and such a disease, but of so many physicians, surgeons and apothecaries’?