[10] A few facts will show the present enormous growth of this interest. Ten years ago, the revenue of the English government, from the sale of patent medicines, was only a little short of fifty thousand pounds sterling. The cost of advertising quack medicines in the United States, was estimated at that time at 200,000 dollars. But it is vastly more now. Dr. Stevens, in his recent address states, that the advertising outlay of some of the most notorious patent medicine proprietors, is reckoned by its fifty and hundred thousand dollars per annum. Quack advertisements occupy a large space in our newspapers. In the twenty columns of a country political paper published tri-weekly, I once counted eleven filled with such advertisements, while only nine were devoted to other advertisements, news, miscellaneous matters, editorials, &c. [11] After he left his professional chair, he wandered about the country, generally intoxicated, seldom changing his clothes, or even going to bed. And though like other quacks who have succeeded him, he boasted that he had discovered a _panacea_, which would cure all disease at once, and even prolong life almost indefinitely, this prince of empirics died after a few hours’ illness, in the forty-eighth year of his age, at Salzburg in Bavaria, with a bottle of his panacea in his pocket. [12] At one time live toads were a popular remedy for hemorrhage, tied behind the ears, or under the arm pits, or to the soles of the feet. It was supposed by some that the effect was altogether mental. But, as in the case of the Tractors, it was contended that this could not be so, because the same effect was produced upon animals. Michael Mercatus asserts that “if you hang the toad round a cock’s neck for a day or so, you may then cut off his head, and _the neck will not bleed a single drop_.” One cannot help being reminded by this of the experiments with the _Brocchieri water_ a year or two since upon animals, which, though reported as perfectly successful, have not saved this remedy from going to the tomb of the Capulets, to which all its predecessors have gone before it. CHAPTER V. THOMPSONISM. Thompsonism, or Thomsonianism, as it is more often called, or written, is a system of quackery, which, though it is evidently declining in public favor, is still so prominent, that it seems to merit a separate notice. The principles of this system shall be stated in the language of its founder. “My system of practice is founded upon these few, simple, and I think, just principles.