*DOCTORS, DOMESTIC REMEDIES, AND FUNERALS* Our forefathers were subject to the same physical ailments as ourselves, but they do not appear to have suffered to the same extent from disease as we do in our day. The surgeon was rarely called upon to exercise his calling, and then only when amputations were felt to be necessary, or some mutilated member needed mending. Fashionable operations were unknown. The vicious tendencies of the _bacteria_ in the human body were not then discovered, or, if they had, war had not yet been declared upon them. Men went about their daily occupations, too busy to bother with the microbes that the modern scientists tell us are gnawing at our vitals. Their greatest fear was from epidemics like smallpox, which occasionally swept through a neighbourhood, leaving a trail of sorrow in its wake. Of licensed practitioners there were but few; and they were, for the most part, attached to the military posts. Occasionally, if the roads were passable, and they felt in the humour and saw a prospective fee of respectable proportions, they might be induced to visit a patient in the neighbouring townships. In this, as in all other matters, the settlers did their best to serve themselves. In no community of this or any other age have there ever been lacking the services of skilled specialists in any line very long, before some unqualified individual volunteered to supply the lack. It was not long before the quack doctor with his vile decoctions appeared among the pioneers. Strenuous efforts were made to legislate him out of existence, but he managed to evade the statutory prohibitions and has even survived to the present day. During the first few decades of the Loyalist settlements it was not so much a question of whether the quack _could_ practise in the townships,[#] but the question more to the point was whether the educated and skilled physician _would_ practise. The settlers had become so expert in treating most of their complaints, that they rarely deemed it necessary to secure the services of the medical practitioner; and, when the real physician did take up his abode among them, he not uncommonly engaged in some other calling as well and practised his profession as a side-line. [#] The first statute providing for the licensing of practitioners in physics and surgery throughout the province was passed in 1795. Up to that time the quacks had it pretty much their own way. The Act was found unworkable and was repealed in 1806; a new and more effective Act was passed in 1815.