Delightful old Fuller tells us "Necessary and ancient their Profession ever since man's body was subject to enmity and casualty." There is no doubt of the necessity and antiquity of the doctor's calling, but there is, without doubt, no profession in which such great and beneficent advance has been made in modern times as in the medical. The tortures which our fathers endured under the old treatment are terrible to think of. It was not enough that they were afflicted by disease; the pains which they had to suffer from the supposed remedies far exceeded those which nature imposed. Cupping, blistering, and especially bleeding, were the common applications in nearly all complaints, the Bleeding was also used as a preventive, which proverb truly tells us "is better than cure"; but in this case the supposed disease could scarcely have been worse than the supposed prevention. Five times in the year--"in September, before Advent, before Lent, after Easter, and at Pentecost"--were the periods at which men in health were accustomed to "breathe a vayne." Besides letting of blood, the physician's cane and the surgeon's club were vigorously used on the unfortunate sufferers. Mr. J. C. Jeaffreson, in his very interesting "Book about Doctors," says, "For many centuries fustigation was believed in as a sovereign remedy for bodily ailments as well as moral failings, and a beating was prescribed for an ague as frequently as for picking and stealing." So what with the lancet and the stick combined, our fathers must indeed have shuddered at the approach of any of the "natural shocks that flesh is heir to." The medicines of those good old times were of a very strange and objectionable kind. Some of the concoctions were composed of many ingredients, and were formed of abominable, not to say disgusting, materials. All nature was ransacked for out-of-the-way and horrible things which could be used as drugs and nostrums for suffering and gullible sufferers. In the reign of Charles II., Dr. Thomas Sherley "recommended a clumsy and inordinate administration of violent drugs" for gout. "Calomel he habitually administered in simple doses. Sugar of lead he mixed largely in his conserves; pulverized human bones he was very fond of prescribing; and the principal ingredient in his gout-powder was 'raspings of a human skull unburied.' But his sweetest compound was his 'Balsam of Bats,' strongly recommended as an unguent for hypochondriacal persons, into which entered adders, bats, sucking-whelps, earth worms, hogs' grease, the marrow of a stag, and the thigh-bone of an ox." A good idea of the things sold to a confiding public as cures for its ills may be gathered from two verses on Colonel Dalmahoy, a well-known--shall we say quack--of the past:-- "Dalmahoy sold infusions and lotions, Decoctions, and gargles, and pills, Electuaries, powders, and potions, Spermaciti, salts, scammony, squills.