Under these circumstances, the faculty had a very difficult problem before them, for the very imperfect solution of which they cannot justly be reproached. A learned and active physician is certainly one of the noblest of the diversified forms of humanity; for he unites in himself the power arising from an insight into the works of nature, with the exercise of a pure philanthropy inseparable from his office. Few men, however, of this ideal perfection lived in those times, and their mitigating influence over the violence of the epidemic, which was generally past before they could closely examine their new enemy and give any deliberate advice, was doubtless but very inconsiderable. By so much the more busy were the ignorant and covetous, who, from time immemorial, the more numerous body in the profession, have always injured it in its moral dignity. They attacked the disease with bold assertions, alarmed the people with inconsiderate representations, lauded the infallibility of their remedies, and were the promulgators of injurious prejudices. In the Netherlands, as we are assured by _Tyengius_, a physician whom we reckon among the learned and benevolent, a vast number of patients died of the effects produced by the distribution of pernicious pamphlets, with which the Sweating Sickness was to be combated by those ignorant interlopers, who many of them gave it out that they had been in England, boasting to the inhabitants of their experience and skill, and with their pills and their “hellish electuaries,” flitting about from place to place[630], especially where rich merchants were to be found, from whom, should they be restored, they obtained the promise of mines of gold[631]. The like occurred in Germany, where, at the commencement, the sound sense of the people was overcome by this officiousness, and violent remedies were recommended as certain means of cure, in a deluge of pamphlets, some of which were written by persons not in the profession.