"No, you dunce; but was not the front of the house closed, and the servants forbidden to polish the plates and glass, that my friends might be led to believe we had all gone to the watering-place?" That was true humbug. Double humbuggery! for the servant girl was humbugging her mistress by pretending to polish the door-knobs, while she was really coqueting with a policeman; and the mistress was humbugging her friends into the belief that the house was closed, and the family gone to Saratoga. So, Hamburg, on the Elbe, being a fashionable resort of the upper-ten-dom of London, those who would ape aristocracy, yet being unable to bear the expense of a trip to the Continent, closed the front of their dwellings, moved into the rear, giving out word that they had gone to _Hamburg_. When a house was observed so closed, with a notice on the door, the passers by would wag their heads, and exclaim, questionably, "Ah, gone to Hamburg!" or, "All gone to Hamburg!" "It's all Hamburg!" and so on. And, like a thousand other words in the English language, this became corrupted, and "humbug" followed. Hence, taking the sense from the derivation of the word, humbug means "an imposition, under fair pretences;" cheat; hoax; a deception without malicious intent. Webster says it is "a low word." The humbugs in medicine, we assert, began to exist with the first persons of whom we have any account in the history of the healing art. Among the early Egyptian physicians, Æsculapius was esteemed as the most celebrated. He was the first humbug in his line. However, nearly all the accounts we have of him are mythological. If we are to credit the early writers, this great healer restored so many to life, that he greatly interfered with undertaker Pluto's occupation, who picked a quarrel with Æsculapius, and the two referred the matter to Jupiter for adjudication. But we may go back of this "god of medicine." If he was physician to the Argonauts, we must fix the date of his great exploits at about the year B. C. 1263. It is claimed by good authority that the Book of Job dates back to B. C. 1520, and is the oldest book extant. Herein we find Job saying, "Ye are forgers of lies; ye are all physicians of no value." Since his friends were trying their best to humbug him, Job certainly intimates that physicians--some of them, at least--were looked upon as humbugs. But, then, Job was only an Arab prince; not an Israelite, at all; nor does he condescend to mention that "peculiar people" in his book. And besides, what reliance can be based upon the opinion of a man respecting physicians, whose only surgical instrument consisted of a "piece or fragment of a broken pot"? Therefore, leaving the "Arab prince," we will turn for a moment to the early Jewish physicians. Josephus does not enlighten us much respecting them. The Old Testament makes mention of physicians in three instances,--the last figuratively.