The Funny Side of Physic: Or, The Mysteries of Medicine, Presenting the Humorous and Serious Sides of Medical Practice. An Exposé of Medical Humbugs, Quacks, and Charlatans in All Ages and All Countries.Crabtre, Addison Darre
History
The Funny Side of Physic: Or, The Mysteries of Medicine, Presenting the Humorous and Serious Sides of Medical Practice. An Exposé of Medical Humbugs, Quacks, and Charlatans in All Ages and All Countries.
Crabtre, Addison Darre
Medicine -- Anecdotes; Quacks and quackery
There was evidence that his lordship had seduced the Misses Amphlett, and
prevailed upon them to leave their mother; and he is said to have
admitted, before his death, that the woman seen in his dream was the
mother of the unfortunate girls, and that she died of grief, through the
disgrace and desertion of her children, about the time that the guilty
seducer saw her in the vision. How could his dreams but have been
disturbed, with the load of guilt and remorse that he ought to have had
resting upon his conscience? The "fluttering bird" was the first form that
the wretched mother assumed in his vision, as a bird might flutter about
the prison bars that confined her darling offspring. The more natural form
of the mother finally appeared to the guilty seducer, and to dream that he
heard a voice is no unusual occurrence in the life of any person. The
peculiar words amount to nothing. Lyttleton gave them no serious thoughts,
and it was an accident of bodily position that caused his sudden death.
The whole thing seems to be too flimsy for even a respectable "ghost
story."
THE BISHOP SEES A GHOST!
An amusing as well as instructive ghost story is related by Horace
Walpole, the indolent, luxurious satirist of fashionable and political
contemporaries, whose twenty thousand a year enabled him to live at his
ease, "coquetting haughtily with literature and literary men, at his tasty
Gothic toy-house at Strawberry Hill."
[Illustration: THE BISHOP'S GHOSTLY VISITOR.]
He relates that the good old Bishop of Chichester was awakened in his
palace at an early hour in the morning by his chamber door opening, when a
female figure, clothed in white, softly entered the apartment, and quietly
took a seat near him. The prelate, who, with "his household, was a
disbeliever in ghosts" and spirits, said he was not at all frightened,
but, rising in his bed, said, in a tone of authority,--
"Who are you?"
"The presence in the room" made no reply. The bishop repeated the
question,--
"Who are you?"
The ghost only heaved a deep sigh, and, while the bishop rang the bell, to
call his slumbering servant, her ghostship quietly drew some old "papers
from its ghost of a pocket," and commenced reading them to herself.
After the bishop had kept on ringing for the stupid servant, the form
arose, thrust the papers out of sight, and left as noiselessly and
sedately as she had arrived.
"Well, what have you seen?" asked the bishop, when the servants were
aroused.
"Seen, my lord?"
"Ay, seen! or who--what was the woman who has been here?"
"Woman, my lord?"
(It is said one of the fellows smiled, that a woman should have been in
the aged bishop's bed-chamber in the night.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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