The history of the life and adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell : $b a gentleman, who, tho' deaf and dumb, writes down any stranger's name at first sight, with their future contingencies of fortune
General
The history of the life and adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell : $b a gentleman, who, tho' deaf and dumb, writes down any stranger's name at first sight, with their future contingencies of fortune
Campbell, Duncan, 1680?-1730; Deaf people -- Great Britain -- Biography; Occultism -- Early works to 1900; Prophets -- Great Britain -- Biography
In the year 1713, lived in Fenchurch-street, one Mr. Coates, a
tobacco-merchant, who had been for many years sorely tormented in his
body, and had had recourse for a cure to all the most eminent physicians
of the age, even up to the great Dr. Ratcliff himself; but all this
mighty application for relief was still in vain; each doctor owned him a
wonder and a mystery to physic, and left him as much a wonder as they
found him. Neither could the professors of surgery guess at his ailment,
or resolve the riddle of his distemper; and after having spent, from
first to last, above a thousand pounds in search of proper remedies,
they found the search ineffectual; the learned all agreed that it could
proceed from nothing else than witchcraft; they had now indeed guessed
the source of his illness, but it was an illness of such a kind that,
when they had found it out, they thought themselves not the proper
persons to prescribe to him any remedies. That task was reserved, it
seems, for our Duncan Campbell, who, upon somebody's information or
other, was sent for to the bewitched patient Mr. Coates, who found him
the wonder that the others had left him, but did wonders in undertaking
and compassing his cure. I remember, one of the ingredients made use of
was boiling his own water, but I cannot tell how it was used; and, upon
turning over the books of some great physicians since, I have found,
that they themselves have formerly delivered that as one part of the
prescriptions for the cure of patients in like cases. But as there are
other things which Mr. Campbell performs, that seem to require a mixture
of the second-sight, and of this natural magic, before they can be
brought about, I will entertain the reader with one or two passages of
that sort likewise, and so conclude the history of this so singular a
man's life and adventures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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