And by all this formidable bombast, is meant nothing in the world but a few paltry roots, as carrots, turnips, skirrets, radish and the like. But they have the old proverb at their fingers’ end: “he that knows thee will never buy thee;” and therefore everything must be made a mystery, to hold their patients in ignorance, and keep up the price of the market. And were not the very names of their medicines sufficient to fright away any distemper, ’tis to be feared the remedy would prove worse than the disease. Can any pain in nature, think ye, have the confidence to look a physician in the face, that comes armed with a drug made of man’s grease? though disguised under the name of mummy, to take off the horror and disgust of it: or to stay for a dressing with Dr. Whachum’s plaster, that shall fetch up a man’s leg to the size of a mill-post? When I saw these people herded with the physicians, methought the old sluttish proverb, that says, “there is a great distance between the pulse and the arse,” was much to blame for making such a difference in their dignities, for I find none at all; but the physician skips in a trice from the pulse to the stool and urinal, according to the doctrine of Galen, who sends all his disciples to those unsavoury oracles, from whose hands the devil himself, if he were sick, would not receive so much as a glister. Oh! these cursed and lawless arbitrators and disposers of our lives! that without either conscience or religion, divide our souls and bodies, by their damned poisonous potions, scarifications, incisions, excessive bleedings, etc., which are but the several ways of executing their tyranny and injustice upon us. In the tail of these, came the surgeons, laden with pincers, cranes-bills, catheters, desquamatories, dilaters, scissors, saws; and with them so horrid an outcry, of cut, tear, open, saw, flay, burn, that my bones were ready to creep one into another for fear of an operation. The next that came in, I should have taken by their mien, for devils disguised, if I had not spied their chains of rotten teeth, which put me in some hope they might be tooth-drawers, and so they proved; which is yet one of the lewdest trades in the world; for they are good for nothing but to depopulate our mouths, and make us old before our time. Let a man but yawn, and ye shall have one of these rogues examining his grinders, and there’s not a sound tooth in your head, but he had rather see’t at his girdle, than in the place of its nativity: nay, rather than fail, he’ll pick a quarrel with your gums. But that which puts me out of all patience, is to see these scoundrels ask twice as much for drawing an old tooth as would have bought ye a new one.