Quacks and quack-medicines.

Date:
[1839]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Quacks and quack-medicines. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    RDAY JOURNAL. massive-made and brilliant Dr. Cr is more than a match for his jud^ sentences ; pale-faced and exact-looking the Church Pastoral Aid Society; and stafltKJg^ugh M‘Neile blows his trumpet in behalf of the Protestant Association. But space would fail us were we to attempt to enumerate either the regular or occasional speakers at Exeter Hall. Burnet, the Inde- pendent minister at Camberwell, a splendid platform speaker ; Gumming, the Presbyterian minister of Crown Court, a clever fellow; tall, graceful, earnest Baptist Wriothesley Noel, minister of St. Jobn-street chapel, Bedford-row ; pleasant Dr. Sumner, the Bishop of Winchester; and boisterous Hugh Stowell from Manchester. More remarkable characters appear at rarer intervals and e.vtraordinary occasions. The “ Wandering Jew,” Joseph y< olfiF; doleful Sir Andrew Agnew, whose face has been described as the impersonation of despair ; broad, burly Daniel O’Connell, the type of an Irishman in face, figure, and accent; and he, all brain and nerves, who will never rest till he rests in the grave, splendid, extraordinary, restless Lord Brougham. But the reader would err grievously if he imagined that the May Meetings at Exeter Hall presented an invariable source of splendid intellectual excitement. A treat they are undoubtedly to ill who take an interest in the proceedings of societies, whose objects are the good of their fellow-men. But it is not always that the meetings can boast of a succession of good speakers. Not seldom a kind-hearted prosy old man will spin a tedious yarn ; or I timid young one, abashed at so many eyes staring full upon him, Fill tremulously hesitate, and perhaps rally with difficulty, even :hough buoyed on by a cheer. Yet it does not require a large imount of intellect to make a speech at Exeter Hall. “ Here the poorest speakers have a certain degree of advantage, while those if a superior order are heard under less favourable circumstances. He who could not plead the clearest cause at the bar, or discuss a imple question in the Houses of Legislature, may here make a 'ery respectable figure, by telling a few facts in an agreeable Banner, and appealing even quietly to the hearts or principles of lis hearers. On the other hand, a first-rate debater finds nothing D combat: there is no scope for argument or reply. Logic is bought dry, and definitions tedious; and he who could convince a try against their will, or carry a senate away by the resistless force f his demonstrations, must here be content to take his stand on the ime level with the man whom he may consider as a fifth or sixth ite ; while, compelled to rely on his own declamatory talents, he lay perhaps make a worse figure than those who possess not a ithe of his abilities or genius.” Perhaps the very best of all the meetings at Exeter Hall during le month of May, is that of the British and Foreign Bible ociety. The magnitude of its operations, its professed freedom om all merely local or narrow interests, and the principle of its ffion—the diffusion of the Bible, and the Bible alone,—render I meetings not now exciting, but pleasing. Even he who refused I admit the Bible to be a revelation, might find much to excite flection, on the fact of the existence of such a great engine for I diffusion, and translation into the various languages of the rth. The meeting of the London Missionary Society is also an :ceedingly interesting one: the Hall is always crowded long ifore the proceedings commence. From the latter end of April to the end of the month of May, up- irds of thirty different religious societies have held their meetings re. One or two others have held their meetings in Freemasons’ all and Hanover-square Rooms, and the Society for the Protection Religious Liberty met last at the “ London Tavern.” And this nation of the London Tavern reminds us of a traveller’s story. The word “ tavern,” which we have appliedtlHbe beetnf our public- houses, means in Italian the worst. “ We remember,” says our gossip, “ some Italians were much puzzled in reading in the news- papers, that English princes, royal dukes, marquises, and lords, the very pink of our nobility, thought nothing of dining at the Tavema di Londra (the London Tavern), which to their ears sounded every bit as vulgar as the Pig and Tinder-hox, or the Cat and Mutton.” One word more about Exeter Hall before we part. After the bustle of May, it obtains a long period of tranquillity, being only used at intervals for meetings of an extraordinary nature, arising out of particular circumstances. Some of the rooms are occa- sionally let for exhibitions of pictures, &c.; others are permanently occupied by the committees and secretaries of certain societies. QUACKS AND QUACK-MEDICINES. It is a remarkable fact that England, which claims to be the centre of civilisation, should contain a population more quack- ridden, more credulous as regards the efficacy of universal secret specifics for the cure of disease, than that of any other country in the world. Immense trading establishments are wholly supported by the sale of quack medicines ; most of the provincial newspapers derive their principal profits from advertising these pretended remedies ; and, as a winding-up of the climax, the government finds a most unholy and disgraceful branch of revenue in the sale of compounds which our rulers know and admit to be impositions upon the uninformed public. In the present enlightened age, there is no Englishman of liberal education to whom it is unknown that, as diseases frequently proceed fiom causes directly opposed to each other, the remedy that would cure one would aggravate another- that, consequently, a universal remedy, applicable to all diseases,’ is impossible. The legislature, therefore, in taxing secret reme- dies and permitting their sale, commits a dishonest act, and tam- pers with .he public morals as well as with the public health. ” They manage things better in France,” is now a trite saying, though often very unjustly applied. To the subject under consi- deration we may however apply it, without being taxed with injustice. In France, no secret remedies are allowed to be sold, under very heavy penalties, involving even corporeal punishment. This is a security to the public against improper and even poison- ous compounds. It may be said, in justification of our own law, that the specification at the office of patents affords an equally good security. No such thingthe specification is an absolute mockery. Scarcely any inventor of a patent medicine specifies the true mode of preparing it, or the real matters of which it is com- posed. If the medicine consist of a known substance and be the result of a secret process, this is almost impossible of detection; as in the instance of James’s Powder, a preparation of antimony, which none of the chemists who aid the College of Physicians m compiling the Pharmacopoeia can successfully imitate. If, on the other hand, the constituents of the medicine are unknown and con- sist of vegetable matters, it is equally difficult to discover them by ordinary chemical analysis, and, when discovered, to ascertain their quantitative proportions. Then, again, who is to bear the expense of such analysis 2 The government ought, but does not; and no official analysis therefore takes place. The specification is then a mere idle ceremony, upon which it is dangerous to rely. To such an extent is the blind infatuation carried in favour of secret remedies, that even perfumers, who certainly possess no medicM knowledge, nor an education that will qualify them for acquiring it, boldly compose and advertise their nostrums for spe- cific disorders; the barber-surgeon of former times being thus replaced by the perfumer-physician of a more refined age. Every newspaper is eloquent on the miracles wrought by pills and extracts, balsams and ointments, the fruit assuredly of intuitive knowledge —if knowledge of any kind be the seed from which it sprang. Nor are letters and certificates wanting to confirm the impudent lies set forth in the newspaper advertisements. They who trust to them, often find themselves suddenly afflicted with premature and irremediable infirmities ; and many, from the effects of such reme- dies, spend a life of torture and die a lingering and painful death. Thus, not only is the public poisoned with impunity, but the in- ventors and sellers of the poisonous trash protected and encouraged on account of the bribe paid to the state in the shape of a stamp duty, which, after all, comes from the purse of the dupe who buys,—the price of the stamp being always added to that of the medicine. By a singular inconsistency, many well-educated per-