Volume 1

The family oracle of health, economy, medicine, and good living adapted to all ranks of society, from the palace to the cottage / By F. Crell ... and W. M. Wallace, Esq., assisted by a Committee of scientific gentlemen.

  • Crell, A. F.
Date:
1824-1827
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The family oracle of health, economy, medicine, and good living adapted to all ranks of society, from the palace to the cottage / By F. Crell ... and W. M. Wallace, Esq., assisted by a Committee of scientific gentlemen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    109/516 (page 99)
    - Humbug of Gratis Medical Advice. 9y of interloping quacks, we should scarcely have thought that any of them would have resorted to the stale bait of gratis advice, after it had been polluted by the street bills of Rakasiri Jordan, Eady, Lamert, Friedeberg, and Kiernan, all protected by govern- ment so long as they pay their stamps. But so it is, that many whom we could name, though regularly enrolled in one or other of the Royal Colleges, are as eager to give their advice gratis as either Cameron, the water-doctor; Taylor and Son, the Leake’s Pill-doctors ; or Courtenay alias Currie, the stricture-doctor • not to mention Sir Mordecai Daniels, or the sweet, 80011110/ Mrs. Johnson. The trick runs thus :-A physician, ’who has no patients, and is hard run lor cash, resolves to do something to aid the good cause ot money-making, by giving his advice gratis Of course he receives no money, not even for his pens, ink and paper, consumed in furnishing prescriptions; but the apothecary does a good stroke of business by dispensing these. The phv sician accordingly drives a bargain with the nearest apothecary or chemist, who will treat with him on reasonable terms, to send him all his gratis patients in lieu of a certain division of the spoil to be paid over to the physician. In order to secure the prescription for his apothecary, and prevent it from going astray into strange hands, it is written with private marks unintelligi- ble to every man in the profession, save the person who has bargained to divide the booty accruing from the gratis advice 1 hese marks vary according to the fancy or cunning of the contrivers. A physician, who practises not a hundred miles rom rpsvvich, puts a simple X to his prescriptions, which is only understood by his pall apothecary ; and nobody else of course can make them up. Some of his gratis patients, more shrewd than he could have wished them, lately exposed the humbug- in the public papers ; but when thus blown up by the odium oLhe job, and pressed to hammer out an explanation hn o ’A *i SSSr’lfTT1 fh1 tlle prf criPtion was 10 Ik made up i'mme! ately. If it had been so, however, why were not all fhp nnn theeanes Ipswich and the neighbourhood apprised Jhat Dr' theC“egiTmate term oOhT ‘r^'6 °f writing •Sn^e e^ f Ys mud‘kS ^ “ »y tta byjood Churchmen in his ^ rokee WhitfawTmell and. elsewhere, adopt Dr. Che- trouble to write a pre^iplTm^saf Wi‘h°Ut lhe