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{"content": "Fair Play for One's Life: OR, THE Sovereign Preservative OF The Royal Family, Nobility, &c. AND, OF THE ARTS of Physick, Surgery, and the Apothecaries TRADE. By a Gentleman of Quality of North Britain.\n\nNo ancient English or non-English language is present in the text.\n\nLondon: Printed for M. Wotton, at the Three Daggers in Fleetstreet; and Sold by J. Morphew, near Stationers-Hall. Price, Two Pence.\n\nUnited South-Britains,\n\nThe Blessed Union (which I hope will never die) struggled in the Birth with difficulties almost insurmountable. How violent were the Opponents of our Partnership with you, whose Luxuries and Avarice insatiably prey on the common Stock; 8 or 10 Leaders of the Parties and Projects shall set on the deluded People, to worry the most Honourable Zeal to do Good.To serve and save their country! How great is the difference in our manners? The protection of life and property is the first article of the compact of human societies. Your most eminent physicians and surgeons have been publicly exploded by you, traitorous to patients, ignorant of all diseases and medicines: the collegiates have often remonstrated the numerous and powerful causes of the calamities of all ranks of the nation. Are there any gentlemen of reason and honor able to detect the malignant disease and apply the sovereign remedy?\n\nBut, the day the most important article of the union was to be debated, a petition of our apothecaries was read for permission to practice physic and surgery. I had the honor to be commanded to deliver the reasons for our refusal: we are obliged to protect the properties, as well as our own estates, titles, and privileges; if we betray the most learned and useful professions.we shall destroy the Law and the Church by example. Consequentially, our universities must be abandoned, and the pursuit of learning extinguished. This will encourage libertines to increase their trade, eventually starving each other. Millions of native and foreign empirics will intrude on their employment, completing its destruction.\n\nStrange! (my United South-Britains), the hour of my arrival at the British Parliament presented me with the fulfillment of our prediction. My kinsman, who had invited me to his house, observed my disorder from the fatigues of the tedious journey. He withdrew and brought his apothecary. This good old gentleman, he said, has advised our family for fifty years. He has more patients and experience than ten physicians and surgeons in our neighborhood. He treats them from the beginnings of all diseases; they are called in only in the most dangerous near their end. I presented him a fee.as is our custom to our lawyers and physicians. He persisted in refusing to touch it. I declared most solemnly, I would never, while I live, be advised, when the numbers and prices of all the medicines only paid the reward; when I saw, passing your streets, eight or ten shops in every one, and the apprentices prattling and playing, no preparations making, not a remedy compounded - they are more numerous than the sick.\n\nI was surprised when the good old gentleman embraced me with the greatest affection, when he wept for joy, that he lived to see one of my quality endowed with wisdom to preserve my life, and the generous public spirit, to assert the safety of the royal family, nobility, gentry, and people. 'Tis only our taking no fee, seeming to advise for nothing, that gives us absolute power in the houses of the nobility and gentry, and makes us able to invade and oppress our physic and surgery. It is in our power (as you most wisely foresaw) to pay ourselves two or three guineas a day in the wealthy households.and one in ordinary houses, above the real values of the remedies, to continue it uninterrupted to the recovery, and vastly above the fees of physicians and surgeons, called in late in the desperate cases, have their ten shillings only every other visit; when the life is imagined in less danger, they must often attend without any reward to prevent relapse, to secure the recovery.\n\nMy dear united Britons, I cannot express my grief and confusion. My first reflection painted to me almost all physicians and surgeons as treacherous to the sick and ignorant of all diseases and the specific remedies. I importuned my good apothecary, who I perceived desired the redress of these terrible grievances, to report the disease and the specific remedy. My servant attended to take our conversation, to be published in a sheet, as the sermons, the cheap antidote and preservative of all the inhabitants of the island.\n\nN.B. I have heardIn the year 1639, the College reported the most significant matter to our most revered and knowledgeable King Charles I in Council. All the Judges were ordered to be present. The Attorney-General was instructed to revoke your charter; your shops were to be adjusted to the proportion of the city. However, the rebellion prevented the regulation. After the Restoration, your physicians published numerous learned discourses on the subject. They and the surgeons frequently addressed not for preferments and pensions, but for the cure of the vileness and deficiencies of the arts for public service.\n\nOur advice and diligent attendance to all the sick in the families of the nobility and gentry, paid for by our bills, for as many doses as we please, and at our own rates, greatly exceed the sums they are able or willing to expend to preserve their health and life. The physician's fee (assuming surgeons are equally concerned) is, when added to our load.the most intolerable burden. It is in our interest to suggest the largest fees, larger than they desire, to make them dread the physicians, till the pains and dangers are most violent. Then they request us to choose a doctor for them. We will prefer none but one who can justify and commend all we have done, who will patiently bear the scandal of the death: he is abandoned forever, and we advance another on the next occasion; we are never turned off, but by one of our apprentices setting up the next house, and prevailing on the stewards and nurses.\n\nNote: Then farewell all sincere and learned practice of physic and surgery. The ambitious or hungry solicitors of your favor shall explode the endeavors of the most generous patriots of their country to preserve the royal family, the nobility, &c. and your trade as well as their own professions. Why are you suddenly pale and disturbed?\n\nS.B. By heavens! we have carried the fatal jest too far.We are undone. The people's affection, as the fondness of an indulgent mother, betrays us to our ruin. We have apprentices forced upon us to have the title of doctors, to practice medicine and surgery, and the apothecary business. For the past hundred years, since our charter in 1616, the number of apprentices has increased dramatically, filling all the streets with eight or ten, and three or four in all the villages around the city. Our gentlemen never think, or for no purpose, for themselves or us. Our excessive increase must inevitably compel us to provide them with more medicines for all diseases whatever, and, from year to year, to raise the prices of the doses. The payment grows more and more oppressive, the physicians and surgeons must be more feared and abhorred, and insulted, when they dare to be heard. But why do they not save and rescue us from ten thousand empirics starting up here, and from all parts of the world?Who takes the bread out of our mouths? The busy or hungry clergy set up with their secret cures. An horrible number of nurses undertake the management, with their own remedies, of all the fevers, smallpox, and so on. The quacks of the advertisements deal with their single preparations to cure infallibly this or that terrible disease, or pretend it shall cure forty or fifty as surely as one; they make the most dreadful havoc of the sick and us. How many pretenders live plentifully by the sale of elixirs, spirits, tinctures, pills, and cordials; the papers of their virtues and uses peddled about from house to house? Then the gentlemen of quality, who pretend to top us on the physicians and surgeons, beggar us without mercy; they buy the spirits, tinctures, laudanum, at the first hand. We must strive to make up our losses by thrusting more of our medicines on them. They struggle against us, by those, and many of their own preparations, and take the goa stone.And yet, from all the Visitants. And indeed, there are many subtle Projectors of our Company who have closed their shops, contrived to ruin me and my brethren. They encroach upon our property; we shall not provide a sea-surgeon, our brother, our kinsman, or old acquaintance, unless they pay exorbitantly at the Hall, and will you suppose their chests superior to ours, when they are the best judges of the remedies they employ?\n\nNote: You see the inevitable tendencies of encroaching on one another. Do not the magistrates know how the public suffers by the invasions of the sacred boundaries of the professions and arts engaged in the preservation of health and life? You have attempted the regulations of the law; the lurking poachers of the game are deterred by the severest penalties. It is now your turn to appeal, to implore the protection of the government. Has not your Company resolved to lay its own foundation?And the public distress before the Parliament? An apothecary has demonstrated the necessity of repelling the empirics and reducing our numbers. He proposes that one half may be obliged to serve the other as hired servants. Many of my brethren, when the College has often desired us to foresee the consequences of our endless multiplication, have earnestly recommended using only laborers to prepare our medicines in the hall. I know many surgeons who lament with us the deadly confusions and disorders, and the necessary barbarous ignorance of modern practice due to the feared destruction of the College. You know the sovereign medicine prepared by the royal martyr and the Lords of his council. You have seen the discourses of Dr. Goddard, Dr. Bates, Dr. Merret, and others. Lately, the Dispensary-Poem has reminded us of the integrity and learning of the professions sinking more and more into the vain presumptions of arrogance.Or the humble compliance of using only the 30 or 40 vulgar remedies from the shops, contrived by divisions into numerous doses in all sorts of diseases, to complete our choice of them, to raise for us out of every fever, smallpox, and so on. Thirty or forty guineas; from long cures, one hundred or one hundred fifty. This is the only title and standing army of our power, and their slavish submission. As there are three or four champions of our projecting parties, there are eight or ten apothecaries who gain their 1500 or 2000 pounds a year. We raise about as many physicians and surgeons, bold Britons who stick at nothing. The court, the gentlemen of quality, can never see their own, and the common calamities, when their physicians and surgeons are presented by us to them, pretending to the learning in vogue, the empty chimeras and romances of hypotheses, every day changed, and as soon out of fashion, the whimsies of the unseen motions and operations of atoms, nothing to the purpose of curing diseases.Unfortunate guessers and surgeons are commanded by us to observe our instructions, defying and damning the College and all its attempts to preserve the public.\n\nNote: They have committed thousands of crimes, requiring them to renounce their own societies and professions. For the honor of their preferments and salaries, they expose their patrons and the people to certain death in all dangerous diseases, and carefully transmit these detestable accomplishments of their arts to posterity.\n\nSubnote: Are we to allow that they have reported for nearly a hundred years the most learned and public-spirited of the Society, the most troublesome disturbers of the public, the most factious reformers? A collegiate must be warily observed and prevented or expelled from any post of public service. Will the Royal College flourish when its most deadly enemies incite gentlemen to fly from it?To assault their best Preservers?\nN.B. Is it conceivable that none of the Gentry will be able to discover their true interest and detect the Impostors?\nS.B. When they leave the care of their wives, sons, and daughters to nurses and attendants, to us, and our physicians and surgeons, all these our mighty grievances must grow in stature and strength. As the innumerable empirics and lurking vendors of medicines multiply, we must enlarge the numbers and rates; the fevers, smallpox, &c. must produce the 20l to 40l, 50l, the chronic, the 100l or 200l. How can I and many of my brethren stint the numbers and prices, when every year necessitates us to larger numbers and rates? When a large part of us gain the doctor's fee out of every boil, and the cordial-draught to wash it down; when 3 or 4 guineas a day are gained and 3 papers of a powder (worth 2d.) shall produce almost the guinea.must they not pale and tremble at the sight of a physician and surgeon, fearing we are laying heavier taxes on them? Must they not implore us to keep them out to the last extremity, and then bring the adviser who must enlarge the account?\n\nN.B. These gentlemen of the faculties must not shrink from anything; but what methods can you and your devoted physicians and surgeons use to destroy the physicians, whose disinterestedness preserves you, with their society and profession?\n\nS.B. They shall assault them with the rage of a gladiator. Dr. G. has published our attempts on the life of two of his patients to kill his reputation with them. The pious cabal of our surgeons and apothecaries, near our cathedral, hired the nurse to frighten and poison a lady in the smallpox, with child, on the same great design. The assassination was prevented by her recovery, when their honest and skilled management dispatched a gentleman of the house to the grave.A party of the Company and Plot:\n\nNote: I am an accomplice with them. I must take my part of the guilt and the punishment, if I do not, in the next parliament, lay the universal calamities before the Committee of the State of the Nation. We must, in the first place, protect you from the numberless, most ignorant and daring empirics, from the sly pedlars of remedies. We must then preserve you from being undone by your two or three apprentices in all the shops. We cannot defend our lives, but by the just proportions of the medicines in various diseases. We must betray our own, and the lives of all the people, we must abolish the faculties in your two famous universities, if we do not restore the dignity and sufficiency of the profession, the most implored in the greatest distress by mankind. The gentlemen then of Great Britain will explode the perfidious physicians and surgeons, will detect the ignorance of the most arrogant, will applaud the most honourable zeal of the collegiates.From the Address to King Charles I, concerning the most vicious Modern Practices:\n\nYou may please add, those who have been assaulted by our Out-Guards, our Physicians and Surgeons in all the Houses about the Court. But when they presented the Public Calamities to the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen and the Common Council, and Our Company unfortunately rejected the Expedient, the Panacea, which could only redress the Confusions and Malignity of the modern Practice, which the Committee had resolved after long and mature Deliberations, the City requested the College to erect its Dispensaries. However, we cannot live without the great yearly Payments from the Poor and the Wealthy. This gives us our Power, confirmed more and more by the long and consuming War, to raise funds up to:\n\nNote. The imminent Danger of the Invasion will unite us, will rouse our vigilance and Courage, when we reflect that we must die in all the most safe and secure Diseases.A young gentleman buys a commission; he must be instructed by officers or learn from their footmen and sutlers. The professors in universities do not inform students which authors give the most certain observations of human nature, of the infinite diseases that are expelled by nature alone, or of the various medicines and the seasons for applying them. Physicians, with a generosity almost peculiar to the profession, were the most candid patrons of young practitioners. Young arrogants now raise themselves by insulting their improved learning and observations of the happy.The success of various methods and medicines in all kinds of diseases relies on proper introduction. Our apothecaries of different designs oblige us with suitable instructions. Prescribe common juleps and boles, along with three or four types of apozemes, from 30 or 40 medicines. Make a great show with them, blisters, scarifying, and setons to entertain the assistants. The greatest part in common safe distempers will recover. Pronounce every escape a mighty cure, shift off from a dangerous business, but proclaim in all your companies, you could have saved the life if they recovered in 2 or 3 days. Show your care and condemn all the medicines before prescribed if they are recovering. The practice was different when I first came to the city. Universities' physicians were examined and applauded by the College, as the clergy by the Bishop, and supported by the old practitioners.The gentlemen of the Gown visited all the cases of the common people in their neighborhood. They opened the lawsuits and advised in purchases of lesser value. The proportioned fees and cheapness of medicines introduced them to all families. The success was assured by frequent conversation with the patrons of the art through instructions or consultations in important cases. We were not yet their dangerous rivals or declared enemies. Our shops were open to them to confirm and improve their skill in drugs, to examine their qualities and virtues, and preparations, or to observe the trial of the new or recently improved. The endowed lectures often convened the collegiates. The conversation revealed never-failing methods to subdue epidemic malignant fevers and specific medicines in acute or most obstinate chronic diseases. They may now debate their own disorders if the Dispensary Poem has truly been drawn by the instructions of the President.The characters of the Mirmils, Querpoes, and Bards. Will it surprise you that we frequently predict in the chamber which remedy the doctor we present to them will order, this or that, along with blisters and cupping? The gentlemen of quality acknowledge they see no difference, and their apothecaries are as effective as the most arrogant.\n\nWill the general enter the field to turn the flying troops, or the judge, when the pleadings are ended? Can they ever understand a disease when brought in by us, when all natural powers are disturbed and broken, and the fatal symptoms are first discovered by the attendants?\n\nNote. How easily are fevers, like fires, extinguished by timely care? How easily are almost all disorders prevented from the most dangerous symptoms? Has the royal family, the nobility, and so on, the physicians' early conduct? How will they ever know the manners of the invasions of diseases, their advances, the ravages they make of the natural strength?When they have lost ten thousand patients near them, who must stand in the front, receive the shocks of diseases, and protect the life of the royal family and nobility? When will their physicians begin to understand them, when all novices in all arts are allowed their proportions of defeats and blunders, especially in the practice which lacks experienced patrons' instructions and cautions?\n\nS.B. When the natural tendencies to collect and separate the morified humors (by which only life can be preserved in all diseases) by the different evacuations are assisted, directed, or controlled, if too vehement, the diseases will be made more benign, the ferments of the humors to greater malignities prevented, and a large part evacuated the first days, the feeble remaining subdued by the internal motion of the blood. When they are suddenly brought to the unhappy turn of the disease, what can we expect from their observations and advice only in the morning?When, after the storm during the night, all symptoms are allayed? While medicines are being prepared, they often become more violent, seizing the Brain, the Breast, the Bowels. Medicines may be destructive in the evening. The exclusion of humors may be fatally stopped, or their evacuation promoted.\n\nNote: I remember you asserted that physicians are limited to 30 or 40 common remedies in their shops, which they mix and divide into doses. I suppose, because you are occupied with advising and attending your own patients, you cannot apply them to the various indications for cure.\n\nS.B.: It's now thought inappropriate for physicians to examine all chymical and galenical preparations and select the best of both. We have discouraged them from this essential part of their art for many years. Therefore, in the Court of Requests and in private families,publish'd their lamentable ignorance, admitting that if they hazarded the prescription of any but common receipts, the colors, scents, tastes, and consistencies would expose them to the laughter or pity of our apprentices. We could send in what remedies we pleased without the fear of their discovery of the fallacy. You will be informed that six eminent apothecaries' preparations, now of the most general use, were condemned in our hall, vilely sophisticed, lacking every dearest ingredient. Three or four apothecaries supplied the army in Ireland with the most infamous drugs, confessed by the druggist. Our gentry often debate whose apothecary has the best things, but our physicians never distinguish if the bole, or julep, or powder, or pill which are mixed by their order of eight or ten preparations, are compounded of the best or the worst ingredients. Cannot be assured, if the bark, the laudanumThe spirits or tinctures are effective; it was either the ignorance of the disease or the dreadful remedy that prevented the cure. The College recently decided to compile a new dispensatory, rejecting the least effective preparations and substituting the most rational and efficacious ones discovered through improved experimental philosophy in all parts of Europe. However, modern learning is of no use to them and the people.\n\nNote: Are not the gentry able to detect the imposture?\n\nResponse: They have long suspected it; in almost all diseases, they seek help from the experienced preparations of their families before our medicine and surgery were corrupted and debased. But when we and the artists combine to disguise the fraud, how easily will amusement prevent conviction? If fevers are attempted to be cured by acids, chymical corrosives are used.Whose force the metals cannot resist; they operate with too much violence, precipitating and coagulating the blood. If by alkalies, what success will you hope, unless the constitution can expel the easy disorder, when 1000 doses may be taken without any kind of operation; and the bezoar is demonstrated by the best physicians of the age, and many late experiments, to be indissolvable, which the most corrosive chemical spirits cannot penetrate. Not many years past, five medicines only pretended to conquer all diseases whatever, with our cordials, designed only to fill vacancies.\n\nNote: What are the remedies we want?\n\nResponse: You know the bark is a powerful specific in all intermittent fevers, which mixed with the blood subdues its effervescence, but it is fatal when the humors are malignant and detained by it. The College therefore in the poem complains, that the art is dwindled into the mere craft of deceiving the sick with few vulgar compositions; but it lacks the generous specifics or alteratives.that the great inquiries or the recovery of them have recently been expelled from practice. Dr. P\u2014has in his comments explained the design of the college in that publication as my Lord Cook does in Littleton. Common sense, as well as the philosophy of physic, will inform us that the morbid humors are not always prepared to be evacuated by sweat, urine, or the bowels. The vicious qualities of the blood must be reduced and disposed for evacuation by the medicines of the contrary qualities. The alteration of the blood, inflamed, extremely vicious, fermenting with violence, and preventing the collection and expulsion of the morbid matter or acid or watery, or ropy, or the crises broken, and the necessary ferment too languid, ought to be the first intention and design of the physician. Then he must warily observe the progress of the natural efforts and distinguish which of the different evacuations are chosen in various constitutions, and then assist and promote, and direct the exclusion.Or moderate or repel precipitate or excessive evacuations. N.B. This is the most sovereign present mankind can receive, if the health and life of all inhabitants are of any value to themselves or the public; oblige me with a short report on it. S.B. The comments publish and demonstrate the four certain principles or constituent parts of all vegetables and animals, which variously altered and mixed produce the healthy and diseased qualities of the blood. The happy application and union of the qualities of the medicines cannot fail to restore the natural and healthy balance. They present us the abundant plenty of the degrees of those qualities mixed and compounded in the vast varieties of their virtues, the magazine of medicine, Providence has provided to prevent and subdue all diseases. Alchemy has unfortunately attempted to improve them by separating and destroying the divine compositions. The separated principles cannot unite with the blood or act on it with the most vehement impressions.The noble uses of alcohol and volatile spirits in surgery are limited to rare cases where \"salutary violence\" is required. They inflame languid spirits and blood but dissipate and waste the most active spirits in the process. They are essential for enforcing evacuations of sweats and perspiration, reviving the vital fire when nearly extinguished, or cooling and repressing the inflamed oil in the mixture of the blood. However, the poverty of alchemy is insignificant compared to the riches and magnificence of nature. All the vinous and volatile spirits are necessary for these purposes.And Volatile and Acid Spirits are but three medicines differing only in the degrees of one quality. The unfermented oils are only discriminated by being more or less diluted. All fixed salts are only varied by the circumstances of their fusion. The magisteries and calcinations are an inactive earthwork, except for the preparations of minerals. The greater part of the additions of the crafty Arabs to the most rational pharmacy are the most absurd medicines in the world. Most conserves and syrups pretend only to prevent the trouble of preparing the most generous remedies, the extracts, infusions, and decoctions, but are the most oppressive in the stomach, the most corrosive corrupters of the blood. The largest part of their compositions is infamous from the horrible tumults of the contrary qualities of 50, 100 ingredients in one, controlling and destroying one another's efficacies.\n\nNote: The most self-evident and serious truths! The noble Species, the Bark.must be taken plain, without adding powder, infusing, decoting, or extracting, shall it be debased into a conserve or syrup with sugar, or distilled into a simple, vapid water, or brandy spirit from a fermented liquor? Does stronger fire overcome the stinking oil? Is the composition of its principles vitiated or lacking, or corrupted by the brutal cookery of the specific? Surgery uses oils or their subtilizations by fermentation in vinous spirits on rare occasions, but fomentations and all other topical applications confess their powerful operations from the preserved entire qualities of the vegetables. How ridiculous are the pursuits of alchemy, designed only for surprise and the pleasures of amusement? How vain the ambition to outdo by our artifices the inimitable masterpieces of nature? How unfortunate are the great and noble.The Alterative Specificks are the medicines that in all ages past restored the most difficult diseases to health by correcting the vicious qualities of the blood and supplying the principles defective in respective disorders. The innumerable fevers, diseases of the brain, breast, bowels, viscera, dropsie, jaundice, gout, scorbutical colliquations, and disorders of the sex can only be cured by the frequent use of their alteratives in proportioned quantities, as the waters, to dilute with the efficacy of their minerals. The comments range them under the obvious classes of their qualities and virtues: 1. The aromatics, the acrid, spicy or cordial, the restorers of the oil and internal motion of the blood, 2. The astringents, 3. the bitter, 4. the acid, 5. the sweet, 6. The watery. But the wisdom and powers of nature are boundless. The aromatics are more acrid.Every other class provides us with the same abundant and varied offerings, whether tempered by the Astringent, Bitter, Acid, Sweet, or Watery qualities. Note: You noted that rarer indications required bleeding, emetics, purgatives, sweats, chymical spirits, and vinous waters to revive the vital flame. I have heard of a sect of physicians who cured all diseases by conveying the alteratives you have described, along with the nourishment of our foods, and the last three are acknowledged to be restorative through nourishment, medicinal, and correctors of vicious humors. Will not patients fear that the distilled waters of fruits and herbs will turn their blood into dropsy, or that the fermented spirit of the grape, and all vegetables, will evaporate and consume the more active parts of the blood, spirits, and therefore require a new supply every hour?Until the appetite and digestion are destroyed to a dropsy or consumption? Will they command their cooks to prepare the flesh with sugar, or distill it into a simple or compound water? Will they feed on the drops of the oil extracted from it?\n\nIt is not more than 3 or 4 centuries since the Arabs invented distillations. Europe long preserved the use of specific alteratives, but the collusions of the last age made the fatal deluge of the simple and compound waters. The ease and profit of the apothecaries have abandoned the vast numbers of them. Milk-water and black-cherries, and three or four of the compounds are the only ones retained in service. The physicians are indifferent which of them makes the julep for the head, breast, or stomach, and so on. The evidence is irresistible, from the attestations of all the most successful practitioners of this age, who avow they only divert their patients with the temperate juleps, as sweetmeats, and from the philosophy of all kinds of distillation.Which can extract no part of the great natural composition from any specific vegetable except the aromatic, and from them only the oil separated from the other principles. If there are 50 plants in the compound water, and 25 aromatic; you have 25 oils with only the qualities of the plant: Every oil must vehemently inflame, raise the nauseas and flatulencies, and the tempests of wind they are pretended to break. The good sense therefore of our gentlemen and porters prefer the simple spirit or infusions of Rattafia and \u01b2squebaugh before them, and the surest success in all windy and phlegmatic colics supports their judgment. Shall our arrogant physicians and surgeons be able to prescribe none of the appropriate remedies, but these most offensive punches, in all the hours of all the diseases of all constitutions and ages? The appropriate alteratives, either the watery oily, or the watery sweet, or the sweet acids.or the Acid bitter in the most agreeable Animal Liquor lately presented from the most efficacious Plants of the Field, and the more agreeable Liquors, whose Oils are attenuated by other Principles, shall abate every hour the deputed motion of the blood in all inflammatory diseases, reject a part of the recrements, every hour, by the pores, by urine or the bowels, and gradually reduce the ferment to the natural temper, and make the just crisis by sweats, and the other evacuations or the cutaneous or glandular separations. When we shall have this and a thousand other reforms, the Physicians and Surgeons obliged to learn and prescribe the most useful Medicines, the Apothecaries carefully preparing the remedy adapted to the circumstances of each case and constitution: The People will generously reward our industry, we shall not insult and destroy the professions to make our reprisals on them, because millions of Empirics, the daring Privateers and Pirates on our trade will no longer exist.My dear United Britons, I assured my good old friend at parting that war would be declared against the wicked Empirics. Their defeat will give the first triumph to Great Britain. Though they are as numerous as the French in Flanders, our gentlemen of honor and virtue, if each one only cares for himself, will bravely attack their intrenchments when their courage is enflamed, after reading the Memoirs of English Practice presented to me by all the physicians and surgeons of integrity. When Arabian alchemy had presented Europe with the admirable vinous and volatile spirits, and the acid spirits and fixed salts, which, when applied correctly, exert almost miraculous powers; the first reviving the almost dead vital flame, the other instantly extinguishing the fire of the blood in a dose of just a few drops and grains: millions of Empirics pestered Italy, France, etc.Every one in Germany pretended his own discovery and laboriously prepared a supernatural remedy. Each drop demanded a piece of gold, the reward of its title and achievements. An army of empirics, like the old Saxons, invaded our island. The princes and nobility, who were secure from the enchantments of the craft of physick?, admired and applauded them. They decried all learning, observations, and medicines of the practitioners, refusing to rely on them in all diseases of mankind. The fiery quackery triumphed until the cheapness of their little doses was detected, forcing them to load the sick with the proportions of other medicines that could support their gain. The manufactures flourished in all parts. The officers licensed the strollers of plays; the tumblers, monsters, and elephants, and tigers, and bears. They first granted their licenses to the stages to delude, cheat, and destroy the people.\n\nOur glorious patron of learning, King Henry VIII, the Lords and Commons.(Established by law in 1524, the College and the Surgeons Company declared in the Act their fear of public calamities befalling the nation if they allowed unexamined undertakers to endanger the lives of subjects with their inexperience in the multitude of diseases and careful use of medicines. Secondly, they expressed concern that advisors received their rewards from arbitrary numbers and rates of doses imposed on all disorders. It is wished that committees of the nobility, gentry, and clergy were appointed to sit until they had compiled all the suffering caused by the doses in various diseases and constitutions. In the following reigns, the kings in council, the Lord Chamberlain, and the judges frequently urged the College to vigilantly detect empirics. The Lord Mayor and justices were also commanded.)The Society assists the Censors in apprehending and punishing. Composed of graduates from our renowned universities, they can only provide languages, philosophy, and rudimentary arts, but must advance to the greatest perfection in the most populous city, presenting millions of cases, requiring diligent attendance, and reporting salutary or unfortunate results of various methods and medicines to one another. The nobility and gentry convene in the two Houses of Parliament to debate state affairs, while physicians exchange and receive knowledge in endowed lectures, and their conferences, observations of complex diseases, and triumphs of specific remedies. Nothing can challenge the wise establishment of the College, except the arrogance of the physician, who assumes to himself the role of prophets, monopolizing the science of all things past, present, and to come.In the reign of King James I (Anno Domini 1616), all legal establishments were overturned by grants bought from the courtiers, allowing invasion of all professions and arts. The apothecaries obtained a charter to deal only in medicines. Previously, waters, spirits, tinctures had been sold by distillers. Confections, powders, pills, ointments, plasters were sold by grocers, who sold spices, fruits, and drugs, and large quantities of medicines to families. My dear Britons, I assure you, Providence will never fail in the abundant provision of all things necessary to support life. Do the people have the property and the just right and demand of our care for the plenty of bread and other foods? The most sovereign medicines are equally easy purchases for the poor.I appeal to your experience with medicines prepared in houses, quantities bought from apothecaries, chymists, drugists, or imported by merchants, in our hospitals where thousands of patients are treated annually at the expense of a nobleman's family. But the physician's fee is more frightening than the pain or fear of death. Our kings, ministers of state, officers of the fleet and army, judges, and clergy receive fees from proportioned taxations of all conditions. The nobility and gentry receive the little payments from the cottages of their manors. The fees of the nobility and gentry have no bounds, but the populace cheerfully presented their gratuities proportioned to their circumstances, along with the inestimable presents of the innumerable diseases, which daily increase the physician's knowledge. The nobility, merchants.And then the physicians received their proportioned salaries. The physicians, near their houses (warranted by their learned education and the examination and applause of the College), were tortured by their greatest interest to subdue the disease in its invasion, abate the malignity of the fevers, and often overcome them in three or four days, to prevent the necessary attendance of the mornings and evenings of the tedious course. Their interest compelled them to communicate the cautious use of the most excellent medicines in the frequent, safe incidental diseases of the families. The vicious sophisticated medicines were prevented or expelled from the chambers. Will you be surprised when I affirm that the physicians, advising all the sick and the numerous distempers near them, will in a few years acquire a science ten thousand times more estimable than the moderns can presume? They observed all the acute and chronic diseases, as the gardener his plants rising out of the earth; and, as a pilot at the helm. had no Opposition from any separate or contrary Interest, and were in all the Dissiculties assisted by the Council of the most generous Patrons, who bequeathed the Arcana of the Diseases and Remedies their Predecessors had left them. Will it be objected, we pursue our Lux\u2223uries and our Avarice beyond all the Universe, but then in the intervals, we are the bravest, and wisest, and most publick Spirited, outdo all in Improvements of Wit, and Pleasures, and Manufactures: Our Phy\u2223sicians and Surgeons, (tho' in the great Assemblies we despise and abhor them) are imagin'd from their imprudent Prattel in the Publick Houses the greatest Artists of Europe. We have often (my dear United Britains) fought for Plunder on the Borders; here I defie you, as the Princes of old contested the Discoveries the most useful and Royal. Our Physici\u2223ans demonstrate, that the Philosophy of Nature has but lately advanc'd Northward, has been insulted in its Progress by the fierce Disputes of imaginary and impertinent NotionsPhysick, the pursuit of preserving health and life through the philosophy of all nature, was the endeavor of princes, nobility, and philosophers after the initial fear of diseases. They gathered all observations of the powers of natural causes and energies affecting or protecting mankind. Hippocrates and Galen, among others, collected the fundamental, infallible, universally received laws of medicine, which varied according to governments, climates, manners, and diet. The establishment of the Royal College aimed to detect diseases specific to our climate, air, manners, and diet, and to adjust methods of cure and the qualities of approved medicines accordingly. The barbarous intrusion of empiricism, akin to the Goths and Vandals, disrupted this established medical knowledge.Dr. Sydenham revived the vast enterprise by caring for all the sick in his province, comparing the impressions of all diseases, observing the efforts and tendencies of nature where its symptoms promise and operate never-failing recovery, where it craves to be assisted, directed, or moderated, or opposed. History gives the surest instructions to all governments in peace and war. The conduct of diseases and the uses of almost all parts of the universe to prevent or conquer them are to be addressed to the peculiar constitutions of distant nations from the great magazines of their success. But we must imitate the ancients in their sincerity and industry. Our physicians had the little, but mighty and most necessary artifice almost peculiar to themselves; had the proportioned fee in the morning, but to prevent mortal suspicions.assumed frequent visits in the most acute and impending dangers. They preserved patients and enriched their knowledge through hourly views of complexions, profuse vomiting, purging, and bleeding. They noted the operations of medicines when they were more powerful or feeble, and observed the approaches of new and contrary symptoms. I have been assured by honorable and virtuous physicians that the first degrees of all diseases, which can affect mankind, are safe. The fierce and painful symptoms often ensure life, as efforts of nature are not repelled and destroyed, but the advanced degrees of all disorders are as fatal as the pestilence. Our physicians could not hear or see the first signals of danger. They did not decree methods of bleeding, vomiting, purging, or the eight to ten sweating doses for the following 24 hours in the first moments. But they warily observed the pulse, heat, and natural evacuations by the pores, urine.The next view showed the bowels cleansing themselves, or the continued evacuation rejecting morbid humors, abating the disease's fury, and promising victory. The other artifice produced its wonderful effects. The different conditions resulted in a half fee in chronic diseases at the physician's house. They did not advise the poor gentlemen at the tippling-houses without examining the urine, an hour before parting with a portion of blood, and the urine's surest messenger, along with other evidence.\n\nShould we then, my dear South Britons, conclude with the gentlemen of quality and the College's remonstrance in the poem that modern medicine is a dangerous craft, and put it down, as the Royal-Oak-Lottery, or restore it to its integrity and sufficiency? The disease is known, and the remedy is most obvious, but the excessive disproportionate increase of apothecaries.And the oppressive invasion of their property by infinite empires. In all the wise governments in Europe, they were prevented from multiplying, harmful to themselves and the profession and people. The 114 in the Charter (An. 1616) increased by the 2 or 3 apprentices in every shop had filled all the streets of the City and the villages around it. In their distress from the encroachments of quacks and themselves, the court-physicians, and a small part then of the collegiates proposed to go into business with them, taking half of the 20 or 30, or 40 l. from all the fevers and smallpox, etc. The easiest and most secure, as the most perplexed and hazardous, and 100 or 200 l. in the long disorders. How can it be? But what cannot the combination of two artists achieve? The vulgar medicines are to be used; the cordials, sweaters, sleepers, etc., instead of their mixtures and divisions in the family from the then known and cheap quantities.all must be divided by the Apothecary into small doses. They are disguised from their knowledge by contrived pompous names in the Latin prescription. Every dose must be pretended to be a rare and precious thing, all the boluses and powders avowed to be compounded with bezoar, though the ten thousandth part is not imported, and all juleps in all disorders must be enriched with pearl, inferior to many of the most plentiful alkalies. The prescription must swell to the admired bulk and grandeur, the common medicines, which are each perfect and complete for the respective intentions, must be jumbled together in each dose, whose ingredients may make 20 or 40. You see, My dear South Britons, that the first great law of nature is violated: as the bark, its sovereign medicines in all other afflictions mirror, Querpo's, and the bards, shall attest that there is no omission or commission in the method of cure the patient has been under.They should communicate their Knowledge and all their Medicines? If they reduce the number of doses of the current 30 common Medicines in the Shop, they will be discarded. They cannot restore the appropriate Specifics, which must control the Cure of Diseases. It is not impossible, my BRITAINS, to find a remedy for your Calamities. Your Ancestors have reserved many infallible Medicines that have been abandoned, and they have bequeathed to you the care of the Public and their Wisdom to preserve it. Their first care was to support Fidelity and Industry, to improve the Science of young Physicians, who were warranted to the People as the Judges of the Circuits, as the Coins and Measures. The Charters prevent Hospitals from usurping Diseases from the Physicians and Surgeons' care. They are commanded to receive only the maimed and wounded Sailors and Soldiers.The Casualties of the City: They foresaw the dangers of the diseased from the rude conveyance to them, the stench of the rooms, excessive numbers, and scents of dressings. They also feared the broken sleep caused by the groans of the painful and departing, and the clamorous attendance. Other dangers included the gross diet in labor houses, the use of vulgar remedies and suspected cruel refusals of just proportions, and the rare and confused advice of physicians and surgeons. The Clergy, reporting the restrictions of their charity to the wounded and maimed in Spittal Sermons, will revive in citizens the ancient usage. In this practice, the poor were saved by the hourly care of their physicians and surgeons, who observed the tendency of each disease and the powers of remedies, with the affectionate attendance of the houses, undisturbed reposes in the air not corrupted, and diets adjusted to all constitutions.And the steady use of Specific Medicines. This Charity will introduce the rewards given to Physicians and Surgeons in all European cities, with the assurance that this method alone can raise Physic and Surgery to the greatest perfection, and the calamitous relieved by their bounty. The Universities and the Clergy will animate your zeal to protect the professions established by law. The College has in the poem humbly proposed that the weighty affair may be examined and judged by visitors, who will command the surrender of Physicians and Surgeons, and Apothecaries charters. Statutes shall be adjusted, which shall not be broken by their mutual rage and the abhorred apostasies of their members. We may fix the necessary boundaries from the laws. The Eastern Emperors and Ministers, Luke's Day, will entertain the audience, as we have at last begun to apply the sacred truths and observations of many ages, collected by the famous Greek and Latin authors.To the British Diseases, whose language and most useful philosophy have not been understood by our most eminent practitioners. Will the Orator be able to persuade that in England, the advice for nothing had undone the poor in every sickness with sovereign medicines ten times cheaper than their food? That it raised apothecaries and empirics on the ruin of physic and surgery, who are elevated and sunk by the apothecaries, and must therefore, with the most infamous treachery, assault and destroy one another, and their professions? That the physicians and surgeons near the court had never seen the rise and progress of any disease, had tampered only with the common receipts of thirty vulgar remedies, almost always fatal to the royal family, the nobility, and millions of the people? How will they be surprised that a hundred years had passed during the sales of patents and charters, and the rebellion, and, after the Restoration, and the more pernicious civil-war of our follies and vices. before the Collegiates could convince the Nation, that the Right and Property in the Plenty of all the Remedies, and the Protection of their Life, can only be restor'd by the Defence of the Apothecaries against the Deluge of the Native and the Foreign Empiricks, and the Regulation of the Number of their Shops?\nFINIS.", "creation_year": 1708, "creation_year_earliest": 1708, "creation_year_latest": 1708, "source_dataset": "EEBO", "source_dataset_detailed": "EEBO_Phase2"}, |
