After these, followed a long train of mountebank-apothecaries, laden with pestles, and mortars, suppositories, spatulas, glister-pipes and syringes, ready charged, and as mortal as gun-shot, and several titled boxes with remedies without, and poisons within: ye may observe that when a patient comes to die, the apothecary’s mortar rings the passing-bell, as the priest’s requiem finishes the business. An apothecary’s shop is (in effect) no other than the physician’s armoury, that supplies him with weapons; and (to say the truth) the instruments of the apothecary and the soldier are much of a quality: what are their boxes but petards? their syringes, pistols; and their pills, but bullets? And after all, considering their purgative medicines, we may properly enough call their shops purgatory; and why not their persons hell? their patients the damned? and their masters the devils? These apothecaries were in jackets, wrought all over with Rs, struck through like wounded hearts, and in the form of the first character of their prescriptions, which (as they tell us) signifies _recipe_ (take thou) but we find it to stand for _recipio_ (I take.) Next to this figure, they write ana, ana, which is as much as to say an ass, an ass; and after this, march the ounces and the scruples; an incomparable cordial to a dying man; the former to dispatch the body, and the latter, to put the soul into the highway to the devil. To hear them call over their simples, would make you swear they were raising so many devils. There’s your opopanax, buphthalmus, astaphylinos, alectorolophos, ophioscorodon, anemosphorus, etc.
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.