Part 2 (2/2)

Hannes' carriage?” etc.

Acting upon these orders, one of these fellows, after looking into every carriage from Whitehall to Royal Exchange, ran into a coffee-house, which was one of the great places of meeting for members of the medical profession. Several physicians were present, among whom was Radcliffe.

”Gentlemen,” said the liveried servant, hat in hand, ”can your honors tell me if Dr. Hannes is present?”

”Who wants Dr. Hannes, fellow?” demanded Radcliffe.

”Lord A. and Lord B., your honor,” replied the man.

”No, no, friend,” responded the doctor, with pleasant irony; ”those lords don't want _your master_; 'tis he who wants them.”

The humbug exploded, but Hannes had got the start before this occurred.

A worthy biographer begins thus, in writing of Dr. Radcliffe: ”The Jacobite partisan, the physician without learning, the luxurious _bon vivant_, Radcliffe, who grudged the odd sixpence of his tavern score,”

etc., ”was born in Yorks.h.i.+re, in the year 1650.”

But notwithstanding Radcliffe's plebeian birth, he died rich, therefore respected--a fact which hides many sins and imperfections. He not only humbugged the people of his day into the belief that he was a learned and eminent physician, but by his shrewdness in disposing of his gains, in bestowing wealth where it would tell in after years, when his body had returned to the dust from whence it came,--such as giving fifty thousand dollars to the Oxford University as a fund for the establishment of the great ”Radcliffe Library,” etc.,--he succeeded in humbugging subsequent generations into the same belief.

Certainly there is room for a few more such humbugs.

Dr. Barnard de Mandeville, in ”Essays on Charity and Charity Schools,”

says of Radcliffe, ”That a man with small skill in physic, and hardly any learning, should by vile arts get into practice, and lay up wealth, is no mighty wonder; but that he should so deeply work himself into the good opinion of the world as to gain the general esteem of a nation, and establish a reputation beyond all contemporaries, with no other qualities but a perfect knowledge of mankind, and a capacity of making the most of it, is something extraordinary.”

Mandeville further accuses him of ”an insatiable greediness after wealth, no regard for religion, or affection for kindred, no compa.s.sion for the poor, and hardly any humanity to his fellow-creatures; gave no proofs that he loved his country, had a public spirit, or love of the arts, books, or literature;” and asks, in summing up all this, ”What must we judge of his motives, the principle he acted from, when after his death we find that he left but a mere trifle among his (poor) relatives who stood in need, and left an immense treasure to a university that did not want it?”

”Radcliffe was not endowed with a kindly nature,” says another writer.

”Meade, I love you,” he is represented as saying to his fascinating adulator, ”and I will tell you a secret to make your fortune. Use all mankind ill.”

Radcliffe had practised what he preached. Though mean and penurious, he could not brook meanness in others.

The rich miser, John Tyson, approximating his end, magnanimously resolved to pay two of his three million guineas to Dr. Radcliffe for medical advice. The miserable old man, accompanied by his wife, came up to London, and tottered into the doctor's office at Bloomsbury Square.

”I wish to consult you, sir; here are two guineas.”

”You may go, sir,” exclaimed Radcliffe.

The old miser had trusted that he was unknown, and he might pa.s.s for a poor wretch, unable to pay the five guineas expected from the wealthy, as a single consultation fee.

”You may go home and die, and be d----d; for the grave and the devil are ready for Jack Tyson of Hackney, who has ama.s.sed riches out of the public and the tears of orphans and widows.”

As the miserable old man turned away, Radcliffe exclaimed, ”You'll be a dead man in less than ten days.”

It required little medical skill, in the feeble condition of the old man, in order to give this correct prognosis.

Radcliffe was the Barnum of doctors. ”_Omnia mutantur, et nos mutamus in illis_,” exclaimed Lotharius the First. But that ”all things are changed, and we change with them,” did not apply to medical humbugs during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--no, nor in the nineteenth century, as we will show, particularly in our articles on Quacks and Patent Medicines.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MISER OUTWITS HIMSELF.]

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