le, and in my opinion a
wheel-barrow will answer the purpose as well as a coach."[226:1] Can any
one doubt that the wheel-barrow furnished a powerful therapeutic
suggestion in this case?

In the early part of the eighteenth century, it appears that charlatans
were very numerous in England. Indeed the "corps of medical savages" was
almost as motley and manifold in form as in the Middle Ages. The
dabblers in medicine included grocers, book-sellers, printers,
confectioners, merchants and traders, midwives, medical students,
preachers, chemists, distillers, gipsies, shepherds, conjurors, old
women, sieve-makers and water-peddlers. Apothecaries were permitted to
sell drugs to "alchemists, bath-servants and ignorant quacks, while
dabsters, calf-doctors, rag-pickers, magicians, witches,
crystallomancers, sooth-sayers and other _mancipia_ [purchased slaves]
of the Devil, were allowed to practice Medicine."[227:1]

At this same period, we are told, the mass of the English people were
extraordinarily credulous. And this fact was true, not only of the
densely ignorant class, but also of the more intelligent and better
educated middle class, who were ready to believe everything that
appeared in print.[227:2] Hence was afforded an ideal field for the
exercise of the wily charlatan's activities. And the glowing
advertisements of quack remedies appealed strongly to the popular fancy.

A London surgeon, Dr. P. Coltheart, writing in 1727, asserted that
English practitioners of that time were the peers of any in Europe. He
complained, however, of the multitude of ignorant quacks, who were
allowed a free hand in the practice of their pretended art, to the
detriment of the community.

The spectacle of such a gallant array of charlatans, recruited from the
ranks of illiterate tramps and vagrants, the very scum of society, yet
thriving by reason of the popular credulity, certainly warranted the
scathing arraignment of these interlopers by reputable physicians, who
thus found a vent for their righteous indignation, although they were
powerless to impede thereby the strong tide of imposture.

How often it happened, wrote William Connor Sydney, in "England and the
English in the Eighteenth Century," that a bricklayer (who chanced to be
the seventh son of his father), or a sharp-witted cobbler, picked up an
antiquated collection of medieval recipes, and perused it in his leisure
hours! Then, dispensing with his trowel or awl, he devoted him