660 Quackery Practice, and St. John Long. QDEc. 



workings visible. The sooner, therefore, the extraction is accomplished 

 the better ; every disease by a timely exertion may be nipped in the 

 bud, and vaccination itself be superseded. You may thus be before- 

 hand with the plague, and defy contagion. 



The " humour" itself is described by Mr. Long and his friends. Mr. 

 Long vaguely speaks of it as a substance a fluid an inflamed fluid ; 

 but Lord Ingestrie, Long's great titled patron, more intelligibly states 

 it to be like quicksilver he himself witnessed the fluid, like quicksilver, 

 extracted twice from the head of one of Mr. Long's patients. It is just 

 possible this may have been an extraordinary case the patient was 

 obviously of a mercurial temperament ; the produce of the noble lord's 

 own head, we have seen it stated, on sufficient authority, had more of a 

 leaden aspect.* 



Long's remedy, again, is as simple, or rather as single as his theory ; 

 he gives no drugs nothing is ever internally administered by him but 

 what is nourishing nothing but what may taken to any extent nothing 

 to adults which children might not take. Oh no ! humane man ; he 

 does nothing but first smoke his patients, which seems to be merely a 

 piece of mummery, just to inspire them with a sense of the occult 

 powers of the operator ; and then bathes and rubs with a lotion so intrin- 

 sically innocent that it cannot harm an infant with which in fact ladies 

 often wash their hands, and even rinse their mouths. But this same 

 lotion, which is professedly applied to open the pores, to givfe egress to 

 the universal fluid, where it meets with disease strips off the skin is of 

 so corrosive a quality as to tear and rend, and decompose all it comes in 

 contact with. Its peculiar virtue is it will fasten upon nothing but 

 disease. 



But besides this grand discovery, he lays claim to the detection of 

 numerous errors in the general practice of the profession a specimen 

 or two will help to measure the man's calibre. Vaccination is mis- 

 chievous, because it only adds disease to disease it only increases the 

 miserable catalogue of human ills. Bleeding, again, must do more 

 harm than good. It is practically mischievous, and logically super- 

 fluous. " It does not remove the deteriorated quality." It merely 

 takes, as he phrases it, quantity from quantity, and not quality from 

 quantity. The blood that remains must be the same as that taken away. 

 Again, medical men are for ever administering chemical poisons, which 

 is not only bad in practice and logic, but apparently worse as to the 

 metaphysics of the business. " Good," he says, with all solemnity, 

 " cannot come of evil, nor nourishment from acrimonious fluids ; affi- 

 nities cannot be generated by contraries, nor can that which irritates 

 soothe. What healthful union can there be between mercury, prussic 

 acid, henbane, digitalis, acetate of lead, sulphuric acid, nitrous acid 

 and flesh and blood ?" The interrogative is supposed to carry with it 

 its own triumphant reply. Some profound aphorisms the distinct 

 result of his own personal experience are scattered over the pages ; 

 such as the " constitution is not to be undermined ;" " no remedies are 

 to be applied which are worse than the disease/' But enough of this 

 the book furnishes, every page of it, proofs of unparalleled ignorance 



* Medical Gazette tine able and indefatigable editor of which has laboured 

 zealously to expose Long's measureless impudence. We have been much indebted 

 to him. 



