1830.] Quackery Practice, and St. John Loiig. 663 



half deluged by the effusion. Mr. Prendergast has some peculiar 

 notions on the subject of testimony an opinion upon oath is something 

 new. He had tried to persuade Mr. Vesey Fitzgerald to consult Mr. 

 Long, but his persuasive were like his other powers not very efficient 

 Mr. Vesey Fitzgerald declined ; " but my opinion on oath is/' says 

 Mr. Prendergast, " that had he been rubbed, he might have been able 

 to preside at the Board of Trade at this moment !" Mr. Prendergast 

 never knew any lady but Miss Cashin die, meaning of those who had 

 had little the matter with them. To such as had been given up by 

 their medical advisers, and were evidently in a desperate state, Mr. 

 Long was in the habit of saying he -would do his best. Now Mr. Long, 

 on the testimony of all his patients, had but one remedy for every thing 

 what then could doing his best mean ? The repetition of the phrase 

 betrays in the mind of Mr. Prendergast a credulity, that would have 

 taken him to Graham, or Mesmer, or Perkins. 



We have had some respect, little as it has been of late, for Sir Francis 

 Burdett, and scarcely suspected him capable of making so very pitiful 

 an appearance as he did at the Inquest. To lend himself, as a cat's- 

 paw, to a great man is something so deplorable, that we willingly pass 

 him by his testimony was not of the slightest worth, and it is painful 

 to dwell on what is at once grovelling and ineffective. 



A Mr. Braithwaite, an honest engineer, seems to have had an extra- 

 ordinary disease a wasting of the limbs ; and believes, apparently with. 

 a thorough devotion, that Mr. Long, in fifty days, restored them to their 

 original dimensions. By the way, somebody else deposes, that his 

 lungs grew under Mr. Long's operations. Mr. Braithwaite was asked 

 whether his confidence in Mr. Long's remedies was at all shaken by the 

 death of Miss Cashin not at all, quite the contrary so that a death 

 seems, in his opinion, to have been desirable to test the power of the 

 remedy. 



Colonel Campbell speaks for his daughter. She had what he terms 

 an affection of the hip ; which affection, as he states it, forced the thigh 

 from the socket ; an abscess formed in the hip-joint, and other tumours 

 on the leg. Her knee turned almost to dislocation, and the toes inclined 

 inwards. Was this case possibly relievable by mechanical means 

 cured by Mr. Long's remedy ? Not precisely the young lady cannot 

 yet walk she cannot yet bear at all her weight upon the limb. Yet this 

 case figures among the cures. 



These are the testimonies of the leading witnesses all of them, it 

 will be observed, proceeding from the patients themselves from unpro- 

 fessional persons knowing nothing of the nature or source of disease 

 incapable of discriminating, and utterly unqualified to give an opinion 

 as to any specific relation between the disease and the remedy. In the 

 only case for we put the Surgeon-General of Jamaica out of the ques- 

 tion where the name of a medical man was brought forward, as pre- 

 viously acquainted with the patient, the evidence was fairly annihilated; 

 and we scarcely doubt the result would have been the same in many 

 other cases, which are said to have been given up by eminent medical 

 practitioners had the parties been rash enoiigh to name them. Many 

 of the witnesses were obviously Mr. Long's friends, and others, it may 

 safely be supposed, having orice committed themselves, were resolved 

 to go through- stitch, and brazen the matter out to the last. The wit- 

 nesses w r ere told the lotion was always the same, on all occasions. None 



