348 Trade and Profession. [APRIL, 



supposed to correspond with his person, and that must unite the priggish 

 precision of dandyism with the most decided opposition to all modish 

 innovation in dress. Breeches and blue silk stockings, and a pigtail, are 

 worth at least 300. per annum to a good trader more especially east of 

 Temple Bar. In one word, he must be unfashionable " a qualre 

 ep ingles," and avoid suspenders to his breeches, as he would practising 

 without a license. But though the trader must not sport too much addic- 

 tion to science, he must be intimately acquainted with whatever else is 

 going ; for it is a most essential point of practice to be amusing. A trading 

 physician is the (Edipus of his circle. He can fill up all the blanks and 

 asterisks of a newspaper knows all that is done at court or in parliament 

 can name the authors of all anonymous publications corresponds with 

 Sir Walter Scott can criticise the last new play, or the last new actor; 

 not, iudeed, from personal knowledge (for he has no time to go to plays), 

 but from report. He can talk politics, without committing himself, to 

 the men scandal to the women and make a dissertation on the adul- 

 teration of tea, or the wholesomeness of brandy arid water, to a fashion- 

 able monthly nurse. He is always overloaded with business, and regularly 

 looks over his list in every house he enters ; but he finds an opportunity of 

 visiting his particular friends as often as his visits are paid for. If he be 

 a rising young man, he will not refuse to act as factotum to a profitable 

 patient : he will procure genuine arrow-root, go in search of unadulterated 

 Epsom salts, or trudge to Leaden hall-street for a particular sort of calcined 

 magnesia. If he resides in a watering-place, his sphere of activity is still 

 more extended : he will hire your house, recommend you tradesmen, and 

 has particular reasons for putting you on your guard against professional 

 roguery ; and tells you, as a profound secret, that there is only one house 

 in the town where the drugs are genuine. 



In the practice of the art itself, the difference between trade and profes- 

 sion is immense. The sole business of the professor is to prescribe what 

 will benefit the patient : the great object of the trader is to write what will 

 do good to the apothecary. A trader never contradicts a nervous lady, but 

 prescribes according to her imaginings ; for who should know the reality 

 of the disease more than she who suffers it. He never refuses any indul- 

 gence that is asked in diet ; for nature knows best .her own wants. He 

 never abandons a case, or dismisses it to the country, while it continues to 

 pay; for that were to despair of his art. A professional physician, if he 

 turn author, seeks for a subject which requires illustration, or one with 

 which accident or the course of his studies has made him more especially 

 acquainted. The trader looks out for matter that will bring grist to the 

 mill. A regular practitioner must not stoop to open quackery, because 

 quacks are rivals, who must be discountenanced ; but it is fair to write 

 hooks ad captandum vulgus treatises on fashionable spa, fashionable 

 medicines, and fashionable complaints. Diseases, it is well known, have 

 their vogue ; and gout, liver, and nerves " take turn, like day and night." 

 A trader will always take care to time his publication so as to kill the most 

 birds at a single shot remembering always, that " scire tuum nihil est," 

 and that advertisement is the high road to notoriety. Godwin, in his 

 " Enquirer," has given good rules for the accomplishment of the trading 

 physician, which mutatis mutandis will serve all the learned profes- 

 sions alike : " The fantastic valetudinarian is particularly his prey: he 

 listens to his frivolous tale of symptoms with inflexible gravity ; he pre- 



