244 On the new Nomenclature adopted hy 



serious nay fatal mischief has been done, every medical 

 man in extensive practice well knows, though he may not 

 for obvious reasons hke to tell it. One instance v^'hich I 

 know to be true, I wiil mention ; as happily its conse- 

 quences were not fatal, and its circumstances laughable : — 

 Soon after sir George Baker had published the new Phar- 

 macopoeia, lady Baker was unwell, and applied to her hus- 



^band for relief. Sir George judged a gentle cathartic to be 

 proper, and ordered an ounce of Epsom sails ; but, proud of 

 ins new nomenclature, wrote v^agncs. vitriol. The apothe- 

 cary's boy read magnes., but took no heed of the vitriol.; 

 and of the drug so familiar to him, magnesia alba, stirred 

 up an ounce with a a. s. of peppermint water, and sent it 

 in a large phial to lady Baker. The dose was nearly equal 

 to the whitewashing her dressing-room ceiling, and when 

 emptied into a slopbason had a most formidable appearance: 

 but lady Baker, with acourage worthy the wife of Celsusor of 



,Musa, attacked it with a spoon; and had contrived to swal- 

 low nearly enough to make a plaster cast of the interior of 

 her stomach, when sir George arrived, and much surprised 

 asked his wife what she was about, and whether she had a 

 sudden attack of green sickness. Lady Baker, clearing her 

 mouth as well as she could from the mortar that clogged 

 the fauces, assured him she was fallowing his prescription. 

 A wife so heroic in the cause of medicine became doubly 

 dear to sir George, and he immediately stopped the further 

 progress of his spouse in this petrific process. Inquiry at 

 the apothecary's soon cleared up the mistake, and the con- 

 sequence to lady Baker was only two or three days unwell- 

 ness, and two or three doses of physic to rid her inside of 

 its load. Had calomel been ordered, lady Baker might not 

 have been alive to tell her story to her husband at his re- 

 turn from his visits. 



Names are given to things for the purpose of distinguish- 

 ing them from each other. Those names, therefore, are 

 the best which are the shortest, and the most dissimilar in 

 sound, as being the easiest remembered and the least likely 

 to be confounded or mistaken; and for the same reason 

 commonly received names should be as little as possible 

 altered. Significant names have no real good, and very 

 often tend to error. Owl or swan are better names for birds 

 than blackbird, inasmuch as they do not pretend to describe 

 anything; whereas blackbird might lead to a supposition that 

 no other bird of that colour existed amongst us, and might 

 induce a foreigner to mistake a crow or a raven for a black- 

 bird. 



That 



