DECEMBER 283 



One instrument, and one only, seems to have been 

 common to all ages the lancet. Down to fifty or sixty 

 years ago blood-letting was indiscriminately prescribed 

 and universally believed in. I possess a folio account- 

 book of an ancestor who flourished when the eighteenth 

 century was still young most entertaining reading, by 

 reason of his having made it a kind of journal also. 

 Regularly, every spring and autumn for many years, 

 recurs an entry such as this : 



' To a chirurgeon, for blooding my wife, Peggy, and me, 



and for giving Peggy a vomit, . . . . 28 /.' 



Peggy was the worthy gentleman's daughter, and the fee 

 was in Scots money. 



But there is no need to go back so far for examples of 

 ferocious practice in medicine. Seasonal blood-letting 

 was reckoned indispensable till well on in the nineteenth 

 century. George iv. was bled the day before his corona- 

 tion, to fit him for the ceremony. His unhappy Queen, 

 after being refused admission to Westminster Abbey on 

 that occasion, drove sorrowfully home, and her agitation 

 brought on liver disorder. Here is an account of the 

 treatment to which she was subjected by the best London 

 doctors of the day : 



1 On Friday (the day after the coronation) last she lost sixty- 

 four ounces of blood; took first of all 15 grains of calomel, 

 which they think she threw up again in the whole or in part ; 

 and then she took 40 grains more of calomel which she kept 

 entirely in her stomach ; add to this a quantity of castor oil 

 that would have turned the stomach of a horse. Nevertheless, 

 on Friday night the inflammation had subsided, tho' not the 

 obstruction on the liver.' J 



1 The Creevey Papers, vol. ii. p. 21. 



