Good, good
, I thought.
A nice touch. Bravo.
“You see here no boastful, upstart, bum-beeping apothecary,” he thundered. “No rumbling quack, no piss-prophet, no greedy physician rambling tamely among you with some moldy tales out of Boccaccio and discoursing of my exotic travels. Not I. No no no no no. Neverrrrrr!”
To a man, the crowd hastily shook their heads, banishing such a possibility.
Such despicable men went about the country, he told us, robbing honest citizens not just of their wealth but also their corporeal health, prescribing the same deceitful cure for every illness, and inventing illnesses to suit their wares, active not in the Hippocratic arts but in the crass pursuit of the hard-earned pittances of foolish people.
“Behold at last an honest man!” he cried, pointing to his modest garb. “Too honest to be rich! You will not hear me talking of the Moon-Palls or the Strong-Fives nor the Hockogrocles, nor the Marthambles, all spurious maladies genesised for his own profit by that arrant quack, Doctor Tufts, who has recently passed through this fair town, spreading misery! Nor even the Dogmatical Incurables of Nathanial Merry, so named because of his rejoicing in his profits earned at the cost of a dozen young lives! How often have I been called—too late, alas, and so futilely to the victims of the hoax quacksters, such as the notorious Doctor Trigg of Tower Wharf, Spawner of the dreaded Golden Vatican Pills! And, though it pains me to say so, of mine own countrymen, no better are the so-called Dottore Salvador Winter and his deadly Elixir Vitae, and Giovanni Francesco Born, with his false Sovereign Julep! Doctors? No! Thieves?
Yes. These men would steal the eyes out of your head and come back for the eyelashes.”
There is the competition destroyed
, I thought.
Well done.
Dottore Velena described himself as a mere Enthusiast in Physic, a scholar who had stumbled on a great benediction while engaged only in the search for knowledge—what this benediction was, well, he humbly asked our patience, but he would return to that subject shortly.
This was his genius,
not
to mention his wares at all, until he had built up a pitch of fervor for them. In the meantime he spoke with great passion of his many and esoteric studies, interlarding each sentence with Latin phrases of a faintly familiar yet not quite comprehensible provenance: This, I soon realized, was because they were nonsense, a mere concoction of learned sounds without substance. And into each sentence he inserted a morsel of Pseudo-Physics or Chemistry, drawing down upon us the Science of a thousand years, and the secrets of a dozen great but extinct cultures.
I lost concentration for a while, amused myself looking on the rapt faces of the crowd. When I re-entered his sphere, he was rolling on about how, as a learned Antiquary, he had recovered out of some Ruin of Asia the formula for a certain precious balm, which not only kept the ancient races immortal but also beautified them beyond belief. He recounted how the members of the College of Physicians had embraced him and wept for joy when presented with the results of his life’s work.
Men and women in the audience nodded sagely at his references to the great Dr. Chamberlen, the inventor of the Anodyne Necklace that had lately saved upward of twelve thousand London children from “dying of their teeth.” And they smiled approvingly at his casual mention of “just a mere few” of his esteemed patients, not solicited by him but who had sought him out, despite his begging to be left to his scholarly retirement.
“But my Lord Hathaway would have none of it when I told him I sought just a simple life, away from court!” the quack cried. “Nor Prince Eugene of Russia, who begged for my help, and whom I had not the heart to turn away when I beheld his
suffering, knowing that in my possession I held the instant cure to the painful malady that ravaged his entire family on account of their overindulgence in the Venus Sports. Only when I had seen them all sound and well did I leave the court at St. Petersburg and make my way to Paris where the Queen herself did await me, all other surgeons having forsaken her as a Case Beyond Hope. And when I left her again blooming in health, and freshly with child, I returned to my native Venice” (here he allowed his eyes to show the rheum of nostalgia, and wiped away another tear) “where the Doge, growing blind, required my services to remove the cataracts on his eyes. It is he who awarded me the title I so rarely use, for motives of modesty, but in this case I shall share it with you: High Venetian Physician Empirickal.”
There was a smattering of applause at this. Dottore Velena bowed deeply.
“And what,” he asked us, rising up pridefully, “has led to the conferment of such honors?”
Only now, and without a word, he produced a single blue glass bottle from a cavern in his breeches. He fondled the little bottle as tenderly as if it were a kitten, allowing a moment’s silence for all eyes to fall on the affectioned object.
“This Physic,” he cried, now holding it up so it caught the light and glistened like a sliver of the ocean, “does cure all the diseases that God ever entailed upon the race of Adam.
“Behold this tiny bottle, so fragile, so delicate. Yet it contains inside it a moiety of that greatness that the whole Universe could not afford to purchase, were it to offer the just sum. This miraculous Elixir contains not just the purest distilled gold, but all the very heart of a Mandrake, the liver of an African Phoenix, and the Tongue of a Nile Mermaid, Anise, Mastich, Ginger, Cardamoms, Cinnamon, Zedoary, Manna, Senna, Mirabolams, Scordium, Bayberries, Catmint, Balsam of Peru …”
The list of ingredients ran on and on, interrupted by explanations of the processes used to fuse them together. These included the contracted and pulled rays of the sun, boiling over a cedar-wood fire, and the blessing of a noble Cardinal.
Breathlessly, he assured us: “And lastly, this golden juice is divested of any crudities by a true separation of the pure from the impure, and impregnated with Beams of Dawn Light and tartaragraphated through an Alembic of Crystalline Transfluency.”
There were moments when the audience seemed to be losing the thread, starting to shuffle or eat apples. When this happened, a curious thing occurred, which I had never seen before, even in Venice. The back wall of the rostrum was perforated with a number of small doors. At somnolent intervals, one of these little doors would pop open, to reveal the grinning head of the Zany, who waved a cautionary finger at the crowd and then disappeared behind the door he had slammed shut loudly. His timing was immaculate: He was clearly adept at earning his snack in the profits. At the clack of the shutter, everyone dozing in the audience would wake up, smile, and address their full attention to the quack again.
The pharmaceutical part of his discourse completed, the quack suddenly fixed his eye on a tripe-woman, glaring at her sternly. “Yes, YOU!” he thundered. “You know only too well of the lapsus of which I speak.”
All eyes fell on the fainting tripe-woman, who could only weep and moan, “Yes sir, you have discovered me. How was I to know what pocky kind of present he had brought for me in his breeches? I beg your kindness. Oh Sir, do help me.”
“PRRRRESENTLY” thundered the quack, holding the medicine away from her outreached hand, rendering it infinitely more valuable in the eyes of all watching.
The question was, would he allow the poor tripe-’woman to perish before he finished his speech? How soon would he relieve her misery by allowing her to purchase the bottle of salvation?
Some time, it seemed, for now the quack had reached the very climax of his speech, in which he described the ongoing symptoms of the disease, which at present showed but feeble signs among them.
“Those who suffer from the light cough, or the mild itch,” he warned, “are already in the grip of the Scurbattical Humor
which even now sucks on their vitals and enfeebles them. These distempers are but the first steps to a Worse Fate.”
The audience drooped visibly, running solicitous hands over various parts of their bodies. The tripe-woman was by this time lying on the ground, her legs twitching.
At this moment, the quack uttered a sharp whistle, and the Zany gambolled on to the stage, holding a miniature theater with shabby red curtains.
“Behold!” announced the quack. “Avert your eyes, if you are female, juvenile, or delicate. For I am about to show you your Futurrrrre!”
The Zany held the little theater up so all might behold it, and with a grand flourish the quack flung open the curtains.
A deep groan coursed through the audience. Several men staggered where they stood. Women, none of whom had averted their eyes, were openly weeping, and two pickpockets working the crowd froze with their hands in the breeches of their victims.
For revealed on the tiny stage was a most appalling waxwork, showing a man and a woman, naked, and in the final stages of a foul disease that had empurpled their skin, caused their hair to drop out, and reduced their fingers and toes to bloodied stumps. Their faces were scarred with striated tissue and worst of all, where the eye should detect the organs of generation were mere blackened holes, from which small waxen worms were seen to emerge.
Dottore Velena closed the curtains with a weighty sigh. He seemed to have lost all his former vigor and proceeded in a weak voice: “All my life I have slaved to counteract the mischiefs that are bred in our blood. Now I am old”—here the Zany plucked at a gray curl of his wig—“and I am weary from my travails”—here he sagged to a stool that the Zany placed beneath him, and he continued in a rasping whisper, “and I shall no more make this curative of mine, despite the entreaties and earnest prayers of several Lords, Earls, Dukes, and Honorable Personages. What you see here are the last drops I shall ever produce on this earth.” He winked back a tear. “Of course I shall continue with their manufacture in Heaven.”
The silence of the crowd was palpable. The audience strained on his every breath.
“Because I value the living soul of every creature on this earth, I have examined my conscience and found it commands me to sell this Infallible Preparation at so small a price as one shilling, even though I rob my own pocket in so doing and condemn myself to a lingering death in abject poverrrty.”
Now the Zany stepped forth with a very small tray of bottles. The crowd surged forward, demanding their share of the precious dwindling stock. While butchers loaded their aprons, housewives their baskets, the quack held himself aloof from the sordid commerce at his side, and continued with a soothing litany, never desisting from his recital of curable symptoms until the last bottle had been snatched from the tray that the Zany repeatedly replenished from a trunk behind the stage. His gambols had lessened: His harlequin tunic was weighed down with coin. Sometimes he teased the crowd, pretending to find the trunk empty, but they soon set up such a howl that he contrived to find some more bottles secreted in a back corner of it.
All through the sales Dottore Velena was murmuring, “If you deign to buy this humble preparation, then I can personally guarantee that it shall save you from the Shrinking of the Sinews, the Scurvy, the Rupture, the Consumption, the Falling-Sickness, Wens on the Neck, Agues of all kinds, the Tertian, Quartan and Quotidian, Retired and Shrunken Nerves, Excrementitious Blood, Colt Evil, Scabs in the Head, Catarrhs, the Humid Flux, Gouty pains, Hare-Lips, Dwindling of the Guts, Green or Cankered Wounds, Polipus up the Nose, Disruption of the Fundament, Swimmings in the Head, Stoppage of the Spleen, Looseness of the Teeth, Nocturnal Inquietudes, Vertiginous Vapors, Perdition of the Huckle-bone and Dolor of the
Os Sacrum
, not to mention Hydiocephalus Dissenteries, Odontalgick or Podagrical Inflammations, Palpitations of the Pericardium, the Hen-Pox, the Hog-Pox, the Whore’s Pox, and the entire Legion of Lethiferous Distempers.”
He uttered these words with a mechanical perfection, and
while he intoned them his eyes were busy counting the number of bottles being dealt out by his Zany.
“Drink but sparingly of this little bottle, it serves best when you allow but fifty or sixty drops (more or less as you please), and they are to be taken in a glass of spring water, beer, ale, Mum or Canary. It works just as well without sugar and a drrram of brrrandy may make it more palatable too, of course. It may be taken by sea and land, in any season too.”
Even as the last few customers were reaching out for their bottles, Dottore Velena was till chanting his instructions. “Don’t forget, ’tis most excellent in coffee and chocolate too, and will perfume both beverages with the most fragrant spirit of goodness. It will wipe off (abstersively) those tenacious conglomerated sedimental Sordes that adhere to the Oesophagus and Viscera, and annihilate all Nosotrophical symptoms. It removes all Webs, Pearls, Spots, Sparks, Clouds and Films from the Eyes….”
Just before the last customer could be satisfied, he made a little motion of his head and the Zany made one final trip to the cupboard, returning with an empty tray and a tragical expression. The unsatisfied customer departed, weeping and bemoaning his fate, and the quack and the Zany quickly closed up their little stage with curtains and retired behind it.
Bravo!
I thought to myself.
An almost faultier performance.
I had rarely seen better, even in Venice.
But they lacked one thing, and in this lack I thought I might help them, and at the same time help myself.
I walked back to my lodgings, pausing only to buy some white chalk powder, an apron, and a simple gray dress that, I was assured, had only been worn twice, and that by a woman of quality.
Take Snails beaten to mash with their Shells 3 pound; Crumb of white Bread new bak’d 12 ounces; Nutmeg 6 drams; Ground-Ivy 6 handfuls; Whey 3 quarts; distil it in a cold Still, without burning.
This Water humects, dilutes, supples, tempers, nourishes, comforts; and therefore is highly conducive in hectic consumptive Emaciations.