A barber of Boston, accidentally overhearing a gentleman mention a certain
remedy for the "barber's itch," seized upon the idea of speculating upon
it, and at once sold out his shop, made up the ointment, clapped M. D. to
his name, put out his circulars, and is now seeking whom he may devour, as
a physician.
With the looseness of morals and the laxity of our laws, one of these
fellows "can make a doctor as quick as a tinker can make a tin kettle."
Probably more barbers have become doctors than any other artisans, for the
reason that barbers were formerly nearly the only acknowledged
"blood-letters." In the earlier days of Abernethy, barber surgeons were
recognized, and the great doctor said of himself, "I have often doffed my
hat to those fellows, with a razor between their teeth and a lancet in
their hands." Doubtless some of them arrived to usefulness in the
profession. Dr. Ambrose Paré, a French barber surgeon, was called the
father of French surgery, and enjoyed the confidence of Charles IX. An
eminent surgeon of London was Mr. Pott. He was contemporary with Dr.
Hunter, and gave lectures at St. Bartholomew Hospital in Hunter's
presence. Some person asking a wag one day where Dr. Hunter was, he
replied that, "with barber surgeons he _had gone to pot_."
This alliance of surgery and shaving, to say nothing of other
qualifications with which they were sometimes associated, conceivably
enough furnished some pretext for apprenticeships, since Dickey Gossip's
definition of
"Shaving and tooth-drawing,
Bleeding, cabbaging, and sawing,"
was by no means always sufficiently comprehensive to include the
multifarious accomplishments of "the doctor." "I have seen," says Dr.
Macillwain, of England, "within twenty-five years, chemist, druggist,
surgeon, apothecary, and the significant, '&c.,' followed by hatter,
hosier, and linen draper, all in one establishment."
I saw in New Hampshire, in 1864, doctor, barber, and apothecary
represented by one man.
William Butts, another barber surgeon of London, was called to attend
Henry VIII., and was rewarded for his professional services with the
honor of knighthood in 1512. Another, who was knighted by Henry VIII., was
John Ayliffe, a sheriff, formerly a merchant of Blackwell Hall.
Royalty had a chronic habit of knighting quacks. Queen Anne became so
charmed by a tailor, who had turned doctor, and who, by some hook or
crook, was called to prescribe for the queen's weak eyes, that she had him
sworn in, with another knave, as her own oculist. "This lucky gentleman,"
says a reliable author, "was William Reade, a botching tailor of Grub
Street, London. To the very last he was a great ignoramus, as a work
entitled 'A Short and Exact Account of all Diseases Incident to the Eyes,'
attests; yet he rose to knighthood, and the most lucrative and fashionable
practice of the period." Reade (_Sir William_) was unable to read the book
he had published (written by an _amanuensis_); nevertheless, aristocracy,
and wise and worthy people at that, who listened to his dignified voice,
viewed his pompous person, encased in rich garments, and adorned with
jewelry and lace ruffles, _cap-a-pie_, resting his chin upon his enormous
gold-headed cane, as, reclining in his splendid coach, drawn by a span of
superb blood horses, up to St. James, considered him the most learned and
eminent physician of that generation.
In the British Museum is deposited a copy of a poem to the great oculist.
This poem Reade himself had written, at the hand of a penny-a-liner, a
"poet of Grub Street," immediately after he was knighted, which has been
mainly instrumental in handing his name down to posterity.