"By nature meant, by want a pedant made,
Blackmer at first professed the whipping trade.
* * * * *
In vain his pills as well as birch he tried;
His boys grew blockheads, and his patients died."
Mr. Jeaffreson says, "the same dull sarcasms about killing patients and
whipping boys into blockheads are repeated over and again; and as if to
show, with the greatest possible force, the pitch to which the evil of the
times had risen, the coarsest and most disgusting of all these lampoon
writers was a lady of rank,--the Countess of Sandwich!"
Wouldn't a young Harvard or Yale medical graduate, without money, friends,
or a practice, leap for joy with the knowledge that he had two-score
_disinterested_ writers advertising him into universal notice, since it is
considered a burning disgrace for an honorable, upright, and educated
physician to advertise himself!
Of course Sir Richard rose, in spite of his foes, to whom he seldom
replied. He says, in one of his own works, "I am but a hard-working
doctor, spending my days in coffee-houses (where physicians were wont to
receive apothecaries, and, hearing the cases of their patients, prescribe
for them without seeing them, at half price), receiving apothecaries, or
driving over the stones in my carriage, visiting my patients."
The honest, upright man who rises from nothing, and continues to ascend
right in the teeth of immense opposition from his enemies, seldom relapses
into obscurity in after life. Though Dr. Blackmer failed as a poet, he
died esteemed as an honest man, a consistent Christian, and an excellent
physician.