1817. Died at Heckington, aged sixty-five, Mr. Samuel Jessup, an opulent
grazier, of pill-taking memory. He lived in a very eccentric way, as a
bachelor, without known relatives; and at his decease possessed of a
good fortune, notwithstanding a most inordinate craving for physic, by
which he was distinguished for the last thirty years of his life, as
appeared on a trial for the amount of an apothecary’s bill, at the
assizes at Lincoln, a short time before Mr. Jessup’s death, wherein he
was defendant. The evidence on the trial affords the following materials
for the epitaph of the deceased, which will not be transcended by the
memorabilia of the life of any man:--In twenty-one years (from 1791 to
1816) the deceased took 226,934 pills, supplied by a respectable
apothecary at Bottesford; which is at the rate of 10,806 pills a year,
or twenty-nine pills each day; but as the patient began with a more
moderate appetite, and increased it as he proceeded, in the last five
years preceding 1816, he took the pills at the rate of seventy-eight a
day, and in the year 1814 he swallowed not less than 51,590.
Notwithstanding this, and the addition of 40,000 bottles of mixture, and
juleps and electuaries, extending altogether to fifty-five closely
written columns of an apothecary’s bill, the deceased lived to attain
the advanced age of sixty-five years.
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