Period referred to: Early 1700s
Sound category: Economic > Quack doctors
Title of work: Amusements Serious and Comical
Type of publication: Satire
Author: Thomas Brown
Year of publication: 1700
Page/volume number: Amusement X
‘In Leicester-Fields, I saw a Mountebank on the Stage,
with a Congregation of Fools about him’
In Leicester-Fields, I saw a Mountebank on the Stage, with a Congregation of Fools about him, who like a Master in the Faculty of Lying, gave them a History of his Cures, beyond all the Plays and Farces in the World. He told them of Fifteen Persons that were Run clear through the Body, and glad for a matter of three Days together, to carry their Puddings in their Hands; but in Four and twenty Hours he made'em as whole as Fishes, and not so much as a Scar for a Remembrance of the Orifice. If a Man had been so bold as to ask him when, and where? his Answer would have been ready without Studying; that it was some Twelve hundred Leagues off in Terra Incognito, by the Token, that at the same time he was Physician in Ordinary to a great Prince, that dy'd about Five and twenty years ago, and yet the Quack was not Forty.