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Updated: May 24, 2025
It is a useful observation, indeed, as to English physicians, that they seldom get their bread till they have no teeth to eat it: though, when they have acquired a reputation, they are as much followed as the great lawyers; they take care, however, not to be so much fatigued. You find them at Batson's or Child's Coffee House usually in the morning, and they visit their patients in the afternoon.
Having devoted a few sentences to a neighbouring establishment, the writer noted that it is "but a short step to a gloomy class of mortals, not less intent on gain than the stock-jobbers: I mean the dispensers of life and death, who flock together like birds of prey watching for carcasses at Batson's. I never enter this place, but it serves as a memento mori to me.
That historian of Batson's who was quoted in the previous chapter, related that after leaving its dismal vicinity he was glad to "breathe the pure air in St.
"When merchant, banker, broker, shake In Crockford's club their elbow, And for St. James's clock forsake The chiming of thy bell, Bow: When Batson's, Garraway's, and John's, At night show empty boxes, While cits are playing dice with dons, Or ogling opera doxies; Then Gog shall start, and Magog shall Tremble upon his pedestal."
In his early days he had been a mad doctor; and at Batson's he could still disconcert the impertinent by a shrewd glance, learned and practised among those unfortunates. With such qualifications, Dr. Addington was not slow to perceive Sir George's absence of mind; and presuming on old friendship he had attended the younger man from boyhood he began to probe for the cause.
Batson's has been reckoned the seat of solemn stupidity: yet it is not totally devoid of taste and common sense. They have among them physicians, who can cope with the most eminent lawyers or divines; and critics, who can relish the sal volatile of a witty composition, or determine how much fire is requisite to sublimate a tragedy secundum artem."
But the fact that it was tacitly accepted as the physicians' resort shows how the principle acted in a general way. One of the most constant visitors at Batson's was Sir Richard Blackmore, that scribbling doctor who was physician to William III and then to Queen Anne.
Thus it would be idle in the main to expect a literary atmosphere among the houses which flourished in the heart of the city. They became the resorts of men of business, and gradually acquired a specific character from the type of business man most frequenting them. In a way Batson's coffee-house was an exception to the rule, inasmuch as doctors and not merchants were most in evidence here.
But in the main the real literary folk of the day would have none of him. He belonged to the city, and what had a mere city man to do with poetry? Even Dr. Johnson, in taking note of a reply Blackmore made to his critics, chided him with writing "in language such as Cheapside easily furnished." Other physicians, however, resorted to Batson's coffee-house in a professional and not a poetic way.
The house served a useful purpose at a time when physicians were not in the habit of increasing their knowledge by visiting the wards of the hospitals. Batson's was a consulting-house instead, not alone for patients but for the doctors themselves. In this respect, then, it differed from the generally commercial character of the coffee-houses under the shadow of the Exchange.
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