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Updated: May 9, 2025
The former are at work on native slippers of such age that they would long ago have been thrown away in any less poverty-stricken land, transforming them into wearable if unsightly articles, after well soaking them in earthen pans. Just here a native "medicine man" dispenses nostrums of doubtful efficacy, and in front a quantity of red Moorish pottery is exposed for sale.
Several of the prescriptions in "The Queen's Closet" are to cure people at a remote distance, by applying the nostrums to a linen cloth previously wet with the patient's blood. They had plasters of power to put on the back of the head to draw the palate into place; and wonderful elixirs that would keep a dying man alive five years; and herb-juices to make a dumb man speak.
What a fool I have been not to surmise what this confounded pain meant between my shoulders! Grandfather Hildreth kept himself alive with nostrums until he was seventy, but he was an invalid all his life. He ought to be cursed for his contemptible selfishness in bringing so much suffering upon the race! There's none of the taint about Evadne, bless her!
All are well clothed and well fed, while the flock that feed the pastor are mostly in squalid poverty, actually bending the knee to their greasy task-masters, poor ignorant victims of circumstances. Among the many nostrums offered to Ireland, nobody offers soap. The greatest inventions are often the simplest, and with all humility I make the suggestion.
John's hands against the charms, elixirs, and nostrums with which Lady Thistlewood's friends supplied her, plasters from the cunning women of Lyme Regis, made of powder of giant's bones, and snakes prayed into stone by St. Aldhelm, pills of live woodlice, and fomentations of living earthworms and spiders.
The Northern quacks can do nothing for me. One ray of this delicious sunshine is worth all their nostrums. I was not prepared to find mamma helpless, or I should not have descended upon her so unceremoniously. Being here, I cannot retreat in good order or with safety to my health, nor without wounding her.
Besides, in times of commotion, some men will gain confidence and importance who merit neither, and who, like political mountebanks, are less solicitous about the health of the credulous crowd than about making the most of their nostrums and prescriptions.
I thort I heerd a scritch, each, from Cleopatra Betsy to Hetta Mary, were constantly rushing in to inquire, or to present questionable dainties and nostrums from their respective 'Mas'; the charwomen, whom Minna had coaxed in her blandest manner to save trouble to Averil and disgust to Henry, were officious in volunteers of nursing and sitting up, the black cook at the hotel sent choice fabrics of jelly and fragrant ice; and even Henry's rival, who had been so strong against the insolence of a practitioner showing no testimonials, no sooner came under the influence of the yearning, entreating, but ever-patient eyes, than his attendance became assiduous, his interest in the case ardent.
Our whole population in New England are groaning and suffering under afflictions, the result of a depressed vitality, neuralgia, with a new ache for every day of the year, rheumatism, consumption, general debility; for all these a thousand nostrums are daily advertised, and money enough is spent on them to equip an army, while we are fighting against, wasting, and throwing away with both hands, that blessed influence which comes nearest to pure vitality of anything God has given.
The doctor, after inveighing loudly against 'men totally ignorant of medical science, who flood the country with quack nostrums backed up by 'fabricated proofs of miraculous cures, proceeds to enumerate the diseases to which his 'Infirmary' is open, and to which his practice will be mainly confined.
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