HAVE your seen my poetical performance against Dr. Lettsom in yesterday’s Chronicle?
Galen. Yes, I have read it with pleasure; but I fear his medical and moral character will not be sufficiently injured by it.
Hippocrates. It is very surprizing[sic], that a foreign emigrant1 as he is, should have acquired in five years, twice as much business as either of us, of so much longer standing.
Galen, They say he has very good connections, and has a method of pleasing patients, that gains him universal esteem; and yet he seems to be a formal, stiff Quaker. Hippocrates. So every body tells me, the apothecary’s files are crouded[sic] with his prescriptions; and wherever you go, you hear something in in his favour; but if we cannot be employed in writing prescriptions, we will write verses against him, and try thereby to get some of his patients, for there is no thriving in his neighbourhood. Galen. We must write again upon his bark and opium, his cantharides, his experiments on frogs, and his museum of birds and fishes, and draw him thereby into a correspondence, which will afford us an opportunity of being more personal, for I fear he is invulnerable on the side of his medical character.
Hippocrates. I coincide with you in sentiment; but let us prove as sarcastic as possible; without which we must lay down our carriages, and live by our shifts.
Oct. 10, 1776.
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Lettsom was born on Tortola in the West Indies.
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| Source: |
British Library Newspaper Collection Colindale - Burney Collection
15 October 1776 (2310) Page 4 Columns 2 and 3 |