Surgeons All
Harvey Graham
Rich & Cowan, 1939
Pages 259-260

The old Barber-Surgeons’ Company had tried first to harass and later to propitiate the quacks. The Surgeons’ Company, in its brief fifty-odd years of existence, treated the problems of widespread roguery and charlatanism much as it treated most other problems, by quietly forgetting about them. For example, in 1785 William Blizzard and another member complained that Mr. Pinkstan, a member of the Court of Assistants, had signed an advertisement recommending certain fever powders for the cure of white swellings. The Court was with them in disapproving the advertisement, but felt that it had no power to take any action in the matter.

Quacks still abounded in London, and there were three in particular, a German, an Italian Jew, and a Scot, whose names became household words. The German, Dr. Myersbach, revived the lost art of urinoscopy. The water-casting, or diagnosing a patient’s ailments and prescribing treatment solely from an inspection of the urine, was a procedure of venerable antiquity. So-called physicians contemporary with Rhazes and Avicenna had no difficulty in forecasting the sex of an unborn child from the prospective mother’s urine. Certain of the early writers of the School of Salerno produced long treatises on urinoscopy. In the Middle Ages the urinal was the emblem of medical practice, and was even used as a convenient sign-board device. Innumerable works of art testify the diagnostic importance of inspection of urine at this period (see plate facing p. 288). In the early Renaissance period “uromancy” was still a popular diagnostic method, but towards the end of the seventeenth century it fell into a deserved disrepute. Myersbach was an M.D. of Erfurth in Germany. The exact value of this doctorate was not known in England, but a young man travelling in Germany had no difficulty in obtaining it for one Anglicus Ponto. After paying the necessary fees and receiving the degree in all solemnity, he revealed the fact that Ponto was his favourite mastiff. Myersbach reached London about 1774, and rapidly proceeded to accumulate a fortune. After two years of affluent immunity from all criticism, he was attacked by John Coakley Lettsom, then a young Quaker physician. Lettsom was one of the founders of the Medical Society of London, and played a large part also in the founding of the Royal Humane Society, which had as its immediate object “the Recovery of Persons who are suppose[d] Dead of Drowning”. Lettsom, if he had never achieved anything at all, would have been remembered by Lord Erskine’s neat rhyme, prompted by the way in which he signed himself ‘I. Lettsom ’:

Whenever patients come to I,
I physics, bleeds, and sweats ’em.
If, after that, they choose to die,
What’s that to me? I.Lettsom.

Lettsom and his friends got a great deal of amusement out of Myersbach. They submitted a flask of port wine to him, and were assured that the case from which it came was one of serious disease of the womb. From the urine of a gelding the omniscient doctor deduced that the patient was a lady, and that she had a disorder of the womb, two children, and a bad temper. A cow’s urine distressed him greatly. He explained that it obviously came from a young man who had been much too free with the ladies of the town. Lettsom wanted the College of Physicians to deal with Myersbach. They could have done so easily, for they had the power to prevent anyone who did not hold their licence from practising within seven miles of London. Like the Surgeons’ Company, however, the College preferred to do nothing, and so Lettsom himself attacked Myersbach, in pamphlets and in letters to the Press. One shaft of his was to the effect that “Dr. Myersbach knew less of urine than a chambermaid and as little of medicine as most of his patients”. Myersbach discreetly packed up his bags and retired to the Continent for some twelve months. Then he returned and had as great a success as ever. Eventually he died, the last of the “uromancers”, and no one since has ever attempted to revive the art of water-casting.

Source: British Library X20/6994 DSC