CHAPTER XIV. QUACKS AND IMPOSTORS.

In Queen Anne’s time, and during the first years of the Hanoverian succession, quackery does not seem to have impaired its professors’ positions in society, providing they had other claims to consideration, and even the most impudent impostors obtained rank and celebrity under circumstances which hardly seem possible. Listen to the following: > “Sir William Read, originally a tailor or a cobbler, became progressively a mountebank and a quack doctor, and gained, in his case, the equivocal honour of knighthood from Queen Anne. He is said to have practised by ‘the light of nature:’ and though he could not read, he could ride in his own chariot, and treat his company with good punch out of a golden bowl. He had an uncommon share of impudence; a few scraps of Latin in his bills made the ignorant suppose him to be wonderfully learned. He did not seek his reputation in small places, but practised at that high seat of learning, Oxford; and in one of his addresses he called upon the Vice-Chancellor, University, and the City, to vouch for his cures—as, indeed, he did upon the people