Epitaph

ON A PATIENT KILLED BY A CANCER QUACK.

ERE lies a fool flat on his back,
The victim of a cancer quack;
Who lost his money and his life,
By plaster, caustic, and by knife.

The case was this-a pimple rose
Southeast a little of his nose;

Which daily reddened and grew bigger,
As too much drinking gave it vigor :

A score of gossips soon ensure

Full three score diff'rent modes of cure:

But yet the full-fed pimple still

Defied all petticoated skill;
When fortune led him to peruse

A handbill in the weekly news,

Signed by six fools of different sorts,
All cured of cancers made of warts;
Who recommend, with due submission,
The cancer-monger as magician.
Fear winged his flight to find the quack,
And prove his cancer-curing knack;
But on his way he found another,-

A second advertising brother;

But as much like him as an owl

Is unlike every handsome fowl;
Whose fame had raised as broad a fog,
And of the two the greater hog;

Who used a still more magic plaster,

That sweat, forsooth, and cured the faster.

This doctor viewed, with moony eyes
And scowled-up face, the pimple's size;

Then christened it in solem answer,

And cried, "This pimpiel's name is CANCER."

LANE LIBRARY. STANFORD UNIVERSITY

“But courage, friend, I see you 're pale,
My sweating plasters never fail;
I've sweated hundreds out with ease,
With roots as long as maple trees,
And never failed in all my trials—
Behold these samples here in vials!
Preserved to show my wond 'rous merits,
Just as my liver is in spirits.

For twenty joes the cure is done—”
The bargain struck, the plaster on,
Which gnawed the cancer at its leisure,
And pained his face above all measure.
But still the pimple spread the faster,
And swelled like toad that meets disaster.
Thus foiled, the doctor gravely swore

It was a right rose-cancer sore;

Then stuck his probe beneath the beard,

And showed them where the leaves appeared;
And raised the patient's drooping spirits,
By praising up the plaster's merits.
Then purged him pale with jalap drastic,
And next applies th' infernal caustic;
Which, gnawing on with fiery pace,

Devoured one broadside of his face;

64

Courage 't is done!" the doctor cried,

And quick the incision knife applied,

That with three cuts made such a hole,

Out flew the patient's tortured soul!

Go, readers, gentle, eke and simple,

If you have wart, or corn, or pimple,
To quack infallible apply;
Here's room enough for you to lie.
His skill triumphant still prevails,
For DEATH'S a cure that never fails.

-DR. LEMUEL HOPKINS.

Greeting to Dr. Holmes

Read at the dinner given by the Medical Profession of New York to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, April 12th, 1883.

YOU'VE heard of the deacon's one-hoss shay

Which, finished in Boston the self-same day
That the city of Lisbon went to pot,

Did a century's service, and then was not.
But the record 's at fault which says that it BUST
Into simply a heap of amorphous dust;

For after the wreck of that wonderful tub,

Out of the ruins they saved a hub;

And the hub has since stood for Boston town,

Hub of the Universe-note that down.

But an orderly hub, as all will own,

Must have something central to turn upon,

And, tempered and smooth, and true, and bright,

We have the AXLE here tonight.

Thrice welcome, then, to our festal board

The doctor-poet, so doubly stored

With science as well as with native wit;

(POETA NASCITUR, you know, NON FIT ;)
Skilled to dissect with knife or pen,
His subjects dead or living men;
With thoughts sublime on every page
To swell the veins with virtuous rage,
Or with a syringe to inject them
With sublimate to disinfect them;
To show with demonstrator's art
The complex chambers of the heart,
Or, armed with a diviner skill,
To make it pulsate at his will ;
To brighten up by harmless guile
The frowning visage with a smile
Or lead the class in desperate tussels,
With Latin names of facial muscles.

By facile pen to soothe the brain
With many a smooth melodious strain,
Or to describe with pains laborious
The even CALAMUS SCRIPTORIUS.
To fire the eye by WIT consummate,
Or draw the aqueous HUMOR from it;
In generous verse to celebrate

The loaves and fishes of some giver,
And then proceed to demonstrate

The lobes and fissures of the liver;
To nerve with fervor of appeal
The sluggish muscles into steel,
Or, pulling their attachments, show
Whence they arise and where they go;
In times of peril give the tone
To public feeling called backbone;
Or grapple with that subject solemn,
"Supporters of the spinal column."
And now I close my artless ditty
As per agreement with committee;
And making place for those more able,

I leave the subject on the table.

Yet one word more.

I've had my pride

AS MEDICUS most sorely tried,

When Englishmen who sometimes show

Of things American, you know,

An ignorance that is melancholy;

As Dr. Holmes is very jolly,

Assume that he must therefore be

A Doctor of Divinity.

So to avoid all chance of wrong

To medicine, or church, or song,

Let DOCTOR HOLMES discarded be
For OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, M. D.

And now, for I really must come to an end, May the fate of the chaise be the fate of our friend: May he never break down, and never wear out, But a century old, or thereabout,

Not feeling the weight of the years as they fly;
Simply stop living when ready to die.

-DR. ANDREW H. SMITH.

The Old Oaken Bucket

(REVISED AND EDITED BY "A SANITARIAN")

ITH what anguish of mind I remember my childhood,

Recalled in the light of a knowledge since
gained;

The malarious farm, the wet fungus grown wildwood,
The chills then contracted that since have remained;
The scum-covered duck pond, the pigsty close by it,
The ditch where the sour smelling house drainage fell;
The damp, shaded dwelling, the foul barnyard nigh it-
But worse than all else was that terrible well,
And the old oaken bucket, the mold crusted bucket,
The moss covered bucket that hung in the well.

Just think of it! Moss on the vessel that lifted
The water I drank in the days called to mind,
Ere I knew what professors and scientists gifted
In the waters of wells by analysis find;
The rotting wood fiber, the oxide of iron,
The algae, the frog of unusual size,

The water, impure as the verses of Byron,

Are things I remember with tears in my eyes.

And to tell the sad truth-though I shudder to think it,
I considered that water uncommonly clear,
And often at noon, when I went there to drink it,
I enjoyed it as much as I now enjoy beer.
How ardent I seized it with hands that were grimy!
And quick to the mud covered bottom it fell!
Then reeking with nitrates and nitrites, and slimy
With matter organic, it rose from the well.