Part 1

THE ÆSCULAPIAN LABYRINTH EXPLORED;

OR,

MEDICAL MYSTERY ILLUSTRATED.

IN A SERIES OF INSTRUCTIONS TO

YOUNG PHYSICIANS, SURGEONS, ACCOUCHERS, APOTHECARIES, DRUGGISTS, AND PRACTITIONERS OF EVERY DENOMINATION, IN TOWN AND COUNTRY.

INTERSPERSED WITH A VARIETY OF

RISIBLE ANECDOTES AFFECTING THE FACULTY.

INSCRIBED TO THE COLLEGE OF WIGS, BY GREGORY GLYSTER, AN OLD PRACTITIONER.

“TWENTY MORE! KILL THEM TOO.”——BOBADIL.

LONDON: PRINTED FOR G. KEARSLEY, NO. 46, FLEET-STREET.

MDCCLXXXIX.

TO THE COLLEGE OF WIGS.

“Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors, “My very noble and approved good” Doctors.

The solemnity of your somniferous aspects, no less than the professional gravity of your external ornaments, lay claim to a bow of obedient recollection in passing through W—— k-lane to public inspection. As one of the most popular descendants from your great progenitor, permit me to acknowledge, I revere the vast extent of your medical abilities; that I feel most forcibly the enormous weight of your accumulated learning, and tremble at the very idea of your experimental abilities.

Condescend, dread Sirs, to sanction this analization of Æsculapian imposition and medical mystery, with such proof of approbation, as the dignity of a diploma, and the muscular rigidity of physical countenance will permit you to bestow; nor let it be the less entitled to your favor, that a long list of valetudinarians (to whom you are daily pensioners) become partakers of the banquet of mirth; or the small fry of pharmacopolists (your humble dependents) for once permitted to take a seat at the same table with yourselves.

Anxiously solicitous to obtain belief, that

“I shall nothing extenuate, “Nor set down aught in malice,”

you may in justice conclude me,

Sage Sirs!

Your very candid,

And obedient representative,

GREGORY GLYSTER.

THE

ÆSCULAPIAN LABYRINTH

EXPLORED.

TO THE PHYSICIAN.

Having passed the tedious years of abstruse study and intense application, necessary to your initiation in the mysteries of physic, and replete with a perfect remembrance of all the requisites to this great art, we suppose you recently emerged from the obscurity of dreary walls and dull professors, a phenomænon of universal knowledge and family admiration. The various and elaborate examinations you have passed, with scholastic approbation, having relieved you from the constantly accumulating load of anxiety, you are at length launched into life under a new character, and daily pant to display the dignity of your profession, in the happy appendage of M. D. to the prescriptive initials of your name.

You are no longer to be considered a student labouring in the heavy trammels of unintelligible lectures upon philosophy, anatomy, botany, chemistry, and the materia medica, with all their distinct and consequent advantages; or investigating the actual properties of electrical fire and MAGNETIC ENTHUSIASM, but stamped (by royal authority) with the full force of physical agency, and have derived from your merit unlimited permission to cure, “kill or destroy,” to the best of your knowledge and abilities, “so help you “God.” The professional path you now begin to tread, is so replete with danger, and the probability of success so very uncertain, that the fertile world have not omitted to make it proverbial, “A physician never begins to get bread, till he has no “teeth to eat it.” The truth of this may perhaps have been lamentingly acknowledged by some of the most learned men that ever became dependant upon a capricious world for precarious subsistance.