Doctor of Love by Lydia Syson

Author:Lydia Syson [Syson, Lydia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846882265
Publisher: Alma Books

While the beau monde opened their purses, the satirists sharpened their quills. “[T]he present object of the muse is one of the finest subjects shot flying these many seasons. Satire may fall to like an Epicure, and feast upon the pure, aetherial, electrical green fat of nonsense.” Grub Street got instantly to work. Editors were hungry for material to leaven the bitter news that so often dominated their newspapers, and there seemed an endless appetite for press pastiches of the Doctor. Graham offered a wealth of different angles, together with a style of writing and oratory that was instantly recognizable and easy to reproduce. Such a rage for public speaking had recently developed – commercial debating clubs and courses and books on eloquence and rhetoric all swiftly multiplying – that everyone suddenly felt qualified to deliver opinions on this subject. Graham’s hilariously high-flown language was an obvious way to signal that he was getting above himself (“...he’s inspired! He is a man divine! / Because he madly mounts above his line”). The electric doctor’s social-climbing crimes were considered all the worse for having been committed by a “Caledonian”.

The Gazetteer, particularly funny and ferocious in these early days at the Adelphi, immediately promoted Graham to Prince of Quacks. Within weeks of the Temple’s opening, parodies of his “Christian’s Universal Prayer”, his musical interludes, his poetical orations, his medical claims, his patients’ testimonials, even his convoluted footnotes all appeared in the papers. He must have been a genuinely ubiquitous presence, since it was clearly taken for granted in the press that the tiniest nuance would be recognized and laughed at by the reading public. Graham-related “characters” even began to appear in costume at masquerades. One satirical print complete with verse and music called “The Quintessence of Quackism” featured the broad figures of Gog and Magog, on either side of their master, “a Doctor rare, who travels much at home”, and claimed to cure everyone and everything. The well-known speaking tube linking Graham’s reception room and his laboratory had been transformed into the tail of a monkey. It perched on the Doctor’s head and waved a telltale quacking duck in the air. Graham held out a large “Ethereal Pill” in his free hand, and wore a clearly identifiable medallion with Catharine Macaulay’s head around his neck. The song was dedicated to the “Emperor of Quacks”.

Quackery had been a target for self-righteous satirists for centuries. Inevitably, every era believed itself to be exceptionally overrun with the species: “The present Gang of Quacks, who infest this Metropolis, are almost as dangerous to Society as the late Gang of Rioters.” Simply to advertise medical services was virtually to admit to “irregularity” in the professional field: it was self-promotion, and often geographical mobility, rather than the survival rate of patients that defined quackery.

When Dr Graham burst onto the London scene, he offered more in every respect than any of those run-of-the-mill pedlars of patent medicines, routinely denounced en masse. His elevation to quack royalty had little to

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