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Learn'd he was in ded'c'cal lore,
For by his side a pouch he wore,
Replete with strange hermetic powder, (1)
That wounds nine miles point-blank would solder;(2)
By skilful chymist, with great cost,
Extracted from a rotten post;(3)
But of a heav'nlier influence
Than that which montebanks dispense;
Tho' by Promethean fire made, (4)
As they do quack that drive that trade.
For as when slovens do amiss
At others' doors, by stool or piss,
The learned write, a red-hot spit
B'ing prudently spply'd to it,
Will convey mischief from the dung(5)
Unto the part that did the wrong;
So this did healing, and as sure
As that did mischief, that would cure.
Incomparable; and as the prince
Of poets, Homer, sung long since,
A skilful leech is better far,
Than half a hundred men of war; (6)
So he appear'd and by his skill,
No less than dint of sword, cou'd kill.
(1) Hermetic, i.e. chymical, from Hermes, Mercury; or perhaps so called from Hermes Trismegistus, a famous Egyptian philosopher.
(2) Meaning to banter the sympathetic powder, which was to effect the cure of wounds at a distance. It was much in fashion in the reign of James the first. See Sir Kenelm Digby's discourse touching the cure of wounds by the powder of sympathy, translated from te French by R. White. Gent. And printed 1658 � point-blank is a term in gunnery, signifying an horizontal level.
(3) Useless powders in medicine, are called powders of post.
(4) That is, heat of the sun: so in Canto iii.v.628. Promethean powder, that is powder calcined by the sun, for the chief ingredient in sympathetic powder was calcined by the sun.
(5) Still ridiculing the sympathetic powder. See the treatis above mentioned, where the poet's story of the spit is seriously told.
(6)Leech is the old Saxon term for physician, derived from laec, lac, munus, reward; Chaucer uses the word leechcraft, to express the skill of a physician, and at this day we are accustomed to hear of beast leech, cow leech, &c. The glossary annexed to Gawin Douglas's Virgil says, lack, Isl. Laeknare, Goth,. Leik, medicus, A. S. laenian, laecinian, sanare, curare,; laikinon. Belg.
Canto II 245 (pp65 book 2)
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Some, with a med'cine and receipt,
Are drawn to nibble at the bait; (7)
And tho' it be a two-foot trout,
�Tis with a single hair pull'd out.(8)
(7) Are cheated of their money by quacks and mountebanks, who boast of nostrums, and infallible recipes. Even persons who ought to have more discernment are sometimes taken in by these cozeners. In later times, the admirers of animal magnetism would perhaps have ranked with this order of wiseacres, and been proper objects of Mr. Butler's satire.
(8) That is, though it be a sensible man, and one as unlikely to be catched by a medicine and a receipt, as a trout two feet long to be pulled out by a single hair.
Canto III 11 (pp 248 book 2)
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So Samuel Butler put the chemist, pharmacist, doctors, mountebanks, and all those that practiced the art of healing in perspective.
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