ON THE FREE USE OF THE LANCET

In former days your starch'd divines

From notes of twenty thousand lines

Held many a long dispute;

One argued this, one argued that,

And reverend wigs, as umpires sat,

All sophists to confute.

They dwelt on things beyond their ken

And teazed and puzzled simple men

To hold them in the dark;

But their long season now is past,

The churchman's horn has blown its blast,

Things take a different mark.

Physicians now to quiet pain

Stick lancet in the patient's vein

That burns with feverish heat:

The next contend, they're wholly wrong,

That life will leak away ere long

If thus the case they treat.

Meantime a practice gets about,

Perhaps to make some doctors pout:

Old Shelah, with her herbs and teas,

And scarce a shilling for her fees,

In many instances, at least,

When deaths and funerals increased,

Did more to dispossess the fever,

Did more from dying beds deliver

Than all the hippocratian host

Could by the lancet's virtue boast;

To which, I trow, full many a ghost

Will have a grudge forever.