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.