[VOL II] AN ITINERANT DOCTOR AT TIEN-SING

AN ITINERANT DOCTOR AT TIEN-SING

Cover Image: An Itinerant Doctor at Tien-sing / TianJin China / Drawn by T. Allom Engraved by P.Lightfoot – ALAMY Image ID:2X4BD2T

*This illustrates the “Jianghu Langzhong” of a generation in Tianjin. These itinerant vendors often claimed to be miracle doctors and sold various strange medicines. “Jianghu Langzhong” typically refers to unconventional or itinerant practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine who may offer unconventional remedies and elixirs.

“They in the danger have no share,
But purely come to hear and stare;
Have no concern for Doctor’s sake,
Which gets the better—leech or snake.”

OLD POEM.

IF years of civilization have brought to the Chinese people very many comforts, and even elegancies of life, they have also introduced an alloy that materially debases the value of these refinements. This detraction consists in the variety of low gratifications, gambling, opium-eating, smoking, devotion to buffoonery of the meanest kind, and reliance upon jugglers, fortune-tellers, and quack doctors. One favourite haunt of these itinerant adventurers is Tien-Sing, a place of much commercial importance, and whose population, like the tide of the ocean, is in a state of eternal oscillation. The most frequented thoroughfare, such as the vicinity of a public gate, is the spot usually selected for the performance of these contemptible exhibitions; and the credulity manifested by the auditors and spectators, fully demonstrates the humble intellectual state of the Chinese nation generally.

Of all that tribe of impostors, which, as a plague, infests society here, the quack doctor is one of the most knavish and most popular: his theme appealing to the personal interest of every individual, many who openly condemn, secretly encourage his frauds, by purchasing his nostrums, and submitting to his coarse remedies. Provided with a regular bench or counter, he spreads on this his various packets, jars, images, instruments, and pitch-plasters, interspersed with scrolls of paper, on which, like our European quacks, the number of wonderful cures effected by his medicines, with the names of those that were healed by them, are emblazoned in letters of gold. Oratorical skill, or rather great conversational powers, constitute a chief qualification in a Chinese doctor, whose cures are accomplished as much by persuasion on his part, as credulity on that of the patient. There is not a malady in the long list of sorrows to which flesh is heir—there is not a deformity to which the human frame can be reduced by accident or primitive impress—which the Chinese quack has not the hardihood to undertake relieving. The lame, blind, and deaf, are generally assembled in numbers around the impostor’s stand, although no knowledge from experience has led them to repose confidence in his chirurgical powers; their hopes being built on his eloquent account of his own inventions, aided by that inclination to credence, which everywhere characterizes the weak, the sick, and the ignorant.

Behind a counter, (in the Illustration) is seen an itinerant doctor, dilating on the virtues of an antidote against the bite of serpents; one of his coadjutors is actually putting the head of the cobra capella, or hooded snake, into his mouth, while a less intrepid, but equally useful assistant, is exchanging the miraculous drug for cash or tseen. The great impostor himself, mounted on a stool, his head protected by a conical hat of split bamboo, a vestment of thick, coarse, compact cloth enclosing his arms, and a similar covering being secured around his waist by a silken girdle, holds a serpent in one hand, and the antidote to its venomous bite in the other;

“Thus he is doubly arm’d with death and life:
The bane and antidote are both before him.”

So perfect is the education of this mischievous reptile, that it essays to bite its owner, and submits to disappointment with the appearance of reluctance. Having proved that this particular enemy of mankind still retains its propensity to injury in the most entire manner, and requires to be guarded against with caution, the doctor takes a medicated ball from one of the packets with which the counter is strewn, and, when the snake renews its attempts, presents the ball to it, upon which it instantly recoils, and endeavours to escape from his grasp. Should this demonstration be insufficient, the efficacy of the charm is still more convincingly established by merely rubbing the forehead, cheek, hand, or any other unprotected part with the antidote, and presenting it to the reptile, which appears to retreat with the same dislike and precipitation, as when the entire ball was shown to it.

There is an old proverb “that seeing is believing,” in which Chinamen implicitly confide, and the close of each exhibition of the doctor and the serpent is uniformly attended by an extensive sale of medicated balls, at a trifling price.

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