The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice

by Michelle Lovric

  Men and women in the audience nodded sagely at his references to the great Dr. Chamberlen, the inventor of the Anodyne Necklace that had lately saved upward of twelve thousand London children from “dying of their teeth.” And they smiled approvingly at his casual mention of “just a mere few” of his esteemed patients, not solicited by him but who had sought him out, despite his begging to be left to his scholarly retirement.

  “But my Lord Hathaway would have none of it when I told him I sought just a simple life, away from court!” the quack cried. “Nor Prince Eugene of Russia, who begged for my help, and whom I had not the heart to turn away when I beheld his suffering, knowing that in my possession I held the instant cure to the painful malady that ravaged his entire family on account of their overindulgence in the Venus Sports. Only when I had seen them all sound and well did I leave the court at St. Petersburg and make my way to Paris where the Queen herself did await me, all other surgeons having forsaken her as a Case Beyond Hope. And when I left her again blooming in health, and freshly with child, I returned to my native Venice” (here he allowed his eyes to show the rheum of nostalgia, and wiped away another tear) “where the Doge, growing blind, required my services to remove the cataracts on his eyes. It is he who awarded me the title I so rarely use, for motives of modesty, but in this case I shall share it with you: High Venetian Physician Empirickal.”

  There was a smattering of applause at this. Dottore Velena bowed deeply.

  “And what,” he asked us, rising up pridefully, “has led to the conferment of such honors?”

  Only now, and without a word, he produced a single blue glass bottle from a cavern in his breeches. He fondled the little bottle as tenderly as if it were a kitten, allowing a moment’s silence for all eyes to fall on the affectioned object.

  “This Physic,” he cried, now holding it up so it caught the light and glistened like a sliver of the ocean, “does cure all the diseases that God ever entailed upon the race of Adam.

  “Behold this tiny bottle, so fragile, so delicate. Yet it contains inside it a moiety of that greatness that the whole Universe could not afford to purchase, were it to offer the just sum. This miraculous Elixir contains not just the purest distilled gold, but all the very heart of a Mandrake, the liver of an African Phoenix, and the Tongue of a Nile Mermaid, Anise, Mastich, Ginger, Cardamoms, Cinnamon, Zedoary, Manna, Senna, Mirabolams, Scordium, Bayberries, Catmint, Balsam of Peru …”

  The list of ingredients ran on and on, interrupted by explanations of the processes used to fuse them together. These included the contracted and pulled rays of the sun, boiling over a cedar-wood fire, and the blessing of a noble Cardinal.

  Breathlessly, he assured us: “And lastly, this golden juice is divested of any crudities by a true separation of the pure from the impure, and impregnated with Beams of Dawn Light and tartaragraphated through an Alembic of Crystalline Transfluency.”

  There were moments when the audience seemed to be losing the thread, starting to shuffle or eat apples. When this happened, a curious thing occurred, which I had never seen before, even in Venice. The back wall of the rostrum was perforated with a number of small doors. At somnolent intervals, one of these little doors would pop open, to reveal the grinning head of the Zany, who waved a cautionary finger at the crowd and then disappeared behind the door he had slammed shut loudly. His timing was immaculate: He was clearly adept at earning his snack in the profits. At the clack of the shutter, everyone dozing in the audience would wake up, smile, and address their full attention to the quack again.

  The pharmaceutical part of his discourse completed, the quack suddenly fixed his eye on a tripe-woman, glaring at her sternly. “Yes, YOU!” he thundered. “You know only too well of the lapsus of which I speak.”

  All eyes fell on the fainting tripe-woman, who could only weep and moan, “Yes sir, you have discovered me. How was I to know what pocky kind of present he had brought for me in his breeches? I beg your kindness. Oh Sir, do help me.”

  “PRRRRESENTLY” thundered the quack, holding the medicine away from her outreached hand, rendering it infinitely more valuable in the eyes of all watching.

  The question was, would he allow the poor tripe-’woman to perish before he finished his speech? How soon would he relieve her misery by allowing her to purchase the bottle of salvation?

  Some time, it seemed, for now the quack had reached the very climax of his speech, in which he described the ongoing symptoms of the disease, which at present showed but feeble signs among them.

  “Those who suffer from the light cough, or the mild itch,” he warned, “are already in the grip of the Scurbattical Humor which even now sucks on their vitals and enfeebles them. These distempers are but the first steps to a Worse Fate.”

  The audience drooped visibly, running solicitous hands over various parts of their bodies. The tripe-woman was by this time lying on the ground, her legs twitching.

  At this moment, the quack uttered a sharp whistle, and the Zany gambolled on to the stage, holding a miniature theater with shabby red curtains.

  “Behold!” announced the quack. “Avert your eyes, if you are female, juvenile, or delicate. For I am about to show you your Futurrrrre!”

  The Zany held the little theater up so all might behold it, and with a grand flourish the quack flung open the curtains.

  A deep groan coursed through the audience. Several men staggered where they stood. Women, none of whom had averted their eyes, were openly weeping, and two pickpockets working the crowd froze with their hands in the breeches of their victims.

  For revealed on the tiny stage was a most appalling waxwork, showing a man and a woman, naked, and in the final stages of a foul disease that had empurpled their skin, caused their hair to drop out, and reduced their fingers and toes to bloodied stumps. Their faces were scarred with striated tissue and worst of all, where the eye should detect the organs of generation were mere blackened holes, from which small waxen worms were seen to emerge.

  Dottore Velena closed the curtains with a weighty sigh. He seemed to have lost all his former vigor and proceeded in a weak voice: “All my life I have slaved to counteract the mischiefs that are bred in our blood. Now I am old”—here the Zany plucked at a gray curl of his wig—“and I am weary from my travails”—here he sagged to a stool that the Zany placed beneath him, and he continued in a rasping whisper, “and I shall no more make this curative of mine, despite the entreaties and earnest prayers of several Lords, Earls, Dukes, and Honorable Personages. What you see here are the last drops I shall ever produce on this earth.” He winked back a tear. “Of course I shall continue with their manufacture in Heaven.”

  The silence of the crowd was palpable. The audience strained on his every breath.

  “Because I value the living soul of every creature on this earth, I have examined my conscience and found it commands me to sell this Infallible Preparation at so small a price as one shilling, even though I rob my own pocket in so doing and condemn myself to a lingering death in abject poverrrty.”

  Now the Zany stepped forth with a very small tray of bottles. The crowd surged forward, demanding their share of the precious dwindling stock. While butchers loaded their aprons, housewives their baskets, the quack held himself aloof from the sordid commerce at his side, and continued with a soothing litany, never desisting from his recital of curable symptoms until the last bottle had been snatched from the tray that the Zany repeatedly replenished from a trunk behind the stage. His gambols had lessened: His harlequin tunic was weighed down with coin. Sometimes he teased the crowd, pretending to find the trunk empty, but they soon set up such a howl that he contrived to find some more bottles secreted in a back corner of it.

  All through the sales Dottore Velena was murmuring, “If you deign to buy this humble preparation, then I can personally guarantee that it shall save you from the Shrinking of the Sinews, the Scurvy, the Rupture, the Consumption, the Falling-Sickness, Wens on the Neck, Agues of all kinds, the Tertian, Quarta
n and Quotidian, Retired and Shrunken Nerves, Excrementitious Blood, Colt Evil, Scabs in the Head, Catarrhs, the Humid Flux, Gouty pains, Hare-Lips, Dwindling of the Guts, Green or Cankered Wounds, Polipus up the Nose, Disruption of the Fundament, Swimmings in the Head, Stoppage of the Spleen, Looseness of the Teeth, Nocturnal Inquietudes, Vertiginous Vapors, Perdition of the Huckle-bone and Dolor of the Os Sacrum, not to mention Hydiocephalus Dissenteries, Odontalgick or Podagrical Inflammations, Palpitations of the Pericardium, the Hen-Pox, the Hog-Pox, the Whore’s Pox, and the entire Legion of Lethiferous Distempers.”

  He uttered these words with a mechanical perfection, and while he intoned them his eyes were busy counting the number of bottles being dealt out by his Zany.

  “Drink but sparingly of this little bottle, it serves best when you allow but fifty or sixty drops (more or less as you please), and they are to be taken in a glass of spring water, beer, ale, Mum or Canary. It works just as well without sugar and a drrram of brrrandy may make it more palatable too, of course. It may be taken by sea and land, in any season too.”

  Even as the last few customers were reaching out for their bottles, Dottore Velena was till chanting his instructions. “Don’t forget, ’tis most excellent in coffee and chocolate too, and will perfume both beverages with the most fragrant spirit of goodness. It will wipe off (abstersively) those tenacious conglomerated sedimental Sordes that adhere to the Oesophagus and Viscera, and annihilate all Nosotrophical symptoms. It removes all Webs, Pearls, Spots, Sparks, Clouds and Films from the Eyes….”

  Just before the last customer could be satisfied, he made a little motion of his head and the Zany made one final trip to the cupboard, returning with an empty tray and a tragical expression. The unsatisfied customer departed, weeping and bemoaning his fate, and the quack and the Zany quickly closed up their little stage with curtains and retired behind it.

  Bravo! I thought to myself. An almost faultier performance.

  I had rarely seen better, even in Venice.

  But they lacked one thing, and in this lack I thought I might help them, and at the same time help myself.

  I walked back to my lodgings, pausing only to buy some white chalk powder, an apron, and a simple gray dress that, I was assured, had only been worn twice, and that by a woman of quality.

  • 3 •

  Pectoral Snail Water

  Take Snails beaten to mash with their Shells 3 pound; Crumb of white Bread new bak’d 12 ounces; Nutmeg 6 drams; Ground-Ivy 6 handfuls; Whey 3 quarts; distil it in a cold Still, without burning.

  This Water humects, dilutes, supples, tempers, nourishes, comforts; and therefore is highly conducive in hectic consumptive Emaciations.

  The next day I was waiting in the same spot when the cart arrived and the Zany tripped forth. Quacks invariably revisit fertile grounds, for they can rely on one day’s gulls to bring friends and neighbors the next.

  Again, I witnessed the singing and the capering, the declamations and the horror stories. When the crowd had been roused up to the previous day’s pitch of desire, to the point where Dottore Velena sought a victim, I pushed myself to the front. Using the skills of my former trade, I had made up my face to a deadly white with rosy spots of fever high on my cheeks.

  At first Dottore Velena avoided me, for a truly sick person was of course the last kind of patient any quack wants to treat. His eye roamed the crowd, refusing to meet mine. When at last it did, dragged there by the hoarse scream I uttered, I winked at him.

  Not for nothing do quacks live on their wits. In an instant Dottore Velena had the measure of me, had grasped my plan and was prepared to give me a try.

  I performed a graceful faint, falling heavily against a robust butcher at my side. Through lowered lids I saw him kneeling above me, gazing with concern.

  “Help me,” I moaned softly. “In God’s name, save my life.”

  Dottore Velena leaned over the stage. “What’s this then? A poor woman who lies a-dying? Shall we see if we can hasten a painless end? Fetch her up here.”

  There was a warning implicit in his words, and I was determined not to fail him.

  I lay limp as I was passed hand over shoulder to the stage, where the Zany propped me up against the doctor’s stool. I allowed my eyes to open, blearily, and hung my head, the very picture of fast-fading life.

  “Behold this tragical sight!” called out Dottore Velena, peering into my eyes, and feeling my pulse. “A young girl undone by the Caledonian Cremona. A thing I have seen all too many times, a promising creature doomed to be snuffed out imminently by the dread disease.”

  He leaned down to me tenderly. “My dear, have you any last requests?”

  In answer, I released one fat tear that rolled down my cheek.

  Someone in the crowd yelled: “Can you not cure her, Dottore?”

  Dottore Velena looked amazed, “But of course I can. It is the work of an instant! My softer sides were so overcome with the pity of this spectacle that the scientist in me lay dormant. Here, my dear, take a little of this.”

  He lifted my chin and poured a few drops from his bottle, this time a green one, into my mouth.

  This was the worst moment, for I knew not if I would be forced to drink some bitter decoction or whether I could stop myself from vomiting it up. Fortunately Dottore Velena had offered me succor from his own personal bottle, the one used for demonstrations, and I was relieved beyond measure to find that it contained nothing more unpalatable than watered Amsterdam gin.

  Nevertheless I promptly screwed up my face with horror, for it is a known thing that the viler a medicine tastes the more potent its effects. Then I buried my face in my apron, and coughed violently for a few seconds, long enough to rub the white powder from my skin and produce a heated glow in my cheeks.

  Dottore Velena was explaining: “This Physic contains, among its parts, the chiefest Antepudenda Specifick in Venus Regalia, which infallibly cures the French Pox, with all its Tram of Gonorrhoeas, Bubo’s and Shankers, Carnosities, Phymosis and Ragades, all without Baths and Stoves …”

  Meanwhile the crowd had grown anxious. They began to deride the quack. There were cries of “Look! You’ve killt her!” and “Pore little lamb, she were only a young-un.”

  At this I rose to my feet, tearing off my apron and balling it up to hide the white and red stains of my cosmetics. I stood proudly, letting them see my strong posture, my high Italian color and my glittering eyes.

  Then I threw myself at the feet of the quack, crying, “I am cured! ’Tis a miracle! Thank you, kind sir, for my very life!” And I embraced his knees, wiping my grateful tears on the coarse fabric of his breeches, despite their musty odor.

  All the while Dottore Velena was declaiming with his usual aplomb, “And this is but a simple cure for this potent Physic. A mere sketch of what it may do. Why, if a man chance to have his Brains beat out, or his Head chop’d off, two drops, I say two drops, Ladies and Gentlemen, seasonably applied, will recall the fleeting Spirits, re-enthrone the deposed Life-force, cement the Discontinuity of the Parts and in six minutes restore the lifeless Trunk to all its pristine functions, as well, nay better, than before. For it shall cherish up any saddened spirits, and restore Virginity forthwith.”

  I stood beaming and nodding. Presently, a roar arose from the crowd that had been stupefied by my recovery. They were in this moment absorbent of any claim that the doctor might make, and I feared that he would run to more extreme boasts, leading in the end to ridicule. But Dottore Velena had judged his victims to a nicety.

  “Give me some o’that!” rasped the man with the tumored throat.

  “I’ll have three bottles!” screamed a woman far gone with the scrofula.

  “I must have it now!” yelled another woman, clearly nearing her time for parturition.

  But Dottore Velena held up a sorrowful hand. He had a new strategy to increase desire for the green bottle, so that even those who had bought yesterday’s blue one would feel themselves bereft without the newcomer. />
  “Stay, stay, good people, if only I could help you all. It breaks my heart to remind you that this particularrr preparation takes a good nine weeks in boiling to distil just one bottle …”

  The Zany appeared with his tray of green bottles, which was emptied in a moment. Again and again he went back to his cupboard, so often that I began to fear that the supply might actually run dry.

  Dottore Velena’s list of curable ailments rolled on interminably, twice as long as the day before. This meant that I had done well for him. It would put up my price. I listened to the list, hoping to catch him out in a repetition and was astounded that I could not.

  “… Which is why,” he intoned, “it refreshes the Bowels and relieves the Spirits. After the good offices in the Ventricle, it deterges and opens the mouths of the Lacteals, that were almost baked up with slime; dilutes and refrigerates the blood, allays the fervent heat, and crispations of the Parboil’d Fibrillae, repairs all the wastes with Nutritious Chyle; cleanses the minutest passages and emunctories; and helps the whole mass to circulate freely, and duly, to nourish and cherish the parts; and to throw off its recrements by Urine, and (where there is an aptitude) by Sweat and Spittle.”

  Only then did he pause to draw breath, and look with satisfaction on the crowd. But when his mantra ceased, so did the frenzied purchase of the drug. Men and women stopped with their coins held high in the air, waiting for him to go on.

  He obliged: “When the Fermentation of the blood is grown low and languishing, this rouses it up again afresh—concocts and incides crude, and pituitose Juices. It removes Atrabilarious Humors stagnating in the Viscera. It opens the obstructions, and discusses the Tumors of the Spleen, quiets and suppresses convulsive corrugations of Fibers. A few drops applied, cures all curable wounds in twenty-four hours; and old Ulcers, Fistulas, Cancers, Wolf in the Breast, noli-me-tangere, in fifteen days, using it daily It is also good against the Carbuncles, and extinguishes them in three hours …”