Untitled - Electric Scotland

1 6 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. i.
about before the house with an old hat slung before him by
a cord over his shoulders. In this hat he had a large lump
of some compound, which he rolled into pills as he walked
about. The hat was fairly saturated through and through
with the drug, and appeared to have been used for that
purpose for years."
His surgery is thus described by an eye-witness, who
visited Whitworth in this very year, 1819 :-
"There were more than a hundred patients in the village.
. . . Wretched invalids were to be seen on every side, some with
patched faces, some with an arm or a leg bound fast to a
board, some with splints on their arms, others moving slowly
along like spectres, in the lowest stage of physical exhaustion.
. . . The doctor s house was sufficiently pointed out by its
large size, and by the wooden machine standing in the street
before it, for fixing immovably horse patients when under their
hands. In the surgery were some fifty patients waiting to
be dressed or examined. They were arranged
in a row round
the room, and in one corner sat James Taylor, with his surgical
apparatus, consisting of the old shoeing-box of the blacksmith.
In this were a few bottles and pots of the invariable remedies
-
keen, a caustic ointment to which the Taylors had given this
name, green salve, red-bottle, some blisters and plasters
ready spread, a large wooden skewer or two, and some hurds. 1
The patients came in succession before the doctor, and he
rapidly examined and dismissed them, flirting off the blisters
when necessary with the wooden skewers, or roughly dressing
with the keen. Among his patients that morning was a stalwart
blacksmith, whose ill-set arm was in a primitive but effectual
fashion re-broken and re-set in the space of a few moments." 2
To John Taylor s care the little boys were now com
mitted, and the following account of his experiences was
dictated by Archbishop Tait himself fifty-two years after
wards :
"No one but myself can give you the history of my life
1 Coarse undressed tow.
1
See A Biographical Sketch of the Whitivorth Doctors \ Rochdale, 1876.