ABSTRACT
Dr Theodor Myersbach—his doctorate was purchased from Erfurt—first achieved prominence in London in the mid-1770s, where he set up as a practitioner specialising in the technique of uroscopy. Myersbach could deceive his patients with the illusion of preternatural prophetic powers, because his servants and porters were expert in the art of getting into casual conversation with sufferers while they were waiting in the anterooms. Myersbach’s minions responded by defending him in the same coin: To suppose that Dr. Mayersbach is infallible would be to run into the contrary extreme and render one as deservedly ridiculous as Dr John Coakley Lettsom. Acording to Lettsom’s biographer, ‘the man returned, however, after a year, and so little had the exposure damaged him, and so short was the memory of the public, that he soon regained all his old popularity’. In 1804 Lettsom launched a series of anti-quack exposés in the Medical and Physical Journal.
