[ROCK (Richard)].
A Letter from Dr. Rock,
"...IS NOT HIS LIXIVIUM A SORT OF LIQUID SOAP?": A MEDICAL SATIRE
Rare. Maslen and Lancaster Bowyer Ledgers 3290 (250 copies printed for Manby and Shute Cox). ESTC records Harvard (x2 - but appears to be only one), US National Library of Medicine and Yale (Walpole - seemingly not in the catalogue though) only in the US; BL (imperfect “wanting all after p.40”), Cambridge - Trinity College, Glasgow (x2; but seems to be only one in the Hunterian) and Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in the UK.
A scurrilous satire on the notorious physician/quack doctor Richard Rock who specialised in cures for venereal disease.
This pamphlet is most likely a response to An Epistle from a physician at Bath to Dr. Rock, practioner in town: Occasion’d by the letter from a physician in town to another at Bath; concerning the C-se of the l–te E- of O-d. (London, c.1745) and satirises Rock’s florid language and speech (he was originally from Hamburg) and the grand claims for his medicines and his own fame. Rock was repeatedly satirised throughout the second half of the 18th-century and appeared in prints by Hogarth and Horace Walpole wrote in 1761, “whoever does court the mob, whether an orator or a mountebank, whether Mr Pitt or Dr Rock, are equally contemptible in my eyes” (see letter to Horace Mann, November 14th)
Provenance: Hugh Selbourne (1906- 1973), general practitioner and book collector.
