The Whitworth Doctors

Hone wrote of country people trusting their health to odd practitioners, and gave the Whitworth Doctors as his example: the Taylor brothers, farriers who became so famous as healers that one attended Lord Thurlow’s brother. Faced with a two-legged and a four-legged patient at once, the doctor always took the horse first. On Sunday mornings they bled people free, up to a hundred at a time seated on benches round a room with troughs to catch the blood, one brother tying up the arms and the other opening the veins. Hone thought their fame rested mostly on their real skill as bone-setters and the cheapness of their medicines.