- monial powder with some mercurial, and always followed
it up with large doses of bark." He suggests that the adjuncts largely accounted for the success of the medicine.
The fever powder acquired great fame in James's lifetime, and after his death imitations were numerous. One of these is of interest because of an advertisement against it written by Dr. Johnson. The man who ventured to imitate the genuine product was named Hawes, and he had once been in the employment of Dr. James. He professed that he had learned how to make the powder during his service, but Dr. James signed an affidavit against his pretensions a short time before his death. Later Hawes asserted that when the doctor made that affidavit he was not in the possession of his mental faculties. To this Francis Newbery replied by an advertisement quoting affidavits by many of James's patients and acquaintances. A paragraph was appended which Newbery himself stated was written by Dr. Johnson, and as a section of literature rather foreign to the famous author, it seems worthy of reproduction. It ran thus:—
"The public will now be fully enabled to judge of Mr. Hawes's
pretensions to the knowledge of this medicine; and they will determine
what degree of credit they ought to pay to the assertions
of a man who has made so daring an attempt to impose upon their
understanding; who in contradiction to Dr. James's deposition
has represented himself as possessing a secret with which he was
never entrusted, and as having performed operations at which he
was never present; and who, to invalidate the Doctor's testimony,
has declared him to be reduced to fatuity at a time when the
vigour of his mind was known and acknowledged by the physician
and surgeon who attended him, and by patients of the highest rank
who continued to entrust him with health and life."
In 1774 Dr. James patented an "analeptic pill." It
was composed of his own fever powder with pil. rufi and
