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Middlemarch vocabulary
15 famous people mentioned
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John St. John Long
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Definition:[1798-1834]an Irish-born quack doctor who claimed to be able to cure tuberculosis. In two instances he was tried for manslaughter of his patients. In the first case he was found guilty and fined £250, and in the second case acquitted. He died at the age of 35, reportedly from tuberculosis but perhaps merely from a horse-riding accident.text from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike
CC-BY-4.0, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36501725
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Uses:
after having been pointed out for so many years as the perfect exemplar of thriving bachelorship, his lapse was an anticlimax somewhat resembling that of St. John Long's death by consumption in the midst of his proofs that it was not a fatal disease.
Thomas Hardy. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
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"[...] But there's St. John Long—that's the kind of fellow we call a charlatan, advertising cures in ways nobody knows anything about: a fellow who wants to make a noise by pretending to go deeper than other people. The other day he was pretending to tap a man's brain and get quicksilver out of it."
George Eliot. Middlemarch
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