‘Quantitative easing?’ said my husband with an unpleasant iatrical chortle. ‘Reminds me of that bit in Humphrey Clinker.’
Tobias Smollett had trained as a surgeon, and he set up practice in Downing Street, surprising as it might sound, where his initial physical interventions proved no more financially rewarding than Gordon Brown’s decade of fiddling with the body politic. Even by the time he published Humphrey Clinker, in 1771, the year of his death, he had not vanquished his habit of presenting bodily distress as an object of humour.
In the novel, a trick is played on a fat, high-living magistrate called Frogmore, whose drink is doctored. When he gets up from bed with belly-ache, he finds his waistcoat won’t meet across his stomach and he fears mortal bloating, unaware that the garment has been taken in while he slept.
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