luxuries; and the chocolate is, in some houses, a prodigious annual
expense, as it is offered to every body who comes in, and some of the
first houses in Madrid expend twenty thousand _livres_ a year in
chocolate, iced waters, &c. The grandees of Spain think it beneath their
dignity to look into accounts, and therefore leave the management of
their household expenses to servants, who often plunder and defraud them
of great sums of money.

Unlike the French, the Spaniards (like the English) very properly look
upon able physicians and surgeons in a very respectable light:--Is it
not strange, that the French nation should trust their health and lives
in the hands of men, they are apt to think unworthy of their intimacy or
friendship?--Men, who must have had a liberal education, and who ought
not to be trusted in sickness, if their society was not to be coveted in
health. Perhaps the Spanish physicians, who of all others have the
least pretensions, are the most caressed. In fevers they encourage their
patients to eat, thinking it necessary, where the air is so subtile, to
put something into the body for the distemper to feed upon; they bleed
often, and in both arms, that the blood may be drawn forth _equally_;
the surgeons do not bleed, but a set of men called _sangerros_ perform
that office, and no other; the surgeons consider it dishonourable to
perform that operation. They seldom trepan; a surgeon who attempted to
perform it, would himself be perhaps in want of it. To all flesh wounds
they apply a powder called _coloradilla_, which certainly effects the
cure; it is made of myrrh, mastic, dragon's blood, bol ammoniac,
&c.--When persons of fashion are bled, their friends send them, as soon
as it is known, little presents to amuse them all that day; for which
reason, the women of easy virtue are often bled, that their lovers may
shew their attention, and be _bled too_.--The French disease is so
ignorantly treated, or so little regarded, that it is very general; they