Sabine Baring-Gould

“ A kind-hearted village doctor, finding that a poor woman he was attending needed nourishing food, got his wife to send her a jelly.
Some time after he went to the cottage, found the ground-floor room untenanted, but heard a trampling, groaning, and struggling going on upstairs. He accordingly ascended to the bedroom, to see a labouring man sitting on the bed, holding up the sick woman's head, whilst another labouring man—her husband—was standing on the bed, one foot on each side of the patient, with a black kitchen kettle in his hand, endeavouring to pour the contents down her mouth. ”

“ The experience of many generations has gone to prove it. A workman who suffered greatly from abscesses cured himself entirely by the use of the roots of the teasel which he asked the writer of this book to be allowed to dig up in his orchard. But it is quite other with the little insects that infest the teasel head, and which are eaten to cure intermittent fevers, or enclosed in a goose quill, sealed up and worn round the neck as a preservative against ague.
A real charm is where the words are used without the medicine, and what good it can do is merely the effect on the imagination. ”

“ He was a popular doctor, enjoyed a great reputation in his neighbourhood, maintained a large family of unmarriageable daughters, and lived in comfort in a cosy cottage embowered in elms, with its pleasant garden full of old-fashioned flowers.
This old gentleman's method, on being sent for, was at once to take a gloomy view of the case. "My dear fellow," he would say to the patient, "this is a very aggravated malady. I ought to have been sent for before. If you die, it is your own fault. I ought to have been sent for before. A stitch in time saves nine. ”

“ I couldn't hold her mouth open myself as well as mind the kettle, so I just called in my mate Thomas, to help and hold her up, and open her mouth for the kettle spout."
The life of the village doctor is a hard one. Never certain of a meal, and never certain of a sound, undisturbed sleep, he has to take his victuals and his rest by snatches, but then he inhales the fresh, pure air, and that maintains him in health. He has to keep his natural weakness and natural impatience under great control. ”

“ Bleeding with lancet and with leeches, cupping, cauterising, blue-pill, et toujours blue-bill, were in vogue. Starving in fever water-gruel administered where now is given extractum carnis, toast and water in place of beef-tea the marvel is that our forefathers did not die off like flies under the treatment.
I remember saying to a yeoman in Essex one day: "What! nine—ten miles from a doctor?" "Well, sir, yes; it is ten. Thank heaven we all in this parish mostly dies natural deaths." ”

“ What another world we live in, that of podophyllin pills coated with silver or sugar! How little can children of this age conceive the sufferings of their parents when they were blooming youths and maidens! ”

“ Then again, the accounts of the doctor are not very readily paid, often not paid till a new necessity arrives for calling him in again, and not very infrequently are not paid at all. And the surgeon cannot afford to sue for his debt in the County Court, lest he get a bad name as harsh, unfeeling, a "skin-flint."
The patients and their friends have odd fancies. They do not esteem a doctor much unless he "changes the medicine," that is to say. ”

“ He always declared that he had something alive in his stomach; and a kind friend, learned in doctoring, confirmed his opinion, and prescribed a most ingenious plan to dislodge the enemy, a big triton, who had taken up his quarters in the man's stomach. He was ordered to eat nothing but salt food and to drink no water; and when he had continued this treatment as long as he could bear it, he was to go and lie down near a weir of the river, where the water was running over, 'with his mouth open.' The man did as he was told, and open-mouthed and expectant placed himself by the side of the weir. ”

“ Then, again, how vexatious, when tired out and hungry, to be suddenly called away for a drive of many miles—perhaps over the very road he has just returned along—to see a malade imaginaire, some hypocondriacal old maid, who is best dosed with a bread pill, or to attend to some pet child whose only complaint is that it has over-eaten itself, and who is well again by the time the doctor arrives. ”

“ What scorn was poured by the doctor on the quack remedies employed by the old women of the parish! And yet, when we look back to the treatment recommended and the potions administered by the faculty in days gone by, I am not sure that the recipes of the old grandams were not the best—at least, they were harmless, and such were not the hackings, cuppings, and bleedings, the calomel, etc., of the faculty. A good many of the village remedies were charms, and charms only, and consequently rubbish. ”

“ Conceive of a man who has had several broken nights and hard days' work, with a head swimming with weariness, called in to a critical case, that he has to diagnose at once. His faculties are not on the alert, they cannot be, and if he make a mistake, an avalanche of abuse is poured down on him, whereas the fault lies not in himself, but in the circumstances. ”

“ If the sick person dropped through his hands, the responsibility was thrown on the sick man and his friends. If, however, he were to recover, then it exalted the skill of the medical practitioner to almost miraculous power. ”

“ I remember seeing a huge oriental centipede exhibited in a herbalist's window in a large town in Yorkshire, as having been an inmate of the stomach of a human being.
I have heard the same story as that told me in Devon, repeated in Sussex with this variation, that instead of an earthworm tempting the newt from its retreat, a roast leg of mutton was exhibited at the mouth of the patient. A friend of mine was warned by an old woman in Staffordshire not to eat cress from a brook, on the ground that an acquaintance of hers had once thus swallowed toad-spawn which had been hatched within her. ”

“ Of course, country people have got odd notions of their internal construction. A farmer's wife in Essex told me once that whenever she was troubled in her lungs she took a dose of small shot from her husband's flask. ”

“ There ain't no offals for a porker. Can't be, nohow."
A friend of mine, a gentleman of some education, and one I should have supposed superior to such crude notions, assured me solemnly that he was acquainted with the following case:—An old dame, in a Devonshire country parish, drank some water in which was the spawn of a triton. The stomach of the good lady proved to be an excellent hatching-place, and the spawn resolved into newt, which lived very comfortably in its snug, if somewhat gloomy, abode. ”