Theodore Dreiser

“ My father had been very ill with gall stones, so weak at last that we thought he was sure to die. The house was so somber at the time. Over it hung an atmosphere of depression and fear, with pity for the sufferer, and groans of distress on his part. And then there were the solemn visits of the doctor, made pleasant by his wise, kindly humor and his hopeful predictions and ending in this seemingly mild prescription, which resulted, in this case, in a cure. ”

“ The doctor merely stared after him quizzically, like an old schoolmaster, as the rather stately colonel marched off to his home.
Another of his patients was an old Mr. Pegram, a large, kind, big-hearted man, who was very fond of the doctor, but who had an exceedingly irascible temper. He was the victim of some obscure malady which medicine apparently failed at times to relieve. This seemed to increase his irritability a great deal, so much so that the doctor had at last discovered that if he could get Mr. Pegram angry enough the malady would occasionally disappear. ”

“ Gridley, as I early began to note, was his profound indifference to what might be called his material welfare. Why, I have often asked myself, should a man of so much genuine ability choose to ignore the gauds and plaudits and pleasures of the gayer, smarter world outside, in which he might readily have shone, to thus devote himself and all his talents to a simple rural community? ”

“ Persons who met the doctor, as I heard years later from his daughter and from others who had known him, were frequently asking him, just in a social way, what to do for certain ailments, and he would as often reply in a humorous and half-vagrom manner that if he were in their place he would do or take so-and-so, not meaning really that they should do so but merely to get rid of them, and indicating of course any one of a hundred harmless things—never one that could really have proved injurious to any one. ”

“ He picked it up and when he returned home that night asked one of his boys if he could lend him a knife.
"No," said his son. "Our knives are all lost. The crows took them."
"I knew that," said the doctor sweetly, "and so, when I met Zip uptown just now, I asked her to lend me one, and she did. Here it is."
He pulled out the knife and handed it to the boy and, when the latter expressed doubt and wonder, insisted that the crow had loaned it to him; a joke which ended in his always asking one of the children to run and ask Zip if she would lend him a knife, whenever he chanced to need one. ”

“ Weeks disappeared from the room and then returned, bearing upon her arm a beautiful yarn spread which she held out before her and, in her nervous, feeble way getting the attention of the little audience, said:
"Doctor, I am going up to Whitley now to live with my daughter, and I don't suppose I will get to see you very often any more. Like myself, you are getting old, and it will be too far for you to come. But I want to give you this spread that I have woven with my own hands since I have been sixty years of age. ”

“ In addition, he wore long, full, brown-gray whiskers, a long gray overcoat (soiled and patched toward the last) in winter, a soft black hat that hung darkeningly over his eyes. But what a doctor! And how simple and often non-drug-storey were so many of his remedies!
"My son, your father is very sick. Now, I'll tell you what you can do for me. You go out here along the Cheevertown road about a mile or two and ask any farmer this side of the creek to let you have a good big handful of peach sprigs—about so many, see? Say that Doctor Gridley said he was to give them to you for him. ”

“ Although a sad man at times, as I understood, the doctor was not a pessimist, and in many ways, both by practical jokes and the humoring of odd characters, sought relief from the intense emotional strain which the large practice of his profession put upon him. ”

“ Always, during his later years, when he felt the least bit ill, he refused to prescribe for himself, saying that a doctor, if he knew anything at all, was never such a fool as to take any of his own medicine. ”

“ His answer was: "He is passing as free from pain as ever I knew a case of this kind."
In yet another case of a dying woman, one of her relatives inquired: "Doctor, is this case dangerous?" "Not in the nature of the malady, madam," was his sad and sympathetic reply, "but fatal in the condition it meets. Hope is broken. There is nothing to resist the damage."
One of his patients was a farmer who lived in an old-time log house a few miles out from Silver Lake, who while working about his barn met with a very serious accident which involved a possible injury to the gall bladder. ”

“ If there be no consciousness, but only a mingling of that which was gentleness and tenderness here with the earth and the waters, then the greenness of the one and the sparkling limpidity of the other are richer for that he lived, and wrought, and returned unto them so trustingly again. ”

“ This interesting speech, made scarcely a day before he closed his eyes in death, was typical of his whole generous, trustful, philosophical point of view.
"If there be green fields and placid waters beyond the river that he so calmly crossed," so ran an editorial in the local county paper edited by one of his most ardent admirers, "reserved for those who believe in and practice upon the principle of 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,' then this Samaritan of the medical profession is safe from all harm. ”

“ Everywhere he went, by every lane and hollow that he fared, he was constantly being called into service by some one—the well-to-do as well as by those who had nothing; and in both cases he was equally keen to give the same degree of painstaking skill, finding something in the very poor—a humanness possibly—which detained and fascinated him and made him a little more prone to linger at their bedsides than anywhere else. ”

“ Gridley, Ed Boulder who used to run the hotel over at Sleichertown, Congressman Barr, and Judge Morgan, sitting out in front of Boulder's hotel over there of a summer's evening and haw-hawing over the funny stories which Boulder was always telling while they were waiting for the Pierceton bus. Dr. Gridley's laugh, so soft to begin with, but growing in force and volume until it was a jolly shout. And the green fields all around. And Mrs. Calder's drove of geese over the way honking, too, as geese will whenever people begin to talk or laugh. ”

“ Going up to the sufferer and finding that some one of his old, and to the doctor well-known, maladies had at last secured a fatal grip upon him, he first administered a tonic which he knew would give him as much strength as possible, and then went out into the yard, where, after putting up his horse, he gathered chips and wood from under the snow and built a roaring fire. ”

“ Both were men in whose families the doctor had practiced for years. One was a prosperous farmer who always paid his "doctor's bills," and the other was a miller, a "ne'er-do-well," with a delicate wife and a family of sickly children, who never asked for a statement and never had one sent him, and who only occasionally and at great intervals handed the doctor a dollar in payment for his many services. ”

“ I never saved money, and I die as poor as when I was born. We do not know what there is in the future now shut out from our view by a very thin veil. It seems to me there is a hand somewhere that will lead us safely across, but I cannot tell. ”

“ I once heard him call to the colonel, as the latter was leaving the postoffice and he was entering (there was no rural free delivery in those days) "—walking around without your rubbers, and no overcoat! You want to get me up in the night again, do you?"
"It didn't seem so damp when I started out, Doctor." ”

“ On one occasion, for instance, when he was sitting out on his front lawn in Warsaw, smoking, his chair tilted back against a tree and his legs crossed in the fashion known as "jack-knife," a poorly dressed farmer without a coat came up and after saluting the doctor began to explain that his wife was sick and that he had come to get the doctor's advice. ”

“ When this was given in a low, reassuring tone, he took from his pocket his little book of blanks and wrote out a prescription, which he gave to the man and began talking again. The latter took out a silver dollar and handed it to the doctor, who turned it idly between his fingers for a few seconds, then searched in his pocket for a mate to it, and playing with them a while as he talked, finally handed back the dollar to the farmer.
"You take that," he said pleasantly, "and go down to the drug-store and have the prescription filled. I think your wife will be all right." ”

“ Gridley sent cha, did he, huh?" he asked as he went. "Well, I guess we all have ter comply with whatever the doctor orders. We're all apt ter git sick now an' ag'in," and talking trivialities of a like character, he cut me an armful, saying: "I might as well give ya too many as too few. Peach sprigs! Now, I never heered o' them bein' good fer anythin', but I reckon the doctor knows what he's talkin' about. He usually does—or that's what we think around here, anyhow." ”

“ N—— is as good a friend of yours as W——, and he always pays you."
"Now, Miss Susan," he returned coaxingly, "N—— can go to Pierceton and get Doctor Bodine, and W—— can't get any one but me. You surely wouldn't have him left without any one?"
What the effect of such an attitude was may be judged when it is related that there was scarcely a man, woman or child in the entire county who had not at some time or other been directly or indirectly benefited by the kindly wisdom of this Samaritan. He was nearly everybody's doctor, in the last extremity, either as consultant or otherwise. ”

“ Finding the old gentleman in a most complaining and hopeless mood one night, not to be dealt with, indeed, in any reasoning way, the doctor returned to his home, and early the next day, without any other word, sent old Enoch, his negro servant, around to get, as he said, the buffalo robe—a request which would indicate, of course that the doctor had concluded that old Mr. Pegram had died, or was about to—a hopeless case. When ushered into the latter's presence, Enoch began innocently enough:
"De doctah say dat now dat Mr. ”