Dr. Brown

“ Brown nodded, rising. "You can see a long way into a man's body, Doctor, but not so far into his soul. There's been a pretty rotten place in mine.... Come, shall we go to bed? It's almost two."
The doctor assented, and Brown went into his bedroom to make it ready for his guest. Closing the drawers he had opened in such haste two hours before, his eye was caught by something unfamiliar. Against one of the framed photographs which stood upon the top of the chest leaned a new picture, unframed. ”

“ Except for being too big for our chairs and tables, and for going voyages of discovery, I do think Dr. Brown would make a very nice person to play with; he seems to believe in fancy things, and he knows so much, and is so good-natured. He asked me what flower I thought Jael was like; and when I told him Margery could imitate her exactly, he said he must see that some day. I dared not tell him Margery can do him too, making his speeches in the shovel hat we found in an old hat box near Bass's Straits, and a pair of old black gloves of Grandmamma's. ”

“ Brown sent that blessed child to me. She has a gift, if ever any one had. Dr. Brown had ought to give her half of what he makes doctorin'; she's more help than all the medicine ever he gives. I never saw a doctor so dretful stingy with his stuff. ”

“ Afterward returning to Lexington he was re-appointed in 1819 to a chair in the Medical Department of Transylvania, that of Theory and Practice. Here he was a distinguished colleague of Professors B. W. Dudley, Charles Caldwell, Daniel Drake, William Richardson, and James Blythe until 1825, when he finally left Kentucky.
[Pg 8] Doctor Brown was a man of fine personal appearance and manners; an accomplished scholar, gifted with a natural eloquence and humor that made him one of the most fascinating lecturers of his day. ”

“ You are not fit; you are trembling all over. God help us!" cried Dr. Brown, again.
For a moment the two strong ones stood irresolute, feeling themselves like little children in the grasp of a fate too big for them to grapple. The sick woman closed her eyes, and waited. God would help, in His good way. ”

“ Dr. Brown was said to have great mechanical ingenuity in the invention and application of special surgical apparatus. He was assiduous in following up his patients, who were treated for the most part in his orthopedic infirmary, the first of its sort in Boston, and was an occasional writer for the medical journals on subjects connected with his specialty. In 1839 he republished from the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, "Remarks on the Operation for the Cure of Club-feet, with Cases." ”

“ Presently the Doctor began again:
"They don't feel that they have any duty or work to do in the school, and how is one to make them feel it?"
"I think if either of them had some little boy to take care of. It would steady them. Brown is the more reckless of the two, I should say; East wouldn't get into so many scrapes without him." ”

“ Bob explained.
“We couldn’t get any other doctor,” added Ned.
“What! Couldn’t get any other doctor in New York?” cried the country practitioner. “You surprise me!”
“Oh, but it wasn’t in New York. It was not far from here, at a place called Brookville,” went on Jerry. “Dr. Wright, if he is the same one you mean, is stopping there on his vacation.”
“You can’t be mistaken in the man,” said Dr. Brown, and he quickly described him, for he had heard him lecture in college several times.
“That is he!” exclaimed Jerry. “He isn’t so far away as you thought, Dr. Brown.” ”

“ Brown-Séquard has been appointed the successor of Claude Bernard in the professorship of Physiology in the College of France—an eminently well-merited appointment. Dr. Brown-Séquard is a native of Mauritius, born in 1818, soon after that island had been taken from the French and made a British possession. His father, Dr. Edward Brown, was a native of Philadelphia, and his mother a native of Mauritius and of French origin. He is eminent as an investigator of brain and nerve organization. ”

“ Doctor Brown was to go to his deanery in Durham after the holidays, and Mr. Lethbridge from Berwick, was to come in his place.
What any one should have seen in Doctor Brown to merit such promotion I cannot guess; but he had grand connections, and was a cousin of the Bishop's lady, which might account for it. We young ones were not displeased at the prospect of a change, though we liked the doctor personally, well enough. He was a fat good-natured sort of man, ready enough to do a kindness when it came in his way, but not likely to seek such occasions, if they cost him any trouble. ”

“ The heart and soul of him may twist
Who doth in cap and bells pursue
The glad sad trade of humorist!
[Pg 78]
GENTLE DOCTOR BROWN
It was a gentle sawbones and his name was Doctor Brown.
His auto was the terror of a small suburban town.
His practice, quite amazing for so trivial a place,
Consisted of the victims of his homicidal pace.
So constant was his practice and so high his motor’s gear
That at knocking down pedestrians he never had a peer;
But it must, in simple justice, be as truly written down
That no man could be more thoughtful than gentle Doctor Brown. ”

“ I know,” replied Father Brown submissively. “Yet, you know, I doubt whether Brayne could have cut off this head.”
“Why not?” inquired Dr. Simon, with a rational stare.
“Well, doctor,” said the priest, looking up blinking, “can a man cut off his own head? I don’t know.”
O’Brien felt an insane universe crashing about his ears; but the doctor sprang forward with impetuous practicality and pushed back the wet white hair. ”

“ Richard Brown, a minister of the Anglican Church, and a nephew of Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown. He was born at Morningside, near Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1744, and after studying medicine at that university for seven years, received his M. D. in 1770. His name appears in the catalogue of graduates as "Brown, Gust. Brit. De Cynanche Phlogistica, 1770." He came to America shortly after in company with several of his fellow students, and settled in St. Mary's County, Maryland. In 1782 he attended one of these, Dr. Ireland, and the illness proving fatal, married his widow. ”

“ Dr. Brown performed many capital operations during his military service, and after the war had a large practice.
He married, in 1852, Mary E. Simpson of Washington, District of Columbia, and had three children, two sons and a daughter. William Bedford, who became a physician in New York City, was one of the sons. ”

“ To-day he was smiling, under the dark mustache that was cut short of the upper lip, though they fancied him a little pale, and he seemed to pause a moment and peer through his spectacles at the artist.
The artist turned from his easel with a natural movement, and then in a flash had captured the doctor by the coat collar.
“I arrest you—” he began; but Doctor Brown plucked himself free with startling promptitude, took a flying leap at the other, tore off his sham beard, tossing it into the air like one of the wild wisps of the cloud ”

“ And she smiled at them, and went sweeping into the house.
"That woman's over-driven," said Father Brown; "that's the kind of woman that does her duty for twenty years, and then does something dreadful."
The little doctor looked at him for the first time with an eye of interest. "Did you ever study medicine?" he asked.
"You have to know something of the mind as well as the body," answered the priest; "we have to know something of the body as well as the mind."
"Well," said the doctor, "I think I'll go and give Quinton his stuff." ”

“ Finally, Doctor Brown removed to London, where fortune seemed to smile upon him, as he gained rapidly in reputation and practice; indeed, he barely missed a call to Berlin and another to Padua as a teacher, the scale being turned against him by his dissolute habits. Though possessed of the highest mental gifts, Brown was unfortunate in lack of mental stamina. He taught that life is not a natural condition, but an artificial and necessary result of constant irritations; all living beings, therefore, tend toward death. Health is an intermediate grade of excitement ”

“ Bleeding and purging—these were the main remedies relied on in those old days; something to make the patient remember his illness by, as he did his doctor's bill, by the quantity of medicine he had swallowed. Brown, satirist as he was, was truthful, even to coarseness, and neither he nor Ward told lies in order to round a sentence, or point an epigram. This is how Brown [529] makes a fashionable physician describe his practice: 'He pays well, and takes Physick freely ”

“ I will give you two very large hints.”
“Well, sir?” said the doctor gloomily.
“First,” said Father Brown quietly, “the thing is quite in your own province. It is a matter of physical science. The blacksmith is mistaken, not perhaps in saying that the blow was divine, but certainly in saying that it came by a miracle. It was no miracle, doctor, except in so far as man is himself a miracle, with his strange and wicked and yet half-heroic heart. The force that smashed that skull was a force well known to scientists—one of the most frequently debated of the laws of nature.” ”

“ Major Brown was a V.C., and an able and distinguished soldier, but he was anything but a warlike person. Like many among the iron men who recovered British India, he was a man with the natural belief and tastes of an old maid. In his dress he was dapper and yet demure; in his habits he was precise to the point of the exact adjustment of a teacup. One enthusiasm he had, which was of the nature of a religion—the cultivation of pansies. ”

“ White always had under her pillow 'n' gone up attic to see what trunks they fitted. Mrs. Macy had to holler him down; 'n', my! but he was snappy. He said, 'Ask Dr. Brown,' 'n' then he clumb straight back up his ladder; 'n' Dr. Brown said's she died o' the complete seclusion of her aspirational 'n' bronchoid tubes. I c'u'd see 't the newspaper man didn't know how to spell it, 'n' he told young Dr. Brown any such doin's 'd squeeze the cod-liver oil over into next week, which couldn't be considered for a minute. ”

“ Browne! I have never known but one Christian in my life, and that was John Temple."
Dr. Browne felt somewhat scandalized. A member of his church to say boldly she had never known but one Christian, and that Christian a Roman Catholic; was it not incomprehensible? But then Mrs. Temple was not now in her usual mind. Due allowance must be made, and he would seek a more favorable opportunity for renewing the subject. He arose to leave.
"What shall I do, Dr. Browne? I cannot bear day nor night; life is a torture; I cannot bear life, nor can I endure to think of death. O, help me, Dr. Browne." ”

“ Doctor Brown secretly believed nothing beyond the capacity of his favorite, but he conscientiously meant not to [196] encourage ambitions that it might be impossible to realize.
“Those hands of Stella’s,” he impulsively remarked one day, when her future was under discussion, letting his sage eyes rest meditatively upon the long, supple, sensitive members—“well, they do say such hands can only belong to a doctor or a musician.”
“Or a mother,” unexpectedly murmured his wife.
He gave her a quick, approving look, and again the warm blood glowed in the Indian girl’s dark cheek. ”

“ Brown, for Jael says he is the only person who ever changes Grandmamma's mind."
I dawdled that night when I could not make up my mind about going out with the Rushlight, but I [197] did not wait one minute now. I climbed over the garden wall into the road, and ran as hard as I could run up to the top of the hill, where lived a man—I mean where Dr. Brown lived. ”

“ Dr. Brown is an eminent practising physician in Edinburgh, with small leisure for literary composition, but no one has stronger claims to be ranked among the purest and best writers of our day.
Boston, December 1861.
CONTENTS. Rab and His Friends 21 “With Brains, Sir” 41 The Mystery of Black and Tan 65 Her Last Half-Crown 77 Our Dogs 83 Queen Mary’s Child-Garden 107 Presence of Mind and Happy Guessing 115 My Father’s Memoir 125 Mystifications 215 “Oh, I’m wat, wat!” 229 Arthur H. Hallam 241 Education Through the Senses 297 Vaughan’s Poems 311 Dr. Chalmers 353 Dr. George Wilson 385 St. ”

“ In the middle of this table lay a single sheet of paper, evidently left there on purpose. The doctor snatched it up, glanced at it, handed it to Father Brown, and crying, "Good God, look at that!" plunged toward the glass room beyond, where the terrible tropic flowers still seemed to keep a crimson memory of the sunset.
Father Brown read the words three times before he put down the paper. The words were: "I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!" They were in the quite inimitable, not to say illegible, handwriting of Leonard Quinton. ”

“ Yet, as he began to think steadily, the very blackness of his cell seemed to make his thoughts more vivid; he began to see as in a kind of vision the fantastic feet capering along the corridor in unnatural or symbolic attitudes. Was it a heathen religious dance? Or some entirely new kind of scientific exercise? Father Brown began to ask himself with more exactness what the steps suggested. Taking the slow step first: it certainly was not the step of the proprietor. Men of his type walk with a rapid waddle, or they sit still. ”

“ Otherwise he is unchanged—except, perhaps, there are moments when, alert and full of feminine unselfishness as the major is by nature, he falls into a trance of abstraction. Then his wife recognizes with a concealed smile, by the blind look in his blue eyes, that he is wondering what were the title-deeds, and why he was not allowed to mention jackals. But, like so many old soldiers, Brown is religious, and believes that he will realize the rest of those purple adventures in a better world. ”