Doctor

“ The young Doctor has a very small office and a very large sign, with a transparency at night big enough for an oyster-shop. These young doctors are particularly strong, as I understand, on what they call diagnosis,—an excellent branch of the healing art, full of satisfaction to the curious practitioner, who likes to give the right Latin name to one's complaint; not quite so satisfactory to the patient, as it is not so very much pleasanter to be bitten by a dog with a collar round his neck telling you that he is called Snap or Teaser, than by a dog without a collar. ”

“ Many a time long after midnight he would read to a finish some such triumphant story; and with a murmur of "Well done!" he would close the book, turn out his lamp, and go to sleep in his chair with his clothes on—with that scene of victory emptying its echoes into his ear and his dreams.
Here, then, was some discrete knowledge of the [pg 96] doctor as a doctor and as a man. But there was one thing in his library that blended these two separate aspects, showing how the man felt as a physician and how the physician felt as a man. ”

“ Before the reader is introduced to the modest country medical practitioner who is to be the chief personage of the following tale, it will be well that he should be made acquainted with some particulars as to the locality in which, and the neighbours among whom, our doctor followed his profession. ”

“ In the popular apprehension the doctor is still the Medicine Man. We smile when we hear about his antics in barbarous tribes; he dresses fantastically, he puts horns on his head, he draws circles on the ground, he dances about the patient, shaking his rattle and uttering incantations. There is nothing to laugh at. He is making an appeal to the imagination. And sometimes he cures, and sometimes he kills ”

“ If only you would give me the name of another doctor.
RIDGEON. Every man in this street is a doctor. But outside myself and the handful of men I am training at St Anne’s, there is nobody as yet who has mastered the opsonin treatment. And we are full up? I’m sorry; but that is all I can say. [Rising] Good morning.
MRS DUBEDAT [suddenly and desperately taking some drawings from her portfolio] Doctor: look at these. You understand drawings: you have good ones in your waiting-room. Look at them. They are his work. ”

“ Doctors obtain an enormous sense of self-importance at medical school, where they proudly endured the high pressure weeding out of any free spirit unwilling to grind away into the night for seven or more years. ”

“ ‘We only diagnose,’ they say, ‘but go to such-and-such a specialist, he'll cure you.’ The old doctor who used to cure all sorts of disease has completely disappeared, I assure you, now there are only specialists and they all advertise in the newspapers. ”

“ People say, ‘The doctor is the person who requires a knowledge of physiology; he is the man who is most likely to study it successfully’—presumably by his mistakes—‘and not waste more time on it than is necessary,’ a point about which they are most solicitous. The doctor, however, prefers to trust the physiologist. ”

“ And, first, it is the duty of the Doctor to cure you,—if he can. That is what we call him in for; and a doctor, be he never so clever and delightful, who doesn't cure, is like a mole-catcher who can't catch moles, or a watchmaker who can do everything but make your watch go. Old Dr. Pringle of Perth, when preaching in the country, found his shoes needed mending, and he asked the brother whom he was assisting to tell him of good cobbler, or as he called him, a snab. ”

“ The 'old-fogy' doctor, who knows the family tendencies of his patient, who 'understands his constitution,' will often treat him better than the famous specialist, who sees him for the first time, and has to guess at many things 'the old doctor' knows from his previous experience with the same patient and the family to which he belongs. ”

“ When the Cat's-meat-Man had gone the parrot flew off the window on to the Doctor's table and said,
"That man's got sense. That's what you ought to do. Be an animal-doctor. Give the silly people up—if they haven't brains enough to see you're the best doctor in the world. Take care of animals instead—they'll soon find it out. Be an animal-doctor." ”

“ When we visit a doctor, we find out before hand whether he is a surgeon or a diagnostician or a homeopath or a faith healer, for we want to know from what angle he will look at our complaint. We ought to be as careful in the choice of our historians as we are in the selection of our physicians. ”

“ These memoranda read as follows: “There shall be a doctor of physic upon whom rests the duty of visiting all the poor patients in the building, females as well as males; a doctor of surgery whose duty it is to apply ointments to all the poor people in the hospital who have wounds of any kind; and a barber who is competent to do, for the women as well as for the men, all the other things that a good surgeon usually does.” ”

“ World be advertis’d of the weighty Business this Doctor is concern’d in. Others by their Equipage, eminent Houses, and occasioning one and the same Patient, to repair needlesly to them twenty or thirty times, manifest a Decoy even taken Notice of by the Vulgar. These few disingenuous Ways, do here purposely bring on Board, omitting many others, to convince the Publick, that the only Means for a Physician to advance himself honourably to Practice, is by discovering his real Abilities in curing Diseases, by quick, certain, and pleasant Medicines ”

“ If I had had a cataract or any grave disease of the eye, requiring a nice operation on that delicate organ, of course I should have properly sought the aid of an expert, whose eye, hand, and judgment were trained to that special business; but in this case I don't doubt that my family doctor would have done just as well as the expert. However, I had to obey orders, and my wife would have it that I should entrust my precious person only to the most skilful specialist in each department of medical practice. ”

“ He declaims against the many who attributed to themselves the name of doctors, simply because they knew how to cure some diseases. According to him, the true doctor must be skilled in curing all kinds of affections. ”

“ The doctor was a tall spare man with an intellectual, finely cut face and a pair of eyes that could look right through one if he were guilty of any violation of rules but that more frequently had a twinkle in them that bespoke a kindly nature and the possession of a sense of humor. ”

“ And as the doctor sat in his library that morning with this final announcement to him of how things sown were growing in the nature of his little boy, it seemed to him the moment to call upon Nature for a settlement—Nature who never fails to collect a bill, but who never pays one. And sitting there with the whole subject before him as a physician studying his own case, he asked of Nature whether without any will of his own she had not started him in life with too great susceptibility to the power of suggestion. ”

“ In the past seventy-five years medicine has progressed from an art to a science. The doctor today has diagnostic aids which would have seemed fabulous to the physician of a hundred years ago. Exact laboratory tests and the X ray enable the physician to base his treatment on definite knowledge. These are as available to the surgeon and doctor aboard ship as to the man working in the most modern and extensive medical center. ”

“ A young doctor is called into a family which lives in the rear of a man’s place of business, above the store or next door to it. The competent young physician discovers a patient suffering from diphtheria, scarlet fever, maybe smallpox. ”

“ How does your patient, doctor?
DOCTOR.
Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies,
That keep her from her rest. ”

“ I presume nobody will question the existence of widely spread popular delusion that every doctor is a titan of science. It is escaped only in the very small class which understands by science something more than conjuring with retorts and spirit lamps, magnets and microscopes, and discovering magical cures for disease. ”

“ We are polite and considerate to the doctor when there is nothing the matter, and we meet him as a friend or entertain him as a guest; but when the baby is suffering from croup, or its mother has a temperature of 104 degrees, or its grandfather has broken his leg, nobody thinks of the doctor except as a healer and saviour. ”

“ The doctor made a fine nervous gesture. “In science one does not hope; one proves. In every thirty thousand experiments one succeeds. We study diseases here. Each physician has his special line of investigation. ”

“ No discussion at the Digamma Pi supper table was more violent than the incessant debate over the value to a doctor, a decent normal doctor who made a good living and did not worry about reading papers at medical associations, of remembering anatomical terms. ”

“ It is the doctor who, by feeling the patient's pulse, is expected to detail the various ailments of his patron, which can be correctly diagnosed by a clever practitioner from the slow or hurried beats. ”

“ If they cure the Patient, both of them are extolled as very eminent Physicians: but when the Imposter performs a cure alone, he has all the Praise to himself, and soon becomes so well established in his Profession, that he is esteemed fit to commence Doctor Maker, and in a few months is furnished by his Ignorant employers, with a Number of Pupils. ”

“ And so the Doctor, at the beginning of the next half-year, looked out the best of the new boys, and separated you and East, and put the young boy into your study, in the hope that, when you had somebody to lean on you, you would begin to stand a little steadier yourself, and get manliness and thoughtfulness. ”

“ As the poor doctor gloomily approached the door of the room in which he had spent last evening, he heard a little rustle and commotion not quite consistent with his expectations—a hum of voices and soft stir such as youthful womankind only makes. ”

“ Assuming that doctors are normal men and not magicians (and it is unfortunately very hard to persuade people to admit so much and thereby destroy the romance of doctoring) we may guess that the medical profession, like the other professions, consists of a small percentage of highly gifted persons at one end, and a small percentage of altogether disastrous duffers at the other. ”

“ There is one doctor for every disease, nor does one and the same (doctor) cure several kinds of diseases. There are also among them some doctors for the eyes, others for the head, others for the teetl, others for hidden diseases. ”

“ The doctor sat there that morning trying to work at the books of the year. The rooms were comfortable; the children were away at [pg 105] the fireside of another man's wife; the servants did not dare disturb him; his horses waited in their stalls; it was the day on which he could begin to reap his golden harvest—a pleasant day for most men; but he could not see the blanks before him nor remember the names he filled in nor the figures that were for value received. ”

“ Fortunately we have not to begin absolutely from the beginning: we already have, in the Medical Officer of Health, a sort of doctor who is free from the worst hardships, and consequently from the worst vices, of the private practitioner. His position depends, not on the number of people who are ill, and whom he can keep ill, but on the number of people who are well. ”

“ Not only has each organism a resident doctor, placed there by Him who can thus heal all our diseases; but this doctor, if watched and waited on, informs any man or woman of ordinary sense what things to do, and what things not to do. ”

“ In my days there were no specialists except cancer doctors. I think they always flourished—there were no skin specialists. A doctor was a doctor, nothing more nor less, and he was supposed to know all that was necessary of the “human form divine.” ”

“ The patients, who are evidently robust country folks, thus set forth their case:—'Do you see, Doctor, my dame and I be come to ax your advice—we both of us eat well, and drink well, and sleep well,—yet still we be somehow queerish!' The Doctor is equal to the emergency and prepared to alter all this promptly. 'You eat well, you drink well, and you sleep well,—very good. ”

“ Have your doctor look you over every six months, no matter how well you feel—or oftener, if he thinks best. Have your regular physician. Pick out a good one, and, especially, a man congenial to yourself. ”

“ Then come to the Doctor before ’tis too late;
His Med’cines are safe, and the Doctor is sure,
He takes none in Hand but he perfects, the Cure.
The Doctor himself he doth freely unfold,
That he can Cure Cuckolds tho’ never so old ”

“ The doctor greets a patient courteously and always waits for him to tell what his symptoms are. He then examines the patient, asking questions based on what the patient tells him, to bring out certain points which will help in making an accurate diagnosis. Very often such questioning will enable the doctor to determine just what the nature of the illness is. ”

“ A doctor is supposed to have studied medicine; to have examined and explored the questions entering into his profession; but we know that doctors are often mistaken. We also know that there are many schools of medicine ”

“ All except one: the profession of medicine remained indivisible. For that is the profession which has but a single ideal, a single duty, a single work, and but one patient—Man."
The silence had become too deep for words.
The young hunter quietly got up and lit his candle and squared himself in the middle of the floor, pale with the sacred fire of a youth's ideal.
"I am going to be a Kentucky country doctor. Good night!" He strode heavily out of the room, and his stride on the stairway sounded like an upward march toward future glory. ”