Convalescence : Part 3

Doctor and Patient
by S. Weir Mitchell, M.D.

(Page 5 of 11)

I had been reading listlessly a cruel essay in the Atlantic on the wickedness of smoking, and was presently seized with a desire to look at King James's famous "counterblast" against the weed. One is like a spoiled child at these times, and I sent off at once for the royal fulmination, which I found dull enough. It led to results the monarch could not have dreamed of. I got a full-flavored cigar, and had a half-hour of worshipful incense-product at the shrine of the brown-cheeked lady, - a thing to remember, - and which I had leisure enough to repent of in the sleepless night it cost me.

This new keenness of perception, of taste and touch, of smell and sound, belongs also, in the splendid rally which the body makes toward health, to the intellectual and imaginative sphere of activities. Something of the lost gifts of the fairy-land of childhood returns to us in fresh aptitude for strange, sweet castle-building, as we lie open-eyed, or in power to see, as the child sees, what we will when the eyes are closed, -

Pictures of love and hate,
Grim battles where no death is. Tournaments,
Tall castles fair and garden terraces,
Where the stiff peacock mocks the sunset light,
And man and maiden whisper tenderly
A shadowy love where no heart ever breaks, -
Love whose to-morrow shall be as to-day.

With the increase of intellectual clearness, within a certain range, come, as with the brightened senses, certain drawbacks, arising out of the fastidiousness which belongs to the changing man just at this time. Let him, therefore, be careful what novels he chooses, for of all times this is the one for fiction, when we are away from the contradictions of the fierce outer world, and are in an atmosphere all sun and flowers, and pleasant with generous service and thankful joy.

Be careful what Scheherezade you invite to your couch. By an awful rule of this world's life, in all its phases, the sharper the zest of enjoyment, the keener the possible disgusts may be. I recommend Dumas's books at this crisis, but they should be read with acceptance; as stories, their value lying largely in this, that no matter who is murdered or what horror occurs, you somehow feel no more particular call upon your compassion than is made when you read afresh the terrible catastrophes of Jack the Giant-Killer.

A delightful master of style, Robert Louis Stevenson, in a recent enumeration of the books which have influenced him in life, mentions, as among the most charming of characterizations, the older Artagnan of the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I feel sure that on the sick-bed, of which he does not hesitate to speak, he must have learned, as I did, to appreciate this charming book. I made acquaintance then, also, with what seems to me, however, the most artistic of Dumas's works, and one so little known that to name it is a benefit, or may be, the Chevalier d'Harmenthal.

In the long road towards working health, I must have found, as my note-books show, immense leisure, and equal capacity to absorb a quantity of fiction, good and bad, and to find in some of it things about my own art which excited amused comment, and but for that would long ago have been forgotten. Among the stuff which I more or less listlessly read was an astonishing book called "Norwood." It set me to thinking, because in this book are recounted many things concerning sick or wounded folk, and those astonishing surgeons and nurses who are supposed to have helped them on to their feet again.

The ghastly amusement which came to me out of the young lady in this volume, who amputates a man's leg, made me reflect a little about the mode in which writers of fiction have dealt with sick people and doctors. I lay half awake, and thought over this in no unkindly critical mood,

"With now and then a merry thought,
And now and then a sad one,"

until I built myself a great literary hospital, such as would delight Miss Nightingale. For in it I had a Scott ward, and a Dickens ward, and a Bulwer ward, and a Thackeray ward, with a very jolly lot of doctors, such as Drs. Goodenough and Firmin, with the Little Sister (out of Philip) and Miss Evangeline to take care of the patients, besides cells for Charles Reade's heroes and heroines, and the apothecary (out of Romeo and Juliet) to mix more honest doses than he gave to luckless Romeo.

Should you wander with a critical doctor through those ghostly wards, you would see some queerer results of battle and fray than ever the doctors observe nowadays, - cases I should like to report, it might be: poisonings that would have bewildered Orfila, heart-diseases that would have astounded Corvisart, and those wonderful instances of consumption which render that most painful of diseases so delightful to die of - in novels. I have no present intention to weary my readers with a clinic in those crowded wards, but it will ease my soul a little if I may say my say in a general fashion about the utter absurdities of most of these pictures of disease and death-beds. In older times the sickness of a novel was merely a feint to gain time in the story or account for a non-appearance, and the doctor made very brief show upon the stage.

Since, however, the growth of realism in literary art, the temptation to delineate exactly the absolute facts of disease has led authors to dwell too freely on the details of sickness. So long as they dealt in generalities their way was clear enough. Of old a man was poisoned and done for. Today we deal in symptoms, and follow science closely in our use of poisons. Mr. Trollope's "Gemma" is an instance in point, where every one will feel that the spectacle of the heroine going seasick to death, owing to the administration of tartar emetic, is as disgusting and inartistic a method as fiction presents. Why not have made it croton oil?

About the Author

Silas Weir Mitchell was an American physician and writer. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania in that city, and received the degree of M.D. at Jefferson Medical College in 1850. During the Civil War he had charge of nervous injuries and maladies at Turners Lane Hospital, Philadelphia, and at the close of the war became a specialist in neurology.