Convalescence : Part 4

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

(Page 6 of 11)

More and worse of this hideous realism is to be found in About's books, such, for instance, as "Germaine"; but from which censure I like to exclude the rollicking fun of "Le Nez d'un Notaire." As to the recent realistic atrocities of Zola, and even of Tolstoi, a more rare sinner, if we exclude his disgusting drama of peasant life, I prefer to say little.

As to blunders in the science of poisons I say little. The novelist is a free lance, and chooses his own weapons; but I cannot help remarking that, if recent investigators are to be trusted, one unlucky female, at least, must be still alive, for a novelist relates that she was done to death by the internal taking of a dose of rattlesnake venom. I hope when I am to be poisoned this mode may be employed. She might as well have drunk a glass of milk. That book was a queer one to me after this catastrophe: the woman ought to be dead and could not be.

The difficulty of the modern novelist in giving symptoms and preserving the entire decorum of his pages has amused me a little. Depend upon it, he had best fight shy of these chronic illnesses: they make queer reading to a doctor who knows what sick people are; and above all does this advice apply to death-beds. As a rule, folks get very horrible at such times, and are a long while in dying, with few of their wits about them at the last. But in novels people die marvellously possessed of their faculties; or, if they are shot, always jump into the air exactly as men never do in fact.

Just here, concerning wounds, a question occurs to me: The heroes who have to lose a limb - a common thing in novels since the war - always come back with one arm, and never with a lost leg. Is it more romantic to get rid of one than of the other? - considering also that a one-armed embrace of the weeping waiting lady-love must be so utterly unsatisfactory.

But enough of the patients. Among them I think I like Pendennis the best, and consider little Dombey and Nell the most delightfully absurd. And as to the doctors. Some of them have absolutely had the high promotion to be the heroes of a whole book. Had not one, nay, two, a novel to themselves? There is delightful Dr. Antonio, not enough of a doctor to call down on him my professional wrath. As to Dr. Goodenough, he has been in our family a long while, - on the shelf (God bless him!), - and attended, we remember, our friend Colonel Newcome in that death-bed matchless in art since Falstaff babbled life away. Yet, after all, he is not a doctor so much as a man charmingly drawn.

There are in novels many good portraits of lawyers, from Pleydell to Tulkinghorn. Whether fair or unjust as pictures, I am scarce able to judge, although I believe that some of them have been recognized by our legal brethren as sufficiently exact. While, however, we have plenty of characters which for his purpose the novelist labels M.D., there seems to have been some insuperable difficulty in evolving for artistic use a doctor who shall seem at home, as such, among the other characters of the novel, - one, at least, who shall appear to any reasonable degree like a doctor to those who really know the genus doctor thoroughly. Save Lydgate, no doctor in fiction answers this critical demand, or seems anything to me but a very stiff lay figure from the moment he is called upon to bring his art into the story, or to figure, except as an unprofessional personage.

Nor does this arise from poverty of types in the tribe of physicians. The training of a doctor's life produces the most varied effects for good or evil, as may chance, upon the human natures submitted to its discipline, so that I think any thoughtful medical man will tell you that there is a more notable individuality among his brethren in middle life than among most of the people he encounters. As for the novelist's effort - an inartistic one, it seems to me - to bring on his stage representations of some especial kind of doctor, I have only a grim smile to give, remembering Mr. Reade's grewsome medico in "Hard Cash," - a personation meant, I suppose, to present to the public a certain irregular London doctor, but which, to the minds of most physicians, reads like an elaborate advertisement of the man in question.

Sir Bulwer Lytton's renderings of a homoeopath and a water-cure specialist are open to the same charge, and could only have been successful in the hands of a master.

There are at least two doctors in Balzac's novels. Rastignac, man of fashion and science, is drawn with the master's usual skill, but he is not a doctor. His art has no prominence. It is not shown how his peculiarities influenced his work, nor how his art, and its use, altered or modified the man. "The Country Doctor," by the same strong hand, is far more near my ideal of what this portraiture should be than any other known to me in French literature. The humorous aspects of a medical life in the provinces of France are nicely handled in Jules Sandeau's "Doctor Herbeau," but the study, however neat and pleasing, is slight.

Wander where you may, in the drama or the novel, you will still find, I think, that the character of the physician awaits in its interesting varieties competent portrayal.

Shakespeare has left us no finished portrait of a doctor. Molière caricatured him. Thackeray failed to draw him, and generally in novels he is merely a man who is labelled "Doctor." The sole exception known to me is the marvellous delineation of Lydgate in "Middlemarch." He is all over the physician, his manner, his sentiments, his modes of thought, but he stands alone in fiction. How did that great mistress of her art learn all of physicians which enabled her to leave us this amazingly truthful picture? Her life gives us no clue, and when I asked her husband, George Lewes, to explain the matter, he said that he did not know, and that she knew no more of this than of how she had acquired her strangely complete knowledge of the low turf people she has drawn in the same book, and with an almost equal skill and truth to nature.

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.