Convalescence : Part 5

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

(Page 7 of 11)

It were easy, I fancy, to point out how the doctor's life and training differ from those of all the other professions, and how this must act on peculiar individualities for the deepening of some lines and the erasure of others; but this were too elaborate a study for my present gossiping essay, and may await another day and a less lazy mood.

If any one should be curious to see what are the modifying circumstances in a physician's life which strongly tend to weaken or to reinforce character, I recommend a delightful little address, quite too brief, by Dr. Emerson, the son of the great essayist. It is unluckily out of print and difficult to obtain. If you would see in real lives what sturdy forms of personal distinctness the doctor may assume, there is no better way than to glance over some half-dozen medical biographies. Read, for instance, delightful John Brown's sketch of Sydenham and of his own father, or George Wilson's life of John Reid, the physiologist, whom community of suffering must have made dear to that gentle intelligence, and whose days ended in tragic horror such as sensational fiction may scarcely match; or, for an individuality as well defined and more pleasing, read Pichot's life of Sir Charles Bell, or one of the most remarkable of biographies, Mr. Morley's life of Jerome Cardan.

I am reminded as I write how rare are the really good medical biographies. The autobiographies are better. Ambrose Paré's sketches of his own life, which was both eventful and varied, are scattered through his treatise on surgery, and he does not gain added interest in the hands of Malgaigne. Our own Sims's book about himself is worth reading, but is too realistic for the library table, yet what a strangely valuable story it is of the struggle of genius up to eminent success. But these are the heroes of a not unheroic profession, and I had almost forgotten to set among them, as a study of character, the life of the tranquil, high-minded Jenner, the country doctor who swept the scars of smallpox from the faces of the world of men, and beside him John Hunter, his friend, impulsive, quick of temper, enthusiastic, an intensely practical man of science. These are illustrations of men of the most varied types, whose works show their characteristics, and who would, in the end, I fancy, have been very different had fate set them other tasks in life, for if the sculptor makes the statue, we may rest quite sure that the statue he makes influences the man who made it.

These, I have said, are our heroes, but I still think there remains to be written the simple, honest, dutiful story of an intelligent, thoughtful, every-day doctor, such as will pleasantly and fitly open to laymen some true conception of the life he leads, its cares, its trials, its influences on himself and others and its varied rewards. John Brown got closest to it in that sketch of his father, and in her delicately-drawn "Country Doctor" Miss Jewett has done us gentle service. But my doctor would differ somewhat in all lands, because nationality and social conventions have their influence on us as on other men, as any one may observe who compares the clergymen of the Episcopal Church in America with those of England.

The man who deals with the physician in fiction would have to consider this class of facts, for social conventions have assigned to the physician in England, at least, a very different position from that which he holds with us, where he has no social superior, and is usually in all small communities, and in some larger ones, the most eminent personage and the man of largest influence.

In the rage for novel characters the lady doctor has of late assumed her place in fiction. Lots of wives have been picked up among hospital nurses, especially since the Crimean war, and since other women than Sisters of Charity got into the business, and so made to seem probable this pleasing termination of an illness. There was a case well known to me where a young officer simulated delirium tremens in order to get near to a Sister of Charity. If ever you had seen the lady, you would not have wondered at his madness; and should any author desire to utilize this incident, let him comprehend that the order of Sisters of Charity admits of its members leaving the ranks by marriage, theirs being a secular order; so that here are the chances for a story of the freshest kind. As for the lady doctor in fiction, her advantages would be awful to contemplate in sickness, when we are weak and fevered, and absurdly grateful for a newly-beaten pillow or a morsel of ice. But imagine the awful temptation of having your heart auscultated. Let us dismiss the subject while the vision of Béranger's Ange Gardienne flits before us as De Grandville drew her.

I have not now beside me Howells's "Doctor Breen's Practice." It is a remarkable attempt to do justice to a very difficult subject, for there are two physicians to handle, male and female, not, I think, after their kind. "Doctor Zay," by Miss Phelps, makes absurd a book which is otherwise very attractive. This young woman doctor, a homoeopath, sets a young man's leg, and falls in love with him after a therapeutic courtship, in which he wooes and she prescribes.

The woman doctor is, I suspect, still available as material for the ambitious novelist, but let him beware how he deals with her.

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.