The Hasheesh Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean

Chapter 21: Concerning the Doctor; Not Southey's, but Mine

XXI. CONCERNING THE DOCTOR; NOT SOUTHEY’S,1 BUT MINE At the time of my greatest need, I was so fortunate as to make the acquaintance of one man2 whose sympathy was, for months of trial, one of my strongest supports. Half discouraged in my attempts at self-rescue, I passed an hour in conversation with him, and fortitude came to me anew; for soul and its connection with the body had so long been his study that he knew how, with the utmost delicacy, to turn thought out of unwholesome channels; moreover, he had the heart as well as the brain for doing good. I need not say that he was a doctor. I can not resist the temptation to a digression in this place for the purpose of giving my testimony, for the highest that it is worth, to one fact of past experience. It is this: if I have ever met a man before unknown to me, whose sympathies flowed instinctively toward distress , whose self-sacrifice had become an inseparable part of nature, whose comprehensive interest in all that might ennoble our kind was equaled only by his loving patience with its present infirmities, I have called him “doctor,” and, nine times in ten, have not been mistaken . Society has now grown old enough, for the sake of self-respect at least, to despise and abandon those stale jokes upon doctors which tickled her childish ear. With her superstition of the value of a horseshoe as prophylactic against witches, let her also put aside the inanities which she talks, in her less somber mood, of the physician in league with the sexton, and the solemnity of mock-learning which reigns over a circle of gold-headed canes. When frightened, she is ever ready to send for the doctor; she stops joking as soon as she is parturient, apoplectic from last night’s surfeit, or appalled at the consequences of having swallowed a button. True, there are empirics in medicine. There are men who tamper with the delicate springs of life upon no other authority than that of a “possunt quia posse videntur.”3 We have all seen the advertisement of one “whose sands of life have nearly run out,” and as we marvel at the length of time during which those sands have been just on the verge of their final down-flow, we are led to ask if, for the sake of that world upon which an incalculable benefit in cases of consumption may be conferred for the price of one shilling, the benevolent possessor of the recipe may not occasionally have tipped up his hour-glass or diminished its aperture. We all know the quack in medicine. We are not blind to the thousand astonishing cures of as many desperate maladies, to the placards on the highways, the columns of the press, the almanacs, the guides, the angels that come down in a hurry from heaven, calling through a trumpet to the moribund to hold on till they get there, with a bottle of sirup under each arm which shall restore peace to his afflicted family. All these things we know; yet are there no other quacks than quacks in medicine? Are there no quacks of divinity? no quacks at law? no political quacks, that dose a diseased nation? no literary quacks, who break down the æsthetic constitution of the people? But, because Brigham Young points out the road to future blessedness through a phalanstery of wives, shall we no more go to church? Because Jeffreys was a villain, must no more causes be adjudicated? And are we to abjure all faith in the science of government inasmuch as some placeman theorizes to the mob in fustian during a campaign , or anathematize all authors in that somebody has befouled the pool of reading-mind by a volume of the Rag-picker’s Nephew?4 If we hold faith in gold, notwithstanding base metal, let us be assured that nowhere is that gold found at a higher percentage of CONCERNING THE DOCTOR; NOT SOUTHEY’S, BUT MINE 189 purity than among doctors. Where one Faun hath stolen the mantle of Esculapius,5 as the good sire lay sleeping, there are a hundred upon whom he has dropped it as upon worthy children. Of all men, the doctor is to be peculiarly cherished. Let us not forget that there was one...