Part 5

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? 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.

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.

PAIN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

As I look from my window, on the lawn below are girls at play,--gay, vigorous, wholesome; they laugh, they run, and are never weary. How far from them and their abounding health seem the possibilities of such torment as nature somewhere in life reserves for most of us. As women, their lives are likely, nay, certain, to bring them a variety of physical discomforts, and perhaps pain in its gravest forms. For man, pain is accidental, and depends much on the chances of life. Certainly, many men go through existence here with but little pain. With women it is incidental, and a far more probable possibility. The most healthy will have least of it. Vigor of body is its foe. Thin blood is its ally. Speaking now, not of the physiological pain, which few escape, but of the torments of neuralgia and the like, Romberg says, "Pain is the prayer of the nerves for healthy blood." As the woman is normally less full-blooded than the man, she is relatively in more danger of becoming thin-blooded than he.

Moreover, the disturbances which come from the nature of her physiological processes subject her to larger risks of lessened blood than man, and hence, for all reasons, she is more likely than he to become anæmic, and out of this to evolve pain in some shape.

If we see that our girls are not overtasked at the age of sexual evolution, that the brain is not overtrained at bitter cost of other developments as essential, we escape a part of this peril. To discuss the question here is not my intention. To secure in our artificial life what is desirable is difficult. It involves matters of dress, exercise, proportion of lessons, diet, and other matters, of which I shall yet say something, and as to which I have elsewhere said a good deal.

But no matter how careful we may be, how thoughtful as to the true needs of these young lives, we may be sure that our daughters will be more likely to have to face at some time the grim question of pain than the lads who grow up beside them.

For both there are always the little ailments of childhood,--the hurts, the accidents, and the disorders or the diseases of youthful years. All come in for a share. Let us be careful how we deal with them. I have often watched with interest a mother beside the girl or boy in temporary pain. As a rule, she assumes from the beginning that the hurt boy is to be taught silent, patient endurance. What! you, a boy, to cry! Be a man! Among his comrades he is a "cry-baby" if he whimpers, "a regular girl," "a girl-boy." He is taught early that from him endurance is expected; the self-conquest of restrained emotion is his constant lesson.

If it be a girl who suffers, she is assumed to be weak, and it is felt that for her tears are natural and not to be sternly repressed; nor are her little aches and complaints dismissed as lightly as are her brother's. She is trained to expect sympathy, and learns that to weep is her prerogative. The first gush of tears after a hurt of body or mind is in some mysterious way a relief, and not rudely to be chidden; but, on the whole, it is wise and right to teach patience and unemotional endurance to the sex which in life is sure to have the larger share of suffering. To be of use, this education must begin reasonably early, and we may leave to the mother to make sure that it is not too severe.

As a girl grows older, we ask and expect some measure of restraint in emotional expression as regards any of the physical or moral troubles which call out tears in the child; for the woman who is wise understands that unrestrained emotion and outward expressions of pain or distress are the beginnings of that loss of self-rule which leads to habitual unrestraint, and this to more and more enfeeblement of endurance, and this, again, to worse things, of which more in the future.