The writer attributes the primary step towards recovery of several patients of his, suffering under great mental, nervous, and bodily prostration, to his ordering the piano or melodeon reopened.
Not long since I visited a patient at a distance. She was young and fair, and “supposed to be in consumption,” which is usually a flattering disease, while this patient was laboring under great despondency, bordering on despair. Her parents could not account for her dejection.
Determined not to hurry over the case, and seeing a closed piano in the room, I asked if it was not used.
“No,” replied the mother; “she has not touched it for more than three months; she takes no interest in anything.”
I looked upon the sad, fair face, and thought I had never seen a picture of such utter hopelessness in a young maiden. I approached the piano, and raised its lid. The ivory keys were all dusty. The mother dusted them off, and with a great, deep sigh, whispered to me, “The dust will soon gather on her coffin. She will never touch these keys again.”
“Pooh!” I exclaimed. “You, madam, discourage her. Let me sing something that will awaken her from her lethargy.”
No matter how I played, or what I sang. It was the right key, the sympathetic chord. The first notes aroused her. She lifted her great, dark eyes for the first time. Great tears burst their bonds, thawing out the winter-locked senses, awakening the spring-time flowers of hope, that led to a summer season of health and happiness....
I know this was decidedly unprofessional; but what care I? The young girl was aroused from her despondency, and her precious life saved. Medicine, which before was of no avail, now took effect. O, I pity the poor fool who only has learned to cram drugs by the scruple, dram, and ounce down the unwilling throats of his more pitiful patients because musty books tell him to.
Dr. Mason F. Cogswell, a graduate of Yale, was a man eminent for piety and benevolence, a scholar, and a successful practitioner, which none can gainsay. “In music he was a proficient,” said Professor Knight. While practising medicine in Stamford, Conn., he was said to have instructed the choir in psalm tunes and anthems, and other music, and adapted one to every Sabbath in the year. He possessed a great library, and was for ten years president of the State Medical Society. Dr. Cogswell had a deaf and dumb daughter, and he originated the design of an asylum, which was more fully developed by Mr. Gallaudet, in the Hartford asylum for the deaf and dumb. He died in 1830, at the age of seventy.
I know of a great many excellent physicians who are musicians and lovers of music. Guilmette is a first-class primo basso.