A sensible Prescription.
A doctor up town recently gave the following prescription for a lady: “A new bonnet, a cashmere shawl, and a new pair of gaiter boots.” The lady, it is needless to say, has entirely recovered.
Rum and Tobacco Patients.
Then there is a large class,—men, mostly; males, at least,—who, having spent all their substance and much of their health in excess of tobacco-using and whiskey-drinking, apply to the physician for aid, “in charity, for God’s sake,” as they have nothing with which to pay him, and usually a numerous family dependent upon their miserable labor for sustenance. Woe to the physician who gets a reputation for benevolence at this day and generation of “cheek.”
“Doctor, I hope you will do something for my distress,” said a gentlemanly-dressed individual, not many months ago. “I have but sixteen cents in my pocket, and I owe for four weeks’ board, and am out of employment.” He was a play actor. Could I say no to so honest a statement of his low state of finance? I treated him faithfully, without a penny.
Not many weeks afterwards I knew of his going away and stopping two days at a hotel with a strange woman.
Still there are others who are quite able, but who think it no sin to cheat a doctor by misrepresenting their inability to pay. They work upon the sympathies of the benevolent doctor; they “would willingly pay a hundred dollars, if they had it,” etc.; and thus slip off without compensating him for his services. Every physician knows that I have not overstated the above.
There is also a large class of patients, with whom, like the “old clo’ Jew,” wisdom, brain work, advice, go for nothing. You must represent their case as perfectly fearful, and do something perfectly awful for them, or you are of no account.
Selden, who understood these failings in mankind vastly well, gives them a sly hit in his “Table Talk.” If a man had a sore leg, and he should go to an honest, judicious surgeon, and he should only bid him keep it warm, and anoint it with such an oil (an oil well known), that would do the cure, haply he would not much regard him, because he knows the medicine to be an ordinary one. But if he should go to a surgeon that should tell him, “Your leg will gangrene within three days, and it must be cut off; and you will die unless you do something that I could tell you,” what listening there would be to this man!
“O, for the Lord’s sake, tell me what this is; I will give you any content for your pains.”