Did you ever sit in the office with one of these prisoners and watch him looking out of his window upon prosperous farmers as they untied fine teams and drove away in comfortable carriages? Did you know how to translate that look in his eye, and the sad abstraction of manner into which he momentarily sank, in spite of his creed, which taught him to always seem prosperous and contented? The translation was not hard. His mind was following that farmer out of town and along the green lanes, bordered by meadows and clover bloom, and on down the road through the cool twilight of the quiet summer evening, to where the ribbon of dark green forest, whose cool cadence had called to him so often, changed to groves of whispering trees that bordered the winding stream that spoke of the swimming holes and fishing pools of his boyhood. And on up the road again, across the fertile prairie lands, until he turns in at the gate of an orchard-embowered home. And do you think the picture is less attractive to this exile because it has not the stately front and the glistening paint of the smart house in town? Not at all. The smart house with glistening paint is the one he must aspire to in town, but his ideal home is that snug farmhouse to which his fancy has followed the prosperous farmer.
That picture is not altogether a product of poetic fancy. We get glimpses of such pictures in confidential talks with lawyers and doctors in almost every town. These poor fellows may fret and sigh for change, “and spend their lives for naught,” but the hunger never leaves them. Not long ago a professional man who has spent twenty-five years of his life imprisoned in an office, most of the time just waiting, spoke to me of his longing to “get out.” His longing had become almost a madness. He forgot the creed, to always appear prosperous, and spoke in bitterness of his life of sham. He said he was like the general of the old rhyme who “marched up the hill and—marched down again.” He went up to his office and—went home again, day in and day out, year in and year out, and for what? But failurephobia held him there, and he is there yet.
What schemes such unfortunates sometimes concoct to escape their fate! I was told of a physician who was “working up a cough,” to have an excuse to go west “for his health.” How often we hear or read of some bright doctor or lawyer who had a “growing” practice and a “bright future” before him, having to change his occupation on account of his health failing!
This is not an overdrawn picture. I believe old and observing professional men will bear me out in it. Statistics of the conditions in the professions are unobtainable, but I feel sure would only corroborate my statement. In a recent medical journal was an article by a St. Louis physician, which said the situation among medical men of that city was “appalling.” Of the 1,100 doctors there, dozens of them were living on ten-cent lunches at the saloons, and with shiny clothes and unkempt persons were holding on in despair, waiting for something better, or sinking out of sight of the profession in hopeless defeat.
This is a discouraging outlook, but it is time some such pictures were held up before the multitude of young people of both sexes who are entering medical and other schools, aspiring to professional life. And it is time for society to recognize some of the responsibility for graft that rests on it, for setting standards that cause commercialism to dominate the age.
CHAPTER III.
WHY QUACKS FLOURISH.
American Public Generally Intelligent, but Densely Ignorant in Important Particulars—Cotton Mather and Witchcraft—A.B.’s, A.M.’s, M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s Espousing Christian Science, Chiropractics and Osteopathy—Gullibility of the College Bred—The Ignorant Suspicious of New Things—The Educated Man’s Creed—Dearth of Therapeutic Knowledge by the Laity—Is the Medical Profession to Blame?—Physicians’ Arguments Controvertible—Host of Incompetents Among the Regular Physicians—Report of Committee on Medical Colleges—The “Big Doctors”—Doc Booze—The “Leading Doctor”—Osler’s Drug Nihilism—The X-Ray Graft.