XV
The Old Doctor
“THE Old Doctor is dead,” said Professor Maturin, holding up a marked newspaper, as he led the way to two easy chairs before the fire. “He was a very individual man of power and integrity, a philosopher as well as a physician—one of those rare people who love and tell the naked truth. So far as I know, he never blinked a fact nor shirked a danger. I feel as though I had known him all his life. For the last twenty years I have seen him only occasionally. But I saw much of him when I was a boy and a young fellow home from college, and my family knew him intimately before I was born.
“As a small boy on some family errand I used often to wait in his outer office, looking through its window to the street, or gazing at its one engraving of a lion staring at the sun, or its portrait of an Italian physician who gave his life to conquer the plague. I always jumped when the doors of the inner office slid apart and the old doctor stood, one hand on each door, with his large head bent and his gray-blue eyes intent upon me from their ambush of tumbled yellowish hair and bristly beard. His rapid questions, in a rich but husky voice, always upset me, and although I knew him to be kindliness itself, I always responded shakily to his summons into his sanctum.
“I can see him, vividly, now, as he sat there writing prescriptions, his tall, thin form bent over his desk, his left hand, white and shapely, holding the paper, his right, heavier and stained, tracing the words with nervous jerks and a lavish expenditure of ink. I see at the same time both the thinning thatch of his broad forehead and the much creased silk skull-cap that crowned his wrinkles later.
“That inner office was crowded with cases that reached to the ceiling and overflowed with books and papers and glittering instruments that proclaimed their owner surgeon as well as physician. The old doctor seldom allowed his servants, whom he chose and kept with more kindliness than discretion, to enter it. And it was so full of all sorts of things that it seemed quite disorderly, although its owner could put his hand instantly on anything that he wanted. The whole place was redolent, moreover, of many drugs and, I regret to say, of horse-blankets. Sometimes, for exercise, the old doctor walked on his rounds—paying little heed to the road, moving fast or slow, upright or bent, according to the thought that abstracted him. But mostly he drove in a much-splashed chaise, a handsome, well-blooded, but ill-groomed horse, to which he was devoted. He was faithful all his life to such speedy but shaggy steeds, just as he was to pepper-and-salt suits and large, soft black hats, each precisely like its predecessor. At the conclusion of each of my early visits he would show me, through a window, some dog or cat or bird that he kept in his back yard, for he ranked pets among the consolations of life.
“Even then I was interested in him as a personality, for I had been told how, as a boy, he used to carry a bag of papers and do similar services for his father, a stately and irritable old judge, who was so formidable that few people could see any fatherly pride and affection in him. But as people used to say that the old judge could see in the dark, there is no reason to think that he was blind to his son’s exceptional character and promise, especially as he sent him to college, which was then very unusual in the town. There, after a time, the young fellow decided to go in for medicine. His reasons, which he did not tell his father, were that law was a selfish and soulless career, which contracted, instead of expanding, the mind, but that medicine was an opportunity for both social service and, through its sure and universal truth, an apprehension of the divine disposition of affairs. This last belief he retained throughout his life, his spirit and imagination never capitulating to the fatalism of his profession.
“The old judge died while the boy was in college, leaving an estate composed chiefly of loans to poor people who could not pay, and rich men who were slow to do so. Still, there was enough, with considerable sacrifice on the part of the mother, to enable the young man to complete his college years and go on to a metropolitan university until he earned his degree in medicine. With this, for the time, most exceptional training, and the approbation of his best professors, he returned to the old town to enter upon general practice, so enamored of his profession that he wondered why all men were not physicians.
“He soon won back the intimacy of a few close friends, but soon came, also, to be disappointed in the force and genuineness of most of his townspeople. On the other hand, his own carelessness in dress and indifference to small formalities confirmed the general local suspicion of any one who had been so long ‘away.’ He disconcerted people, also, by his superior knowledge and directness, and his unfailing attack upon whatever savored of weakness or insincerity. Considering the family finances and his own lack of physical ruggedness, he definitely put marriage aside from his calculations, and when this, like most of his conclusions, became known, it further discounted his social availability. Hence, his life soon became restricted almost wholly to his home, his small circle of intimates, and his profession.
“At his profession he continued to work tremendously, giving exhaustive study to each case that came his way, inquiring into local epidemics and sanitation, tirelessly investigating new ideas, and organizing his entire technical knowledge. He cheerfully turned night into day when he was needed, as he did later, when I knew him to get up in the middle of the night to visit a seriously sick patient whom he had already seen before and after breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and just before going to bed. Birth and death loomed so large in his horizon that he was far from ever considering what it was in his place to do. Self-forgetful as he was, however, he made no sentimental sacrifices, but was the first to introduce trained nurses into the town, and to urge, everywhere and always, the need for the local hospital that came only long after. He had, even, some dreams of preventive medicine.
“His father’s successor and the group of able lawyers, bankers, and business men that controlled the town, looking upon all of this with favor, determined him, although still young, to be one of themselves, and made him health officer and physician to the county jail and poor-farm. This confirmed his identification with his work until he thought of it all the time, riding, walking, at his desk, at meals, or lying awake at night. In this way, without relaxing his following of the latest professional knowledge, he came to believe increasingly in direct observation and experience, and acquired a discriminating respect for the traditional lore of old men and women. Gradually, more and more people began to see in him the true physician—working for work’s sake, giving time and labor to the poor without reward, a tireless guardian of the lives entrusted to him, a devoted champion and example of all sanity and wholesomeness.