“Some of his traits, however, still delayed his complete success. He was often restless, sometimes impatient in argument, and not always considerate of his opponents. Once he even slapped a recalcitrant patient. He was deeply humiliated over that, and candid and regretful over his other defects, but he held that one could do but little by special effort to change one’s character. He was, moreover, too learned and quick-witted and plain-spoken to be a comfortable colleague for most of his fellow practitioners. They felt obliged to look with disfavor on his preference for simple medicaments and his emphasis on hygiene, and they were publicly pained and privately severe concerning his carelessness of appearances and his open pooh-poohing of what he called ‘the hocus-pocus of the profession.’
“But after his marriage, which was an inconspicuous one, the softer and finer sides of his nature took the permanent ascendency, and the community, although it knew little of his family life, felt a new gentleness behind the firmness of his growing power of command. It was then that he began the practice, which he would have scorned earlier, of carrying in his pockets cheerful and humorous quotations as means for enlivening depressed patients. Thus, slowly but steadily, through some conspicuous successes and many sure ones, his reputation became more and more established, until, at about forty-five, he was accepted by all as unquestionably the chief physician of the town.
“His frankness, however, by no means decreased as his fame advanced, but people increasingly understood his eccentricities as they increasingly honored his intellect and revered his character. He never hesitated to say, for example, that his successes were due more to experience and common sense than to any scientific knowledge. This was, perhaps, a limitation of his location so far from the centres of scholarship, but he would have followed reason rather than authority anywhere. When the chief apothecary caught cold and died from a consumption that the old doctor had long pronounced cured, he lamented that this mistaken judgment had brought him more reputation than any real cure he had ever accomplished, and he would sometimes regretfully compare the tremendous exertions that had gone unrecognized in his earliest practice with the late unreasoning praise of almost everything he did—‘So hard it is,’ he would say, ‘to establish unpopular truth or check popular error.’
“In spite of the fact that his penetration so far exceeded the ordinary that his wit often led him beyond knowledge to track nature to her lair, he used to grieve that so many things were hidden from him. He trusted much to the wisdom of the natural course of things, watching his cases and all their surrounding conditions closely, sweeping away many of the cobwebs of current practice, and emphasizing chiefly prescriptions of hygiene. Most diseases, he held, were either hopeless or would cure themselves if people would be reasonably careful. After his income became adequate for his modest needs he disliked to take money for his services, preferring to get whatever he wanted from the local tradesmen, and to care for them and their families without charge on either side.
“Gradually, without decreasing his labors—I have heard that he made fifty thousand professional calls—he became the community’s philosopher and friend, as well as its physician. This was especially the case after he came home, a citizen of the world, from a late European journey, during which, apparently, he had ignored landscape, architecture, and art in order to converse with all sorts and conditions of men. As his earnestness and meditation increased with age, and his utterance, always unexpected and pithy, grew ever more apt and forcible, his sayings became widely quoted and accumulated into a body of doctrine.
“He was by no means chiefly a critic, for, as he said, there were always more unfortunate men needing encouragement than fortunate men needing reproof. He maintained that a clean mind and busy hands were proof against any tribulation, and that happiness lay not in the world, but within the mind. ‘Whoever would live wisely,’ he would say, ‘must know what he wants,’ and ‘Good humor bears half the ills of life.’
“It will be long, indeed, before his place and his friends forget ‘the Old Doctor.’”
XVI
Breakfasting with Portia
“PROBABLY few persons who are not professionally interested,” said Professor Maturin, “realize how earnestly the schools of to-day are endeavoring not only to conserve the proved excellences of traditional knowledge, but also to provide new varieties of training that are made imperative by present-day conditions. Hence the subjects in the curriculum that appear fads to the fathers—nature study, manual training, physical education, household science and art, music, and the fine arts. Probably fewer yet know that American experiment in one of these fields, especially, has been so notable that the British Board of Education sent a special commission to study and to report to Parliament on the teaching of domestic science or household economics in the United States.
“It was the scientific and comprehensive character of this report, sent me by a young friend, that first informed me of our distinction in this difficult field. This same young person had previously overcome my doubt as to the propriety of making such matters the subject of academic study by learnedly quoting Xenophon’s Socrates, to the effect that ‘domestic management is the name of an art, as that of healing or of working in brass, or of building.’