“You mean the ultra-physiological party which goes in for these hideous inoculations?” asked Mildred.
“I do,” he replied. “While I was a student at the hospital, I often remarked the contempt with which many of the physicians spoke of drugs and of the people who believed in them; and found it difficult to reconcile all they said with their practice amongst their private patients who went to their consulting rooms and always returned armed with prescriptions which they were instructed should be dispensed only at the most eminent pharmacies. At the hospital, peppermint water was the great remedy for every complaint, except where some new thing was in hand which wanted testing; but when the guinea-paying public were to be dealt with, they received the most formidable prescriptions, resulting ultimately in rows of medicine bottles.”
Mr. Crowe looked very cross at this, and would have replied with bitterness had it not been for the ladies. To make matters worse, Aunt Janet capped it.
“Yes, I remember Dr. Lee declaring at a meeting of medical men that drugs were a delusion and a sham; and that nothing but nature and a good nurse were wanted to cure any complaint amenable to treatment.”
“What did the others say?” asked Elsworth.
“Oh, they objected that it was all very well for a Royal Physician, who had reached the top of the ladder to talk like that, but that it would not work well for those who were still climbing.”
Wishing to divert the conversation into another channel, Mildred asked Elsworth if he did not think with her that the great cause of sickness amongst the poor was due to drink—in England, at all events.
He agreed that it was so, but attributed the craze for alcohol partly to the climate, and partly to the gradual degradation of the social conditions of life amongst the poor. The separation between the masses and the classes was more pronounced, he thought, in England than in any other country of which he knew anything.
“I don’t wonder at the poor creatures drinking,” said he; “it is the only way they have of satisfying the natural aspiration of mankind for the ideal!”
“You mean, we are all more or less poets, and alcohol develops the latent genius within us?” said Mildred.