“Why, certainly, the affair becomes serious; but still, how you are to set up for yourself I don’t know. You are not qualified.”
“Oh! ain’t I? Just as much as most doctors are. There must be a beginning, and if I gives wrong medicine at first, then I’ll try another, and so on, until I come to what will cure them. Soon learn, Tom.”
“Well, but how will you do about surgery?”
“Surgery? Oh, I’ll do very well; don’t know much about it just now—soon learn.”
“Why, would you venture to take off a man’s leg, Tom? Do you know how to take up the arteries?”
“Would I take off a man’s leg? To be sure I would, as quick as the doctor could. As for, the arteries, why, I might puzzle a little about them; but by the time I had taken off three or four legs I should know something about them. Practice makes perfect—soon learn, Tom.”
“But all your first patients would die.”
“I don’t know that. At all events I should do my best, and no man can do more, and if they did die, why, it would be by the visitation of God, wouldn’t it?”
“Not altogether, I’m afraid. It won’t do, Tom.”
“It has done from the beginning of the world, and will do. I say there’s no learning without practice. People spoil at first in every trade, and make afterwards, and a man ain’t born a doctor any more than he is a carpenter.”