“Do you cook?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you wash the children?”
“Scattered times, sir.”
Then the husband put in: “She couldn’t do her work and it overcast her. She overtopped her mind, sir.”
He was a fine, dignified old fellow, and it was a real pleasure to see how tender he was toward his poor fidgety, neurasthenic spouse. She hadn’t any teeth worth mentioning, and her lips were pursed together with a vise-like grip. I shall not forget how Doctor Grenfell murmured to me in a humorous aside: “Teeth certainly do add to a lady’s charm!”
When medicine is administered, it is hard to persuade the afflicted one that the prescription means just what it says.
This lady was told to take three pills, and she took two. But most of them exceed their instruction. To a woman at Trap Cove Dr. Fox gave liniment for her knee. It helped her. Then she took it internally for a stomach-ache, arguing logically enough that a pain is a pain, a medicine is a medicine, and if this liniment was good for a hurt in the knee it must be good for any bodily affliction. Luckily she lived to tell the tale.
“When I was in the North Sea the sailors if they got the chance ransacked my medicine cupboard and drank up everything they could lay their hands on.” Such autobiographic confessions are often made while the Doctor mixes a draught or concocts a lotion. “Here it is the same way. I have had my customers drain off the whole bottle of medicine at once, on the theory that if one teaspoonful did you good, a bottle would be that much better.” His questions, like his lancet, go right to the root of the trouble. Nothing phases him. He answers every question. He never tells people they are fools; his inexhaustible forebearance with the inept and the obtuse is not the least Christlike of his attributes.
It is difficult for these men to come to the hospital in summer, for their livelihood depends on their catch, and then on their salting and spreading the fish: and after the cod-fishery has fallen away to zero the herring come in October, and the cod to some extent return with them.