Chapter Five.
My Black Patient.
There’s a very terrible disease upon which a great deal has been written, but not a great deal done. In fact, it is difficult to deal with special diseases brought on by the toiler’s work. It is a vexed question what to do or how to treat the consumption that attacks the needle-grinders and other dry grinders; the horrible sufferings of those who inhale the dust of deadly minerals; the bone disease of the workers in phosphorus and many other ills brought on by working at particular trades.
The disease I allude to in particular is one that attacks that familiar personage, the chimney sweep, and I have often had to treat some poor fellow or another for it.
There was one man who stands in my note-book as J.J.—John Johnson, I had under my care several times, and we came to be very good friends, for under that sooty skin of his—I never saw it once really clean—there was a great deal of true humanity and tenderness of heart, as I soon found from the way in which he behaved to his wife.
“Why don’t you chimney sweeps—Ramoneurs as you call yourselves now—invent a better cry than svi-thee-up?”
“Ramoneur,” he said with a husky chuckle. “Yes, that’s it, doctor. Fine, aint it? I allus calls myself a plain sweep, though. That’s good enough for me.”
“But you might do without that yell of yours,” I said. “London cries are a terrible nuisance, though I don’t know that I’d care to have them done away with. Your svi-thee-up don’t sound much like sweep.”
“Svi-thee-up, svi-thee-up,” he cried, as he lay there in bed, to the utter astonishment of his wife. “Don’t sound much like sweep? No, it don’t; but then one has to have one’s own regular cry, as folks may know us by. Why, listen to any of them of a morning about the street, and who’d think it was creases as this one was a hollering, or Yarmouth bloaters that one; or that ‘Yow-hoo!’ meant new milk? It ain’t what we say—it’s the sound of our voices. Don’t the servant gals as hears us of a morning know what it means well enough when the bell rings, and them sleepy a-bed? Oh, no, not at all! But there’s no mussy for ’em, and we jangles away at the bell, and hollers a good ’un till they lets us in; for, you see, it comes nat’ral when you’re obliged to be up yourself, and out in the cold, to not like other folks to be snugging it in bed.