Nature had been most bountiful to the Doctor. He had an intensely “fine bald head of his own”—round and hairless as an ostrich’s egg; and this attractive exterior had been worth a thousandfold more to him than the interior ever could have been, even had it been as full of brains as every egg is said to be full of meat. Had the Doctor depended for his advancement in life on his skill, he might have remained without a patient and without a crust; but, so to speak, standing on his bald head, he had been able to drink his wine daily, although he certainly was “no conjuror.”
The head, to which Doctor Twaddles owed so much, and which had won for him such a number of hatbands from departed patients, was fringed with silver, for the little hair that still lingered round it was white as driven snow. His features were prominent and statuesque. His coat, which was always scrupulously clean and dustless, was black and glossy as that of a mourning-coach horse; and he so far clung to the manners of the old school, as to allow his nether garments to descend only to his knees, where they were fastened by a pair of small gold buckles. His legs, which—to do Doctor Twaddles justice—were exceedingly well shaped, and perhaps accounted for the Doctor’s still clinging to the obsolete fashion of exhibiting them, were veiled by a pair of very thin gossamer-like black silk stockings, through which the flesh showed with a pinky hue; so that the medical gentleman’s calves, as he sat with them crossed one over the other, so as to give the foremost an extra plumpness, bore a strong resemblance in colour to black currant jam.
The only ornaments that the Doctor wore, were a diamond pin “set transparent,” and so pellucid as to be scarcely visible on the white neckcloth that it fastened; and a series of mourning rings on his third and little fingers, as ostentatious marks of respect from some of the most illustrious and wealthy patients he had buried; while from below his waistcoat there dangled a bunch of gold seals, almost as big as the tassel at the end of a bell-rope, and these the Doctor delighted, as he leant back in his chair, to swing up and down, like a muffin-bell, while delivering his opinion.
Doctor Twaddles was wont to increase the importance of his opinion by multiplying himself into many, and substituting, in his discourse, for the plain, humble, and honest I, the pompous, imposing and presumptuous We,—the special prerogative of monarchs and editors. Certainly this style of discourse was fraught with some few attendant advantages, even beyond that of leading the hearer to believe that the verdict pronounced was not the judgment of one solitary individual, but the unanimous opinion of an indefinite number; for when the Doctor, after due feeling of pulse and knitting of brows, said to his patients that we must take a blue pill and black dose, it appeared to the invalid as if the generous Physician intended to swallow half his own medicine.
But, on the other hand, some of the Doctor’s plural edicts had a particularly singular sound with them; for when he told his lady-patients that we must put our feet in hot water, it seemed as if he intended indulging in a joint foot-bath with them. Equally strange and startling did it sound when he said, that “we really must go out of town;” or, stranger still, when in a mysterious manner he declared, that “we really must go to bed as quick as possible.”
Dr. Twaddles was a great favourite with the ladies, by whom he was invariably described as a “loveable old man.” His manner was gentle and polite as a well-fee’d pew-opener. His voice he always subdued to a complimentary sympathy, and he was especially tender in his handling of his fair patients’ pulses. He was, moreover, “remarkably fond of children,” for whom he generally carried in his pockets a small canister filled either with acidulated drops, “refined liquorice,” or “black currant lozenges.” In his habits, too, he was quite a family man, and never failed, if in his visits he found the more healthy members of the family at a “hot lunch,” of seating himself good-humouredly at the table, and declaring that he must really have a bit of the pudding, for he was happy to say that he was still quite a boy in his “love of sweets.”
Nor was the “advice” usually given by Dr. Twaddles of a less attractive character.
The Doctor invariably acted upon the apparently disinterested plan of objecting to the use of physic—excepting of course in the most urgent cases. Formerly, according to the old fable, curriers were prone to insist there was nothing like leather, but of late the contrary, and far more lucrative, practice has sprung up among us; and now-a-days lawyers counsel their clients on no account to “go to law,”—with the greatest possible success; and physicians rail at the exhibition of physic—to equal advantage.
With Doctor Twaddles, “diet was everything”—all maladies proceeding, according to his popular pathology, from the stomach; for patients, he had long ago discovered, never objected to being fed into good health, however strong an aversion they might have to being dosed into convalescence.
Another mode of insinuation that the Doctor adopted was to explain to the invalids, in language that they could not possibly understand, the cause of the malady for which he was prescribing, and the reason for the remedies be adopted: this he did in short family physiological lectures, which he loved to illustrate by the most ordinary objects. He would tell the astonished and half-affrighted patients how the greater part of the food taken into the system acted simply as coals to the vital fire,—how the lungs were, if he might be allowed the expression, nothing more than the grate in which the alimentary fuel was being consumed, and keeping up a continued supply of caloric for the human frame, for, that the selfsame operation was going on in the human chest as in the stove beside him.