VI
There is one notably outstanding memory of Dr. Janeway which dates from those earlier days in his office and which deals with that large class of people who imagine they are ill—those people whose numbers are directly proportionate to periods of so-called prosperity, who call forth innumerable cults of curing, and who are the mainstay of much of the mummery in medicine.
I shall never forget one day at lunch after Dr. Janeway had been seeing some of these mentally mortgaged men and women. As he sat down at table his face wore that expression of perplexity which one at times sees as the outward sign of that inward sense of the futility of things in general. I inquired how matters had been going in the office that morning. His reply, "Neurasthenics!" as it came out with all his characteristic bluntness, set me to asking questions. What I learned that day from the Doctor, coupled with later observations of his methods in dealing with these unfortunates, has never needed unlearning. He saw in these patients, wholly free from organic disorder, yet a prey to aches and obsessions, to fears and depressions, the unhappy results of that conflict in the subconscious self between the natural order of life and the socially ordered life. He saw it and I am sure sorrowed over it. Yet he never entered into a compact to treat them for what he knew they did not have. He never left a stone unturned to prove to himself that they suffered from no physical fault, and with his positive terseness he rarely failed to prove that fact to them—freeing them, oftentimes for good and all, from the fears and symptoms which assailed them, and giving them in few and frank terms the key to their unconscious calamity.
VII
All too soon for me passed that period of service in Dr. Janeway's office, but as good fortune would have it, my future was still to feel the touch of that fine association.
A year later, when my hospital work as an interne was over, Dr. Janeway's son, Dr. Theodore Janeway, asked me to make my office in his house. This arrangement continued for two or three years, when I found myself going to Europe for a winter's special study. With my return to New York, the necessity of a larger office brought that one-time closer affiliation with the Doctor to an end. But the seeds were planted which were destined to bear for me the fruit of one of those infrequent friendships, the influence of which still goes on, finding fresh inspiration from its memory.
I had not been long in my new quarters before I again began to feel the result of Dr. Janeway's and his son's thoughts of me, for it was from them that many of my first patients were referred, and it was from this beginning that the happy relationship with the Doctor was steadily continued as long as he remained in practice.
There was one remarkable thing about all these patients who came from Dr. Janeway's office, or to those I was called to see at his suggestion; one thing in which they seemed to differ from all other patients. They came full of that faith which his thoughtful study and understanding of their cases forced them to feel—and full of that faith which the deep sincerity of his interest in their welfare inspired. It made my part easy and it helped secure good results for the patients, from whom I would often harvest a gratitude where he had scattered the seeds, and reap a reward which was due to his husbandry.
It may be trite, nothing more than a frayed commonplace, perhaps, to say that the force of good goes on, is never lost—yet the sincere, the straight, the strong something that went out from this man and entered into others, certainly continued on, and was not lost.