The city physician may be of fastidious taste, and exquisiteness of feeling; the swamp doctor must have the unconcernedness of the dissecting-room, and be prepared to swallow his peck of dirt all at once.
The city physician must be of polished manners and courtly language: the swamp doctor finds the only use he has for bows, is to escape some impending one that threatens him with Absalomic fate; the only necessity for courtly expression, to induce some bellicose “squatter” to pay his bill in something besides hot curses and cold lead.
The city physician, fast anchored in the sublimity of scientific expression, requires a patient to “inflate his lungs to their utmost capacity;” the swamp doctor tells his to “draw a long breath, or swell your d—dest:” one calls an individual's physical peculiarities, “idiosyncrasy;” the other terms it “a fellow's nater.”
The city physician sends his prescriptions to the drug store, and gives himself no regard as to the purity of the medicine; each swamp doctor is his own pharmacien, and carries his drug store at the saddle.
The city physician rides in an easy carriage over well paved streets, and pays toll at the bridge; we mount a canoe, a pair of mud boots, sometimes a horse, and traverse, unmindful of exposure or danger, the sullen slough or angry river.
The city physician wears broadcloth, and looking in his hat reads, “Paris;” we adorn the outer man with homespun, and gazing at our graceful castors remember the identical hollow tree in which we caught the coon that forms its fair outline and symmetrical proportions.
The city physician goes to the opera or theatre, to relax, and while away a leisure evening. The swamp doctor resorts for the same purpose to a deer or bear hunt, a barbacue or bran dance, and generally ends by becoming perfectly hilarious, and evincing a determination to sit up in order that he can escort the young ladies home before breakfast.
The city physician, compelled to keep up appearances, deems a library of a hundred authors a moderate collection; the swamp doctor glories in the possession of “Gunn's Domestic Medicine,” and the “Mother's Guide.”
The city physician has a costly Parisian instrument for performing operations, and scorns to extract a tooth; the swamp doctor can rarely boast of a case of amputating instruments, and practises dentistry with a gum lancet and a pair of pullikens.
The city physician, with intellect refined, but feelings vitiated by the corruptings and heart-hardenings of modern polished society, views with utter indifference or affected sympathy the dissolution of body and soul in his patients: but think you, we can see depart unmoved those with whom we have endured privations, have been knit like brothers together by our mutual dangers; with whom we have hunted, fished, and shared the crust and lowly couch; with whom we have rejoiced and sorrowed; think you we can see them go down to the grave with tearless eyes, with unmoved soul? If we can, then blot out that expression so accordant with common sentiment, “God made the country, and man the town.”