Popular opinion has been prone to decide that the physician who is anything else than this is a person not to be trusted. The old axiom is too often quoted as concerns us, "Jack of all trades, master of none." But there are enough men who have the power to be master of many trades and passed master of one. It is a question of applicative energy. Few men in early life can do much more than is needed to learn our art and its sister sciences; but, as time goes on, there are many who can add to it other pursuits which greatly benefit them in a wide sense, and enlarge and strengthen their mental powers, or pleasantly contribute to the joys of life, and so even to the growth of a man's moral nature. The wise physician, who is fond of etching or botany, the brush, or the chisel or the pen, or who is given to science, does well to keep these things a little in the background until he is securely seated in the saddle of professional success. Then usually he may feel free to reasonably follow out his tastes, and to write, or in any other way insist on freedom to use or make public his results. If only he has the competent fund of persistent industry to draw upon, he will be not the worse, but the better, physician for such enlargement of his pursuits as I refer to, for we may feel sure that in my profession there is room for the direct or indirect use of every possible accomplishment.
CONVALESCENCE.
To my mind, there is nothing more pleasant than the gradual return to health after some revolutionary disease which has removed a goodly portion of the material out of which is formed our bodily frame. Nature does this happy work deftly in most cases, where, at least, no grave organic mischief has been left by the malady; and in the process we get such pleasantness as comes always from the easy exercise of healthy function. The change from good to better day by day is in itself delightful, and if you have been so happy, when well, as to have loved and served many, now is the good time when bun and biscuit come back to you,—shapely loaves of tenderness and gracious service. Flowers and books, and folks good and cheery to talk to, arrive day after day, and have for you a new zest which they had not in fuller health. Old tastes return and mild delights become luxuries, as if the new tissues in nerve and brain were not sated, like those of the older body in which they are taking their places.
When you are acutely ill, the doctor is business-like and gravely kind; you want him in a way, are even anxious to see him for the relief he may bring, or the reassurance. But when you begin to feel as if you were a creature reborn, when you are safe and keenly enjoying the return of health, then it is that the morning visit is so delightful. You look for his coming and count on the daily chat. Should he chance to be what many of my medical brothers are,—educated, accomplished, with wide artistic and mental sympathies,—he brings a strong, breezy freshness of the outer world with him into the monastic life of the sick-room. One does not escape from being a patient because of being also a physician, and for my part I am glad to confess my sense of enjoyment in such visits, and how I have longed to keep my doctor at my side and to decoy him into a protracted stay. The convalescence he observes is for him, too, a pleasant thing. He has and should have pride in some distinct rescue, or in the fact that he has been able to stand by, with little interference, and see the disease run its normal course. I once watched a famous surgeon just after he had done a life-saving operation by dim candle-light. He stood smiling as the child's breath came back, and kept nodding his head with pleasant sense of his own competence. He was most like a Newfoundland dog I once had the luck to see pull out a small child from the water and on to a raft. When we came up, the dog was wagging his tail and standing beside the child with sense of self-approval in every hair. The man wagged his head; the dog wagged his tail. Each liked well what he had done.
Thus it is that these half-hours by the convalescent's couch are full of subtle flattery for the doctor, and are apt to evolve the social best of him, as he notes the daily gain in strength and color, and listens, a tranquil despot, to one's pleas for this freedom or that indulgence. He turns over your books, suggests others, and, trained by a thousand such interviews, is likely enough a man interesting on many sides.
You selfishly enjoy his visit, not suspecting that you, too, are ignorantly helpful. He has been in sadder homes to-day, has been sorely tried, has had to tell grim truths, is tired, mind and body. The visit he makes you is for him a pleasant oasis: not all convalescents are agreeable. He goes away refreshed.
Most doctors have their share, and more, of illness, and are not, as I have seen stated, exempt from falling a prey to contagious maladies. Indeed, our records sadly show that this is not the case. Perhaps there is value for them and their future patients in the fact that they have been in turn patient and doctor and have served in both camps. Like other sick folks, the physician, as I know, looks forward, when ill, to the "morning visits" quite as anxiously as do any of those who have at times awaited his own coming.
That medical poet who has the joyous art of sending a ripple of mirth across the faces of the Anglo-Saxon world recognizes this fact in a cheerful poem, called "The Morning Visit," and to which I gladly refer any of my readers who would like to know from the lips of Oliver Wendell Holmes what manner of delightful patient he must have been. I can fancy that he lost for his doctor many a pleasant hour.
It has seemed to me as if this wonderful remaking and regrowing of the tissues might be likened to a swift change from the weak childhood of disease to a sudden manhood of mind and body, in which is something of mysterious development elsewhere unmatched in life. Death has been minutely busy with your tissues, and millions of dead molecules are being restored in such better condition that not only are you become new in the best sense,—renewed, as we say,—but have gotten power to grow again, and, after your terrible typhoid or yellow fever, may win a half-inch or so in the next six months,—a doubtful advantage for some of us, but a curious and sure sign of great integral change.
The Greeks had a notion that once in seven years we are totally changed, the man of seven years back having in this time undergone an entire reconstruction. We know now that life is a constant death and a renewing,—that our every-day nutrition involves millions of molecular deaths and as many millions of births,—although to liken that which is so exquisitely managed, so undisturbingly done, to the coarser phenomena of death and birth is in a measure misleading.