The Autobiography of a Quack, and The Case of George Dedlow

by S. Weir Mitchell

During my junior year I became unpopular, and as I was very cautious, I cannot see why. At last, being hard up, I got to be foolishly reckless. But why dwell on the failures of immaturity?

The causes which led to my leaving Nassau Hall were not, after all, the mischievous outbreaks in which college lads indulge. Indeed, I have never been guilty of any of those pieces of wanton wickedness which injure the feelings of others while they lead to no useful result. When I left to return home, I set myself seriously to reflect upon the necessity of greater care in following out my inclinations, and from that time forward I have steadily avoided, whenever it was possible, the vulgar vice of directly possessing myself of objects to which I could show no legal title. My father was indignant at the results of my college career; and, according to my aunt, his shame and sorrow had some effect in shortening his life. My sister believed my account of the matter. It ended in my being used for a year as an assistant in the shop, and in being taught to ring bells—a fine exercise, but not proper work for a man of refinement. My father died while training his bell-ringers in the Oxford triple bob—broke a blood-vessel somewhere. How I could have caused that I do not see.

I was now about nineteen years old, and, as I remember, a middle-sized, well-built young fellow, with large eyes, a slight mustache, and, I have been told, with very good manners and a somewhat humorous turn. Besides these advantages, my guardian held in trust for me about two thousand dollars. After some consultation between us, it was resolved that I should study medicine. This conclusion was reached nine years before the Rebellion broke out, and after we had settled, for the sake of economy, in Woodbury, New Jersey. From this time I saw very little of my deaf aunt or of Peninnah. I was resolute to rise in the world, and not to be weighted by relatives who were without my tastes and my manners.

I set out for Philadelphia, with many good counsels from my aunt and guardian. I look back upon this period as a turning-point of my life. I had seen enough of the world already to know that if you can succeed without exciting suspicion, it is by far the pleasantest way; and I really believe that if I had not been endowed with so fatal a liking for all the good things of life I might have lived along as reputably as most men. This, however, is, and always has been, my difficulty, and I suppose that I am not responsible for the incidents to which it gave rise. Most men have some ties in life, but I have said I had none which held me. Peninnah cried a good deal when we parted, and this, I think, as I was still young, had a very good effect in strengthening my resolution to do nothing which could get me into trouble. The janitor of the college to which I went directed me to a boarding-house, where I engaged a small third-story room, which I afterwards shared with Mr. Chaucer of Georgia. He pronounced it, as I remember, “Jawjah.”

In this very remarkable abode I spent the next two winters, and finally graduated, along with two hundred more, at the close of my two years of study. I should previously have been one year in a physician’s office as a student, but this regulation was very easily evaded. As to my studies, the less said the better. I attended the quizzes, as they call them, pretty closely, and, being of a quick and retentive memory, was thus enabled to dispense with some of the six or seven lectures a day which duller men found it necessary to follow.

Dissecting struck me as a rather nasty business for a gentleman, and on this account I did just as little as was absolutely essential. In fact, if a man took his tickets and paid the dissection fees, nobody troubled himself as to whether or not he did any more than this. A like evil existed at the graduation: whether you squeezed through or passed with credit was a thing which was not made public, so that I had absolutely nothing to stimulate my ambition. I am told that it is all very different to-day.

The astonishment with which I learned of my success was shared by the numerous Southern gentlemen who darkened the floors and perfumed with tobacco the rooms of our boarding-house. In my companions, during the time of my studies so called, as in other matters of life, I was somewhat unfortunate. All of them were Southern gentlemen, with more money than I had. Many of them carried great sticks, usually sword-canes, and some bowie-knives or pistols; also, they delighted in swallow-tailed coats, long hair, broad-brimmed felt hats, and very tight boots. I often think of these gentlemen with affectionate interest, and wonder how many are lying under the wheat-fields of Virginia. One could see them any day sauntering along with their arms over their companions’ shoulders, splendidly indifferent to the ways of the people about them. They hated the “Nawth” and cursed the Yankees, and honestly believed that the leanest of them was a match for any half a dozen of the bulkiest of Northerners. I must also do them the justice to say that they were quite as ready to fight as to brag, which, by the way, is no meager statement. With these gentry—for whom I retain a respect which filled me with regret at the recent course of events—I spent a good deal of my large leisure. The more studious of both sections called us a hard crowd. What we did, or how we did it, little concerns me here, except that, owing to my esteem for chivalric blood and breeding, I was led into many practices and excesses which cost my guardian and myself a good deal of money. At the close of my career as a student I found myself aged twenty-one years, and the owner of some seven hundred dollars—the rest of my small estate having disappeared variously within the last two years. After my friends had gone to their homes in the South I began to look about me for an office, and finally settled upon very good rooms in one of the down-town localities of the Quaker City. I am not specific as to the number and street, for reasons which may hereafter appear. I liked the situation on various accounts. It had been occupied by a doctor; the terms were reasonable; and it lay on the skirts of a good neighborhood, while below it lived a motley population, among which I expected to get my first patients and such fees as were to be had. Into this new home I moved my medical text-books, a few bones, and myself. Also, I displayed in the window a fresh sign, upon which was distinctly to be read:

DR. E. SANDERAFT. Office hours, 8 to 9 A.M., 7 to 9 P.M.

I felt now that I had done my fair share toward attaining a virtuous subsistence, and so I waited tranquilly, and without undue enthusiasm, to see the rest of the world do its part in the matter. Meanwhile I read up on all sorts of imaginable cases, stayed at home all through my office hours, and at intervals explored the strange section of the town which lay to the south of my office. I do not suppose there is anything like it else where. It was then filled with grog-shops, brothels, slop-shops, and low lodging-houses. You could dine for a penny on soup made from the refuse meats of the rich, gathered at back gates by a horde of half-naked children, who all told varieties of one woeful tale. Here, too, you could be drunk for five cents, and be lodged for three, with men, women, and children of all colors lying about you. It was this hideous mixture of black and white and yellow wretchedness which made the place so peculiar. The blacks predominated, and had mostly that swollen, reddish, dark skin, the sign in this race of habitual drunkenness. Of course only the lowest whites were here—rag-pickers, pawnbrokers, old-clothes men, thieves, and the like. All of this, as it came before me, I viewed with mingled disgust and philosophy. I hated filth, but I understood that society has to stand on somebody, and I was only glad that I was not one of the undermost and worst-squeezed bricks.

I can hardly believe that I waited a month without having been called upon by a single patient. At last a policeman on our beat brought me a fancy man with a dog-bite. This patient recommended me to his brother, the keeper of a small pawnbroking-shop, and by very slow degrees I began to get stray patients who were too poor to indulge in up-town doctors. I found the police very useful acquaintances; and, by a drink or a cigar now and then, I got most of the cases of cut heads and the like at the next station-house. These, however, were the aristocrats of my practice; the bulk of my patients were soap-fat men, rag-pickers, oystermen, hose-house bummers, and worse, with other and nameless trades, men and women, white, black, or mulatto. How they got the levies, fips, and quarters with which I was reluctantly paid, I do not know; that, indeed, was none of my business. They expected to pay, and they came to me in preference to the dispensary doctor, two or three squares away, who seemed to me to spend most of his days in the lanes and alleys about us. Of course he received no pay except experience, since the dispensaries in the Quaker City, as a rule, do not give salaries to their doctors; and the vilest of the poor prefer a “pay doctor” to one of these disinterested gentlemen, who cannot be expected to give their best brains for nothing, when at everybody’s beck and call. I am told, indeed I know, that most young doctors do a large amount of poor practice, as it is called; but, for my own part, I think it better for both parties when the doctor insists upon some compensation being made to him. This has been usually my own custom, and I have not found reason to regret it.