My dear Jack,
I expect that, by this time, a good long night and twenty-four hours' reflection will have restored your equanimity. For I can't imagine that much more would be necessary, although I can sympathise, with a very sincere fellow-feeling. Bless you, my boy, it's happened to all of us—and goes on happening too, if that's any comfort to you.
Why even young Calverley, who was in here just now, and who looks, as you know, almost supernaturally solemn for his five-and-thirty years, was the victim of a similar experience only last week, under circumstances far less considerate than yours. For the old lady—the scene was somewhere near Cadogan Square, and it was his second visit—received him in person, sitting very bolt upright.
"You're very young," she told him. "I don't like you. And you don't understand my case."
So you see your experience has not been by any means unique; and I really don't think that you have any ethical ground for complaint. The lady considered you, quite erroneously of course, to be too inexperienced, and having told you so in a letter that is by no means ungraceful, has called in another practitioner. He may be, as you say, an ignorant old rotter. But that is irrelevant. And the fact that you are a locum tenens doesn't, I think, alter the situation.
After all, we are merely the servants of the public, in spite of our M.D.'s and our hospital appointments. And we must face the fact with as much philosophy as we can gather about us. If they don't want us, well, they won't have us, and there's the bitter end of it. Coming fresh from the hospital, where one has been, perhaps, a house-surgeon or house-physician, into the entirely different atmosphere of private practice, it is sometimes a bit hard to realise this, and the process is always a painful one. For between the house-surgeon, clad in white, backed up by the accumulated authority and tradition of his hospital, surrounded by satellite nurses, and perhaps (dare I breathe it?) a wee bit lordly, and the very young man, in a new frock-coat, who will be ushered next week by a curious parlour-maid into a private drawing-room, there is all the difference in the world.
Moreover you seem to have got yourself into the sort of practice that for a young man is perhaps the most difficult to manage—a practice consisting almost entirely of prosperous and middle-class patients. I am not using the term middle-class—it is one that I particularly hate—in any derogatory sense, but faute de mieux as describing the very large stratum of society that pivots upon the shop-counter or the offices behind it. It is a stratum, as you will be sure to find out pretty soon, as kindly, honest, and really considerate as any other, and no less lacking in heroism and endurance. But it is one that has not yet fully acquired perhaps the habit of emotional suppression—the latest to be developed in social evolution—and is consequently a little addicted to superlatives, and still somewhat over-respectful, no doubt, to such mere externals as eloquence and millinery in other people. On the other hand it possesses an extremely accurate appreciation of the cash value of services rendered, and its consideration for a gentleman is by no means going to interfere with this when he comes before them as a salesman of physic and incidentally of advice. Moreover—and it's no good being hypersensitive about it—we mustn't forget that we too, as a profession, have but lately differentiated ourselves from the ranks of retail commerce—so lately, in fact, that the barber tradition is far from being entirely defunct.
I can remember very well, for instance, in my first locum, a fortnight after I had qualified, standing behind the counter of a little surgery in Shadwell in response to a patient who had tapped upon it loudly with the edge of his shilling, and summoned me with a call of "Shop." Would I take out his tooth for sixpence? No, I wouldn't. A shilling was the recognised fee for this operation. Well, what about ninepence? No, not even for ninepence.
"Orl right, guv'nor, 'eave away then," and the shilling went into the till, while the tooth, neatly wrapped in paper, was borne homewards for domestic inspection. Nor are such incidents by any means uncommon even to-day, and they add excellent lessons to those of Winchester and New.