When at our table, the time not positively occupied in mastication he employed in looking first at Quizzle, the interlocutor, and then at Governor Wiseman, the responding oracle.
Quizzle.—How have you, Governor Wiseman, kept yourself in such robust health so long a time?
Wiseman.—By never trifling with it, sir. I never eat muffins too hot. This one, you see, has had some time to cool. Besides, when I am at all disordered, I immediately send for the doctor.
There are books proposing that we all become our own medical attendant. Whenever we are seized with any sort of physical disorder, we are to take down some volume in homeopathy, allopathy, hydropathy, and running our finger along the index, alight upon the malady that may be afflicting us. We shall find in the same page the name of the disease and the remedy. Thus: chapped hands—glycerine; cold—squills; lumbago—mustard-plasters; nervous excitement—valerian; sleeplessness—Dover's powders.
This may be very well for slight ailments, but we have attended more funerals of people who were their own doctor than obsequies of any other sort. In your inexperience you will be apt to get the wrong remedy. Look out for the agriculturist who farms by book, neglecting the counsel of his long-experienced neighbors. He will have poor turnips and starveling wheat, and kill his fields with undue apportionments of guano and bonedust. Look out just as much for the patient who in the worship of some "pathy" blindly adheres to a favorite hygienic volume, rejecting in important cases medical admonition.
In ordinary cases the best doctor you can have is mother or grandmother, who has piloted through the rocks of infantile disease a whole family. She has salve for almost everything, and knows how to bind a wound or cool an inflammation. But if mother be dead or you are afflicted with a maternal ancestor that never knew anything practical, and never ill, better in severe cases have the doctor right away. You say that it is expensive to do that, while a book on the treatment of diseases will cost you only a dollar and a half. I reply that in the end it is very expensive for an inexperienced man to be his own doctor; for in addition to the price of the book there are the undertaker's expenses.
Some of the younger persons at the table laughed at the closing sentence of Wiseman, when Doctor Heavyasbricks looked up, put down his knife and said: "My young friends, what are you laughing at? I see no cause of merriment in the phrase 'undertaker's expenses.' It seems to me to be a sad business. When I think of the scenes amid which an undertaker moves, I feel more like tears than hilarity."
Quizzle.—If you are opposed, Governor Wiseman, to one's being his own doctor, what do you think of every man's being his own lawyer?
Wiseman.—I think just as badly of that.
Books setting forth forms for deeds, mortgages, notes, and contracts, are no doubt valuable. It should be a part of every young man's education to know something of these. We cannot for the small business transactions of life be hunting up the "attorney-at-law" or the village squire. But economy in the transfer of property or in the making of wills is sometimes a permanent disaster. There are so many quirks in the law, so many hiding-places for scamps, so many modes of twisting phraseology, so many decisions, precedents and rulings, so many John Does who have brought suits against Richard Roes, that you had better in all important business matters seek out an honest lawyer.