My friends were very much astonished that he did not prescribe active medicine. "What can it mean?" they asked again and again. For myself, too, I must confess that I was not a little disappointed. Not that I had any considerable attachment to pills and pill boxes,—such a confidence had gone by long before, as you know,—but I verily thought my particular tendencies to pulmonary consumption demanded a little tincture of digitalis, or something in the shape of strong medicine.
But the physician knew my theories, better than he knew the power of that habit whose chains, in this respect, he had long ago escaped. For I learned afterwards, much better than I then knew, that so feeble was his faith in medicine, at least in all ordinary cases, that whenever the intelligence of his patients would at all warrant it, he prescribed, as he had for me, just nothing at all, but left every thing to be done by Nature and good common-sense attendants. This was, in fact, just what he attempted to do here. He doubtless supposed my friends were nearly as well informed in the matter as I was; and that I was as fully emancipated in practice as I was in theory.
"How much drugging and dosing might be saved," I said to myself, when I came to reflect properly on the subject, "if mankind were duly trained to place a proper reliance on Nature and Nature's laws, instead of fastening all their faith on the mere exhibition of some mystic powder or pill or tincture—or, at best, a few drops of some irritant or poison. It is their ignorance that makes their physicians' and apothecaries' bills so heavy, and the grave-digger's calling so good and so certain."
It is hardly necessary for me to say that I followed the advice which had been so wisely given, and which, after all, was but the echo of my own judgment, when that judgment was freely exercised. My friends were not satisfied at first; but when they saw that I was slowly recovering, they submitted with as good a grace as they could. The fact was that they had no court of appeal. They had selected a man who was at the head of his profession, and whose voice, in the medical world, and as a medical man, wherever he was known, was law. Had some young man given such "old woman's" advice, as they would most certainly have regarded it, they would have appealed to a higher court.
No man ever did better, when placed in similar circumstances, with the aid of medicine, than I did without it. In two weeks, at farthest, I was as well as I had been at any time in ten years or even twenty. What more or greater could I have asked? What more could my friends have expected? What more could have been possible? Could Hippocrates or Galen have done more?
CHAPTER LVI.
BUTTER EATERS.
About the year 1833, I became somewhat intimately acquainted with the dietetic and general physical habits of a young woman in a family where I was a boarder, whose case will be instructive.