Part 4 (1/2)
”In New York city?”
”Yes, and I shall there succeed,” he exclaimed, with great determination.
”Well, I hope in my heart of hearts you will,” was his friend's reply, as he kindly loaned him the required sum of money.
Had his friend asked the advice of a third party before making the loan, doubtless the answer would have been something like the following, though it was respecting another case:--
”Dr. J. wants me to loan him some money for thirty days; do you suppose he will refund it?”
”What! lend him money?” was the reply. ”He return it? No, sir; if you lend that man an emetic he would never _return_ it.”
On his borrowed funds,--neither princ.i.p.al nor interest of which his kind friend ever expected him to be able to return,--the doctor entered the great metropolis. He hired a house in a respectable locality, and hung out his sign. During his long quiet days in the country village he had read a great deal, and was ”up to the tricks” of his predecessors. He had particularly posted himself on the ways and means resorted to by some of those physicians, of whom we have already made brief mention, for getting into practice.
[Ill.u.s.tration: COMMENCING A PRACTICE IN NEW YORK.]
”What avails it that I know as much as other physicians who have entered upon a practice? What does my diploma amount to if I have no patients?”
he asked himself over and again. Practice was now his want, and this is the way he obtained it. Having read of a celebrated physician, who kept his few patients a long time in waiting, under pretence that he was preoccupied by the many who fortunately had preceded, our young physician adopted that great man's tactics. For want of patients to keep in waiting, he hired some decently dressed lackeys to apply regularly at his front door, at specified times, and wait till the colored servant admitted them, one at a time. Each was pa.s.sed out after a half hour's supposed consultation, and the next admitted. The neighbors and others pa.s.sing, seeing patients continually in waiting, some with a hand, a foot, face, or other parts bound up, were led to read his sign, and soon a _bona fide_ patient applied, who, in turn, was kept waiting a long time, notwithstanding the young doctor's anxiety to finger a real medical fee from his first New York patient. Others followed, the lackeys were dismissed, and the physician's practice was established. His merit kept what his shrewdness had obtained.
Cannot the reader avouch for the reputed extensive rides of some country doctor, who, without a known patient, harnessed his bare-ribbed old horse to his crazy gig, and drove furiously about the country, returning by a roundabout way, without having made a single professional visit, thereby humbugging the honest country people into a belief that he had innumerable patients in his route?
To quite another cla.s.s of humbugs belongs the subject of the following sketch. I have had the pleasure of meeting him but twice--may I never meet him again. The first interview was at the board of a country hotel.
[Ill.u.s.tration: GRACE BEFORE MEAT.]
I had arrived late at evening by rail, and ordered a light supper. When the tea-bell had summoned me, I found a large, phlegmatic individual seated opposite at the table, who possibly had arrived by the same conveyance as myself. His person was quite repulsive. He was probably fifty years of age, his eyes watery and restless, his thin stock of hair--indicating a corresponding poverty of brain--black, streaked by gray, was stuck back professionally (!) over a low b.u.mp of veneration, and high organs of firmness and self-esteem, which, with a Roman nose, large, protruding under jaw, and wide, open mouth, gave him a striking appearance, at least. But what was most observable was his thin, uneven, scraggy whiskers, uncombed, and besmeared by tobacco juice and bits of the weed, drooling down over their uncertain length, over waistcoat, and so out of sight below the table. His coat sleeves had evidently been subst.i.tuted for a handkerchief when too great a surplus of tobacco juice obstructed his face. He bent his great, watery eyes over towards me, and opened the ball by suggesting that I ask a blessing over the food so bountifully and temptingly laid before us. Having too much compa.s.sion on the present exhausted state of my stomach to disregard its immediate demands, and too little confidence in the veneration of my _vis-a-vis_ to return the request, I went to eating, while he closed one eye, keeping the other on a plate of hot steak just placed before him by the table girl. I have since been strongly reminded of him by the character ”Bishopriggs,”
in Wilkie Collins's book, ”_Man and Wife_.” I think, however, for hypocrisy, the present subject exceeded Bishopriggs. Having wagged his enormous jaw a few times, by way of grace, he began eating and conversing alternately.
”I take it, friend, you're a railroad conductor, coming in so late,” he suggested, between mouthfuls.
”No,” was my brief reply.
”Perhaps, cap'n, you're a drummer. Sell dry or wet goods?”
”No.”
”A newspaper man?”
I merely shook my head.
”Then a patent medicine vender?”
”No!” emphatically.
”Not a minister,” he a.s.serted. ”Perhaps a doctor,” he perseveringly continued.
”Yes, sir; I am a physician.”
”O! ah! indeed! I am rejoiced to learn it. Give me your hand, sir,” he exclaimed, rising and reaching his enormous palm across the table. ”I am rejoiced, as I said before, to meet a brother.”