A dispatch from Long Branch announces that “Dr. Bliss goes to New York
for a few hours today.” That is encouraging. If the doctors had kept
away from the President more he would have been better. He has had from
one to six doctors in sight, night and day, for over ten weeks. Take
a man here at home that is sick, and let a doctor go and stay with him
night and day, and how long do you suppose the man would live?
What a sick man wants is to have a doctor go around practicing on other
people, and come in once or twice a day, blow off a little steam, slap
the patient on the leg and say, “Well, boss, how's your liver?” A sick
man wants to have a doctor forget to come some time when he is expected,
and get nervous about it, instead of getting nervous because the
pill-bags is there all the time, smelling of everything.
Let a doctor that is due at the bedside at 4 o'clock, say, stay away
till 6, and then come in and tell about being down on the South Side
to see about somebody's having a sick baby, or to sew up a man that has
been to a circus, and the cross patient that has been waiting for the
doctor till he got mad, is better at once. It cheers him to know that
somebody else has a baby or had a gash cut in him in a fight, and
changes his mind about swearing at the doctor, and feels better.
Why, some of our best doctors never think of curing a man until they get
him mad a few times. It braces a man up to get mad and think, “Now that
confounded old pill-bags has forgotten all about me, and I'll bet he is
in a saloon somewhere shaking the dice for the drinks.” A sick man gains
strength, actually, lying in bed and thinking how he would like to kick
the stuffin' out of a doctor.
A doctor who has only one patient is a damage to the patient, and
Garfield has suffered more by having those doctors around when he ought
to have been left alone till he yearned for them, than anybody imagines.
Why, the feeling of a man's pulse for half an hour, and timing it as you
would a trotting horse, is enough to make a well man sick. What a doctor
wants to do is to feel of a man's pulse about one second, and then throw
the patient's hand down and say: “O, you are all right. We will have you
entered in a walking match next week.”
He wants to say something of this kind if the man is dying. A doctor has
got to be a good deal of a liar, to succeed. We do not mean to say Bliss
is not a liar, but somehow he does not seem to display judgment. He is
too much of a stayer. Bliss is too frequent.