There is a surgeon in New York city whose income from practice outside of
the hospital is said to be twenty-five thousand dollars per annum. Dr.
Valentine Mott, the celebrated New York surgeon, who died April 26, 1865,
at the age of eighty-one years, had a very large income, but less than
that enjoyed by several surgeons in the metropolis at the present time.
There are some specialists in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, who
receive greater sums annually than the regular medical or surgical
practitioners. There is no law particularly controlling the prices of the
former. The fee for a visit, by the established usage of the medical
societies in these cities, is from three to ten dollars.
A specialist sometimes receives fifty to one hundred dollars for
prescribing in a case, for which another physician, in ordinary practice,
would charge but an office fee of two to ten dollars. A quack
specialist--and an impostor--in the latter city makes his brags that he
has received twelve hundred dollars for one prescription. But then this
same lying braggadocio says he has read medicine with Ricard, and had
various honors conferred upon him.
Dr. Pulte, of Ohio, one of the western pioneers in homeopathy, who has
often been greeted, in his earlier professional rounds, by a shower of
dirt, rotten eggs, stones, brickbats, and had rails and sticks thrust
through his carriage wheels at night, and been otherwise insulted, until,
finally, he had to carry his wife about with him, as a protective
measure,--for his revilers would not insult a lady,--has since made as
high as twenty thousand dollars a year, and has amassed a fortune of two
hundred thousand dollars. There is a Boston homeopathist whose income from
practice is not less than twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars annually.
Some of the surgeons (allopathic) do better, but hardly reach the figures
of Dr. Nelaton, the great French surgeon, who, in 1869, earned four
hundred thousand francs, equal to about eighty thousand dollars.
[Illustration: A PIONEER OF HOMEOPATHY.]
Dr. Bigelow, the very celebrated surgeon of Harvard College, has probably
received the largest fee for a surgical operation of any New England
practitioner. He is said to be worth nearly a million.
Dr. Buckingham, the eminent medical practitioner, of Boston, who probably
earns as much as any physician in the city, a few years ago stated to the
graduating class of Harvard College--so I am informed by a physician then
present--that he received for his first year's practice in Boston _but
fifty-seven dollars_. He then had a little office up stairs, where he
slept, dined,--often on bread and cheese, or a few crackers; sometimes he
did not dine,--and received his few patients. But he was a great student,
and a hard worker, and often, and usually, stuck to his post during those
hours when more prosperous physicians were seeking amusement or
relaxation. He was one of the "_hold-fast_" kind, who always win, in the
end.
"_Catch what you can._"--There is a class of wretches in every city who
have no established fee for prescribing for the sick. They go on the
principle of "catch what I can." If they cannot get a fee of twenty
dollars, they will take two, provided the patient has no more. A young man
who visited one of these medical shave-shops was charged a fee of
thirty-five dollars in a very simple case; but the benevolent doctor
concluded to accept two dollars and a half instead, since the man had no
more money. The shamefulness of such Jewing reminds one of the story of a
negro trading off a worn-out old mule:--
"I say, dar, what will you take for dat yer mule, Cuffy?"
"O, I axes thirty-five dollars for him, Mr. Sambo."
"O, go way, dar. I gibs you five dollars for him," said the first.
"Well, you can take him, Sambo. I won't stand for thirty dollars on a mule
trade, nohow."
There is a female practitioner in St. Louis who earns above ten thousand
dollars a year, and her individual fees are moderate at that.
Another doctress, Mrs. Ormsby, of Orange, N. J., accumulates some fifteen
thousand a year, and is in turn outstripped by another woman practising in
New York, who gets nearly twenty thousand dollars a year. Such certainly
possess great business tact, with or without professional merit, and for
such let all men give them credit.
Several female doctors in Boston receive from three to five thousand
dollars each, yearly.
It is too often the case that a physician's success is reckoned, like a
tradesman's, by what he has gained in a pecuniary point of view. There
are, however, thousands of worthy men, successful with their cases, who,
from less acquisitiveness than benevolence, have failed in securing more
than a bare competence, through a life devoted to their profession.
[Illustration: A SHARP MULE TRADE.]
I presume nearly every physician who has experienced a dozen years in
practice has some mementos of his poor patients' gratitude, in the form,
if not of an ebony bird, or a black cat-skin, of something possessing more
beauty, and, to the benevolent heart, which always beats within the
breast of every true physician, keepsakes prized above gold and silver.
"Who has not kept some trifling thing,
More prized, more prized, than jewels rare,
A faded flower, a broken ring,
A tress of golden hair, a tress of golden hair?"
A very benevolent physician, and a sexagenarian, of New York city, wrote,
twenty years ago, "I even yet enjoy a sort of melancholy satisfaction in
hastening to relieve the suffering poor of my neighborhood, though I know
that my reward will be very small, or, what is far more frequent, that I
shall be paid with ingratitude, if not slander.
"Sometimes there are bright spots in my horizon, and I think myself more
than repaid by a new shirt, or a couple of handkerchiefs--the gift of some
poor, though grateful sewing girl. A few of these little treasures I prize
with peculiar tenderness."
"A tress of hair and a faded leaf
Are paltry things to a cynic's eyes:
But to me they are keys that open the gates
Of a paradise of memories."