The country doctor of the past is interesting in both dress and address.
He is almost always, somehow, an elderly gentleman. He devotes little time
and attention to dress. We have one in our "mind's eye" at this
moment,--the dear old soul! His head was as white as--Horace Greeley's;
not so bald. His hair he combed by running his fingers though it mornings.
His eyes, ears, and mouth were ever open to the call of the needy. His
clothes looked as though they belonged to another man, or as if he had
lodged in a hotel and there had been a fire, and every man had put on the
first clothes he found. His coat belonged to a taller and bigger man, also
his pants, while the vest was a boy's overcoat. His boots were not mates.
His lean old spouse looked neat and prim, but as though she had been used
for trying every new sample of pill which the doctor's prolific brain
invented.
[Illustration: A CALL ON THE VILLAGE DOCTOR.]
I knew another, kind, benevolent old doctor, who started off immediately
on a call, without adding to or changing his dress. I once saw him seven
miles from home in his shirt sleeves in November, driving fiercely along
in his gig, as dignified as though dressed in his Sunday coat. If a friend
reminded him of his omission, he would smile benevolently, swear as
cordially, and drive on. He did not mean to be odd, he did not mean to
swear; and the minister, who had talked with him on the subject more than
once, had come to that charitable conclusion--for the doctor always made
due acknowledgment, and did not forget the contributions and salaries. The
doctor was like an innocent old backwoods deacon we have heard of, who,
chancing at a village tavern for the first time, heard some extraordinary
swearing; and being fascinated by this new accomplishment, he went home,
and looking about for an opportunity to put to practical use the new
vocabulary, he finally electrified his amiable wife by exclaiming,--
"Lord-all-hell, wife; shut the doors by a dam' sight!"
* * * * *
[Illustration: PHYSICIANS COSTUME IN 1790.]
In regard to shirts, a reliable author tells us that Dr. H. Davy adopted
the following plan _to save time_. "He affected not to have time for the
ordinary decencies of the toilet. Cold ablutions neither his constitution
nor his philosophic temperament required; so he rarely ever washed
himself. But the most remarkable fact was on the plea of saving time. When
one shirt became too indecently dirty to be seen longer he used to put a
clean one on over it; also the same with stockings and drawers. By spring
he would look like the 'metamorphosis man' in the circus--big and rotund.
"On rare occasions he would divest himself of his superfluous stock of
linen, which occasion was a feast to the washerwoman, but it was a source
of perplexity to his less intimate friends, who could not account for his
sudden transition from corpulency to tenuity."
The doctor's stock of shirts must have equalled Stanford's.
A California paper tells us that "twenty years ago Leland Stanford arrived
in that state with only one shirt to his back. Since then, by close
attention to business, he has contrived to accumulate a trifle of ten
million."
What possible use can a man have for _ten million shirts_?
The Earl of Surrey, afterwards eleventh Duke of Norfolk, who was a
notorious gormand and hard drinker, and a leading member of the Beefsteak
Club, was so far from cleanly in his person that his servants used to
avail themselves of his fits of drunkenness--which were pretty frequent,
by the way, for the purpose of washing him. On these occasions they
stripped him as they would a corpse, and performed the needful ablutions.
He was equally notorious for his horror of clean linen. One day, on his
complaining to his physician that he had become a perfect martyr to
rheumatism, and had tried every possible remedy without success, the
latter wittily replied, "Pray, my lord, did you ever try a clean shirt?"
Dr. Davy's remarkable oddity of dress did not end here. He took to
fishing: we have noticed his writing on angling elsewhere. He was often
seen on the river's banks, in season and out of season, "in a costume that
must have been a source of no common amusement to the river nymphs. His
coat and breeches were of a bright green cloth. His hat was what Dr. Paris
describes as 'having been intended for a coal-heaver, but as having been
dyed green, in its raw state, by some sort of pigment.' In this attire
Davy flattered himself that he closely resembled vegetable life"--which
was not intended to scare away the fishes.
[Illustration: HOW POOR TOMMY WAS LOST.]
This reminds me of Mrs. Pettigrew's little boy "Tommy." Never heard of it?
"Well," says Mrs. Pettigrew, "I never again will dress a child in green.
You see,"--very affectedly,--"I used to put a jacket and hood on little
Tommy all of beautiful green color, till one day he was playing out on the
grass, looking so green and innocent, when along came a cow, and eat poor
little Tommy all up, mistaking him for a cabbage."
Mrs. H. Davy was as curious in dress as the doctor. "One day"--it is told
for the truth--"the lady accompanied her husband to Paris, and walking in
the Tuileries, wearing the fashionable London bonnet of the
period,--shaped like a cockle-shell,--and the doctor dressed in his green,
they were mistaken for _masqueraders_, and a great crowd of astonished
Parisians began staring at the couple.
"Their discomfiture had hardly commenced when the garden inspector
informed the lady that nothing of the kind could be permitted on the
grounds, and requested a withdrawal.
"The rabble increased, and it became necessary to order a guard of
infantry to remove '_la belle Anglaise_' safely, surrounded by French
bayonets."
[Illustration: BRIDGET'S METHOD OF MENDING STOCKINGS.]
A Portland paper tells how a servant girl there mended her stockings.
"When a hole appeared in the toe, Bridget tied a string around the
stocking below the aperture and cut off the projecting portion. This
operation was repeated as often as necessary, each time pulling the
stocking down a little, until at last it was nearly all cut away, when
Bridget sewed on new legs, and thus kept her stockings always in repair."