DR. SOLOMON AND HIS PATIENT.
I have said that my fellow traveller was less cautious than myself, and
have intimated much more. He was in some respects cautious, and yet in
others absolutely reckless. When hot and thirsty, for example, instead
of just rinsing out his mouth and swallowing a very little water, he
would half-fill his stomach with some of that semi-putrid stuff, ycleped
water, which you often find in Virginia and the Carolinas; and when
hungry, he would eat almost any thing he could lay hold of, and in
almost any quantity, as well as at almost any hours, whether seasonable
or unseasonable.
This course of conduct seemed to answer very well for a few months; but
a day of retribution at last came. He was then in Norfolk, in Virginia.
I had been absent from the place a few weeks, and on my return found him
sick with a fever, and without such assistance as was absolutely and
indispensably necessary. There were Yankees in the place in great
numbers, and some of them were his personal acquaintances and friends;
but they had hitherto refused to come near him, lest they should take
the fever.
I proceeded to take care of him by night and by day. At the suggestion
of an old citizen, in whom I placed great confidence, Dr. Solomon was
called in as his physician. There was some bleeding and drugging, and a
pretty constant attendance for many weeks; but the young man finally
recovered.
If you ask what this chapter has to do with my medical confessions, I
will tell you. Dr. Solomon was an old school physician, and made certain
blunders, which I am about to confess for him. He prescribed--as very
many of us his medical brethren formerly did, for the _name_ of a
disease rather than for the disease itself, just as it now appeared.
Thus, suppose the disease was typhus fever; in that case he seemed to
give just about so many pills and powders every day, without much regard
to the circumstances; believing that somehow or other, and at some time
or other, good would come out of it. If his patient had sufficient force
of constitution to enable him to withstand both the disease and the
medicine, and ultimately to recover, Dr. S. had the credit of a cure;
not, perhaps that he claimed it,--his friends awarded the honor. If the
patient died, it was on account of the severity of the disease. Neither
the doctor nor his medicine was supposed to be at fault. Some, indeed,
regarded it as the mysterious work of Divine Providence.
Dr. S. attended my young companion in pedestrianism a long time, and
sometimes brought a student into the bargain. He probably kept his
patient insane with his medicine about half the time, and greatly
prolonged his disease and his sufferings. But he knew no better way. He
was trained to all this. The idea that half a dozen careful visits,
instead of fifty formal ones, and a few shillings' worth of medicine
instead of some twenty or thirty dollars' worth, would give the young
man a better prospect of recovery than his own routine of fashionable
book-dosing and drugging, never for once, I dare say, entered his head.
And yet his head was large enough to hold such a simple idea, had it
been put there very early; and the deposit would have done much to make
him--what physicians will one day become--a rich blessing to the world.
Reader, are here no confessions of medical importance? If not, bear with
me awhile, and you will probably find them. We have yet a long road to
travel, and there are many confessions to be made in which I have a
personal concern and responsibility, and, as you may perhaps conclude,
no small share of downright culpability.