"What is your general estimate of doctors, lawyers, and ministers?"
said I.
"Wait a minute, till I have got through with your first question,"
said the Master. "One thing at a time. You asked me about the young
doctors, and about our young doctors, they come home _tres bien
chausses_, as a Frenchman would say, mighty well shod with
professional knowledge. But when they begin walking round among their
poor patients--they don't commonly start with millionaires--they find
that their new shoes of scientific acquirements have got to be broken
in just like a pair of boots or brogans. I don't know that I have put
it quite strong enough. Let me try again. You've seen those fellows at
the circus that get up on horseback, so big that you wonder how they
could climb into the saddle. But pretty soon they throw off their
outside coat, and the next minute another one, and then the one under
that, and so they keep peeling off one garment after another till
people begin to look queer and think they are going too far for strict
propriety. Well, that is the way a fellow with a real practical turn
serves a good many of his scientific wrappers--flings 'em off for
other people to pick up, and goes right at the work of curing
stomach-aches and all the other little mean unscientific complaints
that make up the larger part of every doctor's business. I think our
Dr. Benjamin is a worthy young man, and if you are in need of a doctor
at any time I hope you will go to him; and if you come off without
harm, I will--recommend some other friend to try him."
[Footnote 9: From Chapter V of "The Poet at the Breakfast Table."
Copyright, 1872, 1891, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Published by
Houghton, Mifflin Company.]
I thought he was going to say he would try him in his own person; but
the Master is not fond of committing himself.
"Now I will answer your other question," he said. "The lawyers are the
cleverest men, the ministers are the most learned, and the doctors are
the most sensible."
"The lawyers are a picked lot, 'first scholars,' and the like, but
their business is as unsympathetic as Jack Ketch's. There is nothing
humanizing in their relations with their fellow creatures. They go for
the side that retains them. They defend the man they know to be a
rogue, and not very rarely throw suspicion on the man they know to be
innocent. Mind you, I am not finding fault with them--every side of a
case has a right to the best statement it admits of; but I say it does
not tend to make them sympathetic. Suppose in a case of Fever _vs._
Patient, the doctor should side with either party according to whether
the old miser or his expectant heir was his employer. Suppose the
minister should side with the Lord or the devil, according to the
salary offered, and other incidental advantages, where the soul of a
sinner was in question. You can see what a piece of work it would make
of their sympathies. But the lawyers are quicker witted than either of
the other professions, and abler men generally. They are good-natured,
or if they quarrel, their quarrels are above-board. I don't think they
are as accomplished as the ministers; but they have a way of cramming
with special knowledge for a case, which leaves a certain shallow
sediment of intelligence in their memories about a good many things.
They are apt to talk law in mixt company; and they have a way of
looking round when they make a point, as if they were addressing a
jury, that is mighty aggravating--as I once had occasion to see when
one of 'em, and a pretty famous one, put me on the witness stand at a
dinner party once.
"The ministers come next in point of talent. They are far more curious
and widely interested outside of their own calling than either of the
other professions. I like to talk with 'em. They are interesting men:
full of good feelings, hard workers, always foremost in good deeds,
and on the whole the most efficient civilizing class--working downward
from knowledge to ignorance, that is; not so much upward,
perhaps--that we have. The trouble is that so many of 'em work in
harness, and it is pretty sure to chafe somewhere. They feed us on
canned meats mostly. They cripple our instincts and reason, and give
us a crutch of doctrine. I have talked with a great many of 'em, of
all sorts of belief; and I don't think they are quite so easy in their
minds, the greater number of them, nor so clear in their convictions
as one would think to hear 'em lay down the law in the pulpit. They
used to lead the intelligence of their parishes; now they do pretty
well if they keep up with it, and they are very apt to lag behind it.
Then they must have a colleague. The old minister thinks he can hold
to his old course, sailing right into the wind's eye of human nature,
as straight as that famous old skipper John Bunyan; the young minister
falls off three or four points, and catches the breeze that left the
old man's sails all shivering. By-and-by the congregation will get
ahead of him, and then it must have another new skipper. The priest
holds his own pretty well; the minister is coming down every
generation nearer and nearer to the common level of the useful
citizen--no oracle at all, but a man of more than average moral
instincts, who, if he knows anything, knows how little he knows. The
ministers are good talkers, only the struggle between nature and grace
makes some of 'em a little awkward occasionally. The women do their
best to spoil 'em, as they do the poets. You find it pleasant to be
spoiled, no doubt; so do they. Now and then one of 'em goes over the
dam; no wonder--they're always in the rapids."
By this time our three ladies had their faces all turned toward the
speaker, like the weathercocks in a northeaster, and I thought it best
to switch off the talk on to another rail.
"How about the doctors?" I said.
"Theirs is the least learned of the professions, in this country at
least. They have not half the general culture of the lawyers, nor a
quarter of that of the ministers. I rather think, tho, they are more
agreeable to the common run of people than the men with the black
coats or the men with green bags. People can swear before 'em if they
want to, and they can't very well before ministers. I don't care
whether they want to swear or not, they don't want to be on their good
behavior. Besides, the minister has a little smack of the sexton about
him; he comes when people are _in extremis_, but they don't send for
him every time they make a slight moral slip--tell a lie, for
instance, or smuggle a silk dress through the custom-house: but they
call in the doctor when the child is cutting a tooth or gets a
splinter in its finger. So it doesn't mean much to send for him, only
a pleasant chat about the news of the day; for putting the baby to
rights doesn't take long. Besides, everybody doesn't like to talk
about the next world; people are modest in their desires, and find
this world as good as they deserve: but everybody loves to talk
physic. Everybody loves to hear of strange cases; people are eager to
tell the doctor of the wonderful cures they have heard of; they want
to know what is the matter with somebody or other who is said to be
suffering from "a complication of diseases," and above all to get a
hard name, Greek or Latin, for some complaint which sounds altogether
too commonplace in plain English. If you will only call a headache a
_Cephalalgia_, it acquires dignity at once, and a patient becomes
rather proud of it. So I think doctors are generally welcome in most
companies."