The Funny Side of Physic Part 4

"In New York city?"

"Yes, and I shall there succeed," he exclaimed, with great determination.

"Well, I hope in my heart of hearts you will," was his friend's reply, as he kindly loaned him the required sum of money.

Had his friend asked the advice of a third party before making the loan, doubtless the answer would have been something like the following, though it was respecting another case:--

"Dr. J. wants me to loan him some money for thirty days; do you suppose he will refund it?"

"What! lend him money?" was the reply. "He return it? No, sir; if you lend that man an emetic he would never _return_ it."

On his borrowed funds,--neither princ.i.p.al nor interest of which his kind friend ever expected him to be able to return,--the doctor entered the great metropolis. He hired a house in a respectable locality, and hung out his sign. During his long quiet days in the country village he had read a great deal, and was "up to the tricks" of his predecessors. He had particularly posted himself on the ways and means resorted to by some of those physicians, of whom we have already made brief mention, for getting into practice.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COMMENCING A PRACTICE IN NEW YORK.]

"What avails it that I know as much as other physicians who have entered upon a practice? What does my diploma amount to if I have no patients?"

he asked himself over and again. Practice was now his want, and this is the way he obtained it. Having read of a celebrated physician, who kept his few patients a long time in waiting, under pretence that he was preoccupied by the many who fortunately had preceded, our young physician adopted that great man's tactics. For want of patients to keep in waiting, he hired some decently dressed lackeys to apply regularly at his front door, at specified times, and wait till the colored servant admitted them, one at a time. Each was pa.s.sed out after a half hour's supposed consultation, and the next admitted. The neighbors and others pa.s.sing, seeing patients continually in waiting, some with a hand, a foot, face, or other parts bound up, were led to read his sign, and soon a _bona fide_ patient applied, who, in turn, was kept waiting a long time, notwithstanding the young doctor's anxiety to finger a real medical fee from his first New York patient. Others followed, the lackeys were dismissed, and the physician's practice was established. His merit kept what his shrewdness had obtained.

Cannot the reader avouch for the reputed extensive rides of some country doctor, who, without a known patient, harnessed his bare-ribbed old horse to his crazy gig, and drove furiously about the country, returning by a roundabout way, without having made a single professional visit, thereby humbugging the honest country people into a belief that he had innumerable patients in his route?

To quite another cla.s.s of humbugs belongs the subject of the following sketch. I have had the pleasure of meeting him but twice--may I never meet him again. The first interview was at the board of a country hotel.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GRACE BEFORE MEAT.]

I had arrived late at evening by rail, and ordered a light supper. When the tea-bell had summoned me, I found a large, phlegmatic individual seated opposite at the table, who possibly had arrived by the same conveyance as myself. His person was quite repulsive. He was probably fifty years of age, his eyes watery and restless, his thin stock of hair--indicating a corresponding poverty of brain--black, streaked by gray, was stuck back professionally (!) over a low b.u.mp of veneration, and high organs of firmness and self-esteem, which, with a Roman nose, large, protruding under jaw, and wide, open mouth, gave him a striking appearance, at least. But what was most observable was his thin, uneven, scraggy whiskers, uncombed, and besmeared by tobacco juice and bits of the weed, drooling down over their uncertain length, over waistcoat, and so out of sight below the table. His coat sleeves had evidently been subst.i.tuted for a handkerchief when too great a surplus of tobacco juice obstructed his face. He bent his great, watery eyes over towards me, and opened the ball by suggesting that I ask a blessing over the food so bountifully and temptingly laid before us. Having too much compa.s.sion on the present exhausted state of my stomach to disregard its immediate demands, and too little confidence in the veneration of my _vis-a-vis_ to return the request, I went to eating, while he closed one eye, keeping the other on a plate of hot steak just placed before him by the table girl. I have since been strongly reminded of him by the character "Bishopriggs,"

in Wilkie Collins's book, "_Man and Wife_." I think, however, for hypocrisy, the present subject exceeded Bishopriggs. Having wagged his enormous jaw a few times, by way of grace, he began eating and conversing alternately.

"I take it, friend, you're a railroad conductor, coming in so late," he suggested, between mouthfuls.

"No," was my brief reply.

"Perhaps, cap'n, you're a drummer. Sell dry or wet goods?"

"No."

"A newspaper man?"

I merely shook my head.

"Then a patent medicine vender?"

"No!" emphatically.

"Not a minister," he a.s.serted. "Perhaps a doctor," he perseveringly continued.

"Yes, sir; I am a physician."

"O! ah! indeed! I am rejoiced to learn it. Give me your hand, sir," he exclaimed, rising and reaching his enormous palm across the table. "I am rejoiced, as I said before, to meet a brother."

"A _brother_!" I repeated, with unfeigned surprise and disgust.

"Yes, a brother! I, too, am a doctor. I have the honor," etc., for the next ten minutes, while I hastened to finish my supper.

His last interrogation was what a college boy would call a "stunner."

"_Do you think, sir, that the Fillopian ducks are the same in a male as they are in a female?_"

[Dr. S., a quack living in Winsted, Conn., once said to an educated physician, that he sometimes found difficulty in introducing a female catheter on account of the "prostrate" (meaning _prostate_) gland,--which exists only in the male!]

I saw him once after the above interesting interview. He entered the drug house of Rust, Bird, & Brother, Boston, just as I was about to go out. I could not refrain from turning my attention towards him, as I recognized his stentorian voice.

"Have you got any _Bonyset arbs_?" was all I waited to hear. I subsequently learned that he was known in Vermont and part of New York State by the _sobriquet_ of "Dr. Pusbelly."

The following story respecting "Dr. Pusbelly," related in my hearing by a stage-driver, is in perfect keeping with the character of the man, as he impressed me in my first interview at the country hotel.

DR. PUSBELLY.

One sunny day in autumn I had occasion to take a long journey "away down in Maine," when and where there was no railroad. I was seated on the outside of a four-horse stage-coach, with three or four other pa.s.sengers, one of whom was a lady, who preferred riding in that elevated station to being cramped up inside the coach with eight persons, besides sundry babies, a poodle dog, and a parrot.

"Sam," our driver, was a sociable fellow, full of pleasant stories,--and Medford rum, though he was considered a perfectly safe Jehu. The greatest drawback to his otherwise agreeable yarns was his habit of swearing.

Notwithstanding the presence of the lady, he would occasionally round his periods and emphasize his sentences with an expletive which had better have been omitted.

"Can't you tell a story just as well without swearing, Sam?" I inquired.

"O, no; it comes second natur. Why, cap'n, everybody swears sometimes. And that reminds me--Git up, Jerry" (to the horse). "There was an old doctor, Pill--Pilgarlic, I called him, on account of his pills, and the strong effluvia from his cataract mouth. He was up round Champlain, where I drove before the d--d railroads ruined the great stage business. Well, he was as religious as a cuss,--that ain't swearin', is it, cap'n? Well, he came round there pill-peddling, you see, and in order to make the old women believe in his (expletive) medicines--"

"Don't swear, Sam. You can tell the story better without. Come, try,"

interrupted a pa.s.senger, with a twinkle of fun in his expressive eyes.

"Who's telling this story,--you or me?" exclaimed Sam, with a wink.

"Yes, he talked pills by Bible doctrine, swore his essences by the blood of the Lamb, the ---- old hypocrite. I knowed he was a blamed old hypocrite, for I had to drive him round every onct in a while, and he never failed, in season and out of place, to exhort me to seek salvation, and a new heart, and pure understanding, while, all the time, the filthy tobacco juice s...o...b..red all over his filthier mug, and down his scattering whiskers;--now and then one, like the scattering trees in yonder field,--all over his vest; and his coat sleeves were as bad, from frequent drawing across his face. Yes, he said, 'Jesus,' but he meant pills. He said, 'Get wine and milk, without money and without price,' but he meant, buy his essences, _with_ money. The old gals went crazy over him, and the pill market was lively. The louder he prayed and exhorted, the faster he sold his medicines.

"One Sunday afternoon he wanted me to shy him over the lake; so, taking his Hem-book and Bible in his coat pockets, and his two tin trunks of medicine, he followed me to the sh.o.r.e. He seated his great carca.s.s in the starn of the boat, while I rowed him over the lake. All the way he s...o...b..red tobacco juice; and gabbled his religion at me, while occasionally I swore mine back at him.

"When we got over, I jumped out, and told him to set steady till I hauled the boat up further; but he didn't mind, and rose up in the starn with his kit, a tin trunk in each hand, just as I gave the craft a yerk, when over backwards he went kerflounce into the water,--carca.s.s, trunks, Bible, pills, and essences, all into the lake. O, the d----! You ought to have seen him. Up he came, puffin' and blowin' like a big whale! Then I fished him out with the boat-hook, and went for his trunks. No sooner had he reached _terror firmer_ than, blowin' the surplus water and tobacco out of his throat, _he commenced swearin' at me_. Religion went by the board! O, Jerusalem! Such a blessing as he gave me I never before heard. I knowed it was pent up in him, the ---- old sinner, and he only wanted the occasion to let it out. The bath done it! It was the cussidest baptism I ever witnessed in the hull course of my life."

"Was he called Dr. Pusbelly?" I suggested, at the close of the narrative.

"Yes, that was his name; but I called him Old Pilgarlic, blame him."

"PROFESSOR BREWSTER."

When I lived in Hartford, Conn., some years ago, there resided in that city a black man, then somewhat noted as a "seer" among various cla.s.ses of whites, as well as blacks, and who resides there still, and has since become quite famous. In what category to place this man,--Professor Brewster, so called,--it is perhaps a little difficult to determine; whether among "clairvoyants," "animal magnetizers," "natural doctors,"

"fortune-tellers," or what, or all, it must be admitted that he is a "character," and wields great influence among certain cla.s.ses. Nature made him a superior man of his race, and what thorough, early education might have done for him, we are left to conjecture. So noted is Professor Brewster, that I have thought him a proper subject for comment here, as a living ill.u.s.tration of what a man of subtle genius may accomplish, though wholly without "book learning," or other approved instruction, in the field of medicine.