University of Virginia Library

22. CHAPTER XXII.
WHY DOCTORS DIFFER.

The company rearranged itself with some
changes after leaving the tea-table. Dudley
Venner was very polite to the Widow; but that
lady having been called off for a few moments
for some domestic arrangement, he slid back to
the side of Helen Darley, his daughter's faithful
teacher. Elsie had got away by herself, and was
taken up in studying the stereoscopic Laocoön.
Dick, being thus set free, had been seized upon
by Mrs. Blanche Creamer, who had diffused herself
over three-quarters of a sofa and beckoned
him to the remaining fourth. Mr. Bernard and
Miss Letty were having a snug tête-à-tête in the
recess of a bay-window. The two Doctors had
taken two arm-chairs and sat squared off against
each other. Their conversation is perhaps as
well worth reporting as that of the rest of the
company, and, as it was carried on in a louder
tone, was of course more easy to gather and put
on record.

It was a curious sight enough to see those two
representatives of two great professions brought

face to face to talk over the subjects they had
been looking at all their lives from such different
points of view. Both were old; old
enough to have been moulded by their habits
of thought and life; old enough to have all
their beliefs “fretted in,” as vintners say, —
thoroughly worked up with their characters.
Each of them looked his calling. The Reverend
Doctor had lived a good deal among
books in his study; the Doctor, as we will call
the medical gentleman, had been riding about
the country for between thirty and forty years.
His face looked tough and weather-worn; while
the Reverend Doctor's, hearty as it appeared,
was of finer texture. The Doctor's was the
graver of the two; there was something of
grimness about it, — partly owing to the northeasters
he had faced for so many years, partly
to long companionship with that stern personage
who never deals in sentiment or pleasantry.
His speech was apt to be brief and peremptory;
it was a way he had got by ordering
patients; but he could discourse somewhat, on
occasion, as the reader may find out. The
Reverend Doctor had an open, smiling expression,
a cheery voice, a hearty laugh, and a
cordial way with him which some thought too
lively for his cloth, but which children, who are
good judges of such matters, delighted in, so
that he was the favorite of all the little rogues
about town. But he had the clerical art of sobering
down in a moment, when asked to say
grace while somebody was in the middle of some
particularly funny story; and though his voice
was so cheery in common talk, in the pulpit, like
almost all preachers, he had a wholly different
and peculiar way of speaking, supposed to be
more acceptable to the Creator than the natural
manner. In point of fact, most of our anti-papal
and anti-prelatical clergymen do really intone
their prayers, without suspecting in the least
that they have fallen into such a Romish practice.

This is the way the conversation between the
Doctor of Divinity and the Doctor of Medicine
was going on at the point where these notes take
it up.

“Ubi tres medici, duo athei, you know, Doctor.
Your profession has always had the credit of being
lax in doctrine, — though pretty stringent in
practice, ha! ha!”

“Some priest said that,” the Doctor answered,
dryly. “They always talked Latin when they
had a bigger lie than common to get rid of.”

“Good!” said the Reverend Doctor; “I'm
afraid they would lie a little sometimes. But
isn't there some truth in it, Doctor? Don't you
think your profession is apt to see `Nature' in
the place of the God of Nature, — to lose sight
of the great First Cause in their daily study of
secondary causes?”

“I've thought about that,” the Doctor answered,

“and I've talked about it and read about it, and
I've come to the conclusion that nobody believes
in God and trusts in God quite so much as the
doctors; only it isn't just the sort of Deity that
some of your profession have wanted them to
take up with. There was a student of mine
wrote a dissertation on the Natural Theology of
Health and Disease, and took that old lying
proverb for his motto. He knew a good deal
more about books than ever I did, and had
studied in other countries. I'll tell you what he
said about it. He said the old Heathen Doctor,
Galen, praised God for his handiwork in the human
body, just as if he had been a Christian,
or the Psalmist himself. He said they had this
sentence set up in large letters in the great lecture-room
in Paris where he attended: I dressed
his wound and God healed him. That was an old
surgeon's saying. And he gave a long list of
doctors who were not only Christians, but famous
ones. I grant you, though, ministers and doctors
are very apt to see differently in spiritual matters.”

“That's it,” said the Reverend Doctor; “you
are apt to see `Nature' where we see God, and
appeal to `Science' where we are contented with
Revelation.”

“We don't separate God and Nature, perhaps,
as you do,” the Doctor answered. “When we
say that God is omnipresent and omnipotent and
omniscient, we are a little more apt to mean it

than your folks are. We think, when a wound
heals, that God's presence and power and knowledge
are there, healing it, just as that old surgeon
did. We think a good many theologians,
working among their books, don't see the facts
of the world they live in. When we tell 'em
of these facts, they are apt to call us materialists
and atheists and infidels, and all that. We
can't help seeing the facts, and we don't think
it's wicked to mention 'em.”

“Do tell me,” the Reverend Doctor said, “some
of these facts we are in the habit of overlooking,
and which your profession thinks it can see and
understand.”

“That's very easy,” the Doctor replied. “For
instance: you don't understand or don't allow for
idiosyncrasies as we learn to. We know that
food and physic act differently with different people;
but you think the same kind of truth is going
to suit, or ought to suit, all minds. We don't
fight with a patient because he can't take magnesia
or opium; but you are all the time quarrelling
over your beliefs, as if belief did not
depend very much on race and constitution, to
say nothing of early training.”

“Do you mean to say that every man is not
absolutely free to choose his beliefs?”

“The men you write about in your studies
are, but not the men we see in the real world.
There is some apparently congenital defect in
the Indians, for instance, that keeps them from

choosing civilization and Christianity. So with
the Gypsies, very likely. Everybody knows that
Catholicism or Protestantism is a good deal a
matter of race. Constitution has more to do
with belief than people think for. I went to a
Universalist church, when I was in the city one
day, to hear a famous man whom all the world
knows, and I never saw such pews-full of broad
shoulders and florid faces, and substantial, wholesome-looking
persons, male and female, in all
my life. Why, it was astonishing. Either their
creed made them healthy, or they chose it because
they were healthy. Your folks have never
got the hang of human nature.”

“I am afraid this would be considered a degrading
and dangerous view of human beliefs
and responsibility for them,” the Reverend Doctor
replied. “Prove to a man that his will is
governed by something outside of himself, and
you have lost all hold on his moral and religious
nature. There is nothing bad men want to believe
so much as that they are governed by necessity.
Now that which is at once degrading and
dangerous cannot be true.”

“No doubt,” the Doctor replied, “all large
views of mankind limit our estimate of the absolute
freedom of the will. But I don't think it
degrades or endangers us, for this reason, that,
while it makes us charitable to the rest of mankind,
our own sense of freedom, whatever it is, is
never affected by argument. Conscience won't be

reasoned with. We feel that we can practically
do this or that, and if we choose the wrong, we
know we are responsible; but observation teaches
us that this or that other race or individual has
not the same practical freedom of choice. I don't
see how we can avoid this conclusion in the instance
of the American Indians. The science of
Ethnology has upset a good many theoretical notions
about human nature.”

“Science!” said the Reverend Doctor, “science!
that was a word the Apostle Paul did not
seem to think much of, if we may judge by the
Epistle to Timothy: `Oppositions of science
falsely so called.' I own that I am jealous of that
word and the pretensions that go with it. Science
has seemed to me to be very often only the
handmaid of skepticism.”

“Doctor!” the physician said, emphatically,
“science is knowledge. Nothing that is not
known properly belongs to science. Whenever
knowledge obliges us to doubt, we are always
safe in doubting. Astronomers foretell eclipses,
say how long comets are to stay with us, point
out where a new planet is to be found. We see
they know what they assert, and the poor old Roman
Catholic Church has at last to knock under.
So Geology proves a certain succession of events,
and the best Christian in the world must make
the earth's history square with it. Besides, I
don't think you remember what great revelations
of himself the Creator has made in the minds of
the men who have built up science. You seem

to me to hold his human masterpieces very cheap.
Don't you think the `inspiration of the Almighty'
gave Newton and Cuvier `understanding'?”

The Reverend Doctor was not arguing for victory.
In fact, what he wanted was to call out
the opinions of the old physician by a show of
opposition, being already predisposed to agree
with many of them. He was rather trying the
common arguments, as one tries tricks of fence
merely to learn the way of parrying. But just
here he saw a tempting opening, and could not
resist giving a home-thrust.

“Yes; but you surely would not consider it
inspiration of the same kind as that of the writers
of the Old Testament?”

That cornered the Doctor, and he paused a moment
before he replied. Then he raised his head,
so as to command the Reverend Doctor's face
through his spectacles, and said, —

“I did not say that. You are clear, I suppose,
that the Omniscient spoke through Solomon, but
that Shakspeare wrote without his help?”

The Reverend Doctor looked very grave. It
was a bold, blunt way of putting the question.
He turned it aside with the remark, that Shakspeare
seemed to him at times to come as near
inspiration as any human being not included
among the sacred writers.

“Doctor,” the physician began, as from a
sudden suggestion, “you won't quarrel with me,
if I tell you some of my real thoughts, will
you?”

“Say on, my dear Sir, say on,” the minister
answered, with his most genial smile; “your real
thoughts are just what I want to get at. A man's
real thoughts are a great rarity. If I don't agree
with you, I shall like to hear you.”

The Doctor began; and in order to give his
thoughts more connectedly, we will omit the conversational
breaks, the questions and comments
of the clergyman, and all accidental interruptions.

“When the old ecclesiastics said that where
there were three doctors there were two atheists,
they lied, of course. They called everybody who
differed from them atheists, until they found out
that not believing in God wasn't nearly so ugly a
crime as not believing in some particular dogma;
then they called them heretics, until so many
good people had been burned under that name
that it began to smell too strong of roasting flesh,
— and after that infidels, which properly means
people without faith, of whom there are not a
great many in any place or time. But then, of
course, there was some reason why doctors
shouldn't think about religion exactly as ministers
did, or they never would have made that
proverb. It's very likely that something of the
same kind is true now; whether it is so or not, I
am going to tell you the reasons why it would
not be strange, if doctors should take rather different
views from clergymen about some matters
of belief. I don't, of course, mean all doctors

nor all clergymen. Some doctors go as far as
any old New-England divine, and some clergymen
agree very well with the doctors that think
least according to rule.

“To begin with their ideas of the Creator himself.
They always see him trying to help his
creatures out of their troubles. A man no sooner
gets a cut, than the Great Physician, whose agency
we often call Nature, goes to work, first to stop
the blood, and then to heal the wound, and then
to make the scar as small as possible. If a man's
pain exceeds a certain amount, he faints, and so
gets relief. If it lasts too long, habit comes in to
make it tolerable. If it is altogether too bad, he
dies. That is the best thing to be done under the
circumstances. So you see, the doctor is constantly
in presence of a benevolent agency working
against a settled order of things, of which
pain and disease are the accidents, so to speak.
Well, no doubt they find it harder than clergymen
to believe that there can be any world or state
from which this benevolent agency is wholly excluded.
This may be very wrong; but it is not
unnatural. They can hardly conceive of a permanent
state of being in which cuts would never
try to heal, nor habit render suffering endurable.
This is one effect of their training.

“Then, again, their attention is very much
called to human limitations. Ministers work out
the machinery of responsibility in an abstract kind
of way; they have a sort of algebra of human

nature, in which friction and strength (or weakness)
of material are left out. You see, a doctor
is in the way of studying children from the moment
of birth upwards. For the first year or so
he sees that they are just as much pupils of their
Maker as the young of any other animals. Well,
their Maker trains them to pure selfishness.
Why? In order that they may be sure to take
care of themselves. So you see, when a child
comes to be, we will say a year and a day old,
and makes his first choice between right and
wrong, he is at a disadvantage; for he has that
vis a tergo, as we doctors call it, that force from
behind, of a whole year's life of selfishness, for
which he is no more to blame than a calf is to
blame for having lived in the same way, purely
to gratify his natural appetites. Then we see
that baby grow up to a child, and, if he is fat and
stout and red and lively, we expect to find him
troublesome and noisy, and, perhaps, sometimes
disobedient more or less; that's the way each new
generation breaks its egg-shell; but if he is very
weak and thin, and is one of the kind that may
be expected to die early, he will very likely sit in
the house all day and read good books about
other little sharp-faced children just like himself,
who died early, having always been perfectly indifferent
to all the out-door amusements of the
wicked little red-cheeked children. Some of the
little folks we watch grow up to be young women,
and occasionally one of them gets nervous, what
we call hysterical, and then that girl will begin to
play all sorts of pranks, — to lie and cheat, perhaps,
in the most unaccountable way, so that she
might seem to a minister a good example of total
depravity. We don't see her in that light. We
give her iron and valerian, and get her on horseback,
if we can, and so expect to make her will
come all right again. By-and-by we are called
in to see an old baby, threescore years and ten or
more old. We find this old baby has never got
rid of that first year's teaching which led him to
fill his stomach with all he could pump into it,
and his hands with everything he could grab.
People call him a miser. We are sorry for him;
but we can't help remembering his first year's
training, and the natural effect of money on the
great majority of those that have it. So while
the ministers say he `shall hardly enter into the
kingdom of heaven,' we like to remind them that
`with God all things are possible.'

“Once more, we see all kinds of monomania
and insanity. We learn from them to recognize
all sorts of queer tendencies in minds supposed
to be sane, so that we have nothing but compassion
for a large class of persons condemned as
sinners by theologians, but considered by us as
invalids. We have constant reasons for noticing
the transmission of qualities from parents to offspring,
and we find it hard to hold a child accountable
in any moral point of view for inherited
bad temper or tendency to drunkenness, — as hard

as we should to blame him for inheriting gout or
asthma. I suppose we are more lenient with human
nature than theologians generally are. We
know that the spirits of men and their views of
the present and the future go up and down with
the barometer, and that a permanent depression
of one inch in the mercurial column would affect
the whole theology of Christendom.

“Ministers talk about the human will as if it
stood on a high look-out, with plenty of light,
and elbow-room reaching to the horizon. Doctors
are constantly noticing how it is tied up and
darkened by inferior organization, by disease, and
all sorts of crowding interferences, until they get
to look upon Hottentots and Indians — and a
good many of their own race — as a kind of self-conscious
blood-clocks with very limited power
of self-determination. That's the tendency, I say,
of a doctor's experience. But the people to whom
they address their statements of the results of
their observation belong to the thinking class of
the highest races, and they are conscious of a
great deal of liberty of will. So in the face of
the fact that civilization with all it offers has
proved a dead failure with the aboriginal races of
this country, — on the whole, I say, a dead failure,
— they talk as if they knew from their own
will all about that of a Digger Indian! We are
more apt to go by observation of the facts in the
case. We are constantly seeing weakness where
you see depravity. I don't say we're right; I

only tell what you must often find to be the fact,
right or wrong, in talking with doctors. You see,
too, our notions of bodily and moral disease, or
sin, are apt to go together. We used to be as hard
on sickness as you were on sin. We know better
now. We don't look at sickness as we used to,
and try to poison it with everything that is offensive,
— burnt toads and earth-worms and viper-broth,
and worse things than these. We know
that disease has something back of it which the
body isn't to blame for, at least in most cases,
and which very often it is trying to get rid of.
Just so with sin. I will agree to take a hundred
new-born babes of a certain stock and return
seventy-five of them in a dozen years true and
honest, if not `pious' children. And I will take
another hundred, of a different stock, and put
them in the hands of certain Ann-Street or Five-Points
teachers, and seventy-five of them will be
thieves and liars at the end of the same dozen
years. I have heard of an old character, Colonel
Jaques, I believe it was, a famous cattle-breeder,
who used to say he could breed to pretty much
any pattern he wanted to. Well, we doctors see
so much of families, how the tricks of the blood
keep breaking out, just as much in character as
they do in looks, that we can't help feeling as if
a great many people hadn't a fair chance to be
what is called `good,' and that there isn't a text
in the Bible better worth keeping always in mind
than that one, `Judge not, that ye be not
judged.'

“As for our getting any quarter at the hands
of theologians, we don't expect it, and have no
right to. You don't give each other any quarter.
I have had two religious books sent me by friends
within a week or two. One is Mr. Brownson's;
he is as fair and square as Euclid; a real honest,
strong thinker, and one that knows what he is
talking about, — for he has tried all sorts of religions,
pretty much. He tells us that the Roman
Catholic Church is the one `through which alone
we can hope for heaven.' The other is by a
worthy Episcopal rector, who appears to write as
if he were in earnest, and he calls the Papacy the
`Devil's Masterpiece,' and talks about the `Satanic
scheme' of that very Church `through
which alone,' as Mr. Brownson tells us, `we can
hope for heaven'! What's the use in our caring
about hard words after this, — `atheists,' heretics,
infidels, and the like? They're, after all, only
the cinders picked up out of those heaps of ashes
round the stumps of the old stakes where they
used to burn men, women, and children for not
thinking just like other folks. They'll `crock'
your fingers, but they can't burn us.

“Doctors are the best-natured people in the
world, except when they get fighting with each
other. And they have some advantages over
you. You inherit your notions from a set of
priests that had no wives and no children, or
none to speak of, and so let their humanity die
out of them. It didn't seem much to them to

condemn a few thousand millions of people to
purgatory or worse for a mistake of judgment.
They didn't know what it was to have a child
look up in their faces and say `Father!' It will
take you a hundred or two more years to get decently
humanized, after so many centuries of de
humanizing celibacy.

“Besides, though our libraries are, perhaps, not
commonly quite so big as yours, God opens one
book to physicians that a good many of you
don't know much about, — the Book of Life.
That is none of your dusty folios with black
letters between pasteboard and leather, but it is
printed in bright red type, and the binding of it
is warm and tender to every touch. They reverence
that book as one of the Almighty's infallible
revelations. They will insist on reading you lessons
out of it, whether you call them names or
not. These will always be lessons of charity.
No doubt, nothing can be more provoking to
listen to. But do beg your folks to remember
that the Smithfield fires are all out, and that the
cinders are very dirty and not in the least dangerous.
They'd a great deal better be civil, and not
be throwing old proverbs in the doctors' faces,
when they say that the man of the old monkish
notions is one thing and the man they watch
from his cradle to his coffin is something very
different.”

It has cost a good deal of trouble to work the

Doctor's talk up into this formal shape. Some
of his sentences have been rounded off for him,
and the whole brought into a more rhetorical
form than it could have pretended to, if taken
as it fell from his lips. But the exact course of
his remarks has been followed, and as far as possible
his expressions have been retained. Though
given in the form of a discourse, it must be remembered
that this was a conversation, much
more fragmentary and colloquial than it seems
as just read.

The Reverend Doctor was very far from taking
offence at the old physician's freedom of speech.
He knew him to be honest, kind, charitable, self-denying,
wherever any sorrow was to be alleviated,
always reverential, with a cheerful trust in the
great Father of all mankind. To be sure, his
senior deacon, old Deacon Shearer, — who seemed
to have got his Scripture-teachings out of the
“Vinegar Bible,” (the one where Vineyard is
misprinted Vinegar, which a good many people
seem to have adopted as the true reading,) — his
senior deacon had called Dr. Kittredge an “infidel.”
But the Reverend Doctor could not help
feeling, that, unless the text, “By their fruits ye
shall know them,” were an interpolation, the
Doctor was the better Christian of the two.
Whatever his senior deacon might think about
it, he said to himself that he shouldn't be surprised
if he met the Doctor in heaven yet, inquiring
anxiously after old Deacon Shearer.

He was on the point of expressing himself very
frankly to the Doctor, with that benevolent smile
on his face which had sometimes come near
giving offence to the readers of the “Vinegar”
edition, but he saw that the physician's attention
had been arrested by Elsie. He looked in the
same direction himself, and could not help being
struck by her attitude and expression. There
was something singularly graceful in the curves
of her neck and the rest of her figure, but she
was so perfectly still that it seemed as if she were
hardly breathing. Her eyes were fixed on the
young girl with whom Mr. Bernard was talking.
He had often noticed their brilliancy, but now it
seemed to him that they appeared dull, and the
look on her features was as of some passion
which had missed its stroke. Mr. Bernard's
companion seemed unconscious that she was
the object of this attention, and was listening
to the young master as if he had succeeded in
making himself very agreeable.

Of course Dick Venner had not mistaken the
game that was going on. The school-master
meant to make Elsie jealous, — and he had done
it. That's it: get her savage first, and then come
wheedling round her, — a sure trick, if he isn't
headed off somehow. But Dick saw well enough
that he had better let Elsie alone just now, and
thought the best way of killing the evening would
be to amuse himself in a little lively talk with
Mrs. Blanche Creamer, and incidentally to show

Elsie that he could make himself acceptable to
other women, if not to herself.

The Doctor presently went up to Elsie, determined
to engage her in conversation and get her
out of her thoughts, which he saw, by her look,
were dangerous. Her father had been on the
point of leaving Helen Darley to go to her, but
felt easy enough when he saw the old Doctor at
her side, and so went on talking. The Reverend
Doctor, being now left alone, engaged the Widow
Rowens, who put the best face on her vexation
she could, but was devoting herself to all the
underground deities for having been such a fool
as to ask that pale-faced thing from the Institute
to fill up her party.

There is no space left to report the rest of the
conversation. If there was anything of any significance
in it, it will turn up by-and-by, no doubt.
At ten o'clock the Reverend Doctor called Miss
Letty, who had no idea it was so late; Mr. Bernard
gave his arm to Helen; Mr. Richard saw to
Mrs. Blanche Creamer; the Doctor gave Elsie a
cautioning look, and went off alone, thoughtful;
Dudley Venner and his daughter got into their
carriage and were whirled away. The Widow's
gambit was played, and she had not won the
game.