The Funny Side of Physic Part 51

A STUFFED CAT-SKIN.

An eccentric and parsimonious old lady, who died in a small village in the State of Maine, some twenty years ago, always kept a half dozen cats about the house. She was a dried-up-looking old crone, and some ill-minded people had gone so far as to call her a witch, doubtless because of her oddities and her cats, "black, white, and brindled." When one of these delightful night-prowlers departed this life, the old lady would have the skin of the animal stuffed, to adorn her mantel shelf. My informant said he had once seen them with his own eyes, arranged along on the shelf, some half score of them, looking as demure and comfortable as a stuffed cat could, while the old woman sat by the fireplace, croning over her knitting work.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUFFED PETS.]

The woman paid no bills that she could avoid, always pleading poverty as her excuse for the non-fulfilment of her responsibilities.

One dark and stormy night she was taken very sick, and by a preconcerted signal to a neighbor,--the placing of a light in a certain window,--help was summoned, including the village doctor, to whom she owed a fee for each visit he had ever made her. But this was fated to be the doctor's last call to that patient.

"O, doctor, then I am dying at last--am I?"

The physician a.s.sured her such was the case.

"Then, doctor, I must tell you that you've been very patient with me, and have hastened day or night to see me, in my whims, as well as my real sickness, and you shall be rewarded. I have no money, but you see all my treasures arranged along on the mantel-piece there?"

"What!" exclaimed the doctor; "you don't call those cats treasures, I hope!"

"Yes, they are my only treasures, doctor. Now, I want to be just to _you_, above all others, because you've not only served me as I said, but you've often sent me wood and provisions during the cold winters--"

Here she became too feeble to go on, and the doctor revived her with some cordial from his saddle-bags, when she took breath, and continued,--

"See them, doctor; eleven of them. Which will you choose?"

The doctor, with as much grace as possible, declined selecting any one of the useless stuffed skins; when the old lady, by much effort, raised her head from the pillow, and said, "Well, I will select for you. Take the black one--take--the black--cat--doctor!" and died.

Her dying words so impressed him, that he took the cat home, and, on opening her,--for it was very heavy,--he found that the skin contained nearly a hundred dollars, in gold.

AMERICAN FEES AND INCOMES.

There is a surgeon in New York city whose income from practice outside of the hospital is said to be twenty-five thousand dollars per annum. Dr.

Valentine Mott, the celebrated New York surgeon, who died April 26, 1865, at the age of eighty-one years, had a very large income, but less than that enjoyed by several surgeons in the metropolis at the present time.

There are some specialists in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, who receive greater sums annually than the regular medical or surgical pract.i.tioners. There is no law particularly controlling the prices of the former. The fee for a visit, by the established usage of the medical societies in these cities, is from three to ten dollars.

A specialist sometimes receives fifty to one hundred dollars for prescribing in a case, for which another physician, in ordinary practice, would charge but an office fee of two to ten dollars. A quack specialist--and an impostor--in the latter city makes his brags that he has received twelve hundred dollars for one prescription. But then this same lying braggadocio says he has read medicine with Ricard, and had various honors conferred upon him.

Dr. Pulte, of Ohio, one of the western pioneers in homeopathy, who has often been greeted, in his earlier professional rounds, by a shower of dirt, rotten eggs, stones, brickbats, and had rails and sticks thrust through his carriage wheels at night, and been otherwise insulted, until, finally, he had to carry his wife about with him, as a protective measure,--for his revilers would not insult a lady,--has since made as high as twenty thousand dollars a year, and has ama.s.sed a fortune of two hundred thousand dollars. There is a Boston homeopathist whose income from practice is not less than twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars annually.

Some of the surgeons (allopathic) do better, but hardly reach the figures of Dr. Nelaton, the great French surgeon, who, in 1869, earned four hundred thousand francs, equal to about eighty thousand dollars.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A PIONEER OF HOMEOPATHY.]

Dr. Bigelow, the very celebrated surgeon of Harvard College, has probably received the largest fee for a surgical operation of any New England pract.i.tioner. He is said to be worth nearly a million.

Dr. Buckingham, the eminent medical pract.i.tioner, of Boston, who probably earns as much as any physician in the city, a few years ago stated to the graduating cla.s.s of Harvard College--so I am informed by a physician then present--that he received for his first year's practice in Boston _but fifty-seven dollars_. He then had a little office up stairs, where he slept, dined,--often on bread and cheese, or a few crackers; sometimes he did not dine,--and received his few patients. But he was a great student, and a hard worker, and often, and usually, stuck to his post during those hours when more prosperous physicians were seeking amus.e.m.e.nt or relaxation. He was one of the "_hold-fast_" kind, who always win, in the end.

"_Catch what you can._"--There is a cla.s.s of wretches in every city who have no established fee for prescribing for the sick. They go on the principle of "catch what I can." If they cannot get a fee of twenty dollars, they will take two, provided the patient has no more. A young man who visited one of these medical shave-shops was charged a fee of thirty-five dollars in a very simple case; but the benevolent doctor concluded to accept two dollars and a half instead, since the man had no more money. The shamefulness of such Jewing reminds one of the story of a negro trading off a worn-out old mule:--

"I say, dar, what will you take for dat yer mule, Cuffy?"

"O, I axes thirty-five dollars for him, Mr. Sambo."

"O, go way, dar. I gibs you five dollars for him," said the first.

"Well, you can take him, Sambo. I won't stand for thirty dollars on a mule trade, nohow."

There is a female pract.i.tioner in St. Louis who earns above ten thousand dollars a year, and her individual fees are moderate at that.

Another doctress, Mrs. Ormsby, of Orange, N. J., acc.u.mulates some fifteen thousand a year, and is in turn outstripped by another woman practising in New York, who gets nearly twenty thousand dollars a year. Such certainly possess great business tact, with or without professional merit, and for such let all men give them credit.

Several female doctors in Boston receive from three to five thousand dollars each, yearly.

It is too often the case that a physician's success is reckoned, like a tradesman's, by what he has gained in a pecuniary point of view. There are, however, thousands of worthy men, successful with their cases, who, from less acquisitiveness than benevolence, have failed in securing more than a bare competence, through a life devoted to their profession.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A SHARP MULE TRADE.]

I presume nearly every physician who has experienced a dozen years in practice has some mementos of his poor patients' grat.i.tude, in the form, if not of an ebony bird, or a black cat-skin, of something possessing more beauty, and, to the benevolent heart, which always beats within the breast of every true physician, keepsakes prized above gold and silver.

"Who has not kept some trifling thing, More prized, more prized, than jewels rare, A faded flower, a broken ring, A tress of golden hair, a tress of golden hair?"

A very benevolent physician, and a s.e.xagenarian, of New York city, wrote, twenty years ago, "I even yet enjoy a sort of melancholy satisfaction in hastening to relieve the suffering poor of my neighborhood, though I know that my reward will be very small, or, what is far more frequent, that I shall be paid with ingrat.i.tude, if not slander.

"Sometimes there are bright spots in my horizon, and I think myself more than repaid by a new s.h.i.+rt, or a couple of handkerchiefs--the gift of some poor, though grateful sewing girl. A few of these little treasures I prize with peculiar tenderness."

"A tress of hair and a faded leaf Are paltry things to a cynic's eyes: But to me they are keys that open the gates Of a paradise of memories."

ASKING FOR A FEE.

A Boston M. D., who had been in practice fourteen years without acc.u.mulating any property, was about to abandon the profession, and, with this view, he applied to Fowler, the phrenologist, with the question, "What pursuit am I best adapted to follow?" Mr. Fowler, with whom he was unacquainted, said, "The practice of medicine;" but, at the same time, he a.s.sured the doctor that he ought to do business on a _cash_ principle,--"_accipe dum dolet_,"--or employ a collector, as he would never collect his fees. Acting on this hint, the doctor returned to his practice, and in a few years was out of debt, and owned a fine residence.

In the matter of collecting fees only he was deficient.

A New York student--if report is true--began earlier to be impressed with the propriety of getting his fee in advance, as the following will show.

He went before the censors for examination. One of the board was a well-known penurious, fee-loving doctor, who, looking over the list of names of the applicants, said,--

"Mr. ----, if a patient came to your office, what would you first do?"

"I would ask him for a fee, sir," was the prompt reply.

An old navy surgeon relates the following regarding examinations:--

"I was shown into the examining-room. Large table, and a half dozen old gentlemen at it. 'Big wigs, no doubt,' I thought, 'and, sure as my name is Symonds, they'll pluck me like a pigeon.'

"'Well, sir, what do you know about the science of medicine?' asked the stout man in the head seat.

"'More than he does of the practice, I'll be bound,' t.i.ttered a little wasp-like dandy--a West End ladies' doctor.