wns of chance; it is compounded of the feelings which
animate the physician and those which fill the invalid. And hence we see
that the severest sufferings of their neighbours make less impression
on the minds of such people than on those in full health. It is not
from apathy nor selfishness they are seemingly indifferent, but simply
because they regard the question in a different light: to take an
illustration from the gaming-table, they have too deep an interest in
the game itself to feel greatly for the players. The visit of the doctor
is to them the brightest moment of the day; not only the messenger of
good tidings to the patient, he has a thousand little bits of sick-room
gossip, harmless, pointless trifles, but all fraught with their own
charm to the greedy ear of the sick man. It is so pleasant to know how
Mrs. W. bore her drive, or Sir Arthur liked his jelly; what Mrs. T. said
when they ordered her to be bled, and whether dear Mr. H. would consent
to the blister. And with what consummate tact your watering-place doctor
doles out the infinitesimal doses of his morning's intelligence! How
different his visit from the hurried flight of a West-End practitioner,
who, while he holds his watch in hand, counts the minutes of his stay
while he feels your pulse, and whose descent downstairs is watched by
a cordon of the household, catching his directions as he goes, and
learning his opinion as he springs into his chariot! Your Spa doctor has
a very different mission; his are no heroic remedies, which taken
to-day are to cure tomorrow; his character is tried by no subtle test of
immediate success; his patients come for a term, or, to use the proper
phrase, for 'a course of the waters'--then they are condemned to
chalybeates for a quarter of the year, so many glasses per diem. With
their health, properly speaking, he has no concern; his function is
merely an inspection that the individual drinks his fluid regularly, and
takes his mud like a man. The patient is invoiced to him, with a bill of
lading from Bell or Brodie; he has full information of the merchandise
transmitted, and the mode in which the consignee desires it may be
treated--out of this ritual he must not move. The great physician of
the West End says, 'Bathe and drink'; and his _charge d'affaires_ at
Wiesbaden takes care to see his orders obeyed. As well might a _forcat_
at Brest or Toulon hope to escape the punishment described in the
catalogue of prisoners, as