fiction as the
wealthy uncle, the crusty old bachelor, and the unprotected orphan. Even
where they are only referred to incidentally in the course of the story,
you are given to understand that they and their kind furnish the
principal source of income for the doctor; that if he hasn't the tact to
humor or the skilled duplicity to plunder and humbug these self-made
sufferers, he might as well retire from practice. In short, the entire
atmosphere of the drama gives the strong impression that if
people--particularly the wealthy classes--would shake themselves and go
about their business, two-thirds of the illness in the world would
disappear at once.

Much of this may, of course, be accounted for by the delicious and
irresistible attractiveness, for literary purposes, of this type of
invalid. Genuine, serious illness, inseparable from suffering and ending
in death, is neither a cheerful, an interesting, nor a dramatic episode,
except in very small doses, like a well-staged death-bed or a stroke of
apoplexy, and does not furnish much valuable material for the novelist
or the play-writer. Battle, murder, and sudden death, while horrible
and repulsive, can be contemplated with vivid, gruesome interest, and
hence are perfectly available as interest producers. But much as we
delight to talk about our symptoms, we are never particularly interested
in listening to those of others, still less in seeing them portrayed
upon the stage. On account of their slow course, utter absence of
picturesqueness, and depressing character, the vast majority of diseases
are quite unsuitable for artistic material. In fact, the literary worker
is almost limited to a mere handful, at one extreme, which will produce
sudden and dramatic effects, like heart failure, apoplexy, or the
ghastly introduction of a "slow decline" for a particularly pathetic
effect; and at the other extreme, those imaginary diseases, migraines
and vapors, which furnish amusement by their sheer absurdity.

Be that as it may, such dramatic and literary tendencies have produced
their effect, and the popular impression of the doctor is that of a man
who spends his time between rushing at breakneck speed to save the lives
of those who suddenly find themselves _in articulo mortis_ and will
perish unless he gets there within fifteen minutes, and dancing
attendance upon a swarm of old hypochondriacs, neurotics, and nervous
dyspeptics, of both sexes. As a matter of fact, these two sup