CHAPTER XXV. A WATERING-PLACE DOCTOR

Nothing is more distinct than the two classes of people who are to be met with in the morning and in the afternoon, sauntering along the _allées_ of a German watering-place. The former are the invalid portion, poured forth in numbers from hotel and lodging-house; attired in every absurdity of dressing-room toilette, with woollen nightcaps and flannel jackets, old-fashioned _douillettes_ and morocco slippers, they glide along, glass in hand, to some sulphur spring, or to repose for an hour or two in the delights of a mud bath. For the most part, they are the old and the feeble, pale of face and tottering in step. The pursuit of health with them would seem a vain and fruitless effort; the machine appears to have run its destined time, and all the skill of man is unavailing to repair it. Still, hope survives when strength and youth have failed, and the very grouping together in their gathering-places has its consolation; while the endless diversity of malady gives an interest in the eye of a sick man.

This may seem strange, but it is nevertheless perfectly true. There is something which predisposes an invalid to all narratives of illness; they are the topics he dwells on with most pleasure, and discourses about with most eagerness. The anxiety for the ‘gentleman next door’ is neither philanthropy, nor is it common curiosity. No, it is perfectly distinct from either; it is the deep interest in the course of symptoms, in the ups and downs 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 _chargé d’affaires_ at Wiesbaden takes care to see his orders obeyed. As well might a _forçat_ at Brest or Toulon hope to escape the punishment described in the catalogue of prisoners, as for a patient to run counter to the remedies thus arranged, and communicated by post. Occasionally changes will take place in a sick man’s condition _en route_ which alter the applicability of his treatment; but, then, what would you have? Brodie and Chambers are not prophets; divination and augury are not taught in the London and Middlesex hospitals!

I remember, myself, a marquis of gigantic proportions, who had kept his prescription by him from the time of his being a stripling till he weighed twenty stone. The fault here lay not with the doctor. The bath he was to take contained some powerful ingredient--a preparation of iron, I believe; well, he got into it, and immediately began swelling and swelling out, till, big as he was before, he was now twice the size, and at last, like an overheated boiler, threatened to explode with a crash. What was to be done? To lift him was out of the question--he fitted the bath like a periwinkle in its shell; and in this dilemma no other course was open than to decant him, water and all--which was performed, to the very considerable mirth of the bystanders.

The Spa doctor, then, it will be seen, moves in a very narrow orbit. He must manage to sustain his reputation without the aid of the pharmacopoeia, and continue to be imposing without any assistance from the dead languages.

Hard conditions! but he yields to them, like a man of nerve.

He begins, then, by extolling the virtues of the waters, which by analysis of ‘his own making,’ and set forth in a little volume published by himself, contain very different properties from those ascribed to them by others. He explains most clearly to his non-chemical listener how ‘pure silica found in combination with oxide of iron, at a temperature of thirty-nine and a half, Fahrenheit,’ must necessarily produce the most beneficial effects on the knee-joint; and he describes, with all the ardour of science, the infinite satisfaction the nerves must experience when invigorated by ‘free carbonic gas’ sporting about in the system. Day by day he indoctrinates the patient into some stray medical notion, giving him an interest in his own anatomy, and putting him on terms of familiar acquaintance with the formation of his heart or his stomach. This flatters the sick man, and, better still, it occupies his attention. He himself thus becomes a _particeps_ in the first degree to his own recovery; and the simplicity of treatment, which had at first no attractions for his mind, is now complicated with so many little curious facts about the blood and the nerves, mucous membranes and muscles, as fully to compensate for any lack of mystery, and is in truth just as unintelligible as the most involved inconsistency of any written prescription. Besides this, he has another object which demands his attention. Plain, common-sense people, who know nothing of physic or its mysteries, might fall into the fatal error of supposing that the wells so universally employed by the people of the country for all purposes of washing, bathing, and cooking, however impregnated by mineral properties, were still by no means so capable, in proportions of great power and efficacy, of effecting either very decided results, curative or noxious. The doctor must set his heel on this heresy at once; he must be able to show how a sip too much or a half-glass too many can produce the gravest consequences; and no summer must pass over without at least one death being attributed to the inconsiderate rashness of some insensate drinker. Woe unto him then who drinks without a doctor! You might as well, in an access of intense thirst, rush into the first apothecary’s shop, and take a strong pull at one of the vicious little vials that fill the shelves, ignorant whether it might not be aqua fortis or Prussic acid.

Armed, then, with all the terrors of his favourite Spa, rich in a following which is as much partisan as patient, the Spa doctor has an admirable life of it. The severe and trying cases of illness that come under the notice of other physicians fall not to his share; the very journey to the waters is a trial of strength which guards against this. His disciples are the dyspeptic “diners-out” in the great worlds of London, Paris, or Vienna; the nervous and irritable natures, cloyed with excess of enjoyment and palled with pleasure; the imaginary sick man, or the self-created patient who has dosed himself into artificial malady-- all of necessity belonging to the higher or at least the wealthier classes of mankind, with whom management goes further than medicine, and tact is a hundred times better than all the skill of Hippocrates. He had need, then, to be a clever man of the world; he may dispense with science, he cannot with _savoir faire_. Not only must he be conversant with the broader traits of national character, but he must be intimately acquainted with the more delicate and subtle workings of the heart in classes and gradations of mankind, a keen observer and a quick actor. In fact, to get on well, he must possess in a high degree many of those elements, any one of which would insure success in a dozen other walks in life.

And the Spa doctor must have all these virtues, as Swift says, ‘for twenty pounds per annum’--not literally, indeed, but for a very inadequate recompense. These watering-place seasons are brief intervals, in which he must make hay while the sun shines. With the approach of winter the tide turns, and the human wave retires faster than it came. Silent streets and deserted promenades, closed shutters and hermetically sealed cafés, meet him at every step; and then comes the long, dreary time of hibernation. Happy would it be for him if he could but imitate the seal, and spend it in torpor; for if he be not a sportsman, and in a country favourable to the pursuit, his life is a sad one. Books are generally difficult to come at; there is little society, there is no companionship; and so he has to creep along the tedious time silent and sad, counting over the months of his durance, and longing for spring. Some there are who follow the stream, and retire each winter to the cities where their strongest connection lies; but this practice I should deem rather dictated by pleasure than profit. Your Spa doctor without a Spa is like Liszt or Herz without a pianoforte. Give him but his instrument, and he will ‘discourse you sweet music’; but deprive him of it, and he is utterly helpless. The springs of Helicon did not suggest inspiration more certainly than do those of Nassau to their votaries; but the fount must run that the poet may rhyme. So your physician must have the odour of sulphurets in his nose; he must see the priestess ministering, glass in hand, to the shivering shades around her; he must have the long vista of the promenade, with its flitting forms in flannel cased, ere he feel himself ‘every inch a doctor.’ Away from these, and the piston of a steam-engine without a boiler is not more helpless. The fountain is, to use Lord Londonderry’s phrase, the ‘fundamental feature on which his argument hinges,’ and he could no more exist without water than a fish.

Having said so much of the genus, let me be excused if I do not dilate on the species; nor, indeed, had I dwelt so long on the subject, but in this age of stomach, when every one has dyspepsia, it is as well to mention those who rule over our diets and destinies; and where so many are worshippers at the Temple, a word about the Priest of the Mysteries may not be unseasonable.

And now, to change the theme, who is it that at this early hour of the morning seems taking his promenade, with no trace of the invalid in his look or dress? He comes along at a smart walk; his step has the assured tramp of one who felt health, and knew the value of the blessing. What! is it possible--can it be, indeed? ‘Yes, it is Sir Harry Wycherley himself, with two lovely children, a boy and a girl--the eldest scarcely seven years old; the boy a year or so younger. Never did I behold anything more lovely. The girl’s eyes were dark, shaded with long deep fringe, that added to their depth, and tempered into softness the glowing sparkle of youth. Her features were of a pensive but not melancholy character, and in her walk and carriage ‘gentle blood’ spoke out in accents not to be mistaken. The boy, more strongly formed, resembled his father more, and in his broad forehead and bold, dashing expression looked like one who would become one day a man of nerve and mettle. His dress, too, gave a character to his appearance that well suited him--a broad hat, turned up at the side, and ornamented with a dark-blue feather, that hung drooping over his shoulder; a blue tunic, made so as to show his chest in its full breadth, and his arms naked the whole way; a scarlet scarf, knotted carelessly at his side, hanging down with its deep fringe beside his bare leg, tanned and bronzed with sun and weather; and even his shoes, with their broad silver buckles, showing that care presided over every part of his costume.

There was something intensely touching in the sight of this man of the world--for such I well knew he was--thus enjoying the innocence and fresh buoyancy of his children, turning from the complex web of men’s schemes and plottings, their tortuous paths and deep designings, to relax in the careless gaiety of infant minds. Now pursuing them along the walk, now starting from behind some tree where he lay in ambush, he gives them chase, and as he gains on them they turn sharp round, and spring into his arms, and clasp him round the neck.

Arthur, thou hast had a life of more than man’s share of pleasure; thou hast tasted much happiness, and known but few sorrows; but would not a moment like this outnumber them all? Where is love so full, so generous, so confiding? What affection comes so pure and unalloyed, not chilled by jealous doubts or fears, but warm and gushing--the incense of a happy heart, the outpourings of a guileless nature. Nothing can be more beautiful than the picture of maternal fondness, the gracefulness of woman thrown like a garment around her children. Her look of love etherealised by the holiest sentiment of tenderness; her loveliness exalted above the earth by the contemplation of those, her own dear ones, who are but a ‘little lower than the angels’--is a sight to make the eyes gush tears of happiness, and the heart swell with thankfulness to Heaven. Second alone to this is the unbending of man’s stern nature before the charms of childhood, when, casting away the pride of manhood and the cold spirit of worldly ambition, he becomes like one among his children, the participator in their joys and sorrows, the companion of their games, the confidant of their little secrets. How insensibly does each moment thus passed draw him further from the world and its cares; how soon does he forget disappointments, or learn to think of them less poignantly; and how by Nature’s own magnetism does the sinless spirit of the child mix with the subtle workings of the man, and lift him above the petty jarrings and discords of life! And thus, while he teaches _them_ precepts of truth and virtue, _they_ pour into his heart lessons of humility and forbearance. If he point out the future to them, with equal force they show the past to him, and a blessing rests on both. The _populus me sibilat_ of the miser is a miserable philosophy compared to his who can retire from the rancorous assaults of enemies and the dark treachery of false friends, to the bosom of a happy home, and feel his hearth a sanctuary where come no forms of malice to assail him!

Such were my musings as I saw the father pass on with his children; and never before did my loneliness seem so devoid of happiness.

Would that I could stop here; would that I might leave my reader to ponder over these things, and fashion them to his mind’s liking; but I may not. I have but one object in these notes of my loiterings. It is to present to those younger in the world, and fresher to its wiles than myself, some of the dangers as well as some of the enjoyments of foreign travel; and having surveyed the cost with much care and caution, I would fix a wreck-buoy here and there along the channel as a warning and a guide. And now to begin.

Let me take the character before me--one of whom I hesitate not to say that only the name is derived from invention. Some may have already identified him; many more may surmise the individual meant. It is enough that I say he still lives, and the correctness of the portrait may easily be tested by any traveller Rhinewards; but I prefer giving him a chapter to himself.