The Patient Observer | Page 5

go to bed and avoid draughts. And what you need is not medicine but the active agitation for two hours every day of the two legs which the Lord gave you, and which you now employ exclusively for making your way to and from the railway station. This is for your digestion, and you can have it put up in pills or in liquid form, according to taste. And the next time you feel inclined to call me in, think it over in the course of a ten-mile walk."
Now this may be cheering if somewhat mixed treatment, but it has nothing of that sympathy which the ailing body craves. The case is much worse if your smooth-faced physician happens to be a personal friend. The indifference with which such a man will listen to the most pitiful recital of physical suffering is extraordinary. You may be out on the golf links together, and he has just made an exceptionally fine iron shot from a bad lie and in the face of a lively breeze. He is naturally pleased, and you take courage from the situation. "By the way, Smith," you say, "I have been feeling rather queer for a day or two. There is a gnawing sensation right here, and when I stoop----" "That must have been 180 yards," he says, "but not quite on the green. You don't chew your food enough. Take a glass of hot water before your breakfast--and you had better try your mashie!" Of course, no one likes to talk shop, especially on the golf links. Still you think, if you were a physician and you had a friend who had a gnawing sensation, you would be more considerate. After the game he lights his cigar and orders you not to smoke if the pain in your chest is really what you have described it. "In me," he says, cheerfully, "you get a physician and a horrible example for one price."
But there is one thing that this impressionistic school of medicine has in common with the other kind. Both types are faithful to the funereal type of waiting-room which is one of the signs of the trade. It is a room in which all the arts of the undertaker have seemingly been called upon to bring out the full possibilities of the average New York brownstone "front-parlour." I have often tried to decide whether, in a doctor's waiting-room, night or day was more conducive to thoughts of the grave. At night a lamp flickers dimly in one corner of the long room, and the shadows only deepen those other shadows which lie on the ailing spirit. But this same darkness mercifully conceals the long line of ash-coloured family portraits in gold frames, the ash-coloured carpet and chandelier, and the hideous aggregation of ash-coloured couches and chairs which make up the daylight picture. Why doctors' reception rooms should always so strongly combine the attractiveness of a popular lunch-room on a rainy day with the quiet domestic atmosphere of a county jail, I have never been able to find out, unless the object is to reduce the patient to such a horrible state of depression that the mere summons to enter the doctor's presence makes one feel very much better already. There are times when to be told that one has pneumonia or an incipient case of tuberculosis must be a relief after an hour spent in one of those dreadful ante-chambers.
The literature in a physician's waiting-room is not exhilarating. Usually, there is an extensive collection of periodicals four months old and over. From this I gather that physicians' wives and daughters are persistent but somewhat deliberate readers of current literature. The sense of age about the magazines on a doctor's table is heightened by the absence of the front and back covers. The only way of ascertaining the date of publication is to hunt for the table of contents. That, however, is a task which few able-bodied men in the prime of life are equal to, not to say a roomful of sick people, nervous with anticipation. Most patients under such circumstances set out courageously, but only to lose themselves in the first half-dozen pages of the advertising section. Yet the result is by no means harmful. There is something about the advertising agent's buoyant, insinuating, sympathetic tone that is very restful to the invalid nerves. Harrington tells me that the small suburban house in which he lives, the paint and roofing with which he protects it against the weather, the lawn-mower which he has secured in anticipation of a good crop of grass, and the small stock of poultry he experiments with, were all acquired through advertisements read in doctors' waiting-rooms. Some physicians take in the illustrated weeklies as well as the monthly magazines. In