The Patient Observer | Page 4

season of twenty weeks, Dr. Jones made a
house-to-house canvass in his automobile and went without sleep till
the half-million dollars was pledged. He fell seriously ill of pneumonia,
but recovered in time to be present at the signing of the contract. Dr.
Jones used to assert that there was more moral uplift in a single
performance of the 'Mikado' than in the entire book of Psalms. One of
his notable achievements was a Christmas Eve service consisting of

some magnificent kinetoscope pictures of the Day of Judgment with
music by Richard Strauss. Tradition also ascribes to Dr. Jones a saying
that the two most powerful influences for good in New York City were
Miss Mary Garden and the Eden Musée. But our author thinks the story
is apocryphal. He is rather inclined to believe, from the collocation of
the two names, that we have here a distorted version of the Biblical
creation myth.
"The Fourteenth Avenue Church of Cleveland, Ohio, under its famous
pastor, the Rev. Henry Marcellus Stokes, exercised a preponderant
influence in city politics from 1917 to 1925. Dr. Stokes was
remorseless in flaying the bosses and their henchmen. At least a dozen
candidates for Congress could trace their defeat directly to the efforts of
the Fourteenth Avenue Church. The successful candidates profited by
the lesson, and, during the three years' fight over tariff revision, from
1919 to 1922, they voted strictly in accordance with telegraphic
instructions from Dr. Stokes. In the fall of 1921 Dr. Stokes's
congregation voted almost unanimously to devote the funds hitherto
used for home mission work to the maintenance of a legislative bureau
at the State capital. The influence of the bureau was plainly perceptible
in the Legislature's favourable action on such measures as the
Cleveland Two-Cent Fare bill and the bill abolishing the bicycle and
traffic squads in all cities with a population of more than 50,000.
"Our author lays particular stress on the career of the Rev. Dr. Brooks
Powderly of New York, who, at the age of thirty-five, was recognized
as America's leading authority on slum life. Dr. Powderly's numerous
books and magazine articles on the subject speak for themselves. Our
author mentions among others, 'The Bowery From the Inside,' 'At What
Age Do Stevedores Marry?' 'The Relative Consumption of Meat, Pastry,
and Vegetables Among Our Foreign Population,' 'How Soon Does the
Average Immigrant Cast His First Vote?' 'The Proper Lighting for
Recreation Piers,' and, what was perhaps his most popular book,
'Burglar's Tools and How to Use Them.'
"In running through the appendix to Mr. Ducey's volume," concludes
the reviewer, "we come across an interesting paragraph headed, 'A

Curious Survival.' It is a reprint of an obituary from the New York
Evening Post of August, 1911, dealing with the minister of a small
church far up in the Bronx, who died at the age of eighty-one, after
serving in the same pulpit for fifty-three years. The Evening Post notice
states that while the Rev. Mr. Smith was quite unknown below the
Harlem, he had won a certain prestige in his own neighbourhood
through his old-fashioned homilies, delivered twice every Sunday in
the year, on love, charity, pure living, clean thinking, early marriage,
and the mutual duties of parents towards their children and of children
towards their parents. 'In the Rev. Mr. Smith,' remarks our author, 'we
have a striking vestigial specimen of an almost extinct type.'"

III
THE DOCTORS
The quarrels of the doctors do not concern me. I have worked out a
classification of my own which holds good for the entire profession.
All doctors, I believe, may be divided into those who go clean-shaven
and those who wear beards. The difference is more than one of
appearance. It is a difference of temperament and conduct. The
smooth-faced physician represents the buoyant, the romantic, what one
might almost call the impressionistic strain in the medical profession.
The other is the conservative, the classicist. My personal likings are all
for the newer type, but I do not mind admitting that if I were very ill
indeed, I should be tempted to send for the physician who wears a
Vandyke and smiles only at long intervals.
The reason is that when I am really ill I want some one who believes
me. That is something which the clean-shaven doctor seldom does. He
is of the breezy, modern school which maintains that nine patients out
of ten are only the victims of their own imagination. He greets you in a
jolly, brotherly fashion, takes your pulse, and says: "Oh, well, I guess
you're not going to die this trip," and he roars, as if it were the greatest
joke in the world to call up the picture of such dreadful possibilities.
When he prescribes, it is in a half-apologetic, half-quizzical manner,

and