The Professor at the Breakfast Table | Page 9

chair. I
walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his right hand,
with the ring upon it. The ring had been put on long ago, and could not
pass the misshapen joint. It was one of those funeral rings which used
to be given to relatives and friends after the decease of persons of any
note or importance. Beneath a round fit of glass was a death's head.
Engraved on one side of this, "L. B. AEt. 22,"--on the other, "Ob.
1692"
My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man.--Hanged for a
witch. It does n't seem a great while ago. I knew my grandmother, and
loved her. Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief Justice
Sewall hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.- -That
was Salem, though, and not Boston. No, not Boston. Robert Calef, the
Boston merchant, it was that blew them all to-
Never mind where he blew them to,--I said; for the little man was
getting red in the face, and I did n't know what might come next.
This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.
--A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
its shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of talking
over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are plenty of
praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above all, who has
found out, by living into the pith and core of life, that all of the Deity
which can be folded up between the sheets of any human book is to the
Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of the hot aortic flood of

throbbing human life, of this infinite, instantaneous consciousness in
which the soul's being consists,--an incandescent point in the filament
connecting the negative pole of a past eternity with the positive pole of
an eternity that is to come,- -that all of the Deity which any human
book can hold is to this larger Deity of the working battery of the
universe only as the films in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad seams
and curdled lumps of ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin
placers,--Oh!--I was saying that a man who lives out-of-doors, among
live people, gets some things into his head he might not find in the
index of his "Body of Divinity."
I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round their
close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the bottom of
which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street Church and
look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch another such spire
across it without spanning the chasm,--that idea, I say, is pretty nearly
worn out. Now when a civilization or a civilized custom falls into
senile dementia, there is commonly a judgment ripe for it, and it comes
as plagues come, from a breath,-- as fires come, from a spark.
Here, look at medicine. Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long, "curing"
patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling, selling lies at
a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving unfortunate sick people a
mess of things either too odious to swallow or too acrid to hold, or, if
that were possible, both at once.
--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,--
and that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of
eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded! I did
not bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the old
folios in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the proprietor,
of a "Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin reprints by
Philadelphia Editors. Besides, many of the profession and I know a
little something of each other, and you don't think I am such a
simpleton as to lose their good opinion by saying what the better heads
among them would condemn as unfair and untrue? Now mark how the
great plague came on the generation of drugging doctors, and in what
form it fell.

A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy
and incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow
dabbler in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous fiction
(founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy. I am very fair, you
see,---you can help yourself to either of these sets of phrases.
All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general an
effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that