I say nothing at all, here, of unqualified
deceivers. Innumerable are the quackeries
and delusions to which the ignorant poor are
exposed. What of the ignorant rich?—even
of large masses of the rich who are not
ignorant—do they not trifle also with their
health, and offer themselves up victims to
theorists and swindlers, and advertising
quacks? There is one way for all, in that
matter. The only, and the inevitable
difference is, that the poor, being, as a body,
ignorant, are in this, as in every other respect,
most likely to be led astray.

Inasmuch as they are unrestrained in the
expression of their feelings and their passions,
ths sick poor and their friends round about
them offer also to the young practitioner a
useful introduction to the study of character
in connection with disease. If he studies
properly, this leads him to a reverence for
human nature, and a very anxious care to fit
himself for all his duties. Once upon a
time, I was—as each of my brethren has, at
one time, been—a whippersnapper in attendance
on the poor. I had charge, as qualified
assistant, of the paupers in a very extensive
and thinly peopled country parish. My
employer paid me twenty pounds more than he
himself received from the board of guardians;
he devoted two horses to parish work, and
spent also perhaps thirty pounds a year in
drugs. That was a long time ago; when, as
the noble guardians and some of the poor said,
I was very young. But I shall be very old
before I can forget some lessons that were
taught me in those days. The parish was a
strip of country, including seashore, valley,
hill, and moor.

We lived at one end of the strip. At the
other end there was at one time a sick
pauper woman, who occupied a hillside
cottage with her daughter Faith, a girl of about
eleven. They had no neighbours, and seemed
to have no friends. On entering their cottage
nothing was to be seen but a bare clay
floor, and step-ladder leading to a half floor,
which passed for the upper story. I used to
go up the ladder and see the poor woman,
who was desperately sick, lying upon a
mattress that, with a little scanty clothing, was
all her wealth, except the girl. Mother and
daughter had worked in the fields together
—an unfriended widow and her only child.
I used to see Faith hanging about the sick-bed
with beautiful devotion. She never left
her charge except when, three or four times
a week, she set off on a seven-mile walk to
the surgery, to bring reports, or summon
help, or ask for medicine. Seven miles into
the town and seven miles home again, over a
wild country. And I found something to
reverence in her large earnest eyes, the silent,
tearless care spent by this poor little girl
upon her mother. Mother was all to her.
The mother lost, her young heart would be
cut off from the whole world. But she never
once gave way to grief: her whole life
seemed to be staid upon determined labour
to do all that child could do for the sick
parent's recovery. Medicine for which such a
messenger had come so far could not be given
carelessly; and, since all practice among
paupers abounds in incidents like this, the
young practitioner is very soon taught to
feel keenly the responsibilities of the career
that lies before him.

I used to have a weakness for yeast dumplings;
and there is fixed upon my memory one
winter's evening in my whippersnapper days,
when there was a storm of wind and rain
outside; and I, believing that my day's work was
well finished, had dined well, and had eaten
more yeast dumpling than I dare record. It is
a property of diet of this kind to cause
expansion of the body. Therefore I had
unbuttoned my waistcoat, and had placed myself
before a large fire, trusting that it would
assist digestion. Thereupon came galloping
through the storm a man who knocked loudly
at the door, and must needs carry me eight
miles away to help a brother at the point of
death—as I might suppose, from his account,
of inflammation of the bowels. He was not
likely to live till I got to him, but I must go
in speed. I therefore compressed myself by
buttoning my waistcoat, got a horse saddled,
and was off in five minutes at full gallop.
Now, it is not easy to ride fast at night, over
bad cross-roads, up hill and down dale
through moorland country, against a hurricane
of rain and wind almost strong enough
to blow into the sea both the horse and
the rider with two large yeast dumplings
in his stomach. My difficulty was
greater because I was a very young man,
fresh from the schools, who had not many
weeks accepted the necessity of horse-riding,
after no other experience in equitation in
the whole course of his life than the having
once, when quite a little boy, been thrown
by a donkey. I do not know whether,
on that tremendous night, I suffered most
from the wind, the dumplings, or the
saddle.

When I reached my patient, I found that
he had cured himself with a peppermint
lozenge.

As I grew older I learned to understand
better the false alarms that, on account of the
extreme ignorance of the poor, incessantly arise
among them, and I was guilty of countless
hard-hearted refusals to do more than send a
dose of medicine to "dying" creatures, with a
promise to call when I went in their direction.
Even then, because I gave to alarmists the
advantage of each case of doubt, I was
continually yielding up fragments of useful time
to useless labour. Terrible outcry is made
whenever, by some evil chance a surgeon fails
to go out with his help on mistaking a real
cry of wolf for a false one. If the whole truth
were known, the public might with reason
wonder that such refusals to attend an urgent
and untimely summons were not made much