How could Lydgate help himself? It is offensive to tell a lady when
she is expressing her amazement at your skill, that she is altogether
mistaken and rather foolish in her amazement. And to have entered into
the nature of diseases would only have added to his breaches of medical
propriety. Thus he had to wince under a promise of success given by
that ignorant praise which misses every valid quality.
In the case of a more conspicuous patient, Mr. Borthrop Trumbull,
Lydgate was conscious of having shown himself something better than an
every-day doctor, though here too it was an equivocal advantage that he
won. The eloquent auctioneer was seized with pneumonia, and having
been a patient of Mr. Peacock's, sent for Lydgate, whom he had
expressed his intention to patronize. Mr Trumbull was a robust man, a
good subject for trying the expectant theory upon--watching the course
of an interesting disease when left as much as possible to itself, so
that the stages might be noted for future guidance; and from the air
with which he described his sensations Lydgate surmised that he would
like to be taken into his medical man's confidence, and be represented
as a partner in his own cure. The auctioneer heard, without much
surprise, that his was a constitution which (always with due watching)
might be left to itself, so as to offer a beautiful example of a
disease with all its phases seen in clear delineation, and that he
probably had the rare strength of mind voluntarily to become the test
of a rational procedure, and thus make the disorder of his pulmonary
functions a general benefit to society.
Mr. Trumbull acquiesced at once, and entered strongly into the view
that an illness of his was no ordinary occasion for medical science.
"Never fear, sir; you are not speaking to one who is altogether
ignorant of the vis medicatrix," said he, with his usual superiority of
expression, made rather pathetic by difficulty of breathing. And he
went without shrinking through his abstinence from drugs, much
sustained by application of the thermometer which implied the
importance of his temperature, by the sense that he furnished objects
for the microscope, and by learning many new words which seemed suited
to the dignity of his secretions. For Lydgate was acute enough to
indulge him with a little technical talk.
It may be imagined that Mr. Trumbull rose from his couch with a
disposition to speak of an illness in which he had manifested the
strength of his mind as well as constitution; and he was not backward
in awarding credit to the medical man who had discerned the quality of
patient he had to deal with. The auctioneer was not an ungenerous man,
and liked to give others their due, feeling that he could afford it.
He had caught the words "expectant method," and rang chimes on this and
other learned phrases to accompany the assurance that Lydgate "knew a
thing or two more than the rest of the doctors--was far better versed
in the secrets of his profession than the majority of his compeers."