The reader has seen that no one could have been naturally
less interested than was my excellent friend Fairscribe
in my lucubrations, when I first consulted him on
the subject; but since he has contributed a subject
to the work, he has become a most zealous coadjutor;
and half-ashamed, I believe, yet half-proud of the
literary stock-company, in which he has got a share,
he never meets me without jogging my elbow, and dropping
some mysterious hints, as, “I am saying—when
will you give us any more of yon?”—or,
“Yon’s not a bad narrative—I
like yon.”
Pray Heaven the reader may be of his opinion.
When fainting Nature call’d for
aid,
And hovering Death prepared
the blow,
His vigorous remedy display’d
The power of art without the
show;
In Misery’s darkest caverns known,
His useful care was ever nigh,
Where hopeless Anguish pour’d his
groan,
And lonely Want retired to
die;
No summons mock’d by cold delay,
No petty gains disclaim’d
by pride,
The modest wants of every day
The toil of every day supplied.
SAMUEL
JOHNSON.
The exquisitely beautiful portrait which the Rambler
has painted of his friend Levett, well describes Gideon
Gray, and many other village doctors, from whom Scotland
reaps more benefit, and to whom she is perhaps more
ungrateful than to any other class of men, excepting
her schoolmasters.
Such a rural man of medicine is usually the inhabitant
of some pretty borough or village, which forms the
central point of his practice. But, besides attending
to such cases as the village may afford, he is day
and night at the service of every one who may command
his assistance within a circle of forty miles in diameter,
untraversed by roads in many directions, and including
moors, mountains, rivers, and lakes. For late
and dangerous journeys through an inaccessible country
for services of the most essential kind, rendered
at the expense, or risk at least, of his own health
and life, the Scottish village doctor receives at best
a very moderate recompense, often one which is totally
inadequate, and very frequently none whatever.
He has none of the ample resources proper to the brothers
of the profession. in an English town. The burgesses
of a Scottish borough are rendered, by their limited
means of luxury, inaccessible to gout, surfeits, and
all the comfortable chronic diseases which are attendant
on wealth and indolence. Four years, or so, of
abstemiousness, enable them to stand an election dinner;
and there is no hope of broken heads among a score
or two of quiet electors, who settle the business
over a table. There the mothers of the state never
make a point of pouring, in the course of every revolving
year, a certain quantity of doctor’s stuff through
the bowels of their beloved children. Every old
woman, from the Townhead to the Townfit, can prescribe
a dose of salts, or spread a plaster; and it is only
when a fever or a palsy renders matters serious, that
the assistance of the doctor is invoked by his neighbours
in the borough.
