SETTLEMENT FUN. BILL SAPPER'S LETTER TO HIS COUSIN.
Liberti, Missury, May 6t. 18 forty 5.
“DOING” A LANDLORD. A STORY OF SHAPE AND TALENT.
WHO IS SIR GEORGE SIMPSON? AN EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCE ABOUT HIM.
LETTERS FROM A BABY. BY A FORWARD CHILD.
SETH TINDER'S FIRST COURTSHIP, HOW HIS FLAME WAS QUENCHED!
THE DEATH STRUGGLE; OR, THE WAY SMITH DID UP JONES.
“WHO ARE THEY?” A QUESTION OF VITAL IMPORT.
THE CITY PHYSICIAN versus THE SWAMP DOCTOR.
The city physician, or the country doctor of an old-settled locality, with all the appliances of cultivated and refined life around them; possessing all the numberless conveniences and luxuries of the sick-room; capable of controlling the many adverse circumstances that exert such a pernicious influence upon successful practice; having at command the assistance, in critical and anomalous cases, of scientific and experienced coadjutors; the facilities of good roads; the advantages of comfortable dwellings, easy carriages, and the pleasures of commingling with a cultivated, mild, refined society, cannot fully realize and appreciate the condition of their less favoured, humble brethren, who, impelled by youthfulness, poverty, defective education, or the reckless spirit of adventure, have taken up their lot with society nearly in its primitive condition, and dispense the blessings of their profession to the inhabitants of a country, where the obscure bridle-path, the unbridged water-courses, the deadened forest trees, the ringing of the woodman's axe, the humble log cabin, the homespun dress, and all the many sober, hard realities of pioneer life, attest the youthfulness of the settlement.
The city physician may be of timorous nature and weak and effeminate constitution: the “swamp doctor,” whose midnight ride is often saluted by the scream of the panther, must be of courageous nature, and in physical endurance as hardy as one of his own grand alluvial oaks, whose canopy of leaves is many a night his only shelter.
The city physician may be of fastidious taste, and exquisiteness of feeling; the swamp doctor must have the unconcernedness of the dissecting-room, and be prepared to swallow his peck of dirt all at once.
The city physician must be of polished manners and courtly language: the swamp doctor finds the only use he has for bows, is to escape some impending one that threatens him with Absalomic fate; the only necessity for courtly expression, to induce some bellicose “squatter” to pay his bill in something besides hot curses and cold lead.
The city physician, fast anchored in the sublimity of scientific expression, requires a patient to “inflate his lungs to their utmost capacity;” the swamp doctor tells his to “draw a long breath, or swell your d—dest:” one calls an individual's physical peculiarities, “idiosyncrasy;” the other terms it “a fellow's nater.”
The city physician sends his prescriptions to the drug store, and gives himself no regard as to the purity of the medicine; each swamp doctor is his own pharmacien, and carries his drug store at the saddle.
The city physician rides in an easy carriage over well paved streets, and pays toll at the bridge; we mount a canoe, a pair of mud boots, sometimes a horse, and traverse, unmindful of exposure or danger, the sullen slough or angry river.
The city physician wears broadcloth, and looking in his hat reads, “Paris;” we adorn the outer man with homespun, and gazing at our graceful castors remember the identical hollow tree in which we caught the coon that forms its fair outline and symmetrical proportions.
The city physician goes to the opera or theatre, to relax, and while away a leisure evening. The swamp doctor resorts for the same purpose to a deer or bear hunt, a barbacue or bran dance, and generally ends by becoming perfectly hilarious, and evincing a determination to sit up in order that he can escort the young ladies home before breakfast.
The city physician, compelled to keep up appearances, deems a library of a hundred authors a moderate collection; the swamp doctor glories in the possession of “Gunn's Domestic Medicine,” and the “Mother's Guide.”
The city physician has a costly Parisian instrument for performing operations, and scorns to extract a tooth; the swamp doctor can rarely boast of a case of amputating instruments, and practises dentistry with a gum lancet and a pair of pullikens.
The city physician, with intellect refined, but feelings vitiated by the corruptings and heart-hardenings of modern polished society, views with utter indifference or affected sympathy the dissolution of body and soul in his patients: but think you, we can see depart unmoved those with whom we have endured privations, have been knit like brothers together by our mutual dangers; with whom we have hunted, fished, and shared the crust and lowly couch; with whom we have rejoiced and sorrowed; think you we can see them go down to the grave with tearless eyes, with unmoved soul? If we can, then blot out that expression so accordant with common sentiment, “God made the country, and man the town.”
The city physician sends the poor to the hospital, and eventually to the dissecting-room; we tend and furnish them gratuitously, and a proposal to dispose of them anatomically would, in all probability, put a knife into us.
One, with a sickly frame, anticipates old age; the other, with a vigorous constitution, knows that exposure and privation will cut him off ere his meridian be reached.
The city physician has soft hands, soft skin, and soft clothes: we have soft hearts but hard hands; we are rough in our phrases, but true in our natures; our words do not speak one language and our actions another; what we mean we say, what we say we mean; our characters, when not original, are impressed upon us by the people we practise among and associate with, for such is the character of the pioneers and pre-emptionists of the swamp.
To sum up the whole, the city physician lives at the top of the pot, the swamp doctor scarcely at the rim of the skillet: one is a delicate carpet, which none but the nicest kid can press; the other is a cypress floor, in which the hobnails of every clown can stamp their shape: one is the breast of a chicken, the other is a muscle-shell full of cat-fish: one is quinine, the other Peruvian bark: and so on in the scale of proportions.
I have contrasted the two through the busy, moving scenes of life; let me keep the curtain from descending awhile, till I draw the last and awful contrast.
Stand by the death-bed of the two, in that last and solemn hour, when disease has prescribed for the patient, and death, acting