These, I have said, are our heroes, but I still think there remains to be written the simple, honest, dutiful story of an intelligent, thoughtful, every-day doctor, such as will pleasantly and fitly open to laymen some true conception of the life he leads, its cares, its trials, its influences on himself and others and its varied rewards.  John Brown got closest to it in that sketch of his father, and in her delicately-drawn “Country Doctor” Miss Jewett has done us gentle service.  But my doctor would differ somewhat in all lands, because nationality and social conventions have their influence on us as on other men, as any one may observe who compares the clergymen of the Episcopal Church in America with those of England.

The man who deals with the physician in fiction would have to consider this class of facts, for social conventions have assigned to the physician in England, at least, a very different position from that which he holds with us, where he has no social superior, and is usually in all small communities, and in some larger ones, the most eminent personage and the man of largest influence.

In the rage for novel characters the lady doctor has of late assumed her place in fiction.  Lots of wives have been picked up among hospital nurses, especially since the Crimean war, and since other women than Sisters of Charity got into the business, and so made to seem probable this pleasing termination of an illness.  There was a case well known to me where a young officer simulated delirium tremens in order to get near to a Sister of Charity.  If ever you had seen the lady, you would not have wondered at his madness; and should any author desire to utilize this incident, let him comprehend that the order of Sisters of Charity admits of its members leaving the ranks by marriage, theirs being a secular order; so that here are the chances for a story of the freshest kind.  As for the lady doctor in fiction, her advantages would be awful to contemplate in sickness, when we are weak and fevered, and absurdly grateful for a newly-beaten pillow or a morsel of ice.  But imagine the awful temptation of having your heart auscultated.  Let us dismiss the subject while the vision of Beranger’s Ange Gardienne flits before us as De Grandville drew her.

I have not now beside me Howells’s “Doctor Breen’s Practice.”  It is a remarkable attempt to do justice to a very difficult subject, for there are two physicians to handle, male and female, not, I think, after their kind.  “Doctor Zay,” by Miss Phelps, makes absurd a book which is otherwise very attractive.  This young woman doctor, a homoeopath, sets a young man’s leg, and falls in love with him after a therapeutic courtship, in which he wooes and she prescribes.

The woman doctor is, I suspect, still available as material for the ambitious novelist, but let him beware how he deals with her.

PAIN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.