It will therefore be understood, that when such a gauntlet was thus thrown in his very teeth by Dr Fillgrave, he was not slow to take it up.  He addressed a letter to the Barsetshire Conservative Standard, in which he attacked Dr Fillgrave with some considerable acerbity.  Dr Fillgrave responded in four lines, saying that on mature consideration he had made up his mind not to notice any remarks that might be made on him by Dr Thorne in the public press.  The Greshamsbury doctor then wrote another letter, more witty and much more severe than the last; and as this was copied into the Bristol, Exeter, and Gloucester papers, Dr Fillgrave found it very difficult to maintain the magnanimity of his reticence.  It is sometimes becoming enough for a Mediterranean to wrap himself in the dignified toga of silence, and proclaim himself indifferent to public attacks; but it is a sort of dignity which it is very difficult to maintain.  As well might a man, when stung to madness by wasps, endeavour to sit in his chair without moving a muscle, as endure with patience and without reply the courtesies of a newspaper opponent.  Dr Thorne wrote a third letter which was too much for medical flesh and blood to bear.  Dr Fillgrave answered it, not, indeed, in his own name, but in that of a brother doctor; and then the war raged merrily.  It is hardly too much to say that Dr Fillgrave never knew another happy hour.  Had he dreamed of what materials was made that young compounder of doses at Greshamsbury he would have met him in consultation, morning, noon, and night, without objection; but having begun the war, he was constrained to go on with it:  his brethren would allow him no alternative.  Thus he was continually being brought up to the fight, as a prize-fighter may be seen to be, who is carried up round after round, without any hope on his own part, and who, in each round, drops to the ground before the very wind of his opponent’s blows.

But Dr Fillgrave, though thus weak himself, was backed in practice and in countenance by nearly all his brethren in the county.  The guinea fee, the principle of giving advice and of selling no medicine, the great resolve to keep a distinct barrier between the physician and the apothecary, and, above all, the hatred of the contamination of a bill, were strong in the medical mind of Barsetshire.  Dr Thorne had the provincial medical world against him, and so he appealed to the metropolis.  The Lancet took the matter up in his favour, but the Journal of Medical Science was against him; the Weekly Chirurgeon, noted for its medical democracy, upheld him as a medical prophet, but the Scalping Knife, a monthly periodical got up in dead opposition to the Lancet, showed him no mercy.  So the war went on, and our doctor, to a certain extent, became a noted character.