Characteristics / by S. Weir Mitchell.

  • Silas Weir Mitchell
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Characteristics / by S. Weir Mitchell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    knocked about without mercy, or without knowledge that tenderness was needed. Our consultant was a physician with acquired manners. He always agreed with what I said, and was what I call aggressively gentle; so that he seemed to me to be ever saying with calm self-approval, “ See how gentle I am.” I am told that with women he was delightfully positive, and I think this may have been true, but he was incapable of being firm with the obstinate. His formulas distressed me, and were many. He was apt to say, as he entered my room, “Well, and how are we to-day?” And this I hated, because I once knew a sallow undertaker who, in the same fashion, used to associate himself with the corpse, and comfort the living with the phrase, “We are looking quite natural to-day.” My soft-mannered and mellifluous doctor who thought well of himself was nevertheless a most in- telligent physician; but some people possess no mirror for social conduct, and the court fool, who tells men the truth, is out of fashion. He went along in life not knowing how absurd he was at times. To have known would have lessened his usefulness. Self-ignorance is sometimes an essential condition of utility. My good little woman friend supplied me with what my doctors did not, and to this day I cannot tell how she did it. Despite, however, her too rare visits, and those of others who were less helpful, I had a horrible amount of time on my hands. Much reading wearied me, and so I lay imprisoned within the limits of my memories, or took a curious interest in the minutiae of the little fife or action I could see in my l’oom or through my windows. I watched for long months the
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