Autobiography of Mark Twain (55 page)

After waiting a year to make up his mind as to whether the story of Adam and Eve was a myth, Gilbert A. Lovell, of Plainfield, N. J., a young churchman who was denied by the Presbytery of Elizabeth a license to preach the Gospel because he expressed his disbelief in that part of the book of Genesis, was to-day licensed by the Presbytery at its spring session held in Perth Amboy.

Lovell and Harrison K. Wright, of Plainfield, applied last spring to the Presbytery for license, but as both held the same opinion as to Adam and Eve being mythical, they were each rejected by a large majority. Afterward a special session of the Presbytery was held to give them an opportunity to recant. Mr. Wright appeared before it and declared his views had changed on the disputed subject, and he was willing to acknowledge his mistake. His explanation and other answers proved satisfactory. He got his license, and later was ordained by the Presbytery.

Lovell, however, sent word he would wait a year before making another try for a license. Meanwhile he evidently experienced a change of heart, as his examination to-day on all theological points gave entire satisfaction to the Presbytery, which will set a date for his ordination.

We have no respectworthy evidence that the human being has morals. He is himself the only witness. Persons who do not know him value his testimony. They think he is not shallow and vain because he so despises the peacock for possessing these qualities. They are deceived into not regarding him as a beast and a brute, because he uses these terms to disapprovingly describe qualities which he possesses, yet which are not possessed by any creature but himself. On his verbal testimony they take him for every creditable thing which he particularly isn’t, and (intentionally?) refrain from examining the testimony of his acts. It is the safest way, but man did not invent it, it was the polecat. From the beginning of time the polecats have quite honestly and naively regarded themselves as representing in the animal kingdom what the rose represents in the vegetable kingdom. This is because they do not examine.

Man thinks he is not a fiend. It is because he has not examined the Westminster Catechism which he invented. He and the polecat—But it is not fair to class them together, the polecat has not invented a Westminster Catechism.

However, moralless man, bloody and atrocious man, is high above the other animals in his one great and shining gift—intellectuality. It took him ages and ages to demonstrate the full magnitude and majesty of his gift, but he has accomplished it at last. For ages it was a mean animal indeed that was not vastly his superior in certain splendid faculties. In the beginning he had nothing but the puny strength of his unweaponed hands to protect his life with, and he was as helpless as a rabbit when the lion, the tiger, the elephant, the mastodon and the other mighty beasts came against him; in endurance he was far inferior to the other creatures; in fleetness on the land there was hardly an animal in the whole list that couldn’t shame him; in fleetness in the water every fish could excel him; his eyesight was a sarcasm: for seeing minute things it was blindness as compared to the eyesight of the insects, and the condor could see a sheep further than he could see a hotel. But by the ingenuities of his intellect he has equipped himself with all these gifts artificially and has made them unapproachably effective. His locomotive can outstrip all birds and beasts in speed and beat them all in endurance; there are no eyes in the animal world that can compete with his microscope and his telescope; the strength
of the tiger and the elephant is weakness, compared with the force which he carries in his mile-range terrible gun. In the beginning he was given “dominion” over the animal creation—a very handsome present, but it was mere words and represented a non-existent sovereignty. But he has turned it into an existent sovereignty, himself, and is master, of late. In physical talents he was a pauper when he started; by grace of his intellect he is incomparably the richest of all the animals now. But he is still a pauper in morals—incomparably the poorest of the creatures in that respect. The gods value morals alone; they have paid no compliments to intellect, nor offered it a single reward. If intellect is welcome anywhere in the other world, it is in hell, not heaven.

This 1903 text survives in an untitled, previously unpublished manuscript now in the Mark Twain Papers. Clemens identified it as
“Autobiog.”
in the upper left corner of the first page, adding (and later canceling)
“Hannibal, 1842,”
the place and year of the first anecdote about his experience with castor oil. Clemens was always skeptical of doctors and had long since concluded that they were of little or no assistance to their patients. “I am not afraid of doctors in ordinary or trifling ailments, but in a serious case I should not allow any one to persuade me to call one,” he wrote Henry H. Rogers on 8 January 1900 (Salm, in
HHR
, 425). In the present rather desultory essay, however, he remained more or less focused on what he considered the unfairness of the way contemporary doctors charged for their services. For an indispensable overview of Clemens’s attitude toward doctors and medical practice in general, see
Mark Twain and Medicine: “Any Mummery Will Cure”
(Ober 2003).

Paine planned to publish this manuscript in his edition of the autobiography, using the title adopted here and placing it after “Scraps from My Autobiography. Private History of a Manuscript That Came to Grief” (
MTA
, 1:175–89). He suppressed the names of several physicians when he prepared his typescript for the printer. For reasons unknown, however, he decided not to include it, even after it had been set in type.

[Something about Doctors]

I was seven years old when I came so near going to Heaven that time. I do not know why I did not go; I was prepared. This was habit. I had been sick a considerable part of those seven years, and had naturally formed the custom of being prepared. Religion was made up almost exclusively of fire and brimstone in those days, and this furnished a motive for preparation which none but the very thoughtless neglected. To be honest, I will acknowledge that I sometimes neglected it myself; but it was only when I was well. I do not remember what malady it was that came so near to removing me from this life, that time, but I remember what it was that defeated it. It was half a teacupful of castor oil—straight. That is, without molasses, or other ameliorations. Many took molasses with their oil, but I was not of that class. Perhaps I knew that nothing could make oil palatable, for I had had a large experience; I had drunk barrels of castor oil in my time. No, not barrels, kegs; let us postpone exaggerations to a properer time and subject.

The castor oil saved me. I had begun to die, the family were grouped for the function; they were familiar with it, so was I. I had performed the star part so many times that I knew just what to do at each stage without a rehearsal, although so young; and they—they had played the minor rôles so often that they could do it asleep. They often went to sleep when I was dying. At first it used to hurt me, but later I did not mind it, but got some one to joggle them, then went on with my rendition. I can see us at it, to this day.

Dr. Meredith was our family physician in those days; he probably removed from the hamlet of Florida to the village of Hannibal about the same time that we did, in order to keep my custom. No, that could not have been the reason; I have already said that in that early geological period the doctor was paid by the year and furnished the drugs himself; therefore he would not really value my custom, if sane. He often tried to kill me, I suppose; it would be but natural, for he had a family to support, and was a man of good judgment and right intentions, but he never succeeded
in a single instance. It was the irony of fate that his own son Charles should pull me out of Bear creek at last when another half minute would have ended my life. He never smiled again.

Consider the wisdom and righteousness of that old-time custom—the paying of the physician by the year. Consider what a safeguard it was, for both the physician’s livelihood and self-respect, and the family’s health. The physician had a regular and assured income, and that was an advantage to him; the family were safe from his invasions when nothing was the matter, and goodness knows that was an advantage to the family.

Look at the difference in our day. What is the common, the universal, custom of the physician with a limited practice? It is this: to keep on coming and coming, long after the patient has ceased to need him—and charging for every visit. Almost as a rule—I might fairly leave that “almost” out—you are driven to the unpleasant compulsion of discharging him, in order to get rid of him. As a consequence you dread to call him again; and you put it off just as long as you can without peril.

I make this charge deliberately. I draw it from four sources: from my own experience, from the experience of friends, from the statements (hotly worded) of distinguished New York and London physicians, and from editorial statements in the medical journals. Your physician knows you are afraid to discharge him, lest it turn out that you did it too early; he takes a discreditable advantage of this fear.

The hard-driven physician comes no oftener than he is obliged to. As soon as it is safe to say it, he says, “I shall not come again unless you send for me.”

In Hartford our old family physician, Dr. Taft, made us familiar with that remark, but we never got it out of his neglected successor. Eight years ago (in 1895) I arrived from Europe and went straight to Elmira, N.Y. In the bath-tub, that evening, (May 26), I found a round, flat pink spot on the outside of my port thigh, the size of a dime. The next morning we moved up on the East Hill, and called up a doctor (Theron Wales), from below and he said it was an incipient carbuncle. He began to treat it. And also began to talk. To let him tell it, the carbuncle had always been the master of the human race until by God’s mercy he became a member of it. Then he sang the long list of his victories, carbuncle by carbuncle, naming the proprietor in each case and the place on him where the carbuncle roosted, and the illustrious methods whereby he had conducted those carbuncles to a happy and spectacular finish. This was a very dull man, by nature and acquirement, but he was an old friend of the kinship, and I had to endure him, though I give you my word that as between his society and the carbuncle’s, I would have selected the carbuncle’s every time. He had the special characteristic of every limited-practice physician whom I have ever known: he was tedious, witless, commonplace, a stayer, loved to hear himself talk, and was a spirit-rotting bore.

With all his boasted experience he knew nothing about carbuncles that was not known by our old ex-slave cook, Aunty Cord, and he did nothing with mine which she could not have done as well or better. He applied that ancient persuader, a slice of raw salt pork, and came daily while it was doing its work. Came to watch it, I suppose; the cat could have done it as effectively, and certainly the cook could—and gratis. Then he lanced it, and came daily for thirty days more; sometimes to dress the wound—which the cook could have done as well as he—but most of the time for no conceivable reason, unless to exhaust me with his two-hour
visits and his colorless conversation. So many of these visits were professionally objectless that I took them for social visits, or I would have retired him.

He not only charged me for every one of those odious visitations, but charged me a third more than he would have charged a resident. I did not find out this latter detail—this robbery,—until six months ago.

That burglar still keeps up that custom—of paying what people take for social calls, after his professional services are no longer needed, and then charging for them after the family, growing suspicious, have given him a large hint and gotten rid of him.

He did not cure my carbuncle. He watched over it forty-five days like a tender and ignorant carbuncle-angel, then I started across the country with my family. I lectured every night for twenty-three nights, the nightly dressing of the cavern left by the carbuncle going on every night, and at last the place was healed and I walked aboard the ship at Vancouver unassisted.

Carbuncles have families, when they are treated by bunglers. Mine’s first son was born at sea and was lanced in Sydney. The second son was born in Melbourne, but there was a real doctor there—Fitz Gerald—a doctor with an immense practice, and he said he would cure it in twenty-four hours. He kept his word; also, he taught us his art, and we squelched the rest of the family, one by one, as they arrived. Only one of them lasted two days. The carbuncle-expert of Elmira charged me $135 for half-curing one carbuncle. If I had not been obliged to leave on the lecture-tour he would be propagating that one’s posterity to this day.

That Elmira leech knew that I had fallen heir to a heavy debt, and was starting on a year’s journey around the globe to lecture it off and set myself free, but that did not move him to spare me when he had a chance to afflict me with social calls and charge pirate-rates for them. I resolved that I would never again sit in the Sunday school that he superintended, and I have kept my word to this day. However, I was never in it anyway.

It is a bad business to get the
habit
of getting sick. You will find it hard to break. From my seventh year to my fifty-sixth I had had the habit of being well—I had hardly known what sickness was, in all that time. Then the change came. We were living in Berlin. On a very cold winter’s night I lectured for the benefit of an English or American church-charity in a hall that was as hot as the Hereafter. On my way home, I froze. I spent thirty-four days in bed, with congestion of the wind’ard lung. That was the beginning. That lung has remained in a damaged condition ever since. Whenever I catch a cold in the head it descends at once to the bronchial tubes, and I have to send for the medical plumber. That is, I used to do that, but when I found out at last that to relieve it, modify it, shorten its stay or cure it were all beyond his art, I ceased from calling him and allowed the cough to bark itself out at its leisure and perish of fatigue. Its term is six weeks, under these conditions. Before giving up, I experimented with ten physicians in different parts of the world.