Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com Benefit Club, which had some months before put to the vote
whether its long-standing medical man, ‘Doctor Gambit,’
should not be cashiered in favor of ‘this Doctor Lydgate,’
who was capable of performing the most astonishing cures,
and rescuing people altogether given up by other practi-
tioners. But the balance had been turned against Lydgate
by two members, who for some private reasons held that
this power of resuscitating persons as good as dead was an
equivocal recommendation, and might interfere with prov-
idential favors. In the course of the year, however, there had
been a change in the public sentiment, of which the una-
nimity at Dollop’s was an index
A good deal more than a year ago, before anything was
known of Lydgate’s skill, the judgments on it had naturally
been divided, depending on a sense of likelihood, situat-
ed perhaps in the pit of the stomach or in the pineal gland,
and differing in its verdicts, but not the less valuable as
a guide in the total deficit of evidence. Patients who had
chronic diseases or whose lives had long been worn thread-
bare, like old Featherstone’s, had been at once inclined to
try him; also, many who did not like paying their doctor’s
bills, thought agreeably of opening an account with a new
doctor and sending for him without stint if the children’s
temper wanted a dose, occasions when the old practitioners
were often crusty; and all persons thus inclined to employ
Lydgate held it likely that he was clever. Some considered
that he might do more than others ‘where there was liver;’—
at least there would be no harm in getting a few bottles of
‘stuff ’ from him, since if these proved useless it would still