Publisher's Synopsis
The exquisitely beautiful portrait which the Rambler has painted of his friend Levett, welldescribes Gideon Gray, and many other village doctors, from whom Scotland reaps more benefit, and to whom she is perhaps more ungrateful than to any other class of men, excepting herschoolmasters.Such a rural man of medicine is usually the inhabitant of some pretty borough or village, whichforms the central point of his practice. But, besides attending to such cases as the village may afford, he is day and night at the service of every one who may command his assistance within a circle offorty miles in diameter, untraversed by roads in many directions, and including moors, mountains, rivers, and lakes. For late and dangerous journeys through an inaccessible country for services of themost essential kind, rendered at the expense, or risk at least, of his own health and life, the Scottishvillage doctor receives at best a very moderate recompense, often one which is totally inadequate, and very frequently none whatever. He has none of the ample resources proper to the brothers ofthe profession in an English town. The burgesses of a Scottish borough are rendered, by theirlimited means of luxury, inaccessible to gout, surfeits, and all the comfortable chronic diseases whichare attendant on wealth and indolence. Four years, or so, of abstemiousness, enable them to standan election dinner; and there is no hope of broken heads among a score or two of quiet electors, who settle the business over a table. There the mothers of the state never make a point of pouring, in the course of every revolving year, a certain quantity of doctor's stuff through the bowels of theirbeloved children. Every old woman, from the Townhead to the Townfit, can prescribe a dose ofsalts, or spread a plaster; and it is only when a fever or a palsy renders matters serious, that theassistance of the doctor is invoked by his neighbours in the borough.But still the man of science cannot complain of inactivity or want of practice. If he does not findpatients at his door, he seeks them through a wide circle. Like the ghostly lover of Burger's Leonora, he mounts at midnight and traverses in darkness, paths which, to those less accustomed to them, seem formidable in daylight, through straits where the slightest aberration would plunge him into amorass, or throw him over a precipice, on to cabins which his horse might ride over withoutknowing they lay in his way, unless he happened to fall through the roofs. When he arrives at such a 3stately termination of his journey, where his services are required, either to bring a wretch into theworld, or prevent one from leaving it, the scene of misery is often such, that, far from touching thehard-saved shillings which are gratefully offered to him, he bestows his medicines as well as hisattendance-for charity. I have heard the celebrated traveller Mungo Park, who had experiencedboth courses of life, rather give the preference to travelling as a discoverer in Africa, than towandering by night and day the wilds of his native land in the capacity of a country medicalpractitioner. He mentioned having once upon a time rode forty miles, sat up all night, andsuccessfully assisted a woman under influence of the primitive curse, for which his soleremuneration was a roasted potato and a draught of buttermilk. But his was not the heart whichgrudged the labour that relieved human misery. In short, there is no creature in Scotland that worksharder and is more poorly requited than the country doctor, unless perhaps it may be his horse. Yetthe horse is, and indeed must be, hardy, active, and indefatigable, in spite of a rough coat andindifferent condition; and so you will often find in his master, under an unpromising and bluntexterior, professional skill and enthusiasm, intelligence, humanity, courage, and
