MIRTH AND MEDICINE
A review of Poems by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
IF any of our readers (and at times we fear it is the case with all) need
amusement and the wholesome alterative of a hearty laugh, we commend
them, not to Dr. Holmes the physician, but to Dr. Holmes the scholar, the
wit, and the humorist; not to the scientific medical professor's
barbarous Latin, but to his poetical prescriptions, given in choice old
Saxon. We have tried them, and are ready to give the Doctor certificates
of their efficacy.
Looking at the matter from the point of theory only, we should say that a
physician could not be otherwise than melancholy. A merry doctor! Why,
one might as well talk of a laughing death's-head,--the cachinnation of a
monk's _memento mori_. This life of ours is sorrowful enough at its best
estate; the brightest phase of it is "sicklied o'er with the pale cast"
of the future or the past. But it is the special vocation of the doctor
to look only upon the shadow; to turn away from the house of feasting and
go down to that of mourning; to breathe day after day the atmosphere of
wretchedness; to grow familiar with suffering; to look upon humanity
disrobed of its pride and glory, robbed of all its fictitious ornaments,
--weak, helpless, naked,--and undergoing the last fearful metempsychosis
from its erect and godlike image, the living temple of an enshrined
divinity, to the loathsome clod and the inanimate dust.
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