Why, then, should not even the doctor have his fun? Nay, is
it not his duty to be merry, by main force if necessary? Solomon, who,
from his great knowledge of herbs, must have been no mean practitioner
for his day, tells us that "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine;"
and universal experience has confirmed the truth of his maxim. Hence it
is, doubtless, that we have so many anecdotes of facetious doctors,
distributing their pills and jokes together, shaking at the same time the
contents of their vials and the sides of their patients. It is merely
professional, a trick of the practice, unquestionably, in most cases; but
sometimes it is a "natural gift," like that of the "bonesetters," and
"scrofula strokers," and "cancer curers," who carry on a sort of guerilla
war with human maladies. Such we know to be the case with Dr. Holmes.
He was born for the "laughter cure," as certainly as Priessnitz was for
the "water cure," and has been quite as successful in his way, while his
prescriptions are infinitely more agreeable.
The volume now before us gives, in addition to the poems and lyrics
contained in the two previous editions, some hundred or more pages of the
later productions of the author, in the sprightly vein, and marked by the
brilliant fancy and felicitous diction for which the former were
noteworthy.
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