A young medical man fell in love with a young lady patient, and, when he had no longer any pretext for continuing his visits, he sent her a present of a pair of spring ducks. Not reciprocating his attentions, she did not acknowledge the present, upon which he ventured to call, asking if the birds had reached her. Her reply was--"Quack, quack!"
Dr. Lettsom, a quaker in the time of George III., near the close of the last century, had such an extensive practice that his receipts in some years were as much as £12,000; and this although half his services were entirely gratuitous, and rendered with unusual solicitude and care to necessitous clergymen and literary men. Generosity was the ruling feature of his life. On one occasion he attended an old American merchant whose affairs had gone wrong, and who grieved over leaving the trees he had planted. The kind hearted doctor purchased the place from the creditors, and presented it to his patient for life.
Pope, a few days before his decease, bore the following cordial testimony to the urbanity and courtesy of his medical friends:--"There is no end of my kind treatment from the Faculty; they are in general the most amiable companions, and the best friends, as well as the most learned men I know."
And Dryden, in the postscript to his translation of Virgil, speaks in the same way of the profession. "That I have recovered," says he, "in some measure the health which I had lost by too much application to this work, is owing, next to God's mercy, to the skill and care of Dr. Guibbons and Dr. Hobbs, the two ornaments of their profession, whom I can only pay by this acknowledgment."
When Dr. Dimsdale, a Hertford physician and member of Parliament, went over to Russia to inoculate the Empress Catherine and her son, in the year 1768, he received a fee of £12,000, a pension for life of £500 per annum, and the rank of Baron of the Empire.
Dr. Henry Atkins was sent for to Scotland by James the Sixth to attend Charles the First (then an infant), ill of a dangerous fever. The King gave him a fee of £6000, with which he purchased the manor of Clapham.
Louis XIV. after undergoing an operation, gave his physician and his surgeon 75,000 crowns each.