Dr. Puffer’s Lost Opportunity

by Mary Kyle Dallas

Dr. Puffer was an old bachelor—a physician, who belonged to that class of medical practitioners who, having learnt certain rules and laws by rote, and having obtained a diploma, go to work on the principle that all men must be doctored in the same way or in none. And that a patient is a creature formed to swallow nauseous doses which do him no good, without complaint—to foot great bills without a murmur and to die of a dispensation of Providence, making no accusations against the doctor.

As for the idea that a physician’s mission is to heal, that never entered Dr. Puffer’s mind.  As a general thing it is the last idea that does enters a doctor’s head, save as the reputation of having mastered a difficult case may increase fees and practice.  But somehow in Dr. Puffer’s case the truth had come to knowledge, and after seeing his gig wheels wheeling softly behind the mourning coaches of the numerous funerals of victims of quinine, calomel and other relics of medical superstition, which occurred in his field of labor, people began to shrink from patronizing Dr.Puffer, the difference in the bills of mortality in that district being noticeable at once.  To be sure, doctors of the same style remained—men who always have been “called in a little too late,’ or who “mistake the treatment” a dozen times and only discover the cause of the malady after the patient has sunk under it.  But they were not found out yet. Many never are.  Perhaps Dr. Puffer did not talk enough or was not bold enough.  Certainly his practice died out, and he found himself in straightening circumstances, with nothing but the annuity of two hundred dollars which had been left him by his parents, at an age when men who make fortunes at all have usually made them.

The doctor consequently had begun quite seriously to consider the comparative merits of prussic acid and… Read More