“Modern improvements?” I wonder where they are? Perhaps it is the fashionable cloaks, that take leave of their shivering owners at the hips; or the long skirts, whose muddy trains every passing pedestrian pins to the sidewalk; or the Lilliputian bonnets, that never a string in shop-dom can keep within hailing distance of the head; or the flowing sleeves, through which the winter wind plays around the arm-pits; or the break-neck, high-heeled boots, which some little, dumpy feminine has introduced to gratify her rising ambition, and render her tall sisters hideous; or the gas-lit, furnace-heated houses, in which the owners’ eyes are extinguished, and their skins dried to a parchment; or, perhaps, it is the churches, of such cathedral dimness, that the clergyman must have candles at noonday, and where the congregation are forbidden to express their devotion by singing, and forced to listen to the trills and quavers of some scientific stage mountebank; or perhaps ’tis the brazen irreverence with which Young America jostles aside gray-headed Wisdom: perhaps the comfortless, forsaken fireside of the “strong-minded woman:” perhaps, the manly gossip, whose repetition of some baseless rumor dims the bright eyes of defenceless innocence with tears of anguish: perhaps the schools, where a superficial show of brilliancy on exhibition days, is considered the ne plus ultra of teaching: perhaps it is the time-serving clergyman, whose tongue is fettered by a monied clique: perhaps, the lawyers who lie—under a mistake!—perhaps it is the doctor, whom I saw yesterday at Aunt Jerusha’s sick-room, a little thing with bits of feet, and mincing voice, and lily-white hands, and perfumed moustache. I wanted to inquire what ailed Jerusha, so I waited to see him. I wanted to ask him how long it would take him to cure her, and if he preferred pills to powders, blisters to plasters, oat-meal to barley-gruel, wine-whey to posset, arrow-root to farina, and a few such little things, you know. He stared at me over his dicky, as if I had been an unevangelized kangaroo; then he sidled up to Jerusha, pryed open her mouth, and said “humph”—in Latin. Then he crossed his legs, and rolled up the whites of his eyes at the ceiling, as if he expected some Esculapian hand writing on the wall to enlighten him as to the seat of Aunt Jerusha’s complaint. Then, he drew from his pocket a box with a whole army of tiny bottles; and uncorking two of them he nipped out a little white speck from each, which he dissolved in four quarts of water, and told Jerusha “to take a drop of the water once in eight hours.” Tom Thumb and Lilliput! he might as well have tried to salt the Atlantic Ocean with a widower’s tear! He should be laid gently on a lily leaf, and consigned to the first stray zephyr.

Ah, you should have seen our good, old-fashioned Dr. Jalap; with a fist like a sledge-hammer, a tramp like a war-horse, and a laugh that would puzzle an echo. He wasn’t penurious of his physic: he didn’t care a pin how much he put down your throat—no, nor the apothecary either. He pill-ed and potioned, and emetic-ed, and blistered, and plastered, till you were so transparent, that even John Mitchell (and he’s the shortest-sighted being alive) could have seen through you. And then he braced you up with Iron and Quinine, till your muscles were like whip-cords, and your hair in a bristle of kinks. He was human-like, too; he didn’t stalk in as if Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington were boiled down to make his grandfather. No; he’d just as lief sit down on a butter-firkin as on a velvet lounge. He’d pick up Aunt Esther’s knitting-needles, and talk to grandpa about Bunker Hill, and those teetotally discomfrizzled, bragging British, and offer grandma a pinch of snuff, and trot the baby, and stroke the cat, and go to the closet and eat up the pickles and doughnuts, and make himself useful generally. He didn’t have to stupefy his patients with ether, so that they needn’t find out how clumsily he operated. No, it was quite beautiful to see him take a man’s head between his knees, and drag his double teeth out. He didn’t write a prescription for molasses and water, in High Dutch: he didn’t tell you that you were booked for the river Styx, and he was the only M. D. in creation who could annihilate the ferryman waiting to row you over. He didn’t drive through the town with his horse and gig, at break-neck speed, just as meeting was out, as if life and death were hanging on his profitless chariot wheels: he didn’t stick up over his door—“at home between nine and ten,” as if that consecrated hour were all he could bestow upon a clamorous public, when he was angling in vain for a patient every hour in the twenty-four; nor did he give little boys shillings to rush into church, and call him out in the middle of the service. No: Dr. Jalap was not a “modern improvement.”