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قراءة كتاب Some Personal Recollections of Dr. Janeway
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
for some reason or other, to be in the Doctor's office. A lady from a near-by town had been consulting him. As she was about to leave, she said: "Tell me, Dr. Janeway, about Dr. N. in our town. We have just gone there to live, you know, and we want to be sure to have the best doctor in case we have to call one in." Dr. Janeway replied: "You cannot do better than Dr. N. I know him very well. He is a good doctor. He won't do you any harm." The lady went away and I went back to my work in the laboratory, but that phrase kept ringing in my ears. "He is a very good doctor. He won't do you any harm." What had he meant by that? I kept wondering. Well, the woman seemed to be satisfied; at least she went away without further comment. Later on—perhaps two or three weeks later—I heard him make very much the same remark again: "Dr. R. is an excellent doctor. He won't do you any harm." I did not understand his meaning then, but the thing got stuck in my mind, and I remembered it. It was some years, I think, before that saying, for it would keep coming back to me, commenced to make its real impression. Then, as time and experience went on, clearer and clearer became its significance until I have come to see it as an expression of that wisdom—that deeper wisdom of the man whose simple words often revealed such subtle truths.
V
Dr. Janeway's relation to his profession and to his fellow physicians was one of rare felicity, and well it might have been, for his code of professional conduct stood squarely upon that principle of consideration for others, on which the hope of a some-time civilization in reality, must ever rest. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," was more than his motto; it was his motive; more than his precept, it was his practice. The revised version: "Do others before they do you," which has come so largely into recent vogue, both professionally as well as commercially, would have had little appeal to a man whose real goal lay so far on beyond personal position and private gain. In no better place than here, with his simple and straight code of conduct, can I mention something of Dr. Janeway's religion.
In days when doctors are flying from creeds and more—from faith, seeking to solace their souls in science alone, this great man's simple adherence to the teachings of Christ become dramatic proof of his powers of vision. But it was not the conventional Christ drawing a fashionable flock to a Sunday morning service to church and a Monday morning service to self, which gave the angle to this man's uprightness; his religion was one of action rather than exhibition; he used it to control his own life rather than to coerce the lives of others.
VI
There is one notably outstanding memory of Dr. Janeway which dates from those earlier days in his office and which deals with that large class of people who imagine they are ill—those people whose numbers are directly proportionate to periods of so-called prosperity, who call forth innumerable cults of curing, and who are the mainstay of much of the mummery in medicine.
I shall never forget one day at lunch after Dr. Janeway had been seeing some of these mentally mortgaged men and women. As he sat down at table his face wore that expression of perplexity which one at times sees as the outward sign of that inward sense of the futility of things in general. I inquired how matters had been going in the office that morning. His reply, "Neurasthenics!" as it came out with all his characteristic bluntness, set me to asking questions. What I learned that day from the Doctor, coupled with later observations of his methods in