Washington Square

URING a portion of the first half of the present century, and more
particularly during the latter part of it, there flourished and practised
in the city of New York a physician who enjoyed perhaps an exceptional
share of the consideration which, in the United States, has always been
bestowed upon distinguished members of the medical profession. This
profession in America has constantly been held in honour, and more
successfully than elsewhere has put forward a claim to the epithet of
“liberal.” In a country in which, to play a social part, you must either
earn your income or make believe that you earn it, the healing art has
appeared in a high degree to combine two recognised sources of credit.
It belongs to the realm of the practical, which in the United States is a
great recommendation; and it is touched by the light of science—a merit
appreciated in a community in which the love of knowledge has not always
been accompanied by leisure and opportunity. It was an element in Dr.
Sloper’s reputation that his learning and his skill were very evenly
balanced; he was what you might call a scholarly doctor, and yet there
was nothing abstract in his remedies—he always ordered you to take
something. Though he was felt to be extremely thorough, he was not
uncomfortably theoretic, and if he sometimes explained matters rather
more minutely than might seem of use to the patient, he never went so far
(like some practitioners one has heard of) as to trust to the explanation
alone, but always left behind him an inscrutable prescription. There
were some doctors that left the prescription without offering any
explanation at all; and he did not belong to that class either, which
was, after all, the most vulgar. It will be seen that I am describing a
clever man; and this is really the reason why Dr. Sloper had become a
local celebrity. At the time at which we are chiefly concerned with him,
he was some fifty years of age, and his popularity was at its height. He
was very witty, and he passed in the best society of New York for a man
of the world—which, indeed, he was, in a very sufficient degree. I
hasten to add, to anticipate possible misconception, that he was not the
least of a charlatan. He was a thoroughly honest man—honest in a degree
of which he had perhaps lacked the opportunity to give the complete
measure; and, putting aside the great good-nature of the circle in which
he practised, which was rather fond of boasting that it possessed the
“brightest” doctor in the country, he daily justified his claim to the
talents attributed to him by the popular voice. He was an observer, even
a philosopher, and to be bright was so natural to him, and (as the
popular voice said) came so easily, that he never aimed at mere effect,
and had none of the little tricks and pretensions of second-rate
reputations. It must be confessed that fortune had favoured him, and
that he had found the path to prosperity very soft to his tread. He had
married at the age of twenty-seven, for love, a very charming girl, Miss
Catherine Harrington, of New York, who, in addition to her charms, had
brought him a solid dowry. Mrs. Sloper was amiable, graceful,
accomplished, elegant, and in 1820 she had been one of the pretty girls
of the small but promising capital which clustered about the Battery and
overlooked the Bay, and of which the uppermost boundary was indicated by
the grassy waysides of Canal Street. Even at the age of twenty-seven
Austin Sloper had made his mark sufficiently to mitigate the anomaly of
his having been chosen among a dozen suitors by a young woman of high
fashion, who had ten thousand dollars of income and the most charming
eyes in the island of Manhattan. These eyes, and some of their
accompaniments, were for about five years a source of extreme
satisfaction to the young physician, who was both a devoted and a very
happy husband. The fact of his having married a rich woman made no
difference in the line he had traced for himself, and he cultivated his
profession with as definite a purpose as if he still had no other
resources than his fraction of the modest patrimony which on his father’s
death he had shared with his brothers and sisters. This purpose had not
been preponderantly to make money—it had been rather to learn something
and to do something. To learn something interesting, and to do something
useful—this was, roughly speaking, the programme he had sketched, and of
which the accident of his wife having an income appeared to him in no
degree to modify the validity. He was fond of his practice, and of
exercising a skill of which he was agreeably conscious, and it was so
patent a truth that if he were not a doctor there was nothing else he
could be, that a doctor he persisted in being, in the best possible
conditions. Of course his easy domestic situation saved him a good deal
of drudgery, and his wife’s affiliation to the “best people” brought him
a good many of those patients whose symptoms are, if not more interesting
in themselves than those of the lower orders, at least more consistently
displayed. He desired experience, and in the course of twenty years he
got a great deal. It must be added that it came to him in some forms
which, whatever might have been their intrinsic value, made it the
reverse of welcome. His first child, a little boy of extraordinary
promise, as the Doctor, who was not addicted to easy enthusiasms, firmly
believed, died at three years of age, in spite of everything that the
mother’s tenderness and the father’s science could invent to save him.
Two years later Mrs. Sloper gave birth to a second infant—an infant of a
sex which rendered the poor child, to the Doctor’s sense, an inadequate
substitute for his lamented first-born, of whom he had promised himself
to make an admirable man. The little girl was a disappointment; but this
was not the worst. A week after her birth the young mother, who, as the
phrase is, had been doing well, suddenly betrayed alarming symptoms, and
before another week had elapsed Austin Sloper was a widower.

For a man whose trade was to keep people alive, he had certainly done
poorly in his own family; and a bright doctor who within three years
loses his wife and his little boy should perhaps be prepared to see
either his skill or his affection impugned. Our friend, however, escaped
criticism: that is, he escaped all criticism but his own, which was much
the most competent and most formidable. He walked under the weight of
this very private censure for the rest of his days, and bore for ever the
scars of a castigation to which the strongest hand he knew had treated
him on the night that followed his wife’s death. The world, which, as I
have said, appreciated him, pitied him too much to be ironical; his
misfortune made him more interesting, and even helped him to be the
fashion. It was observed that even medical families cannot escape the
more insidious forms of disease, and that, after all, Dr. Sloper had lost
other patients beside the two I have mentioned; which constituted an
honourable precedent. His little girl remained to him, and though she
was not what he had desired, he proposed to himself to make the best of
her. He had on hand a stock of unexpended authority, by which the child,
in its early years, profited largely. She had been named, as a matter of
course, after her poor mother, and even in her most diminutive babyhood
the Doctor never called her anything but Catherine. She grew up a very
robust and healthy child, and her father, as he looked at her, often said
to himself that, such as she was, he at least need have no fear of losing
her. I say “such as she was,” because, to tell the truth—But this is a
truth of which I will defer the telling.