Life had not brought to him all that he was conscious might have been
within its gift. Professionally, indeed, he had reached great heights,
but these only enabled a measure of the territory beyond, and if to
his patients he appeared as a species of demigod, to himself he was
merely a "lucky" physician--his peculiar luck consisting in that sixth
sense which put him so easily into his patients' skins and pierced
through obscure maladies to possible sources. How he knew a great many
things puzzled them, but puzzled him still more. Simply at certain
crises he was aware that mysteries were momentarily revealed to him.
Back of that he possessed, of course, the usual outfit of medical
knowledge, open to any one, but which had never yet made a great
physician since the world with all its aches and pains began. For
_that_ other things were needed: a coloring of the artistic
temperament, a dash of the gambler's, a touch of femininity, as well
as the solid stratum of cool common sense at the bottom of all;
_these_ eked out the modicum of scientific knowledge which is all
mankind has yet wrested from secretive nature. The Doctor sometimes
described himself as a "good guesser." Surgery might be an exact
science; few things in medicine were exact, and what was never exact
was the material upon which medicine must work. The great bulk of his
fraternity went through their studious, conscientious, hard-working,
and not infrequently heroic lives under the contented conviction of
having to deal with two principal facts--disease and medicine--both
accessible through study. To them the imponderable factor of the
patient represented such or such an aggregation of material--muscle,
nerve, blood, brawn, bone, and tissue--which might be counted upon to
respond to such and such a treatment in such and such a manner, with
very slight variation. The Doctor envied them their simplicity of
faith. To him, on the contrary, the patient was a factor which could