Doctor and Patient by S. Weir Mitchell

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A more notable case was that of a New England lady, who was sentenced to
die of consumption by at least two competent physicians. Her husband,
himself a doctor, made for her exactly the same effort at relief which
was made in the case I have detailed, except that when snow fell he had
built a warm log cabin, and actually spent the winter in the woods,
teaching her to live out in the air and to walk on snow-shoes. She has
survived at least one of her doctors, and is, I believe, to this day a
wholesome and vigorous wife and mother.

What large wealth did to help in these two cases may be managed with
much smaller means. All through the White Mountains, in summer, you may
see people, a whole family often, with a wagon, going from place to
place, pitching their tents, eating at farm-houses or hotels, or
managing to cook at less cost the food they buy. Our sea-coast presents
like chances. With a good tent or two, which costs little, you may go to
unoccupied beaches, or by inlet or creek, and live for little. I very
often counsel young people to hire a safe open or decked boat, and, with
a good tent, to live in the sounds along the Jersey coast, going hither
and thither, and camping where it is pleasant, for, with our easy
freedom as to land, none object. When once a woman--and I speak now of
the healthy--has faced and overcome her dread of sun and mosquitoes, the
life becomes delightful. The Adirondacks, the Alleghanies, and the
Virginia mountains afford like chances, for which, as these are in a
measure remote, there must be a somewhat more costly organization. I
knew well a physician who every summer deserted his house and pitched
tents on an island not over three miles from home, and there spent the
summer with his family, so that there are many ways of doing the same
thing.

As to the question of expense, there is no need to say much. All over
our sparsely-inhabited land places wild enough are within easy reach,
and the journey to reach them need not be long. Beyond this, tent-life
is, of course, less costly than the hotel or boarding-house, in which
such numbers of people swelter through their summers. As to food, it is
often needful to be within reach of farm-houses or hotels, and all kind
of modifications of the life I advise are possible.

As to inconveniences, they are, of course, many, but, with a little
ingenuity, it is easy to make tent-life comfortable, and none need dread
them. Any book on camp-life will tell how to meet or avoid them, and to
such treatises I beg to refer the reader who wishes to experiment on
this delightful mode of gypsying.

The class of persons who find it easy to reach the most charming sites
and to secure the help of competent guides is, as I have said in another
place, increasing rapidly. The desire also for such a life is also
healthfully growing, so that this peculiarly American mode of getting an
outing is becoming more and more familiar. It leads to our young folks
indulging in all sorts of strengthening pursuits. It takes them away
from less profitable places, and the good it does need not be confined
to the boys. Young women may swim, fish, and row like their brothers,
but the life has gains and possibilities, as to which I would like to
say something more. In a well-ordered camp you may be sure of good food
and fair cooking. To sleep and live in the air is an insurance against
what we call taking cold. Where nature makes the atmospheric changes,
they are always more gradual and kindly than those we make at any season
when we go from street to house or house to street.

My brothers during the war always got colds when at home on leave, and
those who sleep in a chinky cabin or tent soon find that they do not
suffer and that they have an increasing desire for air and openness.

To live out of doors seems to be a little matter in the way of change,
and that it should have remarkable moral and intellectual values does
not appear credible to such as have not had this experience.

Yet, in fact, nothing so dismisses the host of little nervousnesses with
which house-caged women suffer as this free life. Cares, frets, worries,
and social annoyances disappear, and in the woods and by the waters we
lose, as if they were charmed away, our dislikes or jealousies, all the
base, little results of the struggle for bread or place. At home, in
cities, they seem so large; here, in the gentle company of constant sky
and lake and stream, they seem trivial, and we cast them away as easily
as we throw aside some piece of worn-out and useless raiment.

The man who lives out of doors awhile acquires better sense of moral
proportions, and thinks patiently and not under stress, making tranquil
companions of his worthy thoughts. This is a great thing, not to be
hurried. There seems to me always more time out of doors than in houses,
and if you have intellectual problems to settle, the cool quiet of the
woods or the lounging comfort of the canoe, or to be out under "the huge
and thoughtful night," has many times seemed to me helpful. One gets
near realities out of doors. Thought is more sober; one becomes a better
friend to one's self.

As to the effect of out-door life on the imaginative side of us, much
may be said. Certainly some books get fresh flavors out of doors, and
you see men or women greedily turn to reading and talking over verse who
never dream of it when at home. I am tempted to mention the poets, and
even the other authors who gain a kindly rubric for their work from the
gentle company of lake and wood and stream. I should frankly name Walt
Whitman and Thoreau, and pause pretty soon in wonder at the small number
of poets who suggest out-door life as their source of inspiration. A
good many of them--read as you lie in a birch canoe or seated on a stump
in the woods--shrink to well-bred, comfortable parlor bards, who seem to
you to have gotten their nature-lessons through plate-glass windows. The
test is a sharp one, and will leave out some great names and let in some
hardly known, or almost forgotten. Books to be read out of doors would
make a curious catalogue, and would vary, as such lists must, with every
thoughtful reader, while some would smile, perhaps with reason, at the
idea of any such classification. Certainly all would name Wordsworth,
and a few would add Clough, whilst the out-door plays of Shakespeare
would come in, and we should soon be called on to feel that for this
sort of congenial open-air poetic company we have still to fall back on
the vast resources of English verse. Somehow, as yet, our own poets have
not gotten fully into imaginative relation with what is peculiar in our
own flowers, trees, and skies. This does not lessen our joy in the
masters of English verse, because, of course, much of what they have
sung has liberal application in all lands; yet is there something which
we lose in them for lack of familiar knowledge of English lanes and
woods, of English flowers and trees. A book of the essentially American
nature--poems found here and there in many volumes--would be pleasant,
for surely we have had no one poet as to whom it is felt that he is
absolutely desirable as the interpretive poetic observer who has
positive claims to go with us as a friendly bookmate in our wood or
water wanderings. I have shrunk, as will have been seen, from the
dangerous venture of enlarging my brief catalogue. What I have just now
spoken of as one's bookmates will appear in very different lights
according to the surroundings in which we seek to enjoy their society.
If, as to this matter, any one doubts me, and has the good luck to camp
out long, and to have a variety of books of verse and prose, very soon,
if dainty of taste, he will find that the artificial flavoring of some
books is unpleasantly felt; but, after all, one does not read very much
when living thus outside of houses. Books are then, of course, well to
have, but rather as giving one texts for thoughts and talk than as
preachers, counsellors, jesters, or friends.

In my own wood-life or canoe journeys I used to wonder how little I read
or cared to read. One has nowadays many resources. If you sketch, no
matter how badly, it teaches and even exacts that close observation of
nature which brings in its train much that is to be desired. Photography
is a means of record, now so cheaply available as to be at the disposal
of all, and there is a great charm of a winter evening in turning over
sketch or photograph to recall anew the pleasant summer days. Beyond all
this, there is botany. I knew a lady who combined it happily and
ingeniously with photography, and so preserved pictures of plants in
their flowering state. When you are out under starry skies with breadth
of heaven in view, astronomy with an opera-glass--and Galileo's
telescope was no better--is an agreeable temptation which the cheap and
neat charts of the skies now to be readily obtained make very
interesting.

I should advise any young woman, indeed, any one who has the good chance
to live a camp-life, or to be much in the country, to keep a diary, not
of events but of things. I find myself that I go back to my old
note-books with increasing pleasure.

To make this resource available something more than the will to do it is
necessary. Take any nice young girl, who is reasonably educated, afloat
in your canoe with you, and ask her what she sees. As a rule she has a
general sense that yonder yellow bank, tree-crowned above the rippled
water, is pleasant. The sky is blue, the sun falling behind you. She
says it is beautiful and has a vague sense of enjoyment, and will carry
away with her little more than this. Point out to her that the trees
above are some of them deciduous poplars, or maples, and others sombre
groups of pines and silky tamarack with a wonder of delicate tracery.
Show her that the sun against the sloped yellow bank has covered the
water with a shining changeful orange light, through which gleam the
mottled stones below, and that the concave curve of every wave which
faces us concentrates for the eye an unearthly sapphire the reflex of
the darkening blue above us. Or a storm is on us at the same place. She
is fearless as to the ducking from which even her waterproof will hardly
protect. The clouds gather, the mists trail on the hills, ragged mosses
on the trees hang in wet festoons of gray, and look in the misty
distance like numberless cascades. It rains at last, a solid down-pour;
certain tree-trunks grow black, and the shining beech and birch and
poplar get a more vivid silver on their wet boles. The water is black
like ink. It is no longer even translucent, and overhead the red
scourges of the lightning fly, and the great thunder-roar of smitten
clouds rolls over us from hill to hill.

All these details you teach her and more, and paddle home with a mental
cargo of fresh joys and delicious memories. My young friend is
intelligent and clever, but she has never learned to observe. If she
wants to know how, there is a book will help her. Let her take with her
Ruskin's "Modern Painters." It will teach her much, not all. Nor do I
know of any other volume which will tell her more.[13] Despite its
faults, it has so many lessons in the modes of minute study of outside
nature that it becomes a valuable friend. Although ostensibly written to
aid artistic criticism, it does far more than this and yet not all.
Other books which might seem desirable are less so because they are
still more distinctly meant to teach or assist artists or amateurs. What
is yet wanted is a little treatise on the methods of observing exterior
nature. Above all it should be adapted to our own woods, skies, and
waters. What to look for as a matter of pleasure, and how to see and
record it, is a thing apart from such observation as leads to
classification, and is scientific in its aims. It is somewhat remote
also from the artist's study, which is a more complex business, and
tends to learn what can be rendered by pencil or brush and what cannot.
Its object at first is merely to give intelligent joy to the senses, to
cultivate them into acuteness, and to impress on the mind such records
as they ought to give us at their best.

[Footnote 13: "Frondes Agrestes," Ruskin, is a more handy book than
"Modern Painters," but is only selections from the greater volumes
recommended. "Deucalion" is yet harder reading, but will repay the
careful reader.]

Presuming the pupil to be like myself, powerless to use the pencil, she
is to learn how to put on paper in words what she sees. The result will
be what I may call _word-sketches_. Observe these are not to be for
other eyes. They make her diary of things seen and worthy of note.
Neither are they to be efforts to give elaborate descriptions. In the
hands of a master, such use of words makes a picture in which often he
sacrifices something, as the artist does, to get something else, and
strives chiefly to leave on the mind one dominant emotion just as did
the scene thus portrayed. A few words may do this or it may be an
elaborate work. The gift is a rare and great one. The word-paintings of
Ruskin hang forever in one's mental gallery, strong, true, poetical, and
capable of stirring you as the scenes described would have done, nay,
even more, for a great word-master has stood interpretative between you
and nature.

Miss Bronte was mistress of this art. Blackmore has it also. In some
writers it is so lightly managed as to approach the sketch, and is more
suggestive than fully descriptive. To see what I mean read the first few
chapters of "Miss Angel," by Anna Thackeray. But a sketch by a trained
and poetical observer is one thing; a sketch by a less gifted person is
quite another. My pupil must be content with the simplest, most honest,
unadorned record of things seen. Her training must look to this only.

What she should first seek to do is to be methodical and accurate and by
and by fuller. If wise she will first limit herself to small scenes, and
try to get notes of them somewhat in this fashion. She is, we suppose,
on the bank of a stream. Her notes run as follows:

Date, time of day, place. Hills to either side and their character; a
guess at their height; a river below, swift, broken, or placid; the
place of the sun, behind, in front, or overhead. Then the nature of the
trees and how the light falls on them or in them, according to their
kind. Next come color of wave and bank and sky, with questions as to
water-tints and their causes. Last of all, and here she must be simple
and natural, what mood of mind does it all bring to her, for every
landscape has its capacity to leave you with some general sense of its
awe, its beauty, its sadness, or its joyfulness.

Try this place again at some other hour, or in a storm, or under early
morning light, and make like notes. If she should go on at this pleasant
work, and one day return to the same spot, she will wonder how much more
she has now learned to see.

Trees she will find an enchanting study. Let her take a group of them
and endeavor to say on paper what makes each species so peculiar. The
form, color, and expression of the boles are to be noted. A reader may
smile at the phrase "expression," but look at a tattered old birch, or a
silvery young beech-hole, "modest and maidenly, clean of limb," or a
lightning-scarred pine. Tree-study has advantages because it is always
within reach. The axe has been so ruthlessly wielded that you must go
far into the woods to get the best specimens of the pine, and the
forests about our Maine lakes and in the Adirondacks have been sadly
despoiled of their aristocrats. To see trees at their savage best one
must go South, and seek the white-oaks of Carolina, the cypress of
Florida, but the parks of Philadelphia and Baltimore afford splendid
studies, and so also do the mountains of Virginia. Private taste and
enterprise is saving already much that will be a joy to our children. A
noble instance is the great wild park with which Colonel Parsons has
protected the Natural Bridge in Virginia. I saw there an arbor-vitae said
by botanists to be not less than nine hundred years old, a chestnut
twenty-six feet in girth at the height of my shoulders, and oaks past
praise. But trees are everywhere, and if my observant pupil likes them,
let her next note the mode in which the branches spread and their
proportion to the trunk. State it all in the fewest words. It is to be
only a help to memory. Then she comes to the leaf forms and the mode in
which they are massed, their dulness or translucency, how sunshine
affects their brilliancy, as it is above or falls laterally at morn or
eve. Perhaps she will note, too, on which the gray moss grows, and just
in what forms, and how the mosses or lichens gather on the north side of
trees and on what trees.

I may help my pupil if, like an artist teacher, I give one or two
illustrations, copied _verbatim_ from my note-books. The first was
written next morning, as it is a brief record of a night scene.

Time, July 21, 1887, 9 P.M. Ristigouche River, New Brunswick, Canada.
Black darkness. Hill outlines nearly lost in sky. River black, with
flashing bits of white rapid; banks have grayish rocks, and so seem to
be nearer than the dark stream limits. Sky looks level with hill-tops.
Water seems to come up close. Effect of being in a concave valley of
water, and all things draw in on me. Sense of awe. Camp-fire's red glare
on water. Sudden opening lift of sky. Hills recede. Water-level falls.
This is a barren, unadorned sketch, but it seems to tell the thing.

Or this, for a change. Newport. A beach. Time, August 1, 1887; 4 P.M.
About me cleft rocks, cleavage straight through the embedded pebbles.
Tones ruddy browns and grays. Gray beach. Sea-weed in heaps, deep pinks
and purples. Boisterous waves, loaded with reddish seaweed, blue, with
white crests, torn off in long ribbons by wind. Curious reds and blues
as waves break, carrying sea-weed. Fierce gale off land. Dense fog, sun
above it and to right. Everywhere yellow light. Sea strange dingy
yellow. Leaves an unnatural green. Effect weird. Sense of unusualness.

Of course, such study of nature leads the intelligent to desire to know
why the cleaved rock shows its sharp divisions as if cut by a knife, why
yellow light gives such strangeness of tints, and thus draws on my pupil
to larger explanatory studies. So much the better.

If when she bends over a foot-square area of mouldered tree-trunk, deep
in the silence of a Maine wood, she has a craving to know the names and
ways of the dozen mosses she notes, of the minute palm-like growths, of
the odd toadstools, it will not lessen the joy this liliputian
representation of a tropical jungle gives to her. Nor will she like less
the splendor of sunset tints on water to know the secrets of the
pleasant tricks of refraction and reflection.

I do not want to make too much of a small matter. No doubt many people
do this kind of thing, but in most volumes of travel it is easy to see
that the descriptions lack method, and show such want of training in
observation as would not be noticeable had their authors gone through
the modest studies I am now inviting my pupil to make.

Her temptation will be to note most the large, the grotesque, or the
startling aspects of nature. In time these will be desirable as studies,
but at first she must try smaller and limited sketches. They are as
difficult, but do not change as do the grander scenes and objects. I
knew a sick girl, who, bedfast for years, used to amuse herself with
what her windows and an opera-glass commanded in the way of sky and
foliage. The buds in spring-time, especially the horse-chestnuts, were
the subject of quite curious notes, and cloud-forms an endless source of
joy and puzzle to describe. One summer a great effort was made, and she
was taken to the country, and a day or two later carried down near a
brook, where they swung her hammock. I found her quite busy a week
later, and happy in having discovered that the wave-curves over a rock
were like the curves of some shells. My pupil will soon learn, as she
did, that a good opera-glass is indispensable. Let any one who has not
tried it look with such a glass at sunset-decked water in motion. I am
sure they will be startled by its beauty, and this especially if the
surface be seen from a boat, because merely to look down on water is to
make no acquaintance with its loveliness. A scroll of paper to limit the
view and cut out side-lights also intensifies color. The materials my
pupil is to use are words, and words only. Constant dissatisfaction with
the little they can tell us is the fate of all who use them. The
sketcher, the great word-painter, and even the poet feels this when,
like Browning, he seems so to suffer from their weakness as to be
troubled into audacious employment of the words that will not obey his
will, torment them as he may. Yet, as my pupil goes on, she will find
her vocabulary growing, and will become more and more accurate in her
use and more ingenious in her combination of words to give her meaning.
As she learns to feel strongly--for she will in time--her love will give
her increasing power both to see and to state what she sees, because
this gentle passion for nature in all her moods is like a true-love
affair, and grows by what it feeds upon.

When we come to sketch in words the rare and weird effects, the storm,
the sunsets that seem not of earth, the cascade, or the ravage of the
"windfall," it is wise not to be lured into fanciful word-painting, and
the temptation is large. Yet the simplest expression of facts is then
and for such rare occasions the best, and often by far the most
forceful.

I venture, yet again, to give from a note-book of last year a few lines
as to a sunset. I was on a steam-yacht awaiting the yachts which were
racing for the Newport cup.

August 6, time, sunset; level sea; light breeze; fire-red sun on
horizon; vast masses of intensely-lighted scarlet clouds; a broad track
of fiery red on water; three yachts, with all sail set, coming over this
sea of red towards us. Their sails are a vivid green. The vast mass of
reds and scarlets give one a strange sense of terror as if something
would happen. I could go on to expand upon "this color such as shall be
in heaven," and on the sails which seemed to be green, but for the
purpose of a sketch and to refresh the traitor memory in the future, the
lines I wrote are enough and are yet baldly simple.

Out of this practice grow, as I have said, love of accuracy, larger
insights, careful valuation of words, and also an increasing and more
intelligent love of art in all its forms; nor will all these gains in
the power to observe be without practical value in life.

I trust that I have said enough to tempt others to try each in their way
to do what has been for me since boyhood a constant summer amusement.

THE END.

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