Stray Studies from England and ItalyGreene, John Richard
History
Stray Studies from England and Italy
Greene, John Richard
Italy -- Description and travel
But the chaplain is not here, as in other little Britains, the centre of
social life; he is superseded by the doctor. The winter resort in fact
owes its origin to the doctor. The little village or the country town
looks with awe upon the man who has discovered for it a future of
prosperity, at whose call hosts of rich strangers come flocking from the
ends of the earth, at whose bidding villas rise white among the olives,
and parades stretch along the shore. "I found it a fishing hamlet," the
doctor may say with Augustus, "and I leave it a city." It is amusing to
see the awful submission which the city-builder expects in return. The
most refractory of patients trembles at the threat of his case being
abandoned. The doctor has his theories about situation. You are
lymphatic, and are ordered down to the very edge of the sea; you are
excitable, and must hurry from your comfortable lodgings to the highest
nook among the hills. He has his theories about diet, and you sink
obediently to milk and water. His one object of hostility and contempt
is your London physician. He tears up his rival's prescriptions with
contempt, he reverses the treatment. He sighs as you bid him farewell to
return to advice which is so likely to prove fatal. The London
physician, it is true, hints that though the oracle of the winter resort
is a clever man he is also a quack. But a quack soars into a greatness
beyond criticism when he creates cities and rules hundreds of patients
with his nod.
SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
V.
SAN REMO.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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