“There are one or two elementary rules to be observed in the way of handling patients,” he remarked, seating himself on the table and swinging his legs. “The most obvious is that you must never let them see that you want them. It should be pure condescension on your part seeing them at all; and the more difficulties you throw in the way of it, the more they think of it. Break your patients in early, and keep them well to heel. Never make the fatal mistake of being polite to them. Many foolish young men fall into this habit, and are ruined in consequence. Now, this is my form”--he sprang to the door, and putting his two hands to his mouth he bellowed: “Stop your confounded jabbering down there! I might as well be living above a poultry show! There, you see,” he added to me, “they will think ever so much more of me for that.” “But don’t they get offended?” I asked. “I’m afraid not. I have a name for this sort of thing now, and they have come to expect it. But an offended patient--I mean a thoroughly insulted one--is the finest advertisement in the world. If it is a woman, she runs clacking about among her friends until your name becomes a household word, and they all pretend to sympathise with her, and agree among themselves that you must be a remarkably discerning man. I quarrelled with one man about the state of his gall duct, and it ended by my throwing him down the stairs. What was the result? He talked so much about it that the whole village from which he came, sick and well, trooped to see me. The little country practitioner who had been buttering them up for a quarter of a century found that he might as well put up his shutters. It’s human nature, my boy, and you can’t alter it. Eh, what? You make yourself cheap and you become cheap. You put a high price on yourself and they rate you at that price. Suppose I set up in Harley Street to-morrow, and made it all nice and easy, with hours from ten to three, do you think I should get a patient? I might starve first. How would I work it? I should let it be known that I only saw patients from midnight until two in the morning, and that bald-headed people must pay double. That would set people talking, their curiosity would be stimulated, and in four months the street would be blocked all night. Eh, what? laddie, you’d go yourself. That’s my principle here. I often come in of a morning and send them all about their business, tell them I’m going off to the country for a day. I turn away forty pounds, and it’s worth four hundred as an advertisement!” “But I understood from the plate that the consultations were gratis.”