doctors, from whom Scotland reaps more benefit, and to whom she is
perhaps more ungrateful than to any other class of men, excepting her
schoolmasters.

Such a rural man of medicine is usually the inhabitant of some pretty
borough or village, which forms the central point of his practice. But,
besides attending to such cases as the village may afford, he is day and
night at the service of every one who may command his assistance within
a circle of forty miles in diameter, untraversed by roads in many
directions, and including moors, mountains, rivers, and lakes. For late
and dangerous journeys through an inaccessible country for services of
the most essential kind, rendered at the expense, or risk at least, of
his own health and life, the Scottish village doctor receives at best a
very moderate recompense, often one which is totally inadequate, and
very frequently none whatever. He has none of the ample resources proper
to the brothers of the profession. in an English town. The burgesses of
a Scottish borough are rendered, by their limited means of luxury,
inaccessible to gout, surfeits, and all the comfortable chronic diseases
which are attendant on wealth and indolence. Four years, or so, of
abstemiousness, enable them to stand an election dinner; and there is no
hope of broken heads among a score or two of quiet electors, who settle
the business over a table. There the mothers of the state never make a
point of pouring, in the course of every revolving year, a certain
quantity of doctor's stuff through the bowels of their beloved children.
Every old woman, from the Townhead to the Townfit, can prescribe a dose
of salts, or spread a plaster; and it is only when a fever or a palsy
renders matters serious, that the assistance of the doctor is invoked by
his neighbours in the borough.

But still the man of science cannot complain of inactivity or want of