Washington Square

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. It was an element in Doctor Sloper's reputation that his learning and his skill were very evenly balanced; he was What you might call a scholarly doctor, and yet there was nothing abstract in his remedies - he always ordered you to take something. Though he was felt to be extremely thorough, he was not uncomfortably theoretic; and if he some times explained matters rather more minutely than might seem of use to the patient, he never went so far (like some practitioners one had heard of) as to trust to the explanation alone, but always left behind him an inscrutable prescription. There were some doctors that left the prescription without offering any explanation at all; and he did not belong to that class either, which was after all the most vulgar. It will be seen that I am describing a clever man; and this is really the reason why Doctor Sloper had be come a local celebrity.