How it is that poor men's wives, who have no cold fowl and port wine on which to be coshered up, nurse their children without difficulty, whereas the wives of rich men, who eat and drink everything that is good, cannot do so, we will for the present leave to the doctors and mothers to settle between them.
And then Miss Thorne was great about teeth. Little Johnny Bold had been troubled for the last few days with his first incipient masticator, and with that freemasonry which exists between ladies, Miss Thorne became aware of the fact before Eleanor had half finished her wing. The old lady prescribed at once a receipt which had been much in vogue in the young days of her grandmother, and warned Eleanor with solemn voice against the fallacies of modern medicine.
'Take his coral, my dear,' said she, 'and rub it well with carrot-juice; rub it till the juice dries on it, and then give it to him to play with--'
'But he hasn't got a coral,' said Eleanor.
'Not got a coral!' said Miss Thorne, with almost angry vehemence.
'Not got a coral!--How can you expect that he should cut his teeth?
Have you got Daffy's Elixir?'
Eleanor explained that she had not. It had not been ordered by Mr Rerechild, the Barchester doctor whom she employed; and then the young mother mentioned some shockingly modern succedaneum, which Mr Rerechild's new lights had taught him to recommend.
Miss Thorne looked awfully severe. 'Take care, my dear,' said she, 'that the man knows what he is about; take care he doesn't destroy your little boy. 'But'--and her voice softened into sorrow as she said it, and spoke more in pity than in anger--'but I don't know who there is in Barchester now that you can trust. Poor dear old Dr Bumpwell, indeed--'
'Why, Miss Thorne, he died when I was a little girl.'
'Yes, my dear, he did, and an unfortunate day it was for Barchester. As to those young men that have come up since' (Mr Rerechild, by the by, was quite as old as Miss Thorne herself), 'one doesn't know where they came from or who they are, or whether they know anything about their business or not.'
'I think there are very clever men in Barchester,' said Eleanor.
'Perhaps there may be; only I don't know them; and it's admitted on all sides that medical men aren't now what they used to be. They used to be talented, observing, educated men. But now any whipper-snapper out of an apothecary's shop can call himself a doctor. I believe no kind of education is now thought necessary.'
Eleanor was herself the widow of a medical man, and felt a little inclined to resent all these hard sayings. But Miss Thorne was so essentially good-natured that it was impossible to resent anything she said. She therefore sipped her wine and finished her chicken.
'At any rate, my dear, don't forget the carrot-juice, and by all means get him a coral at once. My grandmother Thorne had the best teeth in the county, and carried them to the grave with her at eighty. I have heard her say it was all the carrot-juice. She couldn't bear the Barchester doctors. Even poor Dr Bumpwell didn't please her.' It clearly never occurred to Miss Thorne that some fifty years ago Dr Bumpwell was only a rising man, and therefore as much in need of character in the eyes of the then ladies of Ullathorne, as the present doctors were in her own.
The archdeacon made a very good lunch, and talked to his host about turnip-drillers and new machines for reaping; while the host, thinking it only polite to attend to a stranger, and fearing that perhaps he might not care about turnip crops on a Sunday, mooted all manner of ecclesiastical subjects.
