Lucius Davoren, Volume I by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

There was not a plethora of patients in the Shadrack-road, nor were the cases which presented themselves to Mr. Davoren for the most part of a deeply-interesting character. He had a good supply of casualties, from broken limbs, dislocated shoulders, collar bones, and crushed ribs, down to black eyes; he had numerous cases of a purely domestic nature-cases which called him out of his bed of nights; and he had a good many small patients in the narrow streets and airless alleys-little sufferers whose quiet endurance, whose meek acceptance of pain as a necessity of their lives, moved him more than he would have cared to confess. So profound a pity as he sometimes felt for these little ones would have seemed hardly professional. His practice among children was singularly fortunate. He did not drench them with those nauseous compounds which previous practitioners had freely administered in a rough-and-ready off-hand fashion; but he did, with a very small amount of drugs, for the most part succeed in setting these delicate machines in order, restoring health's natural hue to pallid cheeks, breathing life into feeble lungs. It was painful to him often to find himself obliged to prescribe good broths and nourishing solids where an empty larder and an unfurnished purse stared him, as it were, palpably in the face; and there were many occasions when he eked out his instructions with contributions in kind-a shilling's worth of beef or a couple of mutton-chops, from the butcher at the end of the street, a gill of port from the nearest tavern. But him, too, Poverty held in his iron grip, and it was not always that he could afford to part with so much as a shilling.

Such luxuries as fresh air and clean water-restoratives which might be supposed easy of access even in the Shadrack-road district, though there were dwellings around and about Shadrack-Basin where even these were hardly obtainable-he urged upon his patients with all his might, and in the households he attended there arose a startling innovation in the way of open windows. From these very poor patients he, of course, received no money; but he had other patrons, small tradesmen and their families, who paid him, and paid him honourably, down on the nail for the most part, and on a scale he felt he must blush to remember by and by when he became a distinguished west-end physician. Small as the payments were, however, they enabled him to live, so very small were his own requirements. His Amati ate nothing. He had, himself, a stoical indifference to good living, and could have sustained himself contentedly upon pemmican, within reach of all the richest and rarest viands earth could yield to a Lucullus. His establishment consisted of an ancient serving-woman, who had withdrawn herself from a useful career of charing for his exclusive service, a woman who returned to the bosom of her family every night and came back to her post in the early morning, and a boy of a low-spirited turn of mind and an inconvenient tendency to bleeding at the nose. It irked him that he was obliged to pay the rent of an entire house, however small, requiring for his own uses at most three rooms. But people had told him that he could not hope to do any good in the Shadrack-Basin district if he began his professional career in lodgings; and he was fain to submit. He concluded that there must be some lurking element of aristocracy in the minds of the Shadrackites, not suggested by their outward habits, which were of the whelk-and-periwinkle-eating order.