The Hillyars and the Burtons by Henry Kingsley

WHEN the morn dawned, I went and looked at him as he lay asleep. He was a terrible ruin. Try to picture to yourself some young round face as it will be when it is old, and you will find it impossible. Again imagine that you have skipped forty years, and met that face again. Would you know it? I should hardly have known Erne.

We had a very clever doctor in Romilly, a man so clever and so répandu in his profession, that I have known him fetched by steamer to Melbourne, in what Miss Burke would call "a hurry," to attend important consultations; his expenses and a hand-ome fee being promised him, and a total immunity against action in civil process being guaranteed him on the honor of the faculty. He had a sympathy with all his patients, inasmuch as he was a prey to a devouring disease himself: that which has been so oddly named, dipsomania, as if an addiction to stimulants had anything to do with thirst. This doctor, when sober (he used to get sober sometimes, as a dissipation, though it played the deuse with his nerves), was a feeble thing, who used to try to dig in his garden; and was always going to give a lecture; but when d--Well, he never was the worse for liquor, generally rather the better,--a perfect king. He had attained such a dictatorship in his profession, that his addiction to brandy was looked on as an amiable weakness by the most respectable people. As for the midwives, they none of them felt really safe without Dr. C. It must not be supposed that the doctor ever got drunk.