The Fighting Doctor

1912. Martin is also the author of The Snob: the Story of a Marriage; Tillie, the Mennonite Maid, The Crossways, etc. The story begins: Doctor Thorpe was taking a hasty dinner before his evening office hour, which of late had actually begun to be rather filled with patients, although the young physician was having a long, hard struggle among the rural Pennsylvania Dutch to overcome their prejudice against the modern method of dispensing with drugs in favor of sanitary living; not to mention the much deeper prejudice against a doctor who was a city stranger and who did not mind his own business, but went about trying to stir up the whole sleepy township with his howl for good roads and no graft. Also the rumor, spread abroad by his prying and loquacious, albeit loyal, housekeeper, of his tony ways and other eccentricities, such as his insisting upon his meals being served in the dining-room instead of the kitchen; his daily (not weekly) baths; his having the parlor shutters open on week days as well as Sundays; his motor runabout; his sleeping on a cot on the roof of the porch; these and other madnesses had served to intensify the local prejudice against a towner.