Doctor Therne
()
About this ebook
Sir Henry Rider Haggard was an English writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and the creator of the Lost World literary genre. His stories, situated at the lighter end of the scale of Victorian literature, continue to be popular and influential. He was also involved in agricultural reform and improvement in the British Empire.
His breakout novel was King Solomon's Mines (1885), which was to be the first in a series telling of the multitudinous adventures of its protagonist, Allan Quatermain.
Haggard was made a Knight Bachelor in 1912 and a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1919. He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Conservative candidate for the Eastern division of Norfolk in 1895. The locality of Rider, British Columbia, was named in his memory.
H. Rider Haggard
H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) was an English adventure novelist. Haggard studied law, but rather than pursuing a legal career took a secretarial position in what is now South Africa. His time there provided the inspiration for some of his most popular novels, including She (1887), an early classic of the lost world fantasy genre and one of the bestselling books of all time.
Read more from H. Rider Haggard
King Solomon's Mines Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Ivory Child Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Benita: An African Romance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dawn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Treasure of the Lake Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Tale of Three Lions Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Smith and the Pharaohs and Other Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hunter Quatermain's Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Child of Storm Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Yellow God: An Idol of Africa Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Finished Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Brethren Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ghost Kings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Virgin of the Sun Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wizard Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Moon of Israel: A Tale of the Exodus Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King Solomon's Mines (illustrated by A. C. Michael) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nada the Lily Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Allan Quatermain: The Zulu Trilogy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Lady of Blossholme Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Swallow: A Tale of the Great Trek Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The World's Desire (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Wisdom's Daughter Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related to Doctor Therne
Related ebooks
Doctor Therne Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDoctor Therne Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDoctor Therne Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDoctor Therne Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDoctor Therne: "Laughter and bitterness are often the veils with which a sore heart wraps its weakness from the world." Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDoctor Therne Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDr Therne by H. Rider Haggard - Delphi Classics (Illustrated) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRound the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRound the Red Lamp Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Round The Red Lamp (1894) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMedicine in the Middle Ages: Surviving the Times Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dr Nikola's Experiment: 'In due course I entered a hospital'' Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Wanderings of a Spiritualist Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Mysteries of Montreal: Being Recollections of a Female Physician Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFace to the Sun Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5A Study in Scarlet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Darrow Enigma Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn White Raiment Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Savant's Vendetta Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Dawn of a To-morrow Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Wanderings of a Spiritualist : On the Warpath in Australia, 1920-1921 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStavrakis Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhat's Wrong with the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Notes from the Underground Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnnatural Death Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Call to Arms Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Doctor On The Ball Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study in Scarlet. and The Country of the Saints Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhat's Wrong with the World (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNotes from Underground (The Unabridged Garnett Translation) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Classics For You
The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wuthering Heights (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Things They Carried Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Little Women (Seasons Edition -- Winter) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Master & Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Master and Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Republic by Plato Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rebecca Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Animal Farm: A Fairy Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Count of Monte Cristo (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Learn French! Apprends l'Anglais! THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY: In French and English Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Grapes of Wrath Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mythos Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Have Always Lived in the Castle Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Jungle: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bell Jar: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Count of Monte-Cristo English and French Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ulysses: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sense and Sensibility (Centaur Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The End of the Affair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Doctor Therne
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Doctor Therne - H. Rider Haggard
DOCTOR THERNE
………………
H. Rider Haggard
DODO COLLECTIONS
Thank you for reading. In the event that you appreciate this book, please consider sharing the good word(s) by leaving a review, or connect with the author.
This book is a work of fiction; its contents are wholly imagined.
All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.
Copyright © 2015 by H. Rider Haggard
Interior design by Pronoun
Distribution by Pronoun
TABLE OF CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
CHAPTER I: THE DILIGENCE
CHAPTER II: THE HACIENDA
CHAPTER III: SIR JOHN BELL
CHAPTER IV: STEPHEN STRONG GOES BAIL
CHAPTER V: THE TRIAL
CHAPTER VI: THE GATE OF DARKNESS
CHAPTER VII: CROSSING THE RUBICON
CHAPTER VIII: BRAVO THE A.V.’S
CHAPTER IX: FORTUNE
CHAPTER X: JANE MEETS DR. MERCHISON
CHAPTER XI: THE COMING OF THE RED-HEADED MAN
CHAPTER XII: THE SHADOW OF PESTILENCE
CHAPTER XIII: HARVEST
AUTHOR’S NOTE
………………
SOME MONTHS SINCE THE LEADERS of the Government dismayed their supporters and astonished the world by a sudden surrender to the clamour of the anti-vaccinationists. In the space of a single evening, with a marvellous versatility, they threw to the agitators the ascertained results of generations of the medical faculty, the report of a Royal Commission, what are understood to be their own convictions, and the President of the Local Government Board. After one ineffectual fight the House of Lords answered to the whip, and, under the guise of a graceful concession,
the health of the country was given without appeal into the hand of the Conscientious Objector.
In his perplexity it has occurred to an observer of these events—as a person who in other lands has seen and learned something of the ravages of smallpox among the unvaccinated—to try to forecast their natural and, in the view of many, their almost certain end. Hence these pages from the life history of the pitiable, but unfortunate Dr. Therne.[*] Absit omen! May the prophecy be falsified! But, on the other hand, it may not. Some who are very competent to judge say that it will not; that, on the contrary, this strange paralysis of the most powerful ministry of the generation
must result hereafter in much terror, and in the sacrifice of innocent lives.
………………
[*] It need hardly be explained that Dr. Therne himself is a character convenient to the dramatic purpose of the story, and in no way intended to be taken as a type of anti- vaccinationist medical men, who are, the author believes, as conscientious in principle as they are select in number.
………………
The importance of the issue to those helpless children from whom the State has thus withdrawn its shield, is this writer’s excuse for inviting the public to interest itself in a medical tale. As for the moral, each reader can fashion it to his fancy.
………………
CHAPTER I: THE DILIGENCE
………………
JAMES THERNE IS NOT MY real name, for why should I publish it to the world? A year or two ago it was famous—or infamous—enough, but in that time many things have happened. There has been a war, a continental revolution, two scandals of world-wide celebrity, one moral and the other financial, and, to come to events that interest me particularly as a doctor, an epidemic of Asiatic plague in Italy and France, and, stranger still, an outbreak of the mediaeval grain sickness, which is believed to have carried off 20,000 people in Russia and German Poland, consequent, I have no doubt, upon the wet season and poor rye harvest in those countries.
These occurrences and others are more than enough to turn the public mind from the recollection of the appalling smallpox epidemic that passed over England last autumn two years, of which the first fury broke upon the city of Dunchester, my native place, that for many years I had the honour to represent in Parliament. The population of Dunchester, it is true, is smaller by over five thousand souls, and many of those who survive are not so good-looking as they were, but the gap is easily filled and pock-marks are not hereditary. Also, such a horror will never happen again, for now the law of compulsory vaccination is strong enough! Only the dead have cause of complaint, those who were cut off from the world and despatched hot-foot whither we see not. Myself I am certain of nothing; I know too much about the brain and body to have much faith in the soul, and I pray to God that I may be right. Ah! there it comes in. If a God, why not the rest, and who shall say there is no God? Somehow it seems to me that more than once in my life I have seen His Finger.
Yet I pray that I am right, for if I am wrong what a welcome awaits me yonder when grief and chloral and that slight weakness of the heart
have done their work.
Yes—five thousand of them or more in Dunchester alone, and, making every allowance, I suppose that in this one city there were very many of these—young people mostly—who owed their deaths to me, since it was my persuasion, my eloquent arguments, working upon the minds of their prejudiced and credulous elders, that surely, if indirectly, brought their doom upon them. A doctor is not infallible, he may make mistakes.
Quite so, and if a mistake of his should kill a few thousands, why, that is the act of God (or of Fate) working through his blindness. But if it does not happen to have been a mistake, if, for instance, all those dead, should they still live in any place or shape, could say to me, "James Therne, you are the murderer of our bodies, since, for your own ends, you taught us that which you knew not to be the truth."
How then? I ask. So—let them say it if they will. Let all that great cloud of witnesses compass me about, lads and maidens, children and infants, whose bones cumber the churchyards yonder in Dunchester. I defy them, for it is done and cannot be undone. Yet, in their company are two whose eyes I dread to meet: Jane, my daughter, whose life was sacrificed through me, and Ernest Merchison, her lover, who went to seek her in the tomb.
They would not reproach me now, I know, for she was too sweet and loved me too well with all my faults, and, if he proved pitiless in the first torment of his loss, Merchison was a good and honest man, who, understanding my remorse and misery, forgave me before he died. Still, I dread to meet them, who, if that old fable be true and they live, read me for what I am. Yet why should I fear, for all this they knew before they died, and, knowing, could forgive? Surely it is with another vengeance that I must reckon.
Well, after her mother’s death my daughter was the only being whom I ever truly loved, and no future mental hell that the imagination can invent would have power to make me suffer more because of her than I have always suffered since the grave closed over her—the virgin martyr sacrificed on the altar of a false prophet and a coward.
I come of a family of doctors. My grandfather, Thomas Therne, whose name still lives in medicine, was a doctor in the neighbourhood of Dunchester, and my father succeeded to his practice and nothing else, for the old gentleman had lived beyond his means. Shortly after my father’s marriage he sold this practice and removed into Dunchester, where he soon acquired a considerable reputation as a surgeon, and prospered, until not long after my birth, just as a brilliant career seemed to be opening itself to him, death closed his book for ever. In attending a case of smallpox, about four months before I was born, he contracted the disease, but the attack was not considered serious and he recovered from it quickly. It would seem, however, that it left some constitutional weakness, for a year later he was found to be suffering from tuberculosis of the lungs, and was ordered to a warmer climate.
Selling his Dunchester practice for what it would fetch to his assistant, Dr. Bell, my father came to Madeira—whither, I scarcely know why, I have also drifted now that all is over for me—for here he hoped to be able to earn a living by doctoring the English visitors. This, however, he could not do, since the climate proved no match for his disease, though he lingered for nearly two years, during which time he spent all the money that he had. When he died there was scarcely enough left to pay for his funeral in the little churchyard yonder that I can see from the windows of this quinta. Where he lies exactly I do not know as no record was kept, and the wooden cross, the only monument that my mother could afford to set over him, has long ago rotted away.
Some charitable English people helped my mother to return to England, where we went to live with her mother, who existed on a pension of about 120 pounds a year, in a fishing-village near Brighton. Here I grew up, getting my education—a very good one by the way—at a cheap day school. My mother’s wish was that I should become a sailor like her own father, who had been a captain in the Navy, but the necessary money was not forthcoming to put me into the Royal Navy, and my liking for the sea was not strong enough to take me into the merchant service.
From the beginning I wished to be a doctor like my father and grandfather before me, for I knew that I was clever, and I knew also that successful doctors make a great deal of money. Ground down as I had been by poverty from babyhood, already at nineteen years of age I desired money above everything on earth. I saw then, and subsequent experience has only confirmed my views, that the world as it has become under the pressure of high civilisation is a world for the rich. Leaving material comforts and advantages out of the question, what ambition can a man satisfy without money? Take the successful politicians for instance, and it will be found that almost every one of them is rich. This country is too full; there is scant room for the individual. Only intellectual Titans can force their heads above the crowd, and, as a rule, they have not even then the money to take them higher. If I had my life over again—and it is my advice to all young men of ability and ambition—I would leave the old country and settle in America or in one of the great colonies. There, where the conditions are more elastic and the competition is not so cruel, a hard-working man of talent does not need to be endowed with fortune to enable him to rise to the top of the tree.
Well, my desire was to be accomplished, for as it chanced a younger brother of my father, who during his lifetime had never taken any notice of me, died and left me 750 pounds. Seven hundred and fifty pounds! To me at that time it was colossal wealth, for it enabled us to rent some rooms in London, where I entered myself as a medical student at University College.
There is no need for me to dwell upon my college career, but if any one were to take the trouble to consult the old records he would find that it was sufficiently brilliant. I worked hard, and I had a natural, perhaps an hereditary liking, for the work. Medicine always fascinated me. I think it the greatest of the sciences, and from the beginning I was determined that I would be among the greatest of its masters.
At four and twenty, having finished my curriculum with high honours—I was gold medallist of my year in both medicine and surgery—I became house-surgeon to one of the London hospitals. After my term of office was over I remained at the hospital for another year, for I wished to make a practical study of my profession in all its branches before starting a private practice. At the end of this time my mother died while still comparatively young. She had never really recovered from the loss of my father, and, though it was long about it, sorrow sapped her strength at last. Her loss was a shock to me, although in fact we had few tastes in common. To divert my mind, and also because I was somewhat run down and really needed a change, I asked a friend of mine who was a director of a great steamship line running to the West Indies and Mexico to give me a trip out, offering my medicine services in return for the passage. This he agreed to do with pleasure; moreover, matters were so arranged that I could stop in Mexico for three months and rejoin the vessel on her next homeward trip.
After a very pleasant voyage I reached Vera Cruz. It is a quaint and in some ways a pretty place, with its tall cool-looking houses and narrow streets, not unlike Funchal, only more tropical. Whenever I think of it, however, the first memories that leap to my mind are those of the stench of the open drains and of the scavenger carts going their rounds with the zaphilotes or vultures actually sitting upon them. As it happened, those carts were very necessary then, for a yellow fever epidemic was raging in the place. Having nothing particular to do I stopped there for three weeks to study it, working in the hospitals with the local doctors, for I felt no fear of yellow fever—only one contagious disease terrifies me, and with that I was soon destined to make acquaintance.
At length I arranged