NON-FICTION: The Looking Doctor

Of physicians it should be remembered that they spend their time among the sick, the wayward, the abnormal of this world. In philosophy their knowledge of our flesh-faults is a heavy balance wheel to the tangents of our loose idealism. As critics of society, they tend to hush the hallelujah chorus, introducing sardonic groans for those imperfections of mankind at which the Chautauqua-shouters, sniffing the electric air of a millennium, flap their coattails. The true earnest of a physician’s worth outside his consulting room* is therefore the degree to which he refrains from hollow croaking; the degree to which he is conscious and confident of sound normality among the masses from which his clientele is drawn.

Dr. Collins of Manhattan, after the experience of a general practice, turned neurologist. He has been asked to unravel the nervous, sexual and emotional snarls of thousands of well-to-do women and some men. Of all U. S. parishes, his is perhaps the most conducive not only to hysteria and hypochondria, especially among its most numerous non-native members, but also to genuine disorders of body, mind and soul. Doctors in less complex communities may well envy the scope for observation that has been his. the diversity and clearcutness of his cases. Proportionately, he has a more rigid test to pass before his discussion of sexual unhappiness, his strictures on adult-infantilism, his “shudder” and “premonition” of a new Dark Age, can be accepted by the fairly happy rank and unselfconscious file whose physicians still give them castor oil, gruff instructions.

How much of Dr. Collins’ pungent, cutting talk is the sheer tripe of a loquacious boudoir professional? How well does this exceedingly articulate if not glib man of the big-city clinic know the average human being?

The answers seem to be: “Not much tripe” and “Very well in deed.” In chapters on “The Sex Urge,” “Frigidity and Incompatibility”, and “Matrimony Wreckers” there is much rehearsal of sex-psychology— prudish parents, prurient children; ignorant girls, boorish men — that will seem, in its sanity, almost old-fashioned to those who are brave enough to buy the book after they learn that the long, frank fourth chapter is on “Homosexuality.” There is even the statement: “If man is polygamous, woman is polyandrous,” with the usual demonstration that each is nothing of the kind. If that fails to reassure the timid, let them turn to “Do Characters in Fiction Behave Like Human Beings” for fresh proof that this doctor’s interests and understanding can reach from Harold Bell Wright to Anatole France without losing sight of actual human conduct. Let them examine “The Fundamentalists and Modernists of Psychology” and be assured that Dr. Collins takes his Freud with a prodigious grain of salt, practical and historical.

Then, after exploring, for the sake of greater tolerance toward three in every hundred of his fellows, the chapter on “urnings” and “uranism” —in which the four long letters, invented or not, are as remarkable as anything that will be published this year—let the reader attend a chapter which may mightily shock and profit parents teachers, preachers, public officials and alleged adults of every sort— the chapter on “Adult Infantilism In a Nation, In an Individual, In Literature.”

“Adult-infantilism is our chief deficiency as a people.” The symptoms are clubbiness, boasted possessions and achievement, love of making rules (laws) and breaking them, suggestibility (advertising) conformity (fashions), fads, seriousness at play (bald golfers “like children playing Papa and Mama”), love of praise, extremes in speech (“marvelous”, “wonderful”), calling wives “the girls’ and husbands “the boys”, short-lived curiosity, emotional unbalance and shallowness, limitation of social intercourse to personalities and amusements. The causes are: coddling parents (“They were allowed to meet the hazards of life”) prosperity through science; mass education, to the neglect of culture. A result: “We are forever carrying our sterile minds and tired bodies to foreign lands.”

The individual in whom adult-infantilism was notably seen is, of course, William J. Bryan.

In literature, Anne Parrish’s Victor Campion (The Perennial Bachelor) and Sherwood Anderson’s Fred Grey (Dark Laughter) are proclaimed the best recent examples of “that cruel maldevelopment.” Childhood’s innocence is not scorned. The doctor appraises it warmly in the writings of A. A Milne, Henry James, James Barrie, Daisy Ashford, Nathalia Crane. His sterner brief is simply against those qualities in children which, smothering innocence, are most often carried beyond puberty—meanness, stupidity, intolerance.

The Significance of a doctor’s diagnosis is in proportion to his ability to prescribe a remedy. This doctor has a simple cure in mind. He concludes (in effect) : “Go to the library. Read the newspapers newsmagazines, literary reviews. Follow your leads into good books.”

*THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT LOVE AND LIFE— Joseph Collins, M. D.—Doran ($3).