Page:Chernyshevsky - What's to be done? A romance.djvu/291

Rh of four millions! But Katia read and dreamed, and the suitors despaired. She was already seventeen, and she read and dreamed and did not fall in love. But suddenly she began to grow thin and pale, and at last fell seriously ill.

was not in active practice, but he did not consider that he had a right to refuse to attend consultations of physicians. And at about that time—a year after he had become a professor and a year before his marriage with Véra Pavlovna—the bigwigs of St. Petersburg practice began to invite him to their consultations often,—even oftener than he liked. These invitations had their motives. The first was that the existence of a certain Claude Bernard of Paris had been established; one of the aforesaid bigwigs, having—no one knows why—gone to Paris for a scientific purpose, had seen with his own eyes a real flesh-and-blood Claude Bernard; he had recommended himself to him by his rank, his profession, his decorations, and the high standing of his patients. After listening to him about half an hour, Claude Bernard had said to him: "It was quite useless for you to come to Paris to study medical progress; you did not need to leave St. Petersburg for that." The bigwig took that for an endorsement of his own labors, and, returning to St. Petersburg, pronounced the name of Claude Bernard at least ten times a day, adding at least five times, "my learned friend," or, "my illustrious companion in science." After that, then, how could they avoid inviting Kirsánoff to the consultations? It could not be otherwise. The other reason was still more important: all the bigwigs saw that Kirsanoff would not try to get away their practice, for he did not accept patients, even when begged to take them. It was well known that a great many of the bigwig practitioners followed this line of conduct: when the patient (in the bigwig's opinion) was approaching an inevitable death and ill-intentioned destiny had so arranged things that it was impossible to defeat it, either by sending the patient to the springs or by any other sort of exportation to foreign parts, it then became necessary to place him in the hands of another doctor, and in such cases the bigwig was even almost ready to pay money to have the patient taken off his hands. Kirsanoff rarely accepted offers of this sort, and to get rid of them generally recommended his friends in active practice, keeping for himself only such cases as were interesting from a scientific standpoint. Why should they not invite to consultations, then, a colleague known to Claude Bernard and not engaged in a race after patronage?

Polosoff, the millionaire, had one of these bigwigs for a doctor, and, when Katérina Vassilievna fell seriously ill, the medical consultations were always made up of bigwigs. Finally she became so weak that the bigwigs resolved to call in Kirsanoff. In fact, the problem was a very difficult one for them; the patient had no disease, and yet she was growing perceptibly weaker. But some disease must be