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The Perfect Doctor. Professionally Lord Dawson is famed for his gastroenteric studies and publications. However, his practice is general and he is socially famed for his bedside manner. When he makes a call the patient is usually gently distracted by his appearance: build slight; hair dark, greying at the temples; mustache slightly lighter than the hair; eyes blue, kindly, twinkly; face lined, still dimply at 64. His manner is gentle, understanding, at the same time businesslike and alert. He makes a swift, thorough examination, usually reaches a diagnosis at the bedside. If his patient is a hysterical woman, he assumes a brusqueness which usually is efficacious. He will scold a woman for "thoughtlessly attempting to pour a quart into a pint bottle"—all the time sympathetically and soothingly holding her hand.
A woman's "duty of Motherhood" is one of his stock bedside sermons. He sees "no evidence of physical or moral harm in birth control." Once he remarked publicly: "To ask this generation to go back to the helter-skelter method of having families is like crying for the moon." Another time he declared: "Imagine a young married couple, the parents of one child, who feel that they cannot afford another for three years, being forced to occupy the same room and to abstain for two years. It's preposterous. You might as well put water by the side of a thirsty man and tell him not to drink it." In 1921 he wrote a book which he does not allow publicized, Love, Marriage and Birth Control.
He has three daughters, no heir. Last year came his first grandchild, by his second daughter, Sydney.
Frequently he sends patients to the quiet of St. Moritz, Switzerland. He occasionally spends his own vacation there.
Travel Talk. He reached Montreal last fortnight. By the time he reached Winnipeg he was hoarse from speeches and interviews. Being casually interviewed bothered him. It was a new experience. He feared he might be misquoted. At Winnipeg he secluded himself with Lady Dawson and their daughter the Hon. Rosemary Dawson (the ladies are slim, friendly) to prepare himself for arduous convention days—donning and removing his academic robes, presiding over the medical section of the convention, delivering a clinical introduction to that section, receiving the honorary doctorate of laws of the University of Manitoba from the University's Chancellor, the Most Rev. Samuel Pritchard Matheson, Archbishop of Rupert's Land and Primate of all Canada.
At Montreal he made his longest talk of the fortnight. It was a prepared discourse on "Alcohol, its power to do and undo." Nub: "I put it to you that because alcohol is used in excess by some, it should be abandoned by all is unsound reasoning. The general application of the argument would lead us to negation and gloom. Because some love well rather than wisely, are we to cease our worship of Venus? Because speech sometimes maddens us, are we to ordain silence?"*
* A Wimpole Street neighbor is Sir E. Fanjuhar Buzzard, neurologist who served the King in his illness. He too went to the Winnipeg Convention.