ABSTRACT
In the twentieth-century edition of his enormously popular guide to success in medical practice, D.W. Cathell and his son William offered practical advice to physicians setting up their professional offices. They stressed the importance of a comfortable waiting area, an airy consulting room, and at least two doors, enabling patients to escape the gaze of waiting patients. In addition to producing a ‘snug, bright, and cosy medical tone inside’, the Cathells urged physicians to ensure that the arrangement of the offices established the physician as ‘possessed of good breeding and cultivated taste, as well as learning and skill’. The doctor’s offices, the Cathells characteristically observed:
. . . are not a lawyer’s consulting-rooms, nor a clergyman’s sanctum, nor an instrument-maker’s shop, nor a smoking-club’s headquarters, – with a vile smell of stale cigars or pipes, – nor a sportsman’s rest nor a loafing room for the idle, the dissipated, and the unemployed; nor a family parlor, nor a social meeting-place of any kind; but the office of an earnest, working, scientific physician, who has a library, takes the journals, and makes full use of the instruments of precision, and the various methods that science has devised for doing different kinds of medical and surgical work, and regards his office as the twin sister to the sick-room.1
