A Mortal Antipathy (1884)

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s novel follows Maurice Kirkwood, a mysterious young recluse, and the social and medical curiosity around his unusual condition. (Open Library)

Watches

Waltham watch: The narrator compares replacing a country doctor to replacing a missing piece from a Waltham watch, using the watch as a familiar example of precision manufacturing.

Source text: There are plenty of men that can get into a Professor's chair, I said, and talk like Solomons to a class of wondering pupils: but once get a really good doctor in a place, a man who knows all about everybody, whether they have this or that tendency, whether when they are sick they have a way of dying or a way of getting well, what medicines agree with them and what drugs they cannot take, whether they are of the sort that think nothing is the matter with them until they are dead as smoked herring, or of the sort that send for the minister if they get a stomach-ache from eating too many cucumbers,—who knows all about all the people within half a dozen miles (all the sensible ones, that is, who employ a regular practitioner),—such a man as that, I say, is not to be replaced like a missing piece out of a Springfield musket or a Waltham watch. (Project Gutenberg ebook 2698)