George Montague Swift

Dr. George Montague Swift was a physician belonging to that type, almost extinct in these days of specialists, the general practitioner; the household adviser and counsellor who walks in the pages of Balzac and Thackeray and Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, who knew the family’s physical qualities and troubles as well as the father or mother did, whose arrival brightened up the sick-room and brought signs of revival to the patient before a single prescription had been administered, whose personality was a pillar of strength in those nights of consternation when the disease had taken its turn for the worse. Dr. Swift had practiced in New York during forty years before he himself fell victim to the physical shock which it had been his service to avert from others; he is one of the memories of what we now call old New York.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1926 Century Association Yearbook