Читать книгу Frontier Humor in Verse, Prose and Picture - Палмер Кокс - Страница 10

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There was a certain citizen of this place, a butcher by occupation, who, deeming the remuneration he received small in comparison to the amount of service done, resolved to discontinue butchering cattle and become a butcher of men, or in other words to assume the responsibilities of a practicing physician and surgeon. It seems in his travels he had collected quite a number of receipts and prescriptions from old almanacs and doctors’ books.

With this limited stock of medical knowledge, and an unusually large amount of “cheek,” he thought to work himself into a lucrative business. As an invoice of smallpox was expected by every steamer, he imagined he might pass among other professionals as though his scientific acquirements were excelled by none, and his vocabulary of Latin names surpassed “Doctor Hornbook’s.”

Hiring an office in a central locality, he hoisted a board reaching nearly across the building, on which his name and calling were made known in large characters. Then sitting down amidst a “beggarly account of empty bottles,” he patiently awaited the result. Whether the city had suddenly become remarkably healthy through the sanitary exertions of the health commissioners, or he had not his proportionate share of the medical practice in requisition, he knew not, but certain it was, that from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve he sat in his room—

“As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.”

One day, however, while straying along North Beach, musing on the strange vicissitudes in human affairs, and thinking how “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable” were all the uses of this world, a happy idea presented itself. In the vicinity of the County Hospital he had noticed the invalids coming out to sun themselves, like seals, along the Beach. What a glorious attraction to custom they would be, congregated around his door! Entering into conversation with some of them, he soon struck a bargain with thirty or more. They were to visit his office once a day, those who could walk there without much trouble or pain receiving fifty cents per day, while those who traveled under greater difficulties were to be paid accordingly. So, every morning, after breakfast, they took up their line of march in twos and threes along the street toward the charlatan’s place of business. They were indeed a motley crowd—that cripple brigade—as they hobbled through the thoroughfare.

ADVANCE OF THE CRIPPLE BRIGADE.

There came the maimed, the halt, the withered, and the blind, shuffling into his office thicker than diseased Jews to the troubled pool of Bethesda. If any stranger chanced to drop in for medical treatment, the crowd of hired specimens began at once to converse among themselves of the wonderful skill of the physician. One remarked how his sight had improved under treatment, how he could see two objects now where he used to see but one. Another related in glowing terms the ravenous appetite the doctor’s bitters had awakened in his system; through all the hours of the day he was now as hungry as a whirlpool. A third would eulogize his method of treating contagious diseases in general.

In this way the real patient, though receiving no actual benefit from the watery potions administered, was retained in hopes of an ultimate cure. At length the curiosity of the resident physician of the Hospital was aroused. He couldn’t imagine where his patients filed away to every morning, as regularly as liberated geese to some well-known pond. Following up the bandaged crew and investigating the matter, he soon learned the state of affairs, and forbade their leaving the Hospital yard without a permit. This sudden falling off in the would-be-doctor’s patients made a material change in the appearance of his office. In short, it leveled his business and his hopes, and again the quack sank into that obscurity from which he so energetically struggled to emerge.