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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of "Speaking of Operations--", by Irvin S. Cobb
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: "Speaking of Operations--"
+
+Author: Irvin S. Cobb
+
+Posting Date: November 7, 2008 [EBook #1890]
+Release Date: September, 1999
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS--" ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Kirk Pearson
+
+
+
+
+
+"SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS--"
+
+by Irvin S. Cobb
+
+
+Respectfully dedicated to two classes:
+
+          Those who have already been operated on
+          Those who have not yet been operated on
+
+
+
+Now that the last belated bill for services professionally rendered has
+been properly paid and properly receipted; now that the memory of the
+event, like the mark of the stitches, has faded out from a vivid red to
+a becoming pink shade; now that I pass a display of adhesive tape in
+a drug-store window without flinching--I sit me down to write a little
+piece about a certain matter--a small thing, but mine own--to wit, That
+Operation.
+
+For years I have noticed that persons who underwent pruning or
+remodeling at the hands of a duly qualified surgeon, and survived, like
+to talk about it afterward. In the event of their not surviving I have
+no doubt they still liked to talk about it, but in a different locality.
+Of all the readily available topics for use, whether among friends
+or among strangers, an operation seems to be the handiest and most
+dependable. It beats the Tariff, or Roosevelt, or Bryan, or when this
+war is going to end, if ever, if you are a man talking to other men;
+and it is more exciting even than the question of how Mrs. Vernon Castle
+will wear her hair this season, if you are a woman talking to other
+women.
+
+For mixed companies a whale is one of the best and the easiest things to
+talk about that I know of. In regard to whales and their peculiarities
+you can make almost any assertion without fear of successful
+contradiction. Nobody ever knows any more about them than you do. You
+are not hampered by facts. If someone mentions the blubber of the whale
+and you chime in and say it may be noticed for miles on a still day when
+the large but emotional creature has been moved to tears by some great
+sorrow coming into its life, everybody is bound to accept the statement.
+For after all how few among us really know whether a distressed whale
+sobs aloud or does so under its breath? Who, with any certainty, can
+tell whether a mother whale hatches her own egg her own self or leaves
+it on the sheltered bosom of a fjord to be incubated by the gentle
+warmth of the midnight sun? The possibilities of the proposition for
+purposes of informal debate, pro and con, are apparent at a glance.
+
+The weather, of course, helps out amazingly when you are meeting people
+for the first time, because there is nearly always more or less weather
+going on somewhere and practically everybody has ideas about it. The
+human breakfast is also a wonderfully good topic to start up during one
+of those lulls. Try it yourself the next time the conversation seems
+to drag. Just speak up in an offhand kind of way and say that you never
+care much about breakfast--a slice of toast and a cup of weak tea start
+you off properly for doing a hard day's work. You will be surprised to
+note how things liven up and how eagerly all present join in. The lady
+on your left feels that you should know she always takes two lumps of
+sugar and nearly half cream, because she simply cannot abide hot milk,
+no matter what the doctors say. The gentleman on your right will be
+moved to confess he likes his eggs boiled for exactly three minutes,
+no more and no less. Buckwheat cakes and sausage find a champion and
+oatmeal rarely lacks a warm defender.
+
+But after all, when all is said and done, the king of all topics is
+operations. Sooner or later, wherever two or more are gathered together
+it is reasonably certain that somebody will bring up an operation.
+
+Until I passed through the experience of being operated on myself, I
+never really realized what a precious conversational boon the subject
+is, and how great a part it plays in our intercourse with our fellow
+beings on this planet. To the teller it is enormously interesting, for
+he is not only the hero of the tale but the rest of the cast and the
+stage setting as well--the whole show, as they say; and if the listener
+has had a similar experience--and who is there among us in these days
+that has not taken a nap 'neath the shade of the old ether cone?--it
+acquires a doubled value.
+
+"Speaking of operations--" you say, just like that, even though
+nobody present has spoken of them; and then you are off, with your new
+acquaintance sitting on the edge of his chair, or hers as the case
+may be and so frequently is, with hands clutched in polite but painful
+restraint, gills working up and down with impatience, eyes brightened
+with desire, tongue hung in the middle, waiting for you to pause to
+catch your breath, so that he or she may break in with a few personal
+recollections along the same line. From a mere conversation it resolves
+itself into a symptom symposium, and a perfectly splendid time is had by
+all.
+
+If an operation is such a good thing to talk about, why isn't it a good
+thing to write about, too? That is what I wish to know. Besides, I need
+the money. Verily, one always needs the money when one has but recently
+escaped from the ministering clutches of the modern hospital. Therefore
+I write.
+
+It all dates back to the fair, bright morning when I went to call on
+a prominent practitioner here in New York, whom I shall denominate as
+Doctor X. I had a pain. I had had it for days. It was not a dependable,
+locatable pain, such as a tummyache or a toothache is, which you can
+put your hand on; but an indefinite, unsettled, undecided kind of pain,
+which went wandering about from place to place inside of me like a
+strange ghost lost in Cudjo's Cave. I never knew until then what the
+personal sensations of a haunted house are. If only the measly thing
+could have made up its mind to settle down somewhere and start light
+housekeeping I think should have been better satisfied. I never had such
+an uneasy tenant. Alongside of it a woman with the moving fever would be
+comparatively a fixed and stationary object.
+
+Having always, therefore, enjoyed perfectly riotous and absolutely
+unbridled health, never feeling weak and distressed unless dinner
+happened to be ten or fifteen minutes late, I was green regarding
+physicians and the ways of physicians. But I knew Doctor X slightly,
+having met him last summer in one of his hours of ease in the grand
+stand at a ball game, when he was expressing a desire to cut the
+umpire's throat from ear to ear, free of charge; and I remembered his
+name, and remembered, too, that he had impressed me at the time as being
+a person of character and decision and scholarly attainments.
+
+He wore whiskers. Somehow in my mind whiskers are ever associated
+with medical skill. I presume this is a heritage of my youth, though I
+believe others labor under the same impression.
+
+As I look back it seems to me that in childhood's days all the doctors
+in our town wore whiskers.
+
+I recall one old doctor down there in Kentucky who was practically
+lurking in ambush all the time. All he needed was a few decoys out in
+front of him and a pump gun to be a duck blind. He carried his calomel
+about with him in a fruit jar, and when there was cutting job he
+stropped his scalpel on his bootleg.
+
+You see, in those primitive times germs had not been invented yet, and
+so he did not have to take any steps to avoid them. Now we know that
+loose, luxuriant whiskers are unsanitary, because they make such fine
+winter quarters for germs; so, though the doctors still wear whiskers,
+they do not wear them wild and waving. In the profession bosky whiskers
+are taboo; they must be landscaped. And since it is a recognized fact
+that germs abhor orderliness and straight lines they now go elsewhere to
+reside, and the doctor may still retain his traditional aspect and yet
+be practically germproof. Doctor X was trimmed in accordance with the
+ethics of the newer school. He had trellis whiskers. So I went to see
+him at his offices in a fashionable district, on an expensive side
+street.
+
+Before reaching him I passed through the hands of a maid and a nurse,
+each of whom spoke to me in a low, sorrowful tone of voice, which seemed
+to indicate that there was very little hope.
+
+I reached an inner room where Doctor X was. He looked me over, while I
+described for him as best I could what seemed to be the matter with
+me, and asked me a number of intimate questions touching on the lives,
+works, characters and peculiarities of my ancestors; after which he
+made me stand up in front of him and take my coat off, and he punched
+me hither and yon with his forefinger. He also knocked repeatedly on my
+breastbone with his knuckles, and each time, on doing this, would apply
+his ear to my chest and listen intently for a spell, afterward shaking
+his head in a disappointed way. Apparently there was nobody at home. For
+quite a time he kept on knocking, but without getting any response.
+
+He then took my temperature and fifteen dollars, and said it was an
+interesting case--not unusual exactly, but interesting--and that it
+called for an operation.
+
+From the way my heart and other organs jumped inside of me at that
+statement I knew at once that, no matter what he may have thought, the
+premises were not unoccupied. Naturally I inquired how soon he meant
+to operate. Personally I trusted there was no hurry about it. I was
+perfectly willing to wait for several years, if necessary. He smiled at
+my ignorance.
+
+"I never operate," he said; "operating is entirely out of my line. I am
+a diagnostician."
+
+He was, too--I give him full credit for that. He was a good, keen, close
+diagnostician. How did he know I had only fifteen dollars on me? You
+did not have to tell this man what you had, or how much. He knew without
+being told.
+
+I asked whether he was acquainted with Doctor Y--Y being a person whom I
+had met casually at a club to which I belong. Oh, yes, he said, he
+knew Doctor Y. Y was a clever man, X said--very, very clever; but Y
+specialized in the eyes, the ears, the nose and the throat. I gathered
+from what Doctor X said that any time Doctor Y ventured below the thorax
+he was out of bounds and liable to be penalized; and that if by any
+chance he strayed down as far as the lungs he would call for help and
+back out as rapidly as possible.
+
+This was news to me. It would appear that these up-to-date practitioners
+just go ahead and divide you up and partition you out among themselves
+without saying anything to you about it. Your torso belongs to one man
+and your legs are the exclusive property of his brother practitioner
+down on the next block, and so on. You may belong to as many as half a
+dozen specialists, most of whom, very possibly, are total strangers to
+you, and yet never know a thing about it yourself.
+
+It has rather the air of trespass--nay, more than that, it bears some
+of the aspects of unlawful entry--but I suppose it is legal. Certainly,
+judging by what I am able to learn, the system is being carried on
+generally. So it must be ethical. Anything doctors do in a mass is
+ethical. Almost anything they do singly and on individual responsibility
+is unethical. Being ethical among doctors is practically the same thing
+as being a Democrat in Texas or a Presbyterian in Scotland.
+
+"Y will never do for you," said Doctor X, when I had rallied somewhat
+from the shock of these disclosures. "I would suggest that you go to
+Doctor Z, at such-and-such an address. You are exactly in Z's line. I'll
+let him know that you are coming and when, and I'll send him down my
+diagnosis."
+
+So that same afternoon, the appointment having been made by telephone,
+I went, full of quavery emotions, to Doctor Z's place. As soon as I was
+inside his outer hallway, I realized that I was nearing the presence of
+one highly distinguished in his profession.
+
+A pussy-footed male attendant, in a livery that made him look like a
+cross between a headwaiter and an undertaker's assistant, escorted me
+through an anteroom into a reception-room, where a considerable number
+of well-dressed men and women were sitting about in strained attitudes,
+pretending to read magazines while they waited their turns, but in
+reality furtively watching one another.
+
+I sat down in a convenient chair, adhering fast to my hat and my
+umbrella. They were the only friends I had there and I was determined
+not to lose them without a struggle. On the wall were many colored
+charts showing various portions of the human anatomy and what ailed
+them. Directly in front of me was a very thrilling illustration,
+evidently copied from an oil painting, of a liver in a bad state of
+repair. I said to myself that if I had a liver like that one I should
+keep it hidden from the public eye--I would never permit it to sit for
+it's portrait. Still, there is no accounting for tastes. I know a man
+who got his spleen back from the doctors and now keeps it in a bottle
+of alcohol on the what-not in the parlor, as one of his most treasured
+possessions, and sometimes shows it to visitors. He, however, is of a
+very saving disposition.
+
+Presently a lady secretary, who sat behind a roll-top desk in a corner
+of the room, lifted a forefinger and silently beckoned me to her side. I
+moved over and sat down by her; she took down my name and my age and my
+weight and my height, and a number of other interesting facts that
+will come in very handy should anyone ever be moved to write a complete
+history of my early life. In common with Doctor X she shared
+one attribute--she manifested a deep curiosity regarding my
+forefathers--wanted to know all about them. I felt that this was
+carrying the thing too far. I felt like saying to her:
+
+"Miss or madam, so far as I know there is nothing the matter with my
+ancestors of the second and third generations back, except that they
+are dead. I am not here to seek medical assistance for a grandparent who
+succumbed to disappointment that time when Samuel J. Tilden got counted
+out, or for a great-grandparent who entered into Eternal Rest very
+unexpectedly and in a manner entirely uncalled for as a result of being
+an innocent bystander in one of those feuds that were so popular in my
+native state immediately following the Mexican War. Leave my ancestors
+alone. There is no need of your shaking my family tree in the belief
+that a few overripe patients will fall out. I alone--I, me, myself--am
+the present candidate!"
+
+However, I refrained from making this protest audibly. I judged she was
+only going according to the ritual; and as she had a printed card, with
+blanks in it ready to be filled out with details regarding the remote
+members of the family connection, I humored her along.
+
+When I could not remember something she wished to know concerning an
+ancestor I supplied her with thrilling details culled from the field of
+fancy. When the card was entirely filled up she sent me back to my old
+place to wait. I waited and waited, breeding fresh ailments all the
+time. I had started out with one symptom; now if I had one I had a
+million and a half. I could feel goose flesh sprouting out all over me.
+If I had been taller I might have had more, but not otherwise. Such is
+the power of the human imagination when the surroundings are favorable
+to its development.
+
+Time passed; to me it appeared that nearly all the time there was passed
+and that we were getting along toward the shank-end of the Christian era
+mighty fast. I was afraid my turn would come next and afraid it would
+not. Perhaps you know this sensation. You get it at the dentist's, and
+when you are on the list of after-dinner speakers at a large banquet,
+and when you are waiting for the father of the Only Girl in the World
+to make up his mind whether he is willing to try to endure you as a
+son-in-law.
+
+Then some more time passed.
+
+One by one my companions, obeying a command, passed out through the door
+at the back, vanishing out of my life forever. None of them returned. I
+was vaguely wondering whether Doctor Z buried his dead on the premises
+or had them removed by a secret passageway in the rear, when a young
+woman in a nurse's costume tapped me on the shoulder from behind.
+
+I jumped. She hid a compassionate smile with her hand and told me that
+the doctor would see me now.
+
+As I rose to follow her--still clinging with the drowning man's grip
+of desperation to my hat and my umbrella--I was astonished to note by a
+glance at the calendar on the wall that this was still the present date.
+I thought it would be Thursday of next week at the very least.
+
+Doctor Z also wore whiskers, carefully pointed up by an expert hedge
+trimmer. He sat at his desk, surrounded by freewill offerings from
+grateful patients and by glass cases containing other things he had
+taken away from them when they were not in a condition to object. I
+had expected, after all the preliminary ceremonies and delays, that
+we should have a long skance together. Not so; not at all. The modern
+expert in surgery charges as much for remembering your name between
+visits as the family doctor used to expect for staying up all night with
+you, but he does not waste any time when you are in his presence.
+
+I was about to find that out. And a little later on I was to find out a
+lot of other things; in fact, that whole week was of immense educational
+value to me.
+
+I presume it was because he stood high in his profession, and was almost
+constantly engaged in going into the best society that Doctor Z did not
+appear to be the least bit excited over my having picked him out to
+look into me. In the most perfunctory manner he shook the hand that has
+shaken the hands of Jess Willard, George M. Cohan and Henry Ford, and
+bade me be seated in a chair which was drawn up in a strong light, where
+he might gaze directly at me as we conversed and so get the full values
+of the composition. But if I was a treat for him to look at he concealed
+his feelings very effectually.
+
+He certainly had his emotions under splendid control. But then,
+of course, you must remember that he probably had traveled about
+extensively and was used to sight-seeing.
+
+From this point on everything passed off in a most businesslike manner.
+He reached into a filing cabinet and took out an exhibit, which I
+recognized as the same one his secretary had filled out in the early
+part of the century. So I was already in the card-index class. Then
+briefly he looked over the manifest that Doctor X had sent him. It
+may not have been a manifest--it may have been an invoice or a bill of
+lading. Anyhow I was in the assignee's hands. I could only hope it would
+not eventually become necessary to call in a receiver. Then he spoke:
+
+"Yes, yes-yes," he said; "yes-yes-yes! Operation required. Small
+matter--hum, hum! Let's see--this is Tuesday? Quite so. Do it Friday!
+Friday at"--he glanced toward a scribbled pad of engagement dates at his
+elbow--"Friday at seven A. M. No, make it seven-fifteen. Have important
+tumor case at seven. St. Germicide's Hospital. You know the place--up on
+Umpty-umph Street. Go' day! Miss Whoziz, call next visitor."
+
+And before I realized that practically the whole affair had been settled
+I was outside the consultation-room in a small private hall, and the
+secretary was telling me further details would be conveyed to me by
+mail. I went home in a dazed state. For the first time I was beginning
+to learn something about an industry in which heretofore I had never
+been interested. Especially was I struck by the difference now revealed
+to me in the preliminary stages of the surgeons' business as compared
+with their fellow experts in the allied cutting trades--tailors, for
+instance, not to mention barbers. Every barber, you know, used to be a
+surgeon, only he spelled it chirurgeon. Since then the two professions
+have drifted far apart. Even a half-witted barber--the kind who always
+has the first chair as you come into the shop--can easily spend ten
+minutes of your time thinking of things he thinks you should have and
+mentioning them to you one by one, whereas any good, live surgeon knows
+what you have almost instantly.
+
+As for the tailor--consider how wearisome are his methods when you
+parallel them alongside the tremendous advances in this direction made
+by the surgeon--how cumbersome and old-fashioned and tedious! Why, an
+experienced surgeon has you all apart in half the time the tailor takes
+up in deciding whether the vest shall fasten with five buttons or six.
+Our own domestic tailors are bad enough in this regard and the Old World
+tailors are even worse.
+
+I remember a German tailor in Aix-la-Chapelle in the fall of 1914 who
+undertook to build for me a suit suitable for visiting the battle lines
+informally. He was the most literary tailor I ever met anywhere. He
+would drape the material over my person and then take a piece of chalk
+and write quite a nice long piece on me. Then he would rub it out and
+write it all over again, but more fully. He kept this up at intervals of
+every other day until he had writer's cramp. After that he used pins. He
+would pin the seams together, uttering little soothing, clucking sounds
+in German whenever a pin went through the goods and into me. The German
+cluck is not so soothing as the cluck of the English-speaking peoples, I
+find.
+
+At the end of two long and trying weeks, which wore both of us down
+noticeably, he had the job done. It was not an unqualified success. He
+regarded is as a suit of clothes, but I knew better; it was a set of
+slip covers, and if only I had been a two-seated runabout it would have
+proved a perfect fit, I am sure; but I am a single-seated design and it
+did not answer. I wore it to the war because I had nothing else to wear
+that would stamp me as a regular war correspondent, except, of course,
+my wrist watch; but I shall not wear it to another war. War is terrible
+enough already; and, besides, I have parted with it. On my way home
+through Holland I gave that suit to a couple of poor Belgian refugees,
+and I presume they are still wearing it.
+
+So far as I have been able to observe, the surgeons and the tailors of
+these times share but one common instinct: If you go to a new surgeon or
+to a new tailor he is morally certain, after looking you over, that
+the last surgeon you had or the last tailor, did not do your cutting
+properly. There, however, is where the resemblance ends. The tailor, as
+I remarked in effect just now, wants an hour at least in which to decide
+how he may best cover up and disguise the irregularities of the human
+form; in much less time than that the surgeon has completely altered the
+form itself.
+
+With the surgeon it is very much as it is with those learned men
+who write those large, impressive works of reference which should be
+permanently in every library, and which we are forever buying from an
+agent because we are so passionately addicted to payments. If the thing
+he seeks does not appear in the contents proper he knows exactly where
+to look for it. "See appendix," says the historian to you in a footnote.
+"See appendix," says the surgeon to himself, the while humming a cheery
+refrain. And so he does.
+
+Well, I went home. This was Tuesday and the operation was not to be
+performed until the coming Friday. By Wednesday I had calmed down
+considerably. By Thursday morning I was practically normal again as
+regards my nerves. You will understand that I was still in a blissful
+state of ignorance concerning the actual methods of the surgical
+profession as exemplified by its leading exponents of today. The
+knowledge I have touched on in the pages immediately preceding was to
+come to me later.
+
+Likewise Doctor Z's manner had been deceiving. It could not be that he
+meant to carve me to any really noticeable extent--his attitude had been
+entirely too casual. At our house carving is a very serious matter. Any
+time I take the head of the table and start in to carve it is fitting
+women and children get to a place of safety, and onlookers should get
+under the table. When we first began housekeeping and gave our first
+small dinner-party we had a brace of ducks cooked in honor of the
+company, and I, as host, undertook to carve them. I never knew until
+then that a duck was built like a watch--that his works were inclosed in
+a burglarproof case. Without the use of dynamite the Red Leary-O'Brien
+gang could not have broken into those ducks. I thought so then and I
+think so yet. Years have passed since then, but I may state that even
+now, when there are guests for dinner, we do not have ducks. Unless
+somebody else is going to carve, we have liver.
+
+I mention this fact in passing because it shows that I had learned to
+revere carving as one of the higher arts, and one not to be approached
+except in a spirit of due appreciation of the magnitude of the
+undertaking, and after proper consideration and thought and reflection,
+and all that sort of thing.
+
+If this were true as regards a mere duck, why not all the more so as
+regards the carving of a person of whom I am so very fond as I am of
+myself? Thus I reasoned. And finally, had not Doctor Z spoken of the
+coming operation as a small matter? Well then?
+
+Thursday at noon I received from Doctor Z's secretary a note stating
+that arrangements had been made for my admission into St. Germicide that
+same evening and that I was to spend the night there. This hardly seemed
+necessary. Still, the tone of the note appeared to indicate that the
+hospital authorities particularly wished to have me for an overnight
+guest; and as I reflected that probably the poor things had few enough
+bright spots in their busy lives, I decided I would humor them along and
+gladden the occasion with my presence from dinner-time on.
+
+About eight o'clock I strolled in very jauntily. In my mind I had the
+whole programme mapped out. I would stay at the hospital for, say, two
+days following the operation--or, at most, three. Then I must be up and
+away. I had a good deal of work to do and a number of people to see on
+important business, and I could not really afford to waste more than a
+weekend on the staff of St. Germicide's. After Monday they must look to
+their own devices for social entertainment. That was my idea. Now when
+I look back on it I laugh, but it is a hollow laugh and there is no real
+merriment in it.
+
+Indeed, almost from the moment of my entrance little things began
+to come up that were calculated to have a depressing effect on one's
+spirits. Downstairs a serious-looking lady met me and entered in a book
+a number of salient facts regarding my personality which the previous
+investigators had somehow overlooked. There is a lot of bookkeeping
+about an operation. This detail attended to, a young man, dressed in
+white garments and wearing an expression that stamped him as one who had
+suffered a recent deep bereavement came and relieved me of my hand bag
+and escorted me upstairs.
+
+As we passed through the upper corridors I had my first introduction
+to the hospital smell, which is a smell compounded of iodoform, ether,
+gruel, and something boiling. All hospitals have it, I understand. In
+time you get used to it, but you never really care for it.
+
+The young man led me into a small room tastefully decorated with four
+walls, a floor, a ceiling, a window sill and a window, a door and a
+doorsill, and a bed and a chair. He told me to go to bed. I did not want
+to go to bed--it was not my regular bedtime--but he made a point of it,
+and I judged it was according to regulations; so I undressed and put on
+my night clothes and crawled in. He left me, taking my other clothes and
+my shoes with him, but I was not allowed to get lonely.
+
+A little later a ward surgeon appeared, to put a few inquiries of a
+pointed and personal nature. He particularly desired to know what my
+trouble was. I explained to him that I couldn't tell him--he would have
+to see Doctor X or Doctor Z; they probably knew, but were keeping it a
+secret between themselves.
+
+The answer apparently satisfied him, because immediately after that he
+made me sign a paper in which I assumed all responsibility for what was
+to take place the next morning.
+
+This did not seem exactly fair. As I pointed out to him, it was the
+surgeon's affair, not mine; and if the surgeon made a mistake the joke
+would be on him and not on me, because in that case I would not be here
+anyhow. But I signed, as requested, on the dotted line, and he departed.
+
+After that, at intervals, the chief house surgeon dropped in, without
+knocking, and the head nurse came, and an interne or so, and a ward
+nurse, and the special nurse who was to have direct charge of me. It
+dawned on me that I was not having any more privacy in that hospital
+than a goldfish.
+
+About eleven o'clock an orderly came, and, without consulting my wishes
+in the matter, he undressed me until I could have passed almost anywhere
+for September Morn's father, and gave me a clean shave, twice over, on
+one of my most prominent plane surfaces. I must confess I enjoyed that
+part of it. So far as I am able to recall, it was the only shave I
+have ever had where the operator did not spray me with cheap perfumery
+afterward and then try to sell me a bottle of hair tonic.
+
+Having shaved me, the young man did me up amidships in a neat cloth
+parcel, took his kit under his arm and went away.
+
+It occurred to me that, considering the trivial nature of the case, a
+good deal of fuss was being made over me by persons who could have no
+personal concern in the matter whatsoever. This thought recurred to me
+frequently as I lay there all tied in a bundle like a week's washing. I
+did not feel quite so uppish as I had felt. Why was everybody picking on
+me?
+
+Anon I slept, but dreamed fitfully. I dreamed that a whole flock of
+surgeons came to my bedside and charted me out in sections, like one
+of those diagram pictures you see of a beef in the Handy Compendium of
+Universal Knowledge, showing the various cuts and the butcher's pet name
+for each cut. Each man took his favorite joint and carried it away,
+and when they were all gone I was merely a recent site, full of
+reverberating echoes and nothing else.
+
+I have had happier dreams in my time; this was not the kind of dream I
+should have selected had the choice been left to me.
+
+When I woke the young sun was shining in at the window, and an
+orderly--not the orderly who had shaved me, but another one--was there
+in my room and my nurse was waiting outside the door. The orderly
+dressed me in a quaint suit of pyjamas cut on the half shell and
+buttoning stylishly in the back, princesse mode. Then he rolled in a
+flat litter on wheels and stretched me on it, and covered me up with a
+white tablecloth, just as though I had been cold Sunday-night supper,
+and we started for the operating-room at the top of the building; but
+before we started I lit a large black cigar, as Gen. U. S. Grant used to
+do when he went into battle. I wished by this to show how indifferent I
+was. Maybe he fooled somebody, but I do not believe I possess the same
+powers of simulation that Grant had. He must have been a very remarkable
+man--Grant must.
+
+The orderly and the nurse trundled me out into the hall and loaded me
+into an elevator, which was to carry us up to the top of the hospital.
+Several other nurses were already in the elevator. As we came aboard one
+of them remarked that it was a fine day. A fine day for what? She did
+not finish the sentence.
+
+Everybody wore a serious look. Inside of myself I felt pretty serious
+too--serious enough for ten or twelve. I had meant to fling off several
+very bright, spontaneous quips on the way to the table. I thought them
+out in advance, but now, somehow, none of them seemed appropriate.
+Instinctively, as it were, I felt that humor was out of place here.
+
+I never knew an elevator to progress from the third floor of a building
+to the ninth with such celerity as this one on which we were traveling
+progressed. Personally I was in no mood for haste. If there was anyone
+else in all that great hospital who was in a particular hurry to be
+operated on I was perfectly willing to wait. But alas, no! The mechanism
+of the elevator was in perfect order--entirely too perfect. No accident
+of any character whatsoever befell us en route, no dropping back into
+the basement with a low, grateful thud; no hitch; no delay of any kind.
+We were certainly out of luck that trip. The demon of a joyrider who
+operated the accursed device jerked a lever and up we soared at a
+distressingly high rate of speed. If I could have had my way about that
+youth he would have been arrested for speeding.
+
+Now we were there! They rolled into a large room, all white, with a
+rounded ceiling like the inside of an egg. Right away I knew what the
+feelings of a poor, lonely little yolk are when the spoon begins to chip
+the shell. If I had not been so busy feeling sorry for myself I think I
+might have developed quite an active sympathy for yolks.
+
+My impression had been that this was to be in the nature of a private
+affair, without invitations. I was astonished to note that quite a crowd
+had assembled for the opening exercises. From his attire and general
+deportment I judged that Doctor Z was going to be the master of the
+revels, he being attired appropriately in a white domino, with rubber
+gloves and a fancy cap of crash toweling. There were present, also,
+my diagnostic friend, Doctor X, likewise in fancy-dress costume, and a
+surgeon I had never met. From what I could gather he was going over the
+course behind Doctor Z to replace the divots.
+
+And there was an interne in the background, playing caddy, as it were,
+and a head nurse, who was going to keep the score, and two other nurses,
+who were going to help her keep it. I only hoped that they would show no
+partiality, but be as fair to me as they were to Doctor Z, and that he
+would go round in par.
+
+So they placed me right where my eyes might rest on a large wall cabinet
+full of very shiny-looking tools; and they took my cigar away from me
+and folded my hands on the wide bowknot of my sash. Then they put a
+cloth dingus over my face and a voice of authority told me to breathe.
+That advice, however, was superfluous and might just as well have
+been omitted, for such was my purpose anyhow. Ever since I can recall
+anything at all, breathing has been a regular habit with me. So I
+breathed. And, at that, a bottle of highly charged sarsaparilla exploded
+somewhere in the immediate vicinity and most of its contents went up my
+nose.
+
+I started to tell them that somebody had been fooling with their ether
+and adulterating it, and that if they thought they could send me off to
+sleep with soda pop they were making the mistake of their lives, because
+it just naturally could not be done; but for some reason or other
+I decided to put off speaking about the matter for a few minutes. I
+breathed again--again--agai----
+
+I was going away from there. I was in a large gas balloon, soaring up
+into the clouds. How pleasant!... No, by Jove! I was not in a balloon--I
+myself was the balloon, which was not quite so pleasant. Besides, Doctor
+Z was going along as a passenger; and as we traveled up and up he kept
+jabbing me in the midriff with the ferrule of a large umbrella which
+he had brought along with him in case of rain. He jabbed me harder and
+harder. I remonstrated with him. I told him I was a bit tender in that
+locality and the ferrule of his umbrella was sharp. He would not listen.
+He kept on jabbing me.
+
+Something broke! We started back down to earth. We fell faster and
+faster. We fell nine miles, and after that I began to get used to it.
+Then I saw the earth beneath and it was rising up to meet us.
+
+A town was below--a town that grew larger and larger as we neared it.
+I could make out the bonded indebtedness, and the Carnegie Library,
+and the moving-picture palaces, and the new dancing parlor, and other
+principal points of interest.
+
+At the rate we were falling we were certainly going to make an awful
+splatter in that town when we hit. I was sorry for the street-cleaning
+department.
+
+We fell another half mile or so. A spire was sticking up into the sky
+directly beneath us, like a spear, to impale us. By a supreme effort I
+twisted out of the way of that spire, only to strike squarely on top of
+the roof of a greenhouse back of the parsonage, next door. We crashed
+through it with a perfectly terrific clatter of breaking glass and
+landed in a bed of white flowers, all soft and downy, like feathers.
+
+And then Doctor Z stood up and combed the debris out of his whiskers
+and remarked that, taking it by and large, it had been one of the
+pleasantest little outings he had enjoyed in the entire course of his
+practice. He said that as a patient I was fair, but as a balloon I was
+immense. He asked me whether I had seen anything of his umbrella and
+began looking round for it. I tried to help him look, but I was too
+tired to exert myself much. I told him I believed I would take a little
+nap.
+
+I opened a dizzy eye part way. So this was heaven--this white expanse
+that swung and swam before my languid gaze? No, it could not be--it did
+not smell like heaven. It smelled like a hospital. It was a hospital. It
+was my hospital. My nurse was bending over me and I caught a faint whiff
+of the starch in the front of her crisp blue blouse. She was two-headed
+for the moment, but that was a mere detail. She settled a pillow under
+my head and told me to lie quiet.
+
+I meant to lie quiet; I did not have to be told. I wanted to lie quiet
+and hurt. I was hurty from head to toe and back again, and crosswise and
+cater-cornered. I hurt diagonally and lengthwise and on the bias. I had
+a taste in my mouth like a bird-and-animal store. And empty! It seemed
+to me those doctors had not left anything inside of me except the
+acoustics. Well, there was a mite of consolation there. If the
+overhauling had been as thorough as I had reason to believe it was from
+my present sensations, I need never fear catching anything again so long
+as I lived, except possibly dandruff.
+
+I waved the nurse away. I craved solitude. I desired only to lie there
+in that bed and hurt--which I did.
+
+I had said beforehand I meant to stay in St. Germicide's for two or
+three days only. It is when I look back on that resolution I emit the
+hollow laugh elsewhere referred to. For exactly four weeks I was flat
+on my back. I know now how excessively wearied a man can get of his own
+back, how tired of it, how bored with it! And after that another two
+weeks elapsed before my legs became the same dependable pair of legs I
+had known in the past.
+
+I did not want to eat at first, and when I did begin to want to they
+would not let me. If I felt sort of peckish they let me suck a
+little glass thermometer, but there is not much nourishment really in
+thermometers. And for entertainment, to wile the dragging hours away,
+I could count the cracks in the ceiling and read my temperature chart,
+which was a good deal like Red Ames' batting average for the past
+season--ranging from ninety-nine to one hundred and four.
+
+Also, through daily conversations with my nurse and with the surgeons
+who dropped in from time to time to have a look at me, I learned, as I
+lay there, a great deal about the medical profession--that is, a
+great deal for a layman--and what I learned filled me with an abiding
+admiration for it, both as a science and as a business. This surely is
+one profession which ever keeps its face to the front. Burying its past
+mistakes and forgetting them as speedily as possible, it pushes straight
+forward into fresh fields and fresh patients, always hopeful of what
+the future may bring in the way of newly discovered and highly expensive
+ailments. As we look backward upon the centuries we are astonished
+by its advancement. I did a good deal of looking backwards upon the
+centuries during my sojourn at St. Germicide's.
+
+Take the Middle Ages now--the period when a barber and a surgeon were
+one and the same. If a man made a failure as a barber he turned his
+talents to surgery. Surgeons in those times were a husky breed. I judge
+they worked by the day instead of by piecework; anyhow the records show
+they were very fond of experiments where somebody else furnished the raw
+material.
+
+When there came a resounding knock at the tradesman's entrance of the
+moated grange, the lord of the manor, looking over the portcullis and
+seeing a lusty wight standing down below, in a leather apron, with his
+sleeves rolled up and a kit of soldering tools under his arm, didn't
+know until he made inquiry whether the gentle stranger had come to mend
+the drain or remove the cook's leg.
+
+A little later along, when gunpowder had come into general use as a
+humanizing factor of civilization, surgeons treated a gunshot wound by
+pouring boiling lard into it, which I would say was calculated to take
+the victim's mind off his wound and give him something else to think
+about--for the time being, anyhow. I assume the notion of applying a
+mustard plaster outside one's stomach when one has a pain inside one's
+stomach is based on the same principle.
+
+However, one doesn't have to go clear back to medieval times to note the
+radical differences in the plan of treating human ailments. A great
+many persons who are still living can remember when the doctors were
+not nearly so numerous as they are now. I, for one, would be the last to
+reverse the sentence and say that because the doctors were not nearly
+so numerous then as they are now, those persons are still living so
+numerously.
+
+In the spring of the year, when the sap flowed and the birds mated, the
+sturdy farmer felt that he was due to have something the matter with
+him, too. So he would ride into the country-seat and get an almanac.
+Doubtless the reader, if country raised, has seen copies of this popular
+work. On the outside cover, which was dark blue in color, there was
+a picture of a person whose stomach was sliced four ways, like a
+twenty-cent pie, and then folded back neatly, thus exposing his entire
+interior arrangements to the gaze of the casual observer. However, this
+party, judging by his picture, did not appear to be suffering. He did
+not even seem to fear that he might catch cold from standing there in
+his own draught. He was gazing off into space in an absent-minded kind
+of way, apparently not aware that anything was wrong with him; and on
+all sides he was surrounded by interesting exhibits, such as a crab, and
+a scorpion, and a goat, and a chap with a bow and arrow--and one thing
+and another.
+
+Such was the main design of the cover, while the contents were made up
+of recognized and standard varieties in the line of jokes and the line
+of diseases which alternated, with first a favorite joke and then a
+favorite disease. The author who wrote the descriptions of the diseases
+was one of the most convincing writers that ever lived anywhere. As a
+realist he had no superiors among those using our language as a vehicle
+for the expression of thought. He was a wonder. If a person wasn't
+particular about what ailed him he could read any page at random and
+have one specific disease. Or he could read the whole book through and
+have them all, in their most advanced stages. Then the only thing that
+could save him was a large dollar bottle.
+
+Again, in attacks of the breakbone ague or malaria it was customary
+to call in a local practitioner, generally an elderly lady of the
+neighborhood who had none of these latter-day prejudices regarding the
+use of tobacco by the gentler sex. One whom I distantly recall, among
+childhood's happy memories, carried this liberal-mindedness to a point
+where she not only dipped snuff and smoked a cob pipe, but sometimes
+chewed a little natural leaf. This lady, on being called in, would brew
+up a large caldron of medicinal roots and barks and sprouts and things;
+and then she would deluge the interior of the sufferer with a large
+gourdful of this pleasing mixture at regular intervals. It was
+efficacious, too. The inundated person either got well or else he
+drowned from the inside. Rocking the patient was almost as dangerous a
+pastime as rocking the boat. This also helps to explain, I think, why so
+many of our forebears had floating kidneys. There was nothing else for a
+kidney to do.
+
+By the time I attained to long trousers, people in our town mainly had
+outgrown the unlicensed expert and were depending more and more upon the
+old-fashioned family doctor--the one with the whisker-jungle--who drove
+about in a gig, accompanied by a haunting aroma of iodoform and carrying
+his calomel with him in bulk.
+
+He probably owned a secret calomel mine of his own. He must have;
+otherwise he could never have afforded to be so generous with it. He
+also had other medicines with him, all of them being selected on the
+principle that unless a drug tasted like the very dickens it couldn't
+possibly do you any good. At all hours of the day and night he was to
+be seen going to and fro, distributing nuggets from his private lode. He
+went to bed with his trousers and his hat on, I think, and there was a
+general belief that his old mare slept between the shafts of the gig,
+with the bridle shoved up on her forehead.
+
+It has been only a few years since the oldtime general practitioner was
+everywhere. Just look round and see now how the system has changed! If
+your liver begins to misconduct itself the first thought of the modern
+operator is to cut it out and hide it some place where you can't find
+it. The oldtimer would have bombarded it with a large brunette pill
+about the size and color of a damson plum. Or he might put you on a
+diet of molasses seasoned to taste with blue mass and quinine and other
+attractive condiments. Likewise, in the spring of the year he frequently
+anointed the young of the species with a mixture of mutton suet and
+asafetida. This treatment had an effect that was distinctly depressing
+upon the growing boy. It militated against his popularity. It forced him
+to seek his pleasures outdoors, and a good distance outdoors at that.
+
+It was very hard for a boy, however naturally attractive he might be,
+to retain his popularity at the fireside circle when coated with
+mutton suet and asafetida and then taken into a warm room. He attracted
+attention which he did not court and which was distasteful to him.
+Keeping quiet did not seem to help him any. Even if they had been
+blindfolded others would still have felt his presence. A civit-cat
+suffers from the same drawbacks in a social way, but the advantage to
+the civit-cat is that as a general thing it associates only with other
+civit-cats.
+
+Except in the country the old-time, catch-as-catch-can general
+practitioner appears to be dying out. In the city one finds him
+occasionally, playing a limit game in an office on a back street--two
+dollars to come in, five to call; but the tendency of the day is toward
+specialists. Hence the expert who treats you for just one particular
+thing With a pain in your chest, say, you go to a chest specialist. So
+long as he can keep the trouble confined to your chest, all well and
+good. If it slips down or slides up he tries to coax it back to the
+reservation. If it refuses to do so, he bids it an affectionate adieu,
+makes a dotted mark on you to show where he left off, collects his
+bill and regretfully turns you over to a stomach specialist or a throat
+specialist, depending on the direction in which the trouble was headed
+when last seen.
+
+Or, perhaps the specialist to whom you take your custom is an advocate
+of an immediate operation for such cases as yours and all others. I
+may be unduly sensitive on account of having recently emerged from the
+surgeon's hands, but it strikes me now that there are an awful lot of
+doctors who take one brief glance at a person who is complaining, and
+say to themselves that here is something that ought to be looked into
+right away--and immediately open a bag and start picking out the proper
+utensils. You go into a doctor's office and tell him you do not feel
+the best in the world--and he gives you a look and excuses himself, and
+steps into the next room and begins greasing a saw.
+
+Mind you, in these casual observations as compiled by me while bedfast
+and here given utterance, I am not seeking to disparage possibly the
+noblest of professions. Lately I have owed much to it. I am strictly on
+the doctor's side. He is with us when we come into the world and with
+us when we go out of it, oftentimes lending a helping hand on both
+occasions. Anyway, our sympathies should especially go out to the
+medical profession at this particular time when the anti-vivisectionists
+are railing so loudly against the doctors. The anti-vivisection crusade
+has enlisted widely different classes in the community, including many
+lovers of our dumb-animal pets--and aren't some of them the dumbest
+things you ever saw!--especially chow dogs and love birds.
+
+I will admit there is something to be said on both sides of the
+argument. This dissecting of live subjects may have been carried to
+extremes on occasions. When I read in the medical journals that
+the eminent Doctor Somebody succeeded in transferring the interior
+department of a pelican to a pointer pup, and vice versa with such
+success that the pup drowned while diving for minnows, and the pelican
+went out in the back yard and barked himself to death baying at the
+moon, I am interested naturally; but, possibly because of my ignorance,
+I fail to see wherein the treatment of infantile paralysis has been
+materially advanced. On the other hand I would rather the kind and
+gentle Belgian hare should be offered up as a sacrifice upon the
+operating table and leave behind him a large family of little Belgian
+heirs and heiresses--dependent upon the charity of a cruel world--than
+that I should have something painful which can be avoided through making
+him a martyr. I would rather any white rabbit on earth should have the
+Asiatic cholera twice than that I should have it just once. These are my
+sincere convictions, and I will not attempt to disguise them.
+
+Thanks too, to medical science we know about germs and serums and diets
+and all that. Our less fortunate ancestors didn't know about them. They
+were befogged in ignorance. As recently as the generation immediately
+preceding ours people were unacquainted with the simplest rules of
+hygiene. They didn't care whether the housefly wiped his feet before
+he came into the house or not. The gentleman with the drooping,
+cream-separator mustache was at perfect liberty to use the common
+drinking cup on the railroad train. The appendix lurked in its
+snug retreat, undisturbed by the prying fingers of curiosity. The
+fever-bearing skeeter buzzed and flitted, stinging where he pleased. The
+germ theory was unfathomed. Suitable food for an invalid was anything
+the invalid could afford to buy. Fresh air, and more especially fresh
+night air, was regarded as dangerous, and people hermetically sealed
+themselves in before retiring. Not daily as at present was the world
+gladdened by the tidings that science had unearthed some new and
+particularly unpleasant disease. It never occurred to a mother that she
+should sterilize the slipper before spanking her offspring. Babies were
+not reared antiseptically, but just so. Nobody was aware of microbes.
+
+In short, our sires and our grandsires abode in the midst of perils.
+They were surrounded on all sides by things that are immediately fatal
+to the human system. Not a single one of them had a right to pass his
+second birthday. In the light of what we know, we realize that by now
+this world should be but a barren waste dotted at frequent intervals
+with large graveyards and populated only by a few dispossessed and
+hungry bacteria, hanging over the cemetery fence singing: Driven From
+Home!
+
+In the conditions generally prevalent up to twenty-five years ago, most
+of us never had any license, really, to be born at all. Yet look how
+many of us are now here. In this age of research I hesitate to attempt
+to account for it, except on the entirely unscientific theory that what
+you don't know doesn't hurt you. Doubtless a physician could give you a
+better explanation, but his would cost you more than mine has.
+
+But we digress. Let us get back to our main subject, which is myself. I
+shall never forget my first real meal in that hospital. There was quite
+a good deal of talk about it beforehand. My nurse kept telling me that
+on the next day the doctor had promised I might have something to eat.
+I could hardly wait. I had visions of a tenderloin steak smothered in
+fried onions, and some French-fried potatoes, and a tall table-limit
+stack of wheat cakes, and a few other incidental comfits and kickshaws.
+I could hardly wait for that meal.
+
+The next day came and she brought it to me, and I partook thereof. It
+was the white of an egg. For dessert I licked a stamp; but this I did
+clandestinely and by stealth, without saying anything about it to her. I
+was not supposed to have any sweets.
+
+On the occasion of the next feast the diet was varied. I had a sip of
+one of those fermented milk products. You probably know the sort of
+thing I mean. Even before you've swallowed it, it tastes as though it
+had already disagreed with you. The nurse said this food was predigested
+but did not tell me by whom. Nor did I ask her. I started to, but
+thought better of it. Sometimes one is all the happier for not knowing
+too much.
+
+A little later on, seeing that I had not suffered an attack of
+indigestion from this debauch, they gave me junket. In the dictionary I
+have looked up the definitions of junket. I quote:
+
+  JUNKET, v. I. t.  To entertain by feasting; regale.  II. i.  To
+  give or take part in an entertainment or excursion; feast in
+  company; picnic; revel.
+
+  JUNKET, n.  A merry feast or excursion; picnic.
+
+When the author of a dictionary tries to be frivolous he only succeeds
+in making himself appear foolish.
+
+I know not how it may be in the world at large, but in a hospital,
+junket is a custard that by some subtle process has been denuded of
+those ingredients which make a custard fascinating and exciting. It
+tastes as though the eggs, which form its underlying basis, had been
+laid in a fit of pique by a hen that was severely upset at the time.
+
+Hereafter when the junket is passed round somebody else may have my
+share. I'll stick to the mince pie a la mode. And the first cigar of my
+convalescence--ah, that, too, abides as a vivid memory! Dropping in
+one morning to replace the wrappings Doctor Z said I might smoke in
+moderation. So the nurse brought me a cigar, and I lit it and took one
+deep puff; but only one. I laid it aside. I said to the nurse:
+
+"A mistake has been made here. I do not want a cooking cigar, you
+understand. I desire a cigar for personal use. This one is full of herbs
+and simples, I think. It suggests a New England boiled dinner, and not a
+very good New England boiled dinner at that. Let us try again."
+
+She brought another cigar. It was not satisfactory either. Then she
+showed me the box--an orthodox box containing cigars of a recognized and
+previously dependable brand. I could only conclude that a root-and-herb
+doctor had bought an interest in the business and was introducing his
+own pet notions into the formula.
+
+But came a day--as the fancy writers say when they wish to convey the
+impression that a day has come, but hate to do it in a commonplace
+manner--came a day when my cigar tasted as a cigar should taste and food
+had the proper relish to it; and my appetite came back again and found
+the old home place not so greatly changed after all.
+
+And then shortly thereafter came another day, when I, all replete
+with expensive stitches, might drape the customary habiliments of
+civilization about my attenuated frame and go forth to mingle with my
+fellow beings. I have been mingling pretty steadily ever since, for now
+I have something to talk about--a topic good for any company; congenial,
+an absorbing topic.
+
+I can spot a brother member a block away. I hasten up to him and give
+him the grand hailing sign of the order. He opens his mouth to speak,
+but I beat him to it.
+
+"Speaking of operations--" I say. And then I'm off. Believe me, it's the
+life!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's "Speaking of Operations--", by Irvin S. Cobb
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS--" ***
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