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+The Project Gutenberg Etext "Speaking of Operations--", by Cobb
+#2 in our series by Irvin S. Cobb
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+"Speaking of Operations--"
+
+by Irvin S. Cobb
+
+September, 1999  [Etext #1890]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext "Speaking of Operations--", by Cobb
+*****This file should be named spopr10.txt or spopr10.zip******
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+This Etext prepared by Kirk Pearson <kpearson@nyx.net>
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+
+
+"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.  lf 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 The Project Gutenberg Etext "Speaking of Operations--", by Cobb
+
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