Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1888 edition. Excerpt: ... Dear Doctor, A number of years ago, on a dull dreary afternoon, which I had partly occupied at B Hospital with writing death certificates, I suddenly rose and felt something come over me, for the fiftieth time at that period. I hardly knew what, but it grew essentially out of my unsatisfactory clinical results. I had been an enthusiastic student of medicine originally, but an arrantly sceptic professor quite knocked the bottom out of all my faith in physic, and overmuch hospital work and responsibilities, grave beyond my age and experience, had squeezed a good deal of the enthusiasm out of me. After pacing up and down c the surgery, I threw myself back into my chair and dreamily thought myself back to the green fields and the early birds'-nesting and fishing days of my childhood. Just then a corpse was carried by the surgery window, and I turned to the old dispenser, and enquired in a petulant tone, "Tim, who's that dead now?" "Little Georgie, Sir." Now little Georgie was a waif who belonged to nobody, and we had liked him, and had kept him about in odd beds, as one might keep a pet animal. Everybody liked little Georgie; the most hardened old pauper would do him a good turn, and no one was ever more truly regretted than he. It all came about in this way: One day I wanted a bed for an acute case, and I ordered little Georgie out of his bed in a warm, snug corner, to another that was in front of a cold window; he went to it, caught cold, had pleurisy, and Tim's reply gives the result. Said I to myself: If I could only have stopped the initial fever that followed the chill by the window, George had probably lived. But three medical men besides myself had treated Georgie--all in unison--and all hospital men; still pleurisy followed the...