5EC0NDLIFE 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY? 
 
LINCOLN ROOM 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 LIBRARY 
 
 presented by 
 
 Marion D. Pratt Estate 
 
 6 
 
 5533sl 
 
 Cop. 3 
 
 LINCOLN nom^ 
 
MY 
 SECOND LIFE 
 
SOME OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME 
 AUTHOR: 
 
 A Country Doctor 
 
 Practising in Pike 
 
 Simon of Cyrene 
 
 Who Shall Command Thy Heart? 
 
 The Duke of Duluth 
 
 Medical Jurisprudence in America 
 
 Ophthalmic Jurisprudence 
 
 A History of Ophthalmology 
 
 Our Own and Our Cousins' Eyes 
 
 The Only Way 
 
 Give the People Their Own War Power 
 
 The People Must Make Their Own Plowshares 
 
 Just One Check on War 
 
 How to Stop Internation War 
 
 How to Stop War-Time Profiteering 
 
 Light, the Raw Material of Vision 
 
 Tramping to Failure (First Autobiography) 
 
 / Etc. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2012 with funding from 
 
 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 
 
 http://archive.org/details/mysecondlifeOOshas 
 
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 MY SI CONI) I II I 
 
MY 
 SECOND LIFE 
 
 By 
 
 THOMAS HALL SHASTID, A.M., M.D., LL.B., Sc.D. y 
 F.A.C.S., F.A.C.P., etc. 
 
 "Any physician disposed to complain 
 that the practice of medicine brings to his 
 attention too much sickness, sorrow, pain, 
 has only to remember that it also calls to 
 his notice joy and health, grotesquerie, 
 wit and humor, and 'helpless laughter hold- 
 ing both his. sides'." — Renouard's "History 
 of Medicine ," p. ggi. 
 
 What makes a vagabond go where he goes? 
 Ask the river why does it flow, 
 Ask the tree why does it grow, 
 But don't ask him, 
 He doesn't know." 
 
 — Anon. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 1944 
 
 GEORGE WAHR 
 
 Publisher to the University of Michigan 
 
 Ann Arbor, Michigan 
 
Copyright, 1944 
 
 By 
 
 THOMAS HALL SHASTID 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Printed, illustrated and bound in the United States of America 
 
 by 
 
 STEELE-LOUNSBERRY CO. 
 
 Fine Edition Manufacturers 
 
 Duluth. Minnesota 
 
S 5-3 3 a ) 
 
 TO 
 
 My Human Trinity — Father, Mother, 
 Wife — Any One of Whom Would at 
 Any Time Gladly Have Died for Me, 
 I Dedicate This Volume, While, of 
 the Trinity Divine, I Do Entreat All 
 Heavenly Blessings on Them. 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 
 I am grateful to many persons for help in the production of this book. 
 To Attorney Oliver R. Barrett, of Chicago, former Pittsfield boy, my 
 thanks are particularly due for many stimulating suggestions as to the 
 practice of medicine and medical quackery in bygone days, also for 
 numerous photographs of old-time places and people, also — and this is 
 no small point — for constant encouragement in my work of writing this 
 volume — a far more laborious task than may appear upon the surface. 
 
 Of almost equal use have been the data supplied by that incomparable 
 historian of early Illinois, Jesse M. Thompson, of Pittsfield. Also in- 
 dispensable have been the reminders by Grant Criswell, of Man- 
 hattan Beach, California, recently deceased, and of my boyhood's friend 
 and protector, Mr. Fred W. Niebur, still living at Pittsfield, and his 
 good wife. The latter's sister, Mrs. Rose Heck Brooks, has also obliged 
 me greatly by securing from her mother, Mrs. Hannah Heck — at the time 
 ninety-seven years of age — a great deal of information concerning old- 
 time people, especially John Hay and John G. Nicolay — then writing it 
 all down and sending it to me. Great assistance I also received from Mrs. 
 Helen Kelly, foster sister of John G. Nicolay; also from Mrs. Sally Bates 
 Utt, niece of John G. Nicolay; also from Messrs. W. C. Bush, and John H. 
 Caughlan, publishers and editors of the Pike County Democrat-Times, and 
 Mrs. Dot Dorsey Swan, publisher of the Pike County Republican; Mrs. 
 Ruth Ducey Kearney, for years a columnist on the Republican staff; Mrs. 
 Mina Swan Cherry, Bee ville, Texas; Mrs. Dora Bobbitt Miller, Madison, 
 Wise. ; Mr. William Strauss, of Pittsfield, by way of several fine photo- 
 graphs of his own making; as well as from innumerable other Pike 
 County, or former Pike County, friends. 
 
 To my former Companion, Fannie English Shastid, now alas in the 
 Great Shadow, I am indebted for the long series of scrapbooks she made 
 for me through several decades, also for the diaries she kept from the 
 time of our marriage almost to the day of her death. 
 
 Much information, otherwise quite unobtainable, I received from 
 Mrs. H. C (Anne Thomson) Shubert, Richland, Mo., and from Rev. 
 Thomson K. Shubert, El Dara, 111., about the old-time John D. Thomson 
 Academy. Mrs. Shubert was then the only living child of John D. and 
 Anne Ledlie Thomson, and the Rev. Shubert is her son. She herself has, 
 since I began to write this book, been gathered into the past. 
 
 My indebtedness to Dr. Carl E. Black, of Jacksonville, Illinois, is 
 repeatedly adverted to in many parts of the book. Without his fine 
 assistance many of the facts about Beecher Hall and the Prince Sani- 
 tarium could hardly have been secured. His letters, too, have been a 
 constant inspiration. 
 
 Special help has also been received from Dr. E. B. Montgomery, 
 Quincy, 111., whose recollections of old-time Pike and Adams County 
 doctors are remarkable. 
 
 To Mrs. Louisa Greene Epling, Tallula, Illinois, my thanks are due 
 for much accurate information about her grandfather, William Graham 
 
Greene, the "Uncle Billy" Greene of all the Lincoln biographies and in 
 short the man who taught Abraham Lincoln how to write clear and 
 forceful English. This accurate and definite information was especially- 
 pleasing to me as "Uncle Billy" Greene and my grandfather, John Greene 
 Shastid, were first cousins. 
 
 To Mr. Harry E. Pratt, Executive Secretary of the Abraham Lincoln 
 Association, Springfield, Illinois, I owe an especial obligation for a long 
 list of Abraham Lincoln's legal activities at Pittsfield, Illinois, also for 
 information whereby I was enabled to secure photographs of two plead- 
 ings which had been written by Lincoln's own hand, then and still filed 
 in the Circuit Clerk's office at Pittsfield. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to mention the help received from some of my 
 close kinspeople: To Mrs. Clara Shastid, widow of my half-brother, 
 Dr. William E. Shastid, I am indebted not only for numerous data con- 
 cerning old-time medical practice, but also for the gift to me of my 
 father's diploma, which bears the signature, among others, of Dr. Joseph 
 Nash McDowell and that of my father's other preceptor, Dr. John T. 
 Hodgen. The large artotype picture of Hodgen which had hung for so 
 many long decades in my father's office and for a quarter of a century 
 longer, in my brother's, Dr. William Shastid's, she also gave me. To my 
 brothers, Jon S. Shastid and Joseph C. Shastid, I am obliged for rem- 
 iniscences almost innumerable, some of which I had wholly forgotten 
 until prodded into active recollection by these wholesale reminders. To 
 my second cousin, Benjamin Wheeler, Milton, Illinois, I am thankful for 
 information about my and his great-grandmother, Eunice Richardson 
 Clemmons, noted midwife and "neighbor-doctor" generally. To my 
 nephew, Jon B. Shastid, I am thankful indeed for constant inspiration 
 in my work, as also to my friend of many years, Dr. Casey A. Wood. 
 The latter, alas, now part and portion of the past. 
 
 To Galesburg friends and friends in my Ann Arbor Law class, I am 
 also under obligations, as well as (concerning southern Illinois) to my 
 old-time patient and comrade, Edward H. Scobey, now deceased, men- 
 tioned several times hereafter in this volume. For an immense amount 
 of valuable information on Professor Joseph Nash McDowell, the most 
 renowned surgeon of the Mississippi Valley in the mid-decades of the 
 nineteenth century, I hereby make grateful acknowledgment to Dr. Robert 
 E. Schluetter, St. Louis. 
 
 To numbers of the old-time people of Pike County I offer abject 
 apologies for my inability to use in this volume more than a very small 
 part of the reminiscences they have sent me concerning my father, his 
 patients and his experiences, and many of the now forgotten medical days 
 and ways in western Illinois. 
 
 Finally, I express my gratitude to my former secretary and office 
 assistant, Miss Esther Erickson, now Mrs. Axel George Carlson, not 
 only for unusually accurate stenographic service, but also for skilful assist- 
 ance in proof-reading and in the preparation of the Index. A good index 
 is not merely a necessity for any serious volume, it is also a rarity in 
 books of any sort or kind. For whatsoever merit may be found in the 
 Index to this present work, the reader may bow to Mrs. Carlson. 
 
NOTE 
 
 My first life, "Tramping to Failure," had left untold a large number 
 of things which I had greatly desired to put on record but for which in 
 that volume there had been no room. Among these were many varied, 
 colorful, and even startling recollections of the old-time practice of 
 medicine which I, as boy, youth and man, had observed with my father, 
 either as apprentice in his office or riding by his side in the country on 
 his rounds among the sick, or, later still, in the many years of my own 
 practice. 
 
 "As boy, youth and man" indeed it was that I beheld the ancient 
 medicine and surgery, centuries old in its larger part, pass into oblivion, 
 and, in its place, come into the world the incredible new medicine, the 
 vastly more incredible new surgery. Superstition exchanged for knowl- 
 edge, death for life! 
 
 I have seen it all, both the old medicine and the new — I with my 
 more than sixty-eight years of medical backlook, "boy, youth and man." 
 Few are now alive whose memory carries over so long a reach of time in 
 connection with so significant and world-shaking a subject. Not politics 
 and fields of physical battle, it is true, but matters of more, far more, 
 importance! And even world politics and world wars have been altered 
 almost beyond recognition by the new, the incomparable, the world- 
 reconstructing discoveries in healing art and healing science. Most 
 magical of all has been the new light which the new medicine, like a 
 candle out of heaven, has shed upon everything else of interest, both 
 human and divine, changing all there is into something new and true 
 and strangely, almost impossibly, beautiful. 
 
 In recounting and describing these changes, I have remembered, so far 
 as was for me realizable, to include the human interest necessarily accom- 
 panying such changes — the wit, the humor, the joys, the fears, the 
 sorrows, the angers, the hatreds, the incapacities and degradations, like- 
 wise the hitherto unrecorded heroisms of those changeful times — chiefly 
 too in a remote part of the world where human affairs, though seemingly 
 uneventful, are ever truly at a white heat. 
 
 No one else that was able to remember those ancient days appeared 
 to be willing to recapture them, I mean in what appeared to be their 
 minor aspects. It therefore remained for me, the "tramp" of the earlier 
 volume, to perform, as usual, the work that had been rejected and 
 despised by others. 
 
 Some book that I read in my boyhood told about a number of cele- 
 brated artists in stained glass, who, day after day, in a great cathedral 
 that was under construction, sought to combine the colorful and un- 
 broken units of their art into a mighty pattern suitable for the chief 
 window of a glorious sanctuary. Day after day, and yet they wholly 
 failed. One morning, arriving to try their hands again, they beheld with 
 a mighty leaping of hearts, the holy work both designed and accom- 
 plished. The loveliness they had merely dreamed of rose before them in 
 
ineffable reality. Search revealed that a mere boy, in the course of the 
 night, had, without access to the proper materials and tools, nevertheless 
 and with only the shattered tiny bits of glass which others had knocked 
 off, rejected and discarded into a waste-heap, constructed a fitting tribute 
 to the Almighty. Alas that I, the aforetime tramp, have neither youth 
 nor genuis! Yet, were I a youth, I should not now possess the long-time 
 memory necessary for this work, and, were I a genius, I might perhaps 
 far more have preferred to devote my abilities to the legalized murder, 
 rather than the helping and saving, of men. And, anyway, who, if not I, 
 will ever salvage the cast-aside yet highly important bits of human history 
 to be found in these pages? 
 
 To those old-time matters of really great significance I have added, 
 merely for the sake of completing my "second life," a number of occur- 
 rences in my further trampings — those, namely, taking place since the 
 publication of my "Tramping to Failure" and down to the very moment 
 in which I write. 
 
 I may add that very little which was told in "Tramping to Failure," 
 saving matters relating to the first World War, has been repeated in this 
 volume, also that a clear understanding of "My Second Life" by no means 
 presupposes even the slightest acquaintance with my first autobiography. 
 
 Tramp's Rest 
 Duluth, Minn. 
 Autumn, 1944 
 
 No person's actual name or anything resembling it is employed in this book 
 when such employment might cause offense to the person himself or to any of his 
 friends or relatives. 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 (Not including those in the text) 
 
 Page 
 
 Apprentice, My Father's (1876 and 1877) 301 
 
 Apprentice, My Father's Most Brilliant, Dr. James Lafayette Edwards 319 
 
 Asepsis in Its Surgical Application 951 
 
 Bates, Major Dorus Evelyn (Brother of Therena Bates) 117 
 
 Beecher Hall, Jacksonville, Illinois 569 
 
 Bernays, Dr. Augustus Charles 825 
 
 Black, Dr. Carl Ellsworth 591 
 
 Black, Dr. Greene Vardiman, Birthplace of 558 
 
 Black, Dr. Greene Vardiman, Bust of 560 
 
 Black, Dr. Greene Vardiman, First Office of 559 
 
 Bush's Block, Pittsfield 142 
 
 Butz, Abraham, Arch-Jester 479 
 
 Campbell, Dr. Orin Shepherd 187 
 
 Casal, Dr. F. M , 516 
 
 Casal, Dr. F. M., House and Office of 432 
 
 Center of the Earth as it was in 1938, The 4 
 
 Clemmons, Eunice Richardson 933 
 
 Clemmons, Eunice Richardson, Grave of 934 
 
 Davis, Jefferson, letter from 152-3 
 
 Deemer, Martha, Residence of 176 
 
 Dick Building, The, Galesburg, Illinois (1895) 863 
 
 Diploma, My Father's 1121 
 
 Doctor-Druggist's Store and Sign, Old-Time 429-30 
 
 Doctors Club, Dr. Hewitt's Outline for Constitution of 29 
 
 Dr. Adams' Alleged "German Spy" 17 
 
 Dublin, Dr. James H. (two portraits) 515 
 
 Edwards, Dr. James Lafayette, Pen Drawings by 320 
 
 Eliot, President Charles William 791 
 
 "Ends of the Earth, The" 251 
 
 English, Fannie Fidelia 771 
 
 Garbutt Home, The 80 
 
 General Store, My Uncle Jon Shastid's, Scene of the Great Shastid-Harfield Fight 654 
 
 Glimpses of Duluth 1031 
 
 Grandma Heath 441-2 
 
 Greene, William Graham 69 
 
 Ground-Plan and Elevation of Typical Southern Illinois Farmhouse 883 
 
 Harvard Square in the Nineties 792 
 
 Hay, Attorney Milton, Home of 80 
 
 Hay, John Milton, as Assistant Private Secretary to Lincoln 81 
 
 Heart of Pike County, The 82 
 
 Heart of Pike County — Later View 140 
 
 Heart of Pike County — Latest View 773 
 
 Hodgen Hill 371 
 
 Hodgen, Dr. John Thomson (two portraits) 188 
 
 Hodgen, Dr. John T., Letter to My Father 166 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS— (Cont'd) 
 
 (Not including those in the text) 
 
 Page 
 
 Hodgen-Mudd Memorial Unveiled 199-200 
 
 Hotel, The Pittsfield 141 
 
 House, My Grandfather's (five views) 79 
 
 Illini Community Hospital 1152 
 
 Last Covered Bridge in Pike County , 702 
 
 Lincoln, Document in One of His Law Cases at Pittsfield 91 
 
 Lincoln-Douglas-Hay-Nicolay Memorial Stone 1122 
 
 Lincoln, His Plea No. 1 in Case of Gardner vs. Finch and Finch at Pittsfield 92 
 
 Lincoln, His Plea No. 2 in Case of Gardner vs. Finch and Finch at Pittsfield 93-4 
 
 Lincoln's Store, New Salem, Illinois, Replica of 58 
 
 Lincoln's Store, New Salem, Illinois, Replica of (Interior View) 58 
 
 "Little Angel of the Dark, The" 353 
 
 Little Lady, The, with the Dying Heart 1139 
 
 Log Cabin, Typical of Old Pittsfield 154 
 
 McDowell, Joseph Nash 175 
 
 Medical Lecture Cards, My Father's, Specimens of Old-Time 118 
 
 Medicine, Federal License to Practice, My Father's 127 
 
 Mother, The, Who had Found a Cigar Stump 665 
 
 My Father and Mother (July, 1912) 952 
 
 My Father's Young Family 128 
 
 My Mother as Musician 129 
 
 My Uncle, My Brother, and the Ever-Faithful Nightshade 683 
 
 Nancrede, Dr. Charles B. de 864 
 
 New Office, The "Great" 644 
 
 New Office, The "Great," a Corner in 653 
 
 Nicolay, John George, as Private Secretary to Lincoln 81 
 
 Nicolay, John G., Free Press Office of 103 
 
 Nicolay, John G., House in Which He Courted and Married Therena Bates 116 
 
 Nicolay, John G., Letter and Receipt by 67-8 
 
 Nicolay, John G., Record of the Naturalization of 105-6 
 
 Old Shastid Homestead as it Stands To-day (two views) 1151 
 
 Old-Time Druggist's Store and Sign 431 
 
 Old-Time Oculist's Office at Galesburg, Illinois 843-6 
 
 Opera House, Old-Time, at Pittsfield 719 
 
 Ornamental Penmanship, My Mother's 130 
 
 Partnership, Contract of, between Dr. Campbell and Dr. Hodgen 189-90 
 
 Patent, Grandfather Shastid's, to His Homestead 164 
 
 Pig and Guinea Pig 1030 
 
 Pigpen Schoolhouse 459 
 
 Pittsfield Academy, Prospectus of (1858) 462 
 
 Pittsfield, Backyard View (1870) 151 
 
 Plainer Handwriting, My Mother's 130 
 
 Prince, Dr. Arthur Edward (two portraits) 581-2 
 
 Prince, Dr. David (two portraits) 579-80 
 
 Prince Sanitarium, Jacksonville, Illinois 570 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS— (Cont'd) 
 
 (Not including those in the text) 
 
 Page 
 
 Public Square, Pittsfield, North Side (1870) 151 
 
 Purkitt, Mrs. George L 233 
 
 ' 'Puss Tat' ' 354 
 
 Rian, Jackie, at His Home 498 
 
 Rian, Jackie, in Stoneyard 497 
 
 Road Leading Down to Honey Creek 1140 
 
 Schoolhouse, Center 460 
 
 Schoolhouse, The Pittsfield, East Building 165 
 
 Schoolhouse, The Ross-Noyes 70 
 
 Schoolhouse, Toll Gate, Teacher and Pupils 461 
 
 Shastid, Dr. Thomas Wesley, in Middle Life 57 
 
 Shastid, Dr. Thomas Wesley, with Son and Grandson 772 
 
 Shastid Home Corner, View from 643 
 
 Shastid Homestead, The Old 163 
 
 Shastid, John Greene, Letter to His Son, Thomas Wesley Shastid 139 
 
 Shastid, Jon Barton 1150 
 
 Shastid, Jon Shepherd 753 
 
 Shastid, Louisa Hall (1883) 557 
 
 Shastid, My Uncle Jon, Earlier Residence of 656 
 
 Shastid, My Uncle Jon, Later Residence of 655 
 
 Suicide of Horse, Newspaper Clipping on 866 
 
 Sundance Valley 372 
 
 Thomson, John D., Autograph of 115 
 
 Thomson, Mrs. John Davis (Anne Ledlie) 104 
 
 Tramp, alias "Doctor Tom," The (1889) 626 
 
 Tramp and Black Eye 1020 
 
 Tramp and Companion at Ann Arbor (1902) 865 
 
 Tramp and Companion at Work 1019 
 
 Tramp in 1940, The 1149 
 
 Tramp, My Favorite Picture of 1029 
 
 Tramp's North Dungeon, The 1032 
 
 Typical Covered Bridge of the Olden Time 701 
 
 Typical Knox County Farmscape 826 
 
 "Uncle" Ned McGuire 774 
 
 Vienna, University of, Main Building 625 
 
 Where I Spoke to the Companion 754 
 
 Worthington, Dr. Thomas A., Preceptor of John T. Hodgen 177 
 
 Worthington Home at Pittsfield 178 
 
 Wood, Dr. Casey Albert. . . . „ 1001 
 
 X-Ray Picture, First Made in Western Hemisphere 31 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 PRELUDE: A Dozen Doctors Many Know 19 
 
 1. The Laughing Doctor. 19 
 
 2. The Doctor Who Broke Down the Color Line 22 
 
 3. The Doctor Who Never Would Operate 26 
 
 4. The Woman Doctor with a Tragi-Comic Complex 27 
 
 5. The Polished Physician 28 
 
 6. The Doctor Who, Born to Be an Actor, Became Instead a 
 General Surgeon of Remarkable Skill 28 
 
 7. The Hard-Boiled Doctor 38 
 
 8. The Doctor Who Kept a Hotel 42 
 
 9. The Doctor Who Would Have Saved Mankind 45 
 
 10. The Doctor Who Merely Stopped In 46 
 
 11. A Physician of Sixty-Odd Years Back — Y.P 48 
 
 12. Doctor Ursus . . ., 50 
 
 THE DOCTOR WHO FATHERED A TRAMP 
 
 Part I. In My Childhood 53 
 
 Part II. In My Youth and Early Manhood 387 
 
 Part III. Without the Father-Preceptor 965 
 
 APPENDIX: FOR FULL MEASURE 
 
 1. More ' Tncredibles' ' 1039 
 
 Cruel and Unusual Patients 1039 
 
 Y. of P's and Atypical M.D's 1075 
 
 2. Biographic Repercussion 1108 
 
 3. You Never Can Go Home 1108 
 
 4. The Second Jungle 1113 
 
 5. The Peace Work 1137 
 
 6. Parting 1156 
 

 * 
 
 DR. ADAMS' ALLEGED "GERMAN SPY" 
 
 Here Shown Hiding in an Open Alley. Note the Peculiarly Sinister Expression of 
 the Spy s Countenance. Even His Shadow is Strangely Bent and Distorted. What 
 Secret Meaning did that Conceal? 
 
 But this seemingly trivial headgear had ultimate results that were very far 
 trom trivial. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 PRELUDE — A Dozen Doctors Many Know 
 
 1.— THE LAUGHING DOCTOR 
 
 A certain physician, on a chill November midnight, in a graveyard 
 near Superior, Wisconsin, sat on a very high tombstone, holding over his 
 head an umbrella to keep off a pounding rain. By the light of a dull, red 
 lantern placed on another high stone nearby, the Doctor was reading 
 aloud from the well-known American Declaration of Independence. 
 
 At a slight distance from him stood a railroad man, likewise uphold- 
 ing an umbrella, shouting from time to time, whenever it lightened and 
 thundered, and in a stentorian bass, "Louder, you, louder!" 
 
 The operative cause behind the macabre scene was an election bet. 
 The payer of the bet was the man who was reading the document, the 
 collector of the bet was the other person. (It is absolutely necessary thus 
 to distinguish clearly the one functionary from the other, as, otherwise, 
 you, my reader, might easily suppose that each had lost a bet.) 
 
 The physician-payer of the stake was a resident of Superior, Wisconsin, 
 one of the finest diagnosticians I have ever known, and a most excellent 
 surgeon. He was indeed a man of many parts, but in seeking no other 
 objective did he shine so brightly as in that of laughter — great, belly- 
 shaking, haw-hawian, Jovian laughter. Laughter he must have. Without 
 it he could not even have lived. So, whenever occasions for laughter 
 did not spontaneously present themselves, he lost no opportunity to 
 create them. 
 
 As, for example, when he made up the story about my so-called "spy 
 cap." Yes, he was the precise man who, in 1917, shortly after the U. S. 
 of America had entered the European conflict, invented with humor pre- 
 pense and merely for the purpose of extracting loud, irresponsible laughter 
 from the situation, the story about my cap. 
 
 I happened, at the time, to be suffering atrociously from chronic nasal 
 sinusitis — as, indeed, I had already suffered from that affection for a very 
 long period of years, and one of my most distressing symptoms was an 
 inexpressible, an absolutely unendurable, sense of coldness in my face 
 whenever I ventured out of doors, not only in really frigid, but even in 
 mildly chilly, weather. One means after another I tried while attempting 
 to overcome the well-nigh intolerable symptom. But all to no avail until, 
 
20 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 one day, a Superior merchant, stopping me on the street, declared he 
 had the very thing I needed for my face. 
 
 And in fact he had it. 
 
 It was what he called an "aviator's cap." It was made of felt about 
 one-half inch thick, a curious head-gear which covered not merely "the 
 noble dome of thought," but, drooping amply and gracefully, managed 
 to protect in an extremely cozy manner, the back-head, the forehead, the 
 back of the neck, all of the suffering face, the front of the neck and so 
 forth and so on, till even the tops of the not-too-wide shoulders were 
 proof against Jack Frost. 
 
 Then, one day as I wore that cap, the laughing doctor of Superior 
 beheld the strange apparition of me — me pushing through the bustling 
 throng along Tower Avenue. And he laughed till the hills of old neigh- 
 boring Duluth must have resounded with the granitic yells. 
 
 He even came straight up to me and then laughed boldly in my felt- 
 covered face. He tried his best to tell me a little of what he was laughing 
 about, but could not manage to do so. 
 
 At length he walked weakly away, still holding his sides. 
 
 Then, later, as he afterwards informed me with loud haw-haws, he 
 had met, just across the street from where I was at that time walking, 
 "a very earnest couple from the country," persons whom he had frequent- 
 ly treated for illness and whom he regarded as an especially credulous 
 and over-serious pair. To these good people he whispered huskily and as 
 if dark things were near: "See that man yonder? Across the street there! 
 There he goes! He's a German Spy, and the United States government is 
 now requiring all German spies in this country to wear that sort of head- 
 gear that you see — 'spy-cap' they call it. Look out for that man, good 
 folks, and pass the truth about him on to all your friends, yes and every- 
 body else, so that everyone in this community may know who he is and 
 so come to avoid him." 
 
 Now this couple took that matter very seriously. So too did many 
 other persons who had no sense of humor. And as I, in those days, dwelt 
 in Superior, the little joke of that good "laughing doctor" had well-nigh 
 serious consequences for the wearer of the "spy-cap." Friends, however 
 — good, earnest friends — pulled me out of the predicament — with much 
 difficulty, I admit, for, though I never had been connected with the 
 German government in any shape or form, I had until the foolish entry 
 of our government into the conflict opposed that entry as bitterly as I 
 had known how to do. And there were other troubles resulting from the 
 joke about the "spy-cap," troubles I shall need to speak about hereafter. 
 
 Up in his doctor's office too this good, but sometimes indiscreet, 
 physician ofttimes had his little joke. 
 
 For example, he had, in connection with his consultation room, a 
 very much smaller apartment, which was painted as black as black could 
 ever be — floor, ceiling, all four walls. Often the good doctor would say 
 to a patient — ordinarily a young man of the blustering type — "Here 
 comes another patient: go into that little room there for a moment, and 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 21 
 
 I'll turn on its light from over here." The patient would step in, the 
 doctor would snap the door to, bolt it, and then indeed turn on the 
 light — only to reveal at the small room's farther end a hideous, grinning 
 skeleton. 
 
 Once he put a braggadocio sort of young man into that room, locked 
 the door and turned on the light — all quite as usual. But then the stalwart 
 young person, a hard-joking kind of person himself, lit into that fine, 
 imported, ether-bleached skeleton, as if he had in truth been afraid of 
 it, made a terrible wreck of it, smashed his way back through the door 
 to where the doctor still stood laughing, there pretended to have gone 
 absolutely insane from fright, wrecked the entire equipment of the con- 
 sultation-room, and, when finally seized by the doctor, ran out into the 
 hall with him clear to the head of the stairway. 
 
 There, locked in each other's fond embrace, they swayed for a moment 
 to and fro, then fell — fell, rolled rather, clean from the top of the stairway 
 to the bottom. 
 
 Astonished people found them there, still locked in each other's tight 
 embrace, and laughing as if their very hearts would burst. 
 
 Ladies and gentlemen, meet — in fact you have already met — the joyous 
 physician, Dr. John Cain (sometimes termed Cain-raising) Adams, of 
 Superior. Dr. Adams is one of the physicians whom all ought really to 
 know, and, in fact, remember. 1 
 
 Why did a man like Dr. Adams do such strangely hilarious things? 
 A good many persons in the state of Wisconsin have pondered that 
 question. Now I happen to know the Doctor's secret thoroughly, al- 
 though he never told it to me. Briefly stated: he was a man of highly 
 sensitive nervous organization, who took the sicknesses and the sorrows 
 of his patients far more deeply into his heart than anyone who never had 
 known him intimately could possibly have supposed. He did an immense 
 amount of major surgery, found it a crushing burden on him, and so, 
 from time to time, attempted to throw that burden off with "the laughter 
 that purgeth the soul." 
 
 On the 23rd of August, 1920, after a stroke of apoplexy, Dr. John 
 Cain Adams passed from earth, and, as this writer believes, to a place of 
 eternal and beautiful laughter. 
 
 1 Anyone who wishes to unearth a veritable mine of both lay and medical jocularity 
 (more serious traits as well) should speak today with Dr. Adams' old-time partner (and, 
 by the way, almost as persistent and unsparing a joker as Doctor Adams was himself) Dr. 
 F. C. Sarazin. Dr. Sarazin still practices in Superior. (Later: Dr. Sarazin has gone to join 
 his laughter-loving friend.) 
 
 — - — One day, when I was in Superior only a short time back, a man in a crowd there, 
 after he had finished telling a very humorous anecdote, asked that ancient question, "Who 
 is it that's made up all these funny stories?" Without the slightest hesitation there came 
 the reply from some one in the crowd, "Doc Adams and Doc Sarazin, only they didn't make 
 them up but made them." 
 
 To all who believe that, as one man plainly expressed the matter to me, "There is 
 nothing at all in a doctor's life of the slightest general interest," I would say that, in the 
 life of John Cain Adams alone, almost anyone whosoever, in the least conversant with the 
 art of writing, could easily discover material sufficient for several large volumes. 
 
22 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 In what a curious, almost incredibly, delayed way, for so the gods 
 would have it, this laughing philosopher-doctor, years after his death, 
 affected my destiny by means of his report, recorded in this sketch, that 
 I was wearing a "spy-cap," I will duly and truly relate hereafter in this 
 volume. 
 
 I must hasten on with this tiny portrait gallery of "a dozen doctors 
 many know," Still other doctors I shall be happy to introduce to you 
 later, but this particular dozen I present to you now for two special 
 reasons (reasons, that is, other than the mere fact that all were known 
 to me more or less personally, therefore belonged in my "Life"): (1) Being 
 typical, they form a natural introduction to the remainder of the volume. 
 (2) Each and every doctor of the dozen either stands with his actual 
 name attached, or, if given a fictitious appellation (something sometimes 
 necessary), his identity can easily be made out by a considerable number 
 of readers who must have been acquainted with him. There can, there- 
 fore, in the case of none of these doctors be any question whatever as to 
 their actuality. 
 
 When "Tramping to Failure" came out, certain questions were asked 
 me by correspondents which appeared to imply grave doubt as to whether 
 or not this character or that whom I had placed in the volume was actual 
 or fictitious. Now and then some one in person would ask me similar 
 questions. I have therefore thought to place at the very beginning of 
 the present book this round dozen of highly vivid and picturesque 
 characters (as vivid and picturesque as any I have drawn elsewhere either 
 in this volume or in the former) and then let their obvious actuality 
 speak out. 1 
 
 2.— THE DOCTOR WHO BROKE DOWN THE COLOR LINE 
 
 There is another physician I have met whom you too ought to meet — 
 and never dodge his color. He was coal black, small, well-made, not so 
 much a negro as a "negrillo." He was not by any means a "laughing 
 doctor." In fact I never did see him laugh, even smile. 
 
 He was one of the most grave and serious persons, truly, that ever 
 I have known, also a standing rebuke to those who believe there cannot 
 be great intellect in any but a Nordic. Almost he spent everything he 
 
 1 As the reader will learn hereafter, I was for a time, at Harvard College, a pupil of 
 that master of literary composition, Barrett Wendell. One day he said to us students, according 
 to the notes I made at the time: "Some of you foolish fellows think that the only way to 
 create is to use your imagination. I say to you that if you do not see a good character sketch 
 in every person that you see — mind, I do not say in 'some' persons that you see, but in every 
 person that you see — it is because you do not see. 
 
 "And, if you do not see a good story in every walk you take about the town, once again 
 the reason is that you do not see: do not see, hear, smell, taste, feel, do anything — but walk." 
 
 Any one who has ever even tried to see, will know that what Wendell told us was the 
 truth. 
 
 I will add that, so far as I have learned, no printed critique of my former volume, 
 "Tramping to Failure," has raised any question as to the actuality of any character or event 
 therein portrayed or related. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 23 
 
 made for books and instruments, and he cared not what they cost. He 
 made innumerable post-mortems and dissections, and, ofttimes, half a 
 night would he sit up with his three kinds of microscopes. 
 
 He used to talk a very great deal about ' 'breaking down the color line," 
 that invisible but exceedingly obstinate boundary which, somehow and 
 for some reason, lies between white society and black, and which a good 
 many persons believe will lie between them forever. 
 
 Early in my acquaintance with this colored man he asked me to 
 witness a post-mortem which he was about to make on a negro child. 
 I complied, and then I saw him demonstrate, so quickly it hardly seemed 
 possible, that one length of the child's intestine had telescoped into 
 another — thus blocking the bowels and producing death. (Had the little 
 negro doctor been allowed to operate there would surely have been no 
 death.) 
 
 All at once, as we stood there, looking at the little dead child, I 
 heard a kind of gasp, turned, looked straight at the little doctor and saw 
 tears streaming down his countenance. "The white physician in this 
 case simply would not let me operate. — Poor little nigger baby, poor 
 little — I get so sorry sometimes for my people. — Do you think if I 
 tried hard, very hard — very, very hard indeed — I could at last break down 
 the color-line in this country? Why is not black society just as good as 
 white? Couldn't I break it down? What do you think?" 
 
 I could not choose but prevaricate. "Yes," I said, "I think that, 
 possibly, if you were persistent enough and had the right good luck, you 
 could, eventually, break down the line. But," I went on more carefully, 
 "wouldn't it be well to try to break down that line in your own pro- 
 fession first — say, to begin with, in your own individual practice? Then 
 maybe you might be able to go farther." 
 
 "O, I'm going to do it in my own practice without doubt. Already 
 a number of well-to-do white persons have come to ask me about this, 
 that, and the other. They seem to be much interested, in fact to recognize 
 my great ability." 
 
 Truly, although immodest, he did have ability of a high order. No 
 better surgeon or pathologist have I seen in my life. Of course I could 
 not tell him though that the color line — well, in fact, that he might just 
 as well expect to break down a line of mountains in the moon. 
 
 Anyway, whenever I met him, he would say to me and keep on saying, 
 "Yes, I'm going to break down the color-line. I'm the man that can 
 do it. You watch me. I'm not bragging." 
 
 Shortly after that, he came to me in ecstasy. A certain well-to-do 
 white man had asked him to take full charge of the case of his little son, 
 a very sickly child with a bad club-foot. 
 
 Well, after a time, the doctor operated. He asked me to give the 
 ether for him, and I did. 
 
 And I tell you the very simple truth when I say that Stromeyer him- 
 self could have done no better operation. 
 
 One day, a few weeks after the operation, which had been to the 
 highest extent successful, the doctor called me to the hospital to see 
 him do a resection of the elbow joint. As I walked into the hospital 
 
24 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 front-yard, I beheld the little colored doctor and a great monster of a 
 white man engaged in bitter controversy. 
 
 "Yes," shouted the white man, "you did a good enough operation, 
 at least we'll say you did. But, if you think I'm going to pay twenty-five 
 dollars to a dirty nigger for just half of one hour's work, you're a son- 
 of-an everlasting so-and-so if you get your expectation. And if you want 
 to take it up — what I called you — you can take it up now." 
 
 He threw three silver dollars down on the lawn at the" little negro's 
 little feet. Then, "Pick 'em up, damn you, and you can have 'em. And 
 that's all you'll ever get." 
 
 Said the little black doctor to me, "Going inside?" 
 
 Inside the hospital, I tried to comfort him, "I'm glad you didn't take 
 the money." 
 
 "And if I sue him he'll certainly kill me." 
 
 "Then don't sue him." 
 
 I saw very clearly what I myself would have done had the case been 
 mine, but the poor little colored fellow — well, he could not quite do the 
 same thing. That color line stood out too plainly drawn against him. 
 
 After a while I saw that the little doctor's lip was beginning to quiver. 
 I went up and put my arm around him and now I'm glad that I did. 
 I said, "Anyway you did a magnificent operation." 
 
 "Yes," so cheered, he answered. "And I'm going to break down the 
 color line in this country. I'll show you how I'll do it. Til do it." 
 
 I did not answer at all, for I could not equivocate to him then. And, 
 for just that reason (that my meaning passed inside him) I lost his 
 interesting friendship then and there, forever and forevermore. 
 
 He had thought that my confidence in his ability to do anything was, 
 ike his confidence in himself, absolutely without end. 
 
 Shortly afterward, I removed from that city. 
 
 So, too, a little later, did the colored doctor. 
 
 I wrote to him at length from my new addresses. Yes, two or three 
 times I wrote to him. But never a word of reply have I received even 
 until this day. 
 
 But, years ago, I ran across a runner for a surgical supply house, a 
 man possessed of the fullest and latest information about the little darkey 
 doctor who had believed that he could "break down the color line." 
 
 "And by heaven," wound up the traveling salesman, "he did it." 
 
 "Did it? Why no! Of course he didn't do it." 
 
 "Listen. After he had moved to that larger city, what step do you 
 think he took? You couldn't guess. 
 
 "In the very first place, he took a small office in an obscure location 
 and endeavored to get a practice among the colored people. Only for a 
 stepping-stone, you know: later he'd break down the color-line. 
 
 "But most of the black folk had no money. And these came to him 
 in great droves. -Those having money employed white doctors. So here 
 was the little negro doctor, broke. And he kept on getting broker and 
 broker. 
 
 "Yet he didn't stop thinking. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 25 
 
 "So, one day, as a result of the agitation in his gray matter (inside 
 that little black head: I can't tell just where he keeps the brains) he went 
 to one of the most fashionable druggists in town. That druggist owned 
 an entire office building, on the lowermost floor of which he conducted 
 his grandiose pharmacy. Now that druggist had had great difficulty in 
 keeping a tenant in the back rooms of his first floor up. Asked too much 
 rent for one thing, and then too the rooms were back ones. 
 
 "So the little colored doctor went to the pharmacist, and, having 
 got his ear with difficulty, propounded a plan, which, all at once and 
 like a flash, that pharmacist accepted. 
 
 "Behold, therefore, the little colored doctor beautifully installed in 
 the great back rooms on the first floor of that pharmacist's great building 
 — at nothing per month whatever. 
 
 "And the little black doctor soon became rich. 
 
 "Incidentally he made much money for the tony druggist also. The 
 druggist got all the little black man's prescriptions. 
 
 "And what was he doing? Practising geni to-urinary diseases only. 
 He was in fact an expert in that field, and no one could have beaten him 
 at it in the city. But the great point was that, whenever any person 
 afflicted with venereal came to that druggist (after the fashion of so 
 many young men and even boys — they nearly always first consult a 
 druggist) to ask him who was the right man to employ in such cases, the 
 druggist would answer (patient and druggist of course would when they 
 discussed the matter be behind the prescription counter) 'See yonder 
 stairway? It runs up to a rather dark hall, where nobody could ever 
 recognize anybody else. Off from that hall open seven dark doors with, 
 on each, a tiny purple light, displaying in black figures the number of 
 the room. Say all the rooms happen to be filled excepting number seven. 
 Look till you find door number seven, which you can by the purple 
 illumination, then open the door, enter, shut the door behind you, and, 
 in the ample illumination of the room, take a chair. 
 
 'No one else can enter while you are in that room. 
 'Neither on the other hand, can you pass backward into the dark 
 hall. You'll just have to wait till the door from that room, opening into 
 the long, well-lighted consulting apartment of the doctor, comes open 
 of itself, and the doctor's voice calls out for you. Then you can enter 
 the consultation room and transact your business with the doctor without 
 your having ever been seen by any person whomsoever except the doctor 
 and his colored assistant. 
 
 'If you absolutely have to leave the building before you have seen 
 the doctor, you merely, in that little private waiting-room, press a 
 lighted button which reads "exit from the building." And then you go 
 out into a very busy alley.' 
 
 "So, you see, the patient — well, he would always perceive the point. 
 No white person would ever behold him either on his way to or while 
 waiting within the doctor's office, or label his right name on his specimen 
 of blood, or leave any record on his books with that patient's right 
 name upon it. All was as secret as the grave. And the best part of it 
 was that colored doctors never commingle with the white crowd socially. 
 
26 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Hence they never can, intentionally or unintentionally, let any sort of 
 secret leak out. 
 
 "The scheme 'caught on.' Even the sense of mystery about the affair 
 contributed greatly to its success. The little colored doctor, as I have 
 already stated, makes oodles of dough. I see him frequently, sell him 
 all sorts of his kind of instruments, and, often, he says to me, knowing, 
 of course, that he'll always be a social outcast — 'Well, so far as concerns 
 the practice of geni to-urinary medicine at least, I have broken down the 
 color-line.' " 
 
 3.— THE DOCTOR WHO NEVER WOULD OPERATE 
 
 We will call him Harn Brinton, though that was not his name pre- 
 cisely. As a lad he was so possessed of the sea that his mother at long 
 last let him take a sample voyage. On the trip he saw a surgeon operate, 
 and, after that, he was all for a skull, a microscope or two, and a scalpel, 
 and no ship even of the best could satisfy him now. 
 
 After his graduation (he was first man in his class) he settled in a 
 very large city, and, being an excellent surgeon, the first case he came 
 across and operated on — well, he took out the gall-bladder. 
 
 The patient died in horrible distress (a pulmonary embolism, for 
 which the doctor was not in the least to blame). And, after that, Dr. 
 Brinton appeared to go all melancholy and sour. 
 
 He moped and he moped, and, after a time, forswore all surgery 
 whatever. Not only, in fact, did he forswear it, but he swore terribly 
 toward it, at it and against it — in season and out of season. He declared 
 ofttimes that surgery was the invention of the devil, that it had killed 
 more people than it ever had cured. 
 
 So he became an internist, and always he kept on fighting surgery 
 and surgeons. Never a case would he refer to any surgeon, no matter 
 how much the patient might need surgery. 
 
 For years and years that went on. At length the man found himself 
 afflicted with a very much enlarged middle turbinal bone (away up high 
 in the upper-back part of his right nasal air passage) a bone which gave 
 him much distress. The pain increased by leaps and bounds, until at 
 length it was almost intolerable. And then it increased a hundredfold 
 more. So then he thought of nasal surgery and a nasal surgeon. 
 
 But by now he had said so many unkind things against surgery and 
 surgeons that he was greatly ashamed (seeing that he badly needed 
 surgery for himself) to resort to a surgeon. 
 
 Very well, the operation was quite simple anyhow. 
 
 So he laid before himself a new anatomy book, the right kind of 
 looking-glass also, then a brilliantly reflected light-source, and so on. 
 After that, having sufficiently anesthetized the inside of the affected nose- 
 passage, he operated — operated on the inside of his own narrow nose 
 and up very high near the brain. 
 
 And he removed that middle turbinal. Very, very thoroughly he 
 removed it — also, along with it, his life. 
 
 An account of his self-taking-off I read in the necrologic department 
 of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the facts of his 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 27 
 
 boyhood and youth I acquired from his mother and his sweetheart — a 
 very beautiful woman whom he never had married and who had waited 
 for him faithfully for more than ten long years. 
 
 It takes all sorts of physicians, of course, to make a medical world. 
 
 4.— THE WOMAN DOCTOR WITH A TRAGI-COMIC COMPLEX 
 
 I knew a physician who sometimes seemed to me what is called "hard- 
 boiled," but I never could be quite certain. That doctor was a woman. 
 She lived not in my own town, but in a very much larger city and one 
 quite far from that in which I lived. Tall she was, black-headed, blue- 
 eyed, active — handsome as heaven when, forgetting herself, she deigned 
 to smile, but as hideous as Hades whenever she aped the masculine mem- 
 bers of her profession. 
 
 She smoked cigarettes long before it was stylish so to do. She was 
 a bundle of nerves and affectations, had histrionic spasms occasionally 
 and trouble with her eyes all the time. Yet her vivacity had ever a 
 certain allure for everyone — especially men. 
 
 Her clientele consisted, I had heard, almost entirely of young women. 
 She used to read startling papers before young women's clubs, especially 
 on subjects like the Relation of Gonorrhoea to Obstetrics; Why Marry 
 Early — or Late?; How to Psychoanalyze a Bachelor's First Baby. And 
 she certainly drew a large crowd whenever she spoke. 
 
 One day she came to my office saying she had gone suddenly and 
 absolutely blind — a common complaint among persons of neurasthenic 
 type. Later, on the same day, her aunt came too, alone and with an air 
 of great importance. In fact the aunt informed me that my patient, from 
 time to frequent time, would vanish from her practice, ostensibly on 
 vacation or the like, but, actually — did I think I could possibly guess the 
 reasons for her departures? 
 
 No, I admitted, I did not think that I could guess. 
 
 She had a little baby. Yes, actually, she, supposed to be a virgin, 
 possessed a tiny son of her very own. It lived with another aunt of the 
 doctor's, a sister of the speaker herself, at a very great distance away. 
 This little son, in fact, was the aim and object of its doctor-mother's life. 
 No, she, the speaker, had told no one else than me, not one, but, as I 
 was the doctor's doctor, attempting in good faith to treat this doctor- 
 patient of mine, who was supposed to be going completely blind, it was 
 only right for me to know her actual, her hysterical, condition, and 
 (could I believe the fact?) the father of the baby (a handsome, no-account 
 hound) was attempting to extort much money from the doctor as the 
 price of his continued secrecy. 
 
 After this I saw that lady physician no more. But, three or four 
 months afterward, I read in the Journal of the A. M. A. that she had died 
 
 of But I do not wish to disclose her identity. Even the titles 
 
 of her papers I have somewhat altered and one or two points of her 
 personal appearance. 
 
28 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 5.— THE POLISHED PHYSICIAN 
 
 Dr. Politus (let us call him that) was far and away the most tactful and 
 courtly physician ever I have known. He even looked polished — like a 
 tombstone. His actions were polished. And the words of his mouth 
 were urbane to the extreme. He would say, for example, to a lady patient, 
 not, in the usual rough manner, "Stick your tongue out" — but, "Would 
 you mind if I looked at your tongue?" 
 
 He was a gentleman in almost every sense of the word. Gentle to men, 
 gentle to women, gentle to children — of all ranks, ages, conditions. 
 
 Small, suave, soft-spoken, with large, fawn-like, generally down- 
 cast eyes! 
 
 He was one day married by a large, coarse-looking woman, who had 
 managed to drive him to the sacrificial altar only because, as it seemed, 
 he was too courteous to resist. 
 
 One day the lady attempted to murder him (so it was said). He (so 
 it was said also) resisted and kicked her down an elevator shaft which a 
 careless workman had left open. She, at all events (crime, accident or 
 what not) suffered fractures of the spine in several places. 
 
 Conscious-stricken in the extreme, the doctor nursed her faithfully un- 
 til she died. She, on her part, blamed herself without cessation, and the 
 two lived more than happily during the time that it took the great crude 
 creature to pass out. I, an oculist, was called into the case incidentally 
 for the purpose of determining why the lady appeared to be going blind. 
 Both optic nerves, I found, were wasting, but, at the husband's request, 
 I gave the lady much hope — not exactly lying it was, but, rather, "psy- 
 chologizing." 
 
 When she died, she left him all her property, and, later, he became 
 insane. 
 
 6.— THE DOCTOR WHO, BORN TO BE AN ACTOR, BECAME 
 INSTEAD A GENERAL SURGEON OF REMARKABLE SKILL 
 
 To the next physician I want to devote more space, for reasons to be 
 discovered by yourself. At this point, however, I will say that this 
 physician has always seemed to me one of the greatest of doctors — 
 surgeons, rather — that ever I have known, notwithstanding the fact that 
 he has always had an abhorrence of authorship, hence has written almost 
 nothing for the journals, and, besides, has been well-nigh wholly with- 
 out ambition excepting only to make his surgery as excellent as possible. 
 
 It was at Galesburg, Illinois, that I formed the acquaintance of this 
 doctor. I had already been practicing in that city for a short time, when, 
 on a very stormy day, as I walked along the street, I ran into ' 'Dr. Mimus' ' 
 — as I quickly came to call him. 
 
 Tall, athletic, black-haired, obsidian-eyed, quick, vivid, resonant- 
 voiced, sympathetic and thoroughly striking in everything he said and 
 did, he would have been picked out instantly as thoroughly distinguished, 
 on any operatic stage of the world or in any brilliant court of Europe. 
 So I thought, the minute I laid eyes on him. Fifteen minutes later, in 
 my inner office, I was laughing — a helpless, hopeless piece of shaking 
 
IESCHER DRUG COMPANY 
 
 DRUGGISTS AND CHEMISTS, 
 13 MAIN STREET, GALE SB OK* 
 
 ELEPHONE NO. 7 6 : 
 
 
 DR. JOHN MICHAEL HEWITT'S PENCILLED OUTLINE 
 FOR THE CONSTITUTION OF THE GALESBURG, ILL., DOCTORS CLUB 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 29 
 
AN X-RAY PICTURE OF MY LEFT HAND 
 
 MADE BY DR. JOHN MICHAEL HEWITT, OF GALESBURG, ILL., IN 1895 
 
 This Skiagraph, So Far as I Know, was the First Roentgenogram Produced in the Western Hemisphere. 
 
 I feel much pride in this really good picture because, though I did not make it myself, I certainly 
 
 "had a hand" in it. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 31 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 33 
 
 jelly — as he mimicked the voices, the words, the gaits, the manners, yes 
 even the superstitions and curious modes of thought of many of the 
 patients he had already had. One cool, disturbing suspicion, however, 
 at length uprose in my mind. What would happen to this man, to his 
 practice, should he become so strongly inclined to imitate his patients 
 in their very presence that he would actually do that? 
 
 Two days later I had the surprise of my life on this point. As I walked 
 into the doctor's waiting-room — which was over-full of patients both 
 of high and of low degree, he came running up to me, hands out-stretched, 
 delightedly crying, "So glad you've come! We have most interesting 
 surgery today." 
 
 And have it he surely did, but none of it even half so interesting as 
 himself. And I, in his inner office, ensconced by his request in his easiest 
 chair, had merely to look on and to wonder at what came forward. 
 Case after case he discoursed upon with a brilliancy unequalled before in 
 my experience. And (much as I had previously, if dimly, suspected he 
 would do) in each and every instance he did actually imitate the given 
 patient to his very face. In fact he "got away with it." Got away with 
 it? Well, his patients simply loved him for it. Whatever he did seemed 
 always perfectly right to them. Not a single offense was ever taken, so 
 far as I could learn, by any of his patients on account of his mimicry so 
 long as he practiced in Galesburg. Understand. He imitated women as 
 well as children and men, and women are almost always sensitive to 
 mimicry, even deeply resentful toward it. But the doctor did it all with 
 such incredible artistry and invariably with such ludicrous effect too, 
 that the subject of the joke would seem to be enjoying it even more than 
 did the doctor or anybody else. 
 
 After that day the doctor and I were fast friends. I sent the most of my 
 general practice and all my general surgery to him, he sent me his oculistic 
 work. And, when we had both taken newer and better office rooms — 
 in the Dick building — up one and the same flight of stairs, we, at night, 
 as soon as the patients of both of us had departed, would get together 
 in his office or in mine, and (gods of laughter and of science too !) how 
 the hours would rush by! 
 
 Sometimes, when both of us had been fatigued by the occurrences of 
 the day, he would supply a good rest for us by acting a little or by recit- 
 ing, and I can hear him now, as Othello, delivering in a voice that 
 Alexander Salvini might have envied — 
 
 "Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle, 
 
 Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven, 
 
 It was my hint to speak." 
 
 But Dickens he never rendered by rote. Dickens, to Dr. Mimus, was 
 far too sacred a writer for his words to be entrusted to mere memory. 
 
 I recall distinctly the first time he ever read to me from Dickens. I 
 had gone into his place — it was late at night — to ask about a little boy 
 patient of his who had been exceedingly sick. Twice, in fact, the doctor 
 had taken me out with him into the country to see the lad, not because 
 
34 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 an eye, ear, nose and throat man was needed in the case, but because, 
 as the doctor stated, he could not bear to look at the child again alone. 
 On this particular day, for some reason or other, he had not asked me 
 to go with him, so, as I say, after office hours I went to his consultation 
 room and there asked him about the child. 
 
 He gave me for a moment a straight, silent look, while a suggestion of 
 pain passed over his countenance. Then he answered (very quietly and 
 I knew all): "They phoned in today not to come. — Ever read to you 
 from "Great Expectations" about Joe Gargery?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Let us forget." 
 
 So he read to me from Chapter VII of the famous book the passage in 
 question wherein Joe Gargery, a simple man, who had been trying to 
 improve his social status, but with some difficulty, brings out the results 
 of his gigantic efforts merely to learn how to read. (It is here essential 
 to reproduce the words in full.) 
 
 "There was no indispensable necessity for my communicating with Joe by letter, inas- 
 much as he sat beside me and we were alone. But, I delivered this written communication 
 (slate and all) with my own hand, and Joe received it as a miracle of erudition. 
 
 " 'I say, Pip, old chap!' cried Joe, opening his blue eyes wide, 'what a scholar you are! 
 Ain't you?' 
 
 " 'I should like to be,' said I, glancing at the slate as he held it: with a misgiving that 
 the writing was rather hilly. 
 
 " 'Why, here's a J,' said Joe, 'and a O equal to anything! Here's a J and a O, Pip, 
 and a J-O, Joe.' 
 
 "I had never heard Joe read aloud to any greater extent than this monosyllable, and 
 I had observed at church last Sunday, when I accidentally held our prayer-book upside 
 down, that it seemed to suit his convenience quite as well as if it had been all right. Wishing 
 to embrace the present occasion of finding out whether in teaching Joe, I should have to begin 
 quite at the beginning, I said, 'Ah! But read the rest, Joe.' 
 
 " 'The rest, eh, Pip?' said Joe, looking at it with a slow, searching eye, 'One, two, 
 three. Why, here's three Js, and three Os, and three J-O, Joes, in it, Pip!" 
 
 "I leaned over Joe, and, with the aid of my forefinger, read him the whole letter. 
 
 " 'Astonishing!' said Joe, when I had finished. 'You ARE a scholar.' 
 
 " 'How do you spell Gargery, Joe?' I asked. him with modest patronage. 
 
 " T don't spell it at all,' said Joe. 
 
 " 'But supposing you did?' 
 
 " It cant be supposed,' said Joe. 'Tho' I'm oncommon fond of reading too.' 
 
 " 'Are you, Joe?' 
 
 " 'On-common. Give me,' said Joe, 'a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me 
 down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!' he continued, after rubbing his knees 
 a little, 'when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, "Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe," how 
 interesting reading is!' 
 
 "I derived from this, that Joe's education, like steam, was yet in its infancy." 
 
 When the doctor had finished reading, he suddenly pulled himself 
 back into the present moment, and softly murmured, "Father in heaven! 
 how we all need laughter!" 
 
 After that night, whenever one of us had learned that a patient, for 
 example, or a newspaper, was saying a good word for one of us, the other 
 would invariably remark, with a grin: "But when you do find a J and 
 a O, and a J-O, Joe, it makes mighty interesting reading." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 35 
 
 And, speaking of Joe Gargery and his writing, Dr. Mimus himself 
 was, indeed and in truth, not very much of a writer. Not that he did 
 not know how to write or to write in a way that was correct and even 
 interesting in the extreme. But he detested and abhorred the mere act 
 of writing. From which curious fact it came about that he seldom wrote 
 even a letter to anyone, and so, ofttimes, he was bitterly upbraided for 
 neglecting his correspondence even by his best friends. 
 
 Nevertheless, when I was founding the Galesburg Doctors Club — a 
 piece of presumption on my part, so young as then was I — he, though a 
 year still younger, persistently and almost fanatically seconded all my 
 efforts, and, before the actual first meeting of the Club, he to my gratifica- 
 tion and astonishment, one night, picking up a prescription blank, 
 sketched out (spite of his abhorrence of the sheer act of writing) a plan 
 for the Club's constitution. This writing (which I herewith reproduce) 
 I found, one day, along with some other documents in his handwriting 
 in one of my old-time trunks some forty-three or -four years later. 
 
 Already, in my book, "An Outline History of Ophthalmology" (1927, 
 page 597) and in the first of my autobiographies, "Tramping to Failure," 
 tl937, pages 251 to 252) I gave concise accounts of Doctor John Michael 
 Hewitt's (I may as well now tell you his actual name) production of 
 what was probably the first X-ray photograph ever made in the Western 
 Hemisphere. The most of the account of this historic event as stated in 
 the latter volume, I reproduce herewith almost in full for all persons 
 who may never have read "Tramping to Failure": "One day in 1895 
 I received at my office a copy of (jas I remember) the Times-Herald, of 
 Chicago. Somewhere within the voluminous leaves of that popular 
 publication I found a telegraphed story about a William Conrad Roentgen, 
 of Wiirzburg, Germany, who had discovered, it seemed, a certain ray 
 which, for the purposes of photography, made the most opaque objects 
 as transparent as glass. This paper I took to Dr. Hewitt's office. When 
 he had read the article, he declared, 'If that story is true, I can duplicate 
 the experiment.' Going to Knox College, a Galesburg institution, he 
 borrowed a Crookes tube, returned with it, and getting a photographic 
 plate enclosed in a plate-holder, from a Mr. Frisbie, photographer, whose 
 studio was up the same stairway with our own offices (234 East Main St.) 
 Dr. Hewitt returned to his office, and there made a picture of the bones 
 of my left hand. This picture I reproduce herewith. And the reader will 
 observe that it is quite as good in some respects as are many of the pictures 
 that are made at the present day. The current which produced the X-rays 
 for this picture was generated by Dr. Hewitt's own static machine. 
 Mr. Frisbie, the photographer, very kindly turned for us the wheel of 
 the machine. This picture, so far as I know, was, as I have already stated, 
 the first X-ray picture produced in America. 
 
 "At that same time I chanced to be experimenting with luminous 
 paints, i.e., paints that shine in the dark. I suggested to Dr. Hewitt 
 that, should we make a screen of pasteboard and set it in a doorway, 
 and then coat the screen with calcium sulphide paint, we could by stand- 
 ing a patient in front of the screen and then placing ourselves behind it, 
 
36 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 see the patient's skeleton instead of merely making photographs of it. 
 This procedure, however, because of the unfortunate intervention of 
 other matters, I did not carry out. In a short time Edison actually in- 
 vented, not merely projected, the fluoroscope. Of course for a merely 
 projected invention a person deserves no credit." 
 
 Then there was another interesting event which occurred as a result 
 of my collaboration with Dr. Mimus, or Dr. John Michael Hewitt. One 
 of the Doctor's patients, having obstruction of the bowels, grew rapidly 
 worse. The doctor, having caused this patient to swallow a dime, waited 
 for a while and then made an X-ray picture of the patient's entire ab- 
 domen. This was, I think, but am not sure, about one week after he had 
 produced the picture of my hand. In the bowel-obstruction picture the 
 location of the dime indicated the location of the obstruction. Two of 
 the general practitioners of the city, having refused to give the ether for 
 what they termed "a piece of utter recklessness," I myself administered 
 the anesthetic and also assisted at the operation. The dime was skilfully 
 removed, and then the obstruction relieved, as I now remember, by the 
 use of the then very popular Murphy button. The patient made a prompt 
 and uneventful recovery. 
 
 Again and again I urged Dr. Hewitt to publish a report of this case. 
 His graphophobia, however, at least his intense misographia, invariably 
 prevented his performing the task. I do not think he has ever written 
 the article even to this day. But, in spite of that fact, he was a great, 
 a truly great, operator. 
 
 The Doctor and I not only joked and laughed and discussed our cases 
 together, we also sometimes argued about matters of more polemic 
 character. And then sometimes (necessarily, of course, because of the 
 temper possessed by each of us) we became mutually angry. He was a 
 "rank" Democrat, I a "rank" Republican. He, a free-silverite, I what 
 then was termed a "gold bug." Then, too, he did not like my peace 
 plan, 1 opposed it vigorously even when I first propounded it — i.e., at 
 the initial meeting of the Galesburg Doctors Club. Later, in his office, 
 when we discussed that matter fully, the verbal fur did fairly fly. I 
 walked out of the doctor's office in high dudgeon. 
 
 After that, for weeks, we met — in our main hall, in our special small 
 hall, in Frisbie's photograph gallery, on the front stairway of our build- 
 ing, on various streets and in various structures all about the city. He 
 had been accustomed (as I was then a lonesome bachelor) to invite me 
 to his house for dinner twice or thrice weekly. Now he had me there no 
 more at all. 
 
 More lonesome than ever I felt, and lonesome I must have seemed to 
 all that had the slightest penetration. Every time I met the Doctor I 
 would expect him to speak to me. But speak he did not. 
 
 Then, one day, I, in a high, nasty wind and late for my office, when 
 I plunged, head hanging downward, toward the scene of my afternoon's 
 
 1 The War-Check Vote, a peace measure I first proposed in my inaugural address to 
 the Galesburg Doctors Club, December 30, 1895. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE yj 
 
 work, all at once, as I dashed round a solid brick corner — bim! as on 
 the day I first had met him I butted into my good Doctor Mimus. 
 
 The breath went fairly out of him. So too did the pride and dignity. 
 As soon as he could get air again, he grinned and commented, "Now 
 this is precisely how you walk and the reason why you always so fool- 
 ishly run into people." He stooped over like a very comical, senile- 
 looking man, and, assuming an expression of the deepest introspection 
 and melancholy, began muttering to himself — as I in fact have always 
 had a way of doing. And he did it all so comically that passers by on 
 Main Street stopped in amazement, and perhaps amusement, to puzzle 
 out the meaning. 
 
 All at once he, catching me by the arm, shouted: "Come along. 
 Tonight I'll show you how a lot of my recently acquired patients talk, 
 and so on. 'Way behind on that, aren't we? God, Shastid, I'm glad you 
 butted some common sense into me!" 
 
 After that, friendship again. No more peace talk, nevertheless. 
 
 My health grew bad indeed. I married, my wife and I left Galesburg 
 -all as heretofore detailed in "Tramping to Failure." 
 
 Letters from Dr. Hewitt I did not get, although I wrote to him fre- 
 quently. I heard, however, that, dropping his practice, he and his ex- 
 cellent wife had joined the gold rush and made that terrible trek 
 to Alaska. 
 
 A little later — war! The Spanish War! Dr. Hewitt, I was not sur- 
 prised to learn by the newspapers, had become a contract surgeon in the 
 army. I wrote to him. He replied with telegraphic brevity. 
 
 A few years later, I sent him a reprint of one of my more lengthy articles. 
 No response. Then, all at once, after months — a letter from Hewitt. 
 He had often, he wrote, perused that article of mine, but could never 
 get much interested in it. "Then, all at once, just now, I happened to 
 turn to the place wherein you pay me a fine compliment. Thanks." 
 
 I answered, recalling the old times, "But when you do find a J and a O 
 and a J-O, Joe, it makes mighty interesting reading." 
 
 That he did not answer. 
 
 But, in 1904, I, visiting all alone the Louisiana Purchase Exposition 
 in St. Louis, was, one mellow autumn day about dusk, promenading by 
 myself along that curious highway of innumerable attractions called 
 "The Pike." All at once I heard a strangely familiar sound. Looking 
 across the street, or "Pike," I beheld a big Chinese barker palavering 
 at the top of his voice in his native language, and, in front of him, whom 
 but Dr. Mimus, imitating the Chinaman at the top of his voice, re- 
 producing, apparently, every word, syllable and pitch accent that came 
 from the Oriental's lips, and even, with just a little ridiculous exaggera- 
 tion, his gestures and his stance. I shouted, loud enough to awaken both 
 Occident and Orient, "Cut that out, Mimus!" 
 
 And it really WAS Mimus. 
 
38 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Slowly he turned, unable immediately to detect the source of my 
 outcry. 
 
 All at once he saw, came pell mell. 
 
 As we sauntered together down the Pike: "Do you remember the 
 patient, Shastid, a woman I used to have who always talked an octave 
 above high C, like this — [exquisite mimicry here]? Yes, and do you 
 remember the big double-fisted farmer from near Peoria who got it into 
 his head that you had been blinding his little daughter though you 
 really were curing her and who had a good notion to beat you up? He 
 walked like this. And he doubled up both fists and came at you like this. ' ' 
 
 "For heaven's sake, Mimus," I shouted. "Everybody thinks you re 
 wanting to whip me." 
 
 We sauntered off quietly then adown the Pike. The next morning, 
 however, was Sunday, and it found us still talking — in some or another 
 park. 
 
 Many years have since then passed, but even once more I have beheld 
 him not — or heard from him directly. He went into the World War, 
 came out therefrom both a colonel and a full professor of military surgery 
 at Cornell University. Should he chance to see this volume, he may find 
 therein something remotely resembling a J and a O, and a J-O, Joe. 
 
 Anyway, believe it or not, his address in Los Angeles (he's alto- 
 gether retired now) is 14754 Dickens Street. 
 
 7.— THE "HARD-BOILED" DOCTOR 
 
 The first time I ever saw this medico he was standing in his own 
 waiting-room arguing vigorously with a small, dark, much frightened 
 man patient. "You talka de Italiano?" inquired the patient, who seemed 
 to be getting the worst of the argument. ' 'No, I don't talka de Italiano, ' ' 
 roared the doctor. "But I do talk turkey. And I'm telling you now in 
 that language that you got to do as I say — as I say, do you understand 
 me — or else " 
 
 The little dark patient, deeply impressed, slipped out of that office 
 silently and with only deep respect, even worship, in his eyes. 
 
 The same day, when the doll of a man had gone, Dr. — I will call him 
 for the nonce Misanthropus — beckoned me into his consultation-room, 
 and there I found he had sent for me because he wished me to examine 
 his eyes. He had already dilated his pupils to save me the trouble: I had 
 only to look inside his vitreous chambers — with bis ophthalmoscope, not 
 mine, and in just the way he indicated. 
 
 I looked in and saw — a truly terrible sight, snow-bank retinitis. 
 Yes, and many other indubitable evidences of chronic inflammation of 
 the kidneys. I gave the big, blond, athletic, unsympathetic fellow one 
 quick pitying glance. 
 
 "Don't pity me," he half shouted. "Think I'm a damned coward?" 
 (Nearly always the laity believes that doctors are hard-boiled, i.e., 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 39 
 
 unsympathetic in the extreme — as to the sufferings of their patients, but 
 distressingly timid and easily frightened when it comes to any disease 
 whatsoever, even a suspicion of a disease, in their own precious bodies. 
 As to Dr. Misanthropus, beyond all question the latter portion of the 
 opinion was, undoubtedly, not correct.) 
 
 "I've tested my urine half a dozen times in the last six months, and 
 always there's albumen — albumen and casts. Now my eyes — I proceeded 
 to test them, found their central vision still wholly unaffected. — Think 
 the sight's good enough for me to go on doing surgery?" 
 
 "Yes, I certainly do." It was the truth. 
 
 There was knocking at the door between the two rooms. 
 
 "Come," shouted the doctor. 
 
 Entered then his receptionist, who said, "Mr. Franklin tells me your 
 orders were to admit him as soon as he arrived." 
 
 "Admit him," vouchsafed the kingly physician. Then to me, "This 
 man is a curious fellow, a fault-finder with all his doctors, I hear — keep 
 your seat." 
 
 In came the man, took the easiest chair for himself without any in- 
 vitation, and then, before the least sidetracking of his thought could 
 occur, poured out a long, harsh tale about the ignorance, double-dealing, 
 and absolutely inexcusable mistakes of all the other doctors he had 
 formerly consulted. "In fact," concluded the man, "The whole medical 
 profession is nothing but arrant humbug and the very vilest fraud. — 
 Now, if you can't do anything for me, I want you honestly to say so — 
 but no more quackery will I tolerate." 
 
 I thought all at once of the old, so commonly used, expression in the 
 backwoods country, ' 'Them's fightin' words in these hyer parts, stranger. 
 
 But, when Franklin had finished his tirade, Doctor Misanthropus be- 
 spoke him as gently as any "sucking dove." Said he, in conclusion, 
 "And I do think that I know something that will be very good for you." 
 
 "You do! Forme?" 
 
 "Yes, sir, indeed I do. Something that will help you greatly." 
 
 "And what is that, may I ask?" 
 
 "Egress," responded Misanthropus. "The fluid extract of egress." 
 
 "Never heard of it before," commented Franklin. 
 
 "Come this way," instructed the doctor. And, having been followed 
 curiously by the patient to the back door, the doctor suddenly threw 
 the door open ana the man out. 
 
 Then the doctor, having washed his hands meticulously, asked me 
 to prescribe for him, Misanthropus. That I did and departed. 
 
 Often thereafter I saw this doctor, and, whenever and wherever I 
 saw him, he was what, in the slang of that day and of this, is termed 
 "hard-boiled" — in other words, devoid of feeling, unsympathetic, ab- 
 solutely pitiless. Yet there were in this man, at times, indications of 
 certain higher feelings, I could not say just what. 
 
 He was indubitably well-equipped enough in a scientific way to 
 practice medicine. The walls of his consultation room were lined with 
 the latest books and bound volumes of journals in three languages. Two 
 
40 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 large instrument cabinets stood near the center of the apartment, and, in 
 each, there was displayed a fair-sized armamentarium. In addition to 
 all this material equipment the man had two diplomas from excellent 
 colleges and his speech, not infrequently, showed him to be very well 
 versed in the accurate use of language. 
 
 Nevertheless, he was, as I have indicated, a rough character, corru- 
 gated inside and out. More than that, he was proud of his roughness — 
 at least he appeared to be so — in fact was always attempting tc make it 
 seem much greater than it really was. 
 
 One winter there occurred in the town wherein I then was practising 
 a frightful epidemic of diphtheria — the very worst I had even known. 
 Antitoxin had just been introduced, but, at least for us in that city, it 
 did no good. Result: literally dozens of intubations and tracheotomies, 
 especially the latter, because the former were ineffective. Night after 
 night, sometimes for a week in succession, I would be called to get up 
 and go to some residence, there to cut open some child's windpipe, therein 
 to introduce a tube through which it might be able to breathe until it 
 should be able, possibly, to throw off the terrible infection. Even then, 
 not infrequently, the child died, because of the false membrane's continuing 
 to form — lower and lower, deeper and deeper, into the air-ways, until at 
 length it had reached beyond the lowest extremity of our air-passing tube. 
 
 One night — almost morning it was — I received a hurry call from this 
 same Dr. Misanthropus. Another case of terrible diphtheria! "Anti- 
 toxin's been tried," grouched the doctor, "but, as usual, 'twas a failure. 
 Everything else too, of course — excepting tracheotomy. We'll have to 
 try that. I'll drive to your house in five minutes — be ready?" 
 
 On our way to the little patient's home through the stinging wind, 
 the doctor said, "I've one request to make of you. I've never done a 
 tracheotomy myself in my life — always got an eye, ear, nose and throat 
 specialist like yourself to do 'em for me — and tonight I want to do just 
 one. Tovey will be there to give the anesthetic, and you stand close beside 
 me so that — just in case I — well, in case I can't do the operation properly, 
 you can take it over." 
 
 "I understand," I responded. "It shall be as you say." 
 Then the doctor swore luridly at the cold, at the horse and the buggy, 
 at the ghastly epidemic — at everything else he could think of. He fairly 
 excelled himself in antagonism to the universe. In fact I had never seen 
 him quite so thoroughly "hard-boiled." 
 
 In the improvised operating-room at the house, Tovey was already 
 giving the anesthetic. As rapidly as Misanthropus and I could do so, we 
 disinfected the patient's head and neck, spread out the instruments. Then, 
 to my horror, this hard-boiled doctor, in a trembly voice began whining, 
 "Of all my little — little — little — patients I've loved this one the most." 
 
 I handed him the knife, taughtened the skin over the trachea, picked 
 up a retractor. The child stopped breathing. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 41 
 
 "Quick, Doctor, quick," I cried, "your patient'll be dead." 
 
 He leaned over with the knife as if to make an incision, attempted to 
 cut — but his hand vibrated, shook, went all wobbling around everywhere. 
 
 Still the child did not breathe. "Cut!" I shouted. "Cut!" 
 
 Once again he tried to use the knife, but merely, all at once, pressed 
 it deep and hard into the tissues of the throat — so deep in fact that, for a 
 moment, I believed he was cutting the child clean down to its neck bone. 
 Then suddenly I observed that not a drop of blood was flowing — although 
 the doctor was slowly removing the knife. 
 
 The doctor had in fact used the back edge of the blade. 
 
 Turning as if in a maze, he dumbly handed me the instrument. 
 
 I took it and, I think (I am not boasting) performed an excellent 
 operation. Yet, next morning, the child was dead. The year following, 
 antitoxin "came in" indeed, and was successful. A miracle it was! 
 Indeed I, in truth, after the successful development of antitoxin — although 
 I did not drop the ear, nose and throat division of my work till sixteen 
 or seventeen years later — never again was asked to do a single tracheotomy 
 for diphtheria. Antitoxin was curing diphtheria. Later it (or the toxin 
 antitoxin, or the toxoid) even prevented that disease. 
 
 But what about Doctor Hard-boiled, the man of so much bluster, even 
 of profanest indifference to everything and everybody, the thoroughly 
 calloused surgeon who was suddenly seized with so unutterable an opera- 
 tion fright? I do not think we should have to hypnotize him, or psy- 
 choanalyse him, or put him through a course of any sort or kind of 
 "psychologic sprouts" in order to make a fair guess at his psyche. Al- 
 most any doctor who understands doctors could have read him in a 
 minute. He was naturally a timid, self-mistrustful man, bashful in the 
 extreme, who had grown an enormous turtle-shell about himself as a 
 kind of cover-up. 
 
 Then, too, I have to make a confession about my very self in connec- 
 tion with the above-mentioned case, in order to render this brief study in 
 doctorial psychology complete. Although for a number of years I had 
 not felt even the slightest symptom of surgical fright on any occasion 
 whatsoever, yet, all at once, when Doctor Hard-boiled had handed over 
 to me his knife and had spoken to me in the above-mentioned terrified 
 tone, I, too, all at once went crazily timid. In fact I fell into as fearful 
 a panic as ever I have seen anybody else fall into. Not only my hand 
 shook, but my whirling head did likewise. Arteries knocked in my neck, 
 my wild heart staccatoed like the man-from-Borneo's drum. Whew! 
 I too should have cut the patient's little throat deep down into his neck 
 — should I have chanced to be holding the knife edge-down against, in- 
 stead of away from, his tissues. 
 
 All at once (this is a silly thing to talk about, but I wish to tell truth) 
 I recalled my dear father's pedantic, as well as religious, advice for use 
 on such occasions: 
 
 "If ever you get 'cut-scared,'" said he, "just do what I have always 
 done on such occasions — namely, forget the operation altogether and 
 recite to yourself in Greek the Lord's prayer. In Greek, mind you, and 
 
42 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 think of nothing else than the Greek version all the while you recite." 
 That was excellent advice, absurd as it possibly seems. That night I 
 followed it strictly. At least I got well started into the Greek. But I 
 did not need to finish the prayer. Merely attempting to recall a certain 
 half-forgotten Greek word in it, I all at once discovered that I had passed 
 completely out of the emotional area of consciousness into the purely 
 intellectual. So — well I operated without the slightest difficulty. 
 
 But the prayer and the cutting, as shown by the sad outcome already 
 herein indicated, were wholly in vain. Next year Emil Von Behring, 
 as I have already stated, had taught the world another and a far better 
 prayer — a prayer which — by the grace of the God of natural religion, 
 whose revelation is called "science" — is almost always answered and in 
 the way man wishes it to be answered — if, at least, he resorts to it in 
 time. 
 
 8.— THE DOCTOR WHO KEPT A HOTEL 
 
 This strange physician and Boniface combined lived, hotelled and 
 "sort of" practised medicine in a rather small town of southern Illinois. 
 The Companion and I once stayed for a time in his weather-beaten, 
 almost two-storied "joint." The cockroaches there were so big they 
 wore horseshoes. They used, of a night, after we had gone to bed, to 
 come ca-lump, ca-lump, ca-lumping up the front and back stairways, 
 and sometimes we thought them ghosts. Seriously, they were large 
 cockroaches and numerous. 
 
 Let us not blame Mrs. Doctor, alias Mrs. Boniface (or let us say, 
 Mrs. Doctor Ho telling) for the size of the cockroaches or the general 
 condition of the premises. She did her best to make the place useful, 
 attractive, ornamental, successful. Thin, bent-over, with face wrinkled 
 and wrenched with anxiety, she toiled early and toiled late. Her husband, 
 the Doctor, was not able to help her much. He was far too busy a man 
 and care-filled. He, too, was thin, because worn almost to the bone 
 with professional cares and responsibilities. His thinness, to be sure, 
 was often, by those who did not like him, ascribed to his constant over- 
 eating. "Eats so much it makes him poor to pack it." So they adjudged, 
 these people, but surely without justice. 
 
 Morning after morning I have seen the Doctor come down to breakfast 
 at ten or eleven o'clock, because — as he himself almost invariably alleged 
 in the hotel office, before entering the salle a manger to eat — he had been 
 out late the night before attending a very sick patient. Have I not heard 
 the man, scores of times at least on such occasions, almost shout against 
 his fate this protest, "The practice of medicine, I tell you, is well-nigh 
 killing me. You men who are not doctors should be happy, very happy 
 indeed, that you are not in this profession." 
 
 When asked, as he sometimes was, why, then, if he found his work 
 so burdensome, he did not retire or at least enter upon the practice of 
 something else, he would answer, shaking his head solemnly as if he 
 were a great martyr, "Somebody has to do this work. — But it's killing 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 43 
 
 me, it's killing me. Well, I must go hitch up Rosalie — several long trips 
 to make." 
 
 It was strange how many of his calls were from long, long distances. 
 Ofttimes, after a phone talk in the office, he would say to the crowd of 
 lodgers assembled there (for example): "Another call to Bradford's — 
 on a consultation. What do these people think I'm made of, iron? Got 
 a little chewin'-tobaccer, Henry?" 
 
 Having torn the corner from a plug of tobacco and mouthed his quid 
 for a while, he would murmur: "Well, time to hitch up Rosalie, and go 
 perform a surgical operation. God, this is terrible." 
 
 Deep at night he would come back into the office, whispering to his 
 lodgers round the fire, "Hardly able to drag, boys." 
 
 I, on a day, talking to one of the Doctor's ardent enemies (and of 
 these he had a host) was informed that Dr. Hotelling had but a very 
 tiny practice in the town wherein he lived, and that that was mostly 
 composed of whooping cough and colds. As to his surgery and practice 
 outside the village — Pah!" 
 
 But that was the enemy talking and I made due allowance for the fact. 
 Indeed I said straight out to the enemy precisely that much. 
 
 . "You! You!" he exclaimed. "You — believe that man's a surgeon? 
 Why, he ain't got no diploma — just a mere Y. P. Say, exactly tomorrow 
 mornin' we're goin' to expose that old blatherskite to the full. Shall we 
 let you in on the game?" 
 
 "Let me in it is," said I. 
 
 With the boys I went at the time assigned to the old doctor's bedroom 
 in the hotel. There, sure enough, we found him on his bed, sleeping the 
 sleep of the all tired out. 
 
 The boys grabbed him, shook him violently. "Wake up, Doc." 
 
 Again: "Doc, wake up. Old man Martin's sick and about to die, 
 and he wants you to come out and perform a surgical operation on him." 
 
 "A what?" 
 
 "Are you alistenin', Doc?" 
 
 "I'm afraid so. Let me go — I'm clean wore to the bone." 
 
 But the message was repeated vigorously, the doctor was dragged 
 from his bed. He still displayed, however, the dazed, otherworld appear- 
 ance of a dense sleep-walker. But even that availed him nothing." 
 
 "Emergency case, Doc. ! Humanity! All that sort of thing and so on. 
 And only you can save the man." Said one of them. 
 
 Another, "We want you to go out, Doc, and open a nice little boil 
 for old Manty Martin." 
 
 "O boys, I'm tired. Seen scores o' patients yesterday." 
 
 "Where all you been?" 
 
 "Everywhere." 
 
 "We meant what people has you been a-seein' an' a-treatin' that's 
 made you so plumb tired out?" 
 
 "I — I couldn't giYC their names, boys. That'd be a breach o' per- 
 fessional etiquette." 
 
 "We don't means you should tell us exactly what's ailded them people 
 that's tired you so plumb completely in the last few days, but only jest 
 
44 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 whom them there peoples air. We're goin' to check up on your lies an' see 
 how many of 'em's the truth." 
 
 "O no—" 
 
 "Grab 'im, boys." 
 
 "All right," conceded Hotelling. "I'll open that air bile." 
 
 The boys having taken charge of him and made him gather together 
 his instruments, anesthetics and a considerable abundance of brandy, 
 hustled him out into their wagon. 
 
 I, at the very last moment, decided not to go. 
 
 However, I eagerly awaited the return of that strange group. 
 
 After about three hours the pack came back, some of them shouting 
 hilariously, others lying in the bed of the wagon. At the gate of the 
 hotel yard I met them. All bore evidence of more or less intoxication. 
 
 "Well," said I to the leader of the gang, "did the Doctor operate?" 
 
 "Nary an operate," the leader replied, "not in no right sense. We 
 taken him to the patient and his big white-centered bile. 'Operate,' 
 says we." 
 
 'Why, that ain't ready yit to open,' " says Doc. 
 'Yes, 'tis,'" says we. " 'Look at that there big white an' yaller 
 spot in it. The core's jest a-poutin' to git let out.' ' 
 
 'So 'tis, so 'tis,' says Doc. 'But you boys all know I hain't never 
 pretended to have no nerve to do no operations onless I got some brandy 
 in me. Where's my brandy, boys?' 
 
 "I says, T got brandy, Doc. Don't need to touch any o' yourn. So 
 I put the bottle to my doctor neighbor's lips.' 
 
 "Says Doc, 'Do all things in accordance with nateral law. An' that 
 means,' says he, 'first to put the mouth o' the bottle ag'in yer own mouth; 
 then second, turn yer head back — cl'ar back — an' third, holdin' the bottle 
 tight ag'in yer lips, to let natur take its course — which means, permit 
 the law o' gravitation to co-operate.' 
 
 "As he says, so he done." 
 
 "Then he passed the bottle round the gang, and the feller that had 
 the bile, he says, 'Well, I'm the feller that's to be operated on, ain't I?' 
 sezee. 'Then gimme my share.' 
 
 'Sure thing,' says Doc. 'The patient got the best right o' all o' us.' 
 
 "So Jake here, he opens up another bottle — one o' hisn. The patient 
 gets hisself anesthetized, and then passes the bottle again to the doctor, 
 and the doctor he drinks about half of that bottle, let's the rest of the 
 group drink the rest of it, and Bill here he finds his case o' instruments. 
 Then Clark here, he finds his bottle, an' the doctor, sezee, T ain't fortified 
 quite enough yit.' So he fortified some more. An' then the patient he 
 fortified some more, and then he sez, T ain't just anesthetecs yit, either. 
 So he anesthetisized hisself some more. An' then a whole lot more. 
 An' then Hank hyer, he found his bottle. An' so we all anesthetisized 
 and fortified, and fortified an' anesthetisized, an' I guess we sort o' finally 
 fergot what we'd come fer. 
 
 "An' finally I sez, 'Doc, you lazy lummicks an' coward,' I sez, 'you 
 got liquor enough in you now,' I sez, 'to operate on a hospital. Go ahead 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 45 
 
 an' operate — ef you got the nerve,' I says. 'But I don't believe you got 
 the nerve,' I says. 'You ain't never been nothin' but a bluffer.' 
 
 'Who — meV says Doc. 'Why, boys, I got more nerve 'n anybody 
 else in the country. But you fellows got me too drunk.' 
 
 "An' with that the patient calls Doc a dumb liar. And Doc hauls 
 off to sock him one, an' Manty Martin holds his hand straight up with 
 the boil on it to ward off the blow, an' so — 
 
 "Well, and so Doc did sort o' operate on him after all. 'Twas a great 
 big core, I'm tellin' ye." 
 
 9.— THE DOCTOR WHO WOULD HAVE SAVED MANKIND 
 
 A. B. Glimmer, M.D. (that was not his actual name, of course) I 
 knew as a promising graduate long, long before I had even entered a 
 medical college. Tall, lean, light-weight, active, he was one of the 
 ablest and most untiring workers that ever I have known. I recall especi- 
 ally the sweep of his large, bright eyes — seeking, forever seeking, seeking. 
 Those eyes seemed to say to me, "Never mind: if I look long enough I 
 shall find it." Much of the time they were seeking at the tube of a 
 microscope. 
 
 He was thought to be quite wealthy, so, soon after his graduation, 
 nobody was much surprised when he announced he was going to specialize 
 in t.b.c. In fact, as he himself expressed it, he was going to fight tuber- 
 culosis to the death — not to the death of himself, but to that of tuber- 
 culosis. 
 
 Day and night he worked, and, after a time, it came out that he really 
 had little money. Nobody seemed to care much though. In a world 
 like this the other fellow's business is the other fellow's business. Test 
 tubes and microscopes! Microscopes and test-tubes! And all sorts of 
 animals in his workshop. 
 
 He moved to a very large city and patients came to him by hundreds. 
 Still, they paid him little cash. 
 
 After a time he began to feel, at about four o'clock each evening, a 
 curious fatigue — a fatigue that was foreign to his highly active nature. 
 A little later and he had one day an early morning chill, then afternoon 
 fatigue, then midnight fever, an inexplicable sweat, a long vigil, and 
 then a morning chill again. Then, all at once, it popped into his head 
 that he too — why that was incredible. 
 
 Nonetheless, it was a fact. Chill, fatigue, fever, night-sweat, vigil 
 and then that morning chill again. 
 
 It was quite the fad at the time in medical circles to send such patients 
 to Colorado. He sent himself to Colorado. I got two or three letters 
 from him, postmarked out there, saying he did not regret his acquirement 
 of tuberculosis since it would probably give him a better understanding 
 of the disease than he could possibly otherwise have had. And how he 
 was going to save the human race from that old devil, the T.B.C. ! How 
 he loved the human race — every man, woman and little child in it. 
 
 It was also a fad among the doctors of that time to prescribe for 
 pulmonary tuberculosis large quantities of whiskey. The doctor pre- 
 
46 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 scribed for himself large quantities of whiskey. After a time the quantities 
 had to be larger. Then larger still. Then larger than that even. He was, 
 most unfortunately, the only person in all the United States of America, 
 perhaps, who could not take it or let it alone. 
 Then, for years, I heard from him no more. 
 
 One day I met a mutual friend of ours who had recently been to the 
 Colorado city in which Dr. Glimmer was supposed to be living. Of him 
 I asked about the old-time, bright-eyed doctor, who had thought to do 
 so much for human beings. 
 
 "O, haven't you heard?" asked the friend. 
 
 "Not even for years," I answered. 
 
 "Glimmer committed suicide — so they say. Did some pretty bad 
 things before that last thing. Left a short note to his uncle, reading: 
 "No use to myself or to humankind. God pity my poor soul." 
 
 My interlocutor added, "If God can pity his soul, he's a pretty 
 good pi tier." 
 
 10.— THE DOCTOR WHO MERELY STOPPED IN 
 
 One day, some years ago, in my "double-dungeon," as the Companion 
 had used to call my two-room study, I heard the door-bell ring, and, 
 breaking away from my forenoon's work, I went to the door myself in 
 what for me was a particularly surly mood. 
 
 Through the glass in the porch-door I saw the person who had rung. 
 A tall, upstanding "gent" he was, who looked glossy, well-fed, at peace 
 with the universe. I certainly would not have called him one of the 
 "under-privileged." All this was to me just one more irritant. So there 
 I stood, frowning, lead pencil still in hand. At length I asked in a snarly 
 tone, "Well?" 
 
 "I'm Doctor Westingtine, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania," he said, in 
 one of the sweetest voices I ever have listened to. He took out his carte 
 de visite. "Is this Tramp's Rest? And is the Tramp in? I merely called 
 for a moment to pay my extreme respects. If the Tramp's resting, I'll 
 even — ' ' 
 
 "No, no, no, no," I interrupted, opening the door. "Come in at 
 once." 
 
 "Such an honor!" he cried, as he entered. And then he began so 
 happy an encomium about that book concerning my life — my other life, 
 the first one — that it seemed as if a heavenly band had suddenly com- 
 menced playing for me a triumphal entry into my own home. 
 
 I led him to the reception room, there begged him to be seated. But 
 he, before taking the proffered chair, gave me a long, sweet look, then 
 softly taking up my right hand, murmured, "So long a time I've wanted 
 to do this and then to tell you all — all — that your book has meant to me 
 and even what it has done for my life." 
 
 Suddenly a cold suspicion swept over me, a feeling that this gentle- 
 man did not mean the things he said. 
 
 Yet I let him run on. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 47 
 
 So, he looked about at my jungle of books and smiled. "Just as I 
 had always imagined they would appear," he commented. Then back 
 came he to that work of my writing, "Tramping to Failure." 
 
 "It is a wonderful autobiography," he said. "I've only a minute to 
 stop, but it is wonderful, truly wonderful." 
 
 Then he ran on more rapidly: "Especially I liked the title of your 
 book and the way it had come to you from your father — almost, as one 
 might say, ready-made to your hand. Your good father, away back there 
 when he was taking you up to Inveni, your first experience in a real 
 college, not merely in your hayloft. How fine it was of him to warn you 
 about your manifest weak-spot. He saw clearly that dangerous tendency 
 of yours to be interested in too many things, too many great subjects — 
 your tendency to, as he expressed it, 'go tramping.' And how wisely he 
 warned you, as he again happily expressed the matter, not to 'go tramp- 
 ing to failure.' 
 
 "Yet you could not choose but 'tramp.' 
 
 "How wisely, at all events, you selected that expression for the title 
 of your book! How modest it sounds! And how modest, again and 
 furthermore, you were all the time when narrating in your volume the 
 failure after failure you had made through life! How decidedly, how 
 extremely, how very unusually modest!" 
 
 I bowed slightly, embarrassed and without words. 
 
 Here I noticed he had been drawing with one of my lead pencils little 
 squares on a piece of paper that happened to be lying on the table. He 
 put my pencil away in his pocket. "Wonderful — " 
 
 And all at once he had murmured, "I am just a little out of money, 
 Dr. Shastid, and now if you'll — well, we'll call it five hundred. Five 
 hundred, shall we? Just a small, a very small, loan till I get back to 
 Pittsburgh and can return the amount. 
 
 "Time's up," I shouted, rising. "I want to complete another of those 
 wonderful, marvelous and most miraculous books." 
 
 Astounded he looked, and then as if ashamed of me. Yet too he 
 appeared to be forgiving me. ' 'Shall we say three hundred?' ' he murmured. 
 
 I shook my head. 
 
 "Two hundred? No? The money would be promptly repaid. I have 
 plenty of money in my bank at Pittsburgh." 
 
 I lead the way steadily to the door. 
 
 "One hundred." 
 
 I threw the door open. "Telegraph to your bank. Inside of two 
 hours " 
 
 He bowed low as he passed me on his way out. 
 
 Then, immediately retracing his steps and stretching out a shaking 
 forefinger, he exclaimed with almost a note of anger in his oversweet 
 voice, "Good-bye. Your book is of no use at all." 
 
48 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 When he had really taken himself away, I looked him up in the 
 American Medical Association's Directory, the main part thereof and 
 the complete Index too. There was no such doctor in Pittsburgh or in 
 the entire United States. 
 
 This doctor, I later learned, was plying some similar racket in almost 
 every good-sized town of the Nation. One sucker in a hundred might 
 have made him a fair living — though sometimes he did have to deposit 
 fraudulent oil stock for collateral. Having wound up in a penitentiary, 
 served his painful time there and been released, he concocted a begging 
 role of some sort, thus entering the already overcrowded ranks of the 
 "underprivileged." So overcrowded however were those ranks that, once 
 again, he returned to the somewhat thinner ranks of the "smart people," 
 and is now again resting his brain in the penitentiary. 
 
 11.— A PHYSICIAN OF SIXTY-ODD YEARS BACK— Y.P. 
 
 Against a dull-gray rainscape I see him again driving toward us in his 
 high, covered buggy — old Doctor Y. P. 
 
 My father and I (I was then a boy of ten or eleven years) watched him 
 from the seat of our own buggy very anxiously indeed. The reason? 
 My father had lately been consulted by a farm-woman who had long 
 been treated by the old Y. P., but wholly without success, and so he, 
 my father, on being applied to and finding that she had an ovarian tumor, 
 had referred her to Dr. David Prince, of Jacksonville, for possible opera- 
 tion. Dr. Y. P. was a man of abusive language backed by a bellicose 
 disposition. We wondered considerably as to what the so-called doctor 
 might wish to say and do to us. 
 
 As the Y. P. drew up, I noticed the apparently intense concentration 
 of his much bewhiskered and small-pocked face. He pulled up his horse 
 a yard or so away, wiped his mouth with a dirty-gloved fist, and then 
 excitedly remarked: "I been over to Doc David Prince's San-eye-tarium — 
 sent for by my patient's own husband himself, Mr. John R. Snapson. An' 
 I seen him — that's Doc Prince — cut a ovarian tumor out. God, it was a 
 great operation, Shastid. He took an' he taken a big knife — it was 
 bigger'n our butcher-knife at home — an' he slit an' he slot that woman 
 vertical — up an' down, ye know — until she jest gapped wide open from 
 her bust-bone to 'er — well, cl'ar down hyer. He missed her navel by 
 cuttin' a little round it — else, by Jingo, he'd a cut plumb through it — an' 
 ye know what'd happen to ye if anybody 'd cut yer navel plumb through. 
 Ever' thing inside ye'd become untied and fall apart from one another, 
 cause the navel's where ever'thing comes together an's tied into one 
 single hard knot. 
 
 "Well, he missed the navel a purpose, and she gapped wide open from 
 up above clean down to down to, and Doc — know what?" 
 
 "No I don't," admitted my father. 
 
 Y. P. got down from his buggy, walked quickly round it, and came 
 to the left side of ours. (My father, contrary to custom, invariably sat 
 on that side, as any auto driver does to-day) and, tapping an excited fore- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 49 
 
 finger on my father's knee, the while he looked up at him with wide, 
 black, staring pupils, whispered: "Doc, I ain't lyin', but I seen 'er 
 ^z#-crease." 
 
 "Her what?" ejaculated Father. 
 
 "Her pan-crease." He pronounced the word as just two syllables. 
 
 "O!" 
 
 "Don't tell me I lie, Doc. I done seen it. 
 
 "An' I says to ol' Prince, I says, 'Doc, is that 'er pan-crease?' I says. 
 Jes' like that, I says. 'I always read about the pan-crease,' I says, 'an' 
 I always wanted to see a pan-crease, but I ain't never seen one yit. An' 
 is that her pan-crease, Doc?' 
 
 " 'Yes,' says ol' Prince, says 'e. 'Yes, Doc, (he called me 'Doc,' like 
 a person should) that's her pan-crease,' he says. 'What you think of it?' 
 'Well, have you prayed over 'er?' I says. 
 'No, don't think I have.' 
 
 'Lots o' diseases is still caused by devils,' I says, 'same as they wuz 
 thousands o' years ago, an' ef ye ain't prayed over 'er,' I sez, 'an' cast 
 out the devils, how do ye know that 'er pan-crease ain't still full o' 
 devils?' 
 
 'The only devils,' says old Doc, 'that produces disease in these days, 
 is disease germs, little bits of vegetables so small you got to see 'em in a 
 mikerscope. Besides, it ain't her pan-crease that's diseased.' An' with 
 that he up an' takes out an ovarian tumor. 
 
 "An', Doc, I, comin' home, I prayed over her. I ain't ashamed to say 
 so, if I am a fightin' man. An' now I hear she's well." 
 
 "The ways of heaven are past finding out, Doctor," my father mused, 
 gently. "At all events, this morning at half-past seven o'clock — I got 
 the telegram about one-half hour ago — Mrs. Snapson died." 
 
 The old, ignorant Y. of P. man stared at my father in amazement. 
 Then, silently, he went round to his own buggy, slowly clambered to 
 its seat and drove off into the mist. 
 
 Ladies and gentlemen, you have just met Dr. Y. P. * — one of the 
 greatest of all the Y. P. men that ever were produced in "The good old 
 times." Such men now exist in the United States no more, though some 
 people do still exist — a good many of them in our very legislatures — who 
 would gladly have such curiosities (uneducated, or very improperly 
 educated, practitioners) back amongst us — with the lives of the public 
 again in their hands. 
 
 Thank God that, even in those days, there were other kinds of doctors 
 too. 
 
 1 I do not give the doctor's actual name, because some of his children — and these are 
 excellent people — still live. 
 
 A Y. P. man, in those times, sixty and more years ago, when the first medical practice 
 law had been passed in Illinois (1878), was a person who, under that law, had been granted 
 a license to practice medicine and without examination too, not because he had ever studied 
 medicine or knew anything at all about the subject, but because, when the law was passed, 
 he had been practising that profession already for at least ten years. He, in other words 
 was licensed solely because of his "years of practice" — Y. P. 
 
50 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 12.— DOCTOR URSUS 
 
 A kinsman of mine had a wife whom he well-nigh worshipped. She, 
 furthermore, looked up to her husband almost as if to a god — for which 
 reason probably it was that, inasmuch as my kinsman had so very high 
 a regard for my medical attainments, she also took me to be a kind of 
 court of last resort in all matters medical. 
 
 Time came when something apparently serious attacked the wife's 
 health. The local physician assured wife and husband that the affliction 
 was trivial, would pass soon. After a while it began to be clear that the 
 local physician had been terribly mistaken. 
 
 So my kinsman wrote to me. I gave him the best opinion I could in 
 a matter that did not affect an eye and on a patient whom I had not even 
 seen for years. The result was that though these people lived a long way 
 from the place wherein I then was practising, they promptly entrained 
 for my town — there to secure my examination, opinion and advice. 
 
 My examination showed that what the patient needed was not an 
 ophthalmologist (eye physician) at all, but a general surgeon — one well- 
 skilled both in the science of malignant tumors and in operative technique. 
 
 I told them "The man you want is Dr. Ursus." To Ursus accordingly 
 they went, after, of course, I had called up Ursus, told him the history 
 of the case, and, finally, made clear the blood relationship between the 
 patient's husband and myself. 
 
 Dr. Ursus quite properly placed the patient in a hospital, where, after 
 a time, it was determined beyond doubt both by Ursus and the X-ray 
 department, that, eventually, the disease from which the patient was 
 suffering would take her life. 
 
 Now this patient was one of the extremely nervous kind — "highly 
 strung," given to spells of the deepest and blackest depression — spells 
 which had no other causes at all than the terror which she felt not merely 
 at the thought of her own dissolution but more, far more because of the 
 perfectly shattering idea that she soon might be departing eternally from 
 her family. Dr. Ursus, the husband and I harmoniously agreed that, the 
 circumstances being what they were, the patient should not at any time 
 be informed at all of her impending doom. She, uplifted by the favorable 
 prognosis which we all three had given her — in addition to what we had 
 reported that the X-ray department had said — nevertheless from time to 
 time became suspicious of the accuracy of our forecast. So, from time to 
 time, she became even more depressed and melancholy than ever before. 
 At length her husband became convinced that a specialist on diseases of 
 the nervous system should be called in consultation on the case. In her 
 presence and in mine he made that suggestion. Like the proverbial 
 drowning person she grasped with eager delight at the little straw so 
 thrown before her. Her face grew radiant. "Perhaps it may turn out, 
 after all," she joyfully speculated, "that my entire sickness is due to my 
 nervous depression and not the other way round." 
 
 Then, all at once, as the visible world is sometimes overshadowed by 
 a cloud, she suffered a reversal of mood. "But suppose," she cried, 
 "suppose that the decision in that consultation should be against me. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 5I 
 
 Or suppose that some terrible thing should happen to me even while the 
 examination was being made. What — what then should I do? I have 
 been terrorized of late so much. 
 
 I answered that her latter fears at least were certainly groundless. 
 
 "But how can I be sure?" she asked. "How can I be sure that nothing 
 dangerous would be done at the examination? Will you promise, Tom, 
 to be present at that examination — from first to last to be present — and 
 through it all to see that nothing dangerous to me shall be in- 
 dulged in?" 
 
 "I solemnly promise," I answered, not dreaming of what I was getting 
 into. 
 
 When the husband and I got back from the hospital to my home, I 
 phoned to Dr. Ursus, told him the patient had just requested a consulta- 
 tion between him, the X-ray operator, and the neurologist — a highly 
 skilful man whom no physician could rightfully have had the slightest 
 objection to — and then I went on to describe the nervous condition of the 
 patient, concluding of course by repeating her most urgent request that 
 I be present at the consultation, merely that she might feel she was not 
 wholly in the hands of strangers. 
 
 It surely was no improper request for me to make, the patient's de- 
 pressed condition rendering my presence at the consultation almost an 
 absolute necessity. Then, too, I was the original, the referring, physician. 
 Neither Dr. Ursus nor the X-ray man nor the neurologist would have 
 had the slightest connection with the case or probably ever have had 
 heard of its existence, save for me. (That the statement of the situation 
 may be complete, I will add that this case was not — contrary to what 
 a lay reader might easily presume, a feeless case. It was, by the very 
 code of ethics itself, a "pay case," and, further, was so understood to be 
 from the beginning.) 
 
 However, no sooner had I ceased speaking than Ursus replied in a 
 loud, aggressive voice, "I don't want you there." 
 
 "What?" I could not believe my ears. 
 
 Ursus repeated the objectionable words with emphasis. 
 
 I began again to urge the circumstances in the case, but was sharply 
 cut off. Ursus repeated, "I said, I don't want you there." 
 
 "Even though the patient would be terrorized without me?" 
 
 "That's nothing but a case of nerves. We'll control that. And I've 
 said twice already, T — do — not want you — present.' " 
 
 He hung up the receiver. 
 
 I started to repeat the conversation to my kinsman. He checked me 
 with, "I heard every word of it. Of course you know what, logically, 
 should be done and so do I. But — (using his wife's pet name) happens 
 to be in such a condition that a quarrel over the consultation, much worse 
 the dismissal of the attending physician, would thrust her inevitably 
 into a panic from which she might not be able to recover, even tempor- 
 arily. Let the consultation continue as Ursus will have it. I'll tell her 
 you'll be present, and then, on the day and hour, you'll say you are 
 unable to attend because of an extreme emergency in your practice. 
 
 UNIVERSITY Of 
 ILLINOIS LIBRARY 
 
52 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Then I'll take her back home. Ursus says she'll die within a month 
 or two at all events. So she may as well pass on at home, where always 
 she has wanted to spend her last hours." 
 
 As he said, so was it done. 
 
 The good lady passed away at her home, no sooner and no later than 
 had she remained in the hands of Dr. Ursus. Incurable as was her case, 
 nothing at all could be done for her except to ease her pain from time to 
 time — till time for her indeed should be no more. 
 
 But — as to Dr. Ursus. I was of course dumbfounded, stunned. Such 
 treatment I had never received before, even at the hands of untrained 
 Y. of P. men. And Ursus was a surgeon of ability! Highly educated too 
 he was in other paths than medicine. It was simply incredible. There 
 must have been some misunderstanding. Yet, turning the subject over 
 and over in my mind, I could not think of any. 
 
 Later, speaking with two other doctors, both friends of Dr. Ursus, 
 I did what I had never done before in connection with the subject. I 
 mentioned the case of Dr. Ursus and the wife of my kinsman. Both 
 laughed heartily, then told me of similar experiences which they them- 
 selves had had with Ursus, also with several other physicians of his kind. 
 
 "It takes all sorts of doctors, of course, to make a medical world," 
 said they. 
 
THE DOCTOR WHO FATHERED A TRAMP 
 
 Part I— IN MY CHILDHOOD 
 
 The subject of this character description was, in his 
 personality, far more important than anything he ever could 
 have written or done. I, therefore, in this sketch, seek to 
 perpetuate the memory of him, rather than of his writings 
 and deed-s, to diffuse the fragrance of his life — after the gates 
 of heaven have shut him from our presence. It would, how- 
 ever, leave my tribute incomplete did I not, in connection 
 with my portrayal of my father himself, attempt also to 
 delineate some of the more typical of the Pike County people 
 whom he so greatly loved and for whom he toiled so unre- 
 mittingly and for so many long decades — showing, however, 
 to some extent of course what he did for them and how they 
 reacted toward him. Further, I have attempted, as a back- 
 ground to this many-figured picture, to sketch-in, very brief- 
 ly to be sure, the little town itself in which he lived, the 
 large extent of countryside around it wherein he chiefly 
 practised, and, finally, the old-time interiors of some of the 
 homes wherein his patients lived, gave life, joyed or sor- 
 rowed, sickened, sometimes recovered and sometimes died. 
 
 Through it all, the controlling spirit of this entire section 
 of the book will be the distinctive character, the individu- 
 ality, of my father, Thomas Wesley Shastid. 
 
 He, the subject of this sketch, was born on August 26, 
 1831, in Sangamon County, Illinois, not very far from the 
 log-built town of New Salem, 1 where, at the time, Abraham 
 
 1 Not to be confounded with the present New Salem, which is in Pike County, Illinois. 
 Old Salem (birthplace in 1860, of W. J. Bryan, afterwards three times candidate for president 
 of the United States) was founded in July, 1823. It still stands and under the same name, 
 as the County Seat of Marion County, down in Southern Illinois. The first New Salem, 
 where Lincoln failed as a store-keeper, was founded October 23, 1829, and was deliberately 
 razed, removed, and, as a town, annihilated, in 1840. Most of the buildings were taken 
 to Petersburg, one or two miles to the north. The post-office had already been removed to 
 Petersburg in 1836. Then, in 1847, the present tiny Pike County village of New Salem, the 
 second of its name in Illinois, was founded. 
 
 To complete the Salem-New Salem explanation: In 1906, when Wm. Randolph Hearst 
 was lecturing at the Salem Chautauqua in Petersburg, he "purchased the site (of Lincoln's 
 "old" New Salem) and presented it to the Chautauqua Association." Beginning in 1918 
 the restoration of the old New Salem has, with much financial assistance from the Illinois 
 legislature, proceeded to completion. The place is now, by federal proclamation in 1932, 
 known as New Salem Park. 
 
54 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Lincoln was clerk and manager in the Offut store, and 
 where, a year or so later, he was to open his own ill-fated 
 store, also to officiate as surveyor and postmaster. 
 
 My father, when in his later life I knew him, still re- 
 tained some recollection of Lincoln as he had been at this 
 time. He specially recalled his trips to the Lincoln store in 
 company with an older brother, Jon, there to buy groceries 
 for the Shastid family. "Lincoln's black-strap molasses," 
 he often declared, "was particularly good. Jon and I used, on 
 the way back home, to sample it — surreptitiously and re- 
 peatedly." In 1834 Lincoln's personal property was about 
 to be sold by the sheriff, but a Mr. Bowling 1 Green, first 
 cousin once removed of my Grandfather Shastid, bid in all 
 the property and restored it to Lincoln. 2 My grandfather, 
 too, John Greene Shastid, was of service to Lincoln in a 
 number of small ways — a pleasant fact which Lincoln never 
 could forget. 
 
 1 Not Bolin, the name as given in the International Cyclopedia, 1898, Vol. IX, p. 48, 
 article "Lincoln, Abraham." Bowling always spelled his last name without the final e. 
 All the rest of our breed of Greenes used the final e. 
 
 2 This fact, though accepted by nearly all authorities (e.g., Internat. Cycloped., 1898> 
 Vol. IX, p. 48, lines 16-18) has been contested by some. I had the story, however, person- 
 ally and repeatedly from "Uncle Billy" Greene, my Grandfather Shastid' s own cousin. So, 
 too, did my half-brother, William, who, for a time, lived very near the home of "Uncle 
 Billy" Greene, at Tallula, Illinois, who was very intimate with him, and who, in fact, 
 married the daughter of his business partner, Dr. J. F. Willson. 
 
 And surely "Uncle Billy" Greene should have known about the matter and about 
 Lincoln generally. He was the man who taught Abraham Lincoln English Grammar — 
 from Kirkham's old book on the subject — and, in general, how to write and speak English 
 correctly and forcibly. Probably more than to anyone else Abraham Lincoln owed his 
 mastery of English style to "Uncle Billy" Greene. 
 
 On the truth of the statements in those last two sentences I quote from Wright's "The 
 Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln" (Grosset & Dunlap, N. Y., 1925) page 119: "He 
 [Lincoln] used to have Billy Greene hold the grammar [Kirkham's] of an evening while 
 he recited the rules ; and after he was elected President he did not forget his friend of former 
 years, but had him on his left at the inaugural banquet and the dignified Secretary Seward 
 on his right. Mr. Lincoln presented the two men to each other saying, 'Seward, this is Mr. 
 Greene of Illinois.' Seward bowed stiffly, when Mr. Lincoln exclaimed, 'Oh, get up, Seward, 
 and shake hands with Greene; he's the man that taught me my grammar.' " 
 
 Further about Bowling Green I quote from Beveridge's "Abraham Lincoln — 1809-1858" 
 (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston and New York; 1928) Vol. I, p. 151: "Bowling Green, 
 who lived about a mile from New Salem, took Lincoln [after the death of Ann Rutledge] 
 to his cabin, where, in a fortnight, the care of Mrs. Green restored the sufferer." (Beveridge 
 spells William Greene's name both ways.) 
 
 As stated above, all our Greenes, with the sole exception of Bowling, have always 
 spelled their surnames with the final e — Greene. "Uncle Billy" Greene, to my certain 
 knowledge did so, but I have had my recollection on this matter confirmed by my Grand- 
 father's (John Greene Shastid's) Bible, also by a letter from my sister-in-law, Clara Willson 
 Shastid, who as the daughter of Dr. J. F. Willson, "Uncle Billy" Greene's banking partner 
 in the firm of Willson and Greene, Bankers, surely ought to know how her father's partner 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 55 
 
 In January, 1836, my father removed with his parents 
 and all the other children of the family to Pittsfield, Illinois. 
 There were at that time in Pittsfield only six houses. My 
 grandfather, although a farmer, nevertheless settled in the 
 little county seat, so that he might be able to give to his 
 children the education which he so highly prized but which 
 
 spelled his surname. I may add that, for several years she was herself an official in her father's 
 and "Uncle Billy's" bank — which should make her a still more certain authority. I have also 
 a letter from "Uncle Billy's" granddaughter, Mrs. Louisa Greene Epling, Tallula, Illinois, 
 stating, "I never knew any of our Greene's to omit the final 'e'." 
 
 I may add, finally, that, on a number of letter-heads of the above-mentioned bank, 
 heads which lie before me as I write, the final e also appears in the name. 
 
 J. F WlLLSON 
 
 W. G. Greene. 
 
 -BANKERS- 
 
 *-*. 
 
 Why do many Lincoln biographers keep on misspelling the name 
 of Lincoln's best friend — W. G. [William Graham] Greene? 
 
 Yet several well known biographers of Lincoln, whenever in their books they mention 
 "Uncle Billy" Greene — as they nearly all do repeatedly — spell his name Green, instead of 
 Greene. 
 
 A matter of slight importance, perhaps, is that I never heard any one in all William 
 Graham Greene's circle of acquaintance refer to him as "Uncle Bill" but always as "Uncle 
 Billy." My above-mentioned sister-in-law writes me that that also has been her experience. 
 My Grandfather Shastid, too, always referred to him as "Uncle Billy," and he was a con- 
 temporary both of Lincoln and of Greene — for he was born in 1798, while Lincoln was born 
 in 1809 and Greene in 1812. Nevertheless, Lincoln's biographers persistently refer to him 
 as "Uncle Bill," possibly on grounds that I know not of. 
 
 A matter of much greater importance is the confusion which so many Lincoln biogra- 
 phers introduce into the various relationships among the Greenes. Thus, so high an au- 
 thority as even Carl Sandburg, in his incomparable life-story, "Abraham Lincoln — the 
 
56 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 he had never been able to secure for himself. The tiny brick 
 schoolhouse which my father began attending at Pittsfield 
 when aged about seventeen still stands, and I take great 
 pleasure in showing herewith a photograph of it in its 
 present condition. 
 
 Prairie Years," Vol. I, page 136, says: "Bill Green, the eighteen-year-old son of Squire 
 Bowling Green, was put in as a helper mainly to tell Lincoln which of the customers were 
 good pay," etc. But "Bill" Green (his full name was William Graham Greene) was not 
 the son of Bowling Greene — at least according to our family's genealogy — but of William 
 Griggs Greene and Elizabeth Graham (Greene). Wm. Greene (Sr.) was first cousin to 
 Bowling Greene, Wm. Greene, Jr. ("Uncle Billy" Greene) was therefore Bowling's first 
 cousin once removed, not his son. Wright, in his "The Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln," 
 page 83, calls Bowling Green "Billy's Uncle"! 
 
 Still greater confusion has arisen among Lincoln's biographers with regard to the 
 literacy or illiteracy of "Uncle Billy" Greene. Thus, referring again to Sandburg's "Abraham 
 Lincoln — the Prairie Years," Vol. I, p. 467, I find the following: "Young Bill Green, who 
 had clerked in the Berry & Lincoln store, slept in the same bed with Lincoln and held Kirk- 
 ham's Grammar while Lincoln recited, was in northern Illinois in 1852, and met some 
 families of movers at Princeton. One was the Carr family, who had come from the Mohawk 
 Valley to Chicago by boat, and were going by wagon to the little log city of Galesburg in 
 Knox County, where the Rev. George Gale and a company from Whitesboro, New York, 
 had plans for churches, schools, colleges, religion, culture, and freedom, in the new prairie 
 region. 
 
 "Clark E. Carr, the boy of the family, listened with sharp ears to the talk of Bill 
 Green 
 
 "He (Bill Greene) had a Tennessee skill in telling stories, and the Carrs told him he 
 was the best at spinning yarns that they had ever heard. He replied: T ain't a primin' to 
 a curi's young feller who used to keep a grocery down whar I live. He kin make a cat laugh. 
 I've seen the whole neighborhood turn out to hear him tell stories. They ain't all jest the 
 kind fer women to listen to, but they's always a pint to 'em. He's a great big feller, with 
 a big mouth, and he kinder acts it all out, smilin' and laffin'. I never seed a real clown, 
 but he'd make one. But I've seen him when he was the solumest man in ten states. When 
 he kem back from runnin' a flatboat to New Orleans, ef anybody said anything about 
 niggers he would git so solum, an' tell about a nigger auction he seed in New Orleans — 
 how they sold a fambly, the man to one planter and his wife to another an' passeled the 
 children out among the highes' bidders, an' thought it was awful 
 
 "But what was the name of the first young man who could make a cat laugh? 'Abe 
 Linkern.' " 
 
 Often I have sat in the house of my Grandfather's first cousin at Tallula, Illinois, and 
 listened for hours to his talk. Barring his use of illiterate language as anyone may use it, 
 when reporting the conversation of illiterate persons, he employed no illiterate language 
 whatever, but was well educated and a master of English. He was indeed a three-year 
 alumnus of Illinois College, as witness the article by his granddaughter, Mrs. Louisa Greene 
 Epling, of Tallula, Illinois, in her article, "William Graham Greene, 1838, Lincoln's 
 Friend," (The Illinois College Alumni Quarterly, January 19.40, pp. 6 and 7). 
 
 These subjects I go into not as a matter of family pride, but because it is really im- 
 portant to know that the man who, far more than any other, assisted to form the literary 
 style of the author of the Gettysburg Address, was by no means ignorant and illiterate. 
 
 To represent him as not knowing even how to pronounce Lincoln's name correctly is an 
 absurd mistake that Carr should certainly never have made concerning William Graham 
 Greene, even had he never met him personally, as he admits doing, "in 1852" — a time long 
 after Greene had taught Lincoln how to write, had then attended Illinois College for three 
 years and left at that institution a record for high scholarship, had then taught English at 
 Priestly College, Sparta, Tennessee, and even become principal of that institution. 
 
 I am specially astonished that Carl Sandburg, a man who, perhaps, knows more than 
 any other living person about Lincoln and knows the most of it very accurately, should not 
 only have quoted the above-cited illiterate sentences, yes and many more like them, even 
 
,V-.:, £■■ : ,{. 
 
 THOMAS WESLEY SHASTID, M.D. 
 In Middle Life 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 57 
 
REPLICA OF THE LINCOLN STORE AT NEW SALEM, ILLINOIS 
 
 At this place my father, Thomas Wesley Shastid, and his older brother, Jon Shastid, used 
 to buy the family groceries — -on the way back home testing the quality of the black-strap 
 molasses repeatedly, clandestinely and with great gusto. 
 
 REPLICA OF THE SAME STORE, INTERIOR VIEW 
 (Both photographs by Georg, Springfield, Illinois) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 58 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 59 
 
 Some years earlier he had attended "Granny Heath's 
 School," so called for the estimable and quite scholarly old 
 Pittsfield lady who had owned it and taught it. 3 
 
 In 1849 he entered the John D. Thomson Academy, also 
 at Pittsfield, there acquiring such a knowledge of Latin and 
 Greek that all his life thereafter he could easily read the 
 most difficult of the old classics in their original words. In 
 that school too he acquired his life-long love of philology 
 — learned in fact to get with its history the very flavor of 
 each English word. This John D. Thomson Academy, by 
 the bye, was, though located in the "backwoods," a famous 
 institution in the preparation of students for entrance into 
 Eastern universities. It closed its doors forever in 1863. 
 
 And now I must return to the date when my grandfather 
 with his family removed, in a covered wagon, from Lincoln's 
 New Salem to Pittsfield — January, 1836. The little one-story 
 red house which my grandfather bought in Pittsfield at 
 that time" and in which the whole large family lived was 
 no bigger than 20 by 30. I knew it well in my childhood, 
 but some years ago it had somehow disappeared. In 1838 
 my grandfather built, largely with his own hands, in the 
 same yard with the little red house a considerably larger 
 white one, a house that still stands and in which a quite 
 remarkable person, though then unknown, was nevertheless 
 on several occasions an honored guest. Abraham Lincoln, 
 that is to say, although he still resided — now not as grocer, 
 but as lawyer — in Sangamon County (to be specific, in 
 
 though at second hand, as having been uttered by William Graham Greene, but also that 
 he should have done that without the slightest correctional comment. 
 
 William Graham Greene, was born at Overton, Overton County, Tennessee, January 
 27, 1812. He removed to Illinois in 1821, taught Lincoln at New Salem how to write in 
 1831 and entered Illinois College in 1834. In addition to teaching the future author of 
 "The Gettysburg Address" how to write strong English, he, in 1861, was placed by Lincoln 
 on his left at the latter's first inaugural banquet, and, later in the same year, was appointed 
 by Lincoln to be Collector of Internal Revenue at Peoria, Illinois. In connection with other 
 persons, Uncle Billy founded a railroad which later became the Chicago and Alton System. 
 He also helped to found Mason City, Greenview and Tallula, all in Illinois. In 1866 he 
 established at Petersburg the first bank in Menard County. He also, in May, 1877, founded 
 at Tallula, Illinois, the firm of Willson and Greene, Bankers. At Tallula, in fact, he spent 
 the most of his life, and there he died in 1894. He, "Lincoln's closest friend," was "buried 
 at Tallula in Greenwood Cemetery, so named for him." 
 
 (For most of the data in the immediately preceding paragraph I am indebted to Mrs. 
 Epling's above-mentioned magazine article and to her letters in answer to my inquiries.) 
 
 3 Granny (Mrs. Mary M.) Heath's discovery that, in anemias which iron cannot help, 
 the free feeding of liver to the patient will not infrequently effect a cure, is adverted to 
 hereafter in this book. 
 
60 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Springfield) not infrequently, as a circuit rider, made trips 
 to Pittsfield on legal or other business. 1 On such occasions 
 he almost never failed to walk from the Court-House Square 
 the three short blocks to my grandfather's residence, there 
 to dine with the family. 2 For this reason I make so bold 
 as to reproduce here pictures of the little building from five 
 points of view. 3 
 
 1 Lincoln was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1836, the year my grandfather removed to 
 Pittsfield. In 1837 Lincoln removed from New Salem to Springfield. On December 3, 1839, 
 he was admitted to the federal bar — together with his subsequent great adversary, Stephen 
 A. Douglas. 
 
 2 On one such occasion it happened that Grandfather Shastid had just come in from the 
 country, where he had been hunting and had bagged a dozen quails (or, as my brother Joseph 
 will have it, wild pigeons). Wild meat was cheap meat as well as good meat then. It also 
 happened, on that day, to be the only meat this family had. Grandfather's numerous progeny 
 stood about, hungry, wide-eyed, waiting for the pigeons to finish broiling. All at once, as 
 the custom then was, somebody pushed the door open without knocking. And behold! there 
 stood Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 Abe sat down at their hearty invitation in the place of honor at the head of the table 
 and soon the platter of pigeons was placed before him. At first Abe talked vivaciously. 
 Then, as he became absent-minded over his impending law-suit, he fell completely silent 
 and ate voraciously. One by one the pigeons disappeared into the vast Lincolnian reservoir. 
 A gesture from grandmother kept all the rest from calling for pigeon. After a short time 
 Abe, still abstracted, reached out his fork for the very last pigeon, took it to his own plate, 
 and began to eat it. Then my father, who at this time was still very young, burst suddenly 
 into tears, and cried out: "Abe Lincoln, you're an old hog!" 
 
 It was always a matter for homeric laughter between the country doctor and his little 
 Tommy that Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the most generous and self-sacrificing of men, had 
 once been called a hog. 
 
 Lincoln, duly contrite and tenderly apologetic, but also filled to repletion, at last arose 
 to go, and himself went and got his hat. All at once he was taken with some idea or another, 
 probably legal, and, pulling from his pocket, as he had a way of doing, a used envelope, 
 he made thereon some brief notation. Having done this, he filed the envelope, not back in 
 his pocket as anyone else would have done, but inside his hat, between the crown and the 
 sweatband. This was, in fact, a common filing place with Lincoln for notes and, indeed, 
 back in New Salem, distributing mail about the village, he had carried it all in his hat. 
 
 There was one point that my father had noted about Lincoln's physiognomy that I 
 never have seen recorded by any other than myself. (See my article, "My Father Knew 
 Lincoln," The Nation, February 20, 1929, p. 227.) It was that Lincoln's left eye, from 
 time to time, looked queer and then suddenly 'crossed,' i.e., turned up. At the time when 
 my father told me this it did not strike me as having the least importance. Older grown, 
 however, and become an oculist, I was struck one day by the recollection and then by the 
 meaning of the fact itself. Lincoln had been the victim of hyperphoria (a tendency of one 
 eye upward) with, now and then, a momentary hypertropia (actual turning of that eye up- 
 ward). Such a condition, as all oculists know, gives rise to an intense form of eyestrain 
 and is one of the commonest causes of deep and protracted melancholy — the chronic, inex- 
 pressible blues. Here, then, was the probable explanation of the well-known Lincolnian 
 depression of spirits which lasted, off and on, until his death. 
 
 The causes ordinarily assigned for Lincoln's frequent periods of dejection are much 
 more romantic than the one I have just suggested, but they don't "hold water" half so well. 
 They are, first, a prevision of his own tragic taking off; second, ineradicable grief at the loss 
 of his sweetheart, Ann Rutledge. 
 
 As to the first, we can dismiss it at once as occult and fantastic. As to the second, we 
 have only to remember that, within one year after Ann Rutledge's death, Lincoln was mak- 
 ing love to Mary S. Owens, and, indeed, though unsuccessfully, he proposed marriage to her. 
 Four years later he was likewise making love to Sarah Rickard and with equal lack of success 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 61 
 
 Among my father's boyhood friends were two remarkable 
 young lads who, later, to a considerable extent, influenced 
 world history — John George Nicolay and John Milton Hay. 
 
 proposed to her also. Almost immediately thereafter he proposed to Mary Todd and was 
 accepted. Then, too, although Lincoln no doubt loved Ann Rutledge with all his great, 
 true heart, it is a fact that he had been confirmed in melancholy long before his first meeting 
 with her. I believe that this melancholy was owing to the unromantic fact that, in Lincoln's 
 day, no oculist knew how to prescribe a prism for hyperphoria. 
 
 This oculistic view of the matter I expressed in my above-mentioned article in The 
 Nation. It then was accepted by some oculists-, but also was strongly controverted by many 
 others in this country and in Europe. The view was generally taken, however, that the 
 evidence was insufficient to show that Lincoln had had hyperphoria. 
 
 Now, as all oculists know, a hyperphoria (tendency of one eye to turn upward) some- 
 times produces double vision, i.e., when it increases to hypertropia. The change from 
 the patient's usual condition of hyperphoria (merely tendency or one eye upward) into hyper- 
 tropia (actual turning of one eye upward, or of one eye upward and the other eye downward, 
 with of course consequent double vision) is specially likely to occur in moments of unusual 
 strain and excitement, or of reaction from such moments. I am therefore glad to quote from 
 Carl Sandburg's "Lincoln — The Prairie Years," Vol. II, p. 432, a passage I first read in 
 1941 — 12 years after I had propounded my hyperphoria explanation of Lincoln's frequent 
 headaches and depressions of spirit, as follows: "A queer dream or illusion had haunted 
 Lincoln at times through the winter. On the evening of his election [a time of unusual 
 strain, or, worse, let-go from strain] he had thrown himself on one of the haircloth sofas 
 at home, just after the first telegrams of November 6 had told him he was elected President, and 
 looking into a bureau mirror across the room he saw himself full length, but with two faces. 
 
 "It bothered him; he got up; the illusion vanished; but when he lay down again there 
 in the glass again were two faces, one paler than the other. He got up again, mixed in the 
 election excitement, forgot about it; but it came back, and haunted him. He told his wife 
 about it; she worried too. 
 
 "A few days later he tried it once more and the illusion of the two faces again registered 
 to his eyes. But that was the last; the ghost since then wouldn't come back, he told his 
 wife, who said it was a sign he would be elected to a second term, and the death pallor of 
 one face meant he wouldn't live through his second term." 
 
 Accept the "ghost" theory let him who can. Also "the death pallor of one face," 
 possibly the superstitious and semi-insane Mrs. Lincoln's addition to the actual facts. Here 
 we have a plain case of double vision in a man who had suffered for years from a "phoria," 
 and who now, in a time of reaction from great strain, experienced a momentary increase of 
 his "phoria" to a "tropia." The fact that it does not appear that Lincoln observed any- 
 thing else doubled than his face, does nothing at all — as a matter of course — to support the 
 "ghost" theory. Phoria patients who are now and then troubled with momentary double 
 vision not infrequently complain only that the faces of their friends, or of themselves in a 
 mirror, look double. It is the face that is emphatically, or exclusively, noticed. In a 
 quickly passing double vision, such as Lincoln's plainly was, the patient is not granted a 
 sufficient length of time for testing out the entire nature and extent of his double vision. 
 
 The passage above quoted is, I believe, a complete confirmation of my view expressed 
 in 1929 that Lincoln's persistent melancholy was due, in part at least and possibly altogether, 
 to what oculists term hyperphoria. 
 
 Still one more point about Lincoln that concerns his eyes. To my grandmother, who 
 once wished to show him the flowers in her front yard, he, according to my father, said: 
 "I will look at your flowers, Mother, but I really cannot understand what people see to 
 admire in such things. I am somehow deficient." From this I have often suspected that 
 Lincoln was color-blind. He would often enough, in conversation and in public speeches, 
 refer to the sunset, the flowers, and so on, but only, as it seemed, because these matters 
 appeared beautiful to others. 
 
 My father heard Lincoln debate with Douglas not once but several times. Douglas, he 
 thought, was the better speaker, but not the better reasoner. It was Lincoln's earnestness 
 and love of justice and right that won. Except in this respect he was no match at all for 
 the august, highly cultivated, lion-voiced orator. Lincoln's tones were high-pitched and 
 
62 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Hay he knew only for one single year, Nicolay, however, 
 he got acquainted with early and remained in intimate 
 contact with for a number of years. Nicolay 's story, to 
 
 often disagreeable. He spoke distinctly, however, and very regularly — almost staccato. 
 
 My father also heard Lincoln at a number of trials. He was altogether commonplace, 
 except when fired by the thought of injustice or oppression. Then he became transformed, 
 inspired with holy determination, a veritable arch-angel of righteous advocacy. To 
 speak well he must think that someone, black or white, had been 'abused.' 
 
 One of these trials my father distinctly remembered, though I myself have forgotten 
 where it occurred. It was a case of some importance, and practically the whole affair hinged 
 on the testimony of a celebrated surgeon. 
 
 Lincoln refused to cross-examine any except this last witness. The surgeon had made 
 some very extreme statements, and when he was all through Lincoln said, very slowly and 
 impressively, "Doctor, how much money are you to receive for testifying in this case?" 
 
 The witness hesitated for a moment, then asked the judge: "Your honor, do I have to 
 answer that question?" 
 
 "Yes," said the judge. "It's proper." 
 
 The witness named a fee so large that the audience fairly held its breath. 
 
 Lincoln rose, turned, and, stretching out his long right arm and forefinger, he cried in 
 a shrill voice, overflowing with the hottest indignation: "Gentlemen of the jury, big fee, 
 big swear." 
 
 And those four monosyllables were all he ever said to that jury. They won the case. 
 
 I must, despite the already great length of this footnote, add the story of how my 
 grandfather Shastid, years later, took the news of Lincoln's death. Grandfather was a man 
 of few words. Therefore when, the morning after Lincoln's shooting, the news of the at- 
 tempted assassination reached Pittsfield and our family, Grandfather at once prayed aloud 
 that God would save the life of our great, good Abraham. This in about half a dozen 
 syllables. So much came to me from my father in my boyhood and again and again. Of 
 course I had not been born when Lincoln died. 
 
 When, however, I had become a practising physician in southern Illinois and, on a visit 
 to Pittsfield, was, with my father, conversing with an old-time druggist, Charley Harder, 
 in his drug-store, the latter told me how my grandfather had taken the news not of Lincoln's 
 shooting but of his death. 
 
 "I was standing," said Harder, "right out there in front of this very store. Right here 
 on this same west side of the square, it was. Well, your grandfather was coming along, 
 headed south, talking to himself devoutly, as was his custom. All at once the news from 
 
 Washington broke loose. You know that big young fellow, named , a worker 
 
 in a. cooper shop, I think he was. Well, he was a-coming along fast, headed north. And he 
 was shouting at the top of his voice, 'Hooray, for old Lincoln is dead! Hooray, for old 
 
 Lincoln is dead! I'm glad that he's dead — that son of a she b tard and grandson of 
 
 a b. . . .ch.' 
 
 'Who did you say was dead?' asked your grandfather. He was born away back in the 
 eighteenth century, and didn't hear so very well. 
 
 'Abe Lincoln. I'm glad he is dead, that old ' 
 
 "Your grandfather's fist shot out and young lay flat on the 
 
 sidewalk, snoring it is true but silent as to Lincoln." 
 
 Lincoln had not originated the custom of men's wearing large, gray, woolen shawls. 
 But he was an inveterate wearer of shawls just the same, and his particular style of shawl 
 was, long after his death, worn at least in western Illinois by men who were great admirers 
 of Lincoln. Thus, in the Hemenway caricature of my father which appears in this volume 
 injra, my father is correctly depicted as still (March, 1904) wearing a Lincoln shawl. He 
 was probably the last man in Pike County to give up this memorial attestation of esteem 
 for Lincoln. 
 
 - 3 The schoolhouse which appears in the left background of one of these views, was 
 not built until much later than the little frame house — i.e., not till 1861-63. This is the 
 building wherein the "Tramp," or "Chipmunk," in other words the present writer, first 
 (and last) attended public school and was regularly beaten up by large bullies until an older 
 and much stronger boy, his good friend, Fritz Niebuhr, put an end to the brutality. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 63 
 
 begin it even before my father had first beheld the lad, runs 
 as follows : 
 
 Nicolay had been born at Kissingen, Bavaria, February 
 26, 1832. In 1838 he had been brought by his parents to 
 St. Louis, then to a farm in Pike County, Illinois, some 
 distance southeast of Pittsfield. Now the Rev. Zachariah N. 
 Garbutt, who lived in Pittsfield, where he owned and edited 
 The Whig Free Press, was also sometimes, on Sundays, a 
 country preacher, and as, one Sunday afternoon in 1848, he 
 was riding in toward Pittsfield from a religious meeting he 
 had just presided over in the southeast part of the county, 
 he suddenly heard piercing screams coming down a winding 
 side-road. Spurring in the direction of the screams, he 
 came upon a woman who was much too vigorously punish- 
 ing a boy. Quizzing, he found that the woman, who was 
 the boy's stepmother, did not care for the lad very much. 1 
 The upshot was that she "gave" him to Mr. Garbutt, who 
 thereupon took him on the horse behind him and brought 
 him to Pittsfield — a freckle-faced, red-headed boy in bed- 
 ticking trousers and straw hat (The Pike County Republican, 
 April 2, 1941, p. 4). Though he never did adopt the boy, 
 he and his good wife brought him up as tenderly as they 
 could have done had the child been their own. 2 
 
 My father, just six months older than Nicolay, became 
 his immediate friend. Again and again those two tramped 
 the plank sidewalks of Pittsfield into the late hours of the 
 night, and, even then, loath to give each other up, would 
 not infrequently go to the little frame Free Press office, mount 
 
 1 The boy's father, according to the Pike County Republican for November 22, 1939, 
 had died in 1846. 
 
 2 According to the Pike County Republican for November 22, 1939, Miss Helen Nicolay 
 — John G. Nicolay's daughter — has stated that her father, on the eventful day in question, 
 "walked to the town to apply for a job in the Free Press office and that he slept the first night 
 on sacks of wool at the early carding plant here." I am sorry to differ with Miss Nicolay, 
 but the story of Nicolay's coming to Pittsfield I received direct from the lips of Mrs. Purkitt, 
 who lived just across Monroe Street from my father's home and who had formerly been 
 the wife of Mr. Garbutt, therefore, naturally, for years the foster mother of John G. Nicolay. 
 She, if anyone, should have known under what circumstances her boy, as she always called 
 him, had come to her. 
 
 The story, just as I have narrated it above, was told me by Mrs. Purkitt not once but 
 times innumerable. I could hardly be mistaken about it. She even used to dilate on the 
 comical appearance which her husband and young John Nicolay made that fateful day as 
 they came "riding double" up to the Garbutt residence. Moreover, other old-time citizens 
 of Pittsfield, including Mrs. Helen Kelly and Monroe Worthington, have remembered the 
 story in the same way. 
 
 I am pleased to present herein a cut of the old Garbutt residence, the one into which, 
 on the fateful day in question, John G. Nicolay was received as a son. 
 
64 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 to the half-story loft, and retire by the very simple process 
 of lying down in their clothes on the hay. Here they would 
 talk for hours of the great men they meant to be and the 
 great things they meant to do. For a time my father taught 
 school. Nicolay became editor and eventually owner of the 
 Free Press} 
 
 3 Nicolay's part in making Abraham Lincoln president of the United States is seldom, 
 if ever, so much as referred to in the biographies of Lincoln. Indeed it is quite infrequently 
 the case that more than a score of words are devoted in Lincoln biographies or U. S. histories 
 to the important connections of Lincoln, Hay and Nicolay with Pike County. Even when 
 the two so highly important photographs of Lincoln which were made at different times in 
 Pittsfield are reproduced in Lincoln volumes, it is seldom indeed that Pittsfield or Pike 
 County is so much as mentioned in connection with them. 
 
 As to Nicolay's part in making Lincoln president, that part was played less when 
 Nicolay was editor of the Pike County Free Press at Pittsfield than after he had removed to 
 Springfield to read law in Abraham Lincoln's office. But here is the whole story as related 
 by Jesse M. Thompson in The Pike County Republican, February 12, 1941 : 
 
 "JOHN G. NICOLAY'S 'LINCOLN FOR PRESIDENT' EDITORIAL 
 WAS WRITTEN IN PITTSFIELD 
 
 "The Republican re-prints below a famous editorial which appeared in Col. D. B. Bush's 
 Pittsfield newspaper, 'The Pike County Journal,' issue of February 9, I860 (eighty-one years 
 ago last Sunday), and which doubtless affected materially the destiny of this republic. The 
 editorial was written by John George Nicolay, former editor of the paper when it was 'The 
 Pike County Free Press.' The Free Press and the Journal were lineal predecessors of the 
 Pike County Republican. 
 
 "Nicolay, who left the Free Press in 1856 and later went to Springfield to read law in 
 Lincoln's law office, had come over from Springfield to visit his sweetheart, Therena Bates. 
 He went in to see Col. Bush and Bush asked him to write an editorial. Lincoln for President 
 was advocated for the first time in this editorial that Nicolay wrote. The editorial was immediately 
 copied, seconded, and very vigorously ratified by most of the Republican newspapers in the 
 United States. 
 
 "The following May, in the Wigwam Republican convention in Chicago, Seward was 
 seemingly the choice of the delegates for president. Col. Ross and others of Lincoln's Pittsfield 
 friends bethought them of Nicolay s editorial. They had thousands of copies re-printed. These they 
 circulated among the delegates. Lincoln was consequently nominated on the third ballot. 
 
 ' 'Thus, on this Lincoln natal day, The Republican presents the Pittsfield editorial which 
 made Lincoln president and changed a Nation's destiny. 
 
 " 'FOR PRESIDENT, HON. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, SUBJECT TO THE DECISION 
 OF THE NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONVENTION 
 
 'We are very confident that we express the almost unanimous sentiment of the Re- 
 publicans of Pike County in the announcement we make at the head of this article — a senti- 
 ment founded not only on the personal attachment to and admiration of Mr. Lincoln, but 
 prompted also by a careful estimate of his qualifications, both as to his fitness and avail- 
 ability to be chosen as the candidate in the coming campaign. It is conceded that the states 
 of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana and Illinois will be the decisive battle-ground in the 
 approaching contest, and of them Pennsylvania and Illinois are most hopeful of Republican 
 success. While that Mr. Lincoln would be as acceptable to the Republican voters of Penn- 
 sylvania as any man whose name has yet been mentioned, we know he is beyond comparison 
 the strongest man for the state of Illinois. We do not state this as mere speculation — the 
 fact is acceptable of demonstration by figures. Give us Lincoln as the candidate and we can 
 promise the electoral vote of Illinois for the Republicans, as a sure result. It is due to the 
 growing interest and power of the west that the next Republican convention shall give 
 her a candidate on the presidential ticket, and to no man in the west does the honor more 
 pre-eminently belong than to Lincoln. From the introduction of the Nebraska bill to the 
 present time, he has fought the extension of slavery as the champion chosen and pitted 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 65 
 
 In 1851 appeared upon the scene a black-eyed, rosy- 
 cheeked, laughter-loving young fellow, six years the junior 
 of Nicolay and almost seven of my father, by name John Hay. 
 He had come to attend the John D. Thomson Academy — 
 which institution my father had already attended before 
 beginning to teach school. 4 John, however, intellectual 
 
 against the great apostle of popular sovereignty and has wrested triumph after triumph 
 from the Little Giant for republicanism in the west. 
 
 'We shall have yet one more battle with the delusion of Douglasism in the state of 
 Illinois, and with no man's weapons can we arm ourselves as securely or fight as successfully 
 as with the arguments offensive and defensive which Abe Lincoln has furnished us. Whatever 
 may be the choice of the politicians, the people of Illinois are undoubtedly for Lincoln. 
 They know him honest and capable, a man of simple habits and plain manners, but possessing 
 a true heart and one of the noblest intellects in the land. He maintains the faith of the 
 fathers of the Republic, he believes in the Declaration of Independence, he yields obedience 
 to the Constitution and laws of his country. He has the radicalism of Jefferson and of Clay 
 and the conservatism of Washington and Jackson. In his hands the union would be safe.' " 
 
 4 I am informed by Attorney Oliver R. Barrett, of Chicago, Illinois, a former Pittsfield 
 boy and high Lincoln authority, that Nicolay also for a time attended the John D. Thomson 
 Academy. The fact has also been quite recently confirmed in a letter to me by Mrs. H. C. 
 (Anne Thomson) Shubert, then the only living child of John D. and Anne Ledlie Thomson. 
 
 The famous little backwoods preparatory school, or Academy, passed out of existence 
 in 186}. For the facts in the following account of the school and its two widely celebrated 
 teachers I am indebted to the above-mentioned then only surviving child of the Thomsons : 
 John David Thomson was born, reared and educated in Dublin, Ireland. His professional 
 degrees (for the ministry) he received at Edinburgh, Scotland. But he never did officiate 
 anywhere as minister, for he finally decided that to the ministry he had no "call." Anne 
 Ledlie (later Mrs. John D. Thomson) born at Larne, Ireland, was reared and educated at 
 Dublin. She and John D. Thomson married, May, 1846, in the Unitarian church at Dublin 
 of which her father was pastor — though the father did not perform the ceremony. 
 
 They immediately came to America and to Pittsfield, at the earnest solicitation of one 
 of Mrs. Thomson's former Dublin teachers, who now was a Pittsfield citizen married to a 
 Mr. John Grimshaw. 
 
 In Pittsfield Mr. Thomson at first kept books. For a time he taught country schools, 
 while his wife did private tutoring. In 1849, at their then home in Pittsfield, they opened 
 their house as a private school, "The Thomson School," upon which institution, however, 
 the public not only of Pittsfield but of the entire upper Mississippi Valley, conferred, as it 
 were an honorary title, the name "John D. Thomson Academy." (There was not in those 
 days a single high school in all the state of Illinois; indeed the first high school in the state 
 was that organized at Jacksonville by Newton Bateman in September, 1851, while very few 
 were organized till much later. 
 
 By this institution there never were issued any circulars or prospectuses. From Mrs. 
 H. C. Shubert, however, the writer has learned that Mrs. Thomson, in the "Academy" 
 taught English, French, and Italian, and that Mr. Thomson taught Greek, Latin, German, 
 all the higher mathematics and even certain other branches. 
 
 The fame of the school spread rapidly. Nothing quite like the swift growth of its 
 reputation had, perhaps, been seen before, at least in the upper portion of the Valley. Pupil 
 after pupil who emerged from the John D. Thomson "Academy" entered without difficulty 
 not only the smaller colleges but even the greater universities of the East. At first the humble 
 Thomson home itself was the only building which the "Academy" possessed. After a time, 
 however, a separate structure was erected in the Thomson couple's yard, just a very few 
 feet from their home. This, in time, a scholastic building only, received the affectionate 
 nickname of "The Chicken Coops," — plural, because the building consisted of two rooms. 
 And to the Chicken Coops came still more students, good students — very earnest men and 
 women (for the institution from its beginning was co-educational). The "Academy" would 
 
66 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 beyond his years and drawn irresistibly to the printing office, 
 soon was an intimate friend of the two older boys. On 
 
 tolerate no indolence within its walls. 
 
 From the Academy's doors went forth — without degrees, without diplomas, even with- 
 out certificates of any sort other than a few handwritten words from John D. and Anne 
 Ledlie Thomson — men and women whose eyes were strangely bright with eagerness for 
 knowledge. John Milton Hay, while a student at the Chicken Coops, began writing his 
 well-known "Pike County Ballads." Later, graduated at Brown University, he became, 
 as elsewhere related in this volume, assistant private secretary to President Abraham Lincoln, 
 and, later still, United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James, and still later, Secretary 
 of State of the United States. Hay, perhaps, was the greatest diplomat the United States 
 has ever produced. John G. Nicolay, too, in the little Pittsfield "Chicken Coops," as stated 
 in this volume elsewhere, acquired not merely knowledge but such an ability to think 
 clearly as later enabled him to make Abraham Lincoln the President of the United States. 
 
 Besides these very famous men there were also others who became well known as 
 writers, lawyers, judges, ministers, physicians — among these latter "the doctor who fathered 
 a tramp." 
 
 Then, all at once, in the midst of the little Academy's intense activity and increasing, 
 well-deserved, fame — Mrs. Thomson died. That was in 1863. 
 
 After that, John D. Thomson seemed to have lost the heart of him. He closed the 
 Academy, closed it tightly, closed it never to open it again. 
 
 The reputation, however, it had gained in early days lives on. Pittsfield, just a little 
 later, established its first high school. Some of the teachers in that high school have been 
 men of fine character and even of national note. But still a tradition lives on among the 
 later generations in Pike County of an Academy which once upon a time blazed into in- 
 comparable glory at little Pittsfield, shone for a few short years with incredible splendor, 
 and then went quickly out — because of the death of a beloved woman. 
 
 My father often said to me: "Tom, I used at first to enter the Academy doors with 
 stupid indifference, but always I came back out of them giddy with the love of learning. 
 After awhile I was giddy with that love both day and night — in fact I am giddy with it 
 still." So in truth he was. 
 
 That giddiness, perhaps, had something to do with his fathering and bringing up a 
 "Tramp." 
 
 After the death of Anne Ledlie Thomson, John David Thomson never taught anything 
 again, even in a country school. It had been the intention of the Pittsfield Board of Educa- 
 tion to appoint the Thomsons as the faculty at the new High School building. But John D., 
 alone, would not teach there. For the rest of the Civil War he was attendant to Captain 
 Westlake in the Provost Marshal's office, at Mt. Sterling. When the war closed, John D. 
 for a time kept a little store at Pittsfield. This he abandoned in 1872, when he removed to 
 a farm in Laclede County, Missouri. Meanwhile he had married a Miss Margaret McBride, 
 daughter of Hugh McBride, of Brown County. 
 
 The children of John D. Thomson are, by his first wife — 
 
 Name Date of Birth Date of Death 
 
 Mary 1847 1848 
 
 Margaret Short (Lodge) 1850 1921 
 
 Charlotte Grimshaw (Irvine) 1853 1928 
 
 James Crawford Ledlie 1854 1925 
 
 Alexander Robinson 1856 1873 
 
 Elizabeth Ledlie 1858 1920 
 
 Anne Holmes (Schubert) 1861 Died at Richland, Mo., 
 
 March 13, 1942 
 
 By his second wife — 
 
 Hugh 1867 1893 
 
 Elberta (McMillen) 1870 Living 
 
 Mrs. Anne Ledlie Thomson's remains lie buried in Oakwood Cemetery, one-half mile 
 south of Pittsfield, not far from the Shastid lot. My father, if he could understand, would 
 
tT^o^e-o^ 
 
 
 
 
 LETTER AND RECEIPT BY JOHN G. NICOLAY 
 
 There used to stand in my father's "lumber room" a considerable number of trunks, in which 
 my father, following advice he so often gave to me, kept absolutely every letter he ever received that 
 was proper to be kept. Among those letters in those trunks were many of great value for more than 
 merely personal reasons. There were, as I remember, a number from Dr. John T. Hodgen, of St. 
 Louis, a few from John Hay and a very large number from his well loved friend, John G. Nicolay. 
 And there were many other letters, too. Some, from Father's brother William, had been sent him 
 from bloody battle fields of the Civil War, in which conflict that brother at length had terribly perish- 
 ed. Others were from his cousin, Harvey Williams, a pacifist who did not believe in fighting for any 
 cause. Drafted, he went to the war, and, in his first battle, when the retreat was sounded, had become 
 so interested in killing that he stood unheeding, or else unhearing, the order, and calmly shooting 
 "Rebs" until, actually, he had killed (from behind some bushes) the very last of the squad from which 
 his comrades had so promptly run. His letters were filled with prayers that God, the Father, would, 
 if possible, forgive him his many "murders." There were letters too from Father's half nephew, Union 
 Army Surgeon Lafayette Edwards, who had escaped from a Confederate prison, ridden twenty miles 
 to Union lines, seen his horse fall dead beneath him, and then for the first time discovered that his 
 
 (Cont 'd over) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
7ru guar' (Dffm, 
 
 /J~ 185 . 
 
 own "fair hide was full of holes." Whether any Lincoln letters were in that immense collection I am 
 ashamed that I cannot recall. Quite possibly there were. 
 
 In my later youth I lost interest in those old letters. In middle life, still taking the presence of 
 the letters in the old home for granted, I paid them no attention whatever till some time after my 
 mother's death. By then the old home had stood vacant for a considerable time. Search then re- 
 vealed that some one had simply stolen those trunkfuls of letters, scarce early postage stamps and 
 all. Nor were they ever recovered. Two letters only remained — rather one letter and one receipt, 
 each by John G. Nicolay. These are herewith reproduced, as they happen to be the only specimens 
 of Nicolay's hand-writing which I — rather my nephew, Jon B. Shastid, for they are in his keeping 
 now — finds available. 
 
 The meaning of the receipt is sufficiently obvious. As to the letter, the "Jon" it addresses was 
 my uncle, Jon Shastid. When farms were cheap my uncle would borrow money with which to buy 
 them. When farms were dear he would sell farms. In this way, largely he amassed a considerable 
 fortune. One of those from whom he used to borrow a good deal was John G. Nicolay — who, by the 
 way, appears to have been a man of considerable shrewdness and managerial ability himself, as Lincoln 
 quickly learned. 
 
 If anyone deem these documents too immaterial, I would say that, as far as I can learn, there is 
 no biography at all, book or article, of John G. Nicolay, the man who made Lincoln president, who 
 was afterward his chief private secretary, and, after Lincoln's death, wrote, in collaboration with Hay, 
 the many-volumed "Abraham Lincoln, a History" (1887) a work which for fullness and accuracy of 
 information can never be equalled. Some of even the longer Lincoln biographies scarcely mention 
 his name. But the time will surely come when every scrap of information relating to any of these 
 three men — Lincoln, Hay and Nicolay — will possess high value. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
wC 
 
 
 wmmmmmm wsms 
 
 William Graham Greene, first cousin of the writer's grandfather, John Greene Shastid. 
 
 This is the "Uncle Billy" Greene who taught Abraham Lincoln how to write strong, clear English 
 and who, in consequence, was placed on Lincoln's left hand at the latter's first inaugural banquet. 
 The picture represents "Uncle Billy" at the time of life when the writer personally knew him 
 and frequently met him in his home at Tallula, Illinois. 
 
 (Original photograph lent to the present writer by 
 B. D. Epling, Tallula, Illinois.) 
 
 'Uncle Billy's" granddaughter, Mrs. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 69 
 
A schoolhouse (built in 1848) which Thomas Wesley Shastid attended at Pittsfield, Illinois, 
 during the session of 1848-49. In this building, the Ross-Noyes School, was housed the second 
 Public school at Pittsfield. For many years the structure has been merely a storage-shed, or 
 tool-house. 
 
 The assertion has often been made that John Thomson Hodgen, afterwards a famous surgeon, 
 also once attended here — an assertion which, for reasons cited later, cannot be correct, as Hodgen, 
 in 1845, entered Bethany College, at Bethany, Virginia; in 1846, the McDowell Medical College, 
 St. Louis; and, early in March, 1848, was practising medicine at Pittsfield. 
 
 (Photograph by the writer in May, 1938.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 70 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 71 
 
 several occasions he, too, slept in their Parnassian company. 1 
 My father never could long keep away from the printing 
 office, even in the daytime, for he loved John Nicolay as 
 he loved his own soul. Once, as my father was crossing the 
 street from the printing-office to the Court-House yard he 
 was met by a long, lank, black-haired, gray-blue-eyed man, 
 who needed some good printing and needed it quickly — 
 Abraham Lincoln. My father took him back to the shop 
 and introduced to him young Nicolay. And this, I am sure, 
 was the first meeting of Lincoln with the lad who was to 
 be instrumental in securing for him the nomination for the 
 presidency, then during the campaign was to be his secretary, 
 and again — after the election — was to become his private 
 
 be well pleased and only regret that the remains of John D. Thomson himself are not also 
 near his own. John D. Thomson died in November, 1882, in Camden County, Maine, and 
 lies buried in the private home-cemetery of his daughter, Mrs. Lodge, and her husband, 
 along with his own son, Hugh Thomson, and eight of his own grandchildren. 
 
 This, so far as I know, constitutes the first and only accurate and fairly complete ac- 
 count of the Thomsons and their little "Academy." The tiny institution's obscure situation 
 and the meteoric brevity of its career seem to have barred it almost entirely from any ad- 
 equate consideration by biographers and historians. Some of the most extensive writers 
 indeed about our Civil War period do not even refer to it. Yet — not to mention country 
 doctors, lawyers, judges, ministers and so on — the very profound influence which the in- 
 stitution had on the minds of John Hay and John G. Nicolay — those day after day and 
 night after night advisers of Abraham Lincoln throughout the entire period of his presidency 
 — could not have been without effect on the mind of Abraham Lincoln and, through that, 
 on the history of the United States. 
 
 For these reasons I have ventured to give in this, my account of the John D. Thomson 
 Academy, a little more detail than might really have been justified solely by the fact that 
 a certain country doctor had attended the institution and loved it dearly. 
 
 1 My father, in later years, on our rides into the country to see patients, not infrequently 
 regaled me with anecdotes of Nicolay and Hay. Some of these I specially remember. 
 
 Hay, for example, was fond of telling about the tramp who went to a circus. A caged 
 lion being brought into the ring, a lady tamer went into his cage and, among other per- 
 formances, permitted the lion to eat sugar from her hand. 
 
 Up jumps the tramp and yells, "I could do that myself!" 
 
 "Oh you could, could you?" sneered the woman. 
 
 "Just as well as the lion," finished the tramp. 
 
 Whether Hay was the originator or not of this joke, I do not know. It is, however, 
 at the present time well known. 
 
 Another of Hay's oft-repeated stories was that of a fellow in the country whose feet 
 were so big that he always had to go out of the door-yard into the horse-lot in order to 
 turn round. 
 
 Once when Hay had, in the presence of my father and of John G. Nicolay, told again 
 this story, Nicolay gravely laid aside his composing stick, sat down on a low stool and, 
 bending well over, scrutinized Hay's feet for some time. Rising with a sigh, he went back 
 to sticking type, without comment — but with from time to time a look of reproof at Hay. 
 (Hay's feet were exceedingly small.) 
 
 In general, however, Nicolay was not much of a joker. He merely "broke loose" at 
 long intervals. 
 
72 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 secretary at Washington and was so to remain almost until 
 the assassin's bullet had done its work. I have seen it stated 
 that Lincoln first met Nicolay when the latter was assistant 
 to the Secretary of State in Springfield, or at least a casual 
 visitor in his home. 1 That, however, is undoubtedly a 
 mistake. 
 
 1 Thus, for example, A. S. Chapman in the Century Magazine, N. S., Vol. XL VI, 1909, 
 p. 444, relates: 
 
 "Nicolay had sold the Pike County Free Press. He had been the Pittsfield correspondent 
 of what is now the St. Louis Globe Democrat, and had started for St. Louis by way of 
 Springfield to see about forming a regular connection with the paper. While he was in 
 Springfield he was entertained by O. M. Hatch of Griggsville, Illinois, who was Secretary 
 of State under Governor Bissell and Governor Richard Yates. During the time that Nicolay 
 was at the home of Mr. Hatch, Lincoln came into Mr. Hatch's office, saying: 
 
 'I wish I could find some young man to help me with my correspondence. It is getting 
 so heavy I can't handle it. I can't afford to pay much, but the practice is worth something.' 
 'I have just the young man for you,' replied Mr. Hatch. 
 
 "He introduced John Nicolay to Lincoln, who thus became acquainted with his future 
 biographer." 
 
 Incidentally, Weik in "The Real Lincoln," p. 283, informs us that Nicolay was not at 
 this time a guest at Mr. Hatch's home, but a clerk in his office. Moreover, Mr. Hatch, at 
 the time in question, may indeed have "introduced" Nicolay to Lincoln, and yet it may 
 also have been that that was not the first occasion on which he had been so introduced. 
 
 See further on this subject my forthcoming volume, "Lincoln's Entourage at Wash- 
 ington." 
 
 As already stated, it is a curious fact that Nicolay has been so grossly neglected as he 
 has, in fact almost forgotten. Not only has he had no tribute paid him in the way of a 
 biographical book, but the magazines, popular and historical alike, almost never mention 
 him. Some of the "lives" of Abraham Lincoln grant two or three brief paragraphs of very 
 grudging attention to the man who made Lincoln president and Hay an immortal diplomat. 
 Even in Thayer's "Life and Letters of John Hay" (1908) Nicolay is scarcely referred to, 
 and Nicolay 's book, "The Outbreak of Rebellion," (1881) might as well never have been 
 written considering the minute amount of attention it received. 
 
 His collaboration with Hay on "Abraham Lincoln: A History," Lincoln's most au- 
 thoritative "life," has kept Nicolay 's name from absolute oblivion, but, in general, his 
 entire public career before his death as well as his little meed of fame after it, seems almost 
 to have been symbolized by his own unnoticed funeral. Says Jesse M. Thompson, in a speech 
 at Pittsfield on June 24, 1925: "He [Nicolay] died in Washington in 1901, in his seventieth 
 year, and John McWilliams of Griggsville, who rode with Nicolay's daughter Helen to 
 the grave, says in his published reminiscences there were probably not more than fifty 
 persons present at the funeral of him who had grown to such splendid stature from such a 
 lowly beginning." 
 
 The explanation seems to be that John G. Nicolay was always a modest, perhaps even 
 diffident, man. My father in fact quite often told me that when, in his boyhood, he and 
 Nicolay of nights had walked together the plank sidewalks of little Pittsfield, Nicolay 
 would, so far as possible, shun the streets whereon the elite of the village were most likely 
 to be passing — so shy, so very, very painfully shy he was. 
 
 Even in 1865, after he had won an international reputation at the White House as a 
 man of magnificent ability and had returned to Pittsfield with the intention of proposing 
 to Therena Bates, he came very near to going back to Washington without her and would 
 in fact have done so, had not some of his old-time admirers so twitted him about his timidity 
 that, at last, in desperation, he rushed into Therena's house, gasped out a proposal and 
 was instantly accepted — by the girl who had been awaiting him for years and years and years. 
 
 Yet this very timid man had in Washington helped even Abraham Lincoln to "stand 
 straight and firm and strong before the greatest." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 73 
 
 Whether my father ever chanced to perform for Hay a 
 service similar to that which he had done for Nicolay, I do 
 not know. In either case it was at Nicolay's insistence that 
 Lincoln took Hay down to Washington as his assistant 
 private secretary, and so gave to the future Secretary of State 
 of the United States and Ambassador to Great Britain the 
 opportunity he needed. 1 
 
 After Hay left Pittsfield (he came and went in 1851) my 
 father, in 1853, going to St. Louis, entered the Medical 
 Department of the University of Missouri, more commonly 
 known as "The McDowell College." There he received the 
 degree of M.D. on February 28, 1856. 
 
 For a year he practised in Pittsfield, then for five and a 
 half in Pleasant Hill, which is also in Pike County, and then 
 returned to Pittsfield where he lived and practised till the 
 close of his life. 
 
 In 1860 he married Miss Mary F. Edwards, of Calhoun 
 County, by whom he had one child, William Edwards. The 
 first wife having died in 1864, he married, October 1, 1865, 
 Louisa Minerva Hall, daughter of Thomas Linster and 
 Angelina Clemmons, Hall, at Toll Gate, Illinois. By her he 
 had three children, Thomas Hall — the "Tramp" and author 
 of this present volume — Jon Shepherd and Joseph Calvin. 
 
 Soon after I had become aware that the first of these 
 children had turned out to be I, then, in addition to my 
 half-brother William and my tiny own brother Jon — Joseph 
 was not yet on the scene — then, I say, along with the form 
 and features of my small, dark mother — of whom much more 
 hereafter — the most beloved image of my childhood was 
 that of my father — tall, fair, kindly-faced, blue-eyed, white- 
 haired, generally carrying a pair of "pill-bags" either into 
 or out of the house, and always greatly concerned about my 
 happiness. One of the earliest memories, in fact, that I have 
 of my childhood is that of my father, who, at my most 
 earnest request, is crawling patiently beneath our low bed 
 
 1 More widely known for a long time even than as Secretary of State, Ambassador to 
 Great Britain, editor of the New York Tribune, author of the Open Door in China, the 
 Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, or as anything else of a political character, was John Hay as the 
 author of "Pike County Ballads," poems in the Pike County dialect which he began writ- 
 ing while still a mere student in Pittsfield and which ran through more than seventeen 
 editions and then were incorporated in his "Poems." 
 
74 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 in order to prove that there is no big dog, bear or tiger 
 under it. 
 
 A few years later — to be specific, when I was well started 
 at school — my father displayed a great eagerness, whenever 
 the weather was right, to have me with him on his rounds 
 among the sick. This at least was the case on Saturdays and 
 Sundays in the school part of the year and on all fair days 
 in the summer. My brother Jon was much too young then, 
 my half-brother William much too athletic — given to base- 
 ball and boxing — to care very much for diseases and their 
 symptoms. I at least was a good listener — and my father 
 was oft times lonely. 
 
 ONE LIVED 
 
 It was a very decidedly sunny afternoon. 
 
 I am simply astonished, in these later years, as I turn my 
 vision backward to the days of my early childhood, to note 
 how extremely many of the hours I spent beside my father 
 on his rounds among the sick, were those of brilliant sun- 
 light. The presence of so much radiance in my recollections 
 may be due to the fact that all of us incline to remember 
 pleasant, rather than dismal, things. Or it may be due to 
 the fact that, in childhood, the pleasanter things make much 
 the deeper, more enduring, impression, or to the undeniable 
 tendency of childhood to see, with its little bright eyes, 
 more effulgence than gloom in even the darkest surroundings. 
 Then, too, my father no doubt selected for my journeys be- 
 side him the days of pleasant rather than of inclement 
 weather. But, after all, we were ofttimes out in heavy 
 storms together, so that, probably, the explanation of the 
 sunlight flood which pours through the most of my early 
 medical reminiscences is simply that, in childhood, almost 
 everything is bright — and very beautiful. 
 
 In the ride I now shall tell about, it was — whatever the 
 explanation — a sunny and charming little world we rode 
 through. 
 
 In fact, so bright was the day that very distinctly I 
 remember the bright spoke-flashings of my father's new 
 buggy when he came driving to the south-side gate of the 
 schoolhouse yard just as school was noisily "letting out." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 75 
 
 I recall quite vividly too that, as I perched beside him, 
 we, before leaving for the country, drove to the Court-House 
 Square, and I can see again, as on that day, Mr. 
 Charles Shadel, in his meat-store, standing before his red, 
 squat, round-bodied, three-legged chopping-block, with 
 bright, uplifted cleaver in his hands. Next, a clerk in Thomas 
 Dixon's dry-goods store is measuring lengths of flower- 
 bright calico along the near edge of the counter, then an old 
 man in Heck's candy-store is filling a paper sack with blue 
 candy for an eager-eyed boy. All at once my father drew 
 rein before Hyde's drug-store. Returning half a minute later 
 with several small bottles and large boxes, he quickly bestow- 
 ed them underneath the buggy-seat, spoke softly to our yellow, 
 or cream-colored, horse, and away we went to the west. 
 
 After that to the north and then to the northwest through 
 a somewhat sparsely settled country. Every now and then 
 a stop and a cordial reception among people where the 
 patient, it seemed, was always getting very much better. 
 How the bees bumbled in the clover-heads! How the 
 meadow-larks carolled from rail-tips in the sunlight, Father 
 crying ecstatically, "O you sweet, sweet little meadow- 
 larks! How you fling us your tiny, tiny kisses of irre- 
 pressible joy! O happy days!" 
 
 But after a while he observed: "Now we must start fast 
 back home. See the glow in the east! The moon will soon 
 be rising." 
 
 Turning, he drove south, saying, "I don't remember hav- 
 ing seen this road before." 
 
 The road narrowed and grew steep-hilled. More and 
 more the weeds, hazel bushes and even hickory trees en- 
 croached upon it. Once a crude, fresh-looking young man 
 was seated on a road-side stump. Of him my father enquired, 
 "What does this road lead to?" "Nothing and damn little 
 of that," was the discourteous answer. All at once came 
 rapid hoof-beats. Then a horsebacker reined before us. 
 "Doc! Doc! It's coming." "So soon?" "Yes, now." 
 
 The man turned, rode ahead of us and we followed up 
 a lonely, shadow-filled lane. 
 
 At the house Father instructed me, "You'll have to stay 
 here, son — too young to go within." He took from under the 
 buggy-seat his long black box of obstetrical instruments and 
 
76 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 several wrapped bottles. As he entered the house I noticed 
 how small, unpainted and decrepit it was — little more than 
 a pig-pen in appearance. Presently he returned, saying: "I 
 shall probably be held for a long time. Curl up here on the 
 seat and use this for a pillow." Folding his coat he put it 
 under my head, then threw the lap-robe over me and tucked 
 it in all around. 
 
 Taking more things from under the seat, he again de- 
 parted. 
 
 The first thing I knew I had been asleep. I moved a 
 trifle and a nightbird's startled call rang out like a woman's 
 scream. The sun had long since gone, but the frail moon 
 was steadily rising, rising, and peering down on the suffering 
 earth, I thought, through realms of boundless space with an 
 ever-pitying eye — upon the suffering earth, ever with a pity- 
 ing eye on our poor suffering earth. 
 
 I tried again to sleep but became more wakeful instead. 
 Katydids shrilled mournfully from the stubble of a wheat- 
 field; cicadas drummed in the roadside maples; a tiny stretch 
 of yellowing corn waved "hail and farewell" to the great 
 world it had known so short a time and of which it had 
 seen so little. I arose and went to walking up and down 
 the roadway, trying to forget. 
 
 I wondered often if my father would some time think me 
 worthy to be a doctor. He had a very exalted idea, I knew, 
 about the requirements of his profession, and I had always 
 been afraid to speak to him about the secret ambition I had 
 had to become a doctor. With what raptures he had spoken 
 of his old-time preceptors, Worthington, Campbell, Mc- 
 Dowell and Hodgen! Perhaps, notwithstanding all their 
 great abilities, I too some day might be able to discover new 
 things, so to lessen somewhat the pain and suffering in this 
 world, the terrors of it all. 
 
 I went and sat down in the grass with my back against 
 the rickety wall of the silent barn. In just one moment, as 
 it seemed, I was fully awake again. 
 
 The entire world seemed to be in a state of tense ex- 
 pectancy. What was about to happen? I was seated facing 
 the south. To my right the pallid moon appeared as if soon 
 to bid farewell to earth. To the left, however, that very 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 77 
 
 strange something that was about to happen, was in fact 
 occurring. 
 
 This, so far as I remember, was my first experience with 
 the great miracle, although my father of course had seen it 
 hundreds of times. 
 
 Lucifer came up first. I knew him from my father's 
 descriptions — Lucifer (bringer of light), also from the pic- 
 tures back at home in our atlases. Then appeared the "false 
 dawn," the zodiacal light — nebulous and half unseen, like 
 the wing of a great, far-away angel. Next the too deep 
 blackness of the lower world softening into changeful, ever- 
 creative grays. Far to the southward vast stretches of the 
 fields opened up where no trees stood and where the hills 
 fell away into wide-ranging valleys that revealed a perfect 
 paradise of forms and colors. New fragrances arose beneath 
 the miracle's influence. An unseen birdlet uttered a tentative 
 "pip." Others with assurance followed and then the older 
 birds confirmed the full passage of the dark. "Old Yellow," 
 still in his shafts at the hitching-post, produced a low, al- 
 most incredibly soft and affectionate whicker. I ran up to 
 meet my father at the horse's side, still full of the wonder 
 of the dawn and the joy that had come to me with it. 
 Bubbling over with that joy, I cried, "You saved them both?' ' 
 
 Father looked at me for some time quite absently and 
 dejected, then remembering my question, replied, as if under 
 his horror-stricken breath, "One — died." 
 
 Those two terrible monosyllables raced round in my brain 
 for a long time. Indeed to this day, when I sometimes 
 awake in the night, they are racing round there still — un- 
 conquerable confirmation of all we have feared about death, 
 the power of the great black angel and the weakness of all 
 mankind, its doctors included, when pitted against him. 
 "The last enemy that shall be abolished is death." 
 
 The pale moon followed us almost all the way back to 
 Pittsfield, spite of the fact that we drove steadily onward 
 toward the glory of the risen sun and although attended 
 the entire way by the choiring of sweet birds. 
 
 When we drove into the Pittsfield Public Square, there 
 were all the old familiar, the commonplace, objects — life as 
 usual. There was the well-gnawed hitching-rack with a 
 dozen horses half asleep against it. The saloons were still 
 
78 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 wide open, the other stores open again — druggist Hyde's 
 place, Heck's, Dixon's, Shadel's. Merchants kept long hours 
 
 in those days. 
 
 MY FATHER'S ASSISTANT 
 
 As we drove up to the old home, there was little Jon 
 already in the front yard turning somersets and big brother 
 William directing his efforts. The odor of boiling coffee 
 filled the air. Mother, in a blue apron, was standing at the 
 front-yard well, pulling tin buckets out of its depths — one 
 for milk, one for butter, one for cheese. (A good, deep well 
 was the long ago precursor of the ice-box and the refrig- 
 erator). She was humming softly to herself and did not see us. 
 
 Having deposited the paraphernalia in a corner of the 
 sitting-room, we washed and went at once into the kitchen, 
 whither my mother had returned and was already engaged 
 at the flour-chest, cutting out biscuits. 
 
 MY MOTHER AS HOUSEWIFE 
 (Line-drawing made in after years by my friend, William H. Schmedtgen, 
 Chicago. The flour-chest in this picture should have been represented not as 
 a table but as indeed a chest. The old-time flour-chest was capacious and 
 extended as a chest down almost to the floor.) 
 
■-■ ■«**■■; .*« ;>:■%?'■:,.■ 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
THE GARBUTT HOME 
 The house to which John G. Nicolay, at the age of sixteen, was taken by his foster parents, Rev. and 
 Mrs. Garbutt. In this house Nicolay lived nine years, 1848 to 1857. It still stands on East Wash- 
 ington Street, Pittsfield. (Photograph by Reuser, February, 1944.) 
 
 Formerly the home at Pittsfield, Illinois, of Attorney Milton Hay, Uncle of John Hay. 
 
 In this home young John resided while a student at the John D. Thomson Academy. 
 
 (Photograph by the present writer in May, 1938.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 80 
 

 
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 MY SECOND LIFE — 81 
 
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 IK*- 
 
 V1EW0FP/KE CO. COURT HOUSE & COUNTY CLERKS OFFICE, AT PITTSFIELD,! LL . 
 
 HEART OF PIKE COUNTY 
 
 One of the Very Earliest Pictures of the Pike County Court House, which was the second Court 
 House at Pittsfield and a Structure completed in June, 1839. This Building and Its Ancillary Struc- 
 tures are Here Shown as They stood During My very Early Childhood. The Court House was 
 ofttimes Termed "The Heart [and a very Sad Heart It Ofttimes Proved to be] of Pike County." 
 It was Supplanted in 1893-4 by a third Structure, still Standing. In the Court House shown in this 
 Picture, John G. Nicolay, on October 12, 1870 — after Years of Service as Private Secretary to Abraham 
 Lincoln, both Before and After he Became President, and, later, as U. S. Consul to Paris — was Made 
 a Citizen of the United States. In this Building Furthermore Lincoln himself, also Stephen A. 
 Douglas, while Circuit Riding in the Eighth Judicial District (of Fourteen Counties) Not Infrequently 
 Transacted Business. 
 
 The following from Mr. Jesse M. Thompson, in Illinois State Register, Springfield, Illinois, 
 
 July 12, 1925, may also be of interest: " the records of the Court House show that in the early 
 
 days of law suits there, one case was on trial where a matter of about fifty dollars was in controversy 
 and in which eight lawyers were engaged. These were Stephen A. Douglas, O. H. Browning, 'War 
 Governor' Richard Yates, E. D. Baker, James A. McDougall, William A. Richardson, D. B. Bush 
 and William R. Archer. Of these eight lawyers in this one case six afterwards became United States 
 senators." 
 
 Also the Pike County Republican for April 2, 1941, reports the discovery, just a few days 
 earlier than the date above given, in the present Pittsfield Court House by its janitor, Fred Hoover, 
 of records which had been made in the Court House which is pictured above and which had been 
 transferred, of course, to the present building after its completion in 1894. The very first record in 
 the "court entry books" is the following: "Ingram use of Mahannah vs. Gibbs: Certiorari. The 
 Clk of the Circuit Court will make copy of the judg't order granting appeal and appeal bond and 
 direct the same to A. Lincoln, Springfield. December 18, 1839. A. Wheeler, Atty. for the Plaintiff." 
 (The Gibbses had been close neighbors of the Lincolns before either family had left Kentucky.) 
 The case was long drawn out, it dragged in fact through both the April and the September terms of 
 the Pike County Court, 1839. Lincoln, defendant's counsel, appears to have been present repeated- 
 ly in the course of the case. This must have been about at the time when he ate up all the Shastid 
 quails, as my father became eight years old between the two terms of court above mentioned. 
 
 Later pictures of this Court House appear further on in this volume. 
 
 (From "Atlas Map of Pike County, Illinois": Andreas Lyter & Co., Davenport, Iowa, 1872) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 83 
 
 "What luck?" she cried. Always she asked that question 
 as we came back from rounds in the country — What luck? 
 
 "One — died," said my father. He did not put it, "One 
 lived." That was characteristic. He wished always to 
 shoulder his responsibilities, never to evade any non-suc- 
 cesses, any failures, whether great or small, that might even 
 have chanced to fall to his lot. 
 
 "I too had a case while you were gone," she said. "At 
 least I held it for you. Old Mr. Bellington. His wife, who 
 came to get you, was determined to get Dr. Dublin in 
 case you were out. I said, 'Let me go see.' We went, and 
 I found he'd broken his collar bone. I put on a Moore's 
 bandage, the deformity disappeared and he was quite com- 
 fortable." 
 
 "Where did you learn to apply a Moore's bandage?" 
 asked my father. 
 
 "One of your books on surgery — long ago. But here I 
 am talking and biscuits not done, and you two so sleepy 
 and tired. — Grandfather got his own breakfast early, left 
 the table all set for the rest of us, and went on down to 'the 
 old place.' ' (That was his own house, now rented, down 
 near the school.) 
 
 After breakfast Father and I went to our respective bed- 
 rooms. It was Saturday and I slept late. When I arose 
 Father had gone again to the country. Before I could get 
 into my clothes, I heard my mother — embodiment of energy 
 — downstairs singing to one of her pupils. She was a born 
 singer, Mother, and, besides, she had had much training in 
 her girlhood from a teacher in the academy over at Win- 
 chester. Just now she was trilling a ballad, popular at that 
 time, about "Tom and the hay-mow." I do not remember 
 another word of it, but whenever I heard her sing it I wanted 
 to give her the world and all the stars too for good measure. 
 
 When I got downstairs she was still warbling the ballad, 
 which was rather a long one, and her pupil, a Miss Mills, 1 
 was seated opposite her with tears streaming down her 
 cheeks. 
 
 Perhaps the reader may think I unduly exalt the sweet- 
 ness of my mother's voice. Nevertheless, on that day as on 
 
 1 Of all her music pupils I remember the names of but three: Miss Mittie Mills (two 
 of that name) and a Miss Nass. 
 
84 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 almost all other days, whenever she sang to her pupils in 
 warm weather, with doors and windows wide, there had 
 gathered in front of our gate both children and grown folk, 
 women who had studied singing in the large eastern cities 
 and also rough men — men who had led strange lives in con- 
 struction camps and in mining and cattle regions. And all 
 stood motionless as she sang. And I remember that I used 
 to think that, as they stood there so unmoving and with 
 eyes so wide and bright, they, like me, were thinking of the 
 persons that they might have been but were not . 
 
 They never did applaud her — with their hands. But I 
 remember that, one day, as she rose from her singing and 
 went to accompany her pupil to the door, she suddenly 
 stopped, startled. Then, "I thank you> ladies and gentlemen. 
 I hope I have given you pleasure." She was always ready 
 with her speech. That was the Irish in her, I suppose. 
 
 Poor mother! I am always glad I knew her while still 
 she looked like a girl and had the unusual mezzo-soprano 
 voice. Those who knew her only in her middle life and old age 
 can scarcely conceive of what she was before the untender 
 touch of time had done its work. "A mountain of energy" 
 I have called her. And that indeed was she. But massive 
 expenditures of energy will have their revenge. And the 
 work in the big house — the cooking, the scrubbing, the 
 washing, the ironing, the patching and darning of clothes, 
 the making of clothes both outer and inner, the sitting up 
 till twelve at night to salvage rotten-specked apples, the 
 tactful management of innumerable patients and of mes- 
 sengers from the country, the helping to treat some of the 
 sick, the instructing of neighbor-nurses in their work for 
 still others, and, finally, the singing and teaching of song, 
 piano, guitar — so many things all to be done in order that 
 just a little money might be laid by against the time when 
 four big boys (there was later to be a fourth) had to be 
 educated and set out into the world. But constant ex- 
 penditure of energy will have its revenge. 
 
 The singing was the first and most beautiful work to go, 
 next the piano and the guitar. After that, she was never 
 quite the same person, I realized. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 85 
 
 One afternoon, in my earlier childhood, I fell with a 
 sharp pencil in my mouth. It ran deeply into my cheek and 
 not only was there great pain but the bleeding was copious. 
 My mother, taking me in her arms and seating herself in a 
 rocking-chair, so placed a forefinger in my mouth that the 
 hemorrhage was controlled. And, as she rocked and sang 
 to me, I steadily watched the assurance and consolation in 
 
 MY MOTHER AS ASSISTANT COUNTRY DOCTOR 
 (Line-drawing by my Friend of After Years, William H. Schmedtgen, Chicago) 
 
 her love-filled face. That face, through many decades, I have 
 kept in my not remarkable memory without the slightest 
 effort, all untouched by time or her various sicknesses or 
 eventual death. 
 
 What memories when the snow falls ! As I now, a very 
 old man in Duluth, pause for a moment in my writing, I lift 
 
86 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 mine eyes to the window and the busy winds of heaven. 
 What memories when the snow falls! Youth, sleds, snow- 
 men, home, Mother, everything. 
 
 Of a winter night, in the old, old days, I would sit up 
 often until very late, sometimes even until eight o'clock. 
 One of those nights I remember in particular. I recall that 
 Mother's fingers, as she knitted scarfs for us boys, seemed 
 never to cease in their shuttling — in and out, in and out, in 
 and out. The wind whined mournfully under the eaves a 
 wild accompaniment to her work. Now and then she would 
 look up at Grandfather Shastid's big clock to say, "Father 
 should be getting home now — if he isn't hurt." 
 
 At times she would say to me, "Put out your arms," 
 then would place a skein of yarn on both my wrists and 
 begin winding the thick gray thread into a big ball from 
 which to supply her knitting-needles again. 
 
 One summer, Jon and I were determined to have a tent 
 in the orchard. The fate of empires seemed to hang upon our 
 having that tent. Refused the tent (it would have been very 
 expensive) we "hooked" a number of bedsheets, cut them 
 and sewed them together again so as to make us a tent. 
 Mother, angered, spanked us soundly, then, repentant, 
 bought sixty-five yards of unbleached domestic and made us 
 a tent that was a tent. And our coon, our kitties, our crow 
 and a neighbor's big dog appeared to enjoy the menagerie 
 as much as we did. As for the neighborhood boys, they paid 
 us all the pins they had to see the menagerie — all of which 
 they had ofttimes seen before for nothing. 
 
 One day Jon and I expressed great dissatisfaction about 
 the shape of the tent — whereupon Mother cried bitterly. 
 We had not realized how much hard work she had spent 
 upon the tent, until she cried. 
 
 All of which reminds me of an old Jewish story once told 
 me in those days by old Dr. Hiller — who did not know 
 about the tent. A certain Jewish mother had a worthless 
 son who continually abused her, even robbed her of her last 
 kopek for strong drink. One day when she had no money 
 he became enraged thereat, beat her to death and decap- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 87 
 
 itated her. As he held her head by its hair, he slipped in 
 her blood and fell. The mother's lips, moving, murmured, 
 "Have you hurt yourself, my child?" 
 
 But my mother had a good deal of fun in her too. For 
 instance, now going back to the days when my brother Jon 
 had just been weaned, her brother, William Hall, a farmer 
 living east of Pittsfield, brought her something that he knew 
 she'd like to see. It was in fact a new-born piggy, the kind 
 called a "runt." The rest of the litter had been of striking 
 vigor and much size, but Runt was so tiny and so listless 
 that my uncle had fairly despaired of rearing him. "Still, 
 Lou," said he, "knowing how sympathetic you always are 
 toward the little and the sick, I thought I'd bring him up 
 and let you see him before I butchered him." 
 
 1 'Butchered him !" exclaimed my mother indignantly. ' 'Why 
 it's not Christian to butcher a little helpless dear like that. 
 Give him to me." 
 
 "Why! how can you bring him up?" 
 
 "I'll nurse him at my very own breasts. How they pain 
 me now, since I weaned Jon!" 
 
 "But pigs are born with teeth, Lou. You couldn't do 
 that." 
 
 "Do piggies' own mothers care at all about the teeth?" 
 
 Well, the upshot was that he gave her the piggie, as 
 he had intended to do in the first place. And piggie soon 
 began to grow. He was a perfect gentleman too, slept in 
 the kitchen near the big cooking-stove, yet was cleanly in 
 his habits. Like Mr. Finney's turnip "he grew and he grew, 
 and he did nobody any harm." But after awhile he became, 
 actually, too big. So piggy had to go. Down to the horse- 
 lot went he, away behind the barn — to the great sorrow of 
 us all. 
 
 For a time he did not there eat very much, but ran hither 
 and yon crying for more human milk. 
 
 Then he seemed to forget all about his early relations to 
 humanity. 
 
 One summer evening, months later, my mother was stand- 
 ing just inside the front kitchen gate, chatting solemnly with 
 several neighbor women about certain church affairs in which 
 
88 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 they were all greatly interested. Otherwise, the evening 
 was full of quiet and the fragrance of roses. I was standing 
 by my mother's side. 
 
 All at once, from the horse-lot, there came the sound of 
 crashing timbers, then the quick tat-tat-tat of a hog's hard 
 hoofs on the brick side- walk. I turned. It was actually 
 Runt, now a veritable giant of a hog. As he reached my 
 mother he screamed like some porker that had just been 
 elevated by the conveyor-belt of a packing-house. 
 
 And he tore at the bosom of her dress. 
 
 Mother screamed. All the good sisters screamed too, and 
 everything was pandemonium till Father and John Ballenger, 
 for years official butcher to the Shastids, who happened to 
 be present, rushed out and scientifically took charge of Runt, 
 conveying him back to the horse-lot. 
 
 Mother thereupon related to the sisters the full story of 
 Runt, with tears of laughter streaming from her eyes. 
 
 But the sisters cried with a mighty voice, "And you 
 gave that pig milk instead of giving it to some of the many 
 children of this neighborhood whose mothers can have no 
 milk in their breasts and no money with which to purchase 
 even the milk of cows? Why, Mrs. Shastid, what would the 
 great Creator of the Universe say to your nursing of pigs 
 instead of human beings?" 
 
 My mother to this replied quite readily, without offense 
 and still laughing. 
 
 But, some years later, when my youngest brother, Joseph, 
 had come upon the scene and been weaned, I noticed that 
 my mother, whose breasts simply would not dry up of 
 themselves, took on for nursing first one and then another 
 of poor folks' puny infants whose mothers' breasts were not 
 able to yield nourishment. She explained to Father that, 
 as the mothers had all at one time or another been part of 
 his clientele, it was only right and proper that she should 
 do her best to nurse their children. 
 
 But, in my mind, my mother still stands as the only 
 doctor's wife that I have ever known who has thought it 
 her duty to play gratuitous wet-nurse to her husband's 
 client-mothers' children. 
 
 If anyone think I speak at too great length about my 
 home and my people in those old days, I have only to reply 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 that what I chiefly seek to do in this part of my volume is 
 to accomplish what I had no space for achieving in my 
 "Tramping to Failure" — i.e., to call again into life a very 
 dead chapter in the history of medicine in this country, one 
 of great importance indeed, yet one that has had but scant 
 attention even in the most voluminous histories of medicine 
 in the United States that ever have been written. And to 
 tell the story of the practice of medicine by the village doctor 
 in the Mississippi Valley as it was in those earlier days, 
 without putting into it both the doctor and the doctor's 
 family, would be to commit a blunder indeed. For the 
 doctor, his family, his clientele, at least in that country 
 and in those far off times, were all bound up together, 
 ligamented, so to speak, and arteriated and inter-nervated 
 into a common life and that from sheer necessity too. 
 
 But now, before I close this chapter, I would say yet one 
 more word about my mother. Many long years later than 
 those above referred to, when I had fallen in love with and 
 married a little lady whom I thought the most beautiful I 
 had ever beheld, I wondered for a long, long time just where 
 and when in the past I had seen that countenance above me 
 in the heavens. One day I had the honor of introducing to 
 each other the Companion and my aged uncle, my mother's 
 brother, William. As if he had suddenly seen a beautiful 
 spectre he cried out, "Well, Lou Hall! When did you be- 
 come a girl again?" And then — not until then, so stupid 
 had I been — did I remember whose face that was, whose 
 face of helpfulness and sympathy, that, in my childhood, 
 I had so often seen looking down upon my own. 
 
 And indeed psychologists inform us that it is frequently 
 the case that a man will select as his sweetheart and wife 
 some woman whose countenance closely resembles that of 
 his mother as she was in her earlier years. 
 
 And now I shall have to describe, howsoever briefly, the 
 little county seat in which we lived and the country round 
 about it — the obscure scene of the events which I am then 
 to relate to you from my father's practice — events which, I 
 assure you, are by no means unimportant or unstirring. In- 
 deed they do exemplify all the motives and principles of 
 human conduct to be found in the plays of Shakespeare — 
 
90 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 ambition, greed, self-sacrifice, honesty, fear, love, infinite 
 compassion, wonder at it all, cunning, intellect, stupidity, 
 revenge, and so forth. The one thing lacking will be power 
 in my pen. 
 
 THE SCENE OBSCURE 
 
 Before I attempt to delineate the drab-gray, somewhat 
 humble, back-scene of my father's eventful practice, I must 
 return to the circle of persons in his home — from which 
 small group I necessarily omitted — at the time my father 
 and I had returned from the night in the country — the 
 description of my Grandfather Shastid. He on that occasion, 
 chanced to be absent from our house. 
 
 I had never then known my father's home without 
 Grandfather. At Christmas, at New Year's and on all our 
 various birthdays, he was the inspiring soul, the very guid- 
 ing spirit, of the occasion. Not a stocking could be hung 
 without our childish clamoring for his approbation. He 
 knew to a certainty all the ins and outs of the incomparable 
 Santa Claus as well as scores and scores of happy Christmas 
 stories for young children. 
 
 At an age when little I could scarcely more than toddle, 
 Grandfather taught me the incredible magic which, in num- 
 erous living forms, lies hidden in printed words — Jack and 
 the Beanstalk, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, then 
 the whole series of Hillard readers. When the latter had 
 been finished, I needed dear Grandfather's skilful guidance 
 no more. In fact I had discovered in my father's great barn- 
 loft a far-away hiding place whereinto I could take my 
 father's books — yes, any or all of them — in what I thought 
 was perfect secrecy, and then in the silence of my hideout, 
 on the wings of the imagination — I could away! 
 
 Tha.t place I later termed "Hayloft University," and, 
 from its secret recesses, I, from time to frequent time, at my 
 father's shouted invitation, issued — not merely to accom- 
 pany him into the country, but, often, to tag along with 
 him on his business calls around the Public Square. 1 
 
 1 My Grandfather Shastid, it may be interesting to note, was born on March 23, 1798, 
 almost two years before the death of President George Washington. Inasmuch as I still live 
 and my life moreover lapped that of my Grandfather by about eight years, how short ap- 
 pears the entire history of our beloved country! 
 
 How curiously probative, too, in many ways, appear all the various mementoes that I 
 have of Grandfather's personality — his Bible and other personal effects. Here, for example, 
 
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 Entry of case number 97 in the "Court Entry Book" at Pittsfield. Lincoln, who 
 was chief attorney in this case (though none of the handwriting in the entry is his) 
 appeared in the case at the Circuit Court in Pittsfield on three separate occasions. 
 The case finally reached the Illinois Supreme Court, at Springfield. Mr. Harry E. 
 Pratt, Executive Secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Springfield, 
 Illinois, writes me, July 1, 1942, "From what I have been able to learn so far, this 
 was the first case Lincoln had in the Illinois Supreme Court." 
 
 The above-presented document at all events is one of many pieces of evidence 
 still in existence which clearly prove that Abraham Lincoln not infrequently was 
 in Pittsfield and that he even tried several cases there. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 

 zzt, ,??LyU.tr ^L^^y /^x^c^ <£^*^r^s% 
 
 Plea No. 1 in the Pittsfield case of Job Gardner v. Finch and Finch. The 
 files in this case are stored, along with many others, in the basement of the 
 Pike County Court House at Pittsfield, 111., in a file-box marked for 1839 and 
 the file of the case is No. 1016. 
 
 The handwriting in this plea is wholly Abraham Lincoln's, though the 
 plea, as the custom then was, is signed by a local attorney, Edward D. Baker. 
 The genuineness of the handwriting has been vouched for by so high an 
 authority as Harry E. Pratt, Executive Secretary of the Abraham Lincoln 
 Association, Springfield, Illinois. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
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 Plea No. 2 (in two parts) in the Pittsfield case of Job Gardner v. Finch. The files in this case are 
 stored, along with many others, in the basement of the Pike County Court House at Pittsfield, 111., 
 in a file-box marked for 1839 and the file of the case is No. 1016. The handwriting in both parts of 
 this plea (as in plea No. 1) is wholly Abraham Lincoln's though the plea (as in plea No. 1) is signed 
 by Baker. The genuineness of the handwriting has been vouched for by even so high an authority as 
 Harry E. Pratt, Executive Secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Springfield, Illinois. 
 
 (Cont 'd Over) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
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 £*» 
 
 Second part of Plea No. 2 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 94 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 95 
 
 There were, in those days, in the County of Pike and in 
 its equally unknown neighbors, Adams, Brown and Calhoun, 
 no such things as beautiful highways, or even hard roads 
 such as, today, make whole counties, villages and even good- 
 sized county-towns, merely suburban continuations of St. 
 Louis and Chicago. Extend the paved streets of these large 
 cities over hill and dale, through village and through cross- 
 roads, fill then the roads with endless streams of automobiles, 
 also line them with countless eating places, garages, filling 
 stations, and you have country reaching into city, city 
 reaching into country, and no clear, particular distinction 
 left between the two. 
 
 In the days of which I write, however, even the town in 
 which we lived, Pittsfield, seemed but a part of the modest 
 countryside rather than of any city, great or small. It was 
 a county-seat, had, therefore, after the fashion of the time, 
 at about its highest point, a court-house square, or yard, 
 with the court-house in its center. All round the yard stood 
 a white board-fence, and, outside that, on stout but far- 
 apart posts, a hitching-rack of hardest oak, deeply gnawed 
 nevertheless by hosts of impatient horses. At intervals, in 
 court-time, some one would stick his head out of an upstairs 
 window of the court-house and cry, for example, "Jefferson 
 Orr, Jefferson Orr!" or "William A. Grimshaw! William A. 
 Grimshaw!" and loafers, young or old, seated in "rockers" 
 and in the shade of the court-yard trees, would awaken, 
 ask each other interestedly, "What does anybody want any 
 more lawyers for?" and drop off happily to sleep again. 
 
 The four sides of the square were all built up with brick 
 stores — excepting only the east side, which still was partly 
 
 is a letter which was written by my grandfather to my father when the latter was a medical 
 student in St. Louis and when postage stamps had been used in this country less than even 
 ten years! This missive I reproduce not for the purpose of proving any great scholarship on 
 his part (though he knew almost the entire New Testament and Fox's "Book of Martyrs," 
 word for word) but to show that, as a person who had had but three months schooling in 
 his life, he did not do so badly. Indeed his penmanship by far excels the disgraceful hen- 
 scratching of his college-bred grandson, the present writer. 
 
 Whatsoever people learned in those days, they clung to. In fact they had to pay for 
 it themselves, with hard manual as well as strenuous mental labor, and they loved their 
 learning almost as they loved their lives. Witness the way in which Grandfather's young 
 friend, Abraham Lincoln, loved and clung to his tiny store of scholarship, so loved his 
 English vocabulary in fact (he really knew no other tongue than English) and the principles 
 of its application that he composed not once but again and again passages of English prose 
 that the world will never let die. 
 
 True it is, in more than one meaning, that "he who hath little hath much." 
 
96 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 unoccupied also partly occupied with small frame one-story 
 buildings. Cornering the alley which precisely bisected 
 this side of the square was a frame structure one and a very 
 little half story high, which housed a small part of the 
 Klemme Furniture Establishment. This tiny edifice had 
 large historical associations. Therein, or rather near-by, my 
 father, as already related, had introduced to each other 
 Abraham Lincoln (then almost wholly unknown) and John 
 G. Nicolay — the highly capable red-headed young man who, 
 later, was to play a large part in making Mr. Lincoln 
 presidential nominee, and who still later became Lincoln's 
 campaign secretary and later still his chief private secretary 
 in the White House. 
 
 Nearly all the brick buildings on the square rose to only 
 one or two stories. "Bush's Block," however, possessed 
 three, the top one known as "Bush's Hall," chief place in 
 those days for dances, lectures and theatrical performances. 
 The Mansion House and the Pittsfield Hotel each boasted 
 three full stories — the unimposed limit of high building in 
 the Pittsfield of that day. 
 
 From each corner of the Square two wide, straight, but 
 wholly unpaved streets led out through "the residence 
 portion of the city." From the northeast corner ran North 
 Monroe Street down to the Wabash depot — tiny railhead 
 for the "Bobtail," a mere six-mile line which extended from 
 Pittsfield to Pittsfield Junction. There it made all-important 
 connection with the great main line of the Wabash, and, 
 there through, with the great world beyond. 
 
 This North Monroe Street, just one block from the 
 Court-House Square, crossed East Jefferson Street, and, at the 
 northeast corner of that intersection, stood my father's big, 
 rambling house — my universe-center. This house, before 
 my father purchased it, had been the Star Hotel, which, 
 like the Pittsfield Hotel, had been built by my father's 
 half-brother, Captain George T. Edwards. On the south- 
 east corner of the big yard stood what once had been the 
 Star Livery Stable, a vast structure which my father had 
 bought together with the hotel. It stood some seventy feet 
 by seventy or eighty, and included a hayloft so large that, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 97 
 
 ofttimes, we boys with our playmates commandeered it for 
 extensive theatricals. In the more secluded end was a well- 
 lighted corner, where I often did my solider reading and 
 which, therefore, I designated Hayloft University. 
 
 North of both house and barn the yard extended for a 
 considerable distance, and so gave room for two grape 
 arbors, an ashhopper, an asparagus bed, woodpile, a com- 
 bination hog-pen and horse-lot, a hen-house (with thirty 
 or forty nests), a kitchen garden, three flower gardens, a 
 good-sized orchard and so on. 
 
 The town as a whole was, as I have stated, not much 
 unlike the surrounding country. This was chiefly because 
 the yards were so large, and because both the yards and the 
 streets displayed so many towering trees and much copious 
 other vegetation. The sidewalks were wide but mostly 
 primitive affairs, a few consisting of weed-separated bricks, 
 the rest of crude planks, each with an unsightly two-inch 
 auger-hole near each end. Chickens, ducks, geese, hogs and 
 even cattle ran at large, and, all over the city, were ac- 
 customed to dropping what were politely termed their 
 "compliments" just wheresoever nature's notion that they 
 should do so happened to prevail with them. 
 
 Sometimes a sick horse, cow, or dog died in an alley or 
 even on a main street. Then it not infrequently lay there 
 on the very spot, surrounded by flies and infiltrated by 
 maggots, for two or three days — until in fact the stench 
 became intolerable. 
 
 On the whole, however, the town was beautiful. Its 
 houses, barring a number of log cabins from the earliest days, 
 were almost always a very vivid white, set off by even vivider 
 green blinds; its yards presented many well-kept lawns with 
 beds of highly scented blossoms; and its trees, tall and 
 stately — the products of many thoughtful years — abounded 
 with birds of brilliant hues and poignantly sweet songs. 
 
 In the days of which I write, the country roads, though 
 never paved and very seldom "worked," were nonetheless 
 
98 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 not wholly devoid of beauty. There were roads through the 
 hill country and roads through the prairie. Of these the 
 more attractive were the former, but, whatsoever the lay of 
 the soil, there were charm and beauty not only in the roads 
 but in all the vistas round about them. 
 
 The majority of the fences by which the roads were 
 lined were "stake and riders," otherwise known as "rail," 
 "worm," and "Virginia" fences. 
 
 East of the little city the country was thickly settled, 
 mostly by people from the South, including my Grandfather 
 Hall and his family, also a number of other Hall relatives. 
 A few miles west of the town whole tracts of land were 
 still uncultivated, and, to the northwest, the roads my 
 father used to drive along were ofttimes serpentine, narrow, 
 closely bordered too by hazel brush or overarching trees. 
 A little farther, in the Ike Winans neighborhood, the land 
 was thickly settled, mostly by Yankees, and the people were 
 highly prosperous. Northeast of the city stretched the 
 Griggsville prairie, again mostly settled by Yankees, beyond 
 that, up even to Perry and beyond, were forests as wild, it 
 appeared, as any in wildest Africa could ever have been. 
 But west and southwest of Pittsfield the country was quite 
 rolling and, due south, it was hilly and forested in the 
 extreme. In this territory, too, both southerners and New 
 Englanders predominated, though Irish and Germans were 
 sprinkled in everywhere. Strange were the animosities 
 produced by the approximation of people of so many and 
 such different origins. The Irish and the Germans ofttimes 
 appeared to hold a natural antipathy to one another. Oft- 
 times they had fist fights, or worse. A good many of these 
 fights we saw along the roads. As to the native Americans, 
 they too quarrelled, sometimes about the recent Civil War, 
 or slavery, or Abraham Lincoln. Besides, the southerners 
 among them were entirely too fond of property and entirely 
 too contemptuous of- book learning. Book learning, they 
 thought, corrupted morals. The New Englanders and the 
 Ohioans, on the other hand, though much too close at a 
 bargain, strongly believed in education, schoolhouses and 
 trained teachers. The developmental effects on one another 
 of all these various kinds of people was excellent in the 
 extreme. The commingling of all their bloods, furthermore, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 99 
 
 was most excellent: the result, a sturdy, self-reliant, clear- 
 headed, broad-minded stock. South of Pike (our county) 
 lay the yet hillier Calhoun; north of it, the mostly prairied 
 Adams. East of it ran the Illinois River, and west of it the 
 Mississippi — streams my father sometimes had to cross in 
 order to visit patients. 
 
 How I loved the old roads we travelled, my father and I, 
 even from their very beginnings to their ends ! 
 
 Take the old, picture-filled "Gravel Road," even where 
 it started in our town, say the beautiful forested park which 
 surrounded the palatial C. P. Chapman home! The purling 
 brook which, slipping silently underneath a wooden bridge 
 across the road, went dashing through the east side of that 
 park, talking to itself, or to the deer, or to the stones that 
 it ran over, all the happy way ! Sometimes my father had to 
 stop and let me out to listen to that brook and to talk to 
 the deer. 
 
 Farther out on that road he would sometimes let me 
 down to precede him over the old red covered bridge across 
 Bay Creek. Miles farther on was Toll Gate schoolhouse, 
 wherein my mother, before her marriage, had taught school, 
 not infrequently singing at the pupils' repeatedly clamored 
 request, and then teaching again. 
 
 One mile farther still, to the north, was the big, rambling 
 homestead of Grandfather Hall. 
 
 South of town, past Oakwood Cemetery, down in the 
 direction of Honey Creek, there grew of an August and in 
 the greatest profusion horse mint and black-eyed Susans. 
 Father's birthday was on the twenty-sixth and I vividly 
 remember that, on one of those anniversaries, he let me out 
 to gather nosegays of the uncultivated flowers (blossoms 
 which nevertheless he gladly kissed) and, at the shallow 
 little Honey Creek ford, let me out once more to fill my 
 hat running over with gay pebbles. How brilliant these all 
 were, and yet today how drab ! 
 
 Beyond and beyond and beyond ! And at length we came 
 to a place where there played a little spring, or natural 
 fountain, one that bubbled in sand at the bottom of a deeply 
 
100 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 sunken barrel. Father quoted from Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 
 
 "INSCRIPTION 
 "FOR A FOUNTAIN ON A HEATH 
 "This Sycamore, oft musical with bees, — 
 Such tents the Patriarchs loved! O long unharmed 
 May all its aged boughs o'er-canopy 
 The small round basin, which this jutting stone 
 Keeps pure from falling leaves ! Long may the Spring, 
 Quietly as a sleeping infant's breath, 
 Send up cold waters to the traveller 
 With soft and even pulse! Nor ever cease 
 Yon tiny cone of sand its soundless dance, 
 Which at the bottom, like a fairy's page, 
 As merry and no taller, dances still, 
 Nor wrinkles the smooth surface of the Fount. 
 Here twilight is and coolness : here is moss, 
 A soft seat, and a deep and ample shade. 
 Thou may'st toil far and find no second tree. 
 Drink, Pilgrim, here; here rest! and if thy heart 
 Be innocent, here too shalt thou refresh 
 Thy Spirit, listening to some gentle sound, 
 Or passing gale or hum of murmuring bees!" 
 
 Then I had him recite for me "Deep in the wave is a 
 coral grove." 
 
 If the roads were like old friends to me, how much more 
 so were the habitations of the people ! 
 
 The smaller houses were, as a rule, those of men who 
 were physically weak, knew not how to manage, or had 
 had chronically sick children or wives, or infertile farms, 
 or — for such alas! there were by dozens — who, in Pittsfield, 
 tarried too long at the wine. Scores of them were simply 
 wasters. The most of these small-house men would be 
 classed today as "underprivileged." Nearly all of them 
 had had rich fathers, at least "good starts" of one kind or 
 another, while the big-house people had almost always be- 
 gun life poor. So goeth the circle — round and round and 
 yet again around. 
 
 These little houses were sometimes only cabins or decay- 
 ing shacks. Most of them boasted a living-room, a bed- 
 room, a combination dining-room and kitchen. (The latter 
 was also now and then the operating room.) The bed would 
 be a "corded" one, the mattress a "tick" full of feathers 
 or corn shucks, and the covers — yet another "tick" full of 
 feathers, or else a counterpane and a patchwork quilt. 
 
 There were few books in these houses. Where more 
 books were, there as a rule the houses were larger — for 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1Q1 
 
 example the house of the Vandermoolens. But the home of 
 John Stettenhausen, though by no means a large one, had 
 a very good shelfful of books (some English, some German) 
 and these were ofttimes humorous — Don Quixote, Till Eu- 
 lenspiegel, Mark Twain's earlier volumes, and Josh Billings' 
 books too. But there were also spelling books, books on 
 correct deportment, even a History of the World, and, of 
 course, a well-worn Lutheran Bible. There was also a 
 what-not and a tall, old-fashioned German clock. 
 
 Some of the tiny houses had been burned down and not 
 rebuilt. Some had been abandoned — plainly for long, long 
 years. 
 
 One of the largest houses in our whole county, I was 
 more than pleased to observe, was that of Grandfather Hall. 
 Grandfather owned well-nigh nine hundred acres, therefore 
 needed a big house. And he certainly had one. 
 
 It stood at the top of a gentle slope, well back from the 
 common highway, yet with a friendly air too of old-time 
 southern hospitality. Grandfather had come from "The 
 Old North State" (North Carolina) and although, unlike 
 my Grandfather Shastid, he was not a particularly strong 
 man, he had nevertheless pre-empted, homesteaded, pur- 
 chased, strong axed, ploughed, harrowed, reaped, fertilized, 
 fenced, and otherwise improved, till now he had a farm 
 which, as he ofttimes took the pains to inform me, was 
 "really" a farm. 
 
 The home was set midway between a great fruit-orchard 
 on the south and a big flower garden on the north, and no 
 man owning a true pair of nostrils could ever have told 
 which way the breezes came the sweeter. 
 
 A large red gate opened from the highway into a lane 
 that led past the north side-doors of the dwelling, then on 
 down a long declivity to a cathedral of a barn. On its way 
 it passed an immense granary, a nut-house (no slang con- 
 notation), a smoke-house or two, a private blacksmith shop 
 and so forth. It was all much like the "village" on a south- 
 ern plantation. From the east side of the house (its back end) 
 stood out conspicuously the large fireplace and its capacious 
 chimney. On the south side ran a two-story gallery, where- 
 on visitors, either of high or of low degree, could sit and 
 
102 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 breathe-in the fragrance of that orchard while from time to 
 time the girls of the family would serve them the orchard's 
 luscious products. 
 
 Even more pleasing to me, however, was my Grand- 
 father's old pal, the superannuated hound, Dan. Always, 
 on arriving, we found him stretched out lazily in the sun 
 on the big stone doorstep at the front (west) entrance to 
 the house. 
 
 How I would jump out of the buggy, and, ahead of all 
 the others of our family, dash up the lane on my way to 
 Dan! Blind, almost, as a stone was he, yet never could I 
 get half-way from the buggy to his divan (the marble block) 
 till up he stood, then, bugling wildly and getting a good, 
 true balance on his stiff old stumps, here, old or no old, 
 blind or no blind, he would come full tilt to meet his well- 
 loved little pard. How many an hour, seated on an upturned 
 tub in the flower garden near its corner by the sweet-smelling 
 locust tree, have I sat facing my Grandfather's big white 
 house with its red-painted window frames and mullions, 
 holding with Dan a protracted conversation. 
 
 Ofttimes I stopped in the orchard with the old dog, 
 even before going into the house, whereupon Grandfather 
 Hall would come dancing out almost as if a stranger to me, 
 explaining, "My name is Thomas Hall. Do you happen to 
 know any boy up at Pittsfield who was named in my honor?" 
 
 I would answer, "His naming was little of an honor to 
 you, I fear, Grandfather. But he loves you just the same." 
 
 "Much as you do that hound?" 
 
 "Even more — you know." 
 
 And Grandfather, taking me tight in his strong arms 
 would carry me into the house. And there, while I rested 
 on his knees, he would tell me stories of the days when 
 pioneers were pioneers and pioneers were real men — men 
 who fought the hard wood of the forest, the great storms 
 and the floods, of the fierce wild beasts and the fiercer and 
 even more treacherous and destructive Indians, also pesti- 
 lence and poverty, and so on. 
 
 When I awoke it would be dinner time. 
 
 I have still at Tramp's Rest the last piece of that big blue 
 set of dishes that Grandfather and Grandmother used to set 
 the table with whenever "company" had come. It is a 
 
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 MY SECOND LIFE — 103 
 
MRS. JOHN DAVIS (ANNE LEDLIE) THOMSON 
 
 When this picture was made Mrs. Thomson was already afflicted with the disease which later caused 
 her most untimely death. The sorrowful portrait is all that now remains in tangible form of the 
 Thomson pair and their brilliant Academy. Pictures of the Academy, the Thomson home and John 
 D. Thomson himself, kindly sent to the writer by Pittsfield, or formerly Pittsfield, friends, have, on 
 investigation, proved unavailable. Many of the correspondents in fact declared that certain buildings 
 which are still standing in Pittsfield were, on a time, the structures which housed the Thomsons and 
 their school. And they submitted recent pictures of these still-standing structures. Mrs. H. C. 
 Shubert, however (born Anne Holmes Thomson and the last-surviving child of John D. and Anne 
 Ledlie Thomson) wrote me shortly before her death on March 13, 1942, that both the home and the 
 Academy buildings were torn down soon after 1868. One plainly very old picture, by many declared 
 to be the Academy building, she rejected "because, small and humble as the structure shown appears, 
 it is a far more sumptuous-looking building than was the real Academy, also because the siding in it 
 runs horizontally while that in the actual building ran up and down." An old picture alleged by 
 several persons to be that of John D. Thomson she rejected because it did not even resemble her 
 father — whom she remembered very well, as he did not die till she was twenty-one years of age. The 
 above picture of her mother, however, she accepted as genuine without the slightest reservation. 
 
 Dr. John T. Hodgen, contrary to general report, was never a pupil at the Thomson Academy. 
 Hodgen, in fact, began the practice of medicine at Pittsfield in March, 1848, and the Academy did 
 not open its doors till September, 1849. 
 
 All these facts I mention specifically because, hereafter, in the Lincoln-Hay-Nicolay literature, 
 also in the history of American medicine, they may become even much more important than now 
 they are, while, nevertheless, they may also have become completely unobtainable. 
 
 For the sake of completeness it should be added that there now are living 56 descendants of John 
 D. and Anne Ledlie Thomson, also 10 of John D. and Margaret McBride Thomson, not one of all 
 these 66 descendants, however, bearing the surname Thomson. Mrs. H. C. (Anne Thomson) Shubert 
 and her daughter, Elizabeth Shubert, have supplied the writer with a complete list of the Thomson 
 descendants. This list, being relevant to the writer's forthcoming volume, "Mississippi Valley 
 Medicine: A History," will appear in that book. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
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 RECORD OF THE NATURALIZATION OF JOHN G. NICOLAY 
 
 Nicolay, at this time, had, returning from Paris/become editor of the Chicago Republican. 
 
 It is a remarkable fact that the man who, next to Lincoln himself, exercised, all through the 
 Civil War with its enormous international complications, the greatest influence and power — John 
 George Nicolay — was, through all those years, and during his subsequent representation of the 
 United States Government as Consul at Paris, not a United States citizen but, actually, a subject 
 of the King of Bavaria. His father never was naturalized, and he himself not till the date shown in 
 this document — October 12, 1870. (Pike County, Illinois, "Common Law Records," pages 394 and 
 395.) 
 
 {Cont'd over) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
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 Second Part of the Record of Naturalization of John G. Nicolay 
 
 (For the discovery of these interesting and important facts, the present writer is indebted to his 
 old-time boyhood's friend and protector, Mr. Fritz Niebuhr — name now spelled Fred Niebur — who 
 is still living at Pittsfield, Pike County, Illinois.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1Q7 
 
 beautiful plate with a great blue magic rose in its center 
 and rich blue ornamentation all about its lovely rim. Those 
 dishes were Grandfather's pride and his gift to Grandmother 
 when he married her and but little other money had he 
 then than it had taken to buy them. I have also the "poem" 
 he wrote her — on May Day, 1825 — when she had just agreed 
 to become his "loving wife." 
 
 Ah me! The Companion used to say, even more than 
 sixty-seven years after Grandfather's death, that she never 
 had known another person quite so crazy as I was to keep 
 every little record of the past. Yet she always protected 
 that one remaining plate and the love letter quite as meti- 
 culously as did I. 
 
 THE STETTENHAUSENS AND THE FIGHTING HEART 
 
 The Stettenhausens 
 
 Once again it was a bright, and almost glorious, morning. 
 
 Grandfather Shastid had now gone to his reward, but 
 his loving spirit seemed still to linger all about our home. 
 His books I kept mostly in my Hayloft University, yet, on 
 the particular day I'm now to write about, I was reading, 
 in that nook of cloistered learning, a packet of letters I had 
 been receiving from persons here and there, to whom I 
 had sent out copies of my recent little book kindly called 
 "Poems." Most of these letters were favorable, I thought. 
 My father and mother did not know, as yet, that I had 
 even got them. Reason: I had feared they would say I had 
 better attend to my duties at the Pittsfield Public Schools. 
 My mother, however, found out in the following manner. 
 As, in the sitting-room, one day, I was, in her presence, 
 putting on my coat, it turned topsy-turvy and the entire 
 packet of letters fell out of it and to the floor. My mother 
 then insisted on reading them all. I objected strenuously, 
 but she explained: "Ever since Daddy and I have let you 
 have your own little box at the post-office so that your mail 
 would not get mixed again with that of the other boys, 
 also so that you might have a separate box-number for your 
 Monthly Gazette [an amateur magazine I then was publish- 
 ing], I have felt that Daddy and I should be exercising a far 
 closer supervision over your correspondence than we have 
 
108 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 yet been doing. Besides, you know your brothers would 
 never read your letters." 
 
 She went through the entire packet while I watched her 
 face. I knew very well that both she and Father had had 
 strenuous objections to my attempts to become what I was 
 pleased to call a poet, although, at the same time, they were 
 somewhat proud too of my endeavors in that direction — 
 endeavors which had taken the form not only of one but 
 of two small books, "Newspaper Ballads," the year before, 
 and "Poems," now. 
 
 So I studied her face intently. It did not look particularly 
 pleased, even when I saw she was reading the quite hopeful 
 comments of Henry W. Longfellow and Francis James Child. 1 
 Then she came to the last letter, that from Jefferson Davis, 
 the man who, not so long before, had been President of 
 the Southern Confederacy — those states in bloody rebellion 
 against the U. S. Government. 
 
 Now it happened that, although my parents had never 
 once quarrelled about slavery and anti-slavery, still my 
 father and all his people had been opposed to slavery, also 
 well-nigh idolatrous of Abraham Lincoln, whereas my 
 mother, like Grandfather and Grandmother Hall, not only 
 believed that slavery was a biblical institution, but, also, 
 like her parents, well-nigh worshipped Jefferson Davis. 
 
 "Beauvoir, Mississippi," she read out loud, as she came 
 to that last letter. 
 
 Gradually, as she read, her face relaxed. And, as she 
 finished reading, she cried, "Good! He ought to have 
 written that letter in strokes of purest gold. Then we could 
 have framed it in diamonds." 
 
 I took all the letters and began to look for my school 
 books, but my father came in, and my mother said to him, 
 "Mind! Tommy's got to go to school today. Twice already 
 this week he's been kept away so he could ride with you in 
 the country." 
 
 But my father said to me, "Come! I've very much to 
 say to you today, Tommy." 
 
 So it was indeed a bright and almost glorious morning. 
 
 1 The latter to become my very special friend long years afterward at Harvard. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1Q9 
 
 "You're growing just a little now," said my father, as 
 we started on our journey, "and you need some helpful 
 advice. First of all, though I never have done it myself (too 
 busy) I want you to keep every letter and every document 
 you ever receive from anybody — unless indeed it be of such 
 a confidential sort that it should naturally be at once de- 
 stroyed. Preserve also a copy of every letter and document 
 you send out yourself. Further, although it may not seem 
 very important to you now, keep carefully every one of your 
 little scrapbooks, every page of your little diaries that you 
 now are writing (never put into them anything you wouldn't 
 want the world to know), and also every issue of your little 
 play newspapers written up for your secret society and play- 
 town daily by you and your friends, Fritz Niebuhr and Gus 
 Heck. 1 Also copies of that monthly magazine which you 
 write and print on a press by yourself. The pleasure such 
 documents will give you (by enabling you, at almost any 
 moment, to renew the facts and impressions of your by-gone 
 days with accuracy) will be an incomparable solace — and 
 even in other ways than that a great advantage. " I promised 
 always to follow his advice and seldom have I failed to 
 follow it — although, now and then, some of my old-time 
 documents have been destroyed accidentally. 2 
 
 1 1 still have many files containing hundreds of "issues," of those pencil-written "news- 
 papers" of our boyhood: The Morning Telegram, The New F. S. S., the F. S. S. Times, The 
 F. S. S. Telephone, all edited at one time or another by August F. Heck; The Berlin News 
 by Fritz W. Niebuhr; The F. S. S. Advocate, The F. S. S. Gazette, by Jon S. Shastid; The Journal , 
 The Happy Star, by Thomas H. Shastid. In some of these newspapers I have discovered for 
 the "backscene" of this volume many quaint fragments of the past, otherwise forgotten — ■ 
 sometimes even bits of the old-time medical drama itself. From all these hundreds of 
 childish lucubrations, furthermore, there could really be constructed a fairly comprehensive 
 "psychology of childhood." 
 
 "F. S. S.," I may say incidentally and (now) without the betrayal of any highly im- 
 portant secret, meant — Friends Secret Society. 
 
 Specimen issues of these boyhood's newspapers are herewith reproduced, very much 
 reduced in size, of course. From here an issue and there an issue of Jon's papers and my own 
 I have largely reconstructed some such incidents hereinafter related as "Biography of U. S. 
 Grant." 
 
 2 To this continually emphasized advice of my father's it was largely due that, in 
 "Tramping to Failure," published in 1937, I was able to document — sometimes, to be sure, 
 after a considerable search — almost any description, character or event that would seem for 
 any reason whatsoever to need proof. And I may add that, in "Tramping to Failure," the 
 only points whose actuality have been in anywise questioned have been those identical points 
 for which I had provided no authentication in the book — e.g., (l) the farm wife who hanged 
 herself, (2) Shastid's umbrella (that sacred symbol thus to be impugned!), and (3) the horse 
 that suicided between Harrisburg and Marion. 
 
 As to the scrapbooks, I will only say that I have a large number of them, some dealing 
 
110 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 After a time, being in the country, he suggested, very 
 gently and as if I were a much older person: "Would you 
 mind, Thomas, letting me see those letters you've been 
 
 .j m in- 
 
 iff. / __ ^ 
 
 Xiao /uvJlfl/U KO fO^ fa*t J~4A^tM&0<&AJ 
 
 fox vfrkoX, y>WJ 0«W £4^ii^U 
 
 The first item in this issue refers to the 
 standing joke that little "Tommas" had be- 
 come physician's apprentice to his father. 
 
 Let not the reader be unduly critical of the 
 spelling and grammar in this boyland "news- 
 paper." Fritz, when he conducted this 
 journal, was a raw German boy, who had 
 been in America only two or three years. 
 The language of the country therefore was 
 still quite strange to him. What he had 
 learned of it, however, was, like his two fists, 
 frequently employed in the service of the 
 oppressed. 
 
 
 (Po^L 
 
 
 
 S&x^t dot 
 
 ^>^c 
 
 juJjsVrtUfcl. 
 
 with my childhood, some with my boyhood, one or more with every college and university 
 which I have ever attended, speeches I have made, reviews about my books, letters and 
 articles in a veritable multitude of newspapers and magazines. All these factual sources 
 
 The second item herein stated determines 
 the date of founding of the F. S. S. and the 
 beginning of its very copious records as 
 August 8, 1876 — very shortly after the day 
 whereon I became medical apprentice to my 
 father. — >■ 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 111 
 
 getting from various persons 
 poems?" 
 
 about your latest book of 
 
 
 
 <fj&/^> yry/atkro^ 
 
 ■<6£fk 
 
 "Me-jQ^ 
 
 /LGy- Utz^ a^e ^o&ffcei^ '4v&&r6o* **^&x^fr**£cu^ 
 
 The play herein referred to, which had been written by "our celebrated orator and poet . . . 
 Thomas Shastid," did not in fact, contrary to the suggestion in the News, die with the placement 
 of several tons of hay in the loft. At my earnest solicitation my good father, a few days later, 
 had a man pile all the hay in the south end of "Hayloft University," whereupon, in the room 
 so provided at the north end, the little theatre was rebuilt, and my "Lafayette" therein perform- 
 ed to the deafening plaudits of a large number of hilarious and happy-go-lucky boys — almost 
 every one of whom is dead now. 
 
 
 J^e* 
 
 have enabled me to write about my life in general and my peace-work in particular, with 
 an accuracy and a certainty that would otherwise have been impossible. 
 
 In my college and university scrapbooks I have almost all the written and printed sets 
 of examination questions which, in my rather long scholastic experience, have been set 
 before me. 
 
112 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Silently and somewhat ashamed I handed over the letters. 
 
 He drove to the shade of a roadside oak, halted the horse, 
 began reading. When he had finished, he, handing the 
 letters 1 back, adjudged: "Most excellent! As already stated, 
 I would keep every letter always — now these in particular. 
 Daddy is prouder of them, no doubt, than are you yourself. 
 Still — and I do not want to hurt you, Thomas — there is no 
 particular evidence that you could ever be a poet, I mean a 
 great one. Even if there were such evidence, recall the fate 
 which has almost always come to the greatest among them. 
 Poetry, like all the other fine arts, is a beautiful thing, and 
 yet it, as a rule, merely misleads, often ultimately destroys, 
 those who attempt to pursue it as a means of livelihood. 
 So, Tom, if I were you I would just forget the poetry. Make 
 no mistake : I appreciate the Jefferson Davis letter and all the 
 other fine compliments about your lines. But it still is a 
 fact that poetry is only a Jack-o'-lantern, amereWill-o'-the- 
 Wisp, which leads its followers to their economic doom." 
 
 To enforce all which and to make it less unpalatable, he 
 went on to confide in me about his own early tastes, ambi- 
 tions, and proper or improper course in life. "I," said he, 
 "when young, longed with an unspeakable desire to become 
 a city surgeon. Even earlier than that I had wanted to be 
 a professor of philology in some university. My final decision 
 was to be and to remain a small town, or "country," doctor. 
 That seemed to me a better opportunity by far to know 
 people intimately, to do good in this world, and — to grow 
 up with my children. 
 
 Having said all of which, and again — as so often hereto- 
 fore — having prophesied a great future for the world in all 
 departments of human knowledge to result from the discovery 
 of the "germ theory" and of "antisepsis," he was starting 
 to tell me the story of his glorious acquaintanceship, even 
 comradeship, with those famous men, Drs. John T. Hodgen 
 and Joseph N. McDowell, when, all at once, in the dis- 
 tance, I beheld, clipping along toward us, Father's chief 
 competitor as well as long-time professional associate and 
 friend, Dr. James Dublin. 
 
 At a distance of perhaps a hundred yards, he halted his 
 
 1 All those letters, I think, I still have without one exception. The letter from Jefferson 
 Davis I herewith reproduce. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE H3 
 
 horse, and, in a manner to which I had long been accus- 
 tomed, began coughing vigorously, vehemently, excessively. 
 Then — more excessively still, till at length his face was as 
 purple as an Easter egg. I began a little to laugh at this, 
 because my father had ofttimes said to me that Dr. 
 Dublin's bronchitis was slight indeed and that it did not in 
 the least justify his acrobatic twistings, turnings, contort- 
 ings, his loud halloos, his har-rumphs, ga-rushes and so forth 
 till the very acme of the expectoration — when he gave, 
 always, one wild yell. That yell, today, made even the 
 pigs in the neighboring "runs" prick up their ears and, 
 panic-stricken, dash to cover. "Doctor Dublin," he used to 
 say (only he used the Doctor's right name) "does everything 
 excessively." 
 
 Just now Dr. Dublin was coughing so excessively that 
 I fell to laughing inside. Had I been able to see what trouble, 
 nay what starkest tragedy, the man was brewing for my 
 father, I should have been more inclined to weep than to 
 laugh. 
 
 All at once, anyway, the distant doctor gave a quick 
 intake of his breath, then spat into a big bush near by, 
 which bowed low, recovered, bowed low and recovered 
 again, and yet again and again, beneath the impact of the 
 bronchial artillery. 
 
 All at once here he came, Uppity-cut, Uppity-cut. 
 
 Father did not start his horse, because the road betwixt 
 ourselves and Dr. Dublin was quite narrow, and, on each 
 side, closely bordered by a shallow ditch quite full of splashy 
 mud. The road where we were, the dry part of it, was not 
 very wide and Father already was ' 'parked" to one side of it. 
 
 As the doctor came abreast of us he threw himself back 
 as if stopping a coach and forty. How big he was, how 
 determined looking, how full of aggressiveness and com- 
 mand. I can see even now his hard, round, blue eyes pro- 
 truding from his florid, vivid, over-energetic countenance. 
 For a long time he gazed at my father without speaking, 
 though my father had given him a more than merely court- 
 eous "Good morning." 
 
 I did not need any little bird to tell me now that trouble, 
 serious trouble, was afoot. 
 
114 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 All at once — the explosion. He yelled as if we had been 
 a mile away. "Do you call yourself a doctor?" 
 
 "As I have done for decades, the University of Missouri 
 along with me." So Father. 
 
 Dublin gave a snort, "The University of Missouri! Any 
 American university! The double blank, blank of a triple 
 blank, blank ! What in the blank, blank, blank do you mean 
 by — blank, blank — if a doctor — if even the shadow of a 
 doctor — do you mean by going around and teaching people 
 that bug theory of disease?" 
 
 "I," said my father, his voice shaking a little with con- 
 trolled passion, "know nothing about any 'bug' theory of 
 disease." 
 
 Dublin's teeth puffed out like a bull-dog's from his un- 
 derslung jaw. His whole big body rocked with emotion. 
 Then, like an arrogant king, he, leaning forward, whip up- 
 lifted, shouted one unprintable term of reproach. 
 
 My father suddenly stiffened, became as an incredulous 
 statue of amazement. Dublin brought his whip down, not 
 on father, it is true, but on our Black Jim, a dangerous horse. 
 
 Off like a rocket went we, and, in almost less than no 
 time, we had reached the home of Mr. and Mrs. John 
 Stettenhausen — also of John's old pal, Mike Donovan. 
 
 When we reached their door my father did not just tap, 
 then push the door inward, as doctors of the place and time 
 were accustomed to doing, but, pausing for a moment, he 
 knocked very gently, then waited. 
 
 For a while there was silence. Then slow and ponderous 
 footsteps began sounding within — nearer and nearer. The 
 door opened a trifle. A half-shut eye peered dully out. The 
 door went ajar a little more, more still, then swung wide. 
 "Gome," invited an uninviting voice. 
 
 We "game," and then I beheld, as I so often before had 
 done, a slatternly woman of middle age. Her big body 
 bulged at breast, at hip and thigh, swayed when she walked 
 like ripe grain billowing in a lush and breezy field. She had 
 a short, wide face, large gaping nostrils, and brown, bovine, 
 blood-shot eyes. She spoke seldom, and then gruffly. 
 
 Nevertheless, there were the same old pictures on the 
 wall of the living room to which we had been admitted, the 
 
/^t^ ILLINOIS. £j$S£*^. ia J7 ^ 
 
 T»xwA*rsi ?< .<-j'.l^ihi'^an,H,«..i Vr(£^^ &■?**&*(. .. L U 
 
 AaS'beiag satisfied that^,^^ , sastain* a good moral character, hm-ohy serines ilia: >U> is qualified proper)? to || 
 teadh t%e following branrhw, viz:- -- , j|( 
 
 I Ortiiog rapnj r, Reading in Sngtoirih, IVniui i.«hi ,». Arithmetic, English Gramma*-, f 
 M Modern ©eograpn}} and tile History of tie' United States, ' ' % 
 
 if Which certificate is good and valid in tsauLCounty for two years from the d&e hereof, renewable at thfc option of lf» 
 y| the S«heol Comrmssi««r, or any two members of the Board of Examiners, ty his or their endorsement thereoa. || ? 
 
 /&.*7r~ 
 
 IN under my hand y at thedate aforesaid.. m 
 
 LI ./^^^jK^T' I 
 
 -> Examiners. „. fi 
 
 _} {"Free Press" Fri«t. H) 
 
 A PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER'S CERTIFICATE 
 
 Signed by John D. Thomson. As the Academy was founded in 1846 and died (as did 
 also Mrs. Thomson) in 1863, this certificate was given in the heyday of the institution's 
 usefulness. The signature of the "School Commissioner" is, so far as I know, the only 
 handwriting of John D. Thomson still in existence. The "Lot H. Crawford," (Lot 
 Hull Crawford) to whom the certificate was issued, was the father of Mrs. George Barcus, 
 now of Chanute, Kansas, who kindly lent the certificate for reproduction in this book. 
 I should add that Mrs. Barcus is also the great-granddaughter of "Grandma" 
 Heath, the unacknowledged lay discoverer of liver as a cure for pernicious anemia, 
 further information about whom can be found by referring to the index in this book. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
'':.."'.,. 
 
 The house wherein, for years, John G. Nicolay courted Therena Bates, and, on June 
 15, 1865, married her. Therena's parents were Dorus Bates (no middle name or initial) 
 and Emma Lucy (Norton) Bates. Dorus Bates, a non-Union man, had long opposed 
 the match, yet eventually relented and permitted the marriage to be held in his house. 
 Therena's place among her brothers and sisters was, in the order of the ages as nearly 
 as these can now be ascertained: Jane, Norton, Dorus Evelyn (Hay's Tilmon Joy), 
 Therena, Sally, Milton, Daniel, and a sister whose name cannot be learned. Therena 
 was a kind of beautiful doll. According to a letter from her daughter, Miss Helen Nico- 
 lay, "She was 5 feet 2 inches high and very slightly built." She was born May 31, 1836, 
 death date not ascertainable. There were born to them a boy who died in childhood and 
 Helen. 
 
 The figures shown in the picture are, left to right: Jane (Bates) Hatch; her married 
 daughter Emma Westlake Brown; Grandfather Dorus Bates; his four-year old grand- 
 daughter, Sally Bates (now Mrs. Alfred R. Utt), standing beside him. Mrs. Utt, I must 
 add, has been of the very greatest service in the collection and supplyal of facts about 
 the Bates family and one of her letters is so interesting that I have reproduced it in full 
 in the form of a footnote in this volume. 
 
 This house, in which Therena and Dorus Evelyn (Tilmon Joy) were born, as well 
 as some of the other children, was, some years ago, displaced by the new Pittsfield post 
 office. 
 
 (Original photograph lent by Att'y Oliver R. Barrett, Chicago.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MAJOR DORUS EVELYN BATES, PITTSFIELD, ILLINOIS 
 
 Bates, brother of Therena Bates (later Mrs. John G. Nicolay) was the hero 
 (Tilmon Joy) celebrated by John Hay in his well-known poem, "Banty Tim." 
 See Hay's "Pike County Ballads," or the much more accessible "Poems by 
 John Hay" (1891) pages 17-20. Major Bates was born April 23, 1842. Con- 
 trary to his father's wishes and despite the smallness of his size, he enlisted in 
 the Union Army at the age of 19. "At the battle of Vicksburg the higher 
 officers were killed and Dorus undertook the command, for which he later 
 received a citation for bravery and was brevetted Captain. At that battle 
 he lost his right hand. A darky named Rosencrans, commonly called Rosy, 
 took a quid of tobacco and stopped the bleeding, which action is supposed to 
 have saved young Bate's life. After he came back to Pittsfield he married 
 Mary Winans." (Oliver R. Barrett). Major Bates died August 17, 1880. 
 
 (Original photograph lent by Oliver R. Barrett, Chicago.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
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 MY SECOND LIFE — 11! 
 
MY SECOND LIFE H9 
 
 same grandfather's clock ticking away, the same shelfful of 
 books with its Till Eulenspiegel, its Don Quixote, its book 
 on deportment, and so forth. Best of all, there was the big, 
 deep, cushiony rocking-chair which, by Mr. Stettenhausen 
 (or "Stett") himself, had always been reserved for my par- 
 ticular delectation and comfort. 
 
 Then, too, there were Mr. John Stettenhausen and Mr. 
 Mike Donovan themselves. And, first, as to "Don." 
 
 Don used to tell me stories of what he humorously called 
 his "threadbare" escapes. As most of the stories were im- 
 possible, I saw he was not trying to lie to me but only to 
 regale me. I also saw that, whether the story was impossible 
 or both possible and probable, Mr. Donovan somehow al- 
 ways managed to escape producing the impression that 
 he had been unusually, big or handsome or anywise cunning 
 or learned in the part which he had played in it — whereby 
 I understood that the man, beneath the surface of his clown- 
 ery, was really a gentleman, who would under no circum- 
 stances attempt to set himself up as superior to any of the 
 members of his audience or to those of the great human 
 family in general. 
 
 I had also understood from my father long before the 
 day of which I write that Mrs. Stett, many years back, had, 
 on going out to the chicken-house one frosty morning, 
 found sleeping in front of it this same Mr. Donovan — sleep- 
 ing drunkenly. She, not knowing precisely what she did — 
 as most of us, in a world like this, almost always do not 
 know — kicked him till he awakened, then ordered him off 
 the place. But Donovan begged loudly to stay. He was 
 mostly sick he said, and only a very little drunk. Thereupon 
 Mr. Stettenhausen, hearkening to the uproar, came forward, 
 and, as presiding officer of the meeting, cast the deciding 
 vote — i.e., in favor of the newcomer staying. 
 
 Taken into the house, Donovan could not eat — even the 
 delicious German cooking of Mrs. Stettenhausen. And, the 
 man appearing from that to be very sick indeed, was put 
 to bed and my father at once sent for. 
 
 "It was a hard pull," my father had said to me, "to save 
 him, but he did come through, and, either out of gratitude 
 or because he had lived a life to which he did not dare to 
 return, or maybe for both reasons, he has stayed on and on 
 
120 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 at the Stettenhausens', he never speaking of his past, they 
 never prying into it; he working like a horse for his room, 
 his board, and the driblets of cash they choose sometimes 
 to pay him; they more than merely content with the faithful 
 services he has given them — to say nothing of the sparkling 
 wit, the unfailing good humor, and the spirit of fine good 
 will and comradeship with which he has filled their home 
 throughout their declining years. 
 
 "Now that he has an incurable disease — diabetes — he has 
 his own little bed, his own little corner of the living room 
 to keep it in, his own little special diet too — yes, and his 
 own little past, which, always, he keeps in the depths of 
 his own big heart — God bless him." 
 
 But Mr. Stettenhausen himself was the patient -that need- 
 ed to be specially seen this day. So, while Father was look- 
 ing him over, Don was free to talk — something he did oc- 
 casionally in Irish dialect, occasionally in as excellent English 
 as one could wish to hear. He was saying — 
 
 "I remember quite well the day I thought me lottery 
 ticket had won me a thousand dollars. Me first impulse 
 was to get drunk, me second was to do likewise, and me 
 third was to do the same. Then whin I discovers me ticket 
 has won me just nawthing — Why — well — me first impulse 
 was to get drunk, me second was to do likewise and so 
 on ad in-fee-^i-tim. 
 
 "And then, whin I discovered that me frind that had 
 bought me the ticket had bought likewise one for himself, 
 and thin waited till after the drawin' to come an' give me 
 the ticket that had lost (kapin' the other fer himself) and 
 thin kim an' towld me me ticket had really won — the 
 spalpeen was afraid to keep on tellin' me I had lost, and 
 whin, after I had wrote to the lottery company and found 
 that me ticket had really lost — fer the reason the names fer 
 the two tickets had been transposed by the same manthat'd 
 bought both of thim — why thin me first impulse was to get 
 drunk — and me second was to settle accounts wid me frind." 
 
 "And did you settle 'em?" I asked. 
 
 "What's that?" 
 
 "Did you settle accounts with your friend?" 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 121 
 
 ' 'Oh — ho — hum. Well, I would have settled thim, only the 
 spalpeen was so rough wid me at the very beginning of the 
 settlement I hadn't the heart at all to go on to the conclusion. 
 So I says to him, "Good-bye to ye," an' slips away like the 
 wind on the infinite ocean!" 
 
 "After which," said I, "your first impulse was " 
 
 "You're quite right, me b'y. Got annythin' wid you?" 
 
 "Come!" cried my father. "We must go." 
 
 At the next place we went to, I had, for some reason, to 
 wait outside. 
 
 The house was a small, one-story affair, and, in Pike 
 County, the smaller the house the bigger as a rule the barn, 
 the granary and the other outbuildings and — the more num- 
 erous the dogs. The dogs, at some of the places, were oft- 
 times incredibly fierce, but, generally, I got along with them 
 by three simple expedients: (1) sitting quietly down, (2) 
 conversing softly with myself, at the same time gazing far 
 away, (3) while so doing, stretching out a friendly hand 
 sidewise toward one of the dogs, thus gentling the others by 
 making them jealous — eager, each, to get the others' petting. 
 (But never look at a strange dog while stretching out a hand 
 to him. In fact never look at any strange animal of any 
 sort when seeking to become acquainted with it. To look 
 steadily at a strange animal means one thing and one thing 
 only throughout the animal kingdom, and that is — FIGHT.) 
 
 On this particular day, when the dog-pack was returning 
 from the chase of my father into the house, I sat down on a 
 stump, looked far, far away, talked softly to myself, and, 
 as the rascals gathered around me, reached a hand out side- 
 wise and soon had all of them fighting for a mere chance to 
 nuzzle the hand and lick it. 
 
 "How do you manage so?" my father asked, as, return- 
 ing, he found the dogs quite friendly to us both. I told him 
 my secrets with no little pride. (Later, when alone at a place, 
 he tried to use them himself but not with great success. He 
 had been bitten badly and torn in his childhood by a dog 
 and was still afraid of dogs, spite of all his reasoning. The 
 dogs, sensing the fear quite readily, regarded the emotion 
 
122 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 as the natural result of enmity — just as in fact human beings 
 do — and acted in accordance with the interpretation.) 
 
 Next, once again, we went to a place where, once more, 
 for some reason, I was not allowed to enter. So I went to 
 the big red barn and sat on an upturned bucket in the barn's 
 great shadow. 
 
 I was, in those days a peculiar commixture of boy at 
 different ages. I could look through a kaleidoscope for 
 hours and enjoy, like a small child, each passing phase of 
 the cheap-glass beauty which fills its magic tube — beauty 
 that is never twice the same yet is inexhaustible. I could 
 turn somersets in the barn, run races at our little fairs for 
 pins, print and get out my little monthly magazine on time, 
 study in the hayloft the military strategy of Napoleon, ride 
 with my discursive father in the country, listen to his deriva- 
 tions of technical terms, match his quotations from Keats 
 or Homer, help him examine a patient in order to discuss 
 the case later in the buggy; and, in a word, be at one and 
 the same period of my life man, youth and small boy. By 
 my size and my years I was still a small boy. Being such, 
 I was now about to do something of which my father heart- 
 ily disapproved — read a "dime" novel (price 5 cents). 
 
 I took out the unbound little volume — a ridiculous tale, 
 but no more ridiculous than many of the "best sellers," or 
 "all-star pictures" on the screen, today — namely "Diamond 
 Dick, the Man Who Spit in the Devil's Eye." 
 
 Alas for the magic pleasure the wretched volume gave 
 me ! The book was soon read through — only fifteen minutes 
 of joy for all my big five cents! 
 
 I stood up, tore the wretched "best seller" into hundreds 
 of pieces, fed them to the delightful breeze and watched 
 them drift off down the whispering corn rows. 
 
 Then back to the buggy, still dreaming. Dreaming that 
 I was a great bandit, dreaming that I was a great surgeon, 
 dreaming that I was a great author, dreaming — yes, even 
 dreaming that I was back at home running foot races for 
 ten pins. 
 
 I took out my diary and began writing about Father, 
 but, just then, there came he out of the house. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 123 
 
 When we had been driving again for a mile or two, he 
 all at once pulled the horse to a stop. And there, stationary 
 in the road, he asked, ''What kind of things are you writing 
 in your diary?" 
 
 "O, a little of everything," I replied. 
 
 "You surely don't say anything about our patients and 
 their troubles, do you?" 
 
 "Yes, sometimes, but I never print any of those things 
 in The Monthly Gazette." 
 
 "Do you use the actual names of patients, when writing 
 up their cases in your diary?" 
 
 "No, I always leave a blank space in place of the name, 
 or else use just the initial." 
 
 He then went on to tell me about an excellent little 
 secret code, one that I could and did learn from him in about 
 ten minutes, and which enabled me to write anything I 
 liked in my diary, without anyone else than myself being 
 able to interpret it. He wound up by asking, "And do you 
 promise you never will write anything at all about any of 
 our patients unless you write it in that secret way?" 
 
 The promise given, Father slapped up the horse with the 
 lines. 
 
 But after a time he slowed him to a walk, and then 
 changed his judgment: "Everything considered, I think I 
 had better say that you ought to give up once and for all 
 both your Monthly Gazette and your diary. If you want really 
 to learn you'll just have to concentrate on your work at 
 school." 
 
 "A mule runs faster out of harness," I said with an air 
 of firmness. 
 
 "What is the meaning of that?" 
 
 ' 'Haven't you told me many a time that, over in Sangamon 
 County, where you were born, you heard that homely ex- 
 pression again and again, that you yourself quite often used 
 it, that Grandfather Shastid did too, and that even the 
 great Abraham Lincoln did also, he who in those days lived 
 near where you were born and was keeper of a store there? 
 Didn't any of you three know what the expression meant?" 
 
 "We all knew what we meant by it then, but what I'm 
 wanting to know is what meaning you attach to it now 7 ." 
 
124 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "I mean this," said I in my brazen young way, "that 
 just as a mule can run much faster out of harness than in it, 
 so I too can learn to write better and far more easily by 
 keeping my diary in which I'm so greatly interested and by 
 setting the type for my magazine, which also I've written 
 the whole of with so much pleasure." 
 
 "Well," said my father, "if you take it all that seriously, 
 and you do go faster out of harness than hitched up, go your 
 own gait without restraint, and God bless you, my little 
 son." 
 
 Later in the day, he returned for a moment to my Monthly 
 Gazette. Said he, "Your mother was telling me yesterday 
 that she read in your latest issue of your magazine about a 
 certain occurrence at the Christian Church which seemed to 
 have been greatly enjoyed by everybody present — except one. 
 I was in a hurry and did not quite get the whole tale. Do 
 you mind telling it to me yourself?" 
 
 "Not in the slightest," I said. "The moral of the an- 
 ecdote is simply, how very, very easily grown up people, 
 who are supposed to have more sense, can be tickled by just 
 nothing whatever. — Here's all that happened, and you can 
 see for yourself there was nothing funny in it. Three Sun- 
 days ago or thereabouts I went to church — Mother, as usual, 
 had made me go — I had rather have stayed in the hayloft — 
 and, after I had gone up to the first row back of the front, 
 and then sat down, and the preacher had begun preaching 
 his sermon, I found the weather all at once too hot. It got 
 hotter and hotter still. So, I did the natural and sensible 
 thing — took off my coat and laid it in the seat beside me. 
 Now it happened that Mother, when making my vest, had 
 discovered in her closet a piece of cloth that was brighter 
 than the brightest color in the rainbow, and almost precise- 
 ly the size and shape to go into the back of that vest be- 
 tween its dark right and left sides. So it became the back 
 part of my vest. Was that my fault? Certainly not. I saw 
 her sewing it in, and protested. But nothing moved Mother. 
 You never saw such a flaming color since the art of dying 
 fabrics was invented. So when I rose to my full height there 
 in the church and peeled off the coat and laid it on the 
 bench beside me — all thoughtfully and reverently as did 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 125 
 
 beseem the Sabbath day — there occurred a sudden and wholly 
 groundless explosion throughout the big room. I couldn't 
 think what was the matter, so, with I suppose a puzzled 
 expression, I turned and looked back over the audience. 
 Why did they act that way? They all looked as if they had 
 suddenly been transported out of the church and into a 
 nigger minstrel show. I turned and looked at Brother Will, 
 who, seated on the bench before me, turned his head in my 
 direction and then, putting his hand to his mouth, whispered 
 so that all could hear even to the farthest corners, 'It's the 
 color — the bright color — in the back of your vest.' 
 
 "Thinking to rectify the situation, I at once peeled 
 off the vest and threw it down over the coat beside me. 
 Why not? It was either that or put the coat back on over 
 the vest, which of course would once again have made me 
 far too hot. But as soon as I had done that, the audience 
 broke out laughing more heartily still. In fact it kept 
 laughing and laughing until the preacher himself was laugh- 
 ing with them. In fact he made some kind of sign to me, 
 by which I thought he meant to tell me that I was to take 
 off still more clothing. But that wouldn't have been decent, 
 and so I just sat down, and the sermon went on and after a 
 while the house got quiet. 
 
 "And why had the audience laughed even more when 
 the vest had come off too?" 
 
 "I didn't know till after I had got home. Then, before 
 a looking-glass, having taken off my coat and vest again, 
 I saw the explanation — my suspenders. They were covered 
 with gaudy embroidered flowers, so that even Solomon in 
 all his glory had not been half so wonderfully arrayed as 
 was little I." 
 
 My father laughed loud and long. 
 
 "Well," I expostulated, "no use to blame me! I didn't 
 want to wear those galluses to church or anywhere else. 
 But Mother had made me wear them, because, spite of their 
 colors, they had been given to me last Christmas by my 
 Sunday school teacher on the tree — and, anyway, they were 
 much too good she said to destroy." 
 
 "And do you think the dozen readers of your Monthly 
 Gazette would care to read about such matters?" 
 
 "Yes, indeed. About half of them were in the church 
 
126 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 that day. And people always like a man they've got a 
 joke on." 
 
 "You're certainly learning human nature rapidly," my 
 father admitted. "Yes, it is true that a mule runs faster out 
 of harness — go it mule!" 
 
 I am purposely alloting a great deal of bulk to this part 
 of my volume, because one of the primary purposes of this 
 book is to set forth in some detail a time that is wholly 
 gone, an era that is dead, yet one which has never, so far 
 as I know, been written up, even in my own "A Country 
 Doctor" (1897) and "Practising in Pike" (1908 and 1909) 
 in a sufficiently full and adequate manner. Both of those 
 former works, though written with all sincerity and as much 
 accuracy as was for me possible, nevertheless, compared with 
 the full richness of the subject, were slight and sketchy in 
 the extreme. To wait for some more competent writer than 
 myself to do the work seems foolish. Not that many far 
 more competent writers do not exist. But, of all the phy- 
 sicians now alive in this nation, there are only a few who 
 really remember "the old medicine" (that which was prac- 
 tised before the introduction of the germ theory and anti- 
 sepsis) as well as the new. This does not mean that I have 
 attained to an age much greater than that of many others 
 or that my medical degree was received at any far earlier 
 date than was theirs (mine is of 1888). But it means that 
 I was, by my father, "set apart and dedicate" (as shall here- 
 after appear) for the study and practice of medicine, while 
 still in my boyhood — hardly more than a small child. I, 
 therefore, have a clear medical recollection span of decidedly 
 more than six and a half full decades. Then again, though 
 a few treatises have appeared (not one sufficiently extensive) 
 on the "History of American Medicine," and though a con- 
 siderable number of adequate biographies have likewise 
 been published of individual American physicians, yet, amid 
 all this worthy literature (1) no great quantity has been 
 produced on early medicine and doctors who practised at 
 an early day in the Mississippi Valley, (2) practically 
 nothing whatever has appeared on doctors of a far humbler 
 and less pretentious type (those who really and for little 
 compensation "bore the burden and the heat" of that labor- 
 
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 ANOTHER DOCUMENT BEARING MEDICO-ECONOMIC INTEREST 
 AND ORIGINATING FROM OUR CIVIL WAR 
 
 All wars cause not merely suffering, death, permanent insanity, blindness, 
 hatred for many generations, deterioration of the future human stock through 
 destruction of its most desirable progenitors, and so on. It also produces 
 financial distresses, here a little, there a little, the whole amounting to vast, 
 toil-producing burdens that scarcely can be borne. 
 
 (Document greatly reduced in size.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 127 
 
MY FATHER'S YOUNG FAMILY 
 
 My half-brother, William Edwards Shastid 
 
 (born 1863) 
 
 He looked so soft and hit so hard. 
 
 A good student withal. 
 
 i . 
 
 My very immature self, Thomas Hall Shastid 
 
 (born 1866) 
 
 Not even a "tramp" as yet. 
 
 My own brother, Jon Shepherd Shastid 
 
 (born 1870) 
 
 He thought and dreamed nothing but music. 
 
 My own brother, Joseph Calvin Shastid 
 
 (born 1877) 
 
 The jovial player of Beethoven. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 128 
 
MY MOTHER AS MUSICIAN 
 
 Louisa Minerva Shastid (1841-1924) Mother of the Tramp 
 and Wife of the Country Doctor Herein Described. 
 
 In Her Music-Teaching Days. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 129 
 
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 MY SECOND LIFE — 130 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 131 
 
 ious early practice), (3) practically nothing whatever has been 
 published on the village-and-country doctors of that day and 
 olace, (4) practically nothing whatever, so far as I know, 
 las been published on the "medical apprentices" (students 
 working under preceptors before admission to medical col- 
 leges) of whom I was for years an inconspicuous example, 
 (5) practically nothing whatever has been published about 
 the -patients themselves of that place and time — those interest- 
 ing people who, in so many marked respects, were different 
 from patients in other parts of the country — say the South 
 and New England — and many of whose characteristics, to- 
 day, are not to be found even in the central Mississippi 
 Valley. In a word, should the story of this long gone 
 medical practice — both from the patient side and from the 
 doctor side and from the side of the old medicine and from 
 that of the new — be not narrated now, immediately, and by 
 myself, it will soon be a chapter as dead, almost, as the 
 medicine of the mound-builders, and hardly to be resurrected 
 in its fullness and accuracy by any subsequent writer or 
 writers howsoever capable and howsoever deeply interested. 
 Should I, in my endeavors to make the long dead live 
 again, appear to the reader to'have been too much enamored 
 of detail, the reader will not, I trust, attribute the error to 
 the customary garrulousness of old age, but will clearly 
 understand that I, in deciding what is to be included in and 
 what is to be excluded from my story, must be somewhat 
 liberal toward the inclusion side — because it is true that no 
 one now can tell, at least as to many a detail which at 
 present appears to be somewhat immaterial to the narrative, 
 just what may, in the far future, assume increased importance. 
 
 As to the details about my own activities and childish 
 personality, these have seemed to me absolutely necessary 
 because, without them, the reader could not correctly judge 
 the value — or the reverse — of the impressions I received and 
 the observations I made of my father, of his patients, of his 
 methods of practice, of the scenic background in Pike and 
 adjoining counties and the climatic conditions there prevail- 
 ing — and, O yes, I nearly forgot — even the character and 
 ability of some of his chief competitors. 
 
 Besides, that red vest, so boldly and unthoughtedly ex- 
 
132 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 posed in church, soon had unforeseen and important con- 
 sequences, as will appear hereinafter (page 278). 
 
 Hardly had we driven from an old ruined house "on the 
 back of another man's farm" and out into the highway again, 
 when here, for the second time that day, drove old Dr. 
 Dublin in a great rush of Hibernian energy, splashing and 
 spluttering and muttering and wagging his massive square 
 head from side to side. As he drew near, he suddenly drove 
 a little beyond the roadway, then quarter-circling, so to 
 speak, he all at once halted his big horse. His rig then stood, 
 of course, diagonally across the highway. This time he 
 wanted a "show-down" — plainly. 
 
 I can see him now, with his hard, protrusive blue eyes 
 staring, winkless, into our own, and with his whole big 
 energetic countenance seeming to boil over with the right- 
 eous indignation of any "ethical" physician who sees or 
 who thinks that he sees something "unethical" in the 
 conduct, real or reported, of his chief competitor. 
 
 The magnificent presence spake and said unto us — rather, 
 to my father: "What the — what the hell! Where you — 
 You've been to Stettenhausen's, John Stettenhausen's? And 
 I suppose you've been filling the man up — filling him full — 
 the man and all the neighborhood that ever come to see him 
 — full of that superstition — that — that bug theory of disease. 
 
 My father smiling tolerantly, replied: "Not superstition. 
 'Superstition' is from the Latin, super, meaning over, and sto, 
 stare, to stand — that is, something which stands over (im- 
 properly, of course) from a bygone age, or, as some will have 
 it mean — ' ' 
 
 "Bah!" 
 
 "But the 'bug theory,' as you term it — has nothing to 
 do with bugs — " 
 
 "BAH!" The eyes protruded more than ever in the vain 
 attempt at self-expression and the face grew as purple as the 
 robe of a Roman emperor. "BAH!" 
 
 "And," continued my father, half laughing, "it is not 
 even a 'theory' in the sense in which you mean that word 
 — i.e., a fanciful, or unproved and even unprovable explana- 
 tion. The Greek word, theoria, means merely 'explanation,' 
 just that and nothing more. And 'germ' means merely 
 
MY SECOND LIFE I33 
 
 'microbe,' a bit of microscopic life. Some of these lowest 
 forms of life are harmless, they may even be beneficial, to 
 human beings. Others produce diseases in them. Nearly all 
 of these microbes, far from being 'bugs,' are not even animals 
 at all, but vegetables. 'Bugs' are animals and animals of 
 high rank. They have intelligence." 
 
 "Just what you haven't got!" shouted Dr. Dublin, who, 
 during my father's little lecture, had been, with very em- 
 phatic slowness, getting out of his buggy and coming round 
 to my side of ours. "Just what you haven't got, I say, you 
 — you bug, you more bugs, you mountebank, you insane 
 man, fool! You — you self-advertiser! Merely to get your- 
 self talked about — you — damn you — you — " 
 
 Now the Doctor's horse had moved a few steps to the 
 far side of the road, thus standing in the far-side ditch and 
 leaving the near-side ditch as well as a part of the roadway 
 quite available for my father's use — who, seeing his chance, 
 spoke out to Jim. 
 
 Jim leaped. We shot easily past the Dublin buggy, and, 
 as I turned and looked through the tiny window in the 
 buggy-hood's back, I beheld Dr. Dublin splattered from 
 heels to head with yellow mud, sent him no doubt by his 
 own blooded horse, which, now, was galloping with the 
 remnants of a very fine buggy through a near-by pasture. 
 
 Dr. Dublin for a moment stood unmoving in the middle 
 of the highway. Then, all at once, as he opened his mouth, 
 his arms and legs began gesticulating wildly, as were he a 
 colossal jumping-jack. 
 
 Comical it seemed, that figure. Yet, child as I was, 
 I knew it meant tragedy, near-tragedy at the least. My 
 father and Dr. Dublin had always respected each other 
 highly. Far apart as south pole from north in many ways, 
 they nevertheless agreed in one important matter — that the 
 practice of medicine and surgery is the greatest thing upon 
 this earth. Each would gladly have given his life, even at a 
 moment's notice, without consideration, without hesitation, 
 absolutely without money and without price, for this heal- 
 ing art he so adored. 
 
 It had been a long day, as the days of a country doctor 
 were apt to be in those times, and I was tired and drowsy 
 
134 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 beyond all power of expression. I thought I heard, off in 
 the hills, some melancholy dog howling a wild complaint 
 about his misunderstood heart. But perhaps I merely dream- 
 ed it. I lifted my father's right arm (he invariably, although 
 right-handed, drove with his left hand and sat on the left 
 side of the seat, just as autoists do today) I lifted, I say, his 
 right arm, crept beneath it, and, praying God not to let Dr. 
 Dublin get my father into trouble, I suddenly awoke — to 
 find my father dismounting from the buggy and my brother 
 William emerging from the front house-door, stable lantern 
 in his hand. 
 
 THE STRANGEST SURGEON THAT EVER LIVED 
 
 It was, once again, a bright and beautiful morning, as 
 so often in those years — the morning of my life. Sometimes, 
 indeed, as I look backward on those days, I see them as made 
 up entirely of mornings and of brightness. A wee bit of 
 reflection, however, together with a modicum of consul- 
 tation with my old-time documents, and I note there was 
 plenty of night too in those years, plenty of gloom, tragedy, 
 blackest disaster. 
 
 As, indeed, on the day I am now about to describe. We 
 were on our way again to John Stettenhausen's, but, on the 
 road, we had to stop at other places. 
 
 Before we had even left town, my father had begun to 
 speak of Drs. McDowell and Hodgen, his old-time idols, 
 whereby I knew he was thinking also about Dr. Dublin 
 — concerning whose surgical skill he also held a high opinion. 
 These two men, indeed, my father and Dr. Dublin, were, to 
 some extent, complementary to each other. Where Dublin 
 was quick and unthinking, that was precisely where my 
 father was slow, cautious, profoundly cogitative. Where 
 my father was too hesitant, somewhat timid, perhaps, there 
 Dr. Dublin was prompt, bold, decisive. Dr. Dublin, too, 
 had high mechanical ability, a great resource indeed in the 
 setting of fractures, the reduction of dislocations, the per- 
 formance of almost every class and kind of surgical manipu- 
 lations and operations. My father had little natural ability 
 of that sort. The consequence was that, in all his major 
 surgery, my father was glad to call in, and did actually oft- 
 times summon to his aid his old colleague and professional 
 
MY SECOND LIFE I35 
 
 friend, whereas Dr. Dublin, on his own part, not infrequent- 
 ly invoked the professional assistance of Dr, Shastid, when, 
 as ofttimes was the case, he knew not what to do for a non- 
 surgical affection or when he was badly stumped in the 
 diagnosis of a disease, whether "internal" or surgical. 
 Besides, when either of these doctors himself took sick, he 
 invariably called the other. 
 
 Add to all this mutual scientific aid and assistance the 
 fine fraternal feeling which had for so long subsisted between 
 the two, the comradeship, the very dependable psychologic 
 support, the encouragement and uplift which each had al- 
 ways so gladly given to the other, and it stands out plainly 
 enough just why the loss of Dr. Dublin's friendship was 
 in itself a stark, staring tragedy for my father. Well indeed 
 it was for him on that day that more, far more, of tragedy 
 — or something much akin to tragedy — which was, in turn, 
 to result from the loss of Dr. Dublin's friendship, lay still 
 in the future wholly veiled from his eyes. 
 
 My father began speaking to me about his old-time teach- 
 er of surgery in St. Louis, the dean of his medical college 
 there, Joseph Nash 1 McDowell — not only a man of great 
 scientific ability, but in addition a very comical character. 
 
 "The funniest man I ever have seen," declared my father. 
 "Also he was a daredevil: he would have spit in the eye of 
 Satan and then have enjoyed that irritable gentleman's 
 discomfiture." All at once he was interrupted. We were 
 driving west and, on the south branch of a cross-road, close 
 to ours of east and west, in a brand new, shining, red- 
 spoked buggy and drawn by a brand new horse, sat Dr. 
 Dublin, calmly awaiting our transit across his majestic field 
 of view. 
 
 Even before we had reached the cross-road my father had 
 spoken to him pleasantly, but the alienated doctor had 
 turned away his face and begun coughing. Louder and louder 
 coughed he, then even louder still. How he twisted and 
 writhed, garrumped and hoo-hawed, finally getting up some- 
 thing from his vast interior and shooting it into a sumach 
 bush — which, in the customary manner of bushes whenever 
 he spat upon them, swayed and recovered, swayed and re- 
 covered again. 
 
 1 Not Nash?, as one biographical encyclopedia has it. 
 
136 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Father slowed his horse at the intersection and again 
 spoke kindly. But again no response — not even the very- 
 slightest. 
 
 So on we sped and Father again began: "Yes indeed 
 'old Mac' was the funniest character I ever have met in all 
 my life — and the most instructive. He used to walk into 
 the lecture room with a big horse pistol in each hand, then 
 with a more bombastic air than a drum major could have 
 summoned, to bang them down on his reading desk and to 
 begin speaking his lecture in a yell of wild defiance to his 
 numerous enemies." 
 
 "Was he a big man, Father?" 
 
 "Yes, big indeed and tall and stately. He had a heavy, 
 tangled mass of dark gray hair, combed back over his head, 
 a long aquiline face and a shrill, penetrant, unbelievably 
 rasping voice. His enemies used to declare he imitated 'that 
 old termagant, John C. Calhoun.' " 
 
 "And did he imitate him?" 
 
 "Probably not. Yet in everything Calhounian he really 
 outdid him. A man of unquestioned scholarship, of elo- 
 quence, of true tenderness and sublimity, he was nevertheless 
 profane and obscene — ofttimes well-nigh incredibly so. Con- 
 cerning a competitor in one of the rival colleges he said 
 (this much I may tell) mentioning the competitor's name 
 outright, 'Professor So-and-so is something of a teacher — 
 much above the average of his school, in fact — but, after all, 
 he's a good deal like the tail of a sheep, which, although a 
 perfectly justifiable and innocent organ in itself, is neverthe- 
 less in bad odor because of the company it keeps.' Concern- 
 ing Pope himself (Charles A. Pope, dean of the competing 
 St. Louis Medical College) he observed, 'Concerning this 
 man I cannot speak as I really ought to do because I am 
 acquainted with no words in the English or any other 
 language sufficiently foul, sufficiently obscene, sufficiently 
 condemnatory, to express the matter justly. Anything I 
 might be able to express, therefore, about this man would 
 be far — very, very far — beyond his actual deserts.' 
 
 "His chief enemies — so he alleged, we have to take this 
 with a grain of salt — were the Jesuit Fathers of the St. Louis 
 University. After McDowell had established his 'Medical 
 
MY SECOND LIFE lyj 
 
 Department of the University of the State of Missouri' and 
 made of it a world-renowned institution (it was almost in- 
 variably called 'McDowell's College'), the Fathers estab- 
 lished 'The St. Louis Medical College.' Red rag to a bull! 
 From that time on there was war between those institutions. 
 Hence the great horse pistols of which I have already spoken. 
 Mac either believed or he affected to believe himself in great 
 bodily danger. Sometimes he came attended by a guard. 
 Always he arrived with his pistols and a heavy brazen 
 breast-plate over his chest. Slamming down the pistols he 
 would shout, 'Now let the enemy come on! Damn them, 
 let them come!' 
 
 "The seats in the amphitheatre were arranged in the 
 form of a cone, the medical warrior himself located at the 
 opening, so to speak, of the cone's funnel. Here the valiant 
 speaker continually went turning around and around, as if 
 he feared some treacherous rear attack. The students' 
 benches, fore and aft, were narrow in the extreme, and Mc- 
 Dowell continually admonished his hearers to sit very 
 straight. 'Military precision!' he would cry. 'Military pre- 
 cision! Military carriage!' You would never have gone to 
 sleep in that lecture room. You wouldn't even have want- 
 ed to. 
 
 "Once in a while, however, Mac would pretend that his 
 audience was snoring. So he would slip into the back of the 
 auditorium with his violin, there to play and sing. 
 
 "Do you think we did not learn anything from such a 
 teacher? Then you are mistaken. Learn? Why, we couldn't 
 help learning. Anatomy and surgery, I suppose, had never 
 been so imparted in all this world before. Hard subjects 
 these, but made supremely easy by the magic wit, the humor, 
 the unforgetably graphic presentation. He used to say that, 
 for every bone, muscle and artery in the human form he had 
 an appropriate story- — something to nail it into our minds 
 with. He was pretty nearly right. 
 
 "How we all loved him, grotesque though he was!" 
 
 "And did he ever really fight — fight, that is, with 
 pistols?" 
 
 "Not that I ever heard of. But he certainly built his 
 college in the form of a fort, his private residence also — 
 
138 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 just across the street from the college. Adjoining his college, 
 actually, was 'the enemy's' school, the Christian Brothers 
 Academy. On patriotic anniversaries old Mac would deck 
 himself out in bright military array — revolutionary cocked 
 hat, blue and gilt coat and pants, a great, shining silver- 
 handled sword in his hand. Accompanied by his bravest 
 students he would pass out to an open space that lay between 
 his college, or fort, and the college of 'the enemy,' and, 
 mounting a speakers stand which had been erected for the 
 occasion, stentorianly dare the enemy — from humblest 'Chris- 
 tian Brother' to the very Pope himself [here note the play 
 on words — the dean of the opposing institution was a man 
 named Pope] to come on 'or forever hold his peace.' Then 
 he and his 'forces' would fire two small cannons for hours. 
 The enemies never 'came on,' but both they and he — either 
 intentionally or unintentionally — got oceans of advertising 
 from the incident and the racket." 
 
 "Must have cost him much money." 
 
 "Yes. He made barrels of it though — surgery came to 
 him from all parts of the world. Yet seldom did he pay his 
 justest debts, even for the burial of his children." 
 
 "His children!" 
 
 "Yes, his two daughters at any rate. 
 
 "Each he placed in a coffin of tin, filled the coffins with 
 alcohol and sealed everything up hermetically. These he 
 then proceeded to place in very much larger coffins of copper, 
 those also filled with alcohol and sealed hermetically. Later 
 he purchased a cave near Hannibal, Mo., 1 buttressed its 
 walls with heavy masonry, and, at its entrance, erected a 
 massive and very beautiful gate of open-work iron. From 
 the ceiling of this cave he caused to be suspended the 
 coffin containing the younger of his children. Later still 
 he gave instructions to his son and some of his more in- 
 timate friends that, when he died, they should seal him 
 up too in metal as he had sealed his children, and then 
 suspend him, thus carefully enveloped, from the roof of 
 Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. He had, he said, already per- 
 
 1 Not Montana, as a certain biographical encyclopedia has it. 
 
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 Letter from my Grandfather, John Greene Shastid, to his son, later my father, Thomas Wesley Shastid, 
 when the latter was attending his last (second) year at medical college. 
 
 There is light shed here on the medical economics of the 1850's. Grandmother Shastid ("your 
 mother" in the letter) is to be treated (and she had to be seen by the doctor almost daily) for thirty dollars 
 per year — probably less than ten cents a professional visit. This was about the prevailing rate of pay- 
 ment then per call for all who "doctored by the year" and paid in advance. The demoralizing effects 
 of such yearly prepayments for medical services ought to be sufficiently obvious, also sufficiently per- 
 tinent to many of the medical prepayment projects proposed at the present day. Yet, apparently, they 
 are not so. 
 
 My grandmother, being actually and unquestionably an invalid, was of course not malingering in the 
 least. \ But my father, who, for a short time after his graduation, "took people's practice by the year," 
 later informed me many times that he very soon completely abandoned the yearly prepayment plan. 
 Whoever had paid for his doctoring a whole year in advance, was almost invariably determined, by fair 
 means or by foul, to get the utmost possible medical service and medicine for his money. So, sick or 
 well, he would send for the unfortunate doctor he had so easily "bought," day after day, yes and night 
 after night, without sense and without mercy. 
 
 The yearly prepayment plan inevitably killed itself. It led to numberless quarrels between doctor 
 and patient, broke up that fine relationship which, otherwise, almost invariably, would have subsisted 
 between them. 
 
 My grandmother's long continued sickness was, in those days, diagnosed as "rheumatism and nerv- 
 ous troubles." At the present time I am almost certain, judging from what my father told me of her 
 sickness, that what she really did suffer from was arthritis and neuritis, produced by focal infection — i.e., 
 suppuration in the tonsils, the teeth, and the nasal sinuses. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 139 
 
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 MY SECOND LIFE — 140 
 
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 ""'"i'mm-xt: .mm. 
 
 The Pittsfield Hotel, N.W. Corner of the Public Square. This building was erected 
 in 1869 by my father's half-brother, George Travis Edwards. The photograph 
 was made by the writer not till May, 1938, but, excepting the white color of the 
 first story, the structure stands substantially as it was in his early boyhood. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 141 
 
VIEW Or THE BUSH BLOCKSOUTH SIDEOFTHE PUBLIC SaUAftE PITTSFIELD ILLS. 
 
 The Bush Block when Constructed was the Tallest Business Structure in 
 Pittsfield. It Housed Two Stores Below, Professional Offices in the Front Part 
 of Its Second Story, the Pike County Democrat in the Back Part of Its Second 
 Story, and the Town's Only Theatre (Bush's Hall) in Its Third Story. 
 
 (From "Atlas Map of Pike County, Illinois": Andreas, Lyter & Co., Davenport, Iowa, 1872.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 142 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 143 
 
 fected the necessary arrangements with the owners of the 
 cave. * 
 
 JOHN THOMSON HODGEN 
 "A marvelous surgeon, Tom, but a human enigma — no 
 such man at least as Hodgen. 
 
 1 McDowell is so important a personage in the history of surgery and anatomy, also in 
 the history of medical education in the United States, that I cannot refrain from adding 
 this footnote in order to rectify a few of the more prevalent errors concerning him. 
 
 MYTHOLOGY AND TRUTH ABOUT DR. JOSEPH NASH McDOWELL 
 
 Question. — Is it true that the dead bodies of McDowell's daughter, or daughters, were 
 placed by him in tin coffins filled with alcohol, that then these coffins were sealed hermet- 
 ically, and, later, taken to a cave near Hannibal, Mo., and there suspended from the cave's 
 ceiling? 
 
 Answer. — This matter I have looked into with considerable care. Omitting all mention 
 of clues which led to nothing, or nothing decisive, I report as follows : 
 
 Writing to the genial and capable editor of The Hannibal Courier-Post, I received a reply 
 dated November 6, 1939, from which I now quote the part relating to the matters in question. 
 "Mr. Charles R. Martin (612 Center Street, Hannibal, Mo.), a resident here since 1860, 
 recalls the story of the Dr. McDowell incident, although he is not personally acquainted 
 with its actual happening. He thinks it was before the Civil War — perhaps in the 1850's. 
 He believes however it is founded on authentic facts, as it was currently told in his early 
 days. The cave mentioned is what now has become famous as 'Mark Twain's cave,' it 
 having been given fame by the author in 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Tom Sawyer'." 
 
 Inasmuch as Mr. Martin, Mr. Cable's "source," was "not personally acquainted with 
 the actual happening," I wrote to my friend and colleague in ophthalmology at Hannibal, 
 Dr. Edward T. Hornback, who referred my letter to "Judge E. T. Cameron, who now owns 
 the so-called Mark Twain cave." Judge Cameron then wrote me as follows: 
 
 "The story of a girl's body in McDowell's cave, now known as the Mark Twain cave. 
 
 "From 'Life on the Mississippi' by Mark Twain: 
 
 " 'There is an interesting cave a mile or two below Hannibal, among the bluffs. I 
 would have liked to revisit it, but had not time. In my time the person who then owned 
 it turned it into a mausoleum for his daughter, aged fourteen. The body of this poor child 
 was put into a copper cylinder filled with alcohol, and this was suspended in one of the 
 dismal avenues of the Cave. The top of the cylinder was removable; and it was said to be 
 a common thing for the baser order of tourists to drag the dead face into view and examine 
 it and comment upon it.' " 
 
 "Mr. Alfred W. Bulkley who was born about 1840 and lived to be ninety-two years of 
 age, lived most of his early life within one-half mile of the cave, showed the writer of this 
 the exact spot where the metal casket was located; he said the body was covered with a liquid 
 which was about two-thirds alcohol and one-third water taken from a spring in the cave 
 which was strongly impregnated with lime; the Dr's hope was that the alcohol would 
 preserve the body until the lime-water had turned it to stone. 
 
 "A Mr. Daulton who was reared near the cave and who was a friend of Sam Clemens 
 told the writer the following story; Mr. Daulton was for years an editor in Arkansas but 
 had relatives in Hannibal and visited here up until the time of his death; Mr. D. said: T 
 remember that body and casket very well; I think they were in the cave about two years 
 then, the Dr. decided that the body would never petrify and had it buried in the Methodist 
 cemetery, now Mt. Olivet. One Sunday afternoon I went into the cave with a young lady 
 friend; when we came to the casket the lid was off and nothing could be seen but the liquid; 
 the girl expressed a doubt as to there being anything underneath the surface of the liquid; 
 I was carrying a cane and stuck the hooked end down in the casket hoping to raise the body 
 so that she could see it; by chance the cane became hooked into the dead girl's mouth and 
 when I pulled up on it up came the head with the snow-white skin and long black hair; 
 when my companion saw it she gave a shriek and fainted and I thought for a while there 
 would be two corpses instead of one; she finally came to and we lost no time in getting out 
 of there; I told her that after that I hoped she would not doubt my word.' " 
 
144 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Where Mac, as a man, was crude, coarse, devoid of 
 even the least refinement, Hodgen, the other great surgeon 
 of our College, was honest, clean, simple, unaffected, trust- 
 worthy — a Christian gentleman, in fact. Thus, when Hodgen 
 
 Thereupon (November 24, 1939) I wrote again to Dr. Hornback as follows: "I am 
 certainly obliged to you for your letter of November 21, enclosing Judge Cameron's state- 
 ment about the case. The fact that Dr. McDowell's cave turns out to be also Mark Twain's 
 cave (Huck Finn's and Tom Sawyer's cave?) makes the whole matter very much more in- 
 teresting. 
 
 "By the bye, are there other caves near Hannibal besides this one? If so, IS the McDowell 
 cave the same as the Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn cave? The fact that the McDowell cave 
 is mentioned by Mark Twain in his 'Life on the Mississippi,' does not necessarily mean 
 that it was the cave in which Mark had imagined certain of the events in his 'Tom Sawyer' 
 and 'Huck Finn' to have occurred. Is it, then, generally understood that the McDowell 
 cave is the same as the Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn cave? If you could call up two or three 
 of the older inhabitants of your city without too much trouble and ask them whether it is 
 their understanding that the McDowell and the Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn caves are 
 identical, I should be greatly obliged to you — although I am greatly obliged to you already. 
 Perhaps the Reference Librarian of the Hannibal Public Library could give you the answer 
 to the above question. 
 
 "I would not presume to bother you so much about the matter in question, but that 
 Professor (Dean) McDowell was, by all odds, the most celebrated surgeon of his day in the 
 Mississippi Valley, and the time will soon have passed when any further information con- 
 cerning him can be secured." 
 
 To that letter Dr. Hornback, on December 21, 1939, replied: "From what I can gather 
 the McDowell Cave, Mark Twain Cave, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn Cave are all the same 
 hole in the ground. There is only one other cave of any size near the Mark Twain Cave except 
 one that has recently been opened that I think is called the Peter LaBaum Cave, but as 
 said above it has not been known until recent years." 
 
 As to the alleged re-burial in the Methodist Cemetery at Hannibal (see the above- 
 reproduced letter from Judge Cameron) I have been unable either to verify or to disprove it. 
 An unquestionable fact, however, is that the two McDowell daughters — not one, but two — 
 were, after the Mark-Twain-cave fiasco, re-interred on an island in the Mississippi River, 
 then, by the order of McDowell himself, exhumed and re-re-interred in — of all places! — a 
 Catholic burial ground in St. Louis. This I have on the written word of the health au- 
 thorities at St. Louis. (See, too, farther on in this footnote, a plat of the McDowell burial 
 lot 1604, block 161, Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis, Mo.) 
 
 After all those "journeyings of the dead," it is singular to note that these poor children, 
 in their final resting place have not now and apparently never have had even the most in- 
 significant stone or marker to commemorate their former existence or present place of 
 sepulture. 
 
 Question. — Is it true that no religious ceremonies, or only ceremonies in honor of the 
 Devil, were held in connection with the sepulture of Dr. McDowell's daughters? 
 
 Answer. — Dr. W. B. Outten's biographic sketch of Dr. McDowell in his "Glimpses of 
 Early St. Louis Medical History," Medical Fortnightly, 1908, pages 143 to 146, says: "The 
 following was the ceremony carried out after the death of two of Dr. McDowell's children: 
 They were put in these copper and alcohol-filled vases and the students of the college went 
 at night to Dr. McDowell's residence. A procession was formed and the students carried 
 lights and deposited in a vault prepared for the purpose in the rear of the house, these dead 
 children; no kind of ceremony, either religious or otherwise, was indulged in." It would 
 seem that some little time elapsed between that interment and the later suspension of the 
 bodies in the Mark Twain cave. 
 
 This already published matter is all that I can learn upon this head. 
 
 Question. — Is it true that Dr. McDowell, in his last will and testament, left an order 
 that, after his death, his body should be placed in an alcohol-filled copper vase, taken to 
 the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, and there suspended from the roof of the cave, also that, 
 after his death, his wishes in this matter were carried out? [I have heard an old-time doctor 
 
MY SECOND LIFE I45 
 
 operated for stone in the urinary bladder, he was all intent 
 upon that stone and the welfare of the patient. Never the 
 least endeavor to impress, to play the advertising mounte- 
 bank, to convert an operation into a means of amusement for 
 
 say that he had actually seen in the Mammoth Cave, and not far from its very mouth, the 
 copper vase in question suspended from the cave's roof.] 
 
 Answer. — A reference to the words of Dr. McDowell's last will and testament farther 
 on in this footnote will show conclusively that the Doctor, in that document, left no such 
 order, or request. Inasmuch, however, as the story about Dr. McDowell's body and the 
 Mammoth Cave of Kentucky is very persistent and reappears from time to time in medico- 
 biographic literature, I took pains to investigate this matter with care. 
 
 First, I wrote to the U. S. Government's Information Bureau, Washington, D. C, and 
 received the following reply from Mr. Frederic J. Haskin, the Director, himself: "We are 
 advised that there has been a myth current for many years that the body of Dr. Joseph Nash 
 McDowell was enclosed in a copper cylinder, filled with alcohol and hermetically sealed 
 and suspended from the ceiling of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. 
 
 "We are advised that there is absolutely no foundation for this myth. The body of a 
 small Indian has been found in the cave, and unless this was the foundation of the myth, 
 officials are unable to tell us how it started." 
 
 Next, I wrote to the Superintendent of the Mammoth Cave Park, Mammoth Cave, 
 Kentucky. The following was the reply: "Receipt is acknowledged of your letter of Oc- 
 tober 23, regarding the burial of Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell in a copper cylinder in Mam- 
 moth Cave. 
 
 "This is to advise to the knowledge of the old Cave employees Dr. McDowell's body 
 was never placed in Mammoth Cave, nor is there any record of a request that this be done." 
 
 It must, however, not for a moment be supposed that there has been no foundation 
 whatever for the myth now in question. Dr. McDowell's undoubted attempt to inter his 
 two daughters successfully in the Mark Twain cave at Hannibal, Mo., would, by itself, 
 be sufficient perhaps to engender the variant story that his own cadaver had been disposed 
 of in some similar manner. Then, too, the great early authority on McDowell's life, Mc- 
 Dowell's own contemporary, Dr. W. B. Outten of St. Louis, (born 1845; medical degree at 
 Washington University, St. Louis, 1866; practised in St. Louis till his death, 1911) has this 
 to say on the subject in question ("Glimpses of Early St. Louis Medical History," Medical 
 Fortnightly, 1908, pp. 143 to 146): "Dr. McDowell himself once became very sick and be- 
 lieving himself upon the point of death he called in Dr. Chas. W. Stevens his partner in the 
 practice of medicine, and his son, Dr. Drake McDowell, to his bedside, and made them take 
 oath that should he die they would place his body in an alcohol filled copper vase, take it 
 to the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky and have it suspended from the roof of the cave. He 
 averred that he had already made due and proper arrangements with the proprietors." 
 
 To sum up, then, it would seem that Dr. McDowell once, when sick, did broach the 
 project of his burial in Mammoth Cave to his son Drake and to Dr. Stevens, but that there 
 the matter ended — aside, of course, from the oft-repeated and ever-growing tales about 
 McDowell's cave burial which, for decades, have enlivened the smoking rooms and banquet 
 halls at all sorts of medical meetings. 
 
 Question. — When, where and from what cause did Joseph Nash McDowell die? He is 
 almost always declared to have died on October 3, 1868. He is sometimes said to have died 
 as the result of a wound which he had received while fighting for the Confederacy during 
 the Civil War. Superstitious negroes of St. Louis (these were always much afraid of "Old 
 Doc McDowell" endurin' ob his lifetime, and, after his death, of his h'ant) continually 
 averred that the Devil had carried away the old-time stealer of negro "stiffs" one night in a 
 thunder-storm, in Bellefontaine Cemetery, jest ez he was about to steal anuddah stiff. 
 
 Answers. — To settle these questions I obtained directly from the Bureau of Vital Statistics, 
 St. Louis, the herewith reproduced certified copy of Dr. McDowell's death certificate, 
 whereby it appears that, though he died in 1868, the day of his death was not October 3, 
 but September 26; also that he did not die of a wound received in the service of the Con- 
 federacy at the time of the Civil War, but of "congestive chills"; also that he was not at 
 the time attempting to exhume, clean up and feloniously carry away a negro cadaver, or 
 any other sort of cadaver, in Bellefontaine Cemetery, but that he died (at least presumably) 
 
146 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 an audience or of profit for himself. Mac, on the other hand, 
 always used to say, whenever he began to incise, 'Gentlemen, 
 never cut for a stone till first you have provided yourself 
 with a stone. Up your sleeve have it — so! Now you see it, 
 
 with his boots off and in bed. (My photographic copy of the proceedings of the McDowell 
 College for September 25 — kindly obtained for me by Dr. Robert E. Schlueter, of St. Louis 
 — makes Doctor MacDowell's death-date in fact September 25, instead of the death cer- 
 tificate's September 26. Certainly the ordinarily given October 3, cannot possibly be 
 correct.) 
 
 Question. — Is it true that Dr. McDowell was, as has been so often alleged, both an 
 atheist and a spiritualist? 
 
 Answer. — He was, in fact, both an atheist and a spiritualist, also an ardent hater of each 
 and every religion, especially the Roman Catholic. In fact he used to curse the Catholics 
 in the very pit of his lecture hall and with an eloquence and an energy which left no doubt 
 of the depth and extent of his convictions. 
 
 All at once, however, very shortly before his death, Dr. McDowell became converted 
 and accepted the Catholic faith. From that time on his closest adviser was Father P. T. 
 DeSmet. After McDowell's death he was buried — actually, this old-time curser of all re- 
 ligions — in holy ground, Bellefontaine Cemetery. The plat of his burial lot I reproduce 
 elsewhere in this volume precisely as it was drawn and indexed for me by the Bellefontaine 
 authorities. 
 
 N? 6512 
 
 CITY OF ST, LOUIS 
 
 Bureau of Vital Statistics 
 DIVISION OF HEALTH 
 
 -No. of Certificate 4?2t, 
 
 CERTIFIED COPY OF DEATH 
 
 Nairn J0.3.Sph...N.«...Mc.D.O.W.9ll- 
 
 rets: No .7.3.7...S.«...8.i f k..S.fcrft&fc. 
 
 ...puce of D«.th .7S7.S....8th...Stree:fc.. 
 
 UNDERTAKER'S REPORT OF DEATH 
 
 SEX | COLOR 
 
 Kale ! 
 
 White 
 
 DATE OF BIRTH (Month) 1 (Day) 
 
 I (tor 19 ) 
 
 1 1805 
 
 AGE YEARS I MONTHS 
 63 1 
 
 
 SINGLE. MARRIED 
 WIDOWED OR DIVORCED 
 
 Married 
 
 BIRTHPLACE 
 
 ««.«<*».«,> Kentucky 
 
 NAME OF FATHER 
 
 BIRTHPLACE OF FATHER 
 (Sute or Country) 
 
 MAIDEN NAME 
 OF MOTHER 
 
 BIRTHPLACE OF MOTHER 
 (Sute or Country) 
 
 OCCUPATION 
 
 .. Bellefontaine. . Cemetery. 
 
 
 
 .SejRft*J8Sfl**_i86a #__, 
 
 Date of Death- 
 
 I HEREBY CERTIFY. That I attended deceased.trom 
 
 19 , to .19 , that I last saw h alive cn_ 
 
 19 , and that death occurred, on the date stated above, at.. 
 
 The CAUSE OF DEATH was as follows: 
 
 .i?.onge3tive..CM.Ufl_ 
 
 
 
 
 .. Duration 
 
 Days 
 
 
 
 Duratl 
 
 n. , 
 
 (Signed) 
 
 . Drake McDowell . 
 
 
 M. D. 
 
 .9-26-1888—. 
 
 PernAFneA....Sejlfc.....2.7.J;h,..18.68. 19 
 
 <^C§L^ 
 
 Health Commissioner. 
 
 -Douu t V Registrar. "» 
 
 OFFICE OF HEALTH DEPARTMENT: — I. the undersigned. Secretary to Health Commissioner, hereby certify the foregoing to be a true copy 
 from the Death Records in this office. 
 FEE. $1.00. 
 
 0f.f. ^u^Ju*«~ 
 
 Countersigned: 
 
 CERTIFIED COPY OF JOSEPH N. McDOWELL'S DEATH CERTIFICATE 
 The death date as here given is very probably erroneous, at least according to the Resolutions 
 adopted by McDowell's college (then entitled "The Missouri Medical College") also according 
 to the clippings attached thereto from the St. Louis Times and St. Louis Republican. 
 
 The cause of death as given, "Congestive Chills," is, however, much more probably correct 
 than is superstitious peoples' "kidnapping by the Devil" while in the course of stealing "stiffs" 
 in a public cemetery. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 147 
 
 Xo X to 
 
 ^w ^>. lH 
 
 /U*A~t 
 
 1L 
 
 >- £h*al 
 
 7h- &*wedl 
 
 GIL, %iS*2l1 
 
 S5 
 
 <h^<xJL 
 
 SUfrtii 
 
 Ac^^rvj^L, 
 
 k !M1 
 
 i x. auS 
 
 fiiie^L 
 
 2_ 
 
 I XL. % ^ %^dL-^{^. ) 
 
 lfc*xiL 
 
 g jl^l 
 
 jj llll 
 
 1L. i±M£ 
 
 y- U& 
 
 Photographic Reproduction of the Plat of Jos. N. McDowell's Burial Lot in Bellefontaine Cemetery, 
 St. Louis, Mo., also the Index to that Plat. Both Plat and Index were Kindly Supplied by the 
 Officers of the Bellefontaine Cemetery Association. 
 
 Explanations additional to those in the Index will be found in the long McDowell footnote supra. 
 
148 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 now you don't. Well, in case the patient does have a stone 
 in his bladder, then you simply take that out and show it — 
 so. But — if he doesnt have a stone, O well, then, you just 
 drop your hand a trifle — thus ! Shake your sleeve a little — so ! 
 
 The meaning of this plat is not clear without certain explanations which, in addition 
 to the plat itself, I received from the Bellefontaine authorities, also without certain sugges- 
 tions, or interpretations, which came to me from the ever-helpful Dr. Robert E. Schlueter, 
 the highest authority no doubt on McDowell, (l) Dr. McDowell's father, Major John 
 McDowell, Officer in the Revolutionary War, does not lie in this cemetery. (2) The first six 
 names that appear in the Index to the Plat are, as stated in the Index, those of persons whose 
 bodies had been removed from Illinois and reinterred in this plot, all of them, on July 2, 
 1867. Of these, the first-named, Amanda, would seem to have been Dr. McDowell's first 
 wife (born Amanda Virginia Drake, a daughter of the world-famous Dr. Daniel Drake of 
 Cincinnati). The "F" in her name as it appears in this Index is almost surely a typographical 
 error for V. 3 and 4 (Mary and Virginia) are understood to be the names of the two daughters 
 who were first interred in the Mark Twain cave, then (possibly) in the Methodist Cemetery 
 at Hannibal, Mo., then (undoubtedly) on an Illinois island in the Mississippi River. 
 
 (5) Josephine is understood to be yet another daughter. (6) The first "Dr. Joseph N. 
 McDowell" is understood to be Joseph Nash McDowell Jr., namesake son of the celebrity 
 in question. (7) The second Dr. Joseph N. McDowell II is the celebrity in question. (Or- 
 dinarily "II" is employed in the sense of "junior," not of "senior." Here, however, it is 
 used to indicate not "second-born," or "junior," but "second-buried" — i.e., in this par- 
 ticular graveyard. Inasmuch as Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell Sr's will does not mention 
 Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell Jr., either for good or for evil, notwithstanding that Mc- 
 Dowell Sr. appears to have been very fond of his namesake son, it is reasonably certain that, 
 at the date on which the will was made (March 22, 1867), Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, Jr. 
 was dead. Quite probably too he had been buried in Illinois, again quite probably on "the 
 island in the Mississippi River" whereon the two young daughters from Mark Twain's cave 
 had had their later interment. That island could have been a portion of Illinois, quite as 
 easily as of Missouri or Iowa. Then the notation at the right of the brace, "July 2, 1867, 
 removed from Illinois," would be perfectly intelligible. It appears to have been between 
 March 22, 1867 — date of the making of the will, which contains no religious expressions 
 or provisions whatever — and July 2, 1867 (date of the removal of the bodies from the Illinois 
 island to the holy ground in the Catholic cemetery of which this drawing shows the arrange- 
 ment), that Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell Sr. became converted from atheism to Catholicism. 
 All the data I have been able to discover are consistent with this explanation. 
 
 The fact that four of the bodies which had been here received after their removal from 
 Illinois are all given the same grave number, "2," means, apparently, that these four bodies 
 were all buried in the one grave-space — i.e., No. 2. The wife, Amanda F. (really V.), who 
 is assigned no number at all, might possibly have been buried in grave-space No. 1, at the 
 left of the left half of the plot, the carelessness of some official having resulted in no record 
 of that burial. 
 
 Josephine and Benjamin D. having not been mentioned in the will, either for good or 
 for evil, were probably, like some of the others, deceased at the date of the making of that 
 document. 
 
 Anna W. McDowell Speed and Drake McDowell were both mentioned in the will, and, 
 as appears by the dates of their interment, did not die till years after the death of their 
 distinguished father. Dr. McDowell's second wife, Sarah E., who by the way is mentioned 
 in his will, does not appear ever to have been buried in the McDowell lot. 
 
 Question. — Is it true, as often reported, that Jane McDowell, daughter of a Dr. McDowell, 
 who became the wife of Stephen Foster, celebrated American song-writer (Old Folks At Home, 
 Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming, etc.) was a niece of the elder Joseph Nash McDowell? 
 
 Answer. — After careful investigation I have to say that there is no relationship whatever 
 between Jane McDowell Foster and the famous surgeon, Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell. 
 
 To some readers it may seem that too much space has been given in this footnote to 
 Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell and his affairs, but all who are acquainted with his world-wide 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 149 
 
 And there you do nevertheless hold in your hand a stone — 
 notwithstanding and nevertheless and despite all the gods of 
 ill luck and misfortune. Of course it's a stone from a former 
 patient's bladder, but it serves the present purpose just the 
 
 reputation as an operative surgeon; with his almost incredible organizing ability (he was 
 the first to found west of the Mississippi River a medical college that lived); his outstanding 
 success as a maker of anatomists, sculptors and surgeons; his astounding personal audacity, 
 venom, eloquence, overflowing animal spirits, scientific penetration combined with crassest 
 superstition — in a word his tremendous impact on the medical profession generally — these 
 will not wonder at the footnote space which I have devoted to him here. In my forthcoming 
 volume, "History of Medicine in the Mississippi Valley," I shall attempt to do more justice 
 to this unique, multi-sided, highly eccentric character. 
 
 Though I have certified photostat copies of the recorded last will and testament of 
 Jos. N. McDowell, also of the Resolutions passed on his death by the Faculty of the Missouri 
 Medical College, September 25, 1868, neither of these documents, because of time-changes in 
 their ink, could be satisfactorily reproduced in this volume. I subjoin immediately here- 
 under, however, the words of both these instruments: 
 
 DR. McDOWELL'S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT 
 (Copied verbatim, literatim et interfunctuationim) 
 
 April 22 1867. 
 
 This instrument is written to express my wish as to what is to be done with the little 
 I leave behind me. 
 
 I desire My Son J D McDowell, to, administer on my, property. Real and personal 
 to give my Wife Sarah E. McDowell one third of the landed property, which may be un- 
 sold at my death; the remainder to be divided between himself and My Son, Charles N. 
 McDowell. I have given My Daughter Anna such property, as will make equal if not more 
 than equal with the remainder of my family, 
 
 My Son John has so conducted himself towards me, So unkindly and, to my own per- 
 sonal knowledge has turned all his influence against me, that I presume he does not wish 
 or expect anything of me. I commend him to the kind recollections of his of, his Father 
 & Mother and the mercy of God, with enough to bury him. 
 
 My Land in Hopkins Co Ky. I wish sold and the money divided, as and the land in 
 Iron dale as before indicated And my Land in Iron county to be sold and divided, and my 
 Land in [Undecipherable word] and New Madred Co's to be disposed of in Like Manner. 
 
 The household furniture was mostly furnished by money loaned me by my wife's 
 Mother and I therefore devise it to be given to her, together with all the silver excep one 
 tea set which I leave for her. to give to the child that, is most kind to her and in the dis- 
 charge of dutes to her Father. 
 
 The Lot of five acres of Land in Galveston I have always designed for my wife and I 
 wish her to have possession of it to do as he pleases with. The college Property is disposed 
 of and I wish the original Dsign carried out my Son J. D. McDowell. 
 
 My Sever vase now in the hands of my Son John J. McDowell I wish to be property 
 of my Son Charles. 
 
 My Books I wish to my good Muss Box I bequeath to my son Drake McDowell [Un- 
 decipherable word] in the college as belonging to it exception Such as may be duplicats, 
 or Such as May Serve to Set My Son Charles up for [Undecipherable word] 
 
 My Surgical instruments I wish to be divide with my Sons Charles McDowell & 
 Drake My Museum I wish to be left in the College and and under the control of J D McDowell 
 My horse & Buggy I wish my Son Drake McDowell, to take charge of and do with them 
 as is just in his own estimation 
 
 Bleving that my Son will do as I wish and as he ought to my family, 
 
 I subscribe my self, 
 
 Jos N McDowell 
 Witness 
 
 Sarah E, McDowell 
 Jno. D. Turnbull 
 C. N. McDowell 
 
150 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 same. — And, by the bye, don't forget to charge the present 
 patient double, because you've not only cut him for stone 
 but you've had to supply him with the stone in addition.' 
 "Hodgen, even in his merriest boyhood moments, would 
 
 STATE OF MISSOURI,) 
 County of St. Louis ) 
 
 BE IT REMEMBERED, That on this TWENTY FIRST day of JUNE A. D. 186 9 
 before me the undersigned JUDGE of the Probate Court of the County of St. Louis, per- 
 sonally came JOHN D. TURNBULL AND CHARLES N. McDOWELL who being EACH 
 by me duly sworn on THEIR oath say: 
 
 "WE saw JOSEPH N. MC DOWELL the testatOR subscribe hIS name to the annexed 
 instrument in writing, and heard h.IM declare the same to be hIS last Will and Testament; 
 WE subscribe OUR nameS thereto as witnessES 1 in the presence and at the request of the 
 said testatOR and at the time of the execution of said instrument as aforesaid, and of OUR 
 subscribing the same as such witness-E^, HE the said testatOR was of sound and disposing 
 mind, to the best of OUR knowledge and belief." 
 
 J. D. Turnbull 
 C. N. McDowell 
 Sworn to and subscribed before me this" 
 21st day of JUNE, 
 A. D., 18tfp 
 
 J. P. Vastine 
 Judge of Probate 
 STATE OF MISSOURI, ) s§ 
 County of St. Louis ) 
 
 BE IT REMEMBERED, That on this TWENTY FIRST day of JUNE A. D. 18ty it 
 being one of the days on the JUNE Term of the Probate Court of the County of St. Louis, 
 for said year, an instrument in writing purporting to be the last Will and Testament of 
 JOSEPH N. McDOWELL deceased, is produced in and exhibited to said Court upon ex- 
 amination whereof, and of the testimony of JOHN D. TURNBULL AND CHARLES N. 
 McDOWELL the subscribing witnesses thereto, it is considered by the Court that said 
 instrument in writing is duly proved to be the last Will and Testament of said JOSEPH 
 N. McDOWELL deceased. 
 
 Witness Wm. E. Wagner Clerk 
 of said Court, and the seal 
 thereof, at office, this 
 21st day of JUNE IS69. 
 W. E. Wagner Clerk. 
 
 '} 
 
 Comment. — One of the most glaring of the numerous faults in this will is that the two 
 chief beneficiaries under it — the wife and the son, Charles N. McDowell — are also made 
 witnesses to the document. It is generally the law now and it was in the time of McDowell 
 that no witness to a will can be also a beneficiary thereunder. Even when a statute ex- 
 pressly permits a witness to a will to be also a beneficiary under it, it is nevertheless bad 
 practice, as a matter of common sense, to make any beneficiary of a will also a witness 
 thereto. 
 
 Another important point about this will is the abundant evidence it supplies as to the 
 astounding personality of its maker. The will is what, in legal parlance, is known as holo- 
 graphic — i.e., entirely in the handwriting of the testator. A comparison of the writing 
 in the will with that in certain other documents and letters (for example the two McDowell 
 signatures on my father's diploma) leaves no doubt upon that point. Indeed in all of Mc- 
 Dowell's letters exactly the same words are misspelled and in exactly the same way as in 
 this will. And quite noteworthy it is that Jos. N. McDowell, one of the world's most 
 famous surgeons, a "miracle-man at operations," as he was called, should be so nearly an 
 absolute illiterate. One well qualified writer, himself a master in the art of writing good 
 English, says of him, "Joseph Nash McDowell received a splendid literary and medical 
 education at Transylvania University." More precisely expressed, no doubt, Joseph Nash 
 
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 MY SECOND LIFE 
 

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 A self-explanatory letter from Mr. Jefferson Davis who, aforetime, 
 had been President of the Confederate States of America. 
 
 (Cont'd over) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 152 
 
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 x^ 
 
 
 Second page of letter from Mr. Jefferson Davis 
 (Both pages reduced in size) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 153 
 
One of the numerous Log Cabins which, in my childhood and later, still stood 
 here and there among better houses in our small county seat. This particular 
 cabin stood just across the alley, east of Hayloft University. 
 
 In my very early childhood this cabin was inhabited by colored tenants, 
 most of them decidedly good people. As, however, the affinity between one of 
 the later of these colored families and my father's chickens increased enorm- 
 ously, my father bought the place. After that, only white tenants in the cabin. 
 The first white family was the Pattersons. Later came Grandpa and Grandma 
 Hyde and their grown children, Lilly and Luther. Many a night my brother 
 Jon and I, together with Fritz Niebuhr and Gus Heck, spent Elysian hours at 
 Grandpa and Grandma Hyde's. They were constant and intelligent talkers. 
 
 Later, the tenants were the Bailey family, including the oldest son, Henry, 
 of whom I speak repeatedly in this volume. This hut was the last to disappear 
 in Pittsfield. It had been built in the 1830's, and was typical of its time. 
 
 (Photograph by the present writer in 1897. Soon after that date this 
 cabin was supplanted by a handsome frame dwelling.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE I55 
 
 never have said a thing like that. He was a mere lad when 
 first I knew him. Later, the greatest surgeon I have ever 
 known. You have often heard me mention him: now I want 
 to tell you something more about him — something more con- 
 nected and always to be remembered. 
 
 "He was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky, about at the 
 very spot where, seventeen years earlier, Abraham Lincoln 
 had been born. Not more than eighty miles eastward, at a 
 town called Danville, old Ephraim McDowell, in 1809 
 (Lincoln's very birthyear, remember it by that) had perform- 
 ed the first successful operation for ovarian tumor — thus 
 
 McDowell, at Transylvania University, did receive on literary subjects splendid instruction, 
 but no education at all. 
 
 It is likewise worthy of notice that, in this will, the testator completely ignores the 
 customary instruction found in nearly all wills that, first of all, his just debts shall be paid. 
 Indeed this highly important matter the Doctor altogether ignores. True, the probate court 
 would see to the payment anyway, so long as the funds lasted. But it was characteristic 
 of Joseph Nash McDowell that he did not even mention debts. It was in fact quite usual 
 with the man to borrow of each and every student in his medical college as much money 
 as he could and then never to repay a cent of it. 
 
 Joseph Nash McDowell, in other words, although a god in surgery, was a devil in 
 finance. 
 
 RESOLUTIONS 
 
 Friday September 25th 1868 
 
 The Faculty met at the call of Drs. Walters and Curtman for the purpose of taking action 
 
 in reference to the death of Dr. Joseph N. McDowell, which had taken place this morning — 
 
 Members present Dr. John S. Moore 
 
 Dean pro tem 
 " Wm M. McPheeters 
 " J. H. Watters 
 
 Chas O. Curtman, Secy. 
 The following resolutions were submitted by Professor John S. Moore and unanimously 
 adopted by the Faculty — Resolved: 
 
 1. That it is with unfeigned sorrow that we have to record the sudden death of Pro- 
 fessor Joseph N. McDowell, our venerable friend and colleague, with whom we have been 
 so long associated. 
 
 2. That in the death of Dr. McDowell this institution has lost not only its founder, 
 but one, who has devoted his entire life and energies to the cause of Medical education in 
 the West; the profession one of its brightest ornaments and the community an honored 
 and useful member — one whose ear was ever open to the cry of the distressed and whose 
 hand was ever ready to alleviate the sufferings of humanity. 
 
 3. That we tender to the widow and family of the deceased our sincere sympathies. 
 
 4. That as a mark of respect we will attend the funeral in a body. 
 
 5. That a copy of these resolutions be signed by the secretary and sent to the family 
 of the deceased and published in the papers of the city. 
 
 Adjourned to meet at the call of the Dean. 
 
 Chas. O. Curtman 
 Secretary. 
 [Note by T. H. S. — In the two newspaper clippings which, in the Records of the College 
 appear, pasted, at the foot of these resolutions, the death-date is plainly stated as Sept. 25.] 
 
 Certified copies of Dr. McDowell's Death Certificate and the Plat of his Burial Lot in 
 Bellefontaine Cemetery are photographically reproduced elsewhere in this volume. 
 
156 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 (though only a village doctor) inaugurating for the entire 
 world the whole great era of abdominal surgery. About this 
 McDowell too, I will, some day, tell you much. Meantime, 
 do not confound Ephraim with Joseph Nash. Joseph Nash 
 was Ephraim 's nephew." 
 
 "I thought Hodgen was a Pittsfield, Pike County, boy." 
 "O, he was. He removed with his parents to a place near 
 Pittsfield — I will show you the spot some time 1 — in 1833, 
 three years earlier than the date when I became a Pittsfieldite. 
 In the Pittsfield school I first got acquainted with him, 
 though he was full five years older than I. Shy, almost 
 timid, he was yet pure gold. Both intellect and character he 
 had. Farming he disliked. His marked mechanical ability 
 drew him irresistibly into carpentering — in which ofttimes 
 misprized occupation he was a genius from the start. His 
 eye was true, his hand infallible, his brain most cunning and 
 idealistic. He could not make even a simple box without my 
 marvelling at the strangeness of its perfection. Why had 
 others not thought to make a box like that? 
 
 1 The place is still farmed and is still ofttimes known as "The John T. Hodgen 
 farm." It is south of Pittsfield a few miles on the Pleasant Hill Road, just south of Honey 
 Creek, and its legal description is: Martinsburg Township, Secton 11, N. W. }/£, east half. 
 A brief abstract of the property, as sent me by my brother, Joseph Shastid, is : U. S. to Hiram 
 Kinman and wife, March 6, 1833; H. K. and wife to Jacob Hodgen (John T. Hodgen's father) 
 May 17, 1835; Jacob Hodgen to H. T. Mudd and John T. Hodgen, April 1, 1852. (John T. 
 Hodgen, in 1852, though professor of surgery in the McDowell Medical College, St. Louis, 
 was nevertheless still struggling for financial existence by practisting medicine and surgery 
 at Pittsfield, Illinois, eight months out of each year. H. T. Mudd, however, a merchant at 
 Pittsfield and very wealthy was John T's father-in-law — which may help to explain the 
 great surgeon's ability to become at this time part owner of his old-home farm.) 
 
 Perhaps it is not trivial to mention the fact that both Hodgen and my father, even 
 when practising physicians at Pittsfield, used not infrequently to engage in standing-jump 
 contests, which were participated in by many youths and men, even on the Public Square. 
 The best records which were made in these contests both Joseph and I still possess. I, 
 however, do not here present them, inasmuch as, if I did, they might not be believed. I 
 will, however, state that, in all these contests, my father invariably stood second, while 
 Hodgen, always first, beat my father easily by half a foot. Hodgen's jump surpassed all the 
 officially recorded standing broad jumps of the day, even the later (and until now all-time) 
 record in 1904 of Ray C. Ewry — 11 feet, 4^8 inches. However, Hodgen, like all the pioneer 
 jumpers at Pittsfield, jumped with a 12-pound dumb-bell in each hand. Whether or not 
 the jump by Ewry was made without weights I do not know. 
 
 My brother Joseph also sent me this anecdote of Hodgen, which Joseph had received 
 from our father. A very famous surgeon from the East, on visiting Hodgen, commented, 
 while he gazed at Hodgen's library: "Doctor Hodgen, I am greatly surprised that so famous 
 a surgeon as you should have so small a collection of books." Hodgen's eyes flashed as he 
 answered: "But all my books are good books.- Furthermore, I know the most of them by 
 heart." 
 
 It was the truth. Hodgen, like Abraham Lincoln, learned "for keeps." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE I57 
 
 "Then, somehow, he became acquainted with Drs. Camp- 
 bell and Worthington, here in Pittsfield. They were family- 
 doctors to the Shastids, so I had known them both before. 
 They were also the first two doctors in Pittsfield. One day 
 Hodgen told me he was going to be an educated man. In 
 1845, therefore, he went clear to Bethany, Virginia, in order 
 to attend the school of his choice. 
 
 "Next year, however, he matriculated at the McDowell 
 Medical College, at St. Louis, from which institution, two 
 years afterward (1848), he was graduated. Returning to 
 Pittsfield, he located there. 
 
 "Son, it is never a bad idea for a professional man to 
 settle at once in the town wherein he grew up — especially if 
 it's a small town. He then knows his people from the begin- 
 ning of his practice, and knowing the people who are sick 
 is well-nigh as important as knowing their diseases. (At this 
 I began to think that, possibly, my father had had some 
 thought of attempting to make a doctor out of me^ so that 
 now he was vaguely hinting at the place wherein I ought to 
 start practising my profession. Long, long, had I hoped he 
 would some time believe me able to learn medicine and to 
 become the proper kind of doctor, but, apparently, he had 
 always had some undercurrent of misprision for my way of 
 life, especially my tendency to wander in the world intel- 
 lectual. Perhaps he had changed his mind now. I would 
 wait and see, however, let him broach the subject himself. 
 I, if I did it, might spoil all. 
 
 "And in Pittsfield Hodgen did well. I ofttimes think he 
 was happier too in our small town than ever he has been in 
 the big city of St. Louis, with his world renowned profes- 
 sorship and all his honors and glory. I, at all events, Thomas, 
 have been very happy here, here among mine own people, 
 mine. Spite of all the hard work, the heavy cares, the ex- 
 treme solicitude, very happy. 
 
 "One of Hodgen's earliest cases was a compound fracture 
 of the femur. He had to amputate. I remember precisely 
 how he looked that day — tall, lean, younger than his years, 
 athletic, features sharper than those of a cameo, than those 
 of a hawk. His eyes were a soft, dark brown, but steady, 
 thoughtful, deeply penetrating. I, though not even a medical 
 student then, by his request assisted him — at that amputa- 
 
158 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 tion. He appeared to think I had shown considerable ability 
 before that, I know not why." 1 
 
 "You don't know why, Father!, Why I think you're one 
 of the greatest doctors that ever have lived." He turned 
 upon me a glowing face. His eyes were actually shining 
 with the highest appreciation of my boyish words, so that, 
 as I looked, I became more and more astonished. At length 
 I began to perceive, though as yet very dimly, that what 
 even the most ambitious of fathers most ardently desires, 
 yearns for in fact above all else, above even the plaudits of 
 the entire world, is the unqualified respect, the sincere admira- 
 tion, of his son. This perception, however, this more or 
 less clear understanding that fathers do wish above all other 
 encomiums to hear the hearty "Well done!" from the man- 
 child or men-children of their loins, did not — so stupid I truly 
 was! — recur to me until I was thirty years of age and more. 
 Then, as one day I lay sick, my father's look, as he turned 
 his face toward me on the earlier day of which I write, re- 
 turned to me with unutterable pathos. And so I came to 
 write "A Country Doctor," which, thank God, could still 
 and actually did go before his living eyes. 
 
 But again as to that day so long ago. He ran on for a 
 very long time about Hodgen and all his superb qualities. 
 A man of great tact Hodgen had been. He carefully avoided 
 controversy. If any one condemned him, his motto always 
 was, "Forget it." Mac's had been, "Fight it." He possessed 
 a simple, homely charm, a shrewd common sense. He be- 
 lieved in concentration too — not "scatteration," the foolish 
 waste of valuable powers. My father, I now can see, was 
 not at all thinking at the time about my own great weakness 
 when he uttered those words — if weakness it really seemed 
 to him to be — but, young and sensitive as I was, I thought 
 that, by what he had just uttered, he had meant indirectly 
 and with the least of hurt to my self-esteem, to make me 
 
 1 Let me conclude the above-written passage by a swift summing up of my father's 
 capabilities. In a large city, perhaps even a large town, he would probably never have 
 shone as a surgeon. As an internist, especially a diagnostician, he would have been resplend- 
 ent anywhere. And as a teacher of philology, he would have stood within his chief rightful 
 domain — would possibly have been a leader of all others within it. 
 
 He loved words as he loved people. And no human being, I am quite certain, has ever 
 more naturally, more spontaneously, more instinctively and persistently loved all the 
 children of the Father of us all. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 159 
 
 understand I never could be a successful physician. So, for 
 a time, I sorrowed and was right glad I had left it to him to 
 broach "the important subject" in his own considerate man- 
 ner — or not at all, as he wished. 
 
 And he told me all about the great mechanical appliances 
 that his idol, Hodgen, had devised — the splints, the sus- 
 pension apparatuses, the various modes of ambulatory treat- 
 ment. Also he told me about the struggles which this great, 
 but also shy and diffident, man had had to go through before 
 he could reach the slightest recognition. "From Pittsfield 
 he had, after a two-year effort, joined in 1850 the gold rush 
 to California. (His knowledge of Pittsfield people, then, I 
 reflected, had not made him especially successful.) Back 
 without gold, he attempted to practice in St. Louis. A few 
 months stay there broke him completely, so that, with bor- 
 rowed money, he, in 1851, returned to little Pittsfield — amid 
 the jeers of unthinking persons. In 1853 he formed a part- 
 nership with Dr. Campbell, of Pittsfield. In 1852 I had be- 
 come his apprentice, he my preceptor. I had already been an 
 apprentice of Worthington and Campbell . He was proud of me, 
 perhaps because he had no other student. Thank God, at 
 all events, that I was Hodgen's pupil — although in the very 
 same year that I began to study under him, his ability at the 
 old college began to be remembered. Mac called him back to 
 St. Louis and to a place on the college faculty. 1 In 1854 I 
 went down to St. Louis and matriculated in his and Mac's 
 college. So, once again, he was my preceptor. In 1856 I 
 received my diploma from that college, the only diploma of 
 any kind I have ever possessed." 
 
 1 Even when Hodgen tried St. Louis for the second time, and even with the great Mc- 
 Dowell College back of him, he secured but little private practice — until after a certain 
 curious occurrence. An account of that occurrence I received in my boyhood indirectly 
 from the son (Goyne Pennington) of one of the participants, also directly from that par- 
 ticipant himself — Mr. Joel Pennington, then Proprietor of the Mansion House (hotel) at 
 Pittsfield. Inasmuch, however, as my brother, Joseph C. Shastid, still of Pittsfield, recalls 
 the story more distinctly than do I, I herewith reproduce it precisely as he wrote it to me 
 some time ago in a letter: 
 
 "This is the story of Dr. Hodgen and his saving a negro from drowning in St. Louis, 
 as told to me by G. S. Pennington: 
 
 'My father (Joel Pennington) was in St. Louis on business, and, while there, visited 
 with his former Pittsfield friend, Dr. John T. Hodgen. On a certain Sunday afternoon, my 
 father and Dr. Hodgen were out for a walk. Dr. Hodgen had just been telling my father of 
 his inability to secure practice sufficient to enable him to stay in St. Louis, and was begin- 
 ning to think that, in order to live, he had better return once again to his former practice 
 in Pittsfield. 
 
 " 'Turning a corner, my father and Dr. Hodgen came suddenly upon a group of people, 
 
160 . MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 He looked far away for a very long while. 
 
 "When the Rebellion broke out, the College broke up. 
 The old McDowell buildings became a military prison, and 
 among its inmates then — inmates, I hear, who were treated 
 very badly — were many of the former students of the college. 
 Hodgen, during this time, was Surgeon-General of Missouri, 
 also — strangely enough — Professor of Physiology at Mc- 
 Dowell's old enemy school, the St. Louis Medical College 
 — Pope's College, actually! Then he became its professor of 
 Clinical Surgery, next (in 1865) its dean. I predict that, 
 some day, he will ,be president of the American Medical 
 Association. 1 
 
 in a park, gathered about a little lake of water. Hodgen said to an onlooker 'What is the 
 matter?' The onlooker replied, 'A nigger just drowned in that fountain pool there!' In- 
 stantly Dr. Hodgen pushed his way through the crowd and to the fountain pool, and, upon 
 being told about where the negro was supposed to be lying in the water, he jerked off his 
 coat, vest and shoes, and handing them to my father, plunged into the pool, or small lake. 
 After four or five attempts, Hodgen brought up the colored man's body. After valiantly 
 trying resuscitation in the then approved methods, Hodgen turned the black man over on 
 his back, and, putting his mouth to the negro's mouth, literally pumped air into the black 
 man's lungs. This he did again and again. And the black man lived. 
 
 'The next day, my father told me, St. Louis was fairly alive with the tale of the 
 heroic rescue of the black man by Dr. Hodgen. Later, the story passed out over a number of 
 states. From that time on Dr. Hodgen had all the private practice that he could attend to.' " 
 
 1 A prediction which, in 1881, was fulfilled. 
 
 Dr. Hodgen died on April 29, 1882. According to The Medical Record, Vol. XXI, pp. 
 529-530: "He had been giving expert testimony in the courts on the day before, and had 
 asked to be excused from completing his evidence because of the 'intense agony and torture' 
 he was undergoing. When he reached his home he could not walk, but crawled upstairs 
 upon his hands and knees. Summoning his colleagues, Baumgarten, E. F. Smith, I. B. 
 Johnson, and E. H. Gregory, to his bed-side, he told them to save him, if possible, but that 
 he felt his end was near. He died next morning, and a post-mortem revealed erosion and 
 perforation of the gall-bladder, which produced the fatal shock and peritonitis. Professor 
 Hodgen journeyed to the Shadowland as he had walked the earth — calm, heroic, peaceful, 
 and with dignity." 
 
 Years before Hodgen's death, he and my father made a solemn compact, later ofttimes 
 renewed, that, whichever of the two died first would, were it anywise possible, return and 
 manifest his presence, being and absolute identity to the one still living. This compact 
 originated with Hodgen. Hodgen died, as above stated, in 1882. My father, not till 1912. 
 Yet no manifestation of Hodgen's presence was ever made to my father. Hodgen had fully 
 believed that, under certain circumstances, which now I have completely forgotten, he 
 could return. 
 
 Some time after I thought this volume had been completed, Dr. E. B. Montgomery, of 
 Quincy, Adams County, Illinois, wrote me a letter: 
 
 "My first acquaintance with Dr. Hodgen was on the occasion of the International 
 Medical Congress held in Philadelphia in September, 1876. I was just taking my first course 
 at Jefferson Medical College there and along with Dr. H. W. Kendall of Quincy went out 
 to the University of Pennsylvania to attend some of the sessions of the Congress. The 
 session I was particularly interested in was the section on surgery presided over by Joseph 
 Lister of London. Dr. Hodgen gave the opening and principal address on 'Antiseptic Sur- 
 gery', in which he was more than enthusiastic over this new development of Dr. Lister. 
 A number of American surgeons discussed the paper, many disagreeing with the author. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 161 
 
 "He is a very famous man, deservedly so. He has always 
 wanted me to settle near him in St. Louis, there to practice 
 by his side, to be perhaps a professor in the St. Louis Medical 
 College, to be (so he himself kindly puts it) known all over 
 the world. I love the very name of Hodgen, but I fear, I 
 dread, I detest, I absolutely abhor — ambition. 1 
 
 "It ruins so many people, ambition. Several persons I 
 have known have become insane as a result of their ambition. 
 Others who were reasonably prosperous already have been 
 broken up by ambition for greater wealth. This very day 
 we shall see a sick school teacher — a youngish man of ex- 
 cellent promise and much reasonable success — who is going 
 down into the grave ere long merely because of his ambition. 
 Unable to be content, he has overworked, studied in season 
 and out, wanted to go to a great city — still wants to go there 
 — to make a great name, to be famous. Now, as a result of 
 his efforts, he has tuberculosis. He must die." 
 
 Professor Lister was the final discussant, answering some of the objections of those who 
 preceded him. He gave a practical demonstration of his method showing the antiseptics 
 used and his spray producer. He emphasized the importance of thorough cleanliness and 
 hand scrubbing on the part of the operator. He quoted Pasteur at length and gave full credit 
 to him for this development of antiseptic surgery. My next meeting with Dr. Hodgen 
 was when after graduating at Jefferson I went in the fall of 1880 to St. Louis with a letter 
 of introduction from Dr. William A. Byrd of this city, one of the co-founders of the American 
 Surgical Association. Dr. Hodgen said, 'While Byrd is not one of our babies he is doing 
 good work', and invited me to his lecture. He [Hodgen] impressed me as one of the greatest 
 teachers to whom I had ever listened, with his quizzing the various students in the class 
 and calling them by name into the amphitheater to demonstrate what they knew. His 
 reputation was richly deserved and his early death from a ruptured gall bladder a great loss 
 to the profession of this country." 
 
 Says Ashburn in his "A History of the Medical Department of the United States Army" 
 (1929) pages 132-3, speaking of the above-mentioned meeting of the International Medical 
 Congress at Philadelphia in 1876: "The discussion of antiseptic surgery was opened with 
 
 a formal paper by Dr. John T. Hodgen, of St. Louis Lister himself then discussed 
 
 antisepsis, described in detail and demonstrated his technic, and emphasized his results 
 
 Lister apparently had no supporters other than Hodgen." These passages I quote (1) to 
 show that even as late as 1876, in the Surgical Section of the International Medical Congress, 
 whereat there had met together most of the leading surgeons of the earth, the only man 
 who stood up and supported the then unpopular views of Lister was John T. Hodgen, of 
 St. Louis. (2) to show that, in 1876 (the year I became my father's apprentice) the war 
 about the Germ Theory of disease production was just beginning to rumble in the distance, 
 the war which finally was to alter the destinies of mankind. 
 
 To put the matter differently: the night of the world was just about over; day was 
 beginning to break. 
 
 Dr. Montgomery, as a student in Jefferson Medical College, saw the first bright rays at 
 Philadelphia. I, as boy and doctor's apprentice, saw them in the backwoods of Pike County, 
 Illinois. 
 
 1 William Allen Pusey, of Chicago, himself a president of the American Medical As- 
 sociation (in 1924-25) was a first cousin once removed of John T. Hodgen. In other words, 
 Hodgen's mother was Pusey's grand aunt. When Pusey died (on August 29, 1940) some of 
 his obituaries mistakenly stated that he was Hodgen's great-grandson. 
 
162 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH 
 
 Father looked once more very far away, his eyes still 
 gleaming with his own suppressed ambition. "I might have 
 been a professor of philology, I suppose," he admitted. "Yet, 
 after all, I like it far better as a country doctor here in Pike, 
 here among the people that I love, in and out daily among 
 the farmhouses, in and out among the fragrant horse-mints 
 and the ox-eyed daisies and the clear songs of meadow larks, 
 or the saucy mockings of the jay birds, then back at night, 
 or perhaps in the morning, to see your mother and you four 
 boys again — or you, Thomas, all the while riding beside me. 
 It is better, far better so. — What's the matter now, Jim?" 
 
 Father had grown so accustomed to talking with his 
 horses because of the lonesome hours which he had spent on 
 country roads in their sole company, that he seemed now 
 and then to forget that horses are not quite human beings. 
 "No, Jim, you equine devil you, just what's the matter? 
 Hey, stop it! You've ambition too, no doubt, and no excuse 
 for having it either. What! I've never seen you yet, you 
 Satan out of Hades, act like that." 
 
 Jim, in truth, had stopped stock still, his long, mean- 
 looking head stretching strongly forward, as he always had 
 stretched it whenever he smelled some person or animal that 
 he did not like. His little ears were pointed strongly forward 
 too, each at a wide angle to his head, and the skin along his 
 spine shifted backwards and forwards villainously. He 
 stamped a forefoot. 
 
 At the same time Father gave a long, precautionary 
 whistle, when "all the sudden," as Pike County farm folk 
 would have put it, the authoritative Dr. Dublin dashed out 
 of a tree-lined lane, curved his flashing spokes into our road- 
 way and came pell-mell towards us. "Well, what the hell!" 
 He was evidently not going to treat us with silence this time. 
 
 "Morning, Doctor!" cried my father cheerily. 
 
 "Morning the devil! We're going to have a show-down. 
 Have it now. Shastid, by the Mighty, you're taking ad- 
 vantage of your professional position to mislead the good 
 people of this county." 
 
 "Haven't I any influence down in Calhoun or up in 
 Adams or across either river?" inquired my father, saucy as 
 a good-natured blue jay. 
 
K \\\ 
 
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 I ': 
 
 mm 
 
 '1111 
 
 mmmmmmmmmrm 
 mmmmMmmmmm^\ , , , . ,,,,. . ., , 
 
 THE OLD SHASTID HOMESTEAD 
 
 This picture was made as late as in the 1890's. Everything in it, however, excepting 
 the granitoid sidewalk, is about as it was in my boyhood, say from 1876 to 1880. 
 
 The Shastid home stands in the foreground to the right. Just above the well-curb 
 and on the roof of the frame addition to the main building, "General Grant," my favorite 
 coon — whose important relation to me and to my father's practice appears herein here- 
 after — used of nights to leap up again and again to the window, pitifully begging to be 
 taken into my room and bed. On the sidewalk, near the foreground maple, pauses for a 
 moment the little "pleck tock." 
 
 Behind this maple and, although so large a tree, completely blacked out by it, 
 stood, until quite recently, the giant cottonwood bearing its several generations of school- 
 boy initials — the cottonwood which appears so large a feature of the landscape in the 
 frontispiece to this book. In later years the cottonwood grew monumental with the 
 initials of all that army of once active by-passing school-boys engraved upon it — a 
 giant wooden memorial lifted toward the eternal sky and so out of sight, therefore ofttimes 
 for a good many persons completely out of mind. Farther back and bisected by the 
 maple is the house of my most excellent boyhood's friend, Mrs. Phimelia Garbutt 
 Purkitt, once foster mother of John G. Nicolay and motherly friend also of the quite 
 young John M. Hay. In this house it was that she regaled me many a time with stories 
 of her boys — the only boys, the only children, that she ever had had. How proud she 
 was, especially of Nicolay, the man who had "made" Lincoln president and "made" 
 Hay America's chief diplomat. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 163 
 
2;s£0 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 

 THE PITTSFIELD, ILLINOIS, SCHOOLHOUSE 
 
 Built 1861 to 1863, it housed both the grade 
 schools and the high school. The entrance near 
 figure, the south, is the one (quite reluctantly) 
 made use of by my father's apprentice. 
 
 From the time I began to attend school until 
 long after I had left Pittsfield, the janitor of 
 this building was "Old George." I do not even 
 yet know George what (Goll?) He was a large, 
 heavy-set, unmarried German who lived, I 
 believe, somewhere in the big school-building 
 all by himself. He was odd in many ways, 
 always smiling and always apparently con- 
 fident that he was talking fluently in the 
 English language — although in fact he knew 
 but little English. He used to "ring the bell 
 for school to take up" — a first bell and a last 
 bell. Any pupil that did not enter the school- 
 house before the "last bell" had quit sounding > 
 was reported as "tardy" — and several "tardies" 
 were a punishable offense. Old George, how- 
 ever, when he saw children still running school- 
 ward at a distance, would keep ringing the bell 
 till the last little kiddie had got safely past his 
 big, grinning countenance. 
 
 Old George was not popular with the teach- 
 
 ers. He used occasionally, even in recitation 
 time, to open recitation-room doors, pop his 
 large, grinning still-hatted head through them 
 and "josh" the teachers in his unintelligible 
 English, even try to ogle them saucily. 
 
 One night, deep in the night, George sent 
 some pal of his to awaken my father and tell 
 him that "Old George" was terribly sick in his 
 high-up room at the schoolhouse. Father re- 
 sponded to the call. Found the schoolhouse 
 doors all tightly locked against him. Dis- 
 covering a basement window open, he got 
 through it, tumbled all over a big coal-pile 
 beneath it. Lost, in fact, his pill-bags. Found 
 his pill-bags. Climbed, next, certain flights of 
 dark stairs, hunting George's room, never suc- 
 ceeded at all in finding it. Lost! Finally, he 
 somehow let himself out of the building. 
 
 For years after that, George would, in vaca- 
 tion time especially, attempt to tell Father 
 and me how, once upon a time, away in the 
 night, he had fooled Father. 
 
 George would always wind up with some- 
 thing like, "Vy! I nefer ket seeg! I zower- 
 kroud Tutchman." 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 165 
 

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 A CHARACTERISTIC LETTER FROM DR. JOHN T. HODGEN TO MY FATHER 
 Al the time this letter was written my father 1855, was again teaching school in Pike County 
 was not in attendance at the College. He had in order to secure the funds for his support at 
 already attended the session (or collegiate "year") the College during his final session of 1855- 
 of 1853-1854, but now, during the year 1854- 1856. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 166 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 167 
 
 "Damn your impudence, sir!" shrieked Dublin. The blaz- 
 ing blue eyes, the livid, almost apoplectic, face, the knots of 
 muscle ridging his large, square jaws, were a sight to behold. 
 "Damn your impudence! Damn — Damn — Damn your bug 
 theory! Bugs produce disease eh! Bugs get into your system 
 — the human system — produce diseases there — make you sick 
 — make putrefaction in wounds — make — make — " 
 
 Father took advantage of the irate man's inability to talk 
 longer by observing, "I know nothing about any 'bug theory' 
 of disease or of any bug-begotten putrefaction in wounds. 
 I do know that, in many diseases, anthrax for example, bacteria 
 — not bugs, but a very low order of vegetable organisms — 
 have been absolutely demonstrated — ' ' 
 
 "Fool!" 
 
 "To have caused the affliction — " 
 
 "Speaking of 'low orders,' how about yourself?" 
 
 "And the proof has been so perfect that even John T. 
 Hodgen — ' ' 
 
 "Shastid, did you ever hear the story about the fellow 
 that said, 'Wrong as I am, I am right?' " 
 
 "Yes," laughed Father, "I have heard it." 
 
 "Well that man's you. Ha, ha! Very good! Wrong as 
 I am, I am right." He raised his whip and was past us in 
 a second, Father softly murmuring, "Wrong as he is, i" am 
 right." Then, "Son, I want you never to forget these little 
 passages, these foolish clashes with Dr. Dublin. All the 
 world, some day, will recognize the value of the 'germ 
 theory'. Then mankind — But I'd better tell you first how 
 the situation has arisen. 
 
 "Here now, is the way, and it's interesting. Before the 
 time of Hippocrates the almost universal belief of mankind 
 about the causation of disease was that almost every bit of 
 it is produced by anger of the gods — i.e., through the agency 
 of devils, or evil spirits which they send to take possession 
 of human bodies. That view of the nature of disease the 
 authors of the New Testament did not even think of ques- 
 tioning. Hence their representation of Jesus again and again 
 as curing all manner of diseases by casting out devils. 
 Whether Jesus was thus correctly represented is more than 
 merely questionable. At all events those who wrote the 
 books about him — a long, long time after he died — un- 
 
168 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 doubtedly did themselves believe in the devil-possession 
 theory of the causation of all disease. So do primitive peoples 
 indeed even to the present day. In darkest Africa, for example, 
 the medicine man, to this minute, dresses up hideously, paints 
 his face fearsomely, puts horns on his head and so forth, then 
 starts leaping and yelling and drum-beating all around the 
 patient in order (literally) to scare the devil out of him. 
 
 "But Hippocrates, a Greek physician of a long time ago 
 (fifth century B. C.) established a new thought-era in the 
 world, the scientific thought-era. That era began, you will 
 olease to remember, in medicine, a long, long time before it 
 3egan in natural science generally (under Aristotle). Hip- 
 pocrates did not make much progress in the ascertainment of 
 disease causation. But he did lay down and thoroughly 
 exemplify the true principles whereby not only the causes 
 of disease but the causes of many other things can often be 
 correctly ascertained — i.e., by careful observation, together 
 with the accurate recordance and comparison of the facts so 
 arrived at and preserved. This, you see, is a very different 
 thing from merely accepting without examination and com- 
 parison with the facts old tales and traditions about gods, 
 devils, and so on, cooked up, all of them, by no one knows 
 just whom. 
 
 "Hippocrates surmised that the great majority of diseases 
 are produced by an improper mixture of the fluids ('humors') 
 of the body — the blood, the mucus, the yellow bile and the 
 black bile. This, the 'humoral' pathology, is still believed 
 in by a good many lay persons and even by some doctors. 
 
 "Hippocrates could not get at the real engenderers of 
 disease because, in his time, the instruments that make such 
 ascertainment possible had not been invented. Nonetheless 
 do not forget that Hippocrates it was who ascertained the 
 correct principles of scientific procedure, those which have 
 rendered possible the invention of all such instruments, as 
 well as an understanding of the proper way in which to 
 employ them — yes, principles correct even to this very 
 minute, and, no doubt, to the end of time. 
 
 "From Hippocrates on to the sixteenth century there 
 were numerous schools of medicine, almost every one of 
 them founded on this, that or the other theory of the pro- 
 duction of disease. Many are somewhat rational, others fan- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 169 
 
 tastic in the extreme. These you can find expounded with some 
 degree of fullness in my Renouard's 'History of Medicine'. 1 
 
 "In the sixteenth century (1590) there was invented the 
 compound microscope — by two Dutchmen, father and son, 
 Hans and Zacharias Jansen. Up to that time there had been 
 in use, of course, simple convex lenses, but these had had 
 little value (except weak lenses, used as spectacles) because 
 the greater the power of a lens the smaller must be the glass 
 sphere from which it was cut — i.e., the stronger the lens the 
 less must be its diameter, hence the less the object's illumi- 
 nation. Besides low illumination, increased power greatly 
 increased faulty coloration and distortion. A black disc with 
 a central hole in it diminished the discoloration and distor- 
 tion but, unfortunately, diminished the illumination still 
 further. In the compound microscope there are two lenses, 
 the first of which (the one that is next the object, therefore 
 called the 'objective') forming an image, after the manner of 
 a magic lantern, and the second of which (the one next the 
 eye, therefore called the 'eye-piece', or 'ocular') serving to 
 magnify that image very greatly. 
 
 "But the Jansen instrument, though powerful, was never- 
 theless quite faulty. It produced still worse coloration and 
 distortion of objects looked at. Nevertheless, Athanasius 
 Kircher (a Jesuit priest) who lived in the seventeenth century 
 and who worked a great deal with one of these faulty instru- 
 ments, expressly stated, and was the very first (1658) of all 
 in history to do so on a basis of actual investigation, 2 the plain 
 doctrine of living organisms as the causes of many diseases. 
 He even believed that he had seen the microscopic producers 
 of disease, but now we know that, with the microscope which 
 he possessed, he saw only the white and the red blood 
 corpuscles. Never forget, however, that great name — 
 Kircher, Kircher of Fulda. You can easily remember him by 
 the terrific irony inherent in the fact that the devil-possession 
 theory of disease causation (which is also the theory en- 
 dorsed by the authors of the New Testament) got the first 
 of its series of modern death blows at the hands of a Jesuit 
 priest. All honor to that seeker after truth. 
 
 1 My father's copy of this book I now possess, along with well-nigh all the other 
 volumes of his library. 
 
 2 Varro, in the first century, B. C, stated the same doctrine, but merely as a matter 
 of surmise or speculation. 
 
170 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 ' 'Then Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, having very much im- 
 proved the simple microscope, discovered both protozoa 
 (lowest order of animals) in 1674, and bacteria (lowest order 
 of vegetables) in 1676. He also discovered the yeast plant, 
 which, in our very own time, has formed the basis for many 
 of the greatest discoveries made by Louis Pasteur — of whom 
 more hereafter. Leeuwenhoek does not seem to have thought 
 at all about his protozoa and bacteria as possible causes of 
 disease, 
 
 "Dolland, of England, in 1757, by combining crown glass 
 with flint glass in his lenses, abolished, both from the 
 microscope and from the telescope, both the distortion and 
 the coloration of the object looked at — a most wonderful 
 invention, whereby the scientific investigation of the causes 
 of disease were facilitated greatly. 
 
 "Probably the first actual discovery of a microbe (micro- 
 scopic form of life, whether animal or vegetable) as the 
 engenderer of a disease was made by the great Italian, Bassi, 
 who, as early as 1836, showed that the cause of 'silkworm 
 disease' is a micro-vegetable now called Botrytis Bassiana. 
 Curious, is it not, that, of all microbic diseases, the first to 
 have its cause disclosed was a disease not of humanity but 
 of silkworms. Then, there were shown the cause of favus, 
 in 1839, and of sarcinae in the stomach, 1842. A greater 
 discovery still was that of the micro-organisms of anthrax, 
 in 1865, by Casimir Davaine. 
 
 "And now we come to Louis Pasteur, one of the few 
 'men of the ages'. Not the first was he to express the idea 
 of a contagium vivum. That, as stated, belongs to the Jesuit 
 priest, Kircher. And, after Kircher, Henle-and others had 
 expressed the same conviction long, long before Pasteur. 
 Neither was he the first to demonstrate some micro-organism 
 as being the cause of disease. Bassi and others, again, were 
 ahead of him there. Nevertheless, he placed the whole 
 subject of disease causation on a scientific basis, discovered 
 that 'the silkworm disease' is really not one but two diseases 
 (jpebrine and flacberie); discovered a cure for each; showed 
 conclusively that there is no such thing as the 'spontaneous 
 generation of life', thus at the same time proving that even 
 the lowest orders of living things (bacteria and protozoa, 
 the chief causers of disease) cannot come into existence mere- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 171 
 
 ly as the result of warmth and moisture, even in the presence 
 of decaying matter. Before that time it had been the almost 
 universal opinion, even among scientists, that grubs and 
 maggots (therefore the comparatively high orders of animals 
 known to develop out of these) did come into existence as 
 the result of warmth and moisture in the presence of putre- 
 faction. So those causers of so many diseases, the protozoa 
 and the bacteria, could likewise not themselves be produced 
 merely by warmth, moisture and putrefaction, but they must 
 have their origin, in each and every instance, from parents 
 belonging to the same species of animals or vegetables and 
 productive of the same diseases. In a word, Pasteur de- 
 veloped protozoology and bacteriology from a few mere scraps 
 of disconnected information into systematic sciences, based 
 on broad, well-founded principles. Once again, please notice 
 that not only was the first disease to have its microbic 
 origin discovered (by Bassi) a disease not of man but of 
 silkworms, hut that the first disease to be assigned an effec- 
 tive cure (by Pasteur) was, once again, not a malady of men 
 but of worms — silkworms. So it is not merely in the grave 
 that worms have had certain advantages over humanity. 
 
 "In fact, Tom, humanity seems to have been snubbed — 
 pathogenetically and therapeutically speaking — even worse 
 than that, for, in 1863 — two full years before Pasteur dis- 
 covered the twofold nature of 'the silkworm disease' and 
 the cure for each — he discovered the disease of wine — an 
 inanimate object — and the cures therefor. 
 
 "Many other great things too 1 we owe to Pasteur, who 
 is either the greatest man in all history or else the greatest 
 after that incomparable founder of scientific medicine, and, 
 through scientific medicine, of natural science generally — 
 Hippocrates." 
 
 "So Lister has had little to do with the matter!" I put 
 in, somewhat depressed. "And Doctor Dublin is just right 
 in despising at least him." 
 
 1 At this time Pasteur had not published anything on preventive inoculations. That 
 he did not do till 1880, and, on the prevention of hydrophobia in particular, not till 1885. 
 
 »For one or two of the points which I have shown my father above as setting forth in 
 his little history of pathogenetics, I have supplied a fact or two from recent medico-his- 
 torical sources. Even so, I have done my father much less, not more, than justice. I cannot 
 begin to exhibit adequately the fulness of his information on old-time doctors and medicine, 
 and I especially fail to convey the terseness, the picturesqueness, the vividness, with which 
 he always spoke upon this subject. 
 
172 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Listen, Thomas, and you shall hear of the greatness of 
 Joseph Lister also. Born at Upton, England, he graduated 
 in medicine at London, studied surgery with Syme in Edin- 
 burgh, married Syme's daughter, and in 1860 became professor 
 of surgery at the University of Glasgow. While at Glasgow 
 he became a benefactor of the human race (also even of the 
 lower animals) and for all time by his marvelous application 
 of the germ theory of disease to the treatment of wounds, 
 both surgical and accidental. Prior to that time, the mor- 
 tality, especially in hospitals, from erysipelas, hospital gan- 
 grene, pyemia, septicemia and tetanus, was simply frightful. 
 His own amputations, skilful surgeon though he was, show- 
 ed a mortality of fully 45 per cent. From Syme he had 
 already learned the value of cleanliness (though not perhaps 
 the actual reasons why cleanliness is valuable), also of fre- 
 quent dressings and abundant drainage. Nevertheless — 45 
 per cent ! 
 
 ' 'The chief difficulty of course was to prevent putrefaction 
 in wounds. 1 Nevertheless, the idea prevailed that a certain 
 amount of the 'right kind' of pus was really beneficial. This 
 right kind was termed 'laudable pus'. 2 It must look thus 
 and so, smell thus and so, and so on. But there is no such 
 thing as laudable pus. All pus is bad. Lister had been read- 
 ing the reports of Louis Pasteur on the value of heat for the 
 destruction of the micro-organisms of wine and milk, thus 
 preventing the souring of wine and the role of infectious milk 
 in the production of disease. Also he understood that pus- 
 producing organisms, though never as yet seen, even through 
 the microscope, and their deplorable effects, could be killed 
 in the same manner — that is to say, that pus (rather the 
 pus-germs known by their effects to be present within the 
 pus) would not, when subjected to heat, infect a wound, 
 whereas, if not so subjected, it would infect it. Now, to, 
 apply heat-sterilization to a wound was impracticable, for the 
 simple reason that the degree of heat required to sterilize a 
 wound would cook, therefore destroy, the tissues themselves 
 that had been wounded. He decided to seek for a chemical 
 
 1 Doctors, in those days, almost invariably spoke of "putrefaction," rather than of 
 "suppuration," in wounds, although the latter term was also used sometimes. 
 
 2 The writer remembers well indeed that, even as late as when he himself was a medical 
 student, the doctrine of "laudable pus" prevailed and was warmly supported by absolutely 
 every text-book on surgery. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 173 
 
 sterilizer, which, though destroying micro-organisms, would 
 not destroy tissues. After a number of trials and rejections, 
 he tested carbolic acid. It worked! On August 12, 1865, 
 he tried it on a compound fracture and with marvelous 
 success. In 1867 he published two papers on the subject, 1 
 and lo! 'the antiseptic system of surgery' had come into the 
 world. Since then his success has been a kind of ceaseless 
 magic — incredible, yet true." 
 
 MY FATHER PREDICTS 
 
 For some time my father gazed into space. Then — 
 
 "Some there be who cannot see the light — our good Dr. 
 Dublin for example. Others, like Hodgen, saw it immedi- 
 ately. I sometimes wonder if Hodgen were not really the 
 first man in America to turn Listerian. Would that more, 
 far more, could see at once and as clearly as does he. But, 
 even yet, there are numerous doctors, not to say nurses, who, 
 in all their work, are filthy in the extreme." 
 
 I all at once recalled and quite vividly a very recent in- 
 cident to which I myself had been witness. Into a case near 
 Barry, one that was being attended by my father at the time, 
 a doctor from Hannibal had been called in. Overruling all 
 that my father had intended to do, he at once (for a com- 
 pound fracture) began to amputate an arm above the elbow. 
 I, with my father, saw him at his work. As my father ex- 
 plained to me later in the buggy, this Hannibalian was a 
 fair mechanic, handled everything however with dirty 
 strength instead of clean dexterity. In fact, while perform- 
 ing the operation, he had not once but a number of times 
 actually spit both on his hands and on his instruments ! 
 
 "There has grown up," my father was continuing, "in 
 the medical profession a considerable war about the truth — 
 whether much, little, or none — in the germ theory of disease 
 and its practical applications to the treatment of wounds — 
 Listerism. More unfortunately still, the laity itself has en- 
 tered the conflict — not understanding in the least what it's 
 all about — and, indeed, the ministry — which ought to know 
 better but does not. 
 
 1 The first was "On a New Method of Treating Compound Fractures, Abscess, etc., 
 with Observations on the Conditions of Suppuration," Lancet, Vol. I, pages 326, 357, 387, 
 507. The second was "On the Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of Surgery," British 
 Medical Journal, Vol. II, pages 246-248. 
 
174 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Those who oppose the germ explanation of the produc- 
 tion of disease, at least many diseases, also the antiseptic 
 treatment of wounds, have no true insight into either re- 
 ligion or science. They just cannot understand that God is 
 one, that there cannot be a God of demonstrable truth who 
 is at the same time a God of demonstrable error. There is 
 only one God, and he is the God of the Truth. His real 
 Bible is Collective Truth — truth wherever it is found. A 
 scientist who does not see the spiritual truth contained in 
 the Bible, that inward truth outshining above all of that 
 volume's exceedingly manifest errors, is spiritually blind. 
 So too is the preacher who cannot take in the rest of the 
 vision — that part which comes to us from extra-Biblical 
 sources — from nature and through science." 
 
 Again he gazed afar. Then he continued, with the look 
 of a prophet : 
 
 "Heretofore the human race has not really lived. It has 
 always been either dying or getting ready to die. Even at 
 the present day the average length of human life is only 
 about twenty-nine years — all preparation and no perform- 
 ance, all seed-time and no harvest. The tall old man with 
 the long white beard and inexorable scythe mows down each 
 generation before it can harvest the crop from its own aspira- 
 tions and endeavors. No, hitherto the human race has had 
 no chance to live, but now, thanks to Pasteur, Lister, Koch, 
 as well as to those who prepared the shining way for them 
 — the Jansens, Kircher, Leeuwenhoek, Bassi and so on — the 
 race will now have a chance to live. No longer will human 
 beings suffer and die by millions in the helpless hells of in- 
 numerable diseases and that, even before the great majority 
 of them have had time to reach manhood and womanhood 
 — cursed to the uttermost by the ridiculous theory (which 
 has come down to us from times the most primitive) that 
 practically all diseases are produced by devils taking posses- 
 sion of the human body. Instead they will live, practically 
 all of them, to a good old age — an old age which will itself 
 be long deferred by the prolongation of the adolescent and 
 middle periods of life, the fruitful, the productive, what 
 should be the happy, years. 
 
 "And one of the finest things about the whole situation 
 is that this prophesy of mine will be fulfilled soon. What is 
 
MM 
 
 MM" : ^ - ;.«»■■ 
 
 JOSEPH NASH MCDOWELL 
 
 Founder of the famous "McDowell College," Medical Department of the 
 University of Missouri. Great surgeon and greater teacher. Next to Para- 
 celsus, probably the most eccentric of all physicians. 
 
 This, the only known authentic, portrait of McDowell is from Otto 
 Juettner's "Daniel Drake and his Followers." (Harvey Pub. Co., Cincinnati, 
 1909.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE- 
 
pes i d enc e or M A RTHA DEEMER sec 21 pfari.tr pikeco. ills. 
 
 A Representative Pike County Farm House of the Better Type in the 1870's. 
 
 (From "Atlas Map of Pike County, Illinois": 
 Andreas Lyter & Co., Davenport, Iowa: 1872) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 176 
 
' ' ' 'ill 
 
 *7* ,/ 
 
 THOMAS WORTHINGTON, M.D., A PRECEPTOR OF JOHN THOMSON HODGEN 
 
 Dr. Worthington was born near Knoxville, Tennessee, June 10, 1808. Having removed in his youth 
 to Illinois, he fought in the Black Hawk War. His medical degree he received in 1835 at the Cin- 
 cinnati Medical College, Cincinnati, Ohio. In the same year he settled at Pittsfield, Illinois, being 
 the first physician to live and practice in that place. 
 
 Dr. Worthington, as a diagnostician, was a continual source of astonishment to physicians from 
 larger cities who were called to Pike County in consultation. His general learning was prodigious, 
 especially in mineralogy and geology. A member of the state senate twice, he was popular with 
 all classes. For a time he was a partner in medical practice with Dr. Campbell. As a financier, he 
 was unusually successful. From his own resources solely, he built in 1836 a remarkably beautiful 
 edifice in the west end of Pittsfield, a structure in the form of an old Greek temple, wherein he intended 
 to house a young ladies seminary. For some reason the educational project fell through, whereupon 
 the Doctor, with his family, moved into the building as their place of residence. A few years later 
 the Doctor retired from the practice of medicine, and from then until his death, he was occupied 
 chiefly in the Rocky Mountains, wherein he made numerous mineralogical and geological investi- 
 gations. 
 
 He died at Pittsfield, November 14, 1888, aged 80. The beautiful Greek temple which he had 
 erected in the cause of education and in which he had entertained Abraham Lincoln, John Hay and 
 John G. Nicolay, continued to stand in Pittsfield even until 1940, a fitting memento and symbol of 
 the character and life of this first Pittsfield physician. 
 
 With equal fitness, when the structure was taken down, it was replaced by the Illini Hospital, 
 the first public hospital building in all Pike County. 
 
 (Portrait by Guerin, St. Louis. From the collection of Mrs. Elitha (L. A.) Chamberlain, Pitts- 
 field, 111., by the courtesy of her niece, Miss Helen Abbott.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
WORTHINGTON HOME 
 Home of the First Physician to Settle in Pittsfield, Dr. Thomas Worthington. 
 (Original Photograph Lent by William Strauss, Pittsfield, 111.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 179 
 
 called the germ 'theory' of disease production, together with 
 what Lister terms 'antiseptic' surgery, will be fully accepted 
 by the profession and even the laity in the course of the next 
 few years. 1 
 
 1 The only point my father was mistaken about in all his enthusiastic prophesy was 
 that the wonderful change — the transformation of the old earth into the new — would come 
 to pass very soon. Long decades, in truth, were needed to go by before his beautiful predic- 
 tion could be at all fulfilled. This was due, in part at least, to the standing and great general 
 ability of the opposition. Those who vigorously opposed the new explanation of the origin 
 of most diseases, did not by any means consist only of the illiterates, the Y. of P. men, the 
 moss-backs, the stick-in-the-muds. Among them in fact were such world-renowned uni- 
 versity professors as John Erick Erichsen, Sir James Y. Simpson (discoverer of general an- 
 esthesia by chloroform), Lawson Tait (marvellous Birmingham operator), Benjamin Ward 
 Richardson and Joseph Snow (renowned surgeons of London), Henry Charlton Bastian 
 (professor of pathological anatomy in University College), and even the mighty Billroth, 
 of Vienna (whose pupils comprised perhaps nine-tenths of all the celebrated teachers of 
 surgery in western Europe). 
 
 When I, in 1888-89, became a student of the eye, ear, nose and throat at the University 
 of Vienna, I found that Professor Billroth was still not wholly converted to the germ theory 
 of disease and Listerism. His first assistant, however, von Iselsberg (whose course on frac- 
 tures and dislocations I joyfully took despite my specialization) was body and soul a Lis- 
 terias One day, in a private conversation with him, as we walked along the Ringstrasse, 
 I gave him a connected account of the little war about the contagium vivum, which, in my 
 boyhood, had raged in the backwoods of Illinois. To this he referred again and again, on 
 the street, in dem Allgemeinen Krankenhaus, in fact wherever I met him. To his pleasure 
 in my simple narrative I have sometimes ascribed the high encomium which he passed upon 
 my work in general surgery under his tutelage and which he was kind enough to put into a 
 handwritten testimonial which he gave me and which he said I might use whenever and 
 wherever I chose. Billroth, as I remember, to the close of his life, opposed the doctrine of 
 specificity in the disease producing activities of microbes. There were bacteria, he thought, 
 each of which was capable of producing not merely one, but many, diseases; while, on the 
 other hand, any given disease might, he believed, be produced by any one or more of a con- 
 siderable number of bacteria. 
 
 The slowness of the progress made by the germ theory and its corollary, Listerism, 
 cannot be more quickly and yet effectively exhibited, I think, than by the following quota- 
 tion from Baas's immortal "History of Medicine," (first published, 1889) in the English 
 translation, revision and enlargement by Handerson (note the date) in 1910: "Inasmuch as, 
 according to Lotze, we cannot foretell the future, but merely prepare ourselves for it, it is 
 wisest to refrain from all criticism of the fate of the germ theory, although, from the almost 
 universal enthusiasm in its behalf at the present moment, a skepticism based upon the 
 history of the past disposes one to doubt its permanence." 
 
 The old "carbolic acid spray pump," of which Lister was at first so proud (and which 
 I, as a lad, actually worked again and again) soon passed into the discard. It had been 
 employed to moisten with a carbolic vapor both the surgeon and the patient, as well as the 
 atmosphere. It was soon supplanted by the steam sterilizer, which required no pumping. 
 It, quite naturally, now and then produced serious poisoning. After a time, largely as a 
 result of Lawson Tait's criticisms, antisepsis gave way to asepsis — which, largely, was 
 simple cleanliness. No longer did surgeons operate with dirty nails and fingers and hands, 
 and while clad in the dust-filled clothing of the street. (I personally have seen them do it 
 some fifty or a hundred times.) They cleaned themselves from top to toe, put on sterilized 
 gowns. Then came sterilized rubber gloves (introduced by W. S. Halsted in 1890), sterilized 
 caps, face-masks and so on. "Sterilization of the air" was no longer practiced after the 
 abandonment of the carbolic acid spray, although, to be sure, the operating room is now 
 quite clean and practically sterile. 
 
 Even yet, however, in the various histories of medicine and in most of the general en- 
 cyclopedias I look in vain for adequate recognition of the worth to the world of the germ 
 theory and of antisepsis and asepsis. Thus", in Garrison's "History of Medicine" (2nd edi- 
 tion, 1917) I find in the "Index" neither "asepsis," nor "germ theory," nor "contagium 
 
180 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Then my father, out of sheer joy in the matter, began to 
 apostrophize a certain grand personage from the long ago. 
 He cried, "Who are you, phantom from the unseen?" 
 
 vivum," nor "carbolic spray," nor "spray carbolic". To "Joseph Lister" are devoted not 
 quite four pages out of a total in the book of 791. To poor Pasteur is assigned a niggardly 
 three. Yet Garrison's is one of the best and most carefully composed of all the histories of 
 medicine. Nutting and Dock's "History of Nursing," fine as it is in a number of respects, 
 does not even mention Lister, Pasteur, contagium vivum, antisepsis or asepsis, either in its 
 "Contents" or its "Index," and these subjects themselves, if treated at all in the two capaci- 
 ous volumes of nearly 1000 pages, must be hunted for therein with more expenditure of time 
 and energy than even my patient and rather energetic self am willing to bestow. As to the 
 general encyclopedias, the treatment accorded to, say, "Lister, Joseph," in "New Ameri- 
 canized Encyclopedia Britannica (Twentieth Century Edition, 1906)" is fairly typical even 
 of encyclopedias published at the present day. Lister, in the main department of the ten- 
 volume book, is ignored absolutely. In the appendix, however, occurs this scanty though 
 
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 ZEUGNISS FROM PROFESSOR VON EISELSBERG 
 (Much reduced in size.) 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 181 
 
 Then, as if it were the phantom speaking, "I am the 
 immortal spirit of medicine, Hippocrates the Second. 1 Time 
 for me has no meaning, excepting that there are three times 
 only — the time which was before me (superstition); the 
 time which elapsed from my appearance and my alterations 
 of things (observation and experiment, but without instru- 
 ments); and the time which is now to supplant me and most 
 of what I did (observations and experiments with instru- 
 ments). You shall see much, but he that is with you shall 
 see more, the unimaginable new Paradise, the transforma- 
 tion, the glorified earth with man therein happier and more 
 blessed by far than any of the merely imagined gods on Mt. 
 Olympus with all the sickness and suffering they themselves 
 are supposed to have endured." 
 
 MEDICINE UNTIL THEN: AN AUTOPSY 
 At about this time — I remember the fact distinctly — old 
 Jim, "the equine devil" began shuddering again, tilting his 
 slim ears one forward and one back. All at once he sent 
 forth a loud challenging neigh, then stopped stock still. 
 WHIZ! Dr. Dublin went flying past us. There were of 
 
 laudatory "life" of one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, benefactors of the human 
 race: "LISTER, Lord Joseph, an English surgeon, born in 1827; became surgeon extra- 
 ordinary to the Queen and in 1880 received the royal medal of the Royal Society, and in 
 1881 the prize of the Academy of Paris for his invaluable discoveries in antiseptic treatment 
 in surgery known as 'Listerism'. 
 
 I have for some time had in preparation a "History of the Germ Theory of Disease, 
 Antisepsis and Asepsis," wherein I endeavor to depict not only that theory and those 
 prophylactic, therapeutic and surgical methods which grew out of it, but also the fierce 
 warfare which, for more than three long decades was waged about that theory and those 
 measures. 
 
 Meantime — let us back to the little side-war, those unseen skirmishes reverberating redly 
 amid Pike County hills. Not exactly a comic opera war was that strife either. On the 
 acceptance or rejection of the germ-theory of disease and its various corollaries in such remote 
 localities generally, hinged the actual fate of the great majority of human beings upon this 
 planet. 
 
 1 Or, "the Great." Hippocrates I was his grandfather. Hippocrates II, the Great, was 
 descended from a long line of Cos physicians (physicians who practised at the temple to 
 Asklepias on the Isle of Cos). Thus : Nebrus (great-great-grandfather); Gnosidicus (great- 
 grandfather); Hippocrates I (grandfather); Heraclides (lather, who had married the midwife, 
 Phainarete); Hippocrates II, the Great. Hippocrates II, in turn, became the ancestor of 
 many physicians. Hippocrates III and IV were his sons; V and VI, his grandsons. And he 
 had still other descendants in the medical line. 
 
 Curious it is that, even to the present day, physicians so frequently beget physicians — 
 ofttimes from wives who have been trained nurses. As a rule, physicians by precept warn 
 their sons against becoming doctors, yet, by example, irresistibly lure them into the pro- 
 fession. And, as usual, "example is stronger than precept." 
 
182 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 course other doctors than these two, my father and Dr. 
 Dublin, in Pittsfield, and there were also a few other doctors 
 located in the smaller villages of the county. But Dr. Dublin 
 and my father were the two most constant figures on the 
 country roads and the Pittsfield streets, both by day and by 
 night. In fact, as I rode with my father, I think I saw Dr. 
 Dublin on the highways oftener than the five or six other 
 Pittsfield physicians, all told. So it was no special wonder 
 that, in those particular days of which I now am writing, 
 we met Dr. Dublin with very great frequency. Anyway, 
 he now went flying past us again, and I thought, but perhaps 
 I merely imagined it, that I heard once more a mocking 
 voice, "Wrong as I am, I am right." Jim, of course could 
 have felt no animosity toward Dr. Dublin, and was no 
 doubt inimical toward his blood-red bay alone, but I affected 
 to believe that, in some mystical way, Jim knew that Dublin 
 was our enemy. 
 
 "Nonsense!" said my father, as I expressed that thought 
 to him. Later, he was not to think the matter so seemingly 
 nonsensical. Just now, however, in response to a question 
 I had formerly asked and he had not yet answered, he said, 
 "Well, just what are the causes of disease, according to the 
 views of all the doctors at the present time — aside, I mean, 
 from the new, the microbic, doctrine of the origin of many 
 diseases — a doctrine not yet by any means accepted? After 
 the passing of all the ages from the earliest man until now, 
 here is the total result — a summary of our present doctrines; 
 and you can see immediately what an inconsistent mess, 
 what a perfectly confused jumble, the science of disease 
 causation consists of at this moment. The doctrine of devil- 
 possession is almost, not quite, a matter of the far away past. 
 Doctors, with a few exceptions, no longer believe in it. 
 Dublin scoffs at it. More of the laity hang on to it, and far 
 more still of the clergy. But, in general, the subject is simply 
 avoided in pulpits and even in the most religious homes. 
 The humoral theory of old Hippocrates has still some ardent 
 adherents among the laity and country doctors. Some, even 
 among the physicians in the cities today, following the 
 physicians of the seventeenth century — Sylvius, Harvey, 
 Willis and so on — believe that certain 'humors' are naturally 
 acid, others naturally alkaline, and that, whenever the 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 183 
 
 humors of the acid type are present in excess, they should 
 be neutralized by the exhibition of alkalies and vice versa. 1 
 
 "Closely related to the humoral theory is the doctrine 
 that many diseases are caused by too little or too much blood. 
 ('Blood,' you remember, was one of the four 'humors' of 
 Hippocrates.) For the former the profession exhibits, and 
 properly, 'beef, wine and iron.' For the latter until quite 
 recently, it 'phlebotomized' — in simpler language, 'bled.' 
 And how many people, in the course of long centuries, have 
 gone to their graves because they were bled into them. 
 George Washington, first president of the United States, was 
 one of those. You have seen no bleedings done by me, but 
 Doctor Dublin still occasionally resorts to them. I have tried 
 to tell him that to -have a patient miss a meal or two will 
 reduce the volume of his blood quite as efficiently as any 
 venesection. But — no use. 
 
 "Then there are other doctrines — for example, that 'there 
 are always in the human tissues passive morbid properties, 
 which, under the action of a morbid force, are developed into 
 active disease. The various emotions are supposed to be 
 prolific causative agents. They do no doubt contribute to 
 the production of swoons, hysteria, and some other diseases. 
 But perhaps bacteria play even in these diseases some pre- 
 paratory role. Miasms (poisonous airs) likewise too great 
 heat and coldness of the air are very much stressed by the 
 
 1 A bit of theoretical nonsense which, in the late 1890's and the earlier 1900's, was re- 
 vived in a curious form by Haig, of London, in his "Uric Acid Diathesis." This doctrine 
 ruled with a rod of iron until about 1909 to 1916, when Drs. Frank Billings, E. C. Rosenow 
 and others showed conclusively that most of the diseases which, by Haig, had been thought 
 to be produced by uric acid, were really being engendered by "focal infection" — in other 
 words by nests, or colonies, of bacteria in other portions of the body than that in which 
 the disorder under consideration was located. How often, too, from about 1896 to 1909 — 
 the dozen years of uric acid rule — I, in common with other oculists, cured with glasses cases 
 of severe eyestrain which many physicians had been calling "uric acid diathesis" and had 
 treated unsuccessfully and for long periods with alkalies. 
 
 Glancing over a number of "Histories of Medicine" which chance to lie at my hand, 
 including even the full and very scholarly volume by Fielding H. Garrison, I find neither 
 "Haig" nor "Uric Acid Diathesis" in any of them. Not so much as a single mention! 
 Curious, is it not, that highly important subjects like "Y. of P. men," the oophorectomy 
 craze, the uric acid diathesis and so on, are simply ignored even in the most extensive histories 
 of medicine. Why? Is it because such chapters in our history seem discreditable to us? 
 Surely not. They do in fact contain most valuable instruction for us, guidance for our future 
 conduct. I have myself, howsoever presumptuously, been for a long time preparing a series 
 of smallish volumes on these and similar subjects. Fearing, however, that fate may not 
 permit me to complete them, I have, in the present volume, included a good many sketches 
 of Y. of P. men (see especially that section of the "Appendix" entitled "Y. of P's and 
 Atypical M.D's"), and the reader will, I hope, as a result of his perusal of those sketches, 
 perceive how full, at least of "human interest," that hitherto neglected subject is. 
 
184 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 doctors of today as disease engenderers. The coldness of the 
 air, in fact, is accused by the great majority of them as 
 being the cause of putrefaction in wounds. These physicians 
 point out the fact that wounds which lie exposed to air, 
 especially cold air, are far more likely to suppurate, or 
 putrefy, than are those which are promptly sealed up. The 
 fact is true; the inference, wrong. It is the dust of the air, 
 largely composed of putrefactive bacteria, which, in a long- 
 open wound, gets into the wound and infects, or contamin- 
 ates it. These bacteria, unless destroyed — as by Joseph 
 Lister's carbolic treatment — proceed to live on the sides of 
 the wounded tissues and to colonize — i.e., to reproduce their 
 kind. The excreta of the colonies, being poisonous to human 
 beings, cause, when they have been absorbed by the tissues 
 and carried by the blood to all parts of the body, chills, 
 fever and ofttimes death. But the anti-Listerians cannot see 
 that this is so. They think that the suppuration in the wound 
 is caused by the coldness of the atmosphere only, not by its 
 dust — the microbic portion thereof. But it remains a fact 
 that, after the use of carbolic (if it be employed early) the 
 coldness of the air has no effect. 
 
 1 'These same 'coldness of the air' people believe that 'night 
 air' in particular, being colder than that of the daytime, is 
 one of the chief begetters of disease. Hence their caution to 
 all parents to 'keep their children in at night and all the 
 doors and windows tight.' Yet, most inconsistently, they 
 also advise that children be permitted to play outdoors in 
 the winter daytime. As if the 'coldness' of the air in winter 
 by day were not much greater than that of summer by night ! 
 Malaria, too, they believe to be caused by bad air. The 
 very word 'malaria,' in fact, was given to this disease — of 
 which we see so much here in Pike County — by the Italian 
 physicians — mala aria meaning simply 'bad air.' I believe, 
 however, that it will eventually be found that malaria is due 
 rather to certain bacteria which grow and proliferate in 
 swampy soil than to the smell-filled air which hangs over 
 that soil. 1 
 
 1 Malaria was, in fact, on November 6, 1880, discovered by Alphonse Laveran to be 
 due not to a bacterium, but to a protozoon — a microscopic animal of the genus "Plasmodium. 
 The vector (carrier) of this parasite to man was discovered in 1897 by Sir Ronald Ross to be 
 the Anopheles mosquito. The best medicine for malaria had already been discovered, away 
 back in the mysterious past, by the Indians of Peru. It was brought to Europe as a secret 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 185 
 
 "Perhaps, however, the most of our people, physicians 
 and laity alike, believe that most diseases are not produced, 
 not caused, by anything. Diseases simply come — just as the 
 sun, the moon and the stars rise and set. 'Is there anything 
 to cause the heavenly bodies to rise and set?' they inquire. 
 'Of course there isn't. They just rise and set — don't have to 
 be caused.' " 
 
 A RELEVANT IRRELEVANCY 
 
 A flock of children pouring from an open near-by school- 
 house door interrupted my father by their shoutings and 
 gay laughter. Father at once drew rein and the children 
 collected round the buggy. ' 'Doctor Shastid ! Doctor Shastid, 
 make us a whistle," they cried. A boy quickly handed him 
 a section cut from a willow branch. 
 
 Now, there are several ways of making a willow whistle, 
 but my father's was the best. He took the delicate cylinder 
 the boy had tendered him, and, as there must be no knots 
 or other imperfections in the material, looked it over care- 
 fully, approved it. Next, he cut one end of the cylinder 
 perpendicularly, the other slanting. An inch beyond the 
 slant-cut end he made a notch about one-fourth the circum- 
 ference in extent. Half way to the other end he incised a 
 complete circle, going no deeper than the bark. Next, he 
 laid the whistle-to-be on his left thigh, and, taking the 
 knife by the blade with his right hand, gently pounded the 
 soft, green bark, turning the precious cylinder over and over 
 on its long axis with his left hand while he pounded. 
 
 Knife laid on seat, he gently — ever so gently — slipped 
 and slid the tender bark from the solider white core of 
 wood underneath. All the big little eyes round about us 
 were fixed steadily on that wood. 
 
 (Do you, reader, perchance inquire, Was it really an es- 
 sential part of the practice of medicine in those days to make 
 
 remedy by the Jesuits in 1632, and, again as a secret remedy, by Juan del Vego in 1640. 
 The latter, having cured with it the malignant malaria of the Countess of Cinchon, christened 
 it "Cinchona bark" in her honor. Louis XVI, of France, having been cured of malaria by 
 the same remedy, purchased the secret and gave it to the world — one of the few good deeds 
 performed by that murderous and dissolute monarch in all his seventy-two years of rule — 
 or misrule. (Incidentally: even the savages of Peru very clearly discerned the great superi- 
 ority in malarial diseases of Cinchona over the "casting out" of devils.) The best preventive 
 of malaria was found — again a discovery by Sir Ronald Ross — in 1902, to be the asphyxiation 
 of the Anophelesian larvae by the spraying of oil on the pools and marshes where the 
 Anopheles mosquito breeds. 
 
 Later. — As to the Countess, see Haggis (Bull., Hist, of Med., X, Nos. 3 and 4). 
 
186 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 willow whistles for little children? I must answer, It is 
 plain that you never have practised medicine in the back- 
 woods either in those days or in these. The sick child, even 
 now, who has seen its doctor make a whistle, will, at the 
 least suggestion of that doctor, submit to a painful examina- 
 tion or swallow the bitterest medicine down without a gasp.) 
 A longish thin slice of wood was then taken off the top 
 of the core from the notch to the core's end. At this point, 
 by long established and very sacred custom, that core would 
 next be passed into the whistle-maker's mouth and rotated 
 "just to slick it up with mouth varnish." This technical 
 step, however, was, by my father, omitted. He, instead, 
 at once replaced the core of wood in its delicate sheath, and 
 then, as was his wont, turned the magic cylinder over to 
 "the littlest of all the girls" and clucked up his horse to 
 the whistling of the donee and the shouts and laughter of 
 all the others. 
 
 ON TO STETTENHAUSEN'S 
 
 "Now, as to the nature of suppuration," went on my 
 father as if there had been no interruption, "we saw, just 
 a moment ago — but, look yonder! How long do you think 
 it will be, Thomas, before such a woman as that, the good- 
 souled Mrs. Stettenhausen (he pointed straight at her as we 
 drew up before her door and spoke to her kindly) can com- 
 prehend the germ origin of many diseases when even Dr. 
 Dublin has not as yet been able to do so?" 
 
 The aforesaid Mrs. Stettenhausen, having finished the 
 sweeping of her front door-steps, gave us an unrecognizing 
 stare, turned and billowed back into her house. I reflected, 
 however, while Father was tying the horse, and, later, while 
 I, by his side, was proudly lugging his pill-bags for him, that 
 there were numerous persons in the world who were very 
 short-sighted, also more who were somewhat hard of hear- 
 ing, also that, in addition, there were many more still to 
 whom articulate speech was a matter of immense difficulty. 
 Hence, I reflected, her seeming lack of interest in our arrival 
 was not to be thought much about. Later, however, I was to 
 think considerably more about it and in spite of myself. 
 
 Inside the house, when I had got seated in my old-time 
 special chair — which Mrs. Stettenhausen herself brought into 
 the living room and placed before me — I glanced again at 
 
ORIN SHEPHERD CAMPBELL, M.D., ANOTHER PRECEPTOR 
 OF JOHN THOMSON HODGEN 
 
 Dr. Campbell was born in New York State in 1802. Being proficient in languages, 
 he taught that subject in some Philadelphia college. Afterwards (in 1829) he received 
 his medical degree at the University of Vermont. He settled in Pike County, 111., 
 at Atlas, in 1834. In 1835 he married Abby Jane Glover, a woman of great ability and 
 fine character. In 1840 he removed to Pittsfield, being the second physician to locate 
 in that town. Here he built up a remarkably wide-spread reputation. Dr. Joseph 
 Nash McDowell said again and again that John Thomson Hodgen was the greatest 
 surgeon in America, and that his preceptor, Orin Shepherd Campbell, of Pittsfield, was 
 the greatest general practitioner. Campbell had an impressive personality which made 
 him a conspicuous figure wherever he went. Charitably inclined, he never refused a call. 
 After a hard day of practice in the country, working for a poverty-stricken family, 
 Dr. Campbell died of apoplexy in March, 1864, aged sixty-two. 
 
 (Photograph by the courtesy of Mrs. Almerina Grimshaw Grote, Pittsfield, 111., 
 a granddaughter of Dr. Campbell) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
JOHN THOMSON HODGEN, M.D. 
 
 In his time, the greatest surgeon, accord- 
 ing to many, in the Mississippi Valley. 
 Born near Hodgenville, Ky., in 1826, 
 he removed with his parents to a 
 place near Pittsfield, 111., in 1833. He 
 graduated at the McDowell Medical 
 College, St. Louis, in 1848. After many 
 years of hardship and want, he became 
 world famous. First a professor at the 
 McDowell Medical College, he later 
 transferred to the St. Louis Medical 
 College, later (in 1865) became its dean. 
 In 1881 he became president of the 
 American Medical Association. He died 
 on April 29, 1882. 
 
 (Hodgen's middle name was Thomson, 
 not Thompson, although the most of his 
 biographers and practically all medical 
 historians insert the p. The profile pic- 
 ture herewith is a copy, greatly reduced 
 in size, of a framed artotype which 
 Hodgen himself presented to my father. 
 It hung in my father's, later in my 
 father's and brother William's office for 
 fifty-six years, then, after my father's 
 death, in my brother William's for a 
 quarter century more. Now, after 
 more than eight-and-eighty years in 
 the Shastid family, it hangs at the place 
 of honor in the present writer's waiting- 
 room. 
 
 (The original photograph of the 
 other picture was lent by Mrs. A. L. — 
 Minna Worthington — Adams, a grand- 
 daughter of Dr. Thomas Worthington) 
 
 m # 
 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 
 
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 Contract of Partnership between Dr. Orin S. Campbell, of Pittsneld, 111., and 
 
 Dr. John T. Hodgen, of both St. Louis and Pittsneld. Hodgen's professor- 
 
 (Cont'd over) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 189 
 
&^<s*- ^Z**~*t A*?-~ & **. * • - >+}, ^*^- *^7~ AiOz^^Zc} 
 
 ship of surgery in the foremost medical college at St. Louis he still held at the 
 time of making this contract (see provision at top of page 2 for his absence 
 from Pittsfield for four months each winter) and yet in Pittsfield this world- 
 renowned teacher of surgery agrees "to do most of the night riding." 
 
 "Even the gods carry on as they must." 
 
 (The original contract was kindly lent for reproduction in this book by 
 Mrs. Almerina Grimshaw Grote, Pittsfield, 111., a granddaughter of Dr. 
 Campbell) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 191 
 
 all the furnishings of the place, to see if, really, this was the 
 Stettenhausen home. It seemed so different. Yet, after all, I 
 could see no difference in it — physically. Wherein lay the 
 change? or had there been any change? 
 
 Don was the same, I was certain — even funnier than ever. 
 "Stett," too, was highly humorous, and yet he seemed, 
 whenever he spoke to my father, to be hiding at least some 
 semblance of serious disrespect. Perhaps I only imagined 
 the cha nge, I thought. 1 
 
 1 In primitive town and rural districts it not infrequently happened that whole neigh- 
 borhoods would fall to discussing with animation, with vivid earnestness, even with extreme 
 mutual vindictiveness, many subjects which they could not begin to understand — e.g., the 
 difference between matter and energy, body and mind, soul and spirit, the value (or the 
 reverse) of vaccination, the relative merits of the Greek and the English New Testaments, 
 the relative military abilities of Lee and Grant, and (strangest warfare of them all) was 
 man created (indirectly) by a monkey or (directly) by God. 
 
 One question was, of course, which came first, a hen or an egg. The arguments about 
 this are still well known. Another: Which was first invented, the railroad train or the 
 railroad track. Some said the track, because, without a track, the train would be useless. 
 Others, the train, because there could be no use for tracks till the train had been invented. 
 Others said that tracks and trains must have been invented at just the same moment — "Yes, 
 by Jiminy, just like hens and eggs. The Lord must have invented a hen and a egg at the 
 same moment." But at once, if a certain old lady were present, she would ask, "Was that 
 'ere egg inside er outside the hen — ef both were invented at the same moment?" If some one 
 asked, "What difference could it make?" some one else would answer, "Ef the egg was 
 inside, then how did breeds come about? But, ef it was outside, then it could 'a' been of a 
 different breed, and that might 'a' been the start o' breeds among chickens." Then some 
 one would say, "But that could account for only two breeds. How do ye account fer all 
 the other breeds?" "O that's easy. Git two breeds to begin with, an' you can outbreed 
 an' inbreed an' git jest as many kinds o' breeds as you like." Then would come the question, 
 Was there a pair o' chickens on Noah's Ark? "Must 'a' been. Bible says so. Says 'all.' ' 
 "Well, ef it meant all, then why a pair o' niggers on the Ark? (Niggers is animals, anyway 
 they is 'livin' things.') An' if niggers was aboard, how come at the end of the forty days, 
 there was any livin' chicken?" "Silas, ain't you never heerd o' meracles?" 
 
 All of these questions I have known to be discussed, but not one of them, so far as I 
 remember, caused half the excitement and bitterness that was later provoked by the neigh- 
 borhood debates about the germ theory — debates which, so far as I have known, had their 
 fighting origin in the case of Mr. Stettenhausen and the Dublin-Shastid contention which 
 grew up out of it. 
 
 A similar debate and excitement arose, much more than two decades later (March, 1904), 
 around the Public Square of Pittsfield, concerning the correct plural of "harness." A harness 
 dealer had on show in his window a set of harness of which he was proud, so he set by its 
 side in his window a placard reading, "our harness are made from oak tanned leather." 
 Passersby began to criticise, others to defend, the treatment of "harness" as a plural. The 
 defenders especially took the ground, which they believed to be unassailable, that, inasmuch 
 as, in English, the plural of a word is almost invariably formed by the addition of J-, to the 
 singular, then it necessarily follows that any word displaying at its posterior extremity 
 two s's, is in the plural with a twofold certainty. Speeches, some of them comical, some of 
 them ironical, many in very terrible earnest, and all quite beyond my power to reproduce — 
 were made in the Courthouse Yard both pro and contra. At last the discussion boiled over 
 into the columns of the three county newspapers, and local cartoonists pilloried the de- 
 baters with take-off pictures absurd enough to make a cat laugh. Some of these cartoons 
 went into the newspapers, others into the merchants' windows. 
 
 But, throughout this' greatly protracted harness-is, harness-are, and harnesses-is and -are 
 debate, the mood was mostly friendly. The discussion, however, about the germ theory, which 
 had my father and Dr. Dublin as its twin storm center, was serious in the extreme — inter- 
 mingled as it was with deeply religious and highly moral implications and considerations. 
 
1ELD, ILLINOIS, THURSDAY, MARCH 31 , 1 904. 
 
 OUfcsJJARNESSARE 
 
 oak; 
 
 Cartoon (much reduced in size) by a local (Pittsfield, 111.) artist, on the great Harness-Is, Harness-Are, 
 debate, which raged all over Pike and Calhoun Counties in the winter and spring of 1904. (From 
 the Companion's "Scrapbook, 1900-1904, II," clipping from Pike County Republican, March 31, 
 1904, front page, top center.) Underneath the cartoon, in the clipping, runs the following large-type 
 
 Back to the woods, O Ann! The matter of thy age has lost its import. 
 
 Back to the tall bamboo, O Sphinx! Thy century-old riddle has become mere punk! 
 
 Back to thy den, O, Stockton! And away with thy lady-or-the-tiger twaddle! 
 
 Avaunt! Mysteries of the past! Begone! 
 
 Hist to the rear and assume condition of repose. 
 
 Is it is?????? 
 
 Or, Is it are?????? 
 
 A Pittsfield merchant, whose intentions, no doubt, were of the best, has displayed in his big 
 show window the following legend: "OUR HARNESS ARE MADE FROM OAK TANNED 
 LEATHER." 
 
 And every merchant, every professional man, all the preachers and Sunday school teachers and 
 students, and mayhap more whom we have not named have taken a rhetorical pop at the grammatical 
 construction of that legend. 
 
 Not since Hamlet propounded the ponderous interrogatory of whether it is best to be or yet not 
 to be, has there been such a galling rub as this. 
 
 Is it "Our Harness ARE made from Oak Tanned Leather;" 
 Or, is it "Our Harness IS Made from Oak Tanned Leather?" 
 
 In other words: Is it IS, or is it ARE? 
 
 At a meeting of principals of various Pike County Schools held in this city recently, by far the 
 greater number of them agreed that harness IS. 
 
 Professor Jon Shastid, of Perry, to whose opinion Pedagogues give weight, says: "That harness 
 made of Oak tanned leather IS! Harness does not have a singular form from which the plural harness 
 may be derived. Plurals may end in s or es, with the sound of z. I do not think there is in the 
 English language one word ending in ess that is plural. Harness means armor, or dress. You might 
 as well say, The horse's dress are, as to say, The harness ARE!" 
 And there you ARE! 
 Likewise, there you IS! 
 
 Is it IS? or, Is it ARE? , 
 
 Prof. Pike, a former principal of the Pittsfield schools, now of Jerseville, and who is no slouch 
 of a grammarian, writes his friend, Col. A. C. Matthews, that "Harness IS!" There you IS again. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 192 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 193 
 
 Always, at the Stettenhausens, my father, after his ex- 
 amination of the patient, would sit in a straight-back chair 
 and then, laying the "strap," or center-band, of his pill- 
 bags across his thighs, one "bag" with its drawer of drugs 
 and bottles hanging to the right of his right leg and the 
 other to the left of his left leg, would be busy for a long, 
 long time, mixing and mixing powders and occasionally other 
 concoctions. Sometimes he rolled half a dozen bright blue 
 pills. Just what these consisted of and what they were in- 
 tended to do, I now have wholly forgotten. But always 
 they provided an abundance of time for John and Mike to 
 put on their usual little show for my particular benefit — 
 although they generally appeared to be confining their re- 
 marks to each other. 
 
 Once, I recall, Mike declared he was inventing a noiseless 
 soup spoon. "People in big cities like Pittsfield, Illinois — 
 Ye know where that is, Johannes?" 
 
 "Yaw, yaw! I kot some iteea." 
 
 "Well, people in such places, do ye mind, they've got 
 sensitive ears, and the sound of the crackin' and the garglin' 
 of a soup-spoon makes their fine ears pain thim badly. So 
 what wuddent they give — in money, mind ye — just to have 
 their spoons made silent?" 
 
 "Du bist vernickt, mein Kind!" ejaculated Mr. Stett. 
 "All spoons pe zilent alretty. You ton't got to infent dem 
 silent. De trouple, ven it is any trouple, is not mit den 
 spoons, but mit den mouts dot dey makes de funny-pizness 
 sounts mit dem. An' de only mouts — " 
 
 "Well, the spoons makes the biggest of all the echoes, do 
 ye mind, even though — " 
 
 "Vait. Vait undil I finished haf. — Und de only mouts 
 vot noises make ven dey de goot soupy eat, dey is all Irish." 
 
 "Begorrah, now — " 
 
 "Vait. Chust again vait. Vait unt a chentleman pe, eefen 
 if you vos a Chinamans unt not a Irish. First, te sounts 
 comes from te mouts not from te spoons. Second [he ampli- 
 fied, as well as recapitulated on his fingers] eefen if de echoes 
 vos de vorst of it all, if de mouts dit not commit any noises 
 in de foist place, den, no echoes dere could pe adall. T'oid, 
 only te Irish mouts makes de noises anyvay, unt te Irish 
 ton't use any spoons at all anyvay put trinks deir zoup vrom 
 
194 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 a blate. Zo it koes — zoo-oo-oop\ 'Zoo-oo-oop! Unt 20 on 
 till dey finish — vich is chenerally dree dimes to vun kvart." 
 
 "Bejabbers 'tis true that the Irish is hearty, and hence 
 they do no playin' whin they eat. Whatever they do, they 
 do it wid a mind and a heart and a soul and a great will. 
 But 'tis not true that they make anny Dutch noises wid their 
 lips whin they unite thimselves in holy matrimony wid a 
 bowl av soup. All the noises they make whin they drink 
 their soup is soft, shwate, endearin', delicate and ladylike in 
 the extreme. But the Dutchmin — Have ye iver [Here he 
 betrayed the fact that he had all along been speaking for my 
 benefit alone by turning straight toward me and asking:] 
 Have ye iver heard piggikins takin' their swill from a deep 
 trough?" I said I had. "Well, thin, ye know how a Dutch- 
 man sounds whin he gargles his t'roat wit his sauerkraut 
 soup. He sounds like the center of the big Swedish whirl- 
 pool — that an' all his echoes do. It goes like this: Sauer- 
 kraut! Sauerkraut! Nix hummer aus! 
 
 He was so comical with the gargling of his words that 
 I rocked with unrestrainable laughter. 
 
 Which seeing, Mr. Stettenhausen appeared suddenly to 
 devise hilarious applause for himself. For he sat straight up 
 in bed and shouted, "I leef it to you, Dommy. I leef it to you, 
 if de Irish ain't de fery worst peeple in de work." 
 
 "Why, yes," I cried. "Of course they are the worst." 
 But then, seeing the face of Mr. Donovan seeming to pale, 
 I was pierced by a deep pang of serious regret. So I added, 
 "I can say that, because I'm Irish myself — one-fourth or 
 maybe half." 
 
 "He's proud of it," ejaculated Donovan to Mr. Stetten- 
 hausen. "Proud, do ye mind, that he's Irish, and only one- 
 quarter or one-half of an Irishman at that." 
 
 "Pud vouldn't you be prouder if you was part Cherman," 
 questioned Mr. Stettenhausen appealingly. 
 
 I was about on the point of replying that I had never 
 yet tried being made up in that particular way, but that my 
 very best friend at school, a certain lad that whipped the 
 bigger boys for me, Fritz Niebuhr, was German — German 
 from the crown of his head to the soles of his shoes, and 
 that no better friend — 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 195 
 
 "Now," broke in my father suddenly, "We'll give this 
 medicine in this way." And so the little show was over. 
 
 "But vat is dis?" Mr. Stettenhausen grunted. "Somet'ing 
 from your heathen magic, yah? It is lucky I do not catch you 
 at it by damn." So thoroughly realistic was his sarcasm that 
 I shuddered, and, for one brief moment, wondered if Dr. 
 Dublin had had the audacity to come into this home in our 
 absence, and then perhaps — But no, surely not that. 
 
 "Now you t'ink maybe I geef you a big revard, eh?" he 
 sneered. 
 
 And again I shuddered and would have shuddered even 
 more, thinking that, possibly, owing to some secret inter- 
 vention by Lord Dublin, my father was about to be dis- 
 missed from the case — which meant too from the entire prac- 
 tice generally of these most excellent friends who had been 
 his friends so long. 
 
 But my heart rebounded mightily when Mrs. Stetten- 
 hausen, all at once entering from the kitchen, inquired, 
 "How do you two want your aigs?" 
 
 We promptly refused to stay, but, as she would not take 
 the refusal, we dined and drank buttermilk and departed 
 amid more jokes from the two men and three or four neigh- 
 bors who dropped in at the close of the meal to congratulate 
 heartily Mr. Stettenhausen on his prompt convalescence. 
 
 And all's well that ends well — if in fact it has ended. 
 
 I remember almost every event, even the tiniest, of that 
 day, as we drove along the road. Figures toiled in the fields. 
 Here and there a boy lazed before his flock of sheep or cattle. 
 I remember the sadly-waving dark-green banners of the corn 
 and the way in which the corn-rows whispered of the soon- 
 coming death of the joyous year. My father stopped before 
 a little brown house that I could not enter with him. I tied 
 Black Jim for him and he, taking his pill-bags and other 
 paraphernalia, went into the shack. After a time, tired of 
 watching butterflies and bees, I started to walk. 
 
 Up a giant hill I went and down it. Up another and 
 down that. Then up another, and I can almost see, even at 
 this distance of time, the ranks of plumed corn which, up 
 here on a height and sheltered from wind by a near grove, 
 stirred not even so much as to whisper. The quiet almost 
 
196 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 pained my years. The sunlight too was intense. Sunlight 
 and silence, each absolute, profound! In every place that I 
 had ever known before there had been at least some sort of 
 reminder of sound — the sighing of wind, a soft drumming of 
 hoofs on the distant highway or a buggy creak, the whistle 
 of a far-off engine, the song of cloistered bird or hum of self- 
 expressing bee, but now — No sense of desolation or loneli- 
 ness came over me, but happiness instead — happiness such 
 as I had never known before. I seemed indeed to have passed 
 already into eternity. Losing the noises of time, I had lost 
 time itself. To see everything and to hear nothing ! A world 
 of visual beauty, as it were the uninterfered with effulgence 
 of the infinite ! 
 
 I had, in fact, been stripped of every sensation and every 
 emotion saving one alone. Sounds there were none, but also 
 there was neither temperature, nor weight, nor touch, nor 
 taste nor any smell whatever, nor volition nor emotion of 
 any least kind or sort. And what was left was — so it seemed 
 to me then and seems to me even now — the happiness of 
 heaven. For the happiness appeared to be that happiness, 
 that unsurpassable ecstasy, which comes from the intensest 
 possible realization of existence. To enjoy existence fully 
 we must enjoy it only — and alone, which means with God. 
 
 To all of us there is friendliness in light, enmity in dark- 
 ness. Even in our childhood we feared the dark; associated 
 with it the sinister and the evil. So too it stands written in 
 the Bible: the Devil is the Prince of Darkness; Jesus, the 
 Light of the World. In every language, also, words express- 
 ing or even in the least suggesting blackness or shadow are 
 somehow connected with wickedness, cruelty, ignorance, 
 limitations on life and on love: black magic, Dark Ages, 
 benighted souls. No wonder there have been fire-worship- 
 pers and sun-worshippers. 
 
 And, ever since that ecstasy of light and nothing but 
 light which I experienced in the effulgence and silence of 
 the hill-top, I have loved silence and light. 
 
 Ofttimes I have walked, even as an aged man, far into 
 the sunlit, quiet country alone to experience them. 
 
 Father picked me up on the hill-top, and, a few moments 
 later, we stood by the bed of a plainly dying man — the young, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 197 
 
 ambitious schoolteacher of whom my father had spoken to 
 me already on this trip and whom he wished me to take as 
 both a symbol and a warning. 
 
 The sick man's wife was constantly busy in his room, 
 attempting to make him comfortable. Sometimes the woman 
 of the house, she with whom the couple boarded, went and 
 came again, endeavoring to do her own bit. Outdoors and 
 opposite the open window the fruit-trees were in blossom — 
 their scents drifted into the room like love-messages from an 
 all-too-happy world. Bird songs rushed in also. 
 
 But, on his bed of pain, the handsome young fellow — 
 handsome in spite of his sickness — writhed and writhed, al- 
 though in silence. 
 
 At long length he motioned to my father. "Doctor, you 
 were — right three years ago — stopped me on the road — re-, 
 member? You'd already treated me — commencing consump- 
 tion — remember?' ' 
 
 "I do remember," said Father. "But don't you worry 
 now. Try to get well." 
 
 ' T was well then — seemed so. You reminded me of all that 
 you'd told me — the dangers of over-ambition, overwork — 
 the constant study, the attempting to write a book — to make 
 a name — so as to get to a high place of honor in the city. 
 You — you — warned me — all of it." 
 
 After a time he began again. "You told me to learn con- 
 tentment — best thing on earth — contentment — best thing 
 even for my health — for myself [he glanced at his wife] for 
 everybody." 
 
 Here he began to have a serious hemorrhage once more. 
 After much hurry and running to and fro by the women and 
 the bringing in of ice and other matters, the hemorrhage 
 ceased. 
 
 For a very few moments the man, I believe, slept. Awak- 
 ing, he motioned to his wife. She went and stood close to 
 the bed, and took one of his hands. "I'm dying, Valeria," 
 he said. 
 
 "No," she screamed, "no, no." After that she merely 
 kept moving her head steadily from side to side, still mean- 
 ing to say "no," but unable to say it. 
 
 "I've been bad to you, Valeria — very bad — but — didn't 
 
198 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 mean to. Any word to send to your — to your father and 
 mother — in case I see them?" 
 
 Half speaking, half screaming, she replied, "Tell them I 
 still do love them both, but you far more." 
 
 "I should have been content," he went on, "to love these 
 Pike County people — they — loved me — to love them always 
 — to work for them — to be content. — Content. — Content.— 
 Right. — Doctor Shastid, you were right. — I — When I am 
 gone, Valeria, jw may be content. — We are as God made us." 
 
 The change passed over his features, whereby anyone 
 might know the rest that had come to him. His wife, 
 screaming, threw herself across the lifeless body. My father 
 said to me, "Come." 
 
 We went out into the beautiful world, took the long, 
 long walk to the buggy — God, how long it seemed! — a walk 
 of only about fifty paces. 
 
 When, in the buggy, we were driving once again along 
 the road, my father said, "Now you see, my son, in part at 
 least, why it is that I — Well, I warned you to be content, 
 not to wander in too many fields." 
 
 But fate would not so have it. I never could be content 
 either in Pike County, whose every hill I loved, or elsewhere. 
 
 I was born to be a wanderer and in more senses than one. 
 
 The schoolteacher had been just right. We are all as 
 God made us. 
 
 And we went at once, as it happened, to a near-by place, 
 to see another victim of tuberculosis, the great kill-master — 
 whether an ambitious victim or one contented wholly, I do 
 not know. 
 
 A pretty child he was too, but the dark angel was no 
 respecter of persons on that account. "I cannot see. I can- 
 not see!" the child kept crying. But it was no disease of the 
 eyes whereof he complained, but mists in the brain. 
 
 When my father, at length arising from his chair by the 
 bed, called the mother to one side, I, unable to bear it all 
 any longer, ran out into the roadway, there to wait. All 
 the way home I was depressed and horrified by the sounds 
 
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 MY SECOND LIFE — 200 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 201 
 
 the wind made in the hedges and the fields. They reminded me 
 of Shakespeare's pretended lunatic, Edgar, in "King Lear": 
 
 "Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind; 
 says suum, mun, nonny." 
 
 That night too, in my bed at home, I suddenly awoke with 
 oppression about me. 
 
 First, there were distant voices, massive but distant, so 
 that it seemed as if an innumerable chorus was chanting to 
 a mighty organ in some far-away church. All at once an 
 uproar broke on our very roof. Then came silence. Then 
 again a low, pitiful moaning voice at some or another 
 crevice. First at one place then at another. Alow and aloof! 
 Suddenly the soft moaning broke into great waves of threat- 
 ening sound, as if some spirit of inexorable destruction were 
 attempting to invade our home. 
 
 Silence. Long, long, unbroken silence. Intolerable! At 
 length secret whisperings around gables and over ridge-pole, 
 followed by soft shufflings of innumerable tiny spirit-feet at 
 the chimney's top. 
 
 A formless void comes into the room, moves about, takes 
 away something very near me and departs with it into the 
 soul-filled night. 
 
 I reach softly — very softly — over and touch my brother, 
 little Jon. Again I touch, feel his shoulder, breathe deeply. 
 Happy after all, I sleep again. 
 
 A long day that had been! How crowded with events! 
 Later, as a student at a medical college, I heard man after 
 man declare that he "never would practice medicine in the 
 country — nothing ever happens there." Now, the practice 
 of a village and country doctor really is a little cosmos, a 
 tiny universe. No happenings? No events? Is it not an event 
 when the lark first sings? When the first hollyhock redeems 
 the cabin wall with homely beauty made out of the soil? 
 When the first frost comes, the first apples ripen, the forests 
 begin to sadden with their whisperings of dead, falling leaves, 
 or the first snowflake comes from somewhere up in heaven 
 down to earth like a message out of God's own heart? Is it not 
 an event when a highly educated physician like Dublin can- 
 not, for all his excellent training, accept the greatest truth that 
 has ever come into the scientific world, but begins instead to 
 dislike his fair-minded colleague, thus disrupting an ancient 
 
202 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 friendship? No "event" when ambition, through tubercu- 
 losis, kills a man, or even when a small child perishes? 
 Is it not an "event" when — But the work of a doctor in 
 village and in country is fuller of events, day in day out, 
 night in night out, than that of any great specialist in a 
 large city could by any possibility be. 
 
 At least it was in those days, before country medical 
 practice had largely moved to town. 
 
 MOSTLY ABOUT FIGHTING 
 Country Sounds 
 
 My father said one day as we rode in the country and 
 none of his patients was dangerously sick: "Can't you do 
 better with your Monthly Gazette 7 . It seems to me not only 
 badly printed but also poorly written. At the beginning I 
 had thought you were going to make a first class little 
 publication of it." 
 
 "As to the printing," I responded, "that will improve 
 when you buy me a better printing press. And it ought to 
 be better indeed." 
 
 "Daddy strained his pocket-book to buy you the one he 
 did. — Anyway, suppose you first improve your writing, and 
 then, second, if collections are not too scanty, he possibly 
 may " 
 
 "What's wrong about my writing?" 
 
 "Very many things. But first of all Daddy wants you to 
 understand that he realizes how poor and scattering and in 
 every way ineffective his own literary style is. But that he 
 cannot help so long as he gives so much of his time to earn- 
 ing a living for four fast-growing boys. Writing demands 
 time — time and incessant expenditure of energy. — But you — 
 Daddy wants you to go a million miles farther than he ever 
 can get. — However, first of all, this morning I just want to 
 teach you one single thing about writing: In your descrip- 
 tions never appeal to one single sense only, unless, as seldom 
 happens, you have some special reason for appealing to only 
 one. You, I am sorry to say, like most inexperienced writers, 
 appeal merely to the sense of sight. You tell forever and 
 always only how things look. A person would suppose that 
 the world in which you live is a world of sight only — 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 203 
 
 nothing in it that can be experienced as heat or cold, or that 
 can be felt or smelt or heard." 
 
 "Fault of the English language largely," I countered. 
 "It is actually overrich in words that tell how things look, 
 but poor indeed in those telling how they sound." 
 
 "True," he replied. "Yet it is rich enough too in, for 
 example, sound-describing vocables. Recall from your shool 
 reader Southey's 'The Cataract at Lodore.' You remember? 
 
 " ' "How does the water 
 
 Come down at Lodore?" 
 My little boy asked me 
 
 Thus, once on a time; 
 And, moreover, he tasked me 
 
 To tell him in rhyme.' 
 
 "So the poet goes on to say how the water sounds as it 
 tumbles down at Lodore, each succeeding stanza running into 
 longer and stronger lines, and all the while roaring and 
 booming and bounding and echoing and cascading and 
 thundering, more and more loudly, until at last the brain 
 of the reader can hardly tolerate the auditory stimulation. 
 Remember?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "And now, son, in just a few minutes, we shall be passing 
 a thrasher outfit — see it up yonder? — it is partly sight but 
 much more sound and I want you to observe both kinds of 
 elements carefully, and then, when we're past the place, to 
 describe the thrashing process to me, and when you get 
 home write it all out and print it in your Gazette" (All this 
 advice, remember, was being given me long years before 
 similar instructions began to appear in college and high- 
 school textbooks.) 
 
 As we passed the thrasher, I did my best to observe with 
 all my senses, even the temperatural sense, and here is the 
 thing I gave him — childish, stiff and formal, I admit, and 
 yet a very useful exercise in observation, the foundation of 
 all good writing: 
 
 "Journeying with my father in the country just the other 
 day, we passed a field wherein a thrashing machine and its 
 crew were busy at their active work. The brilliant sunlight 
 brought us the sights, and the sultry summer air the scents 
 and sounds, of this quite common yet also fascinating work. 
 On one side of the thrasher with its insatiable maw and its 
 
204 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 long, stair-like straw-carrier there stood a great stack of as 
 yet unthrashed wheat; on the other, scores of sacks bulging 
 with the thrashed out grain and one immense pile of flabby- 
 looking straw. 
 
 The sultry summer air was full of lulling melodies — parts , 
 rather, in a great, grand song of the successful year. That song 
 should have been titled, The World Shall Be Fed. Music in- 
 articulate, yet strong with mighty meaning! The hum of 
 the red and yellow thrasher is one part and a steady and 
 sturdy one; the inexorable beating of the black, iron engine 
 is another part; the rustle of the pitchforked straw, the 
 shuffle-shuffle of the feed pans and of the straw-climb, all 
 these commingling with the shouts of human voices rejoic- 
 ing, spite of the quivering hot air, in their great work, came 
 to us, along with the somewhat faint but delectable smell 
 of fine new flour, already issuing a little from the bruised 
 and over-dried grain, like something from a dream in the 
 Arabian Nights." 
 
 "Better!" cried father. "Better! A little more like that 
 will bring you a new press — But you used that word, 'in- 
 exorable'. What is it derived from?" 
 
 "In, not; ex, out or away from; and or are to pray; some- 
 thing one cannot be prayed out of. ' ' 
 
 "Good. Now a word we had yesterday, 'tribulation.' ' 
 
 "I gave him the derivation (tribulum, a thrashing sledge, 
 from which came tribulatio, a thorough beating up, such as 
 the Roman wheat got). And then he tried me on various 
 other words. 
 
 All these things I set down about my father, not because 
 I wish to put on record this, that or the other mere trifle 
 about an obscure man, but because I wish to illuminate the 
 fact — for fact it certainly is — that country and village doctors 
 were not, contrary to what so many suppose them to have been, 
 illiterate beings who never could have attained to the slight- 
 est note in more conspicuous positions, but that, many at 
 least among them, were, though doing the hardest work in 
 all the field of medicine and surgery, finding time to cultivate 
 their minds, to live the lives of those who know life's values 
 — and yet were content — strange as it seems, were actually con- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 205 
 
 tent — to pass away at last into eternal oblivion, so far at 
 least as this world is concerned. 1 
 
 I have already stated that my father used to declare to 
 me that he could give the derivation of almost every word 
 in the then latest Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. And 
 for hours on end I have quizzed him from that book, and 
 have almost never found him failing. In Hebrew and in 
 Syriac he was very far to seek, but, in Latin and in Greek, 
 in French and in Anglo-Saxon, he, though he never spoke 
 French, was nevertheless a scholar incomparable. 
 
 Alas! that his college-bred sons should have trailed so 
 far behind him. 
 
 THE FIGHTING HEART 2 
 My father had not, in general, what then was known as 
 the fighting heart." Almost every grown male had one in 
 
 1 Nor have country doctors, contrary to the general impression, become extinct in the 
 United States. According to Time, June 5, 1939, p. 75: "55,000,000 U. S. rural dwellers are 
 getting horse-and-buggy care. Many interesting and valuable facts about U. S. rural medicine 
 as it exists to-day can be found in the handbook of the Cooperstown (country doctor) Con- 
 ference, entitled 'Rural Medicine' ($3.50)." 
 
 I should set down here that my father ofttimes repeated to me Lincoln's Gettysburg 
 Address. In the first sentence, however, of that notable composition he would invariably 
 stop to criticize: "Does it not strike you, Thomas, as a serious mistake for Lincoln, even 
 in the very first sentence of his 'Address,' to employ the word, 'proposition'? That word, in 
 that sentence, falls like a dash of ice-cold water. Same effect as a geometrical technicality 
 would have in the middle of the Lord's Prayer. 
 
 "It may be presumptuous for me to say so, but to me it does seem that 'sacred belief,' 
 instead of 'proposition,' would have been far more harmonious with the rest of the sentence 
 and of the whole address. Thus: 'Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth 
 on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition 
 [sacred belief] that all men are created equal.' " 
 
 I then put in my lip. Said I, "Nothing about that entire sentence can withstand careful 
 examination. 'Fathers' do not 'bring forth,' but mothers only. Fathers beget. Besides, the 
 whole passage is a mixture of the literal with the metaphorical. 'Fathers' is literal — men, 
 concrete male adult human beings, while 'liberty' is metaphorical — an abstraction which is 
 only considered as if it were a woman. Then the absolute nonsense of having the 'fathers' 
 'bringing forth' something which had not been conceived in them but in 'liberty.' If the 
 'new nation' was really 'conceived in liberty,' then why did not liberty, in the usual sane 
 and sensible manner, herself do the bringing forth? As to the 'dedication,' I certainly will 
 admit that, when a considerable number of literal fathers produce in one and only one 
 abstract and metaphorical mother an offspring which they themselves, then, instead of the 
 mother, 'bring forth,' that zoological monstrosity should certainly be 'dedicated to the 
 [crazy] proposition that all men are created equal.' 
 
 But my father was horrified. He told me that I was attempting to deal with matters 
 which were then far beyond my understanding. 
 
 2 Those. who may believe that I represent the old days and ways in Pike County as more 
 combative and pugnacious than they could possibly have been, need only to read The Pike 
 County Republican for September 3, 1941, article entitled "Early Pike Officials Had to Take 
 Non-Dueling Oath." By that they will quickly see that I have described the old-time 
 situation in a very conservative manner. 
 
206 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 those early, double-fisted times. But the practice of medicine 
 shapes its practitioners in its own way, which way, generally 
 expressed, is one toward kindness, gentleness — helping not 
 hurting. And yet my father could fight. I had seen him, in 
 town, whip a man severely for attacking his elder half- 
 brother, Captain George T. Edwards. And then there was 
 another time — in the country. 
 
 As we drew toward the house, that of a man named 
 Mensil, on the eventful day in question, my father observed, 
 "There's Mr. Mensil in his yard, surrounded by his dogs. 
 I like everything I see around here, excepting the dogs. 
 I owned in my boyhood, son, a very large dog (he was telling 
 me now for about the hundredth time) which seemed ex- 
 tremely fond of me. One day he got angry and tore me almost 
 to pieces. Since then I have feared all dogs with a great fear. 
 And the dogs seem to recognize that fear, even to dislike 
 me for it. Hello! Who's coming from the house? Henry 
 Mocksinger." 
 
 Now, Mocksinger, as I happened to know, was a wealthy 
 neighbor of Mr. Mensil' s, who, once upon a time, had em- 
 ployed my father to treat his impoverished sister. My father, 
 who knew Mr. Mocksinger, had had that miserly gentleman 
 agree in writing that he himself would pay the sister's bill. 
 The sister made an excellent recovery, but then — and not till 
 then — Mr. Mocksinger changed his mind and refused to pay. 
 No particular reason, only — he had changed his mirid. My 
 father had treated poor people for nothing, said Mr. Mock- 
 singer, so why not his sister? 
 
 My father sued. Mocksinger paid. But, after that, he 
 kept out of Father's way. 
 
 Today, no sooner had we driven to the Mensil' s hitching- 
 post and got out of the buggy, than here rushed all the 
 Mensil dogs — hounds, collies, mongrels — business voices up- 
 lifted, hair up, ears back. It was Father's first visit to the 
 place, but the dogs did seem somehow to understand that 
 he feared and therefore disliked them. 
 
 "Look out, son," cried Father. "Jump! Get back into 
 the buggy!" His fear, great as it was, was more, far more, 
 for me than for himself. 
 
 The dogs ignored me completely, passed me, attacked 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 207 
 
 my father with fury. A moment later Henry Mocksinger 
 was up with the hounds. He had actually followed them 
 over the fence, now was shouting back to Mr. Mensil (who, 
 at the same time, was attempting to call off his dogs): "Hey 
 Mensil! Come see yore hound's big mouth: gray cloth over 
 all his teeth! — Well, Doc, I sicked 'em on you: how you 
 like it?" 
 
 Now, my father had been irritable ever since Dr. Dublin 
 had failed to speak to him or had spoken to him only with 
 disrespect. He had said nothing to me on that subject, but 
 I could detect the foaming rage underneath all that he had 
 said on anything else. 
 
 So Father struck Mocksinger — struck him on the side of 
 the neck and the man went down. Up again, too, like a 
 shot and threshing rapidly with wild fists. He had not 
 expected fight in the presence of all those dogs. Father 
 struck: right-left, here-there-everywhere — but always above 
 the belt, and where it would do good. 
 
 At last Mocksinger went to earth all flabby and bloody 
 and breathless. "That'll do, Doc," he gasped. "You were 
 right. I don't blame you." 
 
 Father helped him up. "I wouldn't have whipped you, 
 Mocksinger," said he, "but the dogs might have bitten my 
 son." 
 
 I looked toward the house. The dogs had all gone meekly 
 back, and there was their master, restraining them, grinning 
 too with great joy at the results of the fight. 
 
 Always after that I suspected that Mocksinger must, at 
 some time or other, have attempted to cheat him too. 
 
 At all events my father was destined to have more trouble 
 with Mocksinger about dogs, not Mensil' s dogs this time 
 but Mocksinger 's own — a pack of hungry curs as ill-bred 
 and dangerous as was Mocksinger himself. 
 
 A FIGHT THAT WAS A FIGHT 
 There was in those day a mighty race of men apart whom 
 I loved with all my being. How I had come to love them so I 
 still scarcely understand — perhaps it was because I had read 
 the works of Elihu Burritt, self-taught blacksmith and one 
 of the greatest linguists in the world of that day; or those 
 of George Barrow; or because so many blacksmiths were 
 
208 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Irishmen or both Irishmen and good professional friends of 
 my father. Among the blacksmiths that I loved the best 
 was Michael McCarthy — big muscles, rich brogue and great 
 warm heart of him included. 
 
 My father, if his horse had cast a shoe, would sometimes 
 drive miles out of his way to have the shoe replaced by 
 Michael McCarthy. 
 
 "Mike," as most people called him, was a country road- 
 side blacksmith, as indeed were many of his fraternity at 
 that day. 
 
 Now Mike, like many of the other blacksmiths in those 
 times, was something of a doctor. "Mike, my wife's a pain 
 in the chist. What shall I do for it?" would sometimes shout 
 a passing farmer. ' 'Red flannel and goose-grease will cure it, ' ' 
 would be Mike's answer. 
 
 Mike, like all the other blacksmiths, knew a great many 
 charms — charms for whooping cough, for measles, for scarlet 
 fever, especially charms to keep such things far away from 
 you. A great many persons had doubts about the value of 
 these charms, that is for the protection or treatment of 
 human beings. However, I have seen an Irish blacksmith 
 whisper something softly into the ear of a horse, and presto ! 
 the horse had got over his colic — but not until something a 
 veterinarian had administered to him had had full time to act. 
 
 They would all use axle grease to cure saddle sores. 
 Splints they would rub with tallow and hot mutton bone, 
 sprain with bacon, sweeny with eggs beaten up in vinegar. 
 They would treat more obstinate cases of sweeny by cutting 
 a hole in the horse's shoulder and placing a piece of folded 
 leather in it. 
 
 For human beings they had so many remedies that I can- 
 not even list them. Finally, they were great tooth pullers. 
 
 Seldom, however, did blacksmiths and doctors have any 
 professional conflicts with one another. The blacksmiths 
 pretty well knew their limitations in the matter of medical 
 knowledge and skill. 
 
 The very same day, as it happened, whereon my father 
 had had his terrible fight with Mocksinger, Black Jim, our 
 horse, had cast a shoe. We, therefore, turned him about and 
 headed for Mike McCarthy's smithy by the roadside. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 209 
 
 I was all expectancy, as usual when about to behold again 
 my old friend, Michael. The expectancy turned to ecstasy 
 when I began to hear the faint cling-cling, clang-clang-clang 
 of his musical sledge. A moment later I saw the brightly 
 colored show-bills on the walls of his shop. 
 
 In those very old days there was always nailed above the 
 entrance to the smithy a horseshoe, or a number of difFerent 
 kinds of them, and a great, spreading tree would be standing 
 a little to one side of the door, offering shade and leafy cool- 
 ness for man and for beast. Ofttimes two old men from a 
 neighboring village would be playing checkers underneath 
 that tree. Fortunately or unfortunately, on this day, at 
 Mike's shop, the old men were absent. 
 
 Even before our wheels had ceased to turn, here came 
 Michael in leather apron, sledge in hand and laughter in his 
 wide countenance. "How're the two great docthers?" 
 "Never better. How's Mike, and how's business?" Thus my 
 father. 
 
 "Can't complain at all, Doc. I've set already this marnin' 
 one buggy tire and three wagon tires. Then I completely 
 removed two wagon tires, sharpened a rip-saw and a plow- 
 share, mended a wagon tire, pulled a tooth for old Mrs. 
 Johnson. An' now — Say, Doc, this here harse o' yourn's 
 got both front feet toein' out." 
 
 "He has!" 
 
 "Surely has, and one shoe's off. Get out and stand just 
 where I'm standin' and see the toein' for yourself." I do 
 not attempt to imitate the man's soft brogue. 
 
 Father vaulted, I climbed after. ' 'You're perfectly right, 
 said Father. 
 
 The horse having been unhitched, Mike took him into 
 the shop. 
 
 And there it all was again, a veritable house of magic — 
 the anvil, the forge, the bellows, the sweep, or great curved 
 handle above the forge, whereby the smith would "blow 
 the fire." 
 
 Before he went to work, Mike turned to me with a twinkle 
 in his blue eyes and asked, "Do yez remimber what I taught 
 yez about the shop?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
210 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "What's this blunt end of the anvil called?" 
 
 "The heel." 
 
 "And this pointed end?" 
 
 "The horn." 
 
 "Correct. Now these two holes on the top face of the 
 anvil?" 
 
 "The square hole's the hardy hole and the little round one's 
 the pritchel-hole — there's where you punch nail holes through 
 horse shoes." 
 
 "By dad, Docther, you've got a b'y with a good mimory 
 for words." It was the simple truth. I have always had a 
 good memory for words. If only I had had so good a memory 
 for faces! I did not protest the compliment at all. 
 
 To my Father said Mike, "I've got a new grade of smith- 
 ing coal. To do good work a man must have two things — 
 good tools and good coal. Domestic coal and railroad coal 
 are neither of them good for smithing." 
 
 When he had finished with Black Jim — even that old 
 devil could not resist the alluring ways of Michael — the 
 Irishman turned to me again. "Ye don't remimber how to 
 count in the Irish language, nayther do ye recall the Irish 
 alphabet I taught yez." 
 
 I showed him: "Ah-i, bet, coll, thaheer," etc. Then, 
 "And almost every one of those words is the name of a tree 
 as well as that of a letter." 
 
 I went out of the shop first. As I did so, a great giant of 
 a fellow came from a near-by house which stood on the 
 opposite side of the highway. He walked up to me leisurely, 
 looking me straight in the eye. "Pretty proud of your 
 father, ain't you, tumble-bug?" 
 
 I replied that I certainly was, then heard my father's 
 words beside me — very, very softly spoken indeed, "Better 
 leave the boy out of this, Harfield." 
 
 But the giant continued to address me. "I should think 
 you'd be proud of him, livin' in that big brick house at the 
 county seat. Know how he come to get such a house?" 
 
 "By doing more skilful work than you could ever learn 
 to do," I replied wrathfully. 
 
 "Be quiet, son," admonished my father. "This isn't any 
 boy's fight." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 211 
 
 "O it's a fight, then, is it?" yelled the giant. "So it's a 
 fight! I didn't know but maybe it couldn't never be nothin' 
 but some words. Shastid, you charged me about ten prices 
 for that little work you done for my youngest boy, and then 
 you sued me and made me pay it." 
 
 "Which I couldn't have done," said my father, "if the 
 bill had not been just." 
 
 "I ain't augerin' with you, Shastid. I'm just givin' due 
 notice on what your trimmin' down's to be/^r." 
 
 "These are fighting times," laughed my father. They 
 were indeed that. "And those are fighting words. Also you 
 do not see me running." 
 
 At this the blacksmith, himself a quite sizeable man, 
 having finished with Black Jim, came round by Father and 
 said, "Doctor Shastid, you once did me a favor — saved my 
 life. Do me another and let me lick this monkey-mouthed 
 fellow in your place. Five whole years he's lived across the 
 road from me and I've never had nothing from his lips but 
 abuse— him or his kids or his — And his dogs keep killing 
 my sheep." 
 
 "What was that there you was just a-goin' to say about 
 my wife but didn't?" 
 
 "Whatever you're a thinkin' about her is probably cor- 
 rect," said the blacksmith. "Let it go at that. She's all 
 you probably say about her when you come home drunk, 
 and, begorra," he fetched him a horrible blow on the jaw, 
 "give her that with my comp'iments." 
 
 The giant farmer, so big and so solid was he, scarcely 
 was budged by the blow, which surely would have killed 
 any ordinary person. Instead of budging, he countered 
 beautifully. 
 
 The blacksmith, however, ducked the counter quite as 
 beautifully and the fracas was on. 
 
 The two were well matched, the farmer. the larger and 
 stronger, but the blacksmith also strong and, as I gathered, 
 pretty well skilled in country boxing. At all events he 
 seemed to be learning fast that the farmer knew not how to 
 protect his stomach. So into Harfield's stomach he went, 
 blow after blow, the giant apparently astounded that any 
 man should dare to hit him in the plexus." 
 
212 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 At last the big fellow was weakening, when all at once 
 a shout came from beyond his own gate and then a tall 
 young man, rushing up, cried out like a bugling hound. 
 Mr. Blacksmith lifted his eyes in the son's direction momen- 
 tarily, but that was enough. Harfield struck the blacksmith 
 squarely on his nose and the "claret" flew from zenith unto 
 nadir. 
 
 Only momentarily, however, did the blacksmith pause. 
 Then he answered the onslaught — right-left, right-left — 
 right-left, which happened also to be high-low, high-low, 
 high-low — with Harfield's guards, at each and every lick, 
 precisely where the former lick had gone but not anywhere 
 near the spot where the present one was going. It was a 
 gruelling discharge of blows. Harfield weakened — cried, 
 "Enough!" 
 
 But, even as he did so, the even taller son, running behind 
 the blacksmith suddenly struck him in the spine with a 
 short, iron-bound club. My father wrested the weapon away 
 from the fellow and tossed it into a field, saying only, "Be 
 ashamed." 
 
 Then cried the young man, "I'll show you what shame 
 is," and, to the blacksmith who, blowing his bloody nose, 
 was attempting to say, "I'll whip this one too, Doc," he 
 shouted, "Keep busy with your nose." 
 
 Thereupon the young fellow ran up near the blacksmith 
 shop, and, sticking out his arms in Jem Mace fashion toward 
 my father, roared, "Come on, you dirty " 
 
 Now I knew the strategy that was in the fellow's mind. 
 (I had seen considerable righting in those old, hard days, 
 and had read about more of it.) He meant, when Father 
 ran up to him, to set his back firmly against the wall of the 
 shop, and then, as Father arrived, to kick him in the stomach 
 or face. 
 
 I, in my childish way, attempted to warn Father of the 
 enemy's probable technique, but he paid no attention — quite 
 properly. He ran up to the fellow as if about to plunge 
 straight into him — which would have been well-nigh fatal 
 to himself, but at the very moment of the big fellow's kick, 
 dodged easily leftward and quite as easily seized the chap 
 by the throat. Now it so happened that my father, though 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 213 
 
 not so tall, quite, as his antagonist, was yet only a small 
 fraction of an inch under six feet in height. Moreover — and this 
 was the great point in that game — he had arms like those of 
 a gorilla and hands even longer and larger in proportion. 1 
 He did not know the tricks of fighting well, but he did 
 understand the advantages which his "reach" gave him, so, 
 keeping that long right arm extended fully, he alternately 
 jerked the enemy's head forward then smacked it back against 
 the house. Pretty soon he relaxed his grip a little, then 
 calmly asked, "Be good if I let you go now?" "Naw," 
 whispered the assailant huskily, "when I get well of this 
 I'm goin' to set our whole pack o' dogs on you. They'll 
 chew you into pieces." 
 
 Thereupon my father flew angry indeed. His blue eyes 
 sparkled and his face whitened. One thing he feared extremely 
 was a dog — almost any dog of any size or breed. Apparently, 
 therefore, he designed to settle that dog matter now. Well, 
 he accordingly smacked the villainous head against the 
 shop with so much vigor that, when he relinquished his 
 hold, the man could no longer stand and was quietly helped 
 home by his father. 
 
 On our way to other patients that day, said my father, 
 "I'm thoroughly. ashamed, Thomas, terribly ashamed. What 
 I did by force might easily have been accomplished by 
 diplomacy." And over and over he kept saying how very, 
 very much he was ashamed. Ashamed, ashamed, ashamed. 
 
 At last puny I flew angry, and shouted, "Well, I'm 
 ashamed that you're so much ashamed. You've done that 
 fellow a good turn." 
 
 Father only laughed heartily at my Lilliputian rage, 
 then concluded the entire matter by saying, "Well, thank 
 heaven, those dogs'll never bother us." Nor, in a sense, did 
 they — though we had more trouble with Harfield. 2 
 
 1 I remember my father saying that, when he was not yet fully grown, he had measured 
 his reach with that of Abraham Lincoln. Each, as was the custom of the time, placed the 
 tip of his left middle finger at the house-corner and then, with breast laid flat against the 
 siding and both arms fully outstretched, had some neutral person mark the point to which 
 the tip of the right middle finger extended. And, though Lincoln, in height, was six feet 
 four, my father's reach exceeded his by three full inches. 
 
 2 In a letter to me dated March 30, 1943, Mr. Ernest Moore, of Milton, Pike County, 
 Illinois, an old-time blacksmith who is still active at the forge, wrote to me at large about 
 old-time blacksmiths and blacksmithing. His back-look does not extend quite so far back 
 
214 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 BIOGRAPHY OF GENERAL U. S. GRANT 
 Having said so much in this section about dogs and my 
 father's unalterable fear of them, I feel impelled to add at 
 this point what I am pleased to call my "Biography of 
 General U. S. Grant." It is one biography of the General 
 which, to date, you never have perused. 
 
 I did not first meet General Grant while he was being 
 born, but just a few weeks afterward. I can see him now, of a 
 modest gray but with very decided black and white markings 
 on his face and a strongly ringed tail. Even then he was 
 highly affectionate, acutely inquisitive, unconquerably 
 valiant. 
 
 The circumstances under which the meeting took place 
 were as follows: I was standing in the middle of my father's 
 big garden-plot, wondering just how the other boys and I 
 
 as to the days referred to in this book, yet it certainly adds no little to our knowledge of 
 the aforetime blacksmith and his work, as compared with those of the present day. 
 
 As to "the lampers" mentioned in the letter (see extracts herein) Webster, under 
 "lampas," defines the word in this way: "In horses, a congestion of the mucous membrane 
 of the hard palate just posterior to the incisor teeth. The condition is physiological [not 
 a disease condition] and requires no treatment." The condition, in my boyhood, was 
 regarded as a disease and treated as such by all blacksmiths, the name being then almost 
 universally written and pronounced "lampers." 
 
 Extracts from Mr. Moore's letter: 
 
 "In answer to your letter concerning the old time blacksmith shops I don't believe 
 I can remember far enough back to furnish all the information that you wish, but I will 
 answer your questions the best I can. 
 
 ' 'Some of the shops did have a tree in front or close by. This was desired by the smith 
 to furnish shade in hot weather to tie the horses in that came to be shod. This also gave 
 the shop a more friendly appearance. 
 
 "Most of the shops did have a horseshoe nailed over the door. Some of the shops 
 had several shoes over the door, of various shapes and sizes for various afflictions of horses. 
 This was done largely to display their skill of shoeing horses and making the shoes. It was 
 also a good luck emblem. 
 
 "All shops had a quenching tub (commonly called slack tub). This is still a necessity 
 in the shop for cooling the work when finished. 
 
 "As for the old-time smith prescribing for the people's sickness, I do not recall the 
 smith although I do recall the smith as the veterinarian. His most largely used instru- 
 ment, as I remember, was a red hot piece of iron. This was used for healing cuts that were 
 slightly infected and for any other ailment that could be touched with the hot iron. One 
 ailment of horses that I recall was called (Lampers). This was a swelling of the gums, 
 oftentimes swelling enough to hide the teeth, this was also treated with the red hot iron. 
 
 "I have heard of people doctoring boils with the water from the quenching tub and 
 also giving it to canary birds to make them sing. I don't recall any other medical practices 
 of the smith. 
 
 "The blacksmithing of today is much different from the old-time work. The horse- 
 shoeing is practically gone, the buggy repairing is gone. These were the old-time smith's 
 best work. 
 
 "The plow shares of that day were made by hand by the smith for walking plows. 
 They are mostly tractor plows now, made in factories and only sharpened by the smith. 
 They are much heavier and made of a much more solid steel. 
 
 "All of the material then was iron that was of such an inferior quality that the modern 
 smith can hardly use it successfully. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 215 
 
 would measure it off for the various sheds and departments 
 of our little county fair. All at once a rustle in the still stand- 
 ing sweet corn over in the northeast corner of the plot! 
 Turning, I beheld Johnny Lovitt, one of our finest little 
 neighbor boys, just emerging from the corn — bare-headed, 
 bug-eyed, and holding his hat, crown downward, by each 
 side of its brim and looking upon it tenderly. The crown 
 of the hat sagged heavily toward the earth. 
 
 "What you got there?" I asked. 
 
 "Show you." 
 
 He came up close, pulled open the hat, and there — 
 General Grant, nose sharp as a needle, almost; face well- 
 nigh covered by a black "burglar's mask," after the fashion 
 of all coons since the pair belonging to Noah at the landing 
 of the ark moved without the slightest apprehension across 
 
 "The work now is mostly repairing tractor drawn farm machinery. Most of this is 
 done either by acetylene welding or electric welding instead of the blacksmith welding in 
 the forge, although some forge- welding is done yet. 
 
 "The shop of today contains the forge, anvil and all the other tools of the old-time 
 smith plus emery stands, acetylene or electric welding outfits (or both) usually a power 
 rip-saw, a large post-drill for drilling holes in steel and various other machines for different 
 kinds of work. 
 
 "I do not have any old books or pictures of the old-time shop. I often wish that I 
 did have some pictures of this kind to compare with the shops of today. The smith of the 
 old days was the fellow of the community that every one took their troubles to and followed 
 his advice. He was quite a prominent character." 
 
 Concerning Mr. Moore and his son the February 23, 1943, issue of The Pike County 
 Re-publican has this to say: "Let no one get the idea that the village blacksmith is a 'has 
 been' in American rural life. Still a mighty man is he in his home community. 
 
 "The other day, when the local draft board put Kelly Moore, Milton smith, in I- A 
 and was going to take him for the army, there was a general uprising on the Milton prairies. 
 The embattled farmers of that section and of other neighborhoods more remote from Milton 
 arose in protest and declaimed in effect: 'What! Take our smith! It will be over our dead 
 bodies.' 
 
 "Daniel Hoover, J. A. Bauer, Jr. and Allie Landess circulated a petition and some sixty 
 or more farmers who depend upon the Milton village smith, signed it, asking that the 
 smith be deferred. It was indicated that so far as the smith himself was concerned, he 
 was ready and willing to go to the army. But the farmers over-ruled him and took matters 
 into their own hands 
 
 "Kelly works in the shop of his father, Ernest Moore, the latter's health being such 
 that he cannot keep pace with the demands upon his shop in the matter of farm machine 
 repairs, tool conditioning, etc. Kelly is a grandson of the late Cas Moore, one of the old 
 timers in the smithy business " 
 
 So it is seen that the blacksmith and his shop, contrary to many books and magazine 
 articles, have not by any means been driven out of existence by automobiles and great steel 
 plants. Even the exterior of the shops is much the same: wagon-wheel leaning against 
 unpainted wall, horse-shoe over broad doorway, especially the great tree with its hospitable 
 shadow and ever-whispering leaves. 
 
 The smith himself, however, is no longer a three-fourths dentist or one-fourth doctor. 
 That I admit. His occupation, though it continues to exist, is very much narrower in scope 
 than it was in the days of the mighty blacksmith, Michael McCarthy — God bless him. 
 
216 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 the backs of tigers, lions, and so forth, and then leaped gal- 
 lantly off them to the highest point of Ararat. But the 
 eyes — O, the eyes ! How full they were of affection as they 
 gazed straight at me! Much as to say, "Why, you and I are 
 actually old pals to begin with!" But for all their deep 
 affection they looked into mine unwaveringly. All at once 
 — another rustle in the corn. And then out of the corn came 
 a good sized, three month's dog of the neighborhood, a 
 mean vicious cur even at that early period of dog life. From 
 the way he was nosing about, I judged he had somehow got 
 the odor of wild meat and was coming now to investigate it 
 and the meat's possible availability. All at once the coon 
 had left the hat and was moving toward the dog — not in 
 the least because of any belligerency, but only in order, as it 
 seemed, to place himself in a position where "righteous" 
 self-defense would necessarily become inevitable. (After 
 the fashion of human governments to a T and the world 
 over.) 
 
 Now the coon — But the fight was finished. I had not 
 even seen any fight, so quickly had it occurred. Yes, and 
 the coon was back inside the hat, looking at me with those 
 calm, bright, extremely affectionate, yet always unwaver- 
 ing, eyes. 
 
 Now I was enough of a boy to know exactly what Johnny 
 Lovitt had come over to our place for. I said, "What do 
 you want? the crow?" 
 
 "Of course." 
 
 "Can't have him. You know that. How about the two 
 kittens somebody left here lately? My father and mother 
 say I have too many kittens." 
 
 "And how much boot?" 
 
 Pins I despised as legal tender, nevertheless legal tender 
 pins were in those days, perhaps throughout the entire 
 United States. I said gladly, "A paper of pins." 
 
 "Make it two papers," urged Lovitt. 
 
 I delivered the cats and the pins, Johnny left for home, 
 and I for our hayloft, where, in a jiffy, I constructed a 
 beautiful cage for General Grant. All the rest of the after- 
 noon, as I lay upon the hay reading, I would from time to 
 time go over and talk with the Commander-in-Chief. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 217 
 
 About two mornings later, as I came downstairs to break- 
 fast, Father said to Mother, "I wonder what can be the 
 matter at the barn? The last few days or so I have seen 
 many dogs sniffing and smelling all about it, and, now and 
 then, rushing into and then wildly out of it. The barn must 
 be getting over-run with rats. I will have to look into that 
 matter as soon as practice slackens a little." Look into it, 
 however, he never did. Here's why. I had learned that 
 General Grant, if I left the door of his cage open, would 
 always go back into it, not only at night, but even in the 
 day time as a safe retreat. The dogs could not follow him 
 up the ladder into the loft, and, from time to time, if not 
 too many dogs were in the lower story of the structure, he 
 would slip down all of a sudden, and, without word of 
 warning, re-fight Shiloh or Appomattox Courthouse. Hence, 
 ultimately, the great scarcity of dogs in our neighborhood 
 which had been noticed by my father only a day or two after 
 he had first observed their colossal superabundance. 
 
 Had the General not been quite so brave or quite so 
 voracious he would not so certainly have gotten us both 
 into trouble. As it was, he had no hesitation whatever about 
 leaving the barn for the house — where, of course, he was 
 instantly spotted by Father and Mother as just another of 
 Tom's already too numerous pets. His hands were almost 
 human in their universal applicability, and his appetite — 
 well, it was termed "excellent" whatsoever his busy hands 
 laid hold on. He pulled to pieces and devoured some of my 
 father's and brothers' toughest boots. He ate all my mother's 
 tallow candles. He even unscrewed the caps of many of her 
 Mason fruit jars, devouring the contents to the last sweet 
 drop. I took him to bed with me one cold night, and, 
 before cockcrow, he had risen, found the box wherein my 
 Brother Willie kept his peanuts, hazel nuts, maple sugar 
 and candies, and, before the loud crunching had wakened 
 me, he had devoured not only the contents of the box but 
 the sweet-tasting carton itself. The verdict: General Grant 
 must go — go to such a distance that he never could return. 
 In other words he had become as unpopular as his human 
 namesake had become before the opening of the Civil War. 
 
218 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Then, in fact, there broke out another civil war — on a 
 small scale. 
 
 But, first, we boys had a big county fair, had it in my 
 father's large garden. There was a fine ring in which we 
 ran horse races. There were peep-shows, too, ten pins a peep. 
 There were gambling devices also, wherein the owners — 
 strictly in accordance with grown-up ideas — never did do 
 any gambling but got the pins inevitably. And then there 
 were the pets — the cats, the crow, the dear little nanny-goat, 
 squirrel in a very safe cage, and (last but not least in interest) 
 there was General U. S. Grant — who asked no security what- 
 ever from bolts and bars but could always supply the article 
 himself by paws, claws, and calm courage. He was quite 
 as affectionate as ever, quite as motionless and silent, quite 
 as clear, convincing and unwavering. All at once Jim 
 Tormey came into the garden — I think it was Jim — leading 
 a mastiff by a leash. 
 
 "Hey!" he cried, "cage up that coon er my dog'll kill 
 1m. 
 
 "Betcha?" cried Gus Heck. 
 
 "Yes, I betcha; you want a bet?" 
 
 "Who else'll betcha?" 
 
 Half a dozen others betchaed. Brother Jon held the 
 money. 
 
 "You willin'?" asked Jim of me. "You own the coon." 
 
 I nodded — Grant was already on the silent road to 
 Shiloh. The dog leaped — 
 
 But almost immediately gave tongue and departed, the 
 little burglar-faced jockey firmly seated on his scalp, tear- 
 ing out bits of choice dog-meat and flinging them to all 
 points of the compass. 
 
 Then I heard my father crying from the edge of the 
 garden: "Bring that General here and we'll all take a ride 
 in the country together." The General now was coming 
 back with many laurels (so to speak) and without wounds 
 to his own person. I transferred him to my father's welcom- 
 ing, even affectionate, arms. 
 
 In the buggy said my father, "Henry Mocksinger — you 
 remember I whipped him because he had sicked another 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 219 
 
 man's dogs on us? Well, he's too cowardly to attack me 
 again himself, even with another man's dogs to help him 
 do the job, but, each day, as I drive past his place, he sics 
 one or both of his own big curs after me, and, once, the 
 bigger dog jumped into the buggy and I had a deuce of a 
 time before I could throw him out. Yesterday he bit the 
 horse — badly. To-day — I don't like to have to shoot a dog, 
 or anything. To-day — " 
 
 "You won't have to tell my General what to do," I 
 ventured. 
 
 Nor did he. Both dogs came flying — a great, swift collie 
 in front and a lumbering, vicious mastiff for rear guard. 
 
 Exactly what happened I don't know yet. Father reach- 
 ed for Grant, but the General was on the job before he 
 reached. The mastiff was receiving attention just as the 
 collie shrieked and ran. And then the General was in my 
 arms, unhurt. My father kissed him. 
 
 But General Grant, tough customer though he was, be- 
 came eventually one of my father's patients. 
 
 Somebody had "tossed him something." The General, 
 omnivorous gourmand as he was, swallowed it rapidly and 
 without hesitation. I saw him in the act, in fact I had 
 caught a bare glimpse of the departing tosser. 
 
 In a few minutes the General became very sick. I took 
 him into the sitting-room of our home, and, pulling out 
 the lounge away from the black-board, laid him upon it 
 with all the tenderness of my soul. 
 
 "A gastro-intestinal irritant," diagnosed my father, who 
 did the best he could to cure our little "pardner." But his 
 efforts availed nothing. The General was terribly drawn by 
 cramp after cramp — though never a squeal came out of him. 
 Sitting by his side I comforted him, all the while he looked 
 upon me with the same affection he had displayed the 
 day when first we met. And ever, as on that day, his eyes 
 were steady, unswerving, as willing as could be to face 
 whatsoever of fortune or misfortune this world might have 
 in pickle for him. 
 
 Once Father came round to my side of the lounge, so that 
 I was compelled by the occasion to pass round to the side 
 
220 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 opposite. And then I noticed that the General's eyes were 
 still fixed on the place where I had just been sitting. 
 
 We boys of the F. S. S. were still rather small, so we 
 buried Grant with full military honors. 
 
 My father, from a little distance, during the last part of 
 the proceedings, stood very still and looked on. 
 
 There was yet another case wherein my father played 
 the part of doctor to an animal, even a dog. One smoky 
 autumn day, as he and I were driving leisurely along, there 
 broke suddenly upon us the distant uproar of a deep-voiced 
 hound. He bayed and he bellowed. He bugled and he 
 "broke." He burst into crescendos of bitter complaint then 
 fell into wails and sobs of uttermost despair. He stopped, 
 listened for help, and, getting none, raised his voice in 
 canine objurgation. Yes, who was he ever to have counted 
 on human assistance? 
 
 "Dog's hurt," commented my father somewhat unneces- 
 sarily and stopping his horse. 
 
 He tied the hitch-rein to a fence-post. We both climbed 
 the fence, and set off over a plowed field. Then we entered 
 a dense wood, wherein we had no difficulty in finding Mr 
 Hound. "This is Jim Rannigan's hound," he said, and felt 
 out his fractured ribs. What had fractured them he did not 
 know and the hound could not tell him. 
 
 He carried the dog in his arms to the Rannigan cottage, 
 the dog licking his hand all the way and the Rannigan 
 children almost doing the same thing when "Old Barney" 
 was given the place of honor in the baby's cradle. 
 
 My father "supported" 1 those ribs as tenderly as if Old 
 Barney had been a prince of the blood royal. 
 
 Back in the buggy I ventured, "You loved that dog, 
 Daddy." 
 
 "No," he dissented, "I didn't. But I knew that the Ran- 
 
 1 Fixation, or "support," of the chest-wall was the chief indication in the treatment 
 of fractured ribs. This immobilized the fragments, thus not only lessening the pain but 
 also giving the ends of the fragments a chance to unite (grow together again) more quickly. 
 To effect this object the chest was shaved and then adhesive strips long enough to reach 
 from the breast-bone to the spinal column were horizontally applied. All these steps were 
 taken in the case of Old Barney. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 221 
 
 nigan children did. Besides, that dog was sick. He needed 
 a doctor — a good one. So I answered his call." 1 
 
 REALIZATION OF DEATH 
 
 One forenoon in summer, while I read in Hayloft Uni- 
 versity, up there under the hot shingles and the coo-coo 
 and patter of the pigeons across them, all at once — a quick, 
 light step below, then the voice of my father, "Tommy, 
 don't you want to take a ride?" 
 
 A moment later I was in the buggy beside him, and mov- 
 ing rapidly toward the country — at about four miles per 
 hour. 
 
 What a day it was ! How full of life and energy ! A day 
 on which to discuss the very subject of life itself. I quizzed 
 my father about life's origin, told him all the obscene and 
 foul-worded science of generation as I had learned it from 
 
 1 Not seldom, when the excellent veterinary at Pittsfield was not available, my father 
 was requested to act in his place. "Ef a feller kin kyore a jackass like me," said modestly 
 one of the wisest farmers in Pike County, "I reckon he ortew be purty good with a cow." 
 So Father and I went out to the barn, where, as I remember, I witnessed my first obstetrical 
 procedure. 
 
 The weather was very cold and, though I kept my wraps on, I had to pace about the 
 barn rather rapidly to keep even half-way warm. And I recall how glad I felt that I was 
 probably going to be a doctor of human, not veterinary, medicine. Even human medicine 
 meant hardships without number, but, somehow, it had never before occurred to me that 
 the lot of a veterinarian must from its very nature be in that respect far worse. A doctor, 
 arriving at a farmhouse almost frozen to death by a raging wind, could, at least in the 
 majority of cases, get thoroughly warm before starting to examine his patient or while 
 examining him. A "vet," on the other hand, must almost invariably hurry to the barn, 
 there perhaps to work for hours in its Arctic temperature. 
 
 And to do this kind of work ofttimes by night and for less, far less, remuneration, gen- 
 erally, than a country doctor ordinarily receives — little indeed as that is — seemed to me 
 pitiable in the extreme. (I have not even mentioned the struggles they had with recalcitrant 
 animals, bulls and stallions in particular, perhaps by the light of a candle-lantern and with 
 hands half frozen besides.) 
 
 My father delivered the cow and afterwards "cleaned" her — i.e., removed the afterbirth 
 and membranes. It was nearly sunset when, at last, we passed out of the barn on a squshy 
 path between two cones of manure — cow on one side, horse on the other. The "sqush" 
 went half-way to our knees. 
 
 Oftener he treated a cow's mastitis (inflammation of the udder). I have, however, 
 known him flatly to refuse to dehorn cattle, and, especially, to ring a bull. Such things could 
 wait for a veterinarian. 
 
 Once when we went to see an old horse for influenza ("epizootic"), he greeted us with 
 a low, soft coddling nicker. And behold it was a long-lost friend of ours — "old Dick," 
 who had become too slow and weak for a doctor's use and who had therefore been sold 
 to a teamster, then to a farmer for his aged mother's horse-and-buggy pulling alone. My 
 father never had a more rejoiceful patient — or a horse a more attentive vet. Sugar? He got 
 a plenty (with medicine on some of it). 
 
 In town, too, my father did some veterinary practice incidentally — again when a vet. 
 was not available. In my very early boyhood there had been no educated veterinarian in the 
 county. In those days the Methodist minister, a man named Gilmer, preached in the church 
 across the street from our house. He was a great jolly fellow who was always telling funny 
 
222 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 the boys. Then he offered me the truth, and how beautifully 
 and sweetly he presented it! And how gladly, too, I ac- 
 cepted it. 
 
 And we discussed, as best we could, with all the differ- 
 ences of years and education and experience between us, the 
 mystery and the majesty and the marvel and the meaning of 
 the miracle-thing called "life." 
 
 House after house we visited. 
 
 Mostly I waited outside, and, as soon as my father had 
 returned and got into the buggy, and started old "Quinine" 
 on his way again, once more we would talk of that in- 
 scrutable mystery, life, and of its possible origin and its 
 strangely doubtful continuance in the material universe. 
 
 I told him how much I had already wondered by myself 
 about the fact of animal and vegetable existence, and how, 
 in particular, when I had awakened on some stormy nights, 
 at the banging of the thunder, I would think of the little, 
 tiny earthworms, deep down in their subterranean galleries, 
 and of all the dangers in which they lay. "They're not fish 
 [for so I displayed my knowledge] and they can't get air out 
 of water as the fish do, and so, when there is rain, they have 
 
 stories and keeping the little county capital in an uproar of laughter. Everybody loved 
 him and his equally cheerful wife. My father was their doctor. 
 
 One day their giant of a dog — I think his name was "Sport" — broke a leg. "Nothing 
 to do but shoot him" was the verdict of absolutely everybody excepting his owners. They 
 called Father — knowing, too, how much he feared all dogs. 
 
 Father demurred. They insisted. They finally had their way. 
 
 The dog, at the strong insistence of his friends, kept almost unbelievably quiet. "Not 
 healed yet, quite," my father would keep saying to his owners, whenever they asked to 
 have the splints removed. And so they kept on keeping Sport quiet. It was the safer way. 
 
 One day, as the big, restless fellow lay reluctantly on pillows before the open door — 
 it was summer and long before the days of door and window screens — all at once a boy's 
 rabbit ran through the yard. 
 
 Zip! went Sport, splint, obedience, and everything. 
 
 When he came back, he had removed the splint himself and his leg was as sound as 
 anybody's too. 
 
 Master and mistress rushed with dog to my father's house, where the emotional preacher 
 actually broke down and wept abundantly. 
 
 For years I had, and still have somewhere, a delightful many-paged letter which master 
 and mistress wrote — the dog no doubt supervising — to my father, expressing the most ex- 
 treme gratitude for, and eternal remembrance of, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 
 
 Another animal-and-doctor story. A fine woman, when a ewe on her farm died, 
 leaving a small black lamb, took the lamb into her home, bottle-fed it, petted it, brought 
 it to full maturity. Then she would not part with it for the slaughter, in fact she called my 
 father in a time or two to treat it. Always after adopting that lamb, she bore the nickname, 
 Black Sheep — and seemed too to like it. 
 
 And whenever anyone mentioned this lady in the presence of others by her nickname, 
 some one else man or woman, would inevitably comment, about like," Women always did 
 love black sheep the best, don't they?" 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 223 
 
 to work quickly out onto the surface of the soil, or else 
 simply drown. And many can't move out quickly enough, 
 partly because they have no eyes, and so they do very often 
 perish." And I had pitied, I said, the earthworms, because 
 they must, of course, like all the rest of us, love life. "All 
 living things love life, ' ' I asseverated. ' 'Isn't it so, Father?' ' 
 
 "Yes, mostly," he responded. "Except that, now and 
 then, some poor human being, who isn't happy like our- 
 selves, will commit suicide." Then he gave me a very long 
 lecture, unthoughtedly of course, on the nature, causes and 
 differential diagnosis of suicide. 
 
 So that, eventually, although he did not mean it to be so, 
 the day began to look less alluring to me. 
 
 At length we stopped before a shining white house — no 
 doubt a very small one, but yet, to me, then, apparently 
 spacious. 
 
 It was a silent place too, an almost intolerably silent 
 3lace, and my father remained inside the building for, as I 
 relieved, an unreasonable time. 
 
 Filled at last with an uneasy curiosity and a strange, 
 unaccountable foreboding, I slowly moved up to the cottage 
 and looked in at the doorway. And then — my heart froze. 
 
 A man, white-faced, black-bearded, in the very flower of 
 his years, lay propped with pillows in a bed; and instinct 
 told me that he might be dying. So intent was my father 
 in his efforts to revive the man, that he did not notice my 
 appearance on the scene. Four or five small children at the 
 side of the bed, their faces pressed into the counterpane, 
 sobbed convulsively. At the head of the bed stood a woman, 
 unquestionably the wife. At a little distance were two or 
 three other persons, apparently neighbors, weeping. The 
 grief of the wife and mother was something terrible to be- 
 hold. She did not seem so much to be shaken with many 
 sobs, as to be held and bound in one vast spasm of woe. 
 Her sorrow in fact too strong for intermission! But what it 
 was that here most shocked and overwhelmed me, was not 
 the grief of the spectators, great as that was, but rather the 
 calmness and introspection of the dying man's face (if dying 
 he were) its faint smile and great solemnity. No outward 
 matters concerned it now. Apparently indifferent to the 
 raging woe about, it seemed turned inward on the deepest 
 
224 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 memories of long years, calmly and impartially surveying 
 them, good and evil. 
 
 As soon as I could move, I turned and went to the buggy. 
 My father came soon. 
 
 I did not tell him what I had seen and I kept my face 
 averted that he might not know my depression. The terrible 
 philosophy, that day for the first time, was deeply impressed 
 upon me, that man must die. No matter how happy his 
 heart, or how strong his body, or how beautiful the earth 
 and all that lived upon it seemed to be to him, he must die. 
 Death, so far at least as this world was concerned, was to 
 be the end of all of us. Die, die, die; that we should all do. 
 The whole great family of man should die. Such things, of 
 course, I had heard frequently, and I had often seen at the 
 church, just across from my father's house, many funerals 
 and all the sad trappings and paraphernalia of woe, and I 
 had even known those who had died. But now for the first 
 time, or so its seemed, I perceived, as never before, the 
 meaning of death, and the sad realization filled up my soul 
 with gloom. 
 
 We went next, Father and I, to a place not far from the 
 house where the black-bearded man had possibly died, and 
 the mansion of sorrow, from where I waited in the road, 
 could be distinctly seen, very conspicuous on its lofty hill, 
 shining as a bright monument and warning. 
 
 It drew my eyes with a growing fascination. Turn as I 
 might, I ever found my gaze reverting to it. "Gone, gone!" 
 it seemed to say to me. "Forever gone! Life and love and 
 happiness all gone. What do things matter, what does life 
 amount to?" 
 
 I turned away, I closed my eyes, I dropped my face in my 
 hands, I ran to the fence across the road and pressed my 
 eyes against that. But in vain. I ever found my gaze turned 
 backward to the house of the dying or the dead — to its grief, 
 to its sorrow, to its imperative, its inexorable, instruction. 
 
 Be a doctor now, as I had always wanted to be? Never. 
 
 Overcome at last by the blackest melancholy, I deliber- 
 ately faced about and ran along the road. I ran and I ran 
 and I kept on running. At last I fell. And when I arose, 
 a number of high hills had come between me and the sorrow- 
 ful sight. "Now," thought I, "I am rid of it." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 225 
 
 But I was not. For the sadness of death seemed to have 
 followed me and to have spread, and to have covered all 
 the earth, as it were with a black garment. 
 
 I went and leaned weakly against a fence, and looked 
 into a field where, as it was summer, thousands upon tens 
 of thousands of aged stalks of wheat stood, bowing, bowing, 
 their grave heads in the pleasant breeze. And, as I looked, 
 it seemed, in my overwrought condition, that the stalks, 
 like me, were sad to distraction, that they had some dim 
 foreknowledge of the sickle, and of the time when rain and 
 shine and sweet myriad companionship would cease, when 
 life, which had come upon them so mysteriously, should be 
 as mysteriously taken away. For this reason it was, I 
 thought, that, all day, all day, they kept bowing, bowing, 
 their grave heads— in reverent and silent acquiescence in 
 fate. 
 
 "If it must be so! If it must be so!" 
 
 Unable to stand the morbid fancies longer, I once more 
 started away, and attempted to run; when suddenly — 
 
 "Hello, are you there?" It was my father, in his buggy, 
 coming down the hill. 
 
 How gladly did I not run to him and clamber to his side! 
 And then, as I told him of the black scene and the mood it 
 had brought to me, how tactfully did he not guide my 
 mind to pleasanter subjects — at first to matters of philoso- 
 phic consolation about sickness, the relation of sickness to 
 evolution, and then afterwards to stories of adventure or 
 bits of history, and so on down to comical tales, to huge 
 jokes and side-splitting puns — till the hills and hollows 
 about us were filled with our joyous laughter. 
 
 We kept on laughing for a very long time, betwixt house 
 and house — till the night came down; and then, as we drove, 
 each through his self-peopled dark, my father sat unmoving 
 and unspeaking, so long, so long, that, at last, like the 
 child I was, I began to wonder if the night had not become 
 to him what the day had been to me. 
 
 As we neared home, in the nearly deserted streets of the 
 little town, I asked, in a tremulous whisper, "Dead?" 
 
 "Yes," said my father, with a long, soft sigh, "dead. 
 O yes, dead." 
 
226 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 I leaped suddenly out of the buggy and ran ahead to our 
 house, crying all the way, "O dead, dead, dead!" 
 
 I shall never forget the little white house and its large 
 black message. That tiny building in the country, which I 
 seldom saw again (for my father almost always drove away 
 around it whenever he had me with him) became in my 
 after years a kind of controlling image which, over and over, 
 took possession of my moods, and even, like an unconscious 
 tyrant, directed a good share of my conduct — boy, youth and 
 man. 
 
 Sometimes it has been as a terrible battlefield for me, 
 again as a curious way to happiness. 
 
 It has caused me, I believe, to set upon life an unusual, 
 a strangely exalted, value, and to hate sickness, death and 
 war with an inexpressible, almost infinite, hatred. 
 
 It has, to a large degree, though no doubt indirectly, 
 been the prime-moving cause of whatsoever little service I 
 may have been able to render to the cause of humanity, and, 
 especially, to international peace. 
 
 HENRY SUTLER, DISOBEDIENT 
 
 A doctor's patients (sick people) and clients (those who 
 employed him to attend their sick) varied a great deal in 
 their attitude toward him according to the place where and 
 the occasion whereon they met him. Take, for example, a 
 Sunday morning at a country church. 
 
 Father and I would almost always be in the building 
 before the church members themselves would. He always 
 abhorred going late into church. For a while the crowd 
 would slowly gather about the hitching-rack or in the 
 cemetery. 1 Then they would file into the room with stiff 
 solemnity. There indeed they would generally not speak 
 even to one another, excepting only the very aged. The 
 doctor and his little son they would scarcely seem to notice. 
 "It is incongruous," they appeared to me to say, "for those 
 who believe that bugs, not devils, are the producers of 
 disease to sit, even though silent and apart, in God's holy 
 
 1 For a full treatment of the characteristics of old-time churches and their cemeteries 
 in Pike County, see The Pike County Republican, January 20, 1943, p. 6, article, "Names 
 Famous in Country's Romance and History Found On Stones in Hinman Cemetery." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 227 
 
 temple." Outside the church, however, and when sickness 
 struck hard in the home, they almost always welcomed the 
 doctor with outstretched hands and quick, overflowing 
 obedience in their hearts. 
 
 Henry Sutler, though, was neither particularly religious 
 nor dependably obedient. He was a man of striking character, 
 successful in business, quite well-read, kind to all his neigh- 
 bors. One weak point there was about him: he never liked 
 anybody to tell him what to do. Sick or well, he did not 
 want to be told — well, anything whatever. 
 
 But when he came down with typhoid fever, he let both 
 his wife and his doctor counsel him — at least for a short time 
 and up to a certain point. 
 
 Then Henry Sutler's condition began to improve. Henry 
 did not understand typhoid fever, but he thought that he 
 did. After the fourth week, when he had no more fever and 
 scarcely any pain, he informed my father that he was all right 
 now, that he was going to get up shortly, dress himself and 
 set about his work. My father told the man about the ex- 
 treme danger of hemorrhage from the bowels in a case pre- 
 senting just such symptoms as his at that particular stage 
 of the disease. 
 
 Henry persisted. My father resisted. Henry begged his 
 wife to bring him his shoes, his shirt, his trousers. Father 
 told her not to bring them. "Henry," said he, "if you do 
 not promise not to dress before I say that you may, I'll 
 gather up every particle of clothing that you have in the 
 house, take it away home with me and burn it." 
 
 Thereupon Henry Sutler drew a long breath of resigna- 
 tion and promised that, in every particular, he would do 
 precisely as my father had ordered him to do. 
 
 Father and I then went away happy. 
 
 Scarcely, however, had we driven half a quarter when 
 we heard behind us a woman's shrill screaming. Turning, 
 we saw Mrs. Sutler standing on her front porch, crying and 
 frantically gesturing to us to come back. 
 
 At the house again we arrived just in time to see Henry 
 Sutler faint and fall to the floor. Yes, he was dead, and his 
 trousers were full of blood. 
 
228 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 That evening, at home, I, child-like, stood alone in our 
 kitchen garden watching the fireflies all over the yard sud- 
 denly brightening the summer air with living and ascending 
 light, then, as suddenly, disappearing downward into utter 
 darkness. . 
 
 And I thought again of the little white house and of 
 many other terrible things till the cheery voice of my mother 
 from the back kitchen stoop called her little brood to supper 
 and the gayety of those who live. 
 
 THE FLOOD-GATE AND THE HARP 
 
 Sometimes, when my father went into a farmhouse, I 
 remained in the buggy and played to the farmer boys on my 
 harmonicon — "harp" we called it in those days. (Some- 
 times too, on the road, I played it for Father.) I always 
 have had little talent for music, so was joyed to the heart 
 whenever accused by my tiny rural audience of using a 
 "trick harp" — whatever that may be. 
 
 One day when Father had left me in his buggy just across 
 a creek, with the horse hitched to a fence near a flood-gate 
 and not a soul in sight, I leaned back all by myself against 
 the buggy-hood and began playing my harp. All at once 
 I saw a queer movement in the water just beyond the flood- 
 gate rim. Then, slowly, there came out of the water one 
 boyish head and then another. As I kept on playing, eight 
 or more boys emerged completely from the deep water and 
 climbed atop the flood-gate, where they sat quite silent and 
 apparently enraptured by the music. 
 
 All of a sudden, down the road a rattling farm-wagon 
 hove in sight conveying Mr. Farmer with a young lady by 
 his side. Kersplash went the gleaming bodies back into the 
 water, like so many white-skinned frogs. 
 
 When the wagon had passed, out came the gleaming 
 bodies again and ranged themselves atop the flood-gate. 
 
 But now one of them begged to be allowed to play my 
 harp. "I kin do it better'n you kin." I let him play, but 
 hardly had he started his tune when one of the metallic 
 reeds of the instrument came loose and lodged in his throat. 
 
 Consternation then in the whole group! "He's got a 
 piece of harp in his throat, and now he'll have to die." 
 A wail from the harpist, "Get me to the doctor quick!" 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 229 
 
 The boys having jumped into their trousers, helped me 
 convoy the gasping harpist to the house where my father 
 was seated, instruments in hand, awaiting the arrival of 
 another little harpist, zero age. 
 
 The bedroom door, where the mother-patient lay, was 
 banged shut. My father had me hold the family looking- 
 glass in the sunlight at such an angle that the light came 
 over the patient's right shoulder, was reflected over my 
 father's left shoulder and so into the patient's throat — the 
 customary procedure with throat cases at that time. And 
 there, surely enough, trapped in a pit of the tonsil, shone 
 the reed from the harp. Forceps removed it easily. "Skat!" 
 shouted Father and away went we to the creek-side again. 
 
 Two or three years later, one of the same set of boys, 
 swimming alone in the same deep pool above the flood-gate, 
 drowned. 
 
 In a dream one night I saw him, tried to help him, was 
 wholly unable. Always after that, as I drove with Father 
 past the flood-gate, I saw that dream as if it were being 
 enacted again. 
 
 SCUTTLED 
 
 Yet another in this series of mortality sketches — death is 
 so common even on farms. 
 
 Some one scuttled a flat-bottom boat which the smaller 
 boys of two families were using on a large horse-pond near 
 the barn of one of them. Recent rains had increased the 
 depth of the water and a discharged hired hand of one of the 
 families had come back in the night, bored a hole in the 
 bottom of the boat, put a cork in the hole with the small end 
 projecting a little into the boat just where the boy who 
 steered the boat would be sure, eventually, to place his foot 
 — thus pushing out the cork. A smear of sticky mud over and 
 around the cork had been used to conceal evidence of the 
 crime. 
 
 Next day the four boys went into the boat, pushed off. 
 Two began rowing, one steering. Presently the boat filled 
 with water. 
 
 The two larger boys could swim, but not well. The two 
 little fellows could not swim at all. The result was, appar- 
 
230 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 ently, a double drowning. Father and I by chance driving 
 near, were summoned to the farmhouse. There we re- 
 suscitated the little shavers. 
 
 About this time, their father, who had been absent, re- 
 turned. At once he guessed the culprit. He leaped back upon 
 the horse by which he had come, but his wife shouted, 
 "There he is now in the barn!" And indeed the man who 
 had scuttled the boat containing four small boys was peering 
 from the loft of the barn, grinning with glee at the trouble 
 and danger that he, the moron, had produced. 
 
 Two neighbor men who chanced to be passing were 
 hurriedly told of the situation. My father and I remained 
 with the little patients, while the three big farmers dashed 
 down to the barn. Two guarded the front entrance while 
 the father ran round to the rear in order to block the crimi- 
 nal's exit. 
 
 The stage seemed all set for a first-class, home-made 
 hanging, but Mr. Hired Man was equal to the occasion. 
 From the rear hayloft door he leaped down on the father of 
 the boys so heavily as to stun him. Then, turning, he plaster- 
 ed rain-softened manure all over the stunned man's face. 
 
 Fetching a circuit round the orchard to the front of the 
 house, he mounted one of the neighbor farmer's horses, and 
 away ! 
 
 We afterwards learned that the fellow had crossed "Old 
 Man River" at the Louisiana Ferry. At all events the man 
 was never caught. But rumor for a time was rife that "some- 
 body must 'a' found 'im and made 'im so's he never could be 
 found no more." 
 
 And I still am wondering if rumor, for once amid all its 
 errors, was not correct — despite the fact that nothing at all 
 was ever printed about this matter in any of its phases. 
 
 THE BOTTOM MAN 
 
 Still one more mortality case. 
 
 No, the "Bottom Man" was not someone who stood, or 
 possibly lay, at the bottom of the social ladder. The name 
 referred to anyone who dwelt on a creek or river bottom — 
 Illinois or Mississippi. Now, the bottom man was clearly 
 distinguished from all other men by the fact that he suffered 
 a very great deal from malaria. (Nothing then was known 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 231 
 
 about the real cause of malaria, or why the bottom people 
 then so often had malaria.) 
 
 One day Father (I went with him) was called to see a 
 man at El Dara, whose home, however, was somewhere over 
 in Missouri — the Missouri, or western, side of the Mississippi 
 river-bottom. His name was Treelaker, or something like 
 that. He was a typical bottom man, too, but pretty well 
 off financially because of the great fertility of his bottom 
 farms. 
 
 And now he was terribly sick. He had in fact been at- 
 tacked quite suddenly at El Dara with a congestive chill, 
 which means an exceedingly vile, painful and dangerous 
 chill, produced by a very unusual dose of "double-shot" 
 malaria. 
 
 The man had, for very many years, owed Father for 
 medical services rendered away back yonder when Mr. Tree- 
 laker and his family had lived on the Illinois side of the 
 Mississippi River. Mr. Treelaker not only had never paid 
 his bill but he had also refused point blank to pay it or to 
 try to pay it, and, in addition, with all sorts and varieties 
 of profanity, obscenity and other expressions of deepest con- 
 tempt for every sort and kind of doctor. But, just now, he 
 believed himself dying. So he had sent a good messenger 
 "haste, post-haste" to Pittsfield in order to have my father 
 come and see him. 
 
 When Father and I arrived on the scene, the man did in 
 fact appear to be passing away. His intellect was unclouded, 
 his internal temperature was normal. His external tempera- 
 ture, however, was that of Greenland's icy mountains. There 
 was also, from time to time, most furious vomiting, purging, 
 and intestinal cramping. The man was rapidly approaching 
 collapse. 
 
 His condition was made much worse by his intense fear 
 of death. He kept murmuring, "Save me, O God! Save me, 
 Doctor! I done you wrong, I know, Doctor! But save me! 
 I'll pay you plenty, Doc. I'll pay you even more than you 
 have ever asked me. Pay you for this work too, Doc. But 
 save me!" 
 
 My father did save him. He gave him first a hypodermic 
 — quite a novelty then. And so on, covering the whole 
 program of things useful in a congestive chill. And so, at 
 
232 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 last, he did save him. We left him for awhile in order to 
 visit another patient — half a quarter of a mile or so away. 
 Returning, we found Mr. Treelaker sitting up, drinking hot 
 coffee and "as sassy as a jay bird." 
 
 "Say, Doc," he cried as we entered, "know why Missouri 
 got all the Treelakers and Illinois got all the Shastids?" 
 
 "No. Why?" 
 
 "Missouri got first pick." 
 
 Yes, as sassy as a jay bird — and again a dead beat too. 
 
 But,- inside of a week Mr. Treelaker had paid that bill — 
 with costs — the way he generally preferred to pay. 
 
 In about three months he had another congestive chill. 
 Being angry at all doctors, he would send for no doctor, and 
 his death, I confess, made very little sorrow in my childish 
 heart. 
 
 I MOURN FOR THE LAUGHTER 
 There was great gayety and laughter in those days, as 
 well as sorrow and death. 
 
 How I mourn for that laughter, that gayety! Always it 
 seemed to my father that the Pike County gayety was ever 
 at its best just south of Hodgen Hill (the hill which Father 
 had so christened, a wooded and rocky climb from Honey 
 Creek to the fine plateau-road running by the side of what 
 had been the boyhood home of Hodgen. To me, however, 
 it appeared that the merriest merriment and laughingest 
 laughter were only to be found in what I had christened 
 Sundance Valley. Now that was a valley which lay some 
 distance south of Hodgen Hill, and to which I had given the 
 name, Sundance, because always it seemed to me, whenever 
 we approached it from the north, to be filled with dancing 
 beams of sunlight. And the people around and within that 
 valley were always, as I saw them and heard them, even 
 while, overburdened, they kept at their labors, to be full of 
 quips and rallies, and unlimited jocundity. 
 
 I pause for a moment, now a white-haired physician at 
 Duluth, Minnesota, with sixty-eight years added of arduous 
 experience both in medicine and human nature, to wonder if 
 I do really remember aright the laughter of Hodgen Hill 
 and of Sundance Valley as it was well-nigh three-quarters of 
 a century ago. Was it not perchance the abundant laughter 
 
MRS. GEORGE L. PURKITT 
 
 Mrs. Purkitt, when the wife of a former husband, the Rev. Garbutt, became the foster mother 
 of John George Nicolay and a great friend of the still younger John Hay, later (successively) 
 Assistant Secretary to Abraham Lincoln, editor New York Tribune, U. S. Ambassador to Great 
 Britain, Secretary of State of the United States. 
 
 Mrs. Purkitt had been born in New York State, February 10, 1816, as Phimelia B. Scott. 
 She married the Rev. Garbutt in 1841, and almost immediately moved into the house already 
 depicted in this volume as "The Garbutt Home." The Rev. Garbutt died of smallpox in Memphis, 
 Tenn., in 1855. Her foster son, Nicolay, remained in her home till 1857, at which time he was 
 twenty-five years old. Mrs. Garbutt married George L. Purkitt in 1865. Shortly afterward she 
 and her husband removed to North Monroe Street, just across from my father's house. 
 
 Mrs. Purkitt was a woman of fine character, well educated, versed especially in history, 
 intensely religious, and yet possessed of an unfailing sense of humor. She died November 26, 
 1895. Visiting at Pittsfield during her last illness, I went to see her. She was in much pain and 
 greatly emaciated. Yet she whispered me to bend over her. When I had done so, she referred 
 to the great horror which she knew I had always felt concerning death, also to the terrifying 
 experience which I had had in childhood at "The Little White House." "Do you know, Tom," 
 said she, "that the only fear I have of death is that a fly may possibly become enclosed in my 
 coffin with me? I do detest flies so. I have fought them all my life. I should terribly hate to 
 have one of them shut up in my casket with me and me unable to get the pesky creature out." 
 
 She cackled with joy at the jest against herself, like the hero that she was, in great pain and 
 facing death. 
 
 I kissed her, and she said, "Thank you, Tom. You have always seemed like a son to me. 
 You know I never have had a child myself." 
 
 And I never heard her voice again. 
 
 For some of the above stated facts I am indebted to another foster child of Mrs. Purkitt's, 
 Mrs. Helen McDonald Kelly, also to her son, Louis Kelly, who, in 1938, wrote down some of 
 his mother's answers to my questions. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 233 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 235 
 
 then in my own childish heart that made all things about 
 me seem to be laughter-filled? When anyone has become so 
 old that, though he still receives the papers from his old- 
 home town and county, he nevertheless ofttimes discovers 
 in them no scrap at all of news concerning anyone he knows, 
 is it not indeed possible that the laughter which he hears 
 again is his own childish chuckling come back to him as 
 if from the mouths of others? I have merely to turn to my 
 old childhood diaries, however, to remove all fear of inac- 
 curacy. There I find indeed a very clear record not only of 
 my own old-time impressions of abundant gayety in and 
 about Hodgen Hill and Sundance Valley, but several records 
 besides of the stated impressions of the very inhabitants 
 themselves of those places in those days, concerning their 
 fondness for laughter. Thus "Uncle" Tommy James, as I 
 have it, remarks: "Doctor, do you know that people livin' 
 down along this Pleasant Hill road are the laughin'est people 
 that ever existed? Well they air. On a trip out east, here 
 lately, I ain't heard nothin' like it at all. So solemn they 
 air! So solemn!" 
 
 Not merely, however, were the people of Hodgen Hill 
 and Sundance Valley given over to hilarity and fun. People 
 all over Pike County were much the same. These heavy- 
 laden farmers, yes and their over-burdened wives too (work- 
 ing to the very last day of pregnancy while a pregnant mare 
 would be browsing around unworked) were almost invari- 
 ably cheerful, full of laughter — gentle smiles, wide grins, or 
 full-open, rip-roaring guffaws and involuntary yells which 
 evoked the answering laughter of the otherwise drowsing 
 hillsides. 
 
 They did much more, too, than laugh. They whistled. 
 They sang. Occasionally an even clearer whistling than 
 theirs would pipe from a bobwhite down in a lonesome 
 hollow, or a meadow-lark, mounting a rail-tip, would teach 
 mankind what singing ought to be. 
 
 Yes, these unsung heroes and heroines sang. And they 
 whistled and they joked. The Joe Millers and the Joan 
 Millers of that day had to be merry. Their merriment was 
 protective, enabled them to live when otherwise they could 
 not. Struggling to clear land, working without the assist- 
 ance ofttimes of any labor-saving inventions, attempting in 
 
236 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 many places to produce good crops on grudging hillsides 
 and working always in competition with the deep, rich 
 prairie soils to the east of Pike County and poisoned always 
 by the frightful malaria of the great river bottoms on each 
 side of them — Illinois and Mississippi — they could not, I 
 repeat, have remained in existence, these hardy pioneers of 
 that terrible day, without the assistance of cheerfulness and 
 jollity and whistling and song. 
 
 Irritable they were often, it is true, even to the very 
 fighting point, yet, as a rule, they had with them cheerful- 
 ness and jollity and whistling and song and peace. 
 
 JUST LITTLE PICTURES 
 
 Most of my recollections of the old days are mere tiny 
 pictures, incomplete, often, as well as tiny. Here are one or 
 two of the most typical. 
 
 One summer day I sauntered into the kitchen at home, 
 offering to stir the cake-batter. My mother was standing 
 before the flour-chest, bare-armed and kneading dough. Jon 
 came in with a large armload of wood for the cook-stove. 
 
 And — well, that's all there is of it. But I wouldn't take 
 a thousand dollars for the memory. 
 
 Then again, one night, in our kitchen, as I'm talking 
 with Mother, in walks Mrs. Phimelia Purkitt (born Scott). 
 Upon a time, as heretofore stated, she had been the wife of 
 the Reverend Garbutt, him who had one day brought to 
 their home, riding double, the young John George Nicolay. 
 Not wanted in his stepmother's home, John was only too 
 glad to become the foster son of Mr. and Mrs. Garbutt. 
 Now, Mr. Garbutt had been at the time not only a minister 
 of the gospel, he was also publisher and editor of the Whig 
 Free Press, likewise a job printer. In this business of editing 
 and printing young Nicolay worked with his foster father 
 until the latter 's death in 1855- Then, or it may have been 
 earlier, he himself took over the business, which he con- 
 ducted with increasing success. After his removal from Pitts- 
 field he, in 1860, became campaign secretary to Abraham 
 Lincoln, and so on, as already herein stated. 
 
 On this particular evening she became highly anecdotal, 
 told me an unusually large number of stories about "her 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 237 
 
 boys," the "two Johns," Hay and Nicolay. My mother 
 being interrupted in her listening by the arrival in the sitting- 
 room of a far more formal caller, Mrs. Purkitt, who lived 
 just across the street west of us, invited me to accompany 
 her to her home. That I did, and for a long time she regaled 
 me with still further stories of her boys, showed me many 
 letters from them both, also the great picture of Lincoln 
 and his two private secretaries — again her two boys. The 
 picture, as I remember, had been autographed to her by 
 Nicolay. 
 
 And so the happy hours fled till, all at once, my father 
 appeared, wanting to know, once again, if I would go with 
 him into the country. And here, once more, my story ab- 
 ruptly stops. I cannot recall at all the trip we made that 
 night, other than that it was over in the west side of the 
 county. 
 
 Another truncated recollection, typical of the place and 
 time, refers to the north and east of the county. Father and I 
 one evening, had been seeing patients over near Griggsville 
 Landing, on the Illinois River. Coming back homeward, he 
 was called in at a farmhouse, and, a little later, coming out 
 to the buggy, he announced that this was another o.b. case 
 at which he would almost certainly be detained until morn- 
 ing. Could I, therefore, drive home in the buggy? 
 
 "And let you walk eight miles about dawn? Good-bye! 
 I'll see you tomorrow." 
 
 "You're too little to walk so far!" he shouted. 
 
 "I'll show you how little!" 
 
 "All right. Go it, boots!" 
 
 I went it. 
 
 How vigorously I walked and how proudly! I was real- 
 ly a good walker too. But, after a time, I began to think 
 that I must have gone past Pittsfield, or else that the road, 
 since morning, had been considerably elongated. All at 
 once — was that Jim? black Jim? our Jim? 
 
 I went up closer and found it was Jim, our ' 'equine devil. ' ' 
 Softly he nickered. I looked at my box of bones, which my 
 father always kept beneath the seat — femur, humerus, and a 
 special box of skull-bones. All were there precisely as I 
 
238 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 had placed them after reciting to Father on them that very 
 day. There was no mistake: I had gone round in a circle. 
 
 Hearing the front door of the house open, I was off like 
 a shot again. And, this time, the sky being bright, I would 
 ask no directions of anyone, but, being self-reliant, would 
 keep the Great Dipper behind me. 
 
 The road twisted and turned, however, and the dipper 
 became no trustworthy guide. I at last stopped at a very 
 large house to ask my way. 
 
 "Why! you're Tommy Shastid, ain't you?" was the re- 
 sponse. "Well, you're a great ways from home, son, an' the 
 best thing you can do is to go right down to my brother-in- 
 law's house yonder — where you see that horse an' buggy 
 standin' — and ask your pappy to let you ride home with him. ' ' 
 
 I sat down, uninvited, "Got some coffee" — thus I. 
 
 "Of course." 
 
 I drank the whole cup, thanked the donor, rose and strode 
 off, again toward Pittsfield. 
 
 How beautiful the whole world seemed under the stimulus 
 of that coffee. The air was filled with the sound of cicadas 
 and the scents of new-mown hay. Here and there a light 
 gleamed from a window. Silhouetted forms crossed illumi- 
 nated curtains. I wished myself a part of the human scene 
 within each home — a scene from which, by the darkness and 
 by natural privacy, I was so cruelly excluded. My throat 
 tightened. 
 
 The big dipper was swinging high as I entered Pittsfield 
 and approached the center of the universe. All at once my 
 father's voice behind me, "Get in and I'll take you home." 
 
 On another occasion, after supper is over, Jon beats me 
 on the start up town. I had to run for half a block to get 
 by his side. Then, as always on such occasions, we "caught 
 hold of hands" and ran the rest of the distance on our tire- 
 less bare feet (all children went barefoot in summer-time 
 then) to the post-office — which was then on the south side 
 of the Square. In the post-office I had my own separate lock- 
 box, apart from the one for the rest of the family, and in that 
 separate box was cast all the mail for my Monthly Gazette, 
 herein already mentioned, or for T. H. Shastid, or Thomas 
 Hall Shastid, or for the Grand Master of our boys' F. S. S. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 239 
 
 (Friends Secret Society) which was what I then was — and 
 still am, for that matter, for I have never been constitution- 
 ally deposed and have no competitor for the position. 
 
 There was a great craze, in those days, for all boys whose 
 fathers would buy them printing outfits to publish amateur 
 newspapers or magazines. Most of these papers had sub- 
 scription lists as short as the Irishman's pants, but fun it was 
 and fun without measure to exchange with all the other 
 boy publishers. Some of my "exchanges" in those days were 
 issued by boys who have since become famous — for example, 
 Josephus Daniels, U. S. Secretary of the Navy under Wood- 
 row Wilson, and, later, U. S. Ambassador to Mexico. These 
 exchanges alone would ofttimes fill my post-office box of an 
 evening, and great fun it was for Fritz Niebuhr and Gus 
 Heck, Luther Hyde, George and Herman Robinson, and 
 sometimes other boys, as well as for Brother Jon and me, 
 to stand and watch the big lock-box grow full. Now and 
 then, with a feeling of importance, I would unlock the box 
 and, taking out some of the exchanges, pass them round in 
 "our crowd." Nothing could exceed the dignity with 
 which, on such occasions, all the members of "our crowd" 
 would stand around, perusing their papers in quite the solemn 
 manner of the town's biggest and most prosperous business 
 men. 
 
 On the particular evening in question, Brother Jon got 
 sleepy soon and therefore departed for home. A few minutes 
 later, just as I was about to display to the other boys my 
 fast growing "jay birds" (biceps muscles) in walks my 
 father. A respectful silence falls over the boys. Father ex- 
 changes, as was his wont, the kindliest greetings with them 
 all and then — "Tommy, do you want to go with me into 
 the country?" 
 
 Just where we went that night and what we did when 
 we got there, I remember not at all. But I do remember 
 distinctly that very happy beginning of the trip. And it, 
 too, sticks in my memory, a mere truncated piece of a story, 
 meaning little when looked at in one way but much when 
 looked at in another. 
 
 That night I had a curious terrible dream, in which, at 
 first, I seemed to be in the post-office again. Everything was 
 
240 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 as sharp as in a steel-engraving. There stood even the very 
 bucket of water on the self-same split-bottom chair, an ar- 
 rangement which, at that time, served as the public's highly 
 unsanitary drinking fountain. There was the rusty dipper 
 too, with a very dirty string connecting it to one ear of the 
 bucket. 
 
 There was a sudden agitation in the stationery store 
 which occupied the front half of the post-office room. Here 
 schoolbooks were sold, slates and pencils. In fact, as a 
 printed sign tacked to the front side of a counter informed 
 the public, "Everything needful at the Public Schools." 
 Under this some imp had added, "Except paper wads and 
 spit-gun." 
 
 All at once Fritz Niebuhr and Gus Heck seemed to be say- 
 ing to me, "The trouble's with the spit-gun. Look out! 
 Look out! They're breaking up your printing-press with a 
 spit-gun." 
 
 I awoke in a terror and, indeed, there was trouble about 
 a spit-gun, for a little dog named "Minnie," which belonged 
 to a neighbor but to which I had several times been kind, 
 was licking my face and squealing with great anxiety. Run- 
 ning to my open window, she leaped on the sill thereof, 
 turned and whined in tones of utter anguish. 
 
 It seemed to me that she must be trying to tell me that 
 vandals were breaking up my printing plant. I actually 
 heard some kind of crash, I thought in the wood-shed, where 
 my printing plant was kept. Donning my shoes, I sped to 
 the wood-shed — there to behold three actual vandals — big 
 boys all of them — leaving the scene of destruction with 
 heavy hammers in their hands. 
 
 That ended my Monthly Gazette. Next day I sold the 
 wreckage to a boy named Harvey Arnold for whatever I 
 could get for it, and, years later, even after I had studied 
 medicine and located in Pittsfield to practice there with my 
 father, that harsh night of vandalism, arising like a des- 
 picable ghost, came near to costing me my life, even though 
 at the time I was trying to save the life of one of the very 
 vandals. But of this hereafter. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 241 
 
 AGAIN THE LITTLE SIDE-SKIRMISH 
 IN A GREAT WAR 
 
 Once more the Stettenhausens and big, authoritative Dr. 
 Dublin swam into our ken. We had, in fact, on a number of 
 occasions, since the last above narrated, been called into the 
 Stettenhausen home for some trifling complaint of Mrs. Stett. 
 herself, and, on one of the times, about the following col- 
 loquy arose between Clown Stettenhausen (who, still weak 
 from his fever, was fighting flies as he lay in bed) and Clown 
 Donovan. 
 
 Said Clown Stettenhausen (I still have the record in my 
 Monthly Gazette) as he languidly "puzhed avay zum vlies" 
 (there were no door or window screens in those days): 
 
 "Early to ped 
 
 Und early to rise. 
 Dere's a reason for dis 
 
 Und der answer is vlies." 
 
 All of which made me, the typical small boy, laugh loud 
 indeed. 
 
 Little could I foresee the stark tragedy to be enacted soon 
 on the bare boards of this humble country home (or one to 
 supercede it) or how that tragedy would in a way be a 
 fearsome echo, a soul-shaking repercussion (humble enough 
 and yet symbolical too) of a vast series of events in the 
 great outer world, the importance of which has never been 
 surpassed in all human history, even to the moment in which 
 I write. 
 
 Several times after the scene above narrated my father 
 and I went out to the Stettenhausens, on all those occasions 
 to see Mr. Donovan, and, on each of the occasions, the trio 
 — Mr. Donovan, Mr. Stettenhausen and his wife — were al- 
 ways even more than courteous and kind to myself, but, to 
 my father, they were sometimes courteous and again just a 
 little sneering. That, at least, was true of Mr. and Mrs. 
 Stettenhausen. 
 
 Then, one day, the storm began, though slowly, to break. 
 My father and I, seated in his office, were running over some 
 new microscope slides. All at once there came a low drum- 
 
242 * MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 ming, then a loud and rapid crescendo, of hoofbeats, down 
 from the public square. The rider halted directly in front 
 of our office door. 
 
 Not dismounting, he shouted, "Doc! O Doc!" 
 
 "Yes!" responded my father and went to the steps out- 
 side. 
 
 "They want you out at the Stettenhausens." 
 
 "What's the matter?" inquired my father. 
 
 "How the hell should I know?" was the discourteous 
 response. "You're a doctor. Go see." 
 
 All the way out to the Stettenhausens' my father kept 
 saying, "There's something hot beneath the surface of things 
 out at the Stettenhausens'. It's been there for a long time. 
 Break out soon I'm afraid. Boil." 
 
 "Dublin," I suggested, gently. 
 
 "O no, no, no. Dr. Dublin would never interfere in 
 any case whatever. Too ethical. Might be called in, but, 
 even then, he'd not respond to the call till after a consulta- 
 tion with me. He's hasty and hot-tempered, he's this and 
 he's that. But talk to my patient in my absence? O no, no, 
 no—Some day I'll tell you all about consultations as treated 
 in the code of ethics." 
 
 But when we reached the Stettenhausen house, rather 
 the place where once that house had stood, it stood there 
 no longer. On the spot was only a square of black-and-gray 
 ashes. Even the fence had burned. Sheds and stables too 
 had disappeared in smoke with only an ashen reminder. 
 
 We stood stupidly about, Father foolishly inquiring (of 
 me!) "Where have they gone to?" Then again of me, 
 "Where can we find out?" 
 
 "Maybe there in the school-house." I pointed. 
 
 But even before I had done so, the school had "let out," 
 and the merry band of children, two-thirds of them at least, 
 came rushing toward where we stood. "Want to see the 
 Stettenhausens?" inquired one of the larger girls in a silvery 
 voice. "Yes." "Then you go this way about a half mile 
 or a mile and a half, then pass Dog Rib, then half a quarter 
 the other way, then go up Hog Holler awhile and come 
 round this way — " And so on. Her explanation left him 
 perfectly mystified. He cross-questioned. No better result. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 243 
 
 All the children by now had gathered round the buggy, 
 most of them deeply impressed by that magical being, a 
 country doctor, yet quite happy too because he had been 
 the friend of most of them. Asked a little girl, "Doctor 
 Shastid, do you remember when I wouldn't take my medicine 
 till you took some of it first to show me it was all right? 
 I was just a little girl then — more'n a year ago. ' ' Said another, 
 "Do you remember when Mother used to make us all 'pretty 
 up' before the Doctor (you) and Tommy came? I was a 
 little girl then." 
 
 At length one of the smaller boys proffered, "Let's go 
 with the Doctor. Show him the way: we know it. 'Sides, 
 most of us live down yonder." 
 
 "O no," protested my father. 
 
 But a shout of approval went up. Some of the children 
 even took hold of the traces, and lucky it was that Old 
 Yellow, not the "equine devil"was the horse we were driving 
 that day. Others seized the shafts, still others the hubs, 
 others still grasped the bed of the buggy from behind. With 
 jestings and happy laughter we moved on. 
 
 Even after we had arrived at the Stettenhausens' new 
 house the children would not scatter to their several homes, 
 so I, all the more gladly, as both Stett and Don seemed glum 
 and sour because of their recent enforced removal, sat on a 
 stump in the dooryard where I could watch the children 
 across the roadside playing. After a little, however, they 
 dispersed, the shadows grew long and melancholy and I 
 went into the house. 
 
 And there was my father, leaning over Mr. Stettenhausen 
 and setting a fracture of his right thigh-bone. 
 
 Next day I had to go to school, and my father visited 
 Mr. Stettenhausen without me. 
 
 Then, on Saturday morning, came again the same re- 
 luctant messenger, on the same foaming horse, and shouting 
 in the same rather insolent manner. "Get out to the Stetten- 
 hausens. They say that thigh's still worse and they want 
 you to see if you can't do somethin' fer him this time." 
 
 So out went we once more and behold ! Mr. Stettenhausen 
 had, since my father's last visit, got up from his bed and, 
 spite of the extension apparatus and the splints which my 
 father, the day before, had adjusted to the limb, had at- 
 
244 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 tempted to walk across the room. So trying, he had fallen 
 over a chair, thus converting his "simple" fracture into a 
 "compound" one. 
 
 Now, a compound fracture was (and to some extent still 
 is) in those pre-Listerian days a more serious matter than a 
 simple one. In a "simple" fracture the wound (break in the 
 bone) does not communicate with the atmosphere: in a 
 "compound" fracture it does — that is, the end of one of the 
 fragments (or the ends of more than one) is or are pushed 
 through muscle and fat and on through the skin into the air. 
 A simple fracture, therefore, being closed to the air, does 
 not become contaminated (infected) with the pus-producing 
 germs (ofttimes other germs also) which the atmosphere 
 invariably contains. A compound fracture, on the contrary, 
 having once been open to the atmosphere, does become thus 
 contaminated with germs — from air, dirty clothes, etc. The 
 consequence is that a simple fracture, once reduced — i.e., so 
 manipulated and splinted that the fracture-ends of the bone 
 fragments are brought into proper position and kept there — 
 as a rule heals promptly and without danger to life. Not so, 
 however, in the case of a compound fracture. In that terrible 
 condition sepsis (infection) was, under the pre-Listerian 
 modes of treatment, almost certain to occur, and the mortal- 
 ity was extremely high. In fact in compound fractures of the 
 thigh-bone, like this fracture of Mr. Stettenhausen's, the 
 percentage of deaths was greater by far then the percentage 
 of recoveries. Sometimes indeed the patient would die quite 
 suddenly before the infection had even had time to develop 
 — i.e. from fatty embolism (globules of fat getting into the 
 blood and blocking up arteries in the heart or lungs). 
 
 The old-line treatment (that before the kind developed 
 by Joseph Lister) was, in a word, amputation of the limb 
 instanter. And then, almost always, the patient died as the 
 result of the amputation. 
 
 You would not wonder, O reader of the present day, at 
 the fact that in those times an amputation resulted in the 
 majority of cases in the patient's decease. If kitchen-table 
 surgery is a dangerous affair to-day — and all know that it is — 
 how much more dangerous was it not in the days of which 
 I write? Take, for example, just the matter of flies. To-day, 
 the humblest farmhouses are protected against flies by metal 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 245 
 
 screens. The only screens to be had in my boyhood were 
 those of mosquito netting, a flimsy affair composed of cotton 
 threads whose already too large meshes were widened ma- 
 terially by every little breeze that blew, so that, after such 
 screens had been in place for only a day, sometimes for merely 
 an hour, they could not have excluded even a June-bug. And, 
 besides, very few farmhouses had mosquito-bar screens. They 
 stood wide-open so that not merely flies, but insects of a 
 thousand descriptions, after puddling their numerous feet 
 in the liquid manure of the horse-lot, or — even oftener — the 
 unspeakable cess-pool known as the privy, would, attracted 
 by the food-smells, fly through the kitchen doors and win- 
 dows, and, while the surgeon did his operation on the 
 kitchen table, would, spite of the efforts of the surgeon's 
 assistant to keep the flies away, infect it very thoroughly. 
 Sometimes when I, as a surgeon's assistant, turned for a 
 moment in those good old day to get and pass to the surgeon 
 some additional instrument, the wound, in that brief inter- 
 val only, would turn absolutely black with flies. Then too 
 I, when assisting at an operation in (as a rule) the very 
 much cleaner living room, have known the dust from a 
 passing farm- wagon out in the "hub-deep" road, to come 
 into the room and, all of a sudden, to cover the wound with 
 dirt. And, ofttimes, that little occurrence would be repeat- 
 ed a score of times before the operation was finished. 
 
 "But," says some one, "why not have sent these cases 
 to a hospital?" 
 
 Answer : Because, quite frequently, there was no time to 
 do so. Besides, there was in those days no hospital in our 
 county or in most of the counties adjoining. Furthermore, 
 a hospital, in those days, was the very worst place in which 
 to do an operation. 1 
 
 1 Says Victor Robinson, "The Story of Medicine," pp. 420-421: "The practical ap- 
 plication of anesthesia closed forever one of the most terrible chapters in surgery, but the 
 worst of all remained. In fact, the conquest of pain, by increasing the number and variety 
 of operations, augmented the evil. Every hospital gloried in what was called 'a good old 
 surgical stink.' Every surgeon was proud of his old operating coat, which he neither washed 
 nor changed, for the accumulating incrustations of dried blood and pus attested to his 
 experience. Operators and their assistants came from autopsies or the dissecting- 
 room, and without cleaning their hands, examined patients and parturient women 
 
 Appalled at the frightful statistics, he, Simpson, the discoverer, in 1847, of chloroform 
 anesthesia, collected, he remarked that 'a man laid on the operating table in one of our 
 surgical hospitals is exposed to more chances of death than the English soldier on the field 
 of Waterloo.' Septic poisoning was an ever-present horror, often supervening on the slight- 
 est operation; the stench of infection filled every ward, and phagedena was rarely absent; 
 
246 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 In Mr. Stettenhausen's case my father determined there 
 was to be no surgery but that, instead, he would treat the 
 compound fracture of the femur shaft in the young Joseph 
 Lister's most approved manner, which is to say, not only 
 with fixation (by Hodgen's extension of course) but also 
 with free drainage (through openings and counter-openings) 
 and ample sterilization (germ-killing) by means of proper 
 strength solutions of carbolic acid. 
 
 All right. I had to assist him, first of all of course, in 
 thoroughly cleansing that open, infected, wound and then 
 in applying the carbolic acid. After that, in reducing the 
 fragments (getting them back into line). This proving in- 
 tolerably painful to the patient, I administered the ether and 
 my father reduced. 
 
 All through this stage of the work, Mrs. Stettenhausen 
 stood by and adjudged, rather misadjudged, the work. For 
 one thing she would say to my father from time to time, "He 
 'pears to me too young, Doc. Give that ether yourself." 
 "My son can give ether just as well as I can. Besides I'll 
 have my hands more than full when I try to reduce this 
 fracture." "Humph! Give that ether yourself." 
 
 In the midst of our performance, I heard a slight sound 
 behind me, turned, and there, lo and behold! was old Mrs. 
 Rickshaw and her two daughters, looking toward me with 
 distinct disapproval. 
 
 Presently I looked again, and a little boy had added 
 himself to the duo. "Ma," he whispered, tugging at his 
 mother's dress, "Is this that bad doctor — the bug doctor?" 
 
 "Sh-h-h!" 
 
 Presently Mrs. Stett, returning from the kitchen, waved 
 and billowed up to Mrs. Rickshaw and likewise whispered, 
 "Tain't no way T d do it." 
 
 And immediately thereafter three or four other neighbors 
 sidled through the doorway, all women and all, strangely 
 enough, silent. 
 
 pestilence followed in the footsteps of the most careful surgeon, and often the number of 
 coffins carried out of a hospital corresponded to the number of patients who had entered. 
 So Simpson tried to abolish the hospital system altogether, or urged that hospitals be 
 constructed of iron, that they might frequently be removed, rebuilt and renovated. The 
 suggestion does credit to his warm heart, but it indicates how he and his generation worked 
 in darkness." 
 
 Thus, after all, the so-called "kitchen table surgery" was the best surgery of its day. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 247 
 
 After that came in old Mike Flannihan, a little, dried-up, 
 red-eyed, thick-lipped monkey-faced man, who had "a hitch 
 in his git-along," and who spoke out familiarly (sounding 
 like a skeptic at a funeral sermon): "Well, Doc, how're 
 you an' your bugs comin'?" 
 
 After that I did not notice for some time just who entered. 
 Then, all at once, old Gran 'pa Hillson I saw come in. Sidling 
 up to Mrs. Rickshaw he whispered, "O, they've got Shastid: 
 John's all right." Mrs. Rickshaw did not respond and I 
 went on attending to the anesthetic, giving only a minimum 
 amount. 
 
 After awhile Father inquired, "Primary anesthesia?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 He first cleaned, then reduced — quite successfully. Very 
 slowly he applied the Hodgen extension and the Blake splint. 
 Through the flesh he made punctures and counterpunctures 
 for copious drainage. Mr. Stettenhausen began coming out 
 from the anesthesia, talking crazily for awhile, then sleepily 
 but rationally. At length I assisted my father in copious 
 flushing of the entire wound. This was painful and Mr. 
 Stettenhausen strenuously objected. Some of the persons, in 
 our fast-growing audience very plainly took sides with Mr. 
 Stettenhausen, as if in fact a kind of debate were going on 
 between the patient and his doctor. 
 
 All at once, the audience moved backward into the room, 
 as if out of deference to some superior being. 
 
 Then occurred the unoccurrable. Into the oblique slab 
 of sunlight stretching from the front (south) doorway clean 
 across the cleared part of the floor to the west side of the 
 room there fell, slantwise, the gigantic shadow, head and 
 neck, of a slowly moving human being. Slowly too, al- 
 though as inevitably as fate itself, the rest of the figure 
 followed — shoulders, arms, torso, thighs, legs, even the feet. 
 
 In stalked, thus preceded and pre-announced by his own 
 colossal shadow, the almost equally gigantic form of Dr. 
 Dublin — and paused, standing on the doorsill, the very type 
 and picture of offended authority, dignity, majesty and 
 whatever else exists in that line. 
 
 My father looked up. 
 
 In an interval of awkward silence they merely regarded 
 each other steadily. Then Dublin began "strutting his 
 
248 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 stuff," as the slangoes of the present day would put it. 
 "Shastid!" remonstrated Dublin, with a rising inflection. 
 Then "Shastid!" with a falling ditto. 
 
 My father simply gaped in stupefied amazement. 
 
 Seconds later the offended majesty of the entire medical 
 profession and of many other great ones of the earth, 
 moved into the room. Napoleonically it sat down. Its cold 
 blue eyes swung boldly from one to the other of the two 
 principal characters — the dreamy, only half-awakened, pa- 
 tient, and his stunned and deeply outraged doctor. My 
 father, at a loss what to say, whistled softly to himself. 
 
 Dublin, naturally, was not at all at a loss. "Like every- 
 body else, John, you're only a piece of dirt. That's all that 
 we all are, only some of us (looking toward my father) are 
 dirtier than others. But why do you want to go back to 
 dirt before your time? 
 
 "Understand me. I couldn't possibly take your case my- 
 self now. You don't understand our code of ethics, the rules 
 of right and wrong in the medical profession, but they are 
 very binding on us and they make it impossible for me, hav- 
 ing come into a case like this, ever to be the attending 
 physician in that case. So you see I am not endeavoring to 
 get your practice for myself. That's not why I'm speaking. 
 Besides, as these good people, each and every one of them, 
 clearly understand, I have more practice now than is good 
 for me. ' ' That no doubt was the truth. A number of persons 
 in the audience humbly lowered their heads out of deference 
 and full assent to the views of the superior being. 
 
 "But," he went on, "for the sake of yourself, John, and 
 of your fine wife here, and your son out in Kansas and all 
 your friends — of whom certainly I am one — get rid of this 
 semi-crazy 'bug doctor' — get rid of him." 
 
 Said my father, with a forbearance I had not believed 
 possible, even for him, "I, John, am giving your fracture a 
 treatment that is highly recommended by some of the 
 greatest surgeons of the world — the United States, Great 
 Britain, Germany — everywhere. It has nothing to do with 
 'bugs,' no matter what our friend, the Doctor here, may 
 tell you. But a fracture that has once torn through the 
 flesh and contacted the air has always become contaminated 
 with some of the dust that was in that air — the dust you can 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 249 
 
 see in the air whenever a very bright sunbeam passes through 
 it." I could not help remarking the skill with which my 
 father had spoken to Mr. Stettenhausen about the "dust in 
 the air" — a substance with which the farmer was already 
 familiar, instead of the microscopic vegetable organisms 
 which were in the air along with the dust but which, to a 
 mind like Stett's, would have been absolutely meaningless. 
 I was also delighted with the tactful way in which my 
 father had side-stepped Dr. Dublin's bid for a discussion of 
 the subject of ethics before these simple people. They under- 
 stood, however, dust, played with it, worked with it almost 
 every minute of their lives. When my father revealed to them 
 the (to them) new fact that this dust could poison wounds, 
 they grasped the idea. They could see the dust. 
 
 He even went farther, as he began applying to the wound 
 his carbolic solution. "You yourselves often use hot goose 
 grease on wounds. Why? Because you have found that hot 
 goose grease largely overcomes the poisonous effect that dust 
 has in wounds. It is very good treatment, that hot goose 
 grease. I am using this present treatment instead of the 
 goose grease only because, though it acts in the same man- 
 ner, it kills the poisonous nature of the dust more thorough- 
 ly — takes every bit of the poison out of the dust, not most 
 of it but all. 
 
 "Is it not wonderful that the Great Mind of the Universe 
 is always in one way or another, sending us better and better 
 things?" 
 
 As I noted this quiet and tactful generalship on my 
 father's part, I, mere boy though I was, began to perceive 
 more clearly than ever before what he meant and long had 
 been meaning to all these worthy people. He was to them 
 not merely a doctor, but a prophet, a statesman, even a 
 spiritual guide. They actually came to him often to talk 
 about spiritual matters when they would have been ashamed 
 to speak on the same subject to their preacher — the man 
 they felt to be too impeccable, too remote from common 
 beings like themselves. 
 
 And I also thought of the striking differences between 
 my father and Dr. Dublin. The latter 's snapshot judg- 
 ment, his self-assurance, his gross materialism, his super- 
 cilious attitude toward people in humble circumstances, 
 
250 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 stood out — in spite of a really great excellence in the mani- 
 pulative, the merely mechanical, side of surgery — in very 
 unfavorable contrast with my father's ineffable modesty and 
 gentleness, his slow but accurate judgment, his tactful tol- 
 erance, his thorough scholarship, his open-mindedness to- 
 ward all really valuable innovations. But, just now, he was 
 running on again — quietly, spite of the huge volcano that 
 was boiling up again inside him. 
 
 "It gives you, John," he was saying, "this new treatment, 
 affords you the only chance there is to save both your life 
 and your leg." 
 
 Dublin shrieked with rage. "If you don't take an ampu- 
 tation, Stettenhausen" (a great commotion occurred through 
 every portion of his huge, but highly nervous, body) "you 
 will surely die. I risk my professional reputation on that 
 judgment. — Shastid, get out." 
 
 My father arose and I saw the wildfire in his eye. Yet 
 he did not address himself to Dublin. 
 
 "Did you send for this man?" he asked of Mr. Stetten- 
 hausen. 
 
 "I tit not to dot." 
 
 "Did you know he was coming?" 
 
 "I tit not know dot." After long moments he added, 
 "Pud I am nod zorry he is here. He is goot toctor too. You 
 is pode goot toctors." 
 
 "Of Mrs. Stett he also asked, "Did you know that Dr. 
 Dublin was coming?" 
 
 The paunchy creature put on the brakes, came to a full 
 stop. After plainly working her memory hard, she found 
 the right answer — "No." 
 
 Dublin quit pacing the floor, and, going up to Mr. 
 Stettenhausen, commanded with a curse (he had often cursed 
 before, even in the presence of women, and had never seemed 
 to be hurt professionally thereby) "Choose." 
 
 Mr. Stettenhausen closed his eyes; his wife went into the 
 kitchen. 
 
 "I tell you," repeated the huge doctor, in a transport of 
 rage, "choose. Choose either this charlatan here, or else let 
 me send to for an independent surgeon, say 'Hop- 
 leiter.' ' He said "Hopleiter," I knew, because Hopleiter 
 was a German. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE — 251 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 253 
 
 Stett slowly opened his eyes, good old Stett, and he 
 murmured with extreme slowness, "I keep my luck. An' 
 dot means [he turned to my father] dot — means — I — keep 
 — you." 
 
 Dublin sprang toward the sick man almost as if he had 
 lost his senses. "No such quackery as this," he yelled. 
 "No such — I will not permit — this is a crime — this is a 
 criminal thing — I will settle this now." He began peeling 
 off his coat. "I will at once — " 
 
 "An' phat will yez settle at once?" cried the shrill voice 
 of an old woman. "I think Shastid is right." 
 
 Then jumps Dublin toward her and shouts at her in his 
 great, biggity way, "And who has requested the honor of 
 your opinion on this case, Mrs. Hoolinan?" 
 
 "Who requested yours, me fine lad? Who towld ye to 
 come rooshin into Docther Shastid 's case, informin' him 
 what he cud and what he cud not do? An' don't you go to 
 thryin' anny av that high an' mighty language ye're so 
 well known for on me, ye spalpeen, or I'll up an' tell the 
 intire tezpany jest how ye bled me husban' one day in me 
 absence an' left him wid a cut exthernal joogular an' his 
 hed still hangin' over the edge of the bed an' still bleedin' 
 like the divil himself while ye went off to see another 
 patient, an' a pretty girl it was, an' ye forget to come back 
 an' stop me husban's joogular, an' so 'twas in that plight 
 I found him unconscious an' nearly dead. Say can ye deny 
 it to me face? Ye know ye can't deny it an' so Doc Shastid 
 here, he happened to be coomin' along an' our hired hand 
 caught 'im an' brought 'im in an' he saved me husban's life. 
 Deny it. Let me see ye to the door, good gintleman. An' 
 do ye deny that in thim there days Shastid was the very 
 onliest doctor in all Pike Coonty that said bleedin 'was harm- 
 ful, an' that well advanced doctors was too progrissive to 
 resart to such harmful procedures anny more. An' ye laughed 
 at 'im, ye did. Ye laughed at him (no wonder ye're backin' 
 out o' the house) ye laughed at 'im, jist the same as ye're 
 damnin' at 'im today." 
 
 She followed the Doctor to the door and even beyond it, 
 woman-like, to get the last word and a good many of them. 
 "Jist the same as ye're damnin' 'im today for bein' more 
 advanced than ye are. Arrah now! Bleedin' me husban' 
 
254 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 almost to a cross in the graveyard, an' you a-forgettin' to 
 come back an' see 'im. If it hadn't been for the man you're 
 a despisin' this very day — " 
 
 But all her audience had trickled away and Dr. Dublin 
 was over the hill toward Pittsfield. 
 
 Then the old Irish lady, saying a long good-bye to us all, 
 went her way too — head still high. 
 
 "Nobody can silence the Irish except more Irish." Thus 
 Mr. Donovan, cockily. 
 
 "I hef notice dot," agreed John, laughing almost gayly. 
 
 My father patted his shoulder, said "Good cheer, John. 
 Dr. Dublin means all right, but — Well, you're going to get 
 well." 
 
 Dr. Dublin had beaten an ignominious retreat, but I knew 
 that we should hear from him again, all the more distress- 
 ingly because of the shaming experience he had undergone 
 to-day. 
 
 For some time, however, we saw Dr. Dublin no more, 
 and, as Mr. Stettenhausen seemed to be doing more than 
 merely well, we had no cause for worry on account of either 
 of these men. Then, for a time, there arrived a run of bad 
 luck for the Shastid practice. Several babies that were in my 
 father's care all at once died within a few days of each other. 
 And my father had always had such excellent success with 
 babies too. Then a prosperous farmer, out El Dara way, 
 died, and a few days later (both were patients of my father) 
 his wife — It was "just one of those things." I have known 
 my father to pass through an entire sickly summer without 
 one single death, and then, all at once, to have three or 
 four deaths in one week. 
 
 I became greatly depressed about these recent deaths, 
 remembered indeed a certain Little White House again and 
 its melancholy lesson that all of us must die. Why could I 
 not forget that lesson permanently? How the thought would 
 arise within me, even in the midst of the pleasantest pur- 
 suits, perhaps at a wedding or other country merrymaking! 
 Die, die, die. Always with me. No getting away from it. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 255 
 
 THE JUMPING-OFF PLACE 
 
 Then — it was a quiet summer evening in the country. 
 Father and I were driving homeward and the moon was ris- 
 ing, when I happened to ask him what "burking" meant. 
 
 Instanter he told me the entire story of Burke and the 
 "resurrectionists." "Burking, resurrecting, body-snatching, 
 sacking- 'em-up — all these terms," he said, "and even a few 
 others, mean about the same thing, at least the last three 
 do." 
 
 "The last three? What's the difference, then, between 
 them and burking?" 
 
 "Burking," said he, and it was characteristic that first of 
 all he gave me the derivation of the word, "is derived from 
 'Burke,' a man's name, William Burke. It means really to 
 murder, as a rule by suffocation, but also by any means what- 
 ever that leaves no mark of violence, and then to turn the 
 resulting body over to some medical school for dissection. 
 This is an instance, my son, one of innumerable instances, 
 of a proper noun transforming itself into a verb. In this 
 particular instance the verb went on and proceeded to evolve 
 even another, a secondary, meaning: to dispose of quietly or 
 secretly. Hence to-day we read in the newspapers, for ex- 
 ample, The bill was then laid before the legislature but was 
 promptly burked" 
 
 "But who was this William Burke? What did he do? 
 And what's the meaning of resurrecting, body-snatching, and 
 sacking- 'em-up? Why should people have to disinter dead 
 bodies in order to get dissection material?" 
 
 "A long time ago," he responded, "a very long time ago 
 — it is a highly gruesome story— there was in England and 
 Scotland a great scarcity of dissection material. Not on the 
 Continent, remember. There was in all the Continental 
 countries, even then, enlightened legislation on the statute 
 books, whereby dissection material in great abundance was 
 provided for medical schools and the consequent benefit of 
 living humanity. But, in all Great Britain, no such law. 
 On the contrary, it was in England and Scotland by law a 
 very serious crime to dissect a human body. That law itself 
 was a crime, one which led to the robbing of many graves, 
 of most poor-houses and even some hospitals, yes and even 
 to back-door murders. 
 
256 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "This William Burke was one of the worst of the murder- 
 ers. He flourished in the eighteen twenties, about the time 
 when there had taken place a large increase in the number of 
 private schools of anatomy in Great Britain and even a much 
 larger one in the number of medical students both in British 
 private schools and in those attached to the universities. 
 As a natural consequence dissection material became scarce 
 and the price went up. As high as £50 was sometimes paid 
 for a single corpse — even then. Body-snatching (illegal dis- 
 interment) became a regular profession. In London alone 
 more than two hundred men made fat livings by robbing 
 newly-made graves. 
 
 ' 'The Crown's authorities could do little about the matter. 
 Catch the resurrectionists they could and did. But seldom 
 could they get a conviction. You see, many of the most 
 influential doctors in the country sympathized with the 
 snatchers. No snatchers, no bodies. No bodies, no dissec- 
 tions. No dissections, no sound knowledge of the human 
 frame — no anything whatever in the way of a foundation for 
 medical instruction. 
 
 "Then the snatchers — you see how one bad thing begets 
 another — the snatchers, perceiving that they had the thumb- 
 screws on the medical authorities, pushed up their prices 
 higher and higher still. The doctors could only comply. 
 
 "But all bad situations, chiefly because things that are 
 bad in their nature do necessarily keep on getting worse — 
 tend, eventually, to blow up. This sack-'em-up situation did 
 that very thing. 
 
 "How? Well, the resurrectionists became more and more 
 daring. They worked sometimes without a sentry watching. 
 Exhumed a body occasionally in broad daylight, when 
 passers-by were not afraid to interfere. In one particular in- 
 stance, a Miss Wilson had been courted by two young men. 
 One of these, winning the lady's favor, soon died. The other 
 hired a notorious snatcher to exhume the body, which he 
 did — but was caught in the act, the unsuccessful suitor along 
 with him. 
 
 "After a time the snatchers became so daring, so un- 
 scrupulous, that they started black-mailing the medical au- 
 thorities themselves — e.g., Mr. Snatcher would agree to 
 deliver say three good, freshly buried bodies for £10 (fifty 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 257 
 
 dollars). After delivery, he would ask for say £30, saying 
 the price had been £10 apiece, not £10 for all three. Of 
 course there would have been no written contract. If only 
 the agreed-upon £10 were finally paid, then there would 
 promptly appear on the scene some very notorious character, 
 perhaps a long suspected but not yet convicted murderer, 
 making stern demands on the head of the medical college 
 for that extra £20 — or perhaps the . amount was now in- 
 creased to forty — on the ground that he, the claimant, was 
 the man who had actually done the snatching, while the 
 man, his direct employer, who had tried to collect the £30 
 but had received only £10, had positively refused to pay 
 him, the real snatcher, his promised share, £20. 
 
 "Matters grew worse and worse still. The authorities 
 grew bolder, snatching more dangerous. At length, when 
 the danger had reached a certain height, the snatchers, at 
 least a considerable number of them, turned from the com- 
 paratively harmless snatching to cold-blooded murder. We 
 can almost hear them say, 'Why didn't we think of that in 
 the first place? We stand in an alley, or near some back door, 
 and, when some nobody (no relatives, no friends of any con- 
 sequence) steps out before us, we simply throw a silent 
 cotton-bandage loop round the nobody's throat and tighten 
 it. Then — sack-'em-up! No walking long distances to 
 graveyards. No big job of digging in the dirt and breaking 
 into coffins. No three or four pals to watch various cemetery 
 entrances. No long distance, after the robbery is over, to 
 carry a heavy cadaver along to a medical school.' It worked 
 like a charm, the new procedure. And murder? Well the 
 medical authorities simply could not afford to be mixed up 
 with charges of murder." 
 
 I put in, "But William Burke: what had he to do with 
 all these things?" 
 
 "He and his partner, Hare, were the worst of all the 
 murderers. They never had been resurrectionists. Too danger- 
 ous, that, for these fellows. On November 29, 1827 (it is 
 really a date to remember) Messrs. Burke and Hare sold the 
 unburied body of an aged friend, filled the coffin with 
 tanner's bark, then disposed of the body to a medical college 
 for £7 10s. That was a very large sum for those days, and 
 the money had come quite easily! After that they murdered 
 
258 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 — imbeciles, street-walkers, undesired children, any and 
 everybody who possessed few or no friends! All, or practi- 
 cally all, their bodies Burke and Hare sold to no less a person 
 than Dr. Robert Knox, a renowned professor of anatomy — 
 although, at the place of delivery, No. 10 Surgeons' Square, 
 the bodies were actually received not by Knox but by his 
 two assistants — William Ferguson, later to become a dis- 
 tinguished surgeon, and Thomas Wharton Jones, later to be 
 the greatest of British ophthalmologists. 
 
 "Burke and Hare, however, flourished for only one single 
 year. On Hallowe'en, 1828, 'under the very shadow of 
 Edinburgh Castle,' they committed their last murder. Caught 
 next day! The trial of Burke was held in December, 1828, 
 and the fellow was executed in January, 1829. Hare and 
 some of the other accessories were acquitted because they 
 had 'given state's evidence,' or as people expressed it, in 
 those days, in Scotland, 'turned witnesses for the Crown.' 
 Robert Knox, the famous anatomist, was completely exon- 
 erated — not even tried. Though he became exceedingly un- 
 popular and had even to become a wanderer on the face of 
 the earth because of the abhorrence the public felt for him, 
 he nevertheless lived on to die of apoplexy not so very long 
 ago (1862)." 
 
 "Father," I asked, after a moment's thinking, "Did you 
 ever have anything to do with body-snatching?" 
 
 "No, my son. But my old preceptor and college dean, 
 Joseph Nash McDowell, very often did. In fact he was 
 one of the worst of all body-snatchers. I have probably dis- 
 sected, without knowing the fact at all, bodies that the un- 
 scrupulous old chap had purloined from the grave. In fact 
 he once upon a time told a group of us students — I never can 
 forget the day and hour — of such an 'exploit,' as he called 
 it, in which he had engaged over in this very state. 
 
 "At the time, bodies were scarce and St. Louis grave- 
 yards were watched closely. McDowell and some helpers 
 therefore went over into Illinois where a country funeral was 
 to occur. The deceased was a whole family that had perish- 
 ed in a fire. Within an hour after the burial was complete, 
 Mac and his two stalwart diggers, one of them a colored 
 man, were exhuming the corpses — none of them much in- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 259 
 
 jured by the fire, but dead from smoke. All of a sudden — 
 loud voices drawing nigh ! 
 
 "The next instant half a dozen rough-handed farmers, 
 armed with pitch-forks and other tools, had surrounded 
 them, seized them, brutally beaten them with their fists. 
 They then declared that they were going to bury 'these 
 three city robbers' alive in the potter's field (charity section) 
 of their cemetery. To the potter's field therefore went they all. 
 'This here potter's field,' remarked the leader, a country 
 giant (as McDowell told the story) 'among other things is 
 a fine place for dead or dyin' criminals. We buried a squad 
 o' Confederate soldiers there oncet, we ketched goin' into 
 Missouri.' 
 
 'We may be criminals,' protested Mac, 'but only in the 
 cause of science. And surely we're not dead.' 
 
 'Hain't ye? Well, ye mighty soon will be. How long 
 ye think ye can breathe in one close-packed grave, all of ye, 
 an' air gettin' scarcer an' scarcer? Here we air in the potter's 
 field now, an' nobody'll ever know what became of ye.' 
 
 "Now Mac, despite all his silly characteristics and despite 
 the fact that he was fool, highly learned professor and re- 
 nowned surgical genius all rolled into one, nevertheless was 
 an extremely shrewd, practical person when it came to 
 matters affecting his own hide — the dermal case, or ensheath- 
 ment, wherein he, so to speak, lived and moved and had his 
 scientific and various other kinds of being. He had therefore, 
 as it appeared, taken the utmost precautions against even 
 the very slightest possibility of murderous rebellion on the 
 part of the farmers who lived adjacent to the cemetery. 
 
 "He, in other words, had armed with revolvers a squad of 
 several of his most dare-devilish students, whom he instructed 
 then to slip into the graveyard by an obscure side-entrance, 
 and to be well hidden among trees, and so all ready for any 
 possible melee, even before he, McDowell, and his diggers 
 should have started digging. But, somehow, the students 
 had lost their way to the graveyard and were therefore not 
 available as helpers at the time when their celebrated pro- 
 fessor and his spadesmen were most in danger of their lives. 
 
 ' 'The big one-for-all grave having been completed, Mac be- 
 gan to 'stall' for time. 'Just fifteen minutes, ' he pled, 'in which 
 to beg pardon from Almighty God before we go to meet him. ' 
 
260 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Mac cared no more for Almighty God than he did for 
 his agricultural captors. To them, however, the professor's 
 repentant petition approved itself completely. 'Besides,' 
 they probably thought, 'these men's mental agonies during 
 the fifteen minutes of reprieve will just be further punish- 
 ment for them.' 
 
 "Anyway, Mac made a marvelous speech. Especially he 
 
 asked the Divine Creator, if he, the dean of the 
 
 Medical College (naming his chief rival among the colleges 
 in St. Louis) were really committing an offence in the eyes 
 of the Almighty, when trying to get knowledge from a few 
 dead bodies wherewith to save life for thousands of living 
 persons, then would not He, the Almighty, forgive his sins. 
 'And if, dear God,' he added, 'it be those other persons who 
 are in the wrong and not I, then wilt thou not forgive them, 
 instead of me and my helpers, for they know not what 
 they do.' 
 
 'Make an end,' said the farmer-leader. McDowell 
 started a little. Then, placing hand to ear, he cried with a 
 mighty voice, T can almost hear the tread of the angels now 
 — the angels of salvation. Listen, all of you! Can you not 
 hear the tread?' 
 
 "All listened perforce, so loud and so masterful was the 
 man's attitude and voice. 
 
 "And, sure enough, the sound of running steps was 
 heard. 
 
 "Mac pointed in the wrong direction, shouted, 'There 
 they come! See them — the bright angels — the angels of 
 salvation!' And as the farmers turned to say to Mac, 'Why! 
 we don't see nothin',' they saw a good deal — six or eight 
 revolvers pointing at their breasts. 
 
 "Mac cleared out, his diggers after him. He was always 
 the first to clear out of a tight spot. The students bound the 
 farmers hand and foot, gagged them securely, laid some of 
 them in the grave they had just been digging for others, but 
 threw no dirt upon them. Then they ran for their horses 
 and soon were galloping, still masked and laughing, toward 
 St. Louis." 
 
 "Are you sure that that's a true story?" I asked, when 
 Father had completed his tale. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 261 
 
 "It ought to be. Haven't I told you that, with a little 
 group of students, I had it straight from McDowell's own 
 lips?" 
 
 "Maybe that's one reason for not believing. — And Wil- 
 liam Ferguson and Thomas Wharton Jones, they, you have 
 already said, lived to become famous, both. Were they ever 
 tried for murder?" 
 
 "I don't remember. — Hey, there, don't run into us." 
 
 The man who had nearly struck the side of our buggy 
 with the head of his horse, cried, "Goin' to be a baby, Doc! 
 Come quick! Down that 'ere lane there. Come! I'll show 
 the way." 
 
 Father turned to me, "Well, Tommy, you'll have a first- 
 rate chance, I think, to practice walking." I got out. "Go 
 down that way (pointing); that's a good hard road." He 
 turned and drove after the horseback farmer down a long, 
 tree-lined and gloomy lane — the farmer (he must have been 
 a tenant) remarking, "a farm-road you shouldn't rightly 
 drive pigs down." And then — I remember, his horse stepped 
 into a deep mud-hole. 
 
 I turned and walked in the opposite direction. The moon, 
 arising, lighted up the landscape clearly. I walked and I 
 walked and I walked. Presently, passing a vast cornfield, 
 I came as it chanced alongside a cemetery, and there I stop- 
 ped. The night was still. The cemetery especially was silent. 
 The cornfield contained nothing but the plumed corn — plus 
 vague, unjustifiable, immaterial somethings. For a long 
 time I stood, frozen to the spot. Why had I come to that 
 graveyard? I had known it was there, had seen it two or 
 three times before — with Father. I certainly feared to pass it, 
 and yet even worse I feared to turn and walk back toward 
 the farmhouse — for then the "ghosts" (if any — of course 
 there were not any, but if) might be coming softly up be- 
 hind me, either out of the corn or out of the graveyard. 
 
 While I stood in the deep silence and the ghastly moon- 
 light, listening, listening, a wisp of cloud floated over the 
 moon, and suddenly I heard a strange rustling in the tall 
 stalks of corn — "strange," because there seemed to me to be 
 no wind. How like the plumes of hearses the plumes of the 
 corn were moving ! Chilled through and through with fear, 
 I beheld — actually beheld with my own eyes — two faint 
 
262 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 forms, as it seemed, flitting out of the corn-field and into 
 the cemetery. 
 
 For a moment I could have sworn that I saw those insub- 
 stantial creatures playing hide-and-seek, in and out and 
 around and about, among those tablets and monuments. 
 
 Shrieking, I ran back toward the farmhouse. Again and 
 again I stumbled and fell. 
 
 On reaching the tree-lined lane, I found myself unable 
 to enter it, so terrified was I. It was very dark and I knew 
 it was full of mud-holes. A little to one side of the lane I 
 climbed a stake-and-ridered fence, leaped off — only to land 
 on the other side in a puddle of water up to my knees. I 
 struggled and hurried onward until, at last, passing through 
 a piece of well-lit pasturage and then through a shadowy 
 kitchen garden, I came to the house where my father was 
 at work — or at least where I thought that he was. 
 
 I pushed the door wide open — all doctors, in those days, 
 were accustomed, at the houses of their patients, just to 
 push doors open and "walk right in." 
 
 Imagine my astonishment when I found that neither was 
 my father present nor had he at any time been there. "Go 
 up to the next house," said the kindly old farmer inmate, 
 laughing. "There's where your father is just now, and I 
 expect he's mighty busy." 
 
 "But," shrieked I, "I can't go out of doors again. You 
 please go to where my father is and tell him that, just as 
 soon as he had finished, he's to come down here to this 
 house — that I'll be waiting for him." 
 
 Before the farmer had got started, my father walked in, 
 announcing, "It's a boy," and requesting the farmer to send 
 his wife up to the patient, there to nurse her. 
 
 When Father and I had got into the buggy I told him, 
 shaking and shivering, my whole story. He then made me 
 accompany him back to the cemetery, and, when we had 
 reached it, to go with him inside the ghastly place. 
 
 And there, under the constellated heavens, we wandered 
 in and out among the tombstones, sometimes gazing down- 
 wards sometimes yearningly upwards. And always he talk- 
 ed of equanimity and peace and the means whereby a person 
 might arrive at the possession of these qualities of soul. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 263 
 
 Then he stooped down and kissed me. But as soon as he 
 had done that, I felt come over me such a wave of affection 
 and likewise of fear for my father that I cried aloud, "O 
 Father, they will take you too some day and put you down 
 in the ground like that." 
 
 In horror I ran from the place and headed for the buggy. 
 Father joined me shortly, and home we rode together in 
 silence under the moon and the stars. In silence. And still 
 in silence. So that, a good while before we had got home, 
 I remember thinking I had probably shocked and depressed 
 my father more than he had cheered, encouraged, and com- 
 forted me. 1 
 
 Then, one Sunday, as we drove along a country road far 
 out of Pittsfield, we saw Dr. Dublin again — on another road 
 and at a considerable distance. "Dr. Exoletus," I called 
 him. "No, my son," objected Father. "Dr. Dublin is 
 not superannuated, not behind the times. He is an excellent 
 doctor, and, for all his peculiarities, an excellent man. A 
 good friend he has always been to me and a good friend he 
 will some time be again if only we keep steady and self- 
 controlled and do not offend the real man in him too deeply. 
 
 "Son, we have been having a great many deaths lately, 
 haven't we? Not our faults either, for we have done our best. 
 But what a (speaking literally) hell of a world this earth 
 has been throughout its existence — still is. And he gave 
 me little histories of smallpox, cholera infantum, typhoid, 
 typhus, malaria, leprosy, pneumonia and so on. Of the 
 
 1 My experience at the "Jumping-Off Place" reminds me of a story which a boy friend 
 clipped from a newspaper and gave me after I had told my own (the foregoing) graveyard 
 story in my little Monthly Gazette. Since then the newspaper story has appeared a number 
 of times in one form or another in various periodicals. Here is how it appeared years ago: 
 
 "Yes, suh! I done seen a ghostest once and sence then I do believe in 'em bdbd. Sence 
 then, too, ef anybody scratches even a littlest match behind me, I gits a cold chill, an' 
 sometimes I staht runnin' and does some great runnin' too. 
 
 "Us Jenkinses aint broke no recuhds yit — 'cept fer eatin' — but I does hope that some- 
 body has a stop-watch handy ef I'm goin' by no cemetery again an' somepin' — even ef it 
 aint nuffin' but nuffin' — goes sc-r-atch, sc-r-atch! in dat air grave-place, fer I'm jest as 
 certain as h — / 1 could bust all recuhds den, fer all distances and bust 'em all at de same time. 
 I shore hopes I has flat ground an' no obstructions." 
 
 "You don't look like a feller that would scare easy," observed the merchant. 
 
 "My looks has fooled a lot o' people, boss, fer what I is above is different from what 
 I is below. From my neck up I is bravern any lion. From my neck down — you'd be sur- 
 prised. Some folks says de brain controls de body. Like h — / it do! When my laigs says, 
 'Let's git out of here,' my brains jes' hoi' on tight an' gits a big ride." 
 
264 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Black Death" he spoke, the Bubonic Plague which, about 
 the middle of the 14th century, raged throughout Asia, 
 Africa, Europe, and, possibly, the Western hemisphere also, 
 although, at the time, that part of the world had not yet 
 been discovered and so no records now exist of what the 
 Black Death there may have accomplished. In Europe it 
 raged from A. D. 1348 to 1369, destroying half the then 
 population of that entire continent (25 million out of 50 
 million persons). Many of those who did not die lived only 
 to regret they had not died. The sufferings which, as a rule, 
 preceded death are recorded as indescribable. In Asia, where 
 the plague raged first, the mortality has been variously 
 estimated at from 200,000,000 to 300,000,000. What hap- 
 pened in Africa is almost as unknown as what took place 
 in North and South America. In Asia how was the plague 
 combatted? By the burning of paper slips whereon prayers 
 had been inscribed. In Europe, how? By exorcists (priests 
 who were specialists in casting out devils). And so this 
 world, from the very beginning of life upon it, has been 
 cursed almost unlimitedly by the most appalling ignorance 
 (as to the causes of disease) and by the most appalling super- 
 stition — the greater part of which has grown up out of or 
 been somehow connected with our ignorance as to disease 
 causation. 
 
 "But now, Son, there begins to shine the dawn of a new 
 day. As a consequence of the birth and development of 
 bacteriology, with its God-given offsprings — the germ- 
 theory of disease, antiseptic surgery and so on — this world 
 is to be no longer a hell, but, by comparison at least, a 
 heaven — a heaven upon earth! You will live to see it. And 
 not you alone and your generation, but I too and mine will 
 largely live to see it. The new medicine will, necessarily, 
 transform all the other sciences, purify even religion by 
 purging it of its grosser superstitions. Human beings will 
 live, on the average, no longef a paltry twenty-five to thirty 
 years, but seventy-five, or a hundred — yes, even a hundred 
 and fifty. And those years, too, will no longer be years, very 
 largely, of dreadful sickness, of intolerable suffering, of 
 shameful inefficiency, but years of speedy progress, of hap- 
 piness, of joy. If Daddy should die soon, remember what 
 he told you." I have indeed remembered, but he himself 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 265 
 
 lived long enough to witness (though it came more slowly 
 than he had expected) the fulfilment of his dreams — the 
 partial fulfilment, perhaps I ought to say, a fulfilment which, 
 but for the entrustment by the peoples of the complete war- 
 making power into the hands of their governments, would 
 have been far more complete. 
 
 There was one more occurrence on that memorable Sun- 
 day which, likewise, I clearly remember — our attendance at 
 the services in a little country church. ("Nothing ever 
 happens in the country.") 
 
 When Father and I went into the building the singing 
 was already on, and, as was generally the case in country 
 churches of that day, the house was crowded. So we had 
 to take a back seat — something which, a few minutes later, 
 was a distinct desideratum. 
 
 On the platform behind the lectern stood three stately 
 chairs. The middle of these was filled — filled literally — by 
 a large fat preacher. The others were occupied — of all per- 
 sons ! — by Messrs. Harfield and Mocksinger. When the singing 
 and the prayers had been completed, the minister arose and 
 began speaking. And seldom, I think, in all my life have I 
 heard a richer, sweeter, more organ-like voice. I had often 
 heard about this minister and his eloquence, and now I was 
 glad I had come. Why so excellent a speaker was out here 
 in the backwoods, preaching, I could not then understand. 
 The disagreeable thought came over me that, perhaps, in 
 years gone by, this highly educated man had occupied a city 
 pulpit, but that then, having become involved in some or 
 another form of — ungoodness, he had had to accept a more 
 obscure position. But, as the man kept talking, I began to 
 realize his absolute sincerity. This man believed in every 
 word he said. 
 
 Having read from the Bible, he, first of all, drew a picture 
 of the sufferings of our Savior — his unfair trial, his via 
 dolorosa, his ascent up rugged calvary, his torturous cruci- 
 fixion and death. Then came the glorious resurrection. I 
 was deeply touched, never before so deeply, I think. 
 
 But then I thought I detected a departure from his text. 
 All at once in fact he was declaring that many in this day 
 no longer appreciated the Savior and his sacrifice for others, 
 
266 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 but, instead, in the name of science, sowed throughout the 
 whole community seeds of disbelief, especially in the mir- 
 acles of our Savior whereby he had cast out devils in order 
 to heal all human sickness and suffering . 
 
 "These pretended scientists," he went on, "inculcate the 
 infamous doctrine of evolution, the doctrine that man was 
 not created by God but, in some mysterious way, by a pair 
 of monkeys. Who is there here that can believe that the first 
 man and woman were begotten by the seed of a lower 
 animal?" At this wholly unfair presentation of the doctrine 
 of evolution I was so incensed that I would surely, had I not 
 been merely a boy, have arisen and answered him — most 
 unfortunately too. 
 
 "And now," added this divinely voiced minister, "these 
 same evolutionists are inculcating even a far more nefarious 
 doctrine — a doctrine that diseases are not produced by 
 devils — emissaries which that detestable creature, Satan, 
 sends to take possession of human bodies, and which even 
 our Savior himself cast out and conversed with, but that 
 diseases are caused by bugs — yes, actually bugs, and bugs 
 so small they can only be seen by a microscope. Does any- 
 body believe that a solitary bug, a hundred million of which 
 can stand on a single square inch without over-lapping one 
 another, could ever do the slightest harm to anybody? You 
 know that it could not. But there are those among us who — ' ' 
 And so on. 
 
 He did not go so far as to say that my father and his 
 kind should be burned at the stake, but he did imply that 
 they would burn hereafter, and he said outright that all 
 such persons ought to be driven from the community and 
 never allowed to return into it. 
 
 My father once or twice made a little sudden movement 
 as if about to arise and explain the real nature of the germ 
 theory, but, fortunately of course, he thought better of his 
 intention. 
 
 They took communion that day, but, before the wine 
 (grape-juice) was passed round, the preacher, in a low, husky 
 voice and with a glance toward my father, observed : "There 
 are those among us this day who would pollute and degrade 
 this holy communion of which we now shall drink the 
 chiefest part — the sacrificial blood of God — by declaring 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 267 
 
 that, whatever is drunk by many from one single cup, even 
 here in the house of our Lord and Savior, is capable of 
 spreading foul disease and death from one person unto an- 
 other." 
 
 So they drank from one single cup that day, as they had 
 done on many days before and would on many days there- 
 after — the tuberculous, the syphilitic, the pus-mouthed, even 
 the very healthy, everybody. 
 
 When the cup came to me I drank, but my father, hesitat- 
 ing for a moment, passed the cup on without touching it to 
 his lips. 
 
 After the conclusion of the rite the preacher continued 
 talking about the sins of scientists (all sermons were long in 
 those days) and, after a while, the whole house resounded 
 with the mingled groans and sobs, hisses and shrieks of the 
 congregation. (Emotions were emotions in those days, 
 especially in the country, and more especially still, in country 
 churches.) It was some time before the tumult had subsided 
 so far as to permit the preacher to proceed . Then he finished 
 his sermon on quite a different topic, and, when the congre- 
 gation arose for the final singing and prayer, my father 
 touched my arm and we left the building while yet the 
 attitude toward us which the preacher had produced could 
 not make itself too manifest. 
 
 Back in the buggy my father remarked, "I came near 
 rising and telling that preacher he had better have preached 
 on the text, 'Neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest 
 they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend 
 you.' "But," he answered himself, "had I done so, the 
 minister would probably have taken the position that that 
 text meant that he would be casting pearls before swine in 
 case he ever attempted to teach us anything about the causes 
 of disease. 
 
 "And, had I then answered that, I should merely have 
 angered some of my best-loved friends, and, in addition, 
 have made my enemies more angry. 
 
 "There is no use trying to speak the truth to people where 
 their religions are concerned. No argument in that region of 
 thought avails in the least. People cannot be argued out of 
 religious superstitions, they have to grow out of them. So — 
 
268 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 well, we'll just keep on doing our best to cure patients." 
 But, after a time of silence, he spoke again, "My son, 
 I'll turn prophet again. You, at least, will live to see the 
 time when the germ theory will be accepted gladly even by 
 the most religious. Preachers themselves and their families 
 will gladly avail themselves of its beneficent results. It is 
 in fact the truth, and the highest religion I know is the 
 truth about God's universe as revealed by investigation. 
 Let us, however, always propagate this truth rightly — i.e., 
 at times when and in places where truth has a chance to be 
 received." 1 
 
 "Poor Jesus!" cried my father. "Blessed tramp doctor 
 and tramp preacher combined! How badly he fared at the 
 hands of those who, many years after his death, wrote books 
 about him. How they mingled the superstitions of their 
 narrow day with his eternal truths!" 
 
 THE RELIGION OF A COUNTRY DOCTOR 
 
 My father loved life so whole-heartedly that merely to be 
 in his presence was uplifting. And, unlike myself, he did 
 not too much fear to die, to drop this incredibly joyous gift 
 called life. To him, indeed, the continuance of that gift 
 indefinitely, after so-called death, was axiomatic, a self- 
 evident certainty. To me it was only a probability, one of 
 
 1 And, thanks to the maker of the universe whose truth my father so much loved, 
 not only I, but indeed my father himself — he died not until 1912 — lived to see that truth 
 received with full delight and even ministers of the gospel accepting antitoxin, immunizing 
 sera, and so forth, and accepting them all gladly, in order to kill the bacteria which, other- 
 wise, would have slain the preachers themselves and their loved ones. And, incidentally, 
 they — exorcised no more conversational disease-producing devils. 
 
 "Conversational," I say, because so many persons even at the present time declare 
 that the "devils" which Jesus cast out were in fact bacteria, which bacteria, however, he 
 called "devils," because the term "bacteria" would not at that time have been understood. 
 Utterly inconsistent, however, with that view, are the plainly conversational, even argu- 
 mentative, faculties of the "bacteria" said to have been cast out by Jesus. Bacteria do 
 not speak. Cannot: they have no vocal cords. They cannot make the slightest sounds of 
 any sort, even the inferior sorts such for example as certain species of insects can produce 
 by rubbing a wing or a leg on some other part of the body. 
 
 As proof of the conversational, even argumentative, faculties of the New Testament 
 writer's "bacteria," I quote for just two examples, the following (see any concordance for 
 others): "And he healed many that were sick of divers diseases, and cast out many devils; 
 and suffered not the devils to speak, because they knew him" (Mark, I, 34). "Now when 
 the sun was setting, all they that had any sick with divers diseases brought them unto him; 
 and he laid his hands on everyone of them, and healed them. And devils also came out of 
 many, crying out, and saying, 'Thou art Christ the Son of God.' And he rebuking them 
 suffered them not to speak: for they knew that he was Christ." (Luke, IV, 40-41.) The 
 quotations are from the "Authorized Version" of King James, of England, 1611, the version 
 in use in the days of which I write and which is still preferred by some persons. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 269 
 
 high or low degree according I suppose to the state of the 
 weather or my digestion. I was, by nature, more or less of 
 a doubting Tommie, he, by just as great necessity, a believ- 
 ing Thomas. 
 
 Take, for example, his views on religion. Every normal 
 human being, he thought, is born with a religious instinct, 
 a wholly unacquired reverence for the great Intelligence that 
 pervades the universe, perhaps is the universe— not its 
 Creator, but its Be-er. This Intelligence, this Great Mind 
 which probably is All Things, manifests itself now as matter 
 now as energy— two things which are not set apart from each 
 other, contrary to what many ministers suppose, but which 
 are simply two phases of the One Great Thing, the Eternal 
 Existence, the Eternal Intelligence. "You cannot even 
 imagine a Creator, my son. Not really. Either the universe 
 does not exist at all, but is merely an illusion (and how can 
 there be an illusion without any being, human or other, 
 existing to be illuded) or else it has existed always and will 
 always continue to exist. And you and I, being parts of the 
 whole, are therefore parts of the Great Intelligence, of the 
 Indestructible. 
 
 "When I said a moment ago that every normal human 
 being is born with the religious instinct, I meant with the 
 germ of that instinct. The newborn babe, of course, has no 
 religious feeling any more than it has any sexual feeling. 
 It has what, in the normal child, develops into that. (Some 
 instincts are active at birth, some become active later. But 
 both are present, either already unfolded or yet to unfold, 
 at birth — are inborn.*) 
 
 "This is the beginning of all religion, this natural religion. 
 Some ministers make the mistake of telling the people to 
 read the Bible so as to 'get' religion. But they already have 
 religion. It is inborn in them. 
 
 "Now this natural religion, like all other human emo- 
 tions, seeks to express itself, to communicate itself to others. 
 This expression, like all other expression, is ordinarily very 
 inadequate. But, here and there, once in several centuries — 
 just as, in the case of other emotions, a Homer, a Horace, 
 a Chaucer, a Shakespeare, is seldom born — so there appears 
 at long intervals a human being with some special gift for 
 the expression of religious feeling and thought. These men 
 
270 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 of special religious gifts have, contrary to the usual impres- 
 sion, not been confined to just one race or nationality. They 
 have appeared in China, in India, very outstandingly in 
 Persia, not with much success in Arabia, with somewhat 
 more in Egypt, Greece and Rome. But in Palestine and in 
 the Jewish race there have appeared humanity's chief ex- 
 ponents, or Shakespeares, of religion — Moses, David, Solo- 
 mon, Isaiah, Jeremiah and so on — culminating, of course, in 
 Jesus of Nazareth. In this incomparable man — not writer 
 at all, but speaker only: others than himself recorded his 
 expressions — the religious part of mankind has found its 
 highest — though not its infallible — expression, an expression 
 indeed that is truly sublime, incomparable. 
 
 "And yet Jesus also made mistakes — either he or those 
 who wrote his utterances down long years after his death 
 and transmitted them to us. Ministers commit a very great 
 error when they say that the Bible is 'an infallible book,' 
 'from cover to cover a volume without a single mistake.' 
 
 "What we ordinarily employ in reading is just an English 
 translation of the Bible. Soon we are to have a new and more 
 correct English translation, 1 just because our present trans- 
 lation does contain literally thousands of errors. 2 Some of 
 our Pittsfield ministers cry out against the new 'version,' 
 or translation, saying that the 'authorized' version (au- 
 thorized by King James of England) is the translation 
 'authorized by God.' But no English Bible can possibly 
 be the Bible. The Bible is, for the Old Testament, the Hebrew 
 and Aramaic originals; for the New Testament, the Aramaic 
 (now all lost) and Greek originals — 'originals,' of course, 
 meaning original manuscripts, as there were no ways of print- 
 ing known in the days when the Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew 
 manuscripts were written. 
 
 "Now, if the ministers will only turn to the very Bible 
 out of which they preach (the 'Authorized Translation') 
 they will see in the margins thereof such revealing comments 
 by the translators themselves as, for example, Luke, XVII, 36 : 
 'This 36th verse is wanting in most of the Greek copies/ 
 
 1 In progress for about fifteen years, it was completed in 1885. 
 
 2 According to the Revisers, about one hundred and fifty thousand errors, only some of 
 which, as they themselves declared, were corrected even in the Revised Version — the idea 
 being not to shock the general public by too many changes, especially too many of those 
 which were "non-essential." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 271 
 
 And so in hundreds and hundreds of places — positive admis- 
 sions that the ancient manuscripts themselves do vary from 
 one another. You see, son, we have not one single word of 
 either the Old Testament or the New in the handwriting of 
 any of the original authors, but only copies that date back 
 at the farthest — the New Testament merely to the fourth 
 century A. D. and the Old Testament (astonishingly) only 
 to the tenth century A. D. — in other words, the oldest copies 
 that we have of either the Old Testament or the New are 
 merely copies that stand at the end of an exceedingly long 
 chain of now non-existent copies — no doubt hundreds in 
 number — and which no doubt include practically every one 
 of the many mistakes that must have crept into them — 
 otherwise how explain the almost innumerable variations 
 which even the oldest thirty or forty copies of, say, the 
 New Testament, exhibit when these are compared with one 
 another? 
 
 "And do not forget that there are even passages like that 
 about the woman taken in adultery, John, VIII, 3 to 11 incl., 
 which do not appear in the earlier manuscripts at all and 
 which, therefore, is simply an addition by some late copyist. 
 The new, 'Revised,' edition, I predict, will not contain it, 
 or, if it does, will truly state its nature. 1 
 
 "Nor is that all. What about the Germ Theory and the 
 New Testament? ("Theory," by the way, is merely the 
 Greek word, Theoria, meaning explanation; the restriction of 
 its meaning by the uneducated to fantastic, or unproved, ex- 
 planation, is unjustifiable.) Jesus, again and again, is repre- 
 sented by the sacred writers, or else by their copyists, as 
 confirming the devil-possession theory of the production of 
 all diseases. Now Pasteur and Lister and Weigert and Koch, 
 yes and many others, have demonstrated beyond all chance 
 of error that at least very many diseases are produced by 
 microscopic germs. Yet, says the sacred writer, or by his 
 long chain of copyists is made to seem to say it (Matthew, 
 
 VIII, 16): ' he cast out the spirits with his word and 
 
 healed ALL that were sick.' Similarly too in various other 
 passages. 
 
 1 The Revised edition gives only a half-revealing hint about it. Yet the revisers, cor- 
 recting, as they did, thirty-six thousand out of the hundred and fifty thousand errors that 
 they admit having found in the New Testament alone, surely deserve our thanks for their 
 courage — as far as it went. 
 
272 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Now, my son [my father gazed at me very earnestly] do 
 not make the mistake of supposing that, because there are 
 errors in the Bible there is no truth in it. St. Peter was 
 right when he said to Jesus (John, VI, 68): 'Lord, to whom 
 shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.' No mis- 
 takes by any of the sacred writers themselves or by their 
 long chains of copyists clear on down even to those who 
 penned the oldest copies that have come down to our day, 
 can in the very least obscure that fact. Jesus, more than any 
 other person who has lived, has given expression to natural 
 religion, the inborn religious instincts of mankind. And, my 
 son, when too much inclined to be depressed by thoughts of 
 death — by the shadow of your 'little white house' — remem- 
 ber — do not forget it, but remember — that Jesus, the incom- 
 parable, has told us, 'I go to prepare a place for you 
 
 that where I am, there ye may be also.' Even were Jesus 
 mistaken, that is as to himself in connection with the prep- 
 aration of this place, he was nevertheless correct as to a 
 place being, or having been, prepared for us. The universal 
 presence of the religious instinct in the mind and soul of 
 mankind as necessarily implies the existence of such a place 
 for us hereafter as the existence of thirst in the human body 
 implies the existence of water. 
 
 "And when I say 'a place for us,' I do not mean a place 
 for us minus our respective individualities, but (contrary to 
 the beliefs of many good persons) a place for us: we would 
 not be 'us' without our respective individualities." 
 
 My father had finished speaking. We were just approach- 
 ing the summit of a very high hill, and, as is the way of 
 the human mind generally, I thought of the scene before us 
 as if it would necessarily be somehow connected with the 
 subject of the solemn discourse I had just been hearing from 
 my father, in some way be symbolical of it. Sunset was 
 coming on, and, from the crest of our hill, we overlooked a 
 vast extent of territory as if the discourse of my father could 
 have given us a more comprehensive view of things ter- 
 restrial and in a far more beautiful, even more heavenly, 
 light, than ever before. Far away, toward "the ends of the 
 earth," mighty ramparts of cloud had builded themselves, 
 wherefrom now and then came thundering voices — voices as 
 of eternal archangels. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 273 
 
 "Fantastic indeed!" will say some readers. At all events, 
 as I declared at the beginning of this section, my father 
 "loved life so whole-heartedly that merely to be in his 
 presence was uplifting. ' ' I was certainly uplifted as we came 
 to a full stop on the crest of the great hill beside the old 
 Metzgar place. 1 
 
 MR. STETTENHAUSEN'S TRAGEDY— AND OURS 
 
 At supper that night my father was deeply depressed and 
 said little. When supper was over, I, at his request, started 
 up town with him — my head and shoulders not only under 
 his shawl but under his arm besides. It was the fashion in 
 those days for men, especially the middle-aged and elderly, 
 to wear a dark-gray shawl around their shoulders and arms. 
 One such shawl was nearly always worn, as I have already 
 indicated, by Abraham Lincoln when out of doors, except 
 in hot weather. 
 
 Father and I wound up the evening in Hyde's or Harder 's 
 drug store, then in the post office waiting for the mail to be 
 distributed. 
 
 When we got back to the house I saw lantern-light ashine 
 through the crevices in the barn walls. A soft rain was 
 falling, and, as Father went into the house, I walked down 
 to the barn, looked over the hatch, then went in to 
 assist my brother Willie to hitch up Old Yellow — a splendid 
 night horse. A few minutes later my father was off into the 
 country and I into bed and dreamland. 
 
 I even dreamed I was taking a trip with Father. 
 
 First I was in the vacant block east of the schoolhouse, 
 known to all as "the show grounds," playing with Fritz 
 and Gus, my brother Jon, Johnnie Lovitt and a number of 
 other boys in the sawdust of the ring left by the last circus. 
 Each of us was in ordinary school clothing. I called atten- 
 tion to this impropriety and presto an old clown appeared 
 in the ring — big scarlet circles on his white, flappy one-piece 
 suit; green crescents all over his white, thickly-powdered 
 countenance; the whole surmounted by a clown's regulation 
 conical tan cap. "Tights and spangles?" he shouted. 
 
 1 Years afterwards this "great hill" became particularly precious to me because it lay 
 on a lovely road which ran out past the little childhood home of Fannie Fidelia English — 
 later "The Companion." 
 
274 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Yes," we boys tornadoed. "Tights and spangles!" 
 
 But just as the celestial garments had suddenly flashed 
 upon our flesh — behold! a wild bull rushed into the ring 
 and I out of it — over to the road north of the grounds where 
 my father somehow was seated in his buggy, awaiting me. 
 
 As we started to drive away, the mad bull suddenly 
 darted round in front of our horse, the clown after him, 
 drawing as he ran a slender, bright sword. Bull turned. 
 Clown thrust. Bull fell. Clown came round to the side of 
 the buggy, and looking at me with eyes the saddest of all 
 I had ever seen, he sorrowed: "This is not your father, son, 
 but his ghost. Long years ago did he die, and you yourself 
 are now a very aged man." 
 
 I tried to tell the man how foolish and mistaken he was, 
 but, as my father's form grew dimmer aad dimmer, it shout- 
 ed more and more loudly, "Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!" 
 
 And I, awaking in my bed 'at home, heard my mother's 
 voice coming up from the foot of the stair and calling, 
 "Tommy, Tommy/ If you don't get up and eat, your father 
 will go to the country without you." 
 
 I cried, "I'll be there in a minute!" but, in spite of myself, 
 fell once again asleep. 
 
 And once again I dreamed. 
 
 I dreamed that I was seated, all alone, on the front door- 
 step of our old home — the very house in which I then was 
 dreaming. 
 
 And I dreamed that I had just come in from a long and 
 difficult journey, after a long and very melancholy absence 
 from the old place. I knocked and I rang at the door, each 
 time without response. Then said I to myself, "Do you not 
 remember that all who once lived in this house are dead save 
 only yourself? It is even so. Also the few who are passing 
 in the streets do not in anywise know you, or you them. And 
 you yourself are very aged and must soon eternally depart." 
 
 So I sat down on the doorstep and, meditating on the 
 past, began noticing soon that a melancholy horn somewhere 
 on the Courthouse Square, a block or more away, about in 
 the direction of Bush's Hall, was playing a solemn figure. 
 Over and over, over and over again, as if it were the voice 
 of the mournful past, striving in vain to produce some tender 
 message from those who were gone forever. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 275 
 
 I arose in agony, went to beating on the door. 
 
 I beat so hard that my knuckles awakened me — awaken- 
 ed me to that fact that I was standing in my bed beating my 
 childish fists violently against the unyielding wall. 
 
 A curious thing I have noticed about my dreams is that 
 many of those which have most impressed me, have recurred 
 again and again throughout my life. This dream in partic- 
 ular has done so. And, in these later years, having in reality 
 grown old, I have sat in reality upon those front steps of 
 our house — ours then of course no longer — and, strangely, re- 
 membered that dream of a melancholy horn recalling to me 
 as an aged man a mournful past. And behold, as it happened, 
 there was an actual melancholy horn so blowing ! 
 
 But, as to that particular early morning. I leaped out 
 of the bed and to my room's front window. (It opened 
 directly over the front doorstep I had just been dreaming 
 about.) I threw up the sash, looked into the street, saw 
 my father seated in the buggy, waiting for me. 
 
 1 'Take your time to dress and eat, ' ' he cried. "I'll wait. ' ' 
 
 In the buggy I did not tell him of the dream, for I feared 
 that a dream he was dead might darken his pleasure. But 
 I remember very accurately the ride we made that morning, 
 its various strange events, and the outcome of the whole. 
 
 We had hardly got started when he asked, "You walked 
 back from the barn to the house with Willie last night?" 
 "Yes, he took me underneath his arm as you often do: it 
 was raining. ' ' "Good for Willie. Did he say anything about 
 wanting to become a doctor?" "No." "Do not tell him I 
 asked. He will in time get over his mania for athletics, and, 
 when he does, he will make a great surgeon. He will, in 
 fact, I think, do more in that line than you would ever do, 
 for, in fields intellectual, you are far too much a wanderer. 
 Perhaps we shall have to make a professor of philology out 
 of you. Not much chance for anything else." And so we 
 chatted along until, indeed, we had come into a far wilder 
 country in the south part of the county, a country wherein 
 my father and I had long applied our own private appella- 
 tions to various features of the landscape. "Mount Olym- 
 
276 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 pus," for example, was a name Father had given to a range 
 of great hills, on the highest of which he had affected at 
 times to behold the bright forms of ancient gods, ascend- 
 ing and descending. "The Valley of Seclusion" was a name 
 which I myself had conferred upon an extensive hollow, 
 covered in most part by thick hazel brush and traversed by 
 several quite narrow, almost undiscoverable, wagon ways. 
 
 That day later became so momentous for us that, to this 
 minute, I can recall with the sharpness almost of a steel 
 engraving even the tiniest details of its tiniest events. 
 
 We, for example, met that comical old fellow, Mr. Vomer, 
 a skinny man with a large Adam's apple and a squeaky voice. 
 That Adam's apple indeed used to possess the name of being 
 the liveliest (that is, the up-and-downingest) thing in Pike 
 County. Those who had carefully employed a tape-measure 
 to determine the truth, sometimes swore that the amplitude 
 of its excursions was fully five inches while it went up and 
 down at least four times per second. As he drove up that 
 day, he swallowed once or twice rapidly, as if to demon- 
 strate again his attainments in his most important specialty, 
 then enquired, "Doc, goin' see Stett?" 
 
 "Wrong direction now," responded my father. "Going 
 on south farther to see young Mr. and Mrs. Mildew's new 
 baby, then on to visit Mr. and Mrs. Date (both typhoid). 
 After that, come back and go north to John Stettenhausen's." 
 
 "They say John ain't so good." 
 
 "Isn't?" 
 
 "Nope. But he'll get along all right, Doc, with you." 
 The emphasis sounded a bit sarcastic. 
 
 Father waved an acknowledgment of the good word, and 
 drove on. 
 
 And, as on and on we drove we looked suddenly down 
 on a wild, deep valley, full of motionless thick vegetation. 
 All about us, as we wound and twisted our way into that 
 valley's dense and lofty hazel brush, we seemed to feel the 
 presence of some ineffable and friendly spirit. Father, hav- 
 ing said as much, stopped tired old Dick to rest. Then all 
 was deep silence. I recall, while we sat unspeaking, the soft 
 warming of my limbs in the solemn light, the ancient peace 
 that lay about us — the soundless cathedral hush there in 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 277 
 
 God's Valley of Seclusion, which was like the tranquillity 
 in some one's own prayerful heart. 
 
 Then, all of a jump, with a rush and a clatter and a yell 
 at his blooded bay horse, there hove in sight the spectacular 
 Dr. Dublin. And straightway he stopped in the narrow 
 roadway, barely wide enough for two to pass in. 
 
 "So here you — " he shouted, but got no further, because 
 of his coughing. How he heaved and harrumped and hallooed 
 and wildly gesticulated while attempting to get up the 
 phlegm. At last it came, Hibernian dynamite behind it. 
 He spurted and spat, spat and spurted again. 
 
 "Ha-w-w!" he cried, at last, very well satisfied that that 
 at least was over. "And now I've a little to say to you, 
 Shastid. First a little about the Bug Theory. But just a 
 little, and then I want to speak to you no more. — If ever 
 you lay for me again in a solitary place like this, I'll — " 
 
 "Why!" shouted my father, a bit of angry warning in 
 his voice, "I did not even know that you were coming this 
 way." 
 
 "Never mind the things you did not know — I haven't 
 time to listen to them." 
 
 "But, Doctor — " 
 
 "Listen to me. If ever you lie in wait for me again, or 
 even so much as pass me on a public highway, I'll — now 
 listen — I'll blow your brains out, help me God." 
 
 He put his hand in his pocket. 
 
 My father for a moment sat in unspeakable astonishment. 
 Then he spoke, and his voice, though soft and calm and 
 slow, was full of steady determination. "You know I'm 
 unarmed, Dublin," he said. "But, if nothing will do you 
 but fight, then lay aside your weapon and step out of your 
 buggy." 
 
 "I said nothing of a fight. I said I'd kill you if — You 
 can remember what I said. You even, by the 'Mighty, sent 
 your tiny son to church, the other day, in a scarlet vest, 
 there to advertise yourself and your skill to the natives." 
 
 Then a veritable miracle, for that one time at least, did 
 surely happen. My father, to my utmost astonishment, 
 horror and terror, burst into laughter — loud, rib-splitting, 
 far-away-echoing, laughter. Several resounding, absolutely 
 rejoiceful peals of it! 
 
278 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Doctor Dublin's sudden descent from the Great Germ 
 (he had called it Bug) Theory of Disease and its world-wide 
 consequences, to little Tommy's red vest in church one 
 Sunday was simply too much for him. 
 
 All at once the scandalized doctor went crestfallen, 
 shamefaced. He actually appeared chagrined. Removing 
 his hand from his pocket, he slapped up the horse, sped 
 away. 
 
 When we reached the Mildew's home, Bob Mildew in- 
 formed us, "Man came by while ago, Doctor, said his name 
 was Bilbo and he was to have us tell you when you come 
 that old Mr. Stettenhausen was dead." 
 
 My father put his hand to his face as if he had been struck 
 by a bullet. "So this was the reason why that fellow, 
 Vomer — " I knew all that he would say: that Dublin had 
 been one of the first to hear, and that, having heard, he had 
 taken advantage of what, to my father, would prove to be 
 a great professional misfortune, and so had acted as inso- 
 lently and as threateningly toward him as he chose. Father 
 said no more to me then, but finished with the baby, and, 
 later, at the still farther house, with Mr. and Mrs. Jo Date, 
 and, then, as he wheeled his horse, we headed north. 
 
 Not till we had passed back north through the Valley of 
 Seclusion did the measure of our loss settle down on my soul 
 with its full weight and oppression. For in the north I 
 could see that heavy rain was falling — as if the skies them- 
 selves could be weeping for our good old friend. We were 
 passing through a great maize country, and, mile after mile, 
 the plumed corn kept nodding, nodding, a stately, an eternal, 
 farewell. 
 
 As always when something dreadful occurs, this death 
 of John Stettenhausen seemed to be impossible, therefore not 
 at all to have happened. But, as I grew accustomed to the 
 idea, it began to look inevitable, therefore to have happened 
 beyond all manner of doubt — yes, to have happened long 
 years ago which years until now had been saddened and 
 made shameful for me and my father — for us who had been 
 so carelessly trying new-fangled notions on one of our best 
 friends. Why had my father used irrigations and carbolic 
 acid? Why should he not have stuck to the old and tried, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 279 
 
 the uncriticisable? Then if the man had died he would at 
 least have done so with the distinct approval of the entire 
 neighborhood, yes and of the medical profession of the 
 county — at least so far as concerned the scientific propriety 
 of the treatment. 
 
 I tried to condole with my father, to offer him at least 
 the slender encouragement of "Better luck next time, Father." 
 But he only kept on looking into the distance — looking, 
 looking. 
 
 At length I ceased to speak, and, my thoughts led up- 
 ward by the death of our old friend, I saw in the sky, as it 
 happened — and I remember the occurrence vividly to this 
 day — a giant bright cloud, much like the form of a human 
 being, which, having already detached itself from the shape- 
 less mass of dark cloud-bank lying along the horizon, and 
 now appearing to disdain the earth — the earth and all con- 
 ceivable earthly matters — slowly was bending its face up- 
 ward, upward, until at length it disappeared — ecstatically I 
 thought — into the holy heights of an invisible heaven. 
 
 This cloud, I somehow knew, could easily be taken for a 
 symbol of the righteous human soul, which, mounting 
 and turning its face away from earth and toward heaven, 
 mingles its being with the Infinite. But, somehow, the 
 symbol .failed to satisfy me. I knew its instruction was 
 mighty and unquestionable, and yet I could not dodge the 
 fact that old Mr. Stettenhausen was gone, dead. I never 
 should see him any more in all my life — which, as I still 
 was very young, bade fair to be a long one. 
 
 I began to bethink me, in spite of myself, of yet another 
 symbol, the Little White House, a symbol which, some time 
 before, had come into my life with terrific meaning and effect. 
 
 After a while my father put his arm around me. "Of 
 what are you thinking, son? You are solemn and silent." 
 
 I could not answer, so full I was of the meaning, the 
 terror of death. 
 
 "Are you thinking of that little white house again?" 
 
 ^Tes." 
 
 "And are you filled with horror about it even yet?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 Once more he asked. 
 
 I threw off my share of the dust-robe, started to rise. 
 
280 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Don't jump out here. See that muddy ditch?" He laid 
 a restraining hand on my knee. Then — 
 
 "Son, before Father himself had come into the world, 
 there were certain implied conditions which attended his 
 coming. One was that many friends in this world would 
 prove quite treacherous to him. Another was that money 
 would be hard to acquire, even harder to save, and, being 
 saved, harder still to keep from flying away in unfortunate 
 investments. Yet another condition was that he should 
 take his chances on serious sickness in his own person; that, 
 in addition, and even with the best of care, he should age 
 and wither, and, eventually — perhaps late, perhaps early — 
 he should die. 
 
 ' 'With you the conditions of the coming are exactly the 
 same. We must always remember that the great Creator 
 knoweth his own plans — what is best for us all, his own entire 
 program, in a word a program concerning which we pygmies 
 know so little. Besides, being here, as we are, let us live each 
 passing minute beautifully, let us enjoy everything — in a right- 
 ful way of course — and trust fully that by the grace of the 
 great Artificer we shall live eternally hereafter." 
 
 "But," I shouted, "if a man dies, I can see he is dead. 
 If he lives after death, I cannot see — I cannot see!" And I 
 kept on shouting as if some demon of doubt had possessed 
 me, "I cannot see! I cannot see!" 
 
 My Father halted his horse. "Son," he commanded, "be 
 quiet. — Do you remember that immense three-volume 
 Knight's 'American Mechanical Dictionary,' which you 
 have asked me for so often and which is so very expensive?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "I sent for it yesterday. It should be here soon." 
 
 I gasped through my tears an almost inarticulate "thank 
 you." Then, as he turned the horse's head into a road I 
 recognized too well, I cried out, "But this goes past Mr. 
 Stettenhausen's house." 
 
 "Yes, I know it." 
 
 "But we don't have to go that road this day." 
 
 Father leaned over and kissed me. "Listen, my son," he 
 said in a low, very melancholy voice, "I — your Daddy — fear 
 death almost as much as you do. I believe in the resurrection, 
 in the life eternal. Even for reasons — and they are very many 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 281 
 
 — outside the Holy Scriptures, I believe it. The promise of 
 eternal life is written in the form of an instinct in every 
 human heart. (No lower animal has even the slightest trace 
 of it in him.) And yet I do fear death almost as much as 
 you do. For that very reason I am going to drive past Mr. 
 Stettenhausen's. All my life long I have done first and 
 specially the thing I most dreaded to do. I will be no slave 
 to adverse circumstances. — How desolate the Stettenhausen 
 place looks now ! The leaves of the trees droop too and the 
 corn-rows whisper sadly that our old friend Stettenhausen 
 has gone away and will return no more. 
 
 "And what a friend he was! How kind and true he has 
 always been to me! When, before my birth, one of the 
 conditions I just now spoke of as having been placed upon 
 my coming, was, as I put it, 'that many friends in this world 
 would prove quite treacherous,' I ought to have added that 
 there were beautiful promises made too, as well as hard 
 conditions, and that one of those promises was that I should 
 also find in this world staunch friends — friends I should love 
 and who in return would love and stand by me." 
 
 In time I saw we were actually drawing near the Stetten- 
 hausen neighborhood. I asked my father if he thought it 
 best to drive by the place where, in the last few hours, we 
 had lost a patient. 
 
 "It probably is not best," he said. "Yet, somehow, I 
 cannot keep from driving by." 
 
 So, as we approached the place, he pulled the horse down 
 to a very slow walk, then to one even slower, so that, as 
 we approached the Stettenhausen gate, the horse actually 
 stopped and Father had to cluck him up again. 
 
 Whereupon Mrs. Stettenhausen stepped suddenly from 
 the doorway, shouting joyfully, "Ain't forgotten, Tock, 
 where you're pound for, are you? Chon's a whole lot pedder 
 to-day." 
 
 And behold! the report that our patient was dead, was 
 just somebody's ridiculous misunderstanding, and Father, 
 entering the cottage, cried in a great access of joy, "He's not 
 dead? He's not dead?" 
 
 And old Mr. Donovan (he would) made him the first 
 answer, "He's tickled to death to be alive." 
 
282 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 But Stett came back at him gayly, "Yes, ven I kot a 
 room-made dot's alretty a gorpse lighk you, I am dickled 
 to de't' to be alife alretty even eef I vos de't' too soon — 
 Sdill, Tock und Dommy, he's a priddy goot fellow. Tond 
 plame 'im for whad he gand hellup — bein' funny." He 
 turned to me. "So you vos afrait I vos going to tie." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Vosn't dot silly?" 
 
 "But men do die," I said. 
 
 "Sure dey do. Dey all do if dey live long enough. But 
 me — I dond tink I kot time to do it yet." 
 
 And with these merry words upon his lips I saw him last. 
 
 NEAR TO TAKING THE VEIL 
 In the morning my supersolemn father said that, in the 
 night, he'd been called out to see Mr. Stettenhausen and that 
 this time he was dead. "Yes, he was dead, Son, dead indeed 
 and in truth. Embolism, of course. Sudden — very sudden. 
 Dead? Yes, dead." 
 
 "Are you sure, Father?" I cried with a wail. "Wasn't 
 it just a mistake once again?" 
 
 "No. They had already straightened him for the grave 
 before I got to see him. Now, Son, you must be a man." 
 
 A few days afterward, as Father and I were driving in a 
 different part of the county from the Stettenhausen neighbor- 
 hood, we came about noon to a little town where there were 
 two small general stores, keen rivals to each other. There 
 was a vacant space about twenty feet in width between the 
 two stores, and each store boasted a side-door opening on 
 the vacant space. 
 
 Having gone into the smaller of the two stores and sup- 
 plied ourselves with cheese and crackers as well as with 
 bottles of pop, we came out of the side door and sat down 
 on its steps, munching and gurgling. 
 
 And, as we were doing these things instead of talking, 
 we naturally overheard the loud voices which, in the store 
 opposite, were engaged in vociferous argument. Presently 
 we caught the shouted name, "Doc Shastid." Next we 
 heard such scraps as "She heard Doc Shasteen say they 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 283 
 
 wuzn't bugs but dust." Another: "my wife was there too 
 and heard him say they wuzn't dust but bugs." A deep bass 
 voice: "Prob'bly what he really meant wuz bug-dust ." Then 
 came stamping and laughter, after which a shrill, angry 
 woman's voice: "He's only a bug-doctor, I tell you — believes 
 bugs are the cause of all diseases. That's the way he came 
 to kill John Stettenhausen. Tried to kill the bugs and killed 
 John instead." 
 
 There had been tragedy breeding in the atmosphere for a 
 very long time. That tragedy now was here, not something 
 dreaded or merely dreamed of, but here — an actuality. 
 
 And now my grief for my old friend, Mr. Stettenhausen, 
 commingled with an equally distressing fear for my father. 
 The man Dublin was so completely enshackled by what he 
 conceived to be the Code of Ethics, so thoroughly unbal- 
 anced by it, so utterly unreasonable, as if indeed possessed 
 by a veritable demon of the subject, that he might do almost 
 anything — even perhaps the thing that he had threatened 
 to do. At all events the death of Mr. Stettenhausen had sup- 
 plied the arch enemy of my father with the very weapon 
 that he wished. 
 
 My father, as we drove away from the village, was, I 
 noticed, nervous and apprehensive in the extreme — some- 
 thing quite unusual with him in all his professional relations. 
 I tried to divert his attention to pleasanter things, but to no 
 avail. Towards us drove a man standing on a load of hay, 
 leaning strongly backward while supported by the lines. 
 To get some friendly answer I shouted, "Howdy, Stranger!" 
 He did not know me or reply. Finding big Dick in a lather, 
 my father, under a cooling shade, pulled the old fellow to 
 a halt. A little crook-leg bull-dog trotted out of a fence- 
 corner and began snuffing at the horse's hocks. My father, 
 perturbed by the occurrence, drove on. A few moments later, 
 a heavy shot slapped against hills and rocked back across 
 the flats. He halted the horse once again and looked all 
 about. It was getting to be the hunting season of the year, 
 and, of course, the woods and fields were filling with game 
 seekers. Yet, at each distant rolling thunder of a shot-gun 
 or whip-like crack of a rifle, my father would pull up the 
 horse suddenly, look about, and listen, listen, as if he had 
 
284 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 been some bloody criminal for whom the whole world was 
 seeking. 
 
 And the stories about my father grew steadily worse. 
 Some were altogether incredible, yet were continually being 
 repeated. One of them was so bad I was nearly distracted 
 about it. Mr. and Mrs. John Connett, true friends of my 
 father in Pittsfield, came round to his office one day and 
 repeated it to him sympathetically and with the assurance 
 that they and their friends were going to do the best they 
 could to "nail that lie." 
 
 With such a story circulating — i.e., that Father was 
 going demented and, under the delusion that insects were 
 crawling around in everybody's wounds or inwards, was 
 poisoning and killing his patients wholesale in the endeavor 
 to poison and kill out the cockroaches, tumble-bugs, etc., 
 was it any wonder that my father's practice suffered? ' 'Don't 
 you believe it?" the teller would ask the listener. "What 
 about John Stettenhausen? He killed him, plainly admits 
 that he did — in the name of science." 
 
 With such a story circulating was it any wonder that we 
 saw all about us staring eyes, unfriendly eyes, eyes of con- 
 tempt, derision? Occasionally, behind us, as we walked 
 along some village plank sidewalk, I heard smothered 
 laughter behind us. Turning suddenly, on one such occasion, 
 I saw two or three half-grown bumpkins imitating my 
 father's grave gait. Another time, before a country store 
 and a little laughing group around its doorway, a big young 
 fellow ran out before my father with a tumble-bug in his 
 left hand. Extending it toward him, he cried, "Hey, Doc, 
 when a man's got a wound and you find a thing like this 
 inside of it, do you give him a pill like this?" And, extend- 
 ing his other hand, now open, he displayed a tumble-bug's 
 dung-ball. 
 
 My father's eyes flashed fire. For a moment I thought 
 he intended to give the ignoramus the punishment he de- 
 served. But better than that happened. The clown's father, 
 a whale of a fellow and owner of the store, stepped from the 
 group and administered such a clout to his over-assuming 
 son that the latter put hand to ear and set up a horrible 
 racket. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 285 
 
 "Haven't I told you a dozen times/' asked the father in 
 a very soft tone, which, as I thought, promised still more 
 blows, in case occasion called for them, "Haven't I told you 
 a dozen times that Doc ain't never said nothing about insects 
 getting into peoples' wounds or bodies, but only that little, 
 microscopic vegetable things get into wounds and people 
 and plays hob with 'em by makin' poisons in their systems? 
 An' haven't I told you he takes matter out of wounds, lays 
 it under a microscope and there proves what he say si" Then 
 to the whole crowd, "I got a brother that practices medicine 
 in Chicago and teaches in a medical college, and he says 
 Doc Shastid's right." 
 
 That ended that. And, in fact, my father did not always 
 meet in other places with ignorance and blind opposition 
 to his advocacy of the germ theory and Listerism. In some 
 neighborhoods almost all the people actually shared his 
 view. In others, of course, the matter stood just the other 
 way around. 
 
 In some parts of the country no such excitement ever arose 
 amongst the laity. In other parts it never arose amongst 
 either the laity or the profession. In still others, however, 
 it arose amongst both doctors and general population and 
 raged with an intensity which my father and I had never 
 had to witness. Thus, over in Missouri somewhere, as we 
 heard — one doctor had shot another, although without 
 killing him, as the result of a quarrel, pro and con, about 
 the germ theory. In one or two county medical societies, 
 as my father had heard or read, some of the members were 
 expelled because of their sincere belief in "disease germs" 
 and Listerism — the ground for the expulsions being that no 
 educated physician could sincerely rely upon such doctrines, 
 so that all who were professing to do so, were merely pre- 
 tending to believe in the harmfulness of bacteria, etc., as a 
 means of advertising and so of prying practice away from 
 their fellow practitioners. 
 
 Even in the larger centers of this country the long-con- 
 tinued battle was waged, here with a certain amount of 
 mildness and indifference there with raucous and long-en- 
 during hatred. In the medical centres of Europe it was some- 
 
286 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 what the same, and there, as here, some of the very greatest 
 surgeons were opposed to the "new-fangled theories." 
 
 In one case — I had nearly forgotten this matter — a great 
 elephant of a man and a small, slender fellow got into a 
 fight over the "Dublin view" and the "Shastid view" and 
 before our very eyes. It occurred in the wide space lying 
 between a certain farmhouse and the tiny private burial 
 ground thereunto appertaining. That fight raged to and fro 
 over all those three broad acres, owing chiefly to the fact 
 that, as the big one advanced the little one retreated. The 
 big fellow — the one I have called an elephant — was indeed 
 a hulking giant of a man, with shoulders like slabs of knot- 
 ted oak, arms like the forelegs of a work-horse, and great 
 hands and feet. Spite of his lack of pretense to all things 
 intellectual, he was the ardent champion of the "Shastid 
 view." He believed in the "bugs." His opponent on the 
 contrary was a delicate, wedge-faced man with narrow 
 shoulders and — at least until this time — an apologetic man- 
 ner, the sort of person exactly that one would expect to be 
 eternally pushed out of some one else's way. Just now, 
 however, he was all "het up" over science — both natural 
 and fisticutionary. He did not believe in bugs or evolution, 
 but, stoutly, in the Dublin theory of disease causation. His 
 views on the nature of infectious diseases were, as now each 
 one of us knows, exactly all to the bad; his theory, however, 
 of the proper way in which to fight was excellent in the 
 extreme — assuming of course that there is any excellent way 
 in which to conduct such matters. His technique was, con- 
 tinually, so to deviate from the line elephantine that, when 
 the large antagonist arrived at where you seemed to be, you 
 were always quite somewhere else. 
 
 At length Clem, the elephantine, blinded by blows, was 
 seeking vainly for the whereabouts of his small, hornet-like 
 antagonist, Jim. At last Jim "rushed" Clem, and — crash! 
 both of them went through the well-rotted fence into the 
 graveyard. After that, the task for Jim was easy. In and 
 out he danced among the gravestones, hitting with frightful 
 accuracy and fiendish frequency his perfectly helpless antag- 
 onist — who, more often than not, was simply bruising his 
 helpless fists upon the mossy stones. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 287 
 
 Such a foolish affair would be unthinkable to-day. In 
 those near-pioneer times, however, men still fought for what 
 they believed and fought for it often. 
 
 At length Jim, the little, struck his hard, small fist 
 straight upon the point of big Clem's chin. Clem went 
 down like a barrel full of dead beef, and, for a time, lay 
 across a grave motionless. Blood was all over his face, 
 saturated his clothing. Yet he was not long "out." Warily 
 he turned his head. His frame stiffened. "Let this be a 
 lesson to you," he murmured. He sat up, uttered something 
 incoherent, indecent, waved his shattered hand in sign he 
 understood the thing that had occurred. 
 
 My father went up to him, offered his services. Clem 
 flew into a towering rage. Volubly he cursed my father. 
 "Get away you, d. . . . you. Hadn't been for you and your 
 bug-sick theory — " He looked his hatred and contempt. 
 
 "Dublin's up to my house," suggested a bystander. "Go 
 and bring him at once," cried my father, meaning to have 
 him treat the vanquished. 
 
 But Clem responded, "Get out, both o you! And all the 
 G. . .d. . . .d doctors too get out. I want none o' you." 
 
 The same old situation : ' 'A plague o' both your houses !" 
 
 In the buggy my father: "Dublin put him up to it, that 
 Jim. I happen to have been warned. Jim was to have 
 whipped me, but, having taken a drink, got into a quarrel 
 with Clem instead. I'll never trust a doctor again." 
 
 "Not even a Hodgen?" 
 
 "No — Who? A Hodgen? O yes, of course, I'd trust a 
 Hodgen or even a McDowell to the end of time." 
 
 Later we learned that the "warning" to Father was ab- 
 solutely false, so far at least as Dr. Dublin was concerned. 
 But Father, for months, was in deepest gloom because of 
 what he thought the "hidden machinations" of his former 
 friend. He minded not so much the threat that the Doctor 
 had made him if this or that should happen. That threat 
 had come direct from Dublin, as man to man, and was itself 
 a fair and proper warning. But, to hire a low down pup, 
 a man of no standing whatever, to beat him up, perhaps to 
 stab him (the scoundrel, Jim, had stabbed three men already, 
 across the Missouri line, and got off scot free) was something 
 
288 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 that undermined his confidence, almost, in the medical pro- 
 fession as a whole. 
 
 I regret that, even so late as at the present time, I cannot 
 narrate the fortunate circumstances under which my father 
 came to know that Dr. Dublin's alleged instigation of Jim 
 in the above-mentioned fracas was wholly a fiction. Those, 
 however, still live who would be most deeply hurt and 
 shamed by the narrative, even if all the participants in the 
 matter were mentioned only by fictitious names — the practice 
 I have followed with few exceptions in this part of my book. * 
 
 And we were yet to have more meetings with his royal 
 highness, the Duke of Dublin, at least one of which, whether 
 pleasant or unpleasant, was to be big with destiny. 
 
 A DOCTOR'S APPRENTICE AND A COMING MAN 
 But now, having run considerably ahead of another part 
 of my story, I must go back in time for a number of years, 
 in order to face forward again. 
 
 Jon and I used to practice walking the top stringer of our 
 north-alley fence by moonlight, sometimes even by daylight. 
 We called it "cat walking," and thought it fun. One day, 
 as we were cat walking, we all at once caught the multi- 
 tudinous sounds of a great drove of cattle hoofing to the west 
 of us. It was always an event in our lives to watch such 
 milling animals, to hear their discontented bawlings while, 
 close behind, rode dust-covered men on excited horses, shout- 
 ing "Hey! Hey there!" and cracking great, loud whips with 
 a hearty good will. 
 
 Before the long procession has moved half way past us, 
 Jon and I, looking townward, see our father, seated in his 
 buggy, staring first in one direction then in another, waiting, 
 it is true, for the bawling cattle herd to get out of his way, 
 
 1 Once again, lest the reader may suppose that I exaggerate the extreme combativeness 
 of men, yes and sometimes of women, in the days of which I write, I quote from "History 
 of Pike County, Illinois" (Chicago: Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1880) page 234: "Horses 
 
 were 'swapped,' difficulties settled and free fights indulged in Indeed, fights on 
 
 Saturday in the village and settlement centers were so customary that when a Saturday 
 passed with no fight in the neighborhood, it was the occasion of considerable remark for 
 weeks." This passage was written concerning a period of time somewhat prior to my birth, 
 but, even in my boyhood and youth, quarrels and fights were still among the commonest 
 occurrences. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 289 
 
 but yet, quite as obviously, looking for somebody to ride 
 with him. 
 
 "Come on with me," I cry at Jon, "and go with Father 
 and me into the country." Away dash we on our little bare 
 but tireless feet. Round the house into the street. Up to 
 the rear of the buggy. But then, "I can't go with you," 
 explains Jon. "I have to take my music lesson." So he starts 
 on another run for his music teacher's, George B. Crawford's, 
 office on the Square. 
 
 When I had mounted to the seat beside my father, yet 
 while we were still waiting for the last stragglers of the 
 long-horn cattle to pass, my father asked, "What makes 
 that big lump there in your pocket?" Placing a hand in 
 the side-pocket of my coat, he moved the hand round a 
 little, then removed it. "About time for somebody's tenth 
 birthday, 1 isn't it?" he asked. "In two or three days," I 
 answered, meaning with iron will to put off the viewing of 
 my present until we had got back home. 
 
 We drove that day our gentle, easy-going old sorrel, Dick. 
 The "equine devil" and Old Yellow were each, for certain 
 reasons to appear herein hereafter, becoming day by day, 
 less and less available. For that reason it was that, as we 
 passed a certain farmhouse and a great mastiff in the door- 
 yard set up a challenging bellow, our horse turned sharply 
 round and would have galloped toward home, only that the 
 mastiff — seeing what he thought an easy fight before him, 
 leaped the fence and seized Mr. pacifist horse by the throat. 
 Whereupon my father, despite his usual attitude toward dogs, 
 vaulted over the wheels and, taking the dog by the throat, 
 cast him — actually — into a deserted dry well. Farther on he 
 informed the owner where the dog could be found. 
 
 1 1 am not perfectly certain whether the birthday mentioned was my tenth or a later one. 
 On our way out to the country that day my father indeed, as I remember, spoke at length 
 about Custer's recent battle with Sitting Bull and the Sioux Indians, something which 
 occurred in June, 1876. (My tenth birthday was July 19 of that year.) We also talked of a 
 lecture which, I believe, had been recently given by Robert J. Burdette, the humorist. 
 There were also, however, certain occurrences on that day which make it entirely possible 
 that it was in fact a slightly later, instead of my tenth, anniversary. 
 
 The question can have importance only as it bears upon the total length of time during 
 which I have been engaged, as apprentice and full-fledged physician, in the practice of 
 medicine. 
 
290 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 When on our way again, I asked, "Have you never loved 
 any dogs, Father, besides the big one that you loved in your 
 childhood, and that bit you — thus making you fear all dogs?' ' 
 
 "Yes," he replied. "Not many years ago I was called at 
 midnight to go out to Madison Chapman's. Just as I was 
 putting the pill-bags into the buggy, I heard, in the silence 
 of the sleeping town, a pad-pad-pad between the jail and the 
 Methodist Church. I, that night, was somehow appre- 
 hensive, so — for no reason that I could think of — I stood 
 and watched. 
 
 ' 'And soon there hove into view Old Lion, a big dog I had 
 often seen on the Public Square, but to which I had never 
 paid any attention. Now he came right up to me, though 
 never in his life had he noticed me before, stood there for a 
 moment looking straight into my eyes, then turned and 
 walked to the back of the buggy, where he stood alert and 
 tense, head down and hair up. 
 
 "I knew not just what to do. He was, I understood, quite 
 harmless, yet I did not want to take him with me into the 
 country merely for that reason. I said to him, 'Go home, 
 Lion. Go on home. I'm all right, old man.' But stir he 
 would not. I begged him to go. He wagged his tail and 
 gave me a look of the utmost friendship and fidelity. Yet 
 stir he would not. 
 
 "Now I, as you know, am no believer at all in the so- 
 called mystical powers of animals, especially dogs. Nor am 
 I superstitious. Yet I admit that, after such persistence on 
 Mr. Lion's part, I had a feeling, a mere feeling, that perhaps 
 he did have a reason for his unusual conduct, though one I 
 could not understand. 
 
 "I got into the buggy and drove off, Lion at the back of 
 the buggy each foot of the way. 'Could someone really be 
 wishing to hurt me?' I asked myself, then answered, nat- 
 urally, 'Nonsense.' We passed both Doctor Doss and Doctor 
 Casal, and later a veterinary, but all these were friends, good 
 friends, of mine: no question at all about that. No other 
 persons did we pass. 
 
 ' 'When I entered the Chapman house, Lion went and stood 
 guard at the horse's head. All through my work in the 
 house, I heard, on several occasions, Lion's loud, discordant 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 291 
 
 yells of rage and defiance to the world — all these, no doubt, 
 directed toward drunken farmers going home from town. 
 
 "When I returned. to the buggy, Lion moved behind it 
 again and followed me silently to town. When, at home, 
 I got out of the buggy, he came and stood before me once 
 more, begged shrilly for something though still in vain, and, 
 lifting up a giant paw from time to time as if wishing to 
 shake hands, away he went, head and tail ends both down, 
 pad-padding back to the Public Square." 
 
 My father wound up: "Well, after all, I just don't know 
 what he wanted." 
 
 Then put in I: "That's easy enough. He had a hard 
 bellyache and wanted a doctor — a good one." 
 
 Father, ignoring the flippancy, went on: "Always, after 
 that night, I somehow loved old Lion — though he never 
 again would notice me. — And then there was another dog 
 I loved, the first dog of all — a little yellow boyhood's cur 
 named Monk. (And with this dog comes a moral.) I loved 
 him so much I, a mere child, simply could not sleep without 
 him. I loved him so much it sometimes seemed I could not 
 have lived without him. All through the brilliant summer 
 days — ye gods what brilliant days we then did have — we 
 played together and together and together. 
 
 "One day there were visitors at our house, and, after the 
 dinner, we were all seated — all at least but me — in the yard 
 before the house, the same little white house (not the red 
 one) that you see to-day near the schoolyard. I, for my part, 
 instead of sitting idly in a chair chattering, was engaged in 
 turning handsprings and somersets for the delectation of the 
 visitors — who, however, seemed undelectated. 
 
 "Still I wanted my share of attention. 
 
 "Still I did not get it. 
 
 "So ambitious then I grew, so desirous for the attentions 
 of others, that I said to myself, 'By the shades of the mighty 
 Golly' (the only oath I knew then) I will have my share of 
 attention. 
 
 "Poor little Monk was, of course, frolicking by me, 
 pausing from time to time to lick my hand or shoe, but his 
 attention was not enough. I was ambitious. 
 
292 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "So, picking up a hammer that happened to be near, I 
 struck him — struck him on the dear little head that had 
 loved me so long and so well. But Monk, instead of yelping 
 and capering about, and so of attracting to both of us the 
 attention I thought we deserved, he — merely fell over and 
 was dead. 
 
 "I tried to bring him back to life. I poured water over 
 him. I shouted to him. All to no purpose. He was dead. 
 
 "The visitors tried to revive him, but to no purpose. 
 He was dead. 
 
 "And again and again I saw Monk in my dreams. And 
 then he was living. So, all the brilliant days, I would spend 
 wishing for sleep. Therein I could see Monk, see him again 
 outside my window. And he would be barking to get in. 
 
 "And soon, out of that Monk occurrence, there grew up 
 in our family a saying, a very useful warning, for those who 
 are too ambitious, too anxious for the plaudits of others — 
 Be careful you do not kill Monk. 1 
 
 "And this leads me to say to you something that I long 
 have been wanting to say. You are probably so ambitious 
 you never could be content to become just a doctor — a 
 country doctor; and, anyway, I never would really advise 
 anyone to become a doctor of any sort — although, if I had 
 my life to live again, I would be just what I am." 
 
 At this I began to see his drift. And it seemed all at once 
 as if time itself stood still, all previous hours having existed 
 merely to lead up to this one supreme moment — but then, 
 alas: to stop. He was no longer speaking. With eyes fixed 
 on the distance, he appeared to be lost in contemplation. 
 I knew, at least I felt, that, even yet, he feared I lacked the 
 constancy, the persistence, yes even the dignity, to become 
 a physician. Would he never start talking again? But, if 
 he did, would he, even then, suggest I become his "appren- 
 tice" — the first step, in those days, toward becoming a 
 doctor? No, he had not sufficient confidence in me. 
 
 1 This warning and this story my father placed before me again and again. Once in 
 connection with a family, the Vandermoolens, whose doctor he long had been but whose 
 practice he had lost by being too ambitious — i.e., proving that his arms were longer than 
 Mr. Vandermoolen's. (See my story of the Vandermoolens, Bulletin of the Am. Acad, of 
 Medicine, Vol. VIII (1907) pp. 290-1.) 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 293 
 
 And when, once more, he did start talking, I found that 
 his thinking had taken a different tack. "I too," he ad- 
 mitted, "have had my illusions — my beautiful but wholly 
 idle dreams. I too have thought to become an author: 
 yet see how carelessly I write. To be a successful business 
 man: yet see how badly I manage investments. To be a city 
 surgeon, a great and famous operator. Hodgen has told me — 
 But then you know what he said. He would make me ambi- 
 tious. Great man as he is, he would tempt me away from — 
 from what I am cut out for, from my moral, my religious, 
 duty, yes from the thing that most of all I love. 
 
 "You must decide for yourself, Thomas. Remember that, 
 when I took the veil (decided to practice in Pike County) 
 I had no doctor-daddy here to help me in my choice and, 
 later, in my difficult work. You would have one by your 
 side. 
 
 "John Hay used to call Pike County, although he loved 
 it too, 'Barbaria,' the old Greek word for 'land of the bar- 
 barians' — i.e., people who continually gibber 'bar, bar, bar,' 
 instead of speaking Greek. To me this county has never 
 seemed a land like that. Our people, though primitive, are 
 of most excellent stocks. They are stronger than the average 
 in both body and mind. Once rid of their superstitions, they 
 will advance rapidly. Over and above that, you will at all 
 times love them for their essential kindness and good-heart- 
 edness." 
 
 "Father," I said, "I will take the veil." 
 
 My father put an arm around me and gave me a little 
 squeeze. "You will be Daddy's 'apprentice,' he your 'pre- 
 ceptor.' He will like it very much, even after your gradua- 
 tion in medicine, when you shall have become a full-fledged 
 doctor, a surgeon, perhaps — provided only you would always 
 practice by his side — by which I mean occupy the same 
 office with him, talk cases over with him, and, now and 
 then (not too seldom, either) ride out to see cases with him, 
 and then, each time we are back in the buggy, discuss pa- 
 tients, medicine, languages, philosophy and the eternal 
 beauty of field and sky." 
 
 "Just about what we are doing now?" 
 
294 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Yes, only then you would have patients of your own, 
 patients whom — sometimes but not too often — you would 
 go to see without me, and a home of your own, but not more 
 than one block away from the house in which you were 
 born." 
 
 They say it is only youth that dreams, or at least that 
 dreams of the future. But here was my father constructing 
 castles in the air to a greater extent and with even a greater 
 specula tiveness than youthful I was doing. How, when that 
 future at length arrived, I myself tore down his beautiful 
 aerial constructions will appear hereafter. 
 
 It was late midsummer. From the cloth-netted windows 
 of shack after shack, cabin after cabin, yes and fine house 
 after fine house, came the continual wail of babies sickening 
 with cholera infantum — the greatest cause of infant mor- 
 tality in that day. 
 
 A child would be seized first with purging then with 
 vomiting. These acts would be frequent and violent in the 
 extreme. After the contents of the stomach and bowels had 
 been completely expelled, the evacuations would consist of 
 the serum of the blood which had been secreted or transuded 
 from the blood vessels into the stomach and intestines. Owing 
 to the abstraction of so much fluid from the blood, the child 
 would be almost crazed by thirst. Yet, when water was ad- 
 ministered by the mouth, it would be rejected immediately. 
 Convulsions and coma (dense stupidity) would ensue, then 
 death. 
 
 My father, experimenting a good deal in the cases, had 
 worked out a number of helpful measures for himself. Among 
 these perhaps the most useful was the injection under the 
 skin of a weak solution of ordinary table salt in boiled water. 
 This replaced in the blood the highly valuable water and 
 the most essential salt which it had lost by the vomiting and 
 diarrhoea. My father also taught that cholera infantum, 
 whatsoever its form, was the result of infection by disease 
 germs — something not at all admitted at the time, or for 
 many years afterward, even by the foremost writers. 1 
 
 1 Thus, for example, Austin Flint's "Principles and Practice of Medicine" (1886), chief 
 textbook of its day, says not a word on the subject. Neither does Stevens in "Manual of 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 295 
 
 On the day in question, the more deeply we drove into 
 the country the more cholera infantum we found and the 
 more severe. Indeed on one occasion — this occurred in a 
 large, fine house too — the child had lost so much water and 
 salt from its blood that it was actually dehydrated, dried up, 
 till it looked like an old wrinkled mummy. My father had 
 just given orders for boiled water and some table salt, and, 
 advancing toward the child, was about to administer a stim- 
 ulant, when, suddenly, the baby passed into ''the shadow of 
 the little white house" — a term which, from that sad ex- 
 perience in my earlier childhood, I had come to use for 
 ''dissolution." 
 
 Back in the buggy I cried out to my father, "Maybe, 
 Father, if I practice by your side, I shall be able some day to 
 discover a cure, or, better, a preventive, of cholera infan- 
 tum." 1 
 
 He encouraged me in the thought, and, as we drove back 
 through the mysterious dark, joy pulsed at my throat. Even 
 in spite of the death I had just then witnessed, it pulsed 
 there. A thousand dreams had come or would come, true! 
 
 the Practice of Medicine" (1901). Flint in fact says, op. cit., p. 540, "The causation has 
 relation to a high temperature, the affections [the various affections which he believed 
 came under the head of "cholera infantum"] prevailing almost exclusively during the months 
 of June, July, August and September. Something more than temperature, however, is 
 concerned in their production, for they are almost limited to cities and large towns, and 
 are more prevalent in the Northern and Middle than in the Southern States." Just how 
 erroneous that last statement is, particularly with reference to cholera infantum being 
 "almost limited to cities and large towns," can be seen from what I've said above with 
 respect to my father's country practice. Austin Flint, great man as he was, knew nothing 
 of the practice of medicine outside the city of New York. The "something more than 
 temperature" which was "concerned in its production" was generally thought to be not 
 disease germs but too much or too little food, too much fruit, or, most important matter 
 of all at that time, exposures to the "night air" after exposure to the hot air of the day. 
 
 Cholera infantum is now known to be produced not only by heat and improper diet 
 but also by various kinds of bacteria — not just one specific kind. 
 
 1 Preventives were, in fact, discovered, though not at all by me. Clean milk, clean 
 bottles, clean nipples, and, above all else, metal door and window screens, performed the 
 miracle — did away with the germs. The metal screens, it has to be confessed, were by no 
 means introduced as a method for preventing cholera infantum, but only as a better means 
 of keeping out flies and other annoying insects than the old-fashioned mosquito net. As 
 an Irishman might put it, incidentally they performed their chief purpose. 
 
 But alas! as I look through all the histories of medicine that are now available to me, 
 I find not one which even so much as mentions the effect of metal screens in the prophylaxis 
 of cholera infantum, malaria, yellow fever, and many other germ-borne diseases. Well, 
 what space could we expect to be devoted to the topic of metal screens only, when even to 
 Listerism itself and to the germ theory there have, as a rule, been assigned only three or 
 four pages — out of many hundreds! 
 
296 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 When we had arrived at home, we halted in front of the 
 office, my father saying, "Come in here — where now you'll 
 be my apprentice." 
 
 His apprentice! 
 
 We went in, and it seemed like a new place to me. There 
 were still the same brief rows of bottles — tinctures, extracts, 
 ointments, powders, pills. The two overfull bookcases. The 
 little white-sacked skeleton, the microscope and the box of 
 old bones. All the other little features too of the small place 
 — they were there, all there. And yet they seemed somehow 
 to have expanded from what they had been before until the 
 room was more like a glorious cathedral in some vast city 
 than an insignificant medical office in a tiny town. 
 
 Father stood beside me in front of his big, framed 
 diploma — read me all those well-loved names upon it — then 
 stood me in front of his almost equally large framed picture 
 of John T. Hodgen, his idol, and, looking down at me with 
 the friendliest eyes that ever I have known, asked God to 
 bless me as a doctor's apprentice and always afterwards as 
 a doctor. 
 
 And he further talked to me until far into that night, 
 but the words that he uttered — so fondly happy were they 
 — I believe that I, although I clearly remember the most of 
 them, will keep always in my heart and to myself. 
 
 A PHYSICIAN IN EMBRYO 
 So I had become a doctor's apprentice, the germ and un- 
 mistakable beginning of a true Hippocratides. I was some- 
 times in a kind of trance. At all times I was fluttering wings 
 and trailing clouds of glory. Even in a crowd I seemed to be 
 listening to muted music. 
 
 On the very day I started, our good neighbor across the 
 street to the west of us, Mrs. Purkitt, came in to "have a 
 look" at me. She had heard about the great apprenticeship. 
 She it was, I recall again, who had been the sweet foster 
 mother of John G. Nicolay, and — for a short year only: — 
 almost a foster mother to John's excellent chum, that mis- 
 chief-making little rascal, John Hay. At first she came half 
 laughing, but, seeing my tired and hurt face — I had been up 
 half the night at helping Father — she took me in her good 
 old motherly arms and burst out crying. "Tom, you've al- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 297 
 
 ways seemed just like — " "I know," I said. "I love you 
 too, mother Purkitt." Then my mother came in, and both 
 the women burst out crying. At this I was so ashamed, so 
 ashamed. They would not have cried over any manly-look- 
 ing student. They cried about in the way that both of them 
 had already done when my little brother Jon had forever 
 lost his curls. 
 
 Later, some of my boy friends prophesied, for example: 
 "All that there fine feelin's about him bein' helper to a doctor'll 
 vanish like mist before the sunrise. For one thing, it'll take 
 a lot o' real work to make a real doctor." It did take a lot 
 o' work, but the fine feelin's have never vanished. I am as 
 
 THE DOCTOR'S APPRENTICE LEARNS 
 ABOUT RHONCHI AND RALES 
 
 (Line-drawing by my Friend of After Years, 
 William H. Schmedtgen, Chicago.) 
 
298 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 proud to-day to be a doctor as I was to think of being one 
 between sixty and seventy years ago. 
 
 Much as I stayed now in the office, I did not altogether 
 quit riding in the country with my father. 
 
 One day we drove out west and north and, the first thing 
 I knew, we were in the Stettenhausen neighborhood, and, 
 as I thought of old Mr. Stettenhausen again, behold! the 
 plumes of the aging corn again were waving after us a sad 
 farewell and all the ripening world was sad. So always, I 
 thought, we see in nature the echo of our own thoughts and 
 feelings. 
 
 "What's become of old Mr. Donovan?" I asked. "I hear 
 he is very much better," my father replied. 
 
 Then, all at once, a shout behind us, a whole chorus of 
 shouts then, and behold! Around our buggy the same re- 
 joiceful bevy of children that, a good while back, had follow- 
 ed us from school one day, to show us the road to the new 
 Stettenhausen place. But, this time, they wanted to show 
 us a new game they had just learned. So we stopped, and 
 there, under big, shady trees at an unfenced creek some 
 hundred feet away, they put on their play — so proud, so 
 proud, that the doctor and his boy, who had come from the 
 great, far county-seat with all its magnificence and mystery, 
 were kind enough to watch their acting. "Early Days" it 
 was called. 
 
 The girls had got lost in a forest. Chased by Indians (the 
 smaller boys), the women (all the girls there were) pretended 
 to tear off bits of their dresses for "trails." After a time the 
 Indians caught up with the girls. But the white men (larger 
 boys) following the trails, destroyed the captors and rescued 
 the grateful sweethearts. 
 
 Anon the boys, as husbands, and the girls, as wives, were 
 "keeping house," each pair at its own bush or log or stump. 
 But each pair of eyes of each pair of housekeepers was glanc- 
 ing from time to time askant to see whether or not the 
 doctor and his son were looking. For our benefit indeed it 
 was they were still acting out the little play, which, without 
 the children knowing it at all, was symbolical of all their 
 tiny lives — even the parts thereof that yet were to be. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 299 
 
 Father and I applauded till, all at once, out came old Mr. 
 Donovan. 
 
 I turned for a last glimpse at the children. They were 
 huddled together in the road, gazing after us longingly. 
 
 Mr. Donovan was looking better than I had ever seen 
 him before. He coughed, though, rather badly, told us a 
 little joke and went back into the house. 
 
 Next day we heard that, in the night, he had died. 
 
 TALES OUT OF TIME 
 A good while back, perhaps, I should have told the 
 following three stories in order to have kept their time-order 
 true, but, somehow, I could not find a proper place in which 
 to put them. Even now I tell them merely because they are 
 needed to round out my picture of a long gone time and scene. 
 
 NUBBIN 
 
 He received that name not merely because he was ex- 
 ceedingly small, both of stature and of mind, but because of 
 an incident which, aside from its producing the critical 
 change in his cognomen, was relatively unimportant. The 
 incident : My father and I had gone to the home of his very 
 much larger brother — a brother for whom he was working. 
 The brother, very sick indeed and exceedingly delirious, 
 could of course not answer a question. So to the sick man's 
 wife my father turned and inquired, "Have the bowels 
 moved?" The lady, embarrassed, tried.to answer, could not, 
 blushed violently, and, at length, merely nodded her head 
 and looked down. 
 
 Said then my father, "How large was the movement?" 
 
 She could not answer. 
 
 He turned to some of the neighbors who, sympathetically 
 and solemnly, were sitting around in the room. All of these 
 could speak easily and did, but none knew the answer to the 
 question. 
 
 At length, however, the subject of this sketch — his right- 
 ful name was Saul Simmons — began pursing up his mouth, 
 then made gurgling sounds, and, finally — poor fellow — 
 ejaculated, "I c-c-c-can answer. It's just b-b-behind the 
 
300 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 house where all the rest of his'n is. An' it's exac'ly the 
 s-s-size of a nubbin.' 
 
 The thoughtless audience broke into guffaws, and be- 
 hold! for several years thereafter Mr. Saul Simmons had a 
 new and more distinctive appellation — Nubbin. 
 
 After a time poor little Nubbin broke with his big fine 
 brother, Henry, and moved into a different neighborhood — 
 "One three-quarters of a mile beyond the end of the world." 
 
 But everything he tried to do "went to Pot Holler." 
 
 Honest he was, as shown by the fact that, once, after a 
 rather trying illness which he went through in his shanty 
 all alone, save for the' occasional ministrations of kindly 
 neighbors, after, I say, his recovery from this illness, he 
 offered as payment to my father his span of old mules — all 
 the draught animals he had. 
 
 My father, of course, refused to take the mules, deferring 
 the time of payment till Nubbin might be more prosperous. 
 
 Nubbin, however, never did become more prosperous. 
 He bought a farm, it is true, owed for it mostly, and, finally, 
 we heard he had lost it, "roof, fence and acreage," by mort- 
 gage foreclosure. 
 
 It was quite a wretched conclusion to a little weakling's 
 enterprise. 
 
 A few days later we met him driving his span of aged 
 mules from the jouncing seat of a spring wagon. All the 
 farming and household paraphernalia in the wagon com- 
 bined would not have sold for fifty dollars. 
 
 As we passed him, he, obviously ashamed, volunteered, 
 "Drivin' th-th-this outfit to Missouri to help m-move my 
 b-b-brother over there." 
 
 But he wasn't. His brother in fact never did leave Pike 
 County, and Nubbin himself was the actual mover to 
 Missouri. "Of course he would not do well there," Father 
 and I together speculated, "or anywhere else." 
 
 And he didn't. We saw in a paper one day that Mr. Saul 
 X. Simmons, over in Missouri, had forged somebody's note 
 for thirty-five dollars and in consequence had gone to the 
 penitentiary. 
 
 And he was just as good, or as bad, after that, as dead, 
 both to Father and to me. We never heard of him again. 
 
MY FATHER'S APPRENTICE (1876) 
 Big suit, little boy. Small boys in those days were generally sup- 
 plied with clothing which fitted them not so much "like the paper 
 on the wall" as like the circus tent on the center-hole. Reason: 
 Cloth then was exceedingly durable, so that boys' suits were 
 selected to fit in the faraway future instead of the acutely con- 
 scious present. Should then the boy's increase in size exceed the 
 expectation of his parents, he might get along pretty well. Other- 
 wise — well, he kept on looking like a pint-cup in a tub. 
 
 MY FATHER'S APPRENTICE (1877) 
 
 Showing what about one year of medical apprenticeship can do 
 
 for "a regular guy." 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 303 
 
 As he himself used often to say, "A n-n-nubbin ain't 
 never had no chance — except to get et up." 
 
 And then, by contrast with this little fellow, there was — 
 
 THE ENCHANTED PRINCESS 
 
 On a day, riding with Father, I glimpsed one of the 
 largest and most beautiful country homes I had ever beheld. 
 A great rarity it was in Pike County, Illinois. Two stories 
 and a half! A beautiful lawn about it too, and many re- 
 splendent flowers. In the yard near the gate played a pretty, 
 very neatly dressed little girl whom I had seen only a time 
 or two before. 
 
 "Who lives there?" I asked. 
 
 "Cyril Catesby, together with his wife and little daugh- 
 ter, Clarissa, also Martha, his sister-in-law. They're new- 
 comers, rather, from away down east." 
 
 I began at once to dream that the house was an enchanted 
 castle and Clarissa a lovely Princess confined to the castle 
 and its purlieus by means of wicked enchantment. Perhaps, 
 some day, I might be able, with my good stout arm, to 
 deliver her. 
 
 The opportunity came soon. My father, that very day, 
 drove up to a shanty about one-eighth mile farther on, and, 
 as I got out of the buggy, he remarked, "Sorry, but here 
 you can't go in. As I'll be a good while busy, you'd better 
 take some exercise walking up and down the road." 
 
 I started to take the exercise in the direction of the en- 
 chanted castle. 
 
 And behold the fairy Princess, standing in all her beauty 
 just inside the yard, near the gate! 
 
 "Hello!" cried she, and motioned me to come in. 
 
 I went up to the gate much embarrassed. Here was in- 
 deed a beautiful princess making unmistakable advances in my 
 unmistakable direction. Perhaps she would expect me to 
 propose to her. How should I go about that? My ordinarily 
 only too ready tongue seemed frozen at its base. My childish 
 countenance too, I could tell, had already hung out not the 
 white but the red banner of cowardice. 
 
 However, as I say, I went up to the gate. She motioned 
 me in and I entered, as it seemed, the gate of heaven. 
 
304 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "You are Doctor Shastid's son," said she, saving me the 
 trouble of introducing myself. "We like Doctor Shastid and 
 believe in him." 
 
 "Yes, and you're Clarissa Catesby," I added. I wanted 
 to go much farther than that, but, when I tried to formulate 
 a sentence it refused to take shape. In fact I was almost 
 paralysed with fear. 
 
 "I like you very much," said she, "and I love you too." 
 
 That made the going perfectly clear. I was no longer 
 embarrassed. She was about to get her man. 
 
 I reached up and kissed her, and she kissed me in return. 
 It was not difficult at all, in fact it seemed as if I had known 
 her always. 
 
 "Don't you think we had better go look at our holly- 
 hocks?" she questioned. "We're said to have the finest 
 hollyhocks in all this county." And indeed they were 
 beautiful. I have always loved hollyhocks, especially those 
 in Pike County. And hardly a log cabin or a shanty in all 
 that rather large area but was, each summer, illumined, 
 made inexpressibly glorious by at least a row of hollyhocks 
 on one side of the house. But these hollyhocks, so close to 
 the wall of this fine two-story castle that they nodded and 
 tapped familiarly at some of its unopened windows — one of 
 them perhaps hers — were incomparable. Single and double! 
 Yellow, pink-and-red, maroon colored, ebony black and 
 ivory white — and each and every one of them, in a word, 
 incomparable. 
 
 Suddenly I caught raspy syllables from inside the house, 
 uttered, as it seemed, near one of the windows which was 
 open though protected against insects by a closely woven 
 "mosquito-bar" screen. 
 
 "Where can that Clarissa be now?" demanded the voice, 
 a woman's. And the response, also in feminine accents, was, 
 "Heaven only knows. If she isn't the wild one!" 
 
 "Wilder and wilder every day, Aunt Martha." 
 
 "I'll go and bring her in." 
 
 At that I caught Clarissa by the hand and we ran quickly 
 through an open gate and into the big flower garden. There 
 we hid in masses of sweetness and bloom amid happy, happy 
 sounds of burling bees delirious with inexhaustible honey. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 305 
 
 I remember too that, among those flowers, still holding 
 her little hand, I at least thought that I would tell her how, 
 ever since I had ridden with my father past this home of hers 
 one day, I had fancied her to be a fairy princess confined by 
 some wicked enchanter within the limits of this beautiful 
 castle and its environs. And I thought, too, as I remember, 
 that I would tell her that, some time when I was fully grown 
 up — even bigger than then I was — I would come and break 
 the spell that bound her by taking her away and marrying 
 her. 
 
 Further than that, strangely, I do not remember anything 
 at all about that gloriously romantic day. I do not even 
 recall my return to Father and his buggy, although of course 
 I must have returned to them. 
 
 I do, however, remember very distinctly that when, in 
 later years, I had returned from New York to Pittsfield, on 
 'vacation after my freshman term in medicine, I rode out into 
 the country with Father, just as in former times, to see the 
 sick and to renew old acquaintances. The first thing I knew, 
 we had gone in to see Mrs. Catesby. But I did not glimpse 
 Clarissa, who, of course, by that time, should have become 
 almost a grown woman. 
 
 When we were driving away from the house I asked my 
 father what had become of her. "Oh! Died about five years 
 ago," he responded, "while you were off at Inveni college. 
 Consumption." 
 
 CONFUSION OF VOICES 
 
 Then there were the old couple who called us into their 
 home in the country one day, complaining that their voices 
 had been "switched." Asked what they meant by that, they 
 said that some witch or other had "hexed" them, giving the 
 husband the wife's voice and the wife the husband's. 
 
 And, sure enough, the wife was playing bull fiddle in the 
 family orchestra, while the husband was piping a very 
 shrill piccolo indeed. It was all merely an exaggerated case 
 of what ofttimes happens as a couple grows old: "She," 
 generally the junior but past the turn of life, dons the bass 
 voice, as well as the outside pants and all physical activity, 
 
306 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 while "he," devoid of authority and in a listless corner chair, 
 "pipes and whistles in his sound." 
 
 My father did not attempt to unhex these most excellent 
 people. 
 
 ONCE MORE THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 But forward again to the early days of my apprenticeship. 
 
 For a long time neither my father nor I had seen old 
 Dr. Dublin, that is to speak to him. On a number of 
 occasions, it is true, as we passed along the north side of 
 the Public Square (that nearest to our house) we heard the 
 old fellow on the south side coughing with all his old-time 
 energy — garrumphing and hallooing and hi-highing, and, 
 finally, swooshing his copious sputum into the street. Once 
 indeed I, passing along the Square's south side, almost ran 
 into him as he came debouching from his stairway onto the 
 sidewalk. He gave me an indignant look, then, command- 
 ingly, cried, "Get out!" I replied, impudently, "I wasn't 
 even intending to go in." 
 
 Then, one day, as my father and I were driving along in 
 the Stettenhausen neighborhood, here, all at once, like the 
 very personification of aristocracy and energy, appeared — 
 Dr. Dublin. A great shudder passed over my frame and my 
 heart jumped into my throat. Be it remembered that this 
 was the very determined individual who had notified my 
 father that he would shoot him "on sight" the very next 
 time that my father should have the temerity to cross his 
 path. 
 
 Was my father armed? I did not know, and I confess I 
 do not know now. 
 
 Both men halted their rigs. Neither made a move toward 
 his pocket. 
 
 Then I noted Dublin's eyes. A flame was in them — a 
 flame fierce and yet strangely soft. All at once the man 
 laughed — laughed low and happily, like a man that has just 
 found something for which he had searched far and wide. 
 
 (Does "nothing" ever happen "in the country"?) 
 
 Then he laughed again, went into a vortex of struggles 
 with his bronchitis, spat copiously and accurately onto a 
 little bush — which at once went to bowing and scraping as if 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 307 
 
 it bore no malice. Finally, the paroxysm over, Dublin cried, 
 laughing heartily: "Well, it's funny how things turn out — 
 if you wait long enough. 
 
 "I had an interesting case lately — one you'll want to 
 hear of, I'm sure. Preacher Wrenshaw, up in Adams County, 
 he got a fracture of the right humerus — pounding his d. ... d 
 pulpit too hard, maybe — a compound, yes a compound. 
 Well, as I say, it was a compound fracture. His horse ran 
 away with him, tore up the buggy, gave Wrenshaw a 
 terrible fracture. A compound, yes a mighty bad compound. 
 Dirt rubbed into the fragment-ends and all that. 
 
 "I advised immediate amputation. Why not? Justifica- 
 tion ample. Compound, dirty, all that. I advised immediate 
 amputation. 
 
 "Preacher refused. Said he'd read in the magazines about 
 the treatment of Lister — (It'll be Lord Lister some time. 1 ) 
 Said some excellent surgeons were backing his treatment 
 mightily, got far better life-results than ever had been had 
 by amputation — and then the patients kept their arms and 
 legs besides. I was firm, but he was stubborn. At last he 
 had his way. 'All right,' says I. 'Lister's treatment if you 
 want it, but you yourself accept the responsibility for the 
 outcome in your case.' 
 
 " 'I accept,' says he. 
 
 "I cleaned, disinfected, reduced, sewed up, put in drain- 
 age, and — ahem! He — I never saw a wound get well so fast. 
 A good arm in three weeks — pounds the pulpit all he 
 wants to. 
 
 "Yes and, Dr. Shastid, the Reverend's wife has just this 
 day informed me that Mr. Stettenhausen's widow told her 
 last week that she never had liked you since, many years 
 ago, you had refused to take her advice about your treat- 
 ment in the case of one of her neighbors. Therefore, each 
 and every day, after you had treated Stett's arm, re-dressed 
 it and gone away — why, this same Mrs. Stett had ##dressed 
 it and put some of her own commixtures into it — something 
 compounded of floor sweepings, dog's dung and horse's 
 urine. Then, each time, just before you were due to call 
 again, she would wash and clean the wound (as you had 
 
 x Dr. Dublin's prophecy was literally fulfilled. Lister became Sir Joseph (a baronet) in 
 1883, and, in 1897, Lord Lister, "the first medical man to be raised to the peerage." 
 
308 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 asked her to do) also apply the carbolic acid as you had told 
 her, and so it always appeared to you as if your wishes had 
 been precisely carried out. Stett never told you about his 
 wife's misdoings because he didn't know but that his wife 
 was following your directions. Donovan didn't either, be- 
 cause he was so chicken-hearted he always shut his eyes and 
 turned his head away whenever Mrs. Stettenhausen re- 
 dressed the wound. 
 
 "And that," concluded Dr. Dublin, "is precisely the 
 reason why Mr. Stettenhausen died. It was not because he 
 had had antiseptic treatment at all, but because he hadn't 
 had it. — I'm sorry, Doctor Shastid, that I've said the things 
 that I have said to you in this matter. I believe in anti- 
 sepsis; I do now — in the germ theory. I am thoroughly con- 
 vinced. I ought to have known earlier than this that when 
 Hodgen — ' ' 
 
 But I, as a doctor's apprentice, wanted some slight par- 
 ticipation in this matter myself. I said in a tight little voice 
 which I tried to make big, "You see, Dr. Dublin, my father 
 — well, wrong as he was he was right/' 
 
 Dublin shouted contemptuously, ' 'Who asked you to 
 squirt in?" 
 
 He cut his big blood-bay with the whip and sped into 
 the distance. 
 
 Dr. Dublin, till the end of his life, never forgave me that 
 one bit of a boy's — a little smart Aleck's — triumph over him. 
 
 Years after, when I had become a physician and was 
 practising in Pittsfield, he would have none of me. 
 
 After I had left Pittsfield, gone to Harvard College and 
 there had taken the degree of bachelor of arts (belatedly, I 
 should have received it before my M.D.), I was called to a 
 professorship in St. Louis. Arrived in that city, however, 
 I was at once taken sick and lay at death's door for about 
 six months. Thereafter, temporarily recovered, I returned 
 to Pittsfield and my parents for a rest-up prior to going to 
 New York for an operation by McBurney. One day I thought 
 that, after all these many years and especially after all my 
 recent sufferings, it would be a most excellent time to make 
 my peace with Dr. Dublin. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 309 
 
 Up, therefore, I went to see him at his office, and, inci- 
 dentally, to ask his opinion about the trouble in my side, 
 especially about the cons and pros of an operation therefor. 
 
 He happened to be standing on the sidewalk, just in front 
 of the stairway leading to his office. 
 
 I approached, spoke, stated my mission — all as politely 
 as I knew how to do. 
 
 The man turned purple with rage. With swelling cheeks 
 he cried, "Don't you ever dare speak to me again, sir, unless 
 I speak to you first." 
 
 Was I crushed? I certainly was. There, before me, tower- 
 ed the same mountainous man of mountainous energy, there 
 were the same hard-blue eyes wherewith he had gazed upon 
 me and my father in the early days of the Germ Theory and 
 Listerism — eyes that might have made a Louis the Fourteenth 
 flinch and turn away. Then, characteristically, I re-acted. 
 I started to say to him, "As wrong as I was that time, long 
 ago, Doctor Dublin, I was right," but checked myself with 
 the reflection that this old-time physician who stood so high 
 in the estimation of many town and country people of Pike 
 County, and not undeservedly either, was, spite of his most 
 unworthy grudge against myself for a very trifling ./matter, 
 a true-blue friend of both my father and my brother, Dr. 
 Will — with, I say, that one simple reflection, I held my 
 peace, consenting to be crushed. 
 
 A short time afterward — in May, 1896, to be exact — this 
 same old Dr. Dublin, standing on the sidewalk before 
 his office stairway, and coughing with his usual vehemence 
 and excessive energy to relieve his bronchial tubes of sputum, 
 in characteristic manner produced an oblique fracture of a 
 rib, so that the point of one of the fragments penetrated the 
 lung. 
 
 Summoning my brother William to his assistance, he 
 went home and to bed, but very shortly afterward he died. 
 Before passing he expressed himself as having been greatly 
 pleased with the ethical treatment he had always had at the 
 hands of Dr. William and my father. But of me he spoke no 
 word. 
 
 Once upon a time I had triumphed over him — not in the 
 arrogant, over-bearing way in which he had triumphed, on 
 every possible occasion and with every possible excuse, over 
 
310 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 everybody else, but, on the contrary, very gently, very 
 gently, indeed. 
 
 Still — I had triumphed, and he had never forgotten the 
 fact. 
 
 But back to the days of my boyhood. 
 
 No sooner had Dr. Dublin cut his blood-bay horse with 
 the whip and departed, than my father began reproving me. 
 "Son! son!" he admonished. "Do you not understand how 
 much the friendship of Dr. Dublin means to us both? Can 
 you not see that, when he acknowledged his error about the 
 very foundations of medicine and surgery — the Germ Theory 
 of Disease and Antisepsis — with all that such an acknowl- 
 edgment must have meant to him in the way of humiliation 
 and chagrin — can you not, I say, see that, in such circum- 
 stances, you and I should have welcomed him back to the 
 fold of mutual co-operation and helpfulness — with all that 
 that meant to the patients of both of us — and never have 
 given him even a word of reproof, a single sign of vindic- 
 tiveness? I am greatly surprised that you have so little 
 knowledge of human nature as to do what you did. And I 
 suggest that, hereafter, you stick to your work in the office 
 more closely, your work there as physician's apprentice and 
 student of medicine. 1 
 
 *My father would no doubt have reprehended me far more severely than he did had he 
 known that, only a few days earlier, while I waited in the road by his buggy and he was 
 busy in the farmhouse prescribing for a farm-hand, the master of the premises — himself a 
 smart-Aleck — came out to me and with a supercilious manner, asked, "Well, so you're now 
 a doctor's apprentice?" 
 
 "Yes, I am." 
 
 "You don't look like one, and, what's more, I don't believe you ever can look anything 
 like a doctor." 
 
 "I can only tell by trying," I rejoined politely. 
 
 Then he set my blood boiling. 
 
 "The only job I believe you're fit for is one I have here on the place for somebody." 
 
 "What's that?" 
 
 "Feedin' grasshoppers. We've got a good many grasshoppers on our place an' nobody 
 else seems to want to feed 'em. Suppose you quit lazin' around and go to feedin' my 
 grasshoppers. Give you ten cents a week if you do." 
 
 "All right." I said. "I'll go to work on your grasshoppers as soon as I have my 
 father's permission." 
 
 The man went into the house. 
 
 I was wild with anger but kept my feelings to myself. 
 
 Back in the buggy, when we had not gone more than a dozen rods I asked my father 
 to let me walk a while — a request I had not infrequently made before. When I had walked 
 behind the buggy for a short distance I slipped back to the dwelling place of Mr. Smart 
 Aleck and calmly went to work pulling up all his asparagus and throwing it hither and 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 311 
 
 But, spite of my own saucy intervention at the time when 
 Dr. Dublin had acknowledged his conversion to the Germ 
 Theory and to Listerism, my father and Dr. Dublin, work- 
 ing together, had little trouble in quieting the antagonism 
 which had grown up against these doctrines and, especially 
 to their chief expounder and advocate in Pike County, my 
 father. I cannot say that the people had really been con- 
 verted to those doctrines — to which so many very shortly 
 owed their lives — but they did appear promptly and con- 
 tentedly to have forgotten all about the matter. 
 
 As to my father's advice to me to stick to the office more 
 closely and to the work of a physician's apprentice, I did in 
 fact, from that time on, more closely stick — though not to 
 the exclusion of absolutely all else. * In the office I made him 
 
 thither. The lord of the manor seeing which, came out in a rage, demanding, "What're 
 you doing there, you d d little idiot?" 
 
 "Just what you told me to do — feeding your grasshoppers. They seem to be almost 
 starved." 
 
 He looked at me in blank amazement for a moment, then, after all, took it like a man. 
 "Well, all right, Tommy. Guess you got me there. How much was I to pay you — ah, 
 ten cents a week? Here's your money." 
 
 He tossed a coin. I caught it and threw it back at him. "All I want," I said, "is 
 courteous treatment, the kind I give you." . 
 
 I hastened to join my father at his next stopping place. 
 
 The man never told my father on me, but, a few days later, as we passed his place, I 
 noticed Dr. Doss getting out of his buggy and going into the house with his medicine case. 
 
 Long years later, however, when I was a practicing physician at Pittsfield, this same 
 man's wife had an immense goitre which several of the older physicians (other than my 
 father, who had not been called in the case) had failed to cure. Under galvanism and 
 iodine externally, with sodium iodide in large doses internally — the then accepted treatment 
 — that great, disfiguring mass quite promptly disappeared. 
 
 The man and his wife, one day, came into the office when they knew my father would 
 be there, and showed him the marvellous result. The wife then also told my father (the 
 very first time he had heard of it) about my white-hot pulling up of their asparagus crop 
 and feeding it to the grasshoppers. 
 
 I I cannot refrain from quoting here a passage from a letter to me by a former Pittsfield 
 boy, Mr. Grant Criswell, of Manhattan Beach, California — a passage which shows the 
 intense interest which my father's office in those old days, especially its gleaming, ring- 
 suspended skeleton, possessed for the children of Pittsfield: "You know, Tom, I remember 
 your family so well and for so many reasons, but particularly because on our march to the 
 old East school building it took us past your old brick house just across from the Methodist 
 church. I remember one thing that your father had in connection with his buggy that 
 always interested me in the good old horse and buggy days, was a gadget that in case the 
 hoss started to run away all one had to do was pull a string and immediately you were in 
 neutral gear and the hoss just run. I think this was just after your father had suffered 
 from a runaway. I never saw it again but in those days it was good. [See infra, "My 
 Father's Contraption and Dr. Dublin's Green Tie."] 
 
 "Another thing that stands out in my memory as a kid was the northwest room, first 
 floor, of that old brick home of yours — your father's office. We kids used to go to the 
 window in that office door, flatten our noses against it and wonder what in the name of 
 time you could always keep so busy about in there among all those books and drugs. We 
 always tiptoed up the three steps from the sidewalk to that door, almost holding our breaths, 
 
312 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 thousands of powders, tens of thousands of pills, rolled 
 bandages, scrubbed and polished corks and bottles, renewed 
 labels on the stock jars, etc. Then, too, inasmuch as tele- 
 phones although they had been invented in 1875 were not 
 in general use at that time, a doctor's apprentice was sup- 
 posed to be a kind of telephone in pants — in other words a 
 messenger capable of conveying his preceptor's written or 
 oral communications about town in a minimum of time. 
 Most of the messages I carried were oral, and therefore in 
 addition to the requirement of speed there was also needful 
 the ability to deliver every message to its right place and 
 with absolutely literal accuracy. It would not do, for ex- 
 ample, to deliver to an old maid who had been suffering from 
 malaria and whom my father wanted to quit taking the 
 brown powders as soon as her fever had left off — it would not, 
 I say, be considered ethical or advisable to instruct such a 
 patient to begin now adding the new chalk mixture to her 
 baby's bottle-milk. 
 
 Which reminds me that, very early on a certain morning, 
 I was instructed to apprise a well-to-do, middle-aged couple 
 that, in the night, their married daughter had become the 
 recipient of a bouncing ten-pound baby. My father had not 
 taken the trouble to inform humble me that this ordinarily 
 quite happy event had taken place only about one month 
 subsequent to the daughter's marriage. So, ignorant little I, 
 with only the best intentions in the world, I still am certain, 
 added to the message with which I had been entrusted a few 
 rejoiceful frills. Said I, as soon as admitted to the house, 
 "Well, I have glad news for you — something I'm sure you'll 
 be more than rejoiced to hear. Your daughter, Mrs. Thus- 
 and-so, was delivered about three o'clock this morning, of 
 a bouncing fine baby." 
 
 And then I got "bounced" myself. "Get out!" grouched 
 the grandfather. The grandmother showed me to the door, 
 wherethrough she gave me a forceful push. 
 
 we stood in such awe of the place. But the greatest thing of all was to catch one glimpse 
 of the skeleton, which stood in a dark corner just to the right of the door. That event, 
 the sight of the skeleton, which now and then happened, I think I remember more vividly 
 than anything else which occurred to me at Pittsfield, especially when solemn-sounding 
 music roared from your brother Jon's piano in the room adjoining. I often thought the 
 skeleton's eyes sparked with an unearthly fire whenever that piano played. 
 
 "At all events when it did play we children all unflattened our noses, streaked it away 
 from your office-door window and ran down street shrieking. Sometimes I even promised 
 God to be a good boy." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 313 
 
 Crestfallen but not in the least understanding, I delivered 
 my tale of grievance to the first person at home whom I 
 met — my mother. She led me to my father in the office, 
 where I repeated my report on the unceremonious way in 
 which I had just been treated. 
 
 "Why! I don't understand," protested my father, laying 
 his medical journal down. 
 
 "Don't you remember," inquired my mother, "What I 
 told you about that couple having been married so short a 
 time?" 
 
 "I'd forgotten all about it," my father confessed, "other- 
 wise I'd not have sent the news at all." 
 
 However, from that time onward I was careful, very care- 
 ful, to deliver all messages without additions or subtractions, 
 and the only troubles I then experienced in relation to the 
 messages were the frequent beatings up I received from some 
 of the larger schoolboys who intercepted me on my way to 
 deliver messages. Ofttimes, too, I was not only out to 
 deliver my father's messages, but also to deliver at a res- 
 taurant and a hotel the milk from my two Durham cows. 
 Ofttimes not only was I beaten up but my milk was spilled 
 too. 
 
 SERENADE IN PRAISE OF DEATH 
 Another case of my maladroitness and lack of good taste 
 actually got my preceptor-father into a serious predicament. 
 I, of course, had acted only with the best of intentions — as 
 usual. 
 
 It all came about from my being too musical. Serenading, 
 in those days, was, among boys, and, in some towns and 
 villages, even among grown people, a veritable craze. I was 
 one of a little group of such boys. I had no better voice 
 than a tree toad's, but I could play a little on a mournful 
 flute and somewhat more on a dime "harmonica." Others 
 among our musical night-disturbers were more divinely 
 gifted. My brother Jon, for example, sang like a dozen 
 cherubim. He really did. One lean, lank, cross-eyed fellow 
 sang almost as well. Yet another beat a triangle, wherewith 
 he was never flat or sharp but occasionally kept poor time. 
 And there were others too in our heavenly band. 
 
314 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Well, on the evening in question I suggested that we go 
 and serenade one of my father's patients there in Pittsfield, 
 a Mr. Lightgoody. Mr. Lightgoody was very sick: perhaps 
 a serenade would do him good. 
 
 When we all had got properly arranged in Mr. Light- 
 goody's front yard, brother Jon gave the signal and we all 
 played, not so very badly, "Swanee River." That having 
 roused our emotions to a delectable pitch on the subject of 
 rivers, we proceeded forthwith to sing about another river, 
 the title of whose song now escapes me but whose chorus 
 ran much like — 
 
 "I hope to die in the glory of the Lord, 
 The glory of the Lord, 
 The glory of the Lord 
 I hope to die in the glory of the Lord 
 When I pass over Jordan." 
 
 The song was even more suggestive of dissolution than 
 that. 
 
 Presently the sound of a window-sash running in its 
 frame ! 
 
 To the other minstrels I whispered that the people in the 
 house were about to thank us for our serenade. 
 
 But suddenly we all perceived that the sash had gone 
 not up but down, also that feminine figures behind it were 
 motioning us to go away. Yes, it was indeed a fact. They 
 were telling us to be gone. Not a word of thanks, either. 
 
 "Maybe that there song," moaned one of our group, as 
 we got out of hearing, "did run a leetle too strong on death." 
 
 "Well, it ought to 'a' made death seem quite nice to 
 anybody," suggested another. 
 
 Next day at the breakfast table my father took me 
 severely to task for having serenaded one of his dying pa- 
 tients. "Especially," concluded he, "why did you suggest 
 that that dying patient should even wish to die?" 
 
 Paralyzed with chagrin, I could not speak. I left the 
 table, went to the barn, and, there, beside my two old cows, 
 I cried. 
 
 Well, about one wretched week later, Father called me 
 from the office into the sitting-room. There, as big as life, 
 and he actually was alive, sat old Mr. Lightgoody. My 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 315 
 
 father laughed in a sickly way then said, "Mr. Lightgoody 
 wants to thank you very much for something." 
 
 "Yes, sir," confirmed the erstwhile patient, "I want to 
 thank you and the rest of you serenaders for the lovely song 
 you sang to me a week ago yesterday. It just picked me up 
 out of my melancholy and made me think how wonderful 
 it would be if I could really die in the glory of the Lord. 
 So I repented and accepted that glory. And then I felt so 
 much better that I just didn't die. 
 
 "Boys, I do indeed thank you." 
 
 No wonder my father was chagrined. The apprentice had 
 beaten his preceptor. 
 
 A FIGHTING PENITENT 
 
 "This same old Mr. Lightgoody, despite his restoration 
 and at least apparent reformation, later became involved in 
 one of the ugliest and nastiest fights which Pike County had 
 ever experienced and which was largely of Mr. Lightgoody' s 
 own production. I cannot, however, now, set forth the de- 
 tails, because so to do would cause great pain to some of 
 Mr. Lightgoody 's still surviving, because much younger, 
 friends, and also to his most excellent descendants. 
 
 These matters about belligerent Pike County are here 
 stated not because of any importance in themselves, but be- 
 cause they form an essential part of the picture which I am 
 giving of that far-gone place and time — in some respects a 
 brutal time and place indeed, though not perhaps so brutal 
 as were most other places in the country. Indeed a few 
 miles to the west of us the "West" was still "wild" as a 
 wilderness. Men there still wore six-shooters strapped to 
 their sides and shot one another without ceremony and on 
 little or no provocation. 
 
 Even in Pike County, Illinois, there was much hard 
 fighting, not infrequently on the Courthouse Square itself. 
 Hardly an "Old Settlers' Day," a "Soldiers' Re-union," a 
 "Fourth-of-July," or a Democratic or Republican rally could 
 come off on the Public Square without a few fights of a 
 serious nature sandwiching in between the more peaceful 
 numbers of the printed program. 
 
316 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 One of the most celebrated of these fights was that which 
 occurred some time before my birth — a fight in which the 
 victor was my father's half-brother, Captain George Travis 
 Edwards, either at the time or a little later founder and 
 proprietor of the Pittsfield House. My Uncle Travis, though 
 tall and long-armed, weighed but 135 pounds. His antagon- 
 ist, whose name I forget, weighed almost 200 pounds, and 
 had been for years the bully and terror of Pike County. My 
 father, who saw the fight, oft times related it to me with 
 great and enthusiastic detail. 
 
 The battle occurred in the northwest corner of the Pitts- 
 field Courtyard and every available space in the Square and 
 at the windows of the near-by buildings was occupied. The 
 disparity in size and, to all appearances, in the strength, of 
 the combatants put all the betting on the big man's side 
 and all the sympathy on the small man's. 
 
 The fight began at one o'clock p. m. and did not close 
 till after nine — in other words, it endured more than eight 
 hours. In the course of that time the small man knocked 
 the big man down more than one hundred and fifty times 
 and was not knocked down once himself — a fact which made 
 this struggle a close parallel to the Thomas Sayers and John 
 C. Heenan fight of 1860, the most celebrated in all the annals 
 of the prize ring. 
 
 At last my uncle knocked the big man out, whereby he 
 became the pet of masculine Pike County until his removal 
 to Texas — something which occurred in my own day. 1 
 
 Many of the bitter fights of those days, ofttimes carried 
 on with firearms, resulted in injuries which brought one or 
 another of the participants, or as it might be an innocent 
 bystander, down to my father's office and within the range 
 of my experience. 
 
 1 Even before the removal of my grandfather, John Greene Shastid, with his family to 
 Pittsfield — in other words before their removal from near Lincoln's New Salem — my father's 
 half-brother, seventeen years older than my father, was known as a terrific fighter. One of 
 his best known combats was with Jack Armstrong, the Clary Grove bully whom Abraham 
 Lincoln whipped later. As in the fight above recorded, this one too was long drawn out. 
 Again and again I have heard the entire affair detailed with the utmost enthusiasm by 
 "Uncle" Billy Greene, my grandfather's first cousin hereinbefore mentioned. 
 
 "Uncle" Billy, who had witnessed the fight, several times declared to me that he would 
 rather have been Travis Edwards, the magnificent fist-fighter, than to have been Abraham 
 Lincoln himself. Which gives some slight idea of the esteem in which good fist-fighters 
 were held in those pioneer days. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 317 
 
 One of the most noted of these combats was that between 
 Elliott Baker, who lived south of Pittsfield, and Eli Simpkins, 
 chief of the Pittsfield police. Just how the quarrel started 
 I do not remember, but it occurred on the north side of the 
 Pittsfield Public Square (little over a block from our house) 
 and I heard the revolver shots rock against the glass fronts of 
 the store buildings and rattle down our street like quick- 
 running stones. Baker killed Simpkins, but was completely 
 exonerated by the jury and by all true Republicans. Simpkins, 
 it is only fair to add, was exonerated by all true Democrats 
 — save those on the jury. 
 
 An innocent bystander and witness of the fight was a Mr. 
 James Lowe, who lived in the Lowe (Sunny Hill Church) 
 neighborhood northeast of Pittsfield. One of Mr. Baker's 
 shots took him in the calf of a leg, as a result of which Mr. 
 Lowe lay at death's door for weeks, pyemia having set in. 
 Often I went with my father to see this fine man, who 
 bore his frightful sufferings like a true hero. 
 
 At length he got well. Then Mr. Baker, who of course 
 was not legally responsible for the payment of Mr. Lowe's 
 bill, came down to our little office one day, wholly unasked 
 by anyone, and paid the bill in full. An offered reduction 
 he would not accept. "This," he said, "is a debt of honor." 
 In general, the great fighters of those days were quite honor- 
 able in all other ways than that of fighting, and, in those 
 times, fighting itself was regarded as highly honorable — if 
 the fighter won. 
 
 My study of medicine proceeded apace. 
 
 My father was very insistent that, in the office, I read 
 especially on anatomy and physiology. Diagnosis and treat- 
 ment I could pick up easily in the country by the patient's 
 side, also, back in the buggy, from the words of my father's 
 mouth. But, in the office, I must master the elements of 
 medicine. Gray's "Anatomy," he used to say, "not just 
 anatomy but Gray s great book on the subject, is the most 
 important branch of all medicine, and the part of anatomy 
 which treats of the bones is the most important part of 
 that part." Hence he had me commit to memory all that 
 Gray's "Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical" contained about 
 the bones. And, to this day, it is a curious fact that I, 
 
318 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 when in a quandary about any subject whatsoever, find my- 
 self unconsciously mumbling, for example, "The temporal 
 bones are situated at the side and base of the skull, and 
 present for examination a squamous, mastoid, and petrous 
 portion." I learned by heart easily, and it was great fun, 
 of a summer evening, when my father returned from the 
 country, to surprise him with the large additions I had made 
 to my word-for-word knowledge. He would sometimes say 
 (merely happy-father talk, of course) that he had in fact the 
 best of all apprentices. 1 
 
 iThc use of the term, "doctor's apprentice," to express the idea of a person, almost 
 always a young person, who studied medicine under a practising physician, called the 
 "preceptor," was common indeed in the 18th century, somewhat less common in the first 
 three-quarters of the 19th, and, after 1880, decidedly on its way to the discard. McMaster, 
 in his "History of the People of the United States," Vol. I, p. 27, says concerning this now 
 extinct and almost forgotten functionary: "In general [he is speaking of the latter part of 
 the 18th century and the early 19th] the medical education of a doctor was such as he could 
 pick up while serving an apprenticeship to some noted practitioner in Boston or New York 
 [later, to any practitioner anywhere] during which he combined the duties of a student with 
 many of the menial offices of a servant. He ground the powders, mixed the pills, rode with 
 the doctor on his rounds, held the basin when the patient was bled, helped to adjust plasters, 
 to sew wounds, and ran with vials of medicine from one end of the town to the other. In 
 the moments snatched from duties such as these he swept out the office, cleansed the bottles 
 and jars, tended the night-bell, and, when a feast was given, stood in the hall to announce 
 the guests." 
 
 My father at other times had other apprentices than myself. My half-brother, Will, 
 though older than I, did not make up his mind to become a doctor till years after I did, 
 but, when he did, he became a very efficient apprentice to my father. 
 
 Then, even before my time, there were other apprentices to my father of whom I have 
 knowledge. Clearest in my memory stands Harvey Quinby, a tall, impressive, lithe-looking 
 man, with a vivid Sherlock Holmes countenance. He, for all his unquestioned brilliancy, 
 decided that he never could stand to be around sick people. His intellectual curiosity, even 
 after he had started a grocery store, was immense. He used to discourse very learnedly 
 and accurately to customers on everything he had for sale — pineapples from this part of the 
 globe, coffee from that part. He knew how coffee was raised, where and how it was planted, 
 when it had been discovered, by whom, and so on. 
 
 He would have made an excellent physician (would easily have become inured to sights 
 of suffering) for he loved both learning and mankind. 
 
 Before his time there was yet another apprentice to my father — Alfred Post Burbank, 
 a man who later became quite famous but not at all as a doctor. He was apprentice to my 
 father at a time so early I cannot remember it. He was in those days a grade teacher in 
 the Pittsfield School, but spent his evenings in my father's office. He, too, was a brilliant 
 student but, after often fainting at the sight of blood, he would no longer study medicine. 
 
 Years later, when he lived in New York and had become famous, I heard him in some 
 of his marvelous recitations. His voice seemed to me like that of an archangel, at least 
 of a heavenly bell. Again and again he returned from New York to Pittsfield just to recite 
 for us. Best of all he recited, from Dickens' "Pickwick Papers," "Gabriel Grub, the Story 
 of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton." Each time that the chief Goblin demanded of the 
 invisible chorus an answer to the horrible questions he was asking them about Gabriel, 
 Burbank's voice, in a scarce-heard, far-away tone would start the reply, then steadily in- 
 crease it in horror and volume till it seemed that our big Bush's Hall was filled to the bursting 
 point with rolling Satanic thunder and vociferations. 
 
 Alfred Post Burbank, a truly great speaker and actor, was born in Chicago in 1846; 
 received his college education at the (old, not present) University of Chicago, but never 
 
MY FATHER'S MOST BRILLIANT APPRENTICE — 
 
 DR. JAMES LAFAYETTE EDWARDS, HIS HALF NEPHEW 
 
 Mild looking as Dr. Edwards, in this miniature, appears, he was really im- 
 pressive to the highest degree both in face and in speech and in carriage. 
 He was, indeed, the only human being I have ever known who could look 
 Dr. Dublin down — then keep him looking down and all the while obedient. 
 In fact, despite his Napoleonic undersize, Doctor Edwards could look all other 
 Pike Countians down too, doctors and laymen alike — yes and knock them 
 down, in case they really "asked" for it. Where, in so small a case, he kept 
 so large a "punch" I do not know. Perhaps the shades of Tug Wilson could 
 inform us. 
 
 The smallness yet very great strength of Dr. Edwards' hands was always 
 a marvel to Dr. John T. Hodgen, and not only the rapidity which came out 
 of that strength but even the "sheer beauty" of his operative work was a 
 matter for constant comment by the master, who, in fact, not infrequently 
 referred to Edwards as "a Paganini in surgery." 
 
 Some of the fineness of Dr. Edwards' work has happily been preserved in his 
 pen-drawings (see overleaf). 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
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 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 321 
 
 They were great days, those days, especially for me, 
 when what I called "the paymasters" came in. I kept a 
 little book wherein I entered all the payments accurately, 
 and never a word of doubt or of misunderstanding arose be- 
 tween my father and me at any time upon this hea ? d. 
 
 DOCTORS DON'T TELL 
 
 The most astonishing paymaster that ever I knew was a 
 one-legged man from an adjoining county, who had roomed 
 at the Pittsfield House while my father was treating him. 
 Much pleased with the result, the old fellow came in to 
 pay. I mentioned the full amount of the bill — tentatively. 
 
 He then at once bent over, unscrewed his wooden leg 
 and — lo and behold there appeared within it a kind of First 
 National Bank or United States Sub-treasury. He promptly 
 removed from the leg the full amount of the charge, paid it 
 and screwed back the leg. 
 
 graduated anywhere; for a time was teacher in the grades at Pittsfield but later, in Chicago, 
 was principal of the old Dearborn and Douglas schools. One famous reading tour he made 
 in this country with Mark Twain and several both in this country and in England with 
 Bill Nye. He played Fennel in Pinero's "Sweet Lavender," dramatized Dickens' "Tale of 
 Two Cities," played the leading role in Mark Twain's "The Claimant," and so on. He 
 died at New York, June 22, 1894. 
 
 He was specially fine in the rendition of humor, but "Alas, poor Yorick!" For years 
 his book, "Burbank's Recitations and Readings," a copy of which I still possess, was the 
 leading work of its kind throughout America. Every Friday afternoon for years children 
 in thousands of public schools spoke pieces from this famous book. Now, the very name 
 of Alfred Post Burbank has been forgotten. May these few lines from an old-time physician 
 serve to refresh the memories of some of the older readers concerning Burbank, the actor, 
 even if not concerning Burbank, the frequently fainting apprentice to a country doctor. 
 
 Even before the time of Burbank my father had had a brilliant apprentice. That was 
 his half brother's son, later Dr. James Lafayette Edwards. If ever a man had been born to be a 
 surgeon, that man was James Lafayette Edwards. He had the surgeon's brain, eye, hand. (See 
 hereinbefore, specimens of his pen-work, attesting the extreme delicacy and almost unparallel- 
 ed accuracy of his fingers.) Soon after his graduation from Jefferson Medical College he enter- 
 ed the Northern Army as surgeon, and, for a long time, wrote voluminous letters to his former 
 preceptor on his Civil War medical and surgical experiences, all intensely interesting. These, in 
 my childhood, filled one great trunk to overflowing. After the war Dr. Edwards practiced for 
 a few years at Pittsfield, then removed to Ennis, Texas, later still to Florence, Colorado, 
 where on July 8, 1906, he died, aged 66. I had always intended at some time to collate and 
 edit those Civil War letters by a man who was not only an unusual surgeon but who, in 
 addition, possessed the great gift of excellent literary style. But time went unheeded by. After 
 my mother's death the old home was for a long time unoccupied. When, at length, I went to 
 inspect its contents, some vandal or other had destroyed all trace of the Edwards letters 
 excepting only about a half dozen envelopes from which the postage stamps had been 
 scissored and one very short note from John G. Nicolay to my Uncle Jon Shastid. The 
 vandal had stolen those early-day stamps, which, no doubt, possessed a considerable 
 monetary value, and, fearing to leave evidence that might direct attention to the vandalism, 
 had destroyed all the letters but one and even all the envelopes save those six or seven 
 destamped ones, which, somehow, he had overlooked, being perhaps in a hurry. 
 
322 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "I feel," said I, "as if I had pulled your leg." That joke 
 was inevitable. "No, sir," said he. "Pulled it myself. 
 Buhsides, the work was worth the hull of what I got in 
 there." He tapped his wooden member long and lovingly. 
 
 I asked, "National Bank?" 
 
 "Nope. Safer." 
 
 "Not if anybody finds out where that bank is." 
 
 He rose, looked at me steadily for a moment before start- 
 ing to stump off, then explained, "Doctors don't tell things. 
 Outside o' them I don't even tell my wife." 
 
 Which seemed at least to imply that I was a doctor. 
 
 A COLT'S FOOT OR MONEY 
 
 Mike McCarthy, my good blacksmith friend, came in one 
 day just after a large number of new medical books had 
 come and been piled up in the office, to settle his account. 
 We got to talking about his very wonderful trade — that of 
 horse-shoeing. Said Mike, "When a colt is born, Thomas, 
 it has a soft, cushiony, narrow little hoof, which soon falls 
 off. Then comes on each of its little fe-e-e-t (God bless each 
 wan av thim) a tough, horny hoof. Only a few weeks after 
 that the little colt should be brought to a good blacksmith 
 — that's me." He was right, the good blacksmith was he. 
 "Because, at that time, the f-o-o-t needs proper trimmin'. As 
 the colt runs hard on the pasture, or, later, goes to pullin' 
 loads, his hoofs wear down much faster than nature 
 supplies new hoof material. Therefore, the smith must put 
 on shoes and fit them right — which is a great art and a 
 great science, and an art and a science that I will not by 
 anny means tache yez lest ye should steal it all away from 
 me out of me business, ye too bright spalpeen ye — Say, 
 can ye remember to count one hundred in Irish? Can ye 
 do it?" 
 
 I counted it all for him, and he left me a piece of a new 
 kind of smithing coal to show his enthusiasm. 
 
 Then away went Mike, and we both had forgotten the 
 bill. 
 
 Later, on the Public Square, Mike met my father and 
 asked him the amount of the bill. "O just nothing. Didn't 
 you fight for me?" "Docther, I owe you a lot extra for the 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 323 
 
 excuse you gave me to lick that excuse of a man." And 
 nothing would do Mike but that he should pay that bill. 
 
 "And then," he concluded, "I saw all those wonderful 
 new books of yours in your office. They must have cost a 
 lot of money. ' ' He was one of the few who could ever under- 
 stand that it costs money and plenty of it to run a doctor's 
 office. 
 
 But this reminds me of my father's library — concerning 
 which a word or two. 
 
 HOW THE LIBRARY BEGAN 
 
 Mike Donovan, one day long before the death of his 
 employer and friend, John Stettenhausen, said to me in that 
 roguish way he had, "Has yer pappy ever towld yez about 
 his first acquaintance wid the zodiac man?" 
 
 "The zodiac man? No, I think not. I haven't even heard 
 of 'the zodiac man' before." 
 
 "Well, he ought to have towld yez. Him with that fine, 
 big library there in his office and house and yit niver to have 
 towld yez of the zodiac man! What is the white-headed 
 world a-comin' to annyways?" 
 
 "Well, tell me about the zodiac man. I'm afraid my 
 father's keeping something from me." 
 
 "Musha! he is that. And now he's pretindin' he doesn't 
 hear us shpake." 
 
 I looked at my father. He was calmly folding powders 
 and stacking them. How impeccably calm he was! How 
 always steady, accurate, self-controlled, self-possessed! I 
 nearly forgot to look at Donovan again ! But Donovan would 
 have his little joke on Father, so he said — 
 
 "I'll tell yez about the zodiac man. He's the naked felly 
 that's always standin' on the front page (not countin' the 
 bindin') av all the drug store almanacs, wid his white belly 
 always cut wide open, and a dozen little animals (the 'signs 
 av the zodiac' they calls thim) standin' all round 'im in 
 every direction, ready to jump inside of his guts. And the 
 whole combination has medicinal value. Is that not so, me 
 dear Doctor Zodiac?" 
 
 "O yes, it's quite true," replied my father. "And that 
 zodiac almanac was the very first medical book that ever I 
 owned. I got it in my childhood. I have the precious relic 
 
324 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 still. Twas that that made me want to study medicine, and 
 it formed the beginning of my medical library." 
 
 "Docther, ye've beat me to the clap o' the tale." 
 
 A COUNTRY DOCTOR'S LIBRARY 
 
 My father's medical library, housed in several bookcases, 
 stood mostly in his office — an indirectly heated room of his 
 house, no stove. It boasted a separate street entrance with 
 a bright (but not too bright, that would have been un- 
 ethical) creaking sheet-iron sign swinging over it. A great 
 many patients or messengers from patients, however, came 
 always to the sitting-room door and were there admitted. 
 
 My father's general library was in that "sitting-room," 
 a cross between a reception hall and a scholar's study. The 
 apartment boasted a Starlight stove. Behind that stood a 
 huge wood-box, filled mostly with hickory sticks. How the 
 hickory in that stove would snapple and spark! On the 
 north wall was a large blackboard with a lounge under it. 
 On the lounge my father would sometimes sleep for ten or 
 fifteen minutes between visits to the country. On the black- 
 board he used to write simple sentences in Latin and Greek, 
 under which, before we went to school, Willie and I were 
 supposed to write the correct translations. One day a 
 minister came in to report on the condition of his sick wife. 
 Seeing on the blackboard what he called "profane" sentences 
 from Caesar and Xenophon, he remonstrated: "Why not 
 write verses from the New Testament? Let us say, 4 He that 
 believeth and is baptised shall be saved; but he that be- 
 lieveth not shall be damned' (Luke XVI: 16). That," he 
 went on, "is about the most important passage in all Holy 
 Scripture. But your profane sentences from Caesar and Xeno- 
 phon — pshaw!" 
 
 Now my father bridled up. He did not at all like to hear 
 two of his favorite authors condemned as "profane," even 
 though he knew quite well that the sense in which his 
 minister had used the word meant merely "not inspired." 
 So he spoke somewhat sharply. The minister replied more 
 sharply still. Said he, "You believe, I suppose, Doctor 
 Shastid, that not all diseases are really caused by devil pos- 
 session of the human body." "Correct," replied my father. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 325 
 
 A FEW OF MY FATHER'SIANNOTATIONS 
 
 (Much reduced in size) 
 
 One of hundreds of annotated sheets in my father's handwriting which, after his death, I found 
 between the leaves of the books in his libraries, medical and general. Seldom did he mark the pages 
 themselves of his beloved volumes. He had too often and too rapturously kissed them. 
 
326 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Many diseases have indeed recently been demonstrated to 
 be due to other causes, while, on the other hand, not one 
 single disease that has ever been investigated carefully has 
 been found to have been produced by devil-possession." 
 "You — to say that!" cried the minister. "Then you are a 
 disbeliever and a violator of God's holy word." My father's 
 voice became still shriller. "If you don't believe that 
 medicine teaches the correct causation of many diseases, then 
 why do you — why have you — what on earth do you have 
 your wife take my medicines for?" "Why indeed?" shouted 
 the minister. "Why don't you exorcise the devils instead?" 
 cried my father. "The very next verse after the one you've 
 just quoted, runs: 'And these signs shall follow them that 
 believe; in my name shall they cast out devils.' — Do you 
 believe?" "Yes, of course I believe." "And do you cast out 
 devils?" 
 
 The man looked at my father with glassy eyes, white- 
 faced, speechless. Then he set the bottle of my father's 
 medicine down carefully on the stand, turned without a word, 
 stepped out of the room and away. 
 
 "See what you've done!" cried my mother, as soon as 
 the minister was out of hearing. "You've lost one of your 
 best friends." 
 
 My father was in fact so downcast that he did not answer. 
 Instead he kept pacing the floor in an agony of grief, for 
 the minister was really a kind and companionable man and 
 many had been the nights when he and my father had talked 
 about Greek grammar together. 
 
 But all at once there were footsteps. Incredible as it 
 seems, the minister had returned. Walking promptly to the 
 bottle of medicine, which still was standing where he had 
 left it, he picked it up and started away. But, at the door, 
 he paused and explained, "My wife is very much addicted 
 to human remedies. We shall have to make concessions in 
 her case. It is absolutely necessary to do this." And my 
 father was overjoyed. 
 
 But to get back to the country doctor's library. My 
 father had, in that sitting-room which was half reception- 
 room for patients, two large bookcases. The overflow from 
 these was packed in the lowest drawer of my mother's 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 327 
 
 bureau — which also stood in that room. In the cases there 
 were books on books and books behind books. There were 
 eight or ten Greek grammars and as many Latin. There were 
 Greek texts and Latin texts. There were polyglot medical 
 dictionaries, particularly that of Billings. There was the 
 "New American Cyclopedia," from A — ARA to V — ZWI, 
 also the "Annual Cyclopedia," vast affair, every volume 
 of it, and "Dick's Works" and "Chambers's Information for 
 the People," "American Eloquence" and the great "Cyclo- 
 pedia of Wit and Humor." There were also books about the 
 Bible and poets galore, almost every one of them bound in 
 calf — Shakespeare, Hemans, Crabbe-Heber-and-Pollock, the 
 Divine Comedy of Dante, Tennyson's Complete Works, those 
 of Longfellow and the encyclopedic "Poets and Poetry of 
 America." Historical works without end. And many of his 
 books he had given to one or another of his sons. These 
 they kept upstairs in their own rooms. 
 
 Was my father's book equipment anything unusual among 
 country doctors? Not at all. Dr. Casal's, for instance, was 
 fully the equal of it. Dr. Dublin's I never had a chance to see, 
 but I understood it to be excellent. Dr. Doss's I never be- 
 held but I have good reason to know that, in the field of 
 natural science, particularly veterinary science, it was quite 
 extensive and well selected. As to the earlier doctors in 
 Pittsfield, Doctor Worthington, earliest of them all, was a 
 man of enormous general reading and a well-known author- 
 ity on geology. Doctors of the present day have far better 
 medical training, it is true, but I doubt if, in the field of 
 general learning, they, even those in the larger cities, can 
 begin to compare with our old-time country doctors. On 
 this I lay particular stress because, in some of the recent 
 volumes written for lay readers, the impression is plainly 
 given that doctors of the 1870's and 1880's were a group of 
 ignorant asses. Some ignorant asses in the medical profession 
 we did indeed have then. Nearly all the Y. of P. men be- 
 longed in that class. But show me the doctor of to-day who 
 carries in his pockets not only an Agricola in Latin and an 
 Iliad in Greek — as both my father and Dr. Casal did — or 
 even possesses such books in his library! 
 
328 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 PAUL BUNYAN, M.D., HOMO UNIUS LIBRI 
 Of course there were other kinds of doctors, and some of 
 these were not merely ignorant asses; they were braggarts in 
 addition. One in particular we termed, but long decades 
 later, "Paul Bunyan." He lived in a county adjacent to ours, 
 had received his degree from a diploma mill in Iowa, was 
 big-bodied, cross-eyed, always appraising himself quite high- 
 ly, yet eternally, if unintentionally, revealing his sordidness, 
 his drunkenness, his gross philandering, and so on. 
 
 We often met him on our rounds. On these meetings he 
 would ofttimes stop us in the road and give us the benefit 
 of his great range of knowledge — about himself. In fact 
 he would generally start about like this. "Yes, sir, Shastid 
 [me he always ignored] I got all the things I know out o' 
 jest one book." "What book is that?" "The great big 
 hunderd-volume book of personal knowledge and self-reli- 
 ance. All that I learned in medical college don't count fer 
 nothin'." 
 
 "No," my father would agree, "I don't suppose it does." 
 Misunderstanding, Homo Unius Libri would continue, 
 elated, describing perhaps some operation he was supposed 
 (by himself) to have performed. "I took an' I cut an' I cut. 
 Finally I cut to his heart. Then I cut some of his heart. 
 Then I cut more of his heart. Then I fastened his spring-thorn 
 to his thumbagoozleum. 1 An', sir, he got well. Yes, sir, 
 he got plumb well. Done him lots o' good too. He got well. 
 He got well, an' then he got sick again an' hadn't paid me. 
 Sent fer me — quick, I wouldn't go. I wouldn't go. Well I 
 was drunk, fer one thing. Said he'd give me ever'thing he 
 had — a dollar an' a quarter. I wouldn't go. Another day 
 said he'd give me ever thing he had — a ten dollar bill. I said 
 'No,' but was weakenin'. Said he'd give me a cow, a calf, 
 an' a Duroc-Jersey pig — 'sides the ten dollars. I said, 'Hand 
 'em over first.' Sent word he was dyin'. Says I, 'Hand 'em 
 first, er die.' He handed 'em over an' I saved him. But 
 't wasn't such a very big job I done. Pshaw! I done them big 
 things mighty easy. 
 
 "Ever tell ye about the time a feller over in Menard 
 County lost his right hand an' sent for me 7 . No? Not about 
 
 1 Terms he actually employed again and again — terms he had no doubt been using on 
 many an occasion when bamboozling the laity and which he employed, when talking to 
 my father, from sheer force of habit. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 329 
 
 the time I went to a graveyard an' got a dead man's hand 
 an' the life hadn't yet gone plumb out of it?" Etc. 
 
 Another time he said, "Yessir, I done a good operation 
 on him. I took out his liver an' his lights. Ask Hodgen. 
 He can tell you. So can Jo Nash McDowell. They both can 
 tell you what I done to him." 
 
 "Y-e-es," replied my father, on one such occasion, "they 
 no doubt could tell what you done to him — if they held a 
 post-mortem." 
 
 For a moment the man looked as if he did not wholly 
 comprehend. Then a look of disgust commingled with utter 
 astonishment came into his face. "What! You don't believe 
 me, Doc? Well, I'll tell you. You go up to Bloomington 
 some day and see for yourself that I'm tellin' the truth. 
 The man still lives, Doc. The man still lives. Yes, an' I could 
 tell you many other cases of great things I've done, but you 
 know our rule, Doc. Doctors musn't tell things. It'd be 
 against our code of ethics." 
 
 NO, DOCTORS DO NOT TELL 
 There is great beauty often in very simple things, for 
 example the prints of men's and of animal's feet in the 
 humble dust of the highway, even beauty in many things 
 ordinarily called ugly — a gnarled tree or the frost-bitten 
 features of extreme old age. 
 
 As to prints in the dust. Once, standing by my 
 father's buggy waiting his return from a farmhouse, I saw, 
 in the roadway dust, two simple foot-prints — one that of the 
 bare foot of a man, the other — a companion print — that of 
 the small round end of a wooden leg. A moment later I 
 noted also, amid these human traces, the hoofprints of a 
 cow and that the two kinds of man-prints had followed the 
 cow-prints, for they had occasionally been impressed into 
 them and on top of them. 
 
 Filled with curiosity I followed the three-print trail. 
 Half a mile or so farther (in the direction my father was next 
 to drive in) the prints went up to a road-gate which opened 
 into a barn-lot. The wooden-leg man had here preceded the 
 cow, opened the gate, swung it wide, let the cow pass into 
 the lot and then had closed the gate from the inside. 
 
330 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Returning on the trail, I, having met my father and 
 mounted to the seat beside him, called his attention to the 
 three-fold trail I had been following. 
 
 "O yes," he murmured, "I know who that was you were 
 just now following — one of the finest men that ever I have 
 known." And here he told me a beautiful story (because, as 
 a doctor's apprentice, I would shortly need to know about 
 it) of that unattractive peg-leg person, a man who had un- 
 dergone great punishment without complaint for a crime 
 that had been committed not by himself at all but by his 
 daughter. "Now," Father wound up, "you are never to 
 mention this tale to anybody — not even when you shall have 
 lived to be as old as I am now should you mention it. 
 
 I promised and, though I am now much older than he 
 was then, I will not relate the rest of the story. 
 
 "Doctors do not tell" — that is, tell the things that 
 might give others misery. 
 
 Nevertheless, there is sometimes beauty in footprints — 
 frail beauty and foul sordidness and grim tragedy and death. 
 
 A DOCTOR'S APPRENTICE, BUT FATHER'S 
 LITTLE CHILD 
 I have spoken frequently, both in this volume and in 
 another, of my father's manner in the sick-room. I have 
 said how calm he was, how firm, how prompt, how steady, 
 how accurate; how self-controlled, self-conquered, self-com- 
 manded, self-possessed; how not to be moved for a moment 
 from his presence of mind, how not to be diverted by any- 
 thing or anybody from adopting what he thought to be the 
 right and proper measure for his patient. "You could tell," 
 I said, "by the compression of his lips, that he meant to save; 
 and you could tell by the calm of his eye that his sympathy 
 had not perverted his judgment." And what I told you 
 about his calmness and his judgment perhaps I did not even 
 sufficiently insist upon. When, however, the sick one hap- 
 pened to be a member of his own family, instead of someone 
 else's, then it was an altogether different matter. His judg- 
 ment failed him then — failed him utterly, completely, in- 
 stantaneously. That you could tell by every feature in his 
 countenance. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 331 
 
 How well I remember the way he acted when the sick 
 one was myself! The trouble might be no more than a cold, 
 or the mumps, or one of those ephemeral fevers so common 
 in childhood— but, no matter how slight the difficulty, so 
 soon as my father knew that I was sick, his eyes grew wild. 
 
 Comes before me vividly the morning when I, waking 
 hot and feverish, and finding on my breast a bright glow, 
 called loudly for my father. My father happened to be in 
 the country; but my mother, running in from the kitchen 
 and observing the glow, at once pronounced my difficulty 
 "rose-rash," and moved me, bed and all, to the sitting-room, 
 where she could the better observe me till my father came. 
 When she heard him, she went to the door, and, opening it 
 only a particle, said, supplicatingly : "Now, father! Do try, 
 do try, do try." 
 
 My father dropped his pill-bags, and ran in. "Is Daddy's 
 baby sick?" he cried. 
 
332 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Baby! I was — gracious, how old! And an apprentice too! 
 
 He examined me. Hastily ran off. Hastily came back. 
 Hastily ran off again, returning with books and with pills. 
 Taking a pill from the bottle, he started to give it. Hesitat- 
 ing, he dropped it back into the bottle. Then he said he 
 believed he preferred the form of powders. Reflecting again, 
 though, he again said "pills." "However," he qualified, 
 "the pills must be fresh made." Back to the office he went, 
 returning with ingredients, with scales, with weights, with 
 boxes, with bottles, with pestle, with mortar, with gradu- 
 ates, with placques. When the pills were half made, he 
 stopped. Looking over at me, he asked whether the sight 
 of the pill-rolling affected me unpleasantly. Thinking he 
 saw some strange, new symptom, he dropped the pills, and, 
 stepping to the bedside, examined me anew. Pulling up the 
 covers to my chin, he tucked them in tightly, though I told 
 him that I felt too warm. 
 
 "Better be on the safe side!" 
 
 He went to pacing the floor. 
 
 Now and then stopping before my mother, he would 
 ask her: "What do you think?" 
 
 "What do I think?" 
 
 "Yes, what do you think I'd better give him?" 
 
 "O pshaw! precisely what you'd give anybody else's 
 boy." 
 
 ' 'Do you think so?' ' — staring at her blankly — ' 'and what's 
 that?" 
 
 "Oh you go and get Dr. Dublin. You don't know what 
 you're doing." 
 
 And Dr. Dublin he at last went for and brought back 
 with him. 
 
 I can see the consultant now, as he smiled down at me 
 with round blue eyes from a large, pock-marked countenance. 
 He seemed to have forgiven me, for the duration of my sick- 
 ness at least. The features gave a terrible contortion. "What 
 shall we do with him, Tommy? Shall we put him in a 
 straight-jacket?" 
 
 Still laughing, he took my father away by the arm, and 
 the two talked outside for a minute. 
 
 When my father returned, I could see that the consulta- 
 tion had done him good. Still, he did not appear to be 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 333 
 
 satisfied. The most of the time he sat on the lounge, with 
 his feet on a chair, his legs piled over with books, and huge 
 stacks of books lying on the lounge beside him. When my 
 mother spoke, he answered absently. 
 
 After awhile, he grew more calm. Coming and sitting 
 on the side of the bed, he talked to me for a long time of 
 some clouds he had seen the day before. "The finest I ever 
 saw!" he exclaimed. "You might have been along, as well 
 as not — don't suppose you learned anything at school. 
 Piled-up masses ! torn and heaped up wrecks of other worlds 
 floating into earth's atmosphere! unclaimed continents left 
 over from creation, wandering idly in void space!" etc. etc. 
 
 After awhile he added: "I got to naming some of the 
 peaks. One of them I called 'Mount Desire;' another, 
 'Expectation;' yet another, 'Absolute Certitude;' still an- 
 other, 'Exaltation;' and then the last, the very highest of 
 all, The Pinnacle of Extreme Upliftedness;' and suddenly — 
 why goodness! I was looking clown the precipice of 'Disil- 
 lusion.' You know what I mean?" 
 
 "Oh, yes," I said, smiling, for I knew he referred to his 
 unsuccessful experiments with certain drugs. 
 
 "It does a person good to have a laugh when he's sick, 
 doesn't it?" 
 
 I admitted the fact. 
 
 Then he added, cautiously, and, I knew, without further 
 thought of the experiments: "Don't laugh too much, 
 though. You might bring up your fever." 
 
 In the afternoon a man by the name of Delacrosse came 
 in to have my father go and see his little girl, who, he said, 
 was very sick with the rash. 
 
 "Rash!" ejaculated my father, not thinking; "my son 
 is exceedingly sick, sir. I cannot possibly leave him merely 
 to attend on a case of the rash." 
 
 "Is he sick?" asked the man, advancing sympathetically 
 to the side of the bed, and looking at me. "What's the 
 matter?" 
 
 At this, my mother began laughing. 
 
 The joke dawned on my poor, anxious-stricken father, 
 very slowly. "Why he — why he — I — guess he has only the 
 rash, too. Nevertheless, I can't leave him." 
 
334 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Oh yes you can," said my mother. "I'll take good care 
 of him till you get back." 
 
 "But you can't spare Daddy, can you?" He asked, in a 
 wild appeal to me. 
 
 "Yes, for awhile," I answered. 
 
 "Well, Daddy can't spare you" he replied, "even for a 
 minute. And he isn't going to, either." 
 
 Had the man been an orator, he would have lost his 
 point. But, not being an orator, he merely held his hat out 
 in front of him and said in a voice tremulous with emotion : 
 
 "Oh Doc, Doc!" 
 
 The gesture and the trembling voice touched the father 
 in the doctor and the doctor in the father. My father looked 
 up, touched. Still he said, firmly: 
 I can t go. 
 
 The man appealed again, "Doc, Doc!" 
 
 "It's no use," insisted my father, nevertheless as though 
 it might be well enough for the man to try once more. 
 
 "Doc, Doc!" said the man. 
 
 That settled it. 
 
 My father rose. "All right," he said, "I'll go." 
 
 When I awoke, it was late at night — the old clock told 
 me it was almost twelve. Outside, the wind was rising, and 
 a steady rain was pattering on the roof, now and then mak- 
 ing a sort of splashing sound. A feeling of coziness and 
 comfort came over me. Stretching out deliciously between 
 the warm blankets, I watched, through the damper of the 
 stove, the flickering of the wood fire. Now and then I pushed 
 my hand up under the pillow, and counted my dimes. How 
 pleasant it all was — everything silent, except the clock; every- 
 thing, too, night-changed and lamp-changed. The room, 
 presently it seemed to me, was overbright for an hour so late. 
 Looking around, there, at the stand, in the full glow of the 
 lamp, I saw my father and my mother, sitting together and 
 reading from a single book. 
 
 That book I knew to be "Fromartin on Diseases of Child- 
 ren;" so they were reading up my case. Their faces wore a 
 look of such comical anxiety that, like the boy I was, I 
 nearly laughed. Placing my hand across my mouth, though, 
 I held in. There they sat, at twelve o'clock at night, reading 
 up as seriously as though it were a matter of life and death, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 335 
 
 a case of — the rose-rash. I had no fever; I had no pain; be- 
 sides, there was nothing at all the matter with me, except — 
 the rose-rash. Nevertheless, there they sat, and pored away, 
 and pored away. 
 
 Sometimes they raised their eyes to each other with looks 
 of subtle inquiry, forming with their hushed lips words that 
 I could not understand. Sometimes, as they turned their eyes 
 to the book again, my father's gaunt forefinger would trace 
 for my mother some unusually significant passage. As I kept 
 looking, the scene grew less funny to me. Presently it seemed 
 rather pretty. Suddenly, with a kind of pang, came to me 
 the thought that my father and my mother were very good 
 to me. I looked all round once more, listening to the wind 
 and the rain. I noted every detail of the little room : the slant, 
 
336 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 blue-covered almanac; the blackboard, with its Latin and its 
 Greek; the glazed bookcases, full of books; the old, kindly- 
 looking clock, talking to itself on its mantle; the big nigger- 
 head stove, shining out in a spot on my bed; the wall-paper, 
 figured with red clover-blossoms and yellow vases; the bright 
 pictures, in their deep, old-fashioned frames; and, lastly, 
 there by the stand, in the full glow of the lamp, my 
 father and my mother reading up the subject of the rose-rash 
 as though it were a fine romance of mystery, or war, or love. 
 
 Sometimes my father turned a leaf, and then turned it back. 
 Once, as he turned it back, he did so a little too hurriedly and 
 it softly rustled. Up he glanced to see if he had awakened me. 
 But, of course, I "possumed." When I opened my eyes again, 
 he was once more reading. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 337 
 
 In the midst of the hush came a click at the gate; a quick 
 step; a knock at the door. My father rose, closed the book, 
 laid it down; and went cat-footed across the room and opened 
 the door so softly that I could scarcely tell the moment when 
 the knob turned. The messenger started to speak aloud, but 
 my father quickly hushed him. The two talked low then for 
 some time — the messenger insistently, my father sternly and 
 obstinately. Still they kept talking. Presently the messenger's 
 voice grew very tender, and I heard him speak of his "only 
 child." My father said something to my mother. She rose 
 and went to the door. 
 
 "Oh, yes!" I heard her whisper, "I can take good care of 
 him." 
 
 "All right, then," said my father. "I'll go." 
 
 Closing the door, he came and stood by the side of the bed, 
 looking down at me. Of course, I "possumed" again. 
 
 Then he went and got his buggy-lantern. My mother 
 helped him light it, and then helped him on with his over- 
 coat and raincoat. Taking up his lantern and saddle-bags, 
 he went out. My mother turned the lamp down, and went 
 and laid herself on the lounge. Presently, I heard my father's 
 step in the barn. Again, I heard him speak to his horse, as 
 he drove from the sidewalk. His lantern flung a group of 
 sliding, yellow panes across the ceiling, as he turned east- 
 ward — in the very face of the wind; the slow, suction-like 
 sounds of his horse's hoofs in the deep mud came to me more 
 and more indistinctly, and then more and more indistinctly 
 still, and at last I heard no sound at all except the low sighing 
 of the wind and the splashing of the rain. 
 
338 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 BIG WORDS AND THE LAITY 
 One day I was reading aloud from Gray's "Anatomy." 
 This was a habit I had picked up by ascertaining that, when 
 I read any passage aloud, I could get it by heart in far less 
 time than when I read it by vision alone. The secret of course 
 was simply that, when I read aloud, the words went into my 
 brain by two routes, instead of one only — by the ears as. well 
 as the eyes. In fact, I might have said by three routes, instead 
 of by two, because, when my vocal organs were acting on 
 the passage, the sense of touch in those organs conveyed the 
 messages to me, as surely as did the eyes and the ears. By 
 way of slight addition there was the muscle sense also. ( 
 
 One day, when I was reading aloud from Gray about the 
 "iter a tertio ad quartum ventriculum" and so forth, there 
 walked into the office an old farmer who, once or twice, 
 had spoken to me contemptuously about my efforts to be a 
 doctor's apprentice, also about "book learnin' ' generally. 
 But now he stood as if transfixed with wonder — hands hang- 
 ing loose, jaw down, eyes wide, all the possible marks of 
 respect and even awe standing out over him. 
 
 Big words from a little man ! It was surely something to 
 remember, to tell to people away back in the hills! So he 
 seemed to be saying to his ego. 
 
 I kept on reading for a while longer. "Well, what is it, 
 Mr. Pokeberry?" I questioned, at last. 
 
 "You — Tommy — you — read like that? Excuse me, 
 Thomas." 
 
 "Like what?" I replied. 
 
 "Like that — the way you wu^ readin'?" 
 
 ' 'Yes, I was reading like the way I was reading. Sit down, 
 Mr. Pokeberry." 
 
 He sat down like a pauper in the palace of a king — had 
 come to pay his bill. 
 
 I told him the exact full amount that he owed, where- 
 upon he paid that exact full amount, although, almost in- 
 variably (he was such a skinflint) my father had had to make 
 him a large reduction. 
 
 After that, boy-like, and for two or three years, I took 
 great pains, you may be certain, whenever I heard steps coming 
 up to our office door, to be reading (I confess it) some or 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 339 
 
 another big-word volume, thereby to produce the better im- 
 pression on all such people as cannot otherwise understand 
 that smallness of stature does not necessarily mean total 
 absence of brains. And, incidentally, but importantly, it 
 made me a better collector of cash. And bad collecting, by the 
 bye, makes for poorness of service necessarily. 
 
 To-day, however, no such procedure would ever increase 
 a caller's respect in the slightest for an apprentice, small or 
 large (if apprentices still existed) or result in better collec- 
 tions. Education, no matter how excellent and desirable, 
 to-day is entirely too common to be impressive. However, 
 it is the then, not the now, I am trying to reveal. 
 
 MORE PEOPLE OF THEN 
 
 I had, in that little office, far more experiences than those 
 just related. There was, for example — well it was on a day 
 when a heavy, but tranquil, snow was falling and I felt in 
 consequence a strange, cool sense of peace. All at once a 
 voice — a cry like a shriek from the grave! Then entered, 
 together with the voice, one of the strangest figures that 
 ever I had seen. A man in middle life, tall and gaunt almost 
 beyond belief! One of his eyes looked like a fried egg, and 
 of nose he had almost nothing. A disease of some sort had 
 fearfully ravished almost his entire countenance. As he 
 talked he ran about the office flinging his long arms aim- 
 lessly about, as once, in a frightful storm, I had seen a wind- 
 torn scarecrow doing. Now and then he stopped, wringing 
 his hands and moaning, "O I am the forgotten of God! 
 I am the forgotten of God!" 
 
 Frightened, I attempted to talk with him, but he grew 
 worse, cursed himself in biblical language from Genesis to 
 Revelation, declared that, although he had been resurrect- 
 ed, he still was forgotten of God. Of God? Yea, of God, of 
 the Father and also of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. At 
 this moment my father, covered with mountains of snow, 
 stepped into the office. 
 
 The wild man for a moment stopped pacing and shout- 
 ing, then, putting his hands before his eyes, he screamed to 
 my father, "Thou art the promised archangel, but thy 
 heavenly presence can do no grain of good to a sin-bowed 
 
340 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 man like me." He whispered then to persons who to me 
 were invisible. I thought of course that he was crazy. 
 
 My father, during all this, had remained standing near 
 the doorway, inspecting the curious patient with calm, care- 
 fully appraising eyes. Then he shook off his snow, and, 
 saying to me that he had had a hard night and needed a 
 solace of some sort for his nerves, he dissolved in a glass of 
 water a good-sized dose of the perfectly harmless sodium 
 bromide, drank about a third of it, and pill-bags in hand, 
 went out of the room at its inner door — intending, as I 
 supposed, to pass through his bed-room into the sitting- 
 room, there as usual to deposit his pill-bags by the little 
 iron safe. This time, however, he was too long gone for 
 merely that, and I thought he had probably sent some one 
 out for a policeman. 
 
 The mentally affected patient went up to the tumbler of 
 bromide solution, looked at it, smelled of it, murmured 
 4 'solace" — the word my father had used for it. He picked 
 it up and sniffed at it. "Solace! If it's good for thee it's 
 good for me." 
 
 He swigged it all down, smacking his lips lustily. 
 
 At this moment, in the adjoining room to the south, our 
 "parlor," there began to arise the softest possible suggestion 
 of music — whereby I knew that my brother Jon had begun 
 playing the piano. More and more sweetly it sounded, more 
 and more seductive — a veritable nepenthe. The man, silent, 
 slipped into a reclining chair. Slowly his eyes closed, his 
 limbs and torso relaxed. "Give me forgetfulness," he pray- 
 ed, "of sin, of pain, of sorrow." God granted his request — 
 through the instrumentality of the bromide and the piano. 
 
 The worn man slept and slept . I turned to my Gray's ' 'Anato- 
 my Descriptive and Surgical." After a time the beleaguered 
 of the Devil awoke, looked round and asked calmly, "What 
 time is it?" 
 
 My father, coming into the office at that moment, answer- 
 ed him, then examined and prescribed for him, sent him 
 away with a cracking good horse story. 
 
 I can see my father now as he turned and faced me — a 
 lecture plainly on his lips. He was dressed in black from toe 
 to collar, the coat a Prince Albert with unusually long tails 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 341 
 
 — the kind affected by all physicians of the day. His shirt 
 and collar were white, but his tie, a bow, was as black as 
 was his suit. This was the customary attire in fact for all 
 physicians until about 1899 — long after the time of which 
 I write. 
 
 "Tom," he said, looking at his enormous hands reflec- 
 tively, "that man was not crazy: he was just about to be." 
 
 "Did you have Jon play for him?" 
 
 "Yes. And the man is cured. He was simply a religious 
 enthusiast — a man with an ingrown religion. His religious 
 difficulties had kept him out of his sleep for a very long 
 time, as you could see. Had I asked him to take medicine, 
 he would have refused. Therefore I gave him a chance to 
 take it on his own initiative. The piano did the rest. If 
 that patient takes his medicine for a week he will entirely 
 have forgotten that he had ever been forgotten. But the 
 start of it all will have been a good big dose of the bromide 
 of piano. 
 
 "Remember, always, the whole man, Tom. Study, di- 
 agnose and treat the entire personality — not the mere body 
 alone. Remember this other typical example also: I was 
 treating old Hi Henderson for typhoid fever. He was doing 
 pretty well, only his heart was slowly giving out. If that 
 heart could be kept going for a few more days he would 
 surely recover, but the heart was giving out. I had tried the 
 whole list of my resources — whiskey, caffein, strychnine, 
 everything. Nothing would bring that heart one step toward 
 normal. Faster and faster, each day, I found that heart — 
 faster and weaker. 
 
 "At last, one day, I sat beside him, wondering what his 
 little family would do when he was gone — what I would 
 do too, for always I had liked Hi Henderson. 
 
 "All at once something occurred to me — two things, 
 rather. Why hadn't I thought of them before? I said to Hi, 
 'Hi, wheat's gone up, just in the last week alone, more than 
 ten cents a bushel.' 
 
 "Hi turned his utterly discouraged eyeballs toward me 
 and muttered in such a way it sounded like a curse, 'It'll go 
 down again.' 
 
 "Then I played my last card. I sadly mumbled, 'Hi, Hen 
 Skillet passed in his checks last night.' 
 
342 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 'Who? — Say that again.' 
 
 'Hen Skillet. He died at two o'clock this morning.' 
 
 'Naw. You're tryin' to cheer me up.' 
 
 'No. He really did die this morning.' 
 
 'How'd you know?' 
 
 'I saw him, even closed his eyes.' 
 
 'You ain't never lied to me yit, Doc. — Well, the old 
 ornery son of a what is it. Doc, I'm a goin' to git well.' 
 
 "And get well he did. His heart was better from that 
 minute. Skillet was his worst enemy, had grossly mistreated 
 him, in fact. Henderson had lain there hating the fellow 
 hour after hour, hour after hour, giving his own heart no 
 chance to get well. The information I supplied him was, 
 under the circumstances, the best of all heart tonics, yes ten 
 times over the best. I had treated the whole man" 
 
 STILL IN THE OFFICE 
 
 Whenever anyone came into the office and wanted a vac- 
 cination, I — as my father himself would have done — took 
 down a vaccination scab, which had been carefully enclosed 
 of course in a ring of beeswax resting on a glass plate, the 
 whole then covered over with another plate of glass. Re- 
 moving the upper glass plate, I with a lancet scraped off a 
 little of the epidermis from the subject's upper arm, about 
 at the insertion of the deltoid muscle. Into the scraped place 
 I would rub a minute particle of the scab. 
 
 There was in those days, as in fact there still is, no little 
 opposition from many medically ignorant persons to vaccina- 
 tion against smallpox. Over and over people used to inform 
 me that they knew of a great many cases in which people 
 had died just as the result of this very thing, vaccination. 
 
 The following conversation would then, in substance, 
 follow : 
 
 I: "You know of many persons, you say, who have died 
 as the result of vaccination?" 
 
 Objector: "I sure do — lots of 'em." 
 
 I: "Give me the name and address of just one." 
 
 Objector, after much squirming and unsuccessful attempts 
 to change the subject: "Well, I can get you lots of such 
 names and addresses. But I'll have to ask my wife's sister 
 first. She knows 'em. I've heard her say so." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 343 
 
 I: "Don't forget to bring them in." 
 
 Objector: "I won't." 
 
 But he never did in fact bring them in. 
 
 That was sixty-five or more years ago, and, in all the 
 many years that have elapsed since then — almost two-thirds 
 of a century — I have never been able to secure the name and 
 address of even one single person who had died from vac- 
 cination. 
 
 Of probably several hundred I have heard who had died 
 in that way. But the name and address of just one, I repeat, 
 I have not yet been able to procure. 
 
 There may, it is true, actually have been such a case. 
 Almost anything can happen. 
 
 THE APPRENTICE, IGNORED, LOOKS ON 
 THE INSIDE 
 
 One day there came into the office and into the presence 
 of my father and me one of the more prominent citizens of 
 the little city accompanied by his wife. One word brought 
 on another and soon the two consorts were quarreling, there 
 in the presence of me, a mere youth, and caring not at all, 
 so angry were both, what they said or how they said it. 
 My father begged them to desist. There was always a chance 
 that some one might, going by on the public sidewalk, 
 overhear them. 
 
 "Overhear and be damned," said Mr. Man, "I'm not 
 responsible for that child, and I'm not going to father it." 
 
 At this the lady placed him in the lie. He rushed at her. 
 My father restrained him. ("Nothing ever happens in the 
 country.") 
 
 "Into a chair my father forced that husband. "Now," 
 said he, "I'm a friend of both of you, and I'm going to 
 settle this matter and settle it right. Mrs. Wife, you speak 
 first and state the whole case. You, Mr. Husband, merely 
 listen till she finishes. If you interrupt her inside of five 
 minutes, I'll beat the blazing daylights out of you. After 
 five minutes, you, Mrs. Wife, should yield your husband 
 five minutes without interruption." 
 
 The woman began speaking, and, presently, had stated 
 her case so clearly, so consecutively, so fairly that the man, 
 when she had finished speaking, flatly declared, "That's all 
 
344 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 there is of it. I couldn't put the question more plainly 
 myself. 
 
 Well, "all there was of it" was simply this question, 
 whether or not a woman, in her first pregnancy, could or 
 could not carry her child for almost ten months before she 
 gave birth to it. 
 
 My father repeated the question to make sure he under- 
 stood it. Both agreed that he had understood. Then he 
 delivered his opinion. "The answer is, Yes. A woman can, 
 in her first pregnancy, 'carry' a child for ten full months, 
 even a month or two longer than that, before she gives 
 birth to it. Not only so, but a great many do it — in first 
 pregnancies and in later pregnancies too." 
 
 "You don't mean that, Doctor!" cried the man, seizing 
 both of Father's hands in ecstasy. 
 
 "I certainly do." 
 
 "Word of a Mason?" 
 
 "Word of a Mason." 
 
 A very happy couple soon had left the office. Then my 
 father, looking at me in astonishment, almost shouted, 
 "Were you — were you here — Were you here all the time 
 those people — ?" 
 
 "O yes. I was here." 
 
 "Well. I didn't notice you at all. You ought not to have 
 staid!" 
 
 "But I'm your apprentice now." So I justified. 
 
 "Well, all right. Yes, of course, you will have to get 
 into the harness some time." 
 
 I was pretty young for the "harness." But all these 
 things were training for me, either in medicine or in human 
 nature. 
 
 And, shortly after, when a young and very poor woman 
 in town was seized in "a killing childbirth" and I, in the 
 office, was appealed to as "the only resort," all the other 
 doctors being at the time out in the country, I, mere youth 
 though I was, went to the house of the afflicted lady and 
 found her not exactly in childbirth, but in the middle of a 
 miscarriage — and, by the bye, bleeding almost fatally. 
 
 For a moment I thought I would send them for my 
 mother: she had read far more than I about these matters. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 345 
 
 But would there be time for that? If the patient died — 
 I knew what I should do, so I did it. In other words I 
 rolled the patient onto her side and tamponed. Then she 
 was safe. When my father arrived, there was a neat little 
 embryo on the cotton waiting to be removed. 
 
 Father, I soon learned, had been kicked by his horse 
 while repairing the harness out in the country (the same old 
 "equine devil," Black Jim, had done the work) and was 
 covered from top to toe with mud. He managed to ask, 
 "You washed and disinfected your hands?" "Yes." "Car- 
 bolized your tampons?" "Of course," I spoke like an old 
 obstetrician. (No rubber gloves had we in those days.) 
 "Help me onto the lounge." 
 
 MOTHER, THE TACTICIAN 
 Though I now was doing the most of my father's office- 
 collecting of accounts, my mother too, as will be noted in 
 detail hereafter, collected bills quite frequently- — i.e. from 
 all who came not to the office but, by our southside door- 
 way, into the sitting-room. She was an excellent collector 
 indeed, Mother, but, even better by far than that, a born 
 tactician and friend-maker. A special instance of her patience 
 and long-suffering in the matter of making, or keeping, 
 friendships, comes back to me vividly. A man and his wife 
 for a period of almost three months drove in from another 
 town to our house almost daily in order to leave their baby 
 in my mother's care while they, forsooth, went up to the 
 Public Square and to the office of another doctor, there to 
 have the woman treated. Was my mother kind and courteous 
 to them? She certainly was. And she cooed to and petted 
 that baby, no matter how long a time the baby was left 
 with her. Several years later this couple actually fell out 
 with their Public Square physician and began to employ my 
 father. In fact they continued then to employ him for many 
 years and also referred to him many other patients. 
 
 BLUE GLASS 
 In the second or third year of my apprenticeship I was 
 greatly troubled by people who came to our office unneces- 
 sarily and only for argument. The argument was generally 
 
346 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 for the purpose of showing me, and, through me, my father, 
 possibly, what the callers alleged to be the very great value 
 of a pane of blue glass somewhere in a window of the house, 
 preferably one on the first floor. 
 
 This belief in the health-giving properties of blue glass 
 had become an obsession, a veritable craze, not only among 
 the most of the laity but even among some doctors. My 
 father was one of those who would not endorse the non- 
 sense. What! Approve that perfectly baseless proceeding? 
 He would just as soon repudiate science altogether and back 
 the devil-possession theory of disease-production. After a 
 time he became angry whenever anyone sought his support 
 for the blue-glass prevention of disease. "What, Doc! You 
 who teach that vaccination with cowpox prevents smallpox 
 — that one disease can actually prevent another — you, who 
 teach that, refuse to teach that blue glass in a house keeps 
 all disease out of it ! You must be a little bit teched — I mean 
 in the pocket-book." So some of them would say, where- 
 upon my father, though a man of great patience ordinarily, 
 would lose his patience altogether. 
 
 So the " auger ers" came to me as to one who would be 
 more patient with them. I was, but I seethed inwardly and 
 said little to my father about the matter. 
 
 Every doctor in Pittsfield, so far as I remember, refused to 
 back the nonsense. But there were doctors in other places 
 who did back it and who even sold special kinds of blue 
 glass at specially high prices. The laity took to it, most of 
 them, as if they were crazy. Books on the subject of blue- 
 glass treatment and prevention of disease were sold by 
 thousands. Some of these books were of very large size and 
 printed on blue paper. Journals, likewise on azure paper, 
 were published expounding the merits of the blue-glass 
 window-pane. Of all such literature I now possess, I am 
 sorry to say, not one single copy. Still, only a few years 
 ago, an old Pike Countian wrote me (for use in this volume) 
 that an old neighbor of hers still kept a pane of blue glass 
 in its same old place. 
 
 THE LITTLE ANGEL OF THE DARK 
 There raged, for a very short time, another superstition 
 I must mention — one which, unlike the blue-glass craze, al- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 347 
 
 ways seemed to me very beautiful. This one grew up about 
 the framed picture of a child angel flying in the darkness, 
 and, presumably, toward this world of sorrow and sin. The 
 picture, without creating the slightest excitement, had long 
 hung on the sitting-room wall of my Uncle Billy Hall's 
 house at Toll Gate, not very far from my Grandfather Hall's 
 old homestead. 
 
 How the curious belief arose that there was something 
 religiously magical about that picture, I do not certainly 
 know. But all at once there it was — a myth fully formed 
 and believed in! The story, as once I heard it, ran about as 
 follows : 
 
 - Some farmer, I think, living farther south in the county 
 than my Uncle Billy, perhaps down Milton way, had a very 
 sick wife. In fact she was going to die. So said all the 
 doctors. 
 
 But, one day, the farmer chanced to drop in for a moment 
 at my Uncle Billy's, and there he beheld that striking picture 
 on the wall — The Little Angel in the Darkness. He jumped 
 up, crying, "I have had an inspiration! I have had an in- 
 spiration! A voice from on high has come to me and it says, 
 'Bring her to see the picture. Then she will live.' 
 
 Well, he brought her to see the picture and she did in 
 fact live. 
 
 After that, many sick folk were brought to see the picture. 
 And they too lived — so many people said. 
 
 Then all at once the myth died. Why, I do not know. 
 It was a beautiful myth, quite helpful, too, probably, for 
 some of the firmest believers in the mystic powers of the 
 little child-angel in the dark. 
 
 A few years later my uncle decided to move with his 
 family to the north part of the state, so his household goods 
 were for sale. "The Little Angel of the Dark" I had always 
 loved, even years before it had started to become an object 
 of superstitious reverence. It had in fact become closely as- 
 sociated in my mind with the many happy days I had spent 
 at my Uncle's home, especially in the company of his only 
 child, "Little Willie." My cousin and my uncle, in short, 
 gave me the picture. 
 
348 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Shortly after that, in the north of the state, my former 
 playmate, Little Willie, died. 
 
 The picture I have still. For years upon years it has hung 
 in my bedroom, high above the mantel, where it still serves 
 a health-preserving purpose — not, indeed, as it did for those 
 old-time pioneers — that is as a talisman — but as a gentle 
 reminder of things once loved and now forever gone. In 
 that way it has assisted me through more than one terrible 
 illness. 
 
 Whosoever has had a happy childhood should always 
 keep in some conspicuous place in his home some or another 
 concrete reminder thereof, lest he forget and so allow hatred 
 and worry to destroy the health of his heart. 
 
 THROUGH THE OFFICE WINDOW 
 Even in those very early years, by helping my father in 
 the office I gave my mother more time for her housewifely 
 duties. Often, as I sat at my father's office desk folding 
 powders or rolling innumerable pills or endless bandages, I 
 would hear my mother's voice out in the north yard singing 
 underneath the clothes-line — 
 
 "Bird of beauty whose bright plumage 
 Sparkles with a thousand dyes ! 
 Gay thy notes and gay thy carols 
 
 When thy song doth fill the skies!" 
 
 As she reached the last words of the uplifting old refrain, 
 her sweet mezzo-soprano, with its ever-increasing ecstasy 
 and volume, would seem well-nigh itself to touch heaven's 
 dome. 
 
 Often, as I looked out from my apprentice tasks and saw 
 her with the big baskets of clothing standing by her side, 
 I determined that, as soon as I was through with the work 
 in the office, I would slip quietly out and help her at her 
 labors. I cannot now recall, however, that I ever really did 
 that. More often than not, I forgot her altogether and, re- 
 pairing to the barn, mounted the ladder into Hayloft Uni- 
 versity. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 349 
 
 TRAMPS AND MEDICINE 
 
 The financial depression of 1873 was the very worst this 
 country has ever known, and it continued without inter- 
 mission even till the close of 1878. The hordes of tramps 
 that passed through Pittsfield the very summer I became my 
 father's apprentice were, indeed, almost incredible as to size 
 and again as to the depredations they committed. And each 
 and every year the tramps were more numerous and com- 
 mitted more and worse depredations. Often when I slipped 
 away to Hayloft University, there to "linger with my soul," 
 behold, a dirty-faced, husky-looking tramp enthroned on the 
 hay before me ! Sometimes there were two or three of these 
 unfortunates. Many of them were sick, and no wonder. 
 All of them were hungry or, worse, thirsty for liquor. They 
 would come up to the house and beg. Mother was afraid 
 of them, but always fed them bountifully and gave them too 
 a little hand-lunch to carry away to wherever they were 
 going. Father would always treat their sicknesses and try 
 to answer their questions as to when the "hard times" would 
 be over. But he never tolerated any "monkey business." 
 Once, after feeding and treating a tramp he pulled out his 
 purse and gave the man a silver quarter. The man attempted 
 to grab the purse, and the next moment was on the ground 
 with a bloody nose and a black eye. 
 
 Father pointed to the gate. The man obeyed. 
 
 Cases, cases, cases! In the rich and in the poor, and most 
 of the people were poor in that depression. 1873 to 1878! 
 
 I could fill a large volume with just reports of the cases 
 of those days, and each and every case quite different from 
 all the others. Would you say there was nothing but monot- 
 ony in "life behind the veil"? 
 
 One of the chief solaces of my father in those days was 
 his horses, his friendship with his horses. 
 
 FATHER'S HORSES 
 
 I have already told of the kick my father once received 
 
 from Black Jim away out in the country and then of his 
 
 arrival at home all covered with mud. From that kick he 
 
 was sick for several days. All the while he denounced "that 
 
350 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 equine devil," and yet I could see that he loved him too. 
 Perhaps there was mutual admiration between that horse and 
 the master for the untiring energy which each of them 
 possessed. 
 
 At all events I want to speak of some of my father's 
 horses in greater detail than yet I have done, also of some of 
 the other accessories of a country medical practice in those 
 days. Of "Old Dick," the sorrel, I have already spoken. 
 He was old indeed, gentle and kind, and possessed the softest 
 and most engaging whinney that ever I have heard. He 
 was, however, as far back as I remember, really too slow 
 for a doctor's use, but my father kept him for years after all 
 his speed had oozed out of him — though he was yet in fact 
 very strong. Father kept him for so many years because 
 Grandfather Shastid had loved him, and, after Grandfather, 
 we three children too. At last my father sold him to a 
 Pittsfield teamster with the understanding that "Old Dick" 
 was, whenever possible, to be used for teaming along Monroe 
 Street between the depot and the Public Square — in other 
 words where, daily, we three boys could repeatedly mount 
 the fence and cry "Hello" and "Good-bye" to him. 
 
 One day we missed him, inquired the reason. He had 
 been sent to the country. What happened to him later still 
 I have already related herein in a footnote. 
 
 Peter Cooper was a tall white horse, who was sold to 
 my father with his appellation on him. His former owner, 
 a farmer and member of the "Greenback" party, had, of 
 course, named the horse for that strange party's founder, 
 Peter Cooper, aforetime candidate for the U. S. Presidency. 
 The horse, however, could "run" but little better on a hurry 
 call than his namesake had done for President. Sometimes 
 indeed he seemed to fall into a kind of dream and then would 
 stand for long minutes, not really sleeping but unable to stir. 
 
 My father was beginning to think that he had been pretty 
 badly "stuck," was quite in the dump about it; could not 
 resell the horse; when all at once, one day, here along the 
 road plodded toward us Peter's former owner. 
 
 Peter gave a challenging neigh, started for his old pal, 
 the pal at the same time starting toward him. 
 
 "Doc, what'U you take for your bargain?" 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 351 
 
 "Ten Dollars." 
 
 "Done." 
 
 The man paid the original price plus ten dollars, came 
 that night and got Peter at the barn, almost crying over him. 
 
 All of which shows that, as in matters concerning 
 women, it is very well indeed that not all men want the 
 same. 
 
 Quinine, a bay with a sprinkling so to speak of white 
 powder on his hips, was a first class trotter but a very poor 
 walker, and, when he trotted, he made no effort to avoid 
 anything that lay before him. Rocks, chuck holes, logs, 
 thank-you-ma'ams, a lost sack of farmer's wheat, anything 
 in fact was just the same to him as nothing. He was an 
 excellent night horse, yet, after all, he kept the four wheels 
 of my father's buggy so much of the time in the air that my 
 father had to sell him in order to get set down again on 
 terra firma. 
 
 And then there was "the Halpin mare," really named 
 for her former owner but ofttimes called, gently, "Fannie," 
 otherwise "Tang." She was a mustang, a sorrel with a 
 yellow mane, the smallest horse my father ever drove, but 
 tireless absolutely. So hardy she was that she minded 
 neither hottest heat nor coldest cold! No rain was ever 
 too wet for her, lightning too bright or thunder too loud, 
 nor mud or snow too deep or drives too long. 
 
 The only thing she ever appeared to dislike much was a 
 too long wait at a farmhouse. After a few minutes of stand- 
 ing at a hitching-post, she would begin to stamp. A very 
 few minutes more, and she would start neighing remon- 
 strantly. When at last my father came out, she would 
 always give a little whicker of recognition and delight. So 
 soft, so low, it nearly always was that you could not be 
 certain you had heard it. 
 
 But my father heard it invariably. A layman never could 
 have known what a country doctor's horse meant to him. 
 On the lonely roads at night, his horse was his companion, 
 his affectionate comrade, his friend. How my father used 
 to talk to his horses at night! And some of them talked 
 back in the best way they could. I used to laugh at him 
 occasionally for discussing medical cases with his horses. 
 
352 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Years later, myself a country doctor — out in the wilderness 
 of a night, the wilderness of a night without stars, and 
 perhaps the buggy lanterns extinguished and frigid winds 
 tossing the buggy from one side to the other — I, appalled at 
 the conditions of some of my patients, have talked long — 
 I am not ashamed to own the fact — to both my horses and 
 my God. 
 
 Almost as well as he loved the mustang, Fannie, my 
 father loved his "Palomino." A palomino is what some 
 call a "circus horse." It is a beautiful animal, always, 
 cream-colored or golden with white or ivory mane and tail 
 and a big broad "blaze" down the whole length of its face. 
 So gentle and intelligent and highly moral it is that even 
 the lovely ladies in the circus trust it implicitly. 
 
 Where we got our palomino I do not remember, but I 
 think it was from a horse dealer who was shipping south- 
 western horses into Pike County. (The palominos, as I 
 remember, were from an old Spanish stock.) Even as his 
 individual name we called our palomino "Palomino," and 
 he was just as sweet and beautiful as was his name. Wise 
 and trustworthy in the extreme, he was loved by the children 
 of every neighborhood, who fed him fresh grasses, sugar 
 lumps, cookies and candies. On the road he was speedy and 
 enduring, never went lame on any kind of road and was 
 always comradely — especially on those lonely, soul-harrow- 
 ing nights. My mother always felt easier of a night, if 
 Father was only driving Palomino. 
 
 Then came the thunderbolt. "Palomino must go." 
 "What!" I cried to my father, "Why! Palomino is our 
 friend!" 
 
 "And still he must go." 
 
 It seemed, then, that the public had somehow got to 
 thinking it funny that so serious a man as my father was 
 driving a "circus horse." In fact I had been with him on 
 several occasions when someone on the Public Square had 
 called out, facetiously, "When you goin' to have that there 
 circus, Doc?" A boy once shouted, "Give me and my 
 brother some free tickets, Doctor." And there had been even 
 further jocularity about that splendid gentleman of a horse, 
 whose stock showed plainly in his every step. 
 
"THE LITTLE ANGEL OF THE DARK" 
 
 This Picture was said to Have Healed Many Sick Persons 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 353 
 
A. 
 
 
 ■&!&" - 
 
 J* 
 
 O 
 
 *i - vis/©* 
 
 A PART OF THE OLD DAYS 
 
 Mr. Grant Criswell, Manhattan Beach, California, writes: "I wish when writing about your 
 father you would speak of a trait that might possibly escape you, I mean his fondness for cats. I 
 remember he told me once people generally disliked cats, but because they did not understand them. 
 
 "I recall that he had usually a number of cats and that any stray cat that came to his place 
 immediately found a happy home. He had a way too when greatly disturbed about a case, of sitting 
 with a torn or a pussy in a chair beside him, and talking to it as if it understood him, and often the 
 cat would really seem to understand for it would open and close its eyes with magnificent happiness, 
 or 'make bread,' and, of course, sing like an Aeolian harp. This trait of your father's seemed a part 
 of his general love of life, of all living things, except perhaps dogs — and that was owing to an un- 
 fortunate occurrence in his childhood. 
 
 "One of his cats was known as 'Puss Tat' all over Pittsfield. Brutal boys, and even some brutal 
 men, would generally kick a cat as far as they could send her. But nobody, so far as I know, ever 
 kicked Puss Tat. They did not even want to. Everybody loved her, even those who generally hated 
 felines. Many, I remember, used to beg for her kittens, and children all over the city would^brag 
 that their kitties' mother or grandmother was Doctor Shastid's Puss Tat. (Masculine genealogy, I 
 believe, is somewhat ignored in the feline tribe.)" 
 
 The picture above presented is that of Puss Tat. She was not only very prolific but also long- 
 evous. In fact she came to us before I became my father's apprentice (1876) and lived for about 
 twenty years — which, I think, is about the limit for Felis domestica. She always knew me on my 
 home returnings, even when on my come-back from Vienna I had been absent for nearly two years. 
 In fact she met me with the very plainest expressions of delight and promptly conducted me into 
 our smoke house, where, looking first at me and then at her latest family, she curved and sang proudly. 
 
 So true are Mr. Criswell's words about my father that, in the Hemmenway cartoon reproduced 
 elsewhere in this volume, my father's "leit motif" appears as a cat — in contrast to Dr. Barber's, 
 which is a dog. Dr. Barber was another physician with an affection for all life. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 355 
 
 At last the merriment, as ofttimes happens in a country 
 town (in any case fostered by one of my father's enemies) 
 showed signs of undue increase. "The Palomino must go," 
 was the final judgment in the matter. He went. 
 
 I said to my father, "You loved Palomino better than 
 any other of your horses." 
 
 "No," he said. "I loved him indeed, but better than any 
 other horse I ever have had I love that 'equine devil/ Black 
 Jim." Then I remembered, and I knew that that was true. 
 But note the sequel. 
 
 My father, but not on the time I have already mentioned, 
 on a very muddy day drove into the country in his two- 
 wheeled sulky. (A sulky was much easier pulling in mud 
 than any buggy could have been.) He drove to the sulky 
 that best loved and strongest of his horses, "the equine 
 devil." Coming back into town from the long trip, the 
 horse seemed strangely tired, and so my father permitted 
 him to walk along leisurely. All at once, just as they were 
 opposite the Kespohl brickyard, the horse gave a forward 
 jump, my father went backward out of the sulky, striking 
 head and shoulders on the ground. 
 
 The horse ran home to our barn, where I, coming home 
 from school, found him standing quietly, sulky still attached 
 but no driver in sight. 
 
 One or two hours later we found Father, unconscious, 
 in the home of the Kespohl family, where, I believe, Dr. 
 Doss was quite properly administering to him. 
 
 Father soon recovered consciousness, was gently brought 
 home, lay in bed for two days, and then was up and at his 
 work again. 
 
 But soon he began to suffer from various paresthesias 
 (abnormal sensations) in the neck, shoulders and arms. 
 These settled down in time to just one — the sensation of 
 coldness. That one sensation, however, remained in the neck, 
 shoulders and back to the end of his life — which occurred 
 many years later. 
 
 But the love affair between my father and the "equine 
 devil," did that still go on? It certainly did. Whenever 
 Father wanted speed he drove that "equine devil." One 
 day, in the country, my father got out to gather ground 
 
356 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 cherries, of which my mother was exceedingly fond. Return- 
 ed to the buggy, he said,"Getup" — nothing about that to be 
 regarded as a serious insult, surely. But Black Jim, instead 
 of getting up, started to lie down — right there in the high- 
 way and hitched to the buggy. So Father cut him with the 
 whip. Whereupon the devil arose, but arose in wrath. And 
 he kicked that buggy all to pieces. Even while my father 
 was getting out of the buggy, that devil destroyed he it. 
 Then came home the devil to the barn with pieces of the 
 wreck still clinging about his rapid limbs. 
 
 So came the divorce — at last. Father, quite literally, sold 
 Black Jim "down the river," at least as far down as the 
 town of Louisiana, Missouri. 1 
 
 After that Father bought many other horses, some weak 
 some strong, some sweet some sour — but none greatly gifted 
 with speed or high-tempered. The sensations of extreme 
 cold in his neck, shoulders and arms were continual remind- 
 ers to him of what might happen along with the speed. 
 
 So, for many years thereafter, he contented himself with 
 horses which, instead of granting him great speed, would, 
 as he left a farmhouse to come back to the buggy, give him 
 a soft, low nicker of welcome. He really loved that charac- 
 teristic most of all anyway. 
 
 DOCTORS AND FLOODS 
 
 Father and I were just coming home from Harder' s Drug 
 Store and his pockets were bulged with bottles of quinine 
 sulphate, for it had been a malarious spring and now, at the 
 beginning of summer, every other farmer in the county, as 
 
 1 My father had already offered the horse at a low price and with full disclosure of the 
 "devil's" bad qualities. The prospective buyer, quite surprisingly said that he most desired 
 just such a horse as that — one worthy of his own tough metal. He, however, requested 
 the privilege of trying the horse out for a day. 
 
 The request granted, the prospect took the horse at once to a professional horse buyer 
 who happened to be in the city from Louisiana and offered to sell him the horse. Thereupon 
 the professional buyer discovered and expatiated upon so many alleged physical defects in 
 the horse and made so low an offer for him that the prospect, frightened, returned the horse 
 to my father. 
 
 The very day of the return, there came to my father to buy the horse the self-same 
 Louisiana professional. Not to my father did he cry down the horse. But "How much 
 will you take for him?" My father, giving the gentleman a pair of cool eyes, just doubled 
 the price he had made to the other party. 
 
 "Take him," said Mr. Professional and handed over the money. 
 Jim went cheap at that — if you don't like horses gentle. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 357 
 
 it seemed, had not only chills and fever but in addition a 
 choice variety of ague cake. One of my own little pockets 
 contained a box of curious, light-weight, little transparent 
 cylinders with a tiny cap on each. These dainty containers 
 were denominated "capsules," the first, I believe, that ever I 
 had seen. 1 
 
 Even as we neared our house we saw my mother limping 
 out of our front door (she still was crippled with the milk- 
 leg after bearing Joseph) and heard her crying, "Hurry, 
 hurry, hurry! Old Mr. Woodlot has fallen and broken his 
 right thigh bone. It's gone through the flesh and he wants 
 you immediately." Back went she into the house. 
 
 My father, for one short moment, looked blank. I knew 
 precisely what he was thinking about. The ride was long, 
 the heat intense, the dust almost intolerable. Old Mr. 
 Woodlot, moreover, was a farmer whose wife did the most 
 of the farming. She, very much his junior, even plowed and 
 chopped the wood and, incidentally, bore all the children. 
 The part that old Mr. Woodlot himself performed in all 
 these numerous functions was comparatively small. He, in 
 addition to being, or to having been, a farmer, had also been 
 many other things. He had been, for example, a school- 
 teacher — who had never taught school. A minister — who 
 had never preached. A great fighter — who had never fired 
 a gun except at little squirrels. He had been (to hear him 
 tell it) even many other useful and even brilliant personages, 
 for, in fact, was he not as versatile as Julius Caesar himself? 
 
 To cap the climax. His physical appearance was quite 
 in keeping with his entire character. He was tall, lean, 
 skinny, half-starved looking; with weak blue, watery eyes, 
 
 1 Gelatin capsules, according to a letter I have from Professor Urdang, of the University 
 of Wisconsin, were invented by a French pharmacist called Mothes, in 1833. But these 
 consisted of one single piece. The modern, two-piece capsule was invented by James Mur- 
 dock, of London, in 1865- Even these, however, did not come into general use, at least 
 in America, for twelve or fifteen years. 
 
 There is an old story to the effect that, when gelatine capsules first came into use, some 
 of the patients who had been prescribed medicine in them, afterwards complained to the 
 doctor that they had had great difficulty in getting the medicine out of "them air tiny 
 bottles without first breakin' the bottles and so, maybe, gettin' glass into the medicine." 
 This story I can fully confirm, as I heard not one but many of my father's patients register 
 that very complaint. Some of them indeed brought "the little bottles" back to the doctor, 
 thinking he could use them again. In fact, in those old days, even before the introduction 
 of capsules, patients, as a rule, after the close of an illness, would return all corks and bottles 
 to the doctor. It was just a piece of the great thrift and carefulness of the times — a piece 
 that shows quite clearly how far we have advanced to-day in the science of ^economics. 
 
358 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 a thin, pale nose, and a skin that was forever colored like 
 bronze by many a brave, wild, and enduring bout with Mr. 
 Bacchus. Once before, I recalled, he, in his cups, had fallen 
 on his face — a possession which could never have been much 
 damaged — and broken his left thigh bone — for all the bones 
 in him were brittle, as brittle as ever had been his promises 
 to pay doctors. 
 
 Nor could my father ever collect anything from Mr. 
 Woodlot, even when crops had been unusually good, in op- 
 position to that gentleman's wishes, for the simple reason 
 that Mr. Woodlot never possessed anything whatever that 
 was not fully subject to the statute of exemptions; nor from 
 his really good little wife, for she, in addition to being 
 forever much overworked, never did sit for one single 
 moment "at the receipt of custom." 
 
 My father looked all round at the brazen sky again. 
 "Terribly hot day," he remarked, unnecessarily. "It's 
 going to be cooler, though," he added, and then I knew that 
 the doctor within him had, as usual, conquered the col- 
 lector. He looked at the sky again. "Want to go along?" 
 
 "Well, of course." 
 
 "I'll go into the office and get the extension apparatus 
 and so forth, while you go down to the barn and saddle the 
 horses." But then he changed his mind and went with me 
 to the barn to see that the horses did not kick me — some- 
 thing which surely was reasonable enough but which, two 
 days later, was found to have had dynamitic repercussions. 
 If only he had gone to the office in the first place ! 
 
 As we rode out of the barn on those reluctant horses 
 and down the broad street, the yellow, thick, suffocating air 
 seemed to strike us with the impact of an irrespirable wave. 
 Then, as we rode past the calaboose and the jail, we both 
 observed that the merry-go-round which, for many days, 
 had spun round and spun round and spouted its loud, coarse, 
 intolerable music, was now as silent and utterly moveless 
 as could have been an afternoon gone by. Even the owner 
 and manager of the contraption, sprawled out in one of the 
 cars thereof, had pulled his hat down over his eyes and now 
 appeared to be comatose. Not a human form was visible on 
 the Square nor even one horse at the hitching-rail thereof. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 359 
 
 All at once my father cried, "I've forgotten the extension 
 apparatus, the pill-bags and so forth." Back drove we, not 
 indeed to the house-door, but to the outer door of the office. 
 Not a soul was in the office as we gathered together the 
 equipment that we needed in the country — a seemingly un- 
 important fact but one which, later, as already suggested, 
 was found to have had great consequences. 
 
 And, already, once more, as we drove this second time in 
 the direction of the Square, we met an obstruction. In the 
 street and in front of the calaboose, or town prison, had 
 gathered, in the few minutes since we had passed the place 
 before, a large crowd of gesticulating people. Policeman 
 Saylor, I believe it was, was trying to land a prisoner in the 
 tiny jail and the crowd was madly declaring that he must 
 promptly give up the attempt to do so. 
 
 Policeman Saylor, giving yet one more twist to the come- 
 along which he had fastened on the prisoner's wrist, shouted 
 to my father, "Doctor Shastid, come on and help me control 
 this mob. The law declares that any officer of the law may 
 call upon any able-bodied citizen to aid him in resistance to 
 a mob. I call upon you." 
 
 "I have a patient who may be dying," shouted back my 
 father. "And, anyway, physicians are exempt from posse 
 duty." And, strange as it may seem, we were at last upon 
 our way — although it seemed a century before we were truly 
 clear of the small town. 
 
 The heat of the day built up into a flaming, blistering 
 dance. The sky turned from blue to a hot white, to a sim- 
 mering brass. I sat on my big blood bay like a sun-struck 
 flea on an ambling elephant. "Rain soon," encouraged my 
 father from his small sorrel mare, about six feet ahead of me. 
 I paid no attention. "It never will rain again," thought I. 
 
 At the shallow Honey Creek ford we stopped to breathe 
 our lathered horses and let them drink. A quarter mile to 
 the west, and again we forded Honey Creek — this time a 
 mere rock-slabbed, altogether dried-up Honey Creek. On 
 south we went, up Hodgen Hill, then past the boyhood home 
 of the great surgeon and so into Sundance Valley. But to-day 
 the sun did not dance there: it just baked and blistered there. 
 And what about the usual mirth of people in that valley? 
 We did not on that day see any people there at all, mirthful 
 
360 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 or unmirthful. O yes, we did indeed behold one man — a 
 solitary, sunburned and sun-resistant being who slowly and 
 dejectedly guided a cultivator along his corn-rows. All of 
 a sudden the horses stopped, their heads lolling. The man 
 gradually turned his utterly discouraged countenance full 
 upon us, and said — nothing, although my father had already 
 cried to him cheerfully, ' 'Howdy!" 
 
 Why! this was the very man who, once upon a time, as 
 we drove through Sundance Valley, had, in response to one 
 of my father's witticisms, "hauled off and let go with both 
 lungs." 
 
 "Howdy!" called out my father again, fearing that Mr. 
 Dejection had not heard him the first time. 
 
 "Howdy!" came a cry from behind us. 
 
 Turning, we saw an old-time moving-wagon which, un- 
 observed, had crawled up near us, and from which yet an- 
 other dejected man, one with bright red, quite hot-looking 
 whiskers was beckoning us to approach. 
 
 Inside the wagon we found a woman on a straw bed 
 suffering from malarial fever. Father gave her medicine, left 
 more medicine with the husband — who had already told 
 him he could not pay for it, and then said my father, "All 
 she needs now is rest." 
 
 "Rest? Rest! What rest?" 
 
 It was not my father's possible function to provide people 
 with rest. Besides, a very old man with perhaps a mortal 
 fracture of the femur was awaiting his help. However, all 
 at once a voice said, "You two may rest for a week in my 
 house, if you'll just come in." 
 
 The man from the corn-rows! The man who had not 
 granted us a laugh! 
 
 Seated atop my horse, I, the cooked flea on the giant 
 elephant, had many curious experiences — that day whereon 
 arrived experiences innumerable. Again and again I beheld 
 not only many things that were but also many things that 
 were not. Once I thought I saw by the roadside horse-mint 
 and ox-eyed daisies. Well, I had seen them. Then again, I 
 thought I saw a blacksmith working at his anvil in the 
 middle of the road before me. Well, I had not seen him. Then 
 again, I thought I saw a band of Indians coming over a hill at 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 361 
 
 my right, and then, at my left, a black cloud, raining. Well, 
 I had seen neither. After a time I departed into deep 
 oblivion and saw and heard nothing. All at once I was wide 
 awake and furiously galloping, though leaning horizontally 
 out from my saddle, the way Apaches ride. Straightening 
 up, I passed once more into oblivion — only to fall wide wake 
 overside and land in a pillow of dust. Back in the saddle for 
 a moment, I awoke once more to find myself sliding, sliding, 
 down over my horse's neck, then over his head to a hard fall. 
 
 Father came riding back, placed me on my horse again, 
 said, "In yonder house, thank Destiny, is the compound 
 fracture man." Dismounting a few moments later at the 
 door, we entered, found no one at home. The place was 
 inhabited, but the furniture was good, and my father re- 
 marked, "Old Mr. Woodlot and his family most assuredly 
 do not live here." 
 
 All at once a dull, reverberating boom roared out across 
 the dry world. "Thunder!" cried Father, and we did not 
 pass the doorway. A nameless fear seized me. The sound 
 was not thunder, I was sure. 
 
 Father slowly opened the door. All at once the world 
 rocked with thunder, gun thunder. There were rifle shots 
 and pistol shots and heavy double-barrelled shot-gun shots. 
 Sometimes I thought that I heard the even heavier shots of 
 anvils — anvils such as were fired at sunrise each Fourth of 
 
 There came into the public highway, despite the soft 
 cushioning of dust there, the far but swiftly approaching 
 clatter of a horse's hoofs. Rider and horse, around a great 
 hill, hove into view. "Ball Wirey!" shouted Father in 
 excitement. 
 
 "What does that mean?" 
 
 "Be quiet." He seemed to be trying to puzzle something 
 out. "They may be after him. Yes, they may be after him. 
 Perhaps they have evidence this time." 
 
 "Evidence of what?" 
 
 "Be still." 
 
 It was late in the afternoon. We mounted and gave rein 
 again. All at once there were shrieks in a wood near by and 
 many loud voices of greatly excited persons. "I wonder," 
 
362 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 my father murmured, "if that's Ball, and they've got him. 
 Perhaps that shooting just a while ago was in his direction. 
 I wonder. They may have been shooting for rain and for 
 something else too." 
 
 Suddenly a very excited man on a very tired horse rode 
 toward us, holding up a hand. We stopped. "Whom were 
 those people shooting at?" demanded my father. 
 
 "Who? What? O, they wa'n't shootin' at nobody. Jest 
 shootin' to make some water come down. But Doc, my 
 father's awful sick — you know, Mr. Pole Platter. You 
 cured him of the typhoid years ago." 
 
 "Just now I'm bound for the Woodlots — can't find the 
 house." 
 
 Second house on your left, Doc. He moved lately. And 
 the very next house on your left is our house. Get there 
 soon, please, Doctor." 
 
 AT LAST THE WOODLOT HOME 
 So at last, after many adventures, we had reached the 
 place we had started for. But there was something very 
 strange about that Woodlot home. The big black dog that 
 should have been there did not come barking out at us, or 
 at all. The loud-crying guinea-fowls, almost invariably the 
 careful guardians of any Pike County farmhouse, were 
 silent — if present at all. Nothing stirred in the bushes or on 
 the trees, but all seemed as if dreaming of a siesta gone by. 
 No kitchen smoke. No cow bawling for her calf. No 
 katydids, no crickets. No anything. 
 
 We pushed in the front door. The house was vacant 
 everywhere, except that, on one front window-ledge, there 
 stood an empty whiskey bottle, and, on the mantle, a 
 broken-to-pieces corn-cob pipe. 
 
 At the barn, the granary, the woodshed — everywhere the 
 same story. Mr. Nobody lived here. 
 
 "Old Mr. Woodlot seems to be pretty well mobilized," 
 quoth my father, "for a man with a compound fracture of 
 the thigh. He — " 
 
 There was a clatter in the road, the slide of a horse, the 
 shout of a man : ' 'Doc, they need you up at Mrs. Pendleton's. 
 Right away quick, Doc!" He was gone, and we were on the 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 363 
 
 road to the Pendleton home — the place where old Mrs. 
 Pendleton lived (in a way), moved (in a way), and (in a 
 way again) had her being. And all of her ways were very 
 nervous ways indeed. 
 
 Before we reached her house, however and thank good- 
 ness, here, once again, came a messenger, with the word 
 that we must come and see Pole Platter. Pole's got a injured 
 hand, Doc, its all black and blistery, and, now and then, he 
 talks nonsense." 
 
 To Pole's at once we went. Father thought him far 
 sicker than Mrs. Pendleton. Now, it happened that my 
 father, wheresoever he went and on whatsoever mission, 
 invariably had with him a good-sized operation case. No 
 Catlin knives in it at all, but plenty of others, and artery 
 forceps galore. He had also cotton and carbolic acid. 
 
 But my father had been watching the northwestern sky 
 from time to time throughout the long afternoon. He 
 sensed, he said, something wrong in the air, had a definite 
 feeling of oppression all over plus something like a tight 
 band around his forehead, pressing in, cutting off the blood. 
 Just before we reached Pole Platter's place, we saw what 
 Father had been looking for all afternoon — to the northwest 
 a white thunder-head building up, rolling over the horizon 
 with incredible speed. The clouds were of an unusual white- 
 ness — a sickly, threatening shade, white tinged and dark- 
 ened by yellow here and there, darkened still further by a 
 deadly blackness just above a fiery horizon. 
 
 The storm came on apace, but silently. There was no 
 sound but the bawling, here and there, in farmyards, of 
 cattle and the dull, steady clap, clap, clap of their hoofs 
 on the hard ground. 
 
 Then we began to hear the dull, heavy rumble of distant 
 thunder. A cool breeze sprang up. Lightning flashed from 
 the cloud bank. Again! Again and yet again! The sun went 
 out of view. Father lighted his lantern. 
 
 Bang! came an explosion, worse than that of all the 
 anvils of the afternoon. The great battle of the elements 
 was on. 
 
 The rain came down in sheets, in torrents, in floods. 
 Amid the uproar of the thunder we heard at times the 
 hoarse laughter of the roadside deluge. "The streams will 
 
364 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 all be over their banks in less than an hour." Thus Father, 
 and at length we reached the Pole Platter place, bathed all 
 over with water and thin mud. 
 
 Having stalled our horses in the barn, we held our saddle 
 blankets, umbrella-like, over our heads and started for the 
 house. 
 
 But, of all the surprises of that surprising day, this was 
 the most surprising. My father indeed had suspected that 
 old Mr. Platter might have a gangrenous hand so that he 
 would, just possibly, have to have it amputated. But he 
 was certainly not prepared to see the old gentleman die just 
 as we entered the room. Yet that was what old Mr. Platter 
 did. Like a candle that has burned to its socket, he guttered 
 out. "So glad, Doc!" This he said with some animation. 
 Then he was dead. 
 
 The wife and daughter were already with him, and, a 
 moment later, the messenger who had told us to come here, 
 arrived, and, at the request of the women, left at once for 
 Pittsfield to get a funeral director. 
 
 "God bless you both," gently breathed my father. "May 
 I leave Thomas here?" 
 
 "In a storm like this we wouldn't let him go." 
 
 To me Father said, "I'll be back in the morning." 
 
 I was full of horror. To sleep — actually to sleep and 
 practically alone in a house with a dead man in it !* But the 
 storm was terrific. I was both hungry a'nd wornout. I ate 
 ravenously and slept soundly — yes soundly, even there in 
 the house of the dead. 
 
 After breakfast — the rain was falling gently then — my 
 father arrived — he had eaten elsewhere — and he and I left 
 just as the undertaker, with a minister, came in. 
 
 I am full of confusion as I try to remember the places 
 where my father said he had been that night, the things he 
 had tried to do. But where he had been in that gehenna of 
 a storm and what he had really done at various farmhouses 
 while it continued was a story well-nigh incredible. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 365 
 
 THE FIRST TELEPHONE IN PIKE COUNTY 
 
 Still, there was just a touch of fun amid the horrors of 
 those two days and one night. 
 
 When we got to Mrs. Pendleton's, which we did by 
 swimming our horses across a swollen stream, the cabin was 
 entirely empty, at least of human beings. We shouted here, 
 there, everywhere. No response. We hunted for matches 
 on the mantel. Found them. (Another storm was making 
 all things dark again.) Father reached up and lighted the 
 coal-oil lamp. We searched for some piece of paper with 
 writing on it — anything to explain the patient's absence, 
 hers and all her people's. Father began to worry. "Old Mrs. 
 Pendleton has always been my friend, helped me to build a 
 practice when practice-building was not easy for me. And 
 now, because of my delay, she may have gone to town to 
 consult another doctor." 
 
 "But you couldn't help going to Mr. Pole Platter's first. 
 What's that 7 ." 
 
 "Yes, what is it?" 
 
 Listening, we both perceived a faint sound — a mere ghost 
 of a dog-cry coming through the storm. Then it died out. 
 Then it began again, grew louder — became a crescendo of 
 rapid-fire yells, and a "hound dog," as Pike County people 
 called such "critters," dashed into the room, leaped on the 
 table then off it. Ran to me. Ran to Father. All the while 
 he was yelping for help. Eventually he leaped on the table 
 again and stayed there, turning his posterior first toward 
 one of us then toward the other of us, directing also pitiful 
 eyes upon us alternately and whimpering for assistance. 
 
 Then Father and I simultaneously observed that there 
 were two things closely associated with the suffering tail — 
 a split stick and a piece of oil cloth. The piece of oil cloth 
 was fastened to the split stick, and the split stick was clamp- 
 ed to the tail close up to the body — where it could not 
 easily be wagged off. 
 
 The rough side of the oil cloth read: "Doc, I'm dine. 
 Come to wunst. Bring Anty Dotes. Wuz at Marys. Now 
 at Elmers. P. S. i took pizen." 
 
 We both "forked leather" as we never had forked it 
 before. Choppity-clop went we to Elmer's house. 
 
366 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 And there we found Gran'ma just about "dine" indeed, 
 from a pretty bad case of "compound poisoning." She, it 
 appeared, had gone some days before to Mary's (her daugh- 
 ter's) house for a brief visit, and, while there, in a closet 
 had found a number of bottles, each partly filled with 
 medicine which my father had left for members of Mary's 
 family on various occasions. Gran'ma, finding the bottles 
 and being a thrifty soul, had declared she would by no 
 means see so much excellent medicine go to waste. "But 
 you don't know at all what's in them bottles," the rest had 
 objected. "Don't need to know," responded Gran'ma, "I'm 
 ailin', ain't I? An' medicine's medicine, ain't it? An' old 
 Doc's fixin's alius good fer whatever ails you. All this here 
 fine medicine goin' to plumb waste! I declare I won't stand 
 fer it." And she took a large part of the medicine, became 
 instantly ill. 
 
 "Lord God, anyhow save me, whether I'm plumb fool 
 or part one." Thus prayed Gran'ma. 
 
 And Gran'ma was saved. Father gave her an emetic and 
 up came everything to light, whether it was good or whether 
 it was evil — just as if it had all been evacuated on Judgment 
 Day. 
 
 How apologetic was Gran'ma then, and how explicitly 
 explanatory! "You see, Doc," she said, "we had to get that 
 there writin' down to my place in short order. We haint got 
 none of these here telephones yet, even ef any sech things 
 has really been invented. So I thought real quick-like of 
 Clip's tail. Says I to my daughter, says I, 'Bring me Clip.' 
 She brought me Clip. That's the dog. An' I took an' I 
 made me a writin', as you seen how I done on a piece of old 
 oil cloth. An' I took an' I split me a stick, as you seen how 
 I done. An' I took an' I fastened the writin' to the stick, 
 as you seen how I done. And then I spread open the stick, 
 as you seen how I done, and let it clamp tight to the tail, 
 as you seen how I done. An' Clip did the rest — er him an' 
 you together. 
 
 "I tell you, Doc and Tommy," she continued, as Father 
 and I began leaving, "it takes brains to do things like that 
 — that is, to beat a telephone — an' I very much doubt ef 
 there is any sech a thing as a telephone. It takes brains to 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 367 
 
 do what I do. It shore does take brains. Well, I got the 
 brains." 1 
 
 "And now for home at last," cried Father, as we forked 
 our mounts once again. But here came Elmer out of the 
 house shouting, "I plumb forgot to tell you, Doc, that ol' 
 Mrs. Pole Platter is jest about to f oiler her husband. They 
 want ye down there quick. You see, on account o' my 
 mother bein' so bad — " But we stayed no longer to listen to 
 explanations — and promptly found that the worst trial of 
 our perilous trip was now upon our schedule. In other words 
 we had come to a stream which, only the night before, a 
 good strong bridge had spanned. Now, however, the bridge 
 was gone, and dangerous mud-filled water was rolling and 
 roaring across the creek's wide banks. Said my father: 
 "You ride back by the old west road to the Summer Hill 
 road and so get into Pittsfield. Now, go on. I can make it. 
 You never can." 
 
 Father, drawing up his legs, sent his horse straight into 
 the stream. The little horse swam with the greatest of ease. 
 My b.ig bay, all at once, despite my efforts to control him, 
 followed suit. I, always afraid of water, vented a yell for 
 help. But the myriad voices of the water drowned every 
 syllable. Then, in a trice, I had a delightful feeling of 
 security. My big horse swam as smoothly as a Pullman car 
 could have run. On the other side, however, my father was 
 far ahead of me. 
 
 Then, pleasure of pleasures, there was another swollen 
 stream before us. Once more the pleasure, the unspeakable 
 delight, of guiding and controlling my huge, unconquerable 
 friend over an inimical flood ! How vainly the voices of the 
 deep shouted after us, demanding our lives! But, all at once 
 — a greater terror! 
 
 Upstream a mighty, uprooted tree was bearing down 
 toward us. 
 
 1 Gran'ma's suspicion that there were no such things as telephones was, of course, 
 incorrect. Telephones, however, came quite slowly into favor and use. Doctors, especially, 
 were at first reluctant to instal them. They said again and again, "No, sir, I'll have no 
 such thing as a telephone in house or office. People would pester me to death, calling me 
 up every minute of day and night to talk to me about the latest kind of ache or pain they'd 
 had." A few doctors said even, "Everybody would be asking me what to do, instead of asking 
 me to come right out." 
 
368 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Closer it came and closer still. A wild scream came out 
 of my former savior. 
 
 Now it seemed the tree would miss us. Again that it 
 would get us. All at once I lost consciousness. Whether I 
 had fainted or had been submerged by tree or horse I do not 
 know, or how long I had lain upon the bank. But, all at 
 once, I awakened and my father was bending over me and 
 gently rolling me to and fro. 
 
 My horse, he quickly told me, had reached the creek- 
 shore, then wildly galloped toward him and passed him — 
 riderless, of course. Father, recognizing the horse, had sped 
 back to where I lay. His own theory was that I had fainted 
 while still on the horse, but safe beyond the stream, and 
 that then, on the bank, the horse, still terrified, had thrown 
 me. He took me up behind him on the sorrel and we sped 
 away to see Mrs. Pole Platter — who, by the bye, was merely 
 suffering prostration from her husband's death. 
 
 We two, then, wishing to return to Pittsfield and riding 
 the one horse, now actually did ride across to "the west 
 road," as my father had earlier advised me to do, and, bear- 
 ing north, would soon have turned east toward Pittsfield. 
 But now, to make this abstract of a two-day history com- 
 plete, at least in its main essentials, it is necessary to digress 
 for a moment and to relate an episode of this, the second, 
 day of our journey, which, excursive as it really may be, is 
 nevertheless, even of itself, illustrative of both the great 
 good and the great bad which exist in human nature as well 
 as of the sunshine and the shadow which fill the country 
 doctor's life. 
 
 All at once, some distance away, my father and I espied 
 Ball Wirey, actually bare-headed and clad only in a full suit 
 of red underwear, coming toward us from the south — lickety- 
 split, lickety-split, and scattering clay mud in every direction. 
 
 "Whoa!" cried my father, "I believe I was right." 
 
 A horde of horsemen, just as he spoke, dashed into view 
 not far behind Wirey. 
 
 "Right about what? ^ I demanded. 
 
 "Never mind!" 
 
 And, at that, Wirey and his horse went over a fence and 
 behind a hill, so that we saw them no more. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 369 
 
 My childish curiosity was piqued to the highest point. 
 "But you must tell me, Father. What has this man done?" 
 
 "Be quiet." 
 
 "But am not I a doctor — at least very soon to be one? 
 Tell me." 
 
 "Son — " He breathed a long sigh. "Son, there are 
 things a doctor does not tell, even — " He was looking down 
 into my eyes. "There are things a doctor does not tell even 
 to another doctor — yes, even though the other doctor be his 
 son. And you, if you want to form the habit of keeping pro- 
 fessional secrets — something you ought to begin immedi- 
 ately — will now and forever forget that you have even seen 
 Ball Wirey on this day. — Look at that little old stable a- 
 burning over yonder. Somebody must have dropped his 
 pipe in the hay." 
 
 N Three or four years later, about 1880 I believe, there 
 broke out in Pittsfield a series of fires so long, also so de- 
 structive, as to seem almost incredible. 
 
 These fires always occurred at night. I remember how I 
 would be awakened by the fire bell and confused cries of 
 "Fire," then jump into my clothes and, taking my already 
 dressed brother Jon by the hand, rush up to the Square. How 
 we watched the lithe tongues of flame leap from basement 
 to first floor, from first floor to second, into the attic, out 
 through the roof, whooping and roaring as if striving to 
 reach the sky. 
 
 Night after night! 
 
 One night the arsonist attempted to burn the Pittsfield 
 House, the town's largest and finest hotel. It had been built 
 and was still managed by my father's half brother, Captain 
 George Travis Edwards. Uncle Trav., happening to go into 
 the attic of his building on that particular night, caught the 
 culprit — and it was Ball Wirey! 
 
 Father did not speak at all to me, that night of the 
 capture, about Ball Wirey, but, after Ball had been tried, 
 had pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in the 
 penitentiary, he said to me in our barn — a good, quiet place 
 for talking: "You ought to know, I think, at least this 
 much about Ball Wirey. Long, long before you and I saw 
 those farmers chasing him (three or four years back of that 
 
370 . MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 time, in fact) Ball, visiting in the country, suffered a serious 
 accident. A tree, falling, struck the top of his head. I did not 
 attend him, but I know the details of the injury. Always after 
 that accident, Ball seemed to me to have suffered certain alter- 
 ations of his mind — not such indeed as would be perceptible 
 to laymen but such as almost any doctor who had known 
 him before the injury would have been certain to take note of. 
 
 "Tom, I do not believe Ball Wirey was responsible when 
 he started those fires." 
 
 "And you — you," I almost shouted. "You did not go 
 up and tell the court so?" 
 
 "No, I did not." 
 
 "Why? And why did you not elevate the depressed 
 portion of his skull?" 
 
 "Because, for one thing, I had never been requested to 
 do so. Doctors can't just throw people down in the street 
 and operate on them, willy-nilly, saying perhaps, 'Lie still, 
 I know what's good for you.' Another doctor in Pittsfield, 
 Ball's ordinary attendant, did in fact propose one day to 
 operate on Ball and Ball in consequence came near to adding 
 homicide to arson. Nor would Ball's nearest of kin so much 
 as consider an inquisition of lunacy in his case. And that 
 isn't all. I offered both to Ball himself and to his lawyer 
 to testify on the trial that Ball was mentally unsound. And 
 both refused to let me testify. There was another point in 
 the matter, Tom. Ball pleaded guilty, would have no trial. 
 You see, no trial could, under all the circumstances, have 
 taken place at all without an incidental revelation to the 
 world of what seemed like moral turpitude on the part of 
 two perfectly innocent women. This necessary consequence 
 of a trial Ball saw clearly enough, for all his mental confu- 
 sion, so he would not hear to having any trial. Even with 
 doctors ready to clear him he would not have one. Well, 
 even Dublin and I, when we had learned of all the danger 
 that any trial whatsoever would have brought to the reputa- 
 tion of those fine women, told Ball Wirey he was right." 
 
 And Ball was sentenced to two years in the penitentiary 
 — for burning sixteen buildings, or half the Public Square. 
 
 Later still, when I was practising medicine myself in 
 Pike County, there came to me even further evidence of the 
 
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MY SECOND LIFE 373 
 
 innocence of those women, thus proving completely that 
 Father and Dublin and even Ball himself, despite his mental 
 confusion, had acted wisely. 
 
 But back to the two-day adventure of long ago and its 
 curious anti-climax. Through the deep mud we plodded and 
 into Pittsfield, where the merry-go-round was going round 
 merrily again (the weather being now so much cooler) and, 
 raucously as ever, the horses were biting the hitch-rails, and 
 the drunkards were stumbling along the plank sidewalks, 
 some in dull anger and some in hideous delight. 
 
 When we had arrived before the old home, Miss Sarah 
 Spann, good helper to Mother since the birth of Joseph, 
 came running out to us, and, seeing my wan and tuckered-out 
 appearance, pulled me off the horse and into her arms and 
 went to crying over me audibly. "We thought we would 
 never see either of you two again," she murmured. 
 
 Then came Mother complaining, "Why did you two run 
 away from home just as I'd informed you that old Mr. 
 Woodlot was in the office with a broken bone?" 
 
 "In the office! Why you said nothing at all about his 
 being in the office, but only that old Mr. Woodlot had 
 received a compound thigh-fracture and that he wanted me 
 to come immediately to see him." 
 
 "I declare I don't believe that I did say once 'in the 
 office.' 
 
 "And, after you had told us about him, Tommy and I 
 did go into the office to get the extension apparatus and all 
 the other necessities for a fracture of the femur." 
 
 "O yes, there was no place to lay him in the office, so, 
 as soon as I had spoken to you, I took him into the sitting- 
 room and there made him a pallet on the floor. This morning, 
 though, so many people were passing through the sitting- 
 room that Sarah and I got him back into the office and 
 fixed his pallet there. You can go there now, both of you, 
 and not be able to miss him." 
 
 In the office Father asked Mr. Woodlot where he was 
 living now, adding, "We went to two houses to look for 
 you down Pleasant Hill way and you were not in either one 
 of them." 
 
374 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "O me and the family moved over into Scott County last 
 month. But, jist yestiday, I come back into Pike to buy a 
 horse, an', ridin' him, was throwed, and so I got this com- 
 pound fracture." 
 
 A careful examination, however, of Mr. Woodlot's thigh, 
 revealed that he had received no fracture of any sort or kind. 
 He had simply scratched the thigh rather deeply. 
 
 But back to my apprenticeship. 
 
 (W'^^vw Im^lm R&j&fcte i\irtH^(/ ^A^^d ' tfit 
 Jvuic4uc0 ^v a2L oJd a&4 o£ ^w^^t^oc a^^ P^U^ 
 
 Extract from a letter to T. H. S., August 14, 1942, by Mrs. Frederick E. Stryker (form- 
 erly Miss Sarah Spann) Chicago. In 1877, when my brother Joseph was born and for 
 some time thereafter she was a most efficient helper to my ailing mother. The somewhat 
 premature "autobiography" which she mentions my being engaged upon (at the ripe 
 age of eleven) is still in existence (in my chicken-track handwriting) and is quite copious 
 and detailed about many events and people in the medical practice of my father — to 
 whom I had even then been medical apprentice for nearly one year. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 375 
 
 Always in my heart there was a lovely little glow be- 
 cause I had become really a physician's apprentice. More- 
 over, my father was pleased with my work, especially my 
 progress in the classical languages but also because of my 
 almost equal advance in anatomy, physiology and path- 
 ology. With Latin and Greek in my head, the anatomical 
 terms (almost always Latin, like iter a tertio ad quartum vm- 
 triculum which had so astonished and overawed the natives) 
 also the terms in pathology (almost always Greek) became 
 quite simple. I knew, of course, that this, my apprenticeship, 
 had begun somewhat prematurely, inasmuch as admission 
 to medical colleges in that day could not occur till the attain- 
 ment of the nineteenth year of life, also inasmuch as the 
 apprenticeship need not have endured for longer than only 
 two years. In other words, no apprenticeship need ever have 
 begun until the aspirant for a medical degree had become 
 seventeen years of age. Moreover, I was meaning to attend, 
 before entering a school of medicine, some college of liberal 
 arts and sciences, there to attain my bachelor's degree — al- 
 though, in those days, no applicant for medical matricula- 
 tion was required to present evidence of any preparation 
 whatsoever saving and excepting a signed certificate from 
 his preceptor that the applicant was not less than nineteen 
 years of age, that he was of good moral character, and that 
 he had been the said preceptor's apprentice for not less than 
 two years. A medical apprenticeship, by the way, could be 
 running simultaneously with school and college study, or 
 with banking, preaching, school-teaching, clerking, solicit- 
 ing as book-agent, carrying on at manual labor — or whatso- 
 ever else do you make your living by? Time was, of course, 
 deducted for hours or days spent on these non-medical oc- 
 cupations. 
 
 I, however, meant to be a doctor of the better sort — one 
 like my father, or — God willing — John T. Hodgen himself. 
 Hence, if I should have an apprenticeship of four, five, or 
 even six or nine years, what of it? And even if I went to a 
 school of liberal arts, as I surely intended to do, well what of 
 that also? All these things would only the better prepare me. 
 
 I took my work seriously. 
 
 My mates, however, at school, by no means took it so. 
 My apprenticeship, to them, was merely a huge joke. I be 
 
376 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 a doctor? Get out! No midget who bore the sobriquets of 
 Chipmunk, Tom Thumb, Minus Quantity, and so forth, 
 could really, by them, be thought of as a doctor. Already, 
 because of my size, I had ofttimes had hard beatings — beat- 
 ings by boys much bigger than I, beatings cruel and pro- 
 longed. 
 
 One day there had shown up in my room at school a 
 sturdy new comer, Fritz Niebuhr by name. Born in Germany, 
 he had come to this country at the age of seven, settled with 
 his parents at Quincy, Illinois, and, lately, with still a 
 German accent in his speech, removed to Pittsfield. Fritz 
 was not at all a "minus quantity." In fact, by the fistic 
 code he was infinity plus. Blows, to him, were as nothing. 
 And, anyway, he did not have to take many of them, the 
 adversary being too soon out. Fritz was just the opposite 
 of a bully; he was looking for some one to protect. So he 
 "picked on" me, and I was more than willing to be picked 
 on in that sense. The cruelty I had been experiencing, and 
 which had developed in my character about the quickest 
 and nastiest temper this world had ever known (a temper 
 which still stays with me) that cruelty, I say, disappeared 
 like frost before the sun. 
 
 Then, all at once, Fritz left school to enter his half- 
 brother's shoe-store. 
 
 The cruelty re-began. I bought dumb-bells, Indian clubs, 
 spring-exercisers and so on — used them in my all-alone 
 gymnasium at Hayloft University. My muscles really grew 
 somewhat. Proud of them, I, one night at the post office 
 while awaiting the distribution, as so often I did await it, 
 of the mail, threw up my shirt-sleeves gallantly, and dis- 
 played my little "jay-birds." A ringing chorus of laughter 
 and jeers was the only response. Then said a boy of twice 
 my size, "I'm going to lick you — Doctor." And he stepped 
 forward. 
 
 But Fritz Niebuhr vaulted in between, at the same time 
 imparting the information, "Tom's got these muscles too." 
 
 So there was no fight that night. 
 
 But I went home, proud of Fritz yet utterly miserable 
 because I, a doctor's apprentice and a boy who could clearly 
 outlearn almost all the others in his class, could not protect 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 377 
 
 myself against the jeers of those much younger than I. There 
 was no use trying to be a doctor or anything else. Nothing 
 and nobody here on earth could ever help me help myself — 
 the only help really desirable ! 
 
 But I had forgotten the great magician, Puberty, him 
 who produces so silently yet so effectually the dramatic peri- 
 peteia in so many lives — the great crisis, or sudden reversal 
 in human organisms and in what they may be and become. 
 
 He came to me exactly on my fifteenth birthday, waved 
 his wand — if so I may speak — and, without one bit of trouble 
 on my part, I began to be covered with the loveliest lumps 
 of indisputable muscle I thought I ever had seen. I also, in a 
 few months, grew several inches in height. I never got 
 really big, but I did get big enough, big enough that is to 
 whip the worst of my tormentors, Jo Pawling. When I had 
 got through with him he looked like something the cat had 
 brought in and taken out again several times. 
 
 If anyone thinks that these matters have nothing to do 
 with the practice of medicine in the Mississippi Valley in 
 the days of which I write, he has thus far learned little from 
 my depiction of the place and time. A man in those days 
 and in that Valley had to look like a doctor to be a doctor, 
 had to look like a doctor and to act like one. For this reason 
 it was — the necessity for acting like a doctor — that my 
 father had been obliged to part with the horse he had loved 
 the most of all next to Black Jim. To have kept on driving 
 "Palomino," a "circus horse," would have killed his use- 
 fulness as a doctor completely. He might quite as well have 
 attempted to practice medicine in an old clown's suit of 
 clothing — wide pants, red spots, cone-shaped cap and every- 
 thing. And, beyond doubt, my father's height, combined 
 with his superb activity and easy strength, had much to do 
 with impressing the Pike County public with his ability as 
 a doctor. 1 
 
 1 Even in the sophisticated East, it was better, far better, that a doctor be able to "fill 
 the eye," as witness the sad case of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes, one of the greatest 
 of all the world's physicians — famous poet and discoverer, in fact, of the cause of and the 
 means for preventing child-bed fever (1842) — suffered greatly in his practice because of his 
 diminutive stature. Over and over, this, together with his boyish face, caused him to be 
 mistaken for only a small boy. Holmes himself, to his friends, ofttimes bitterly bewailed 
 
378 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 WHAT LITTLE THINGS CAN DEDOCTORIZE 
 
 It did not in those days take anything like so much as a 
 clown's suit to dedoctorize, or undignify, a physician. Just 
 a little steel and cotton could do the work. 
 
 It was indeed a very general custom in those days to use 
 an umbrella at times when and in places where no umbrella 
 to-day would be employed. For example a large, strong um- 
 brella would be mounted in a universal socket both on 
 sulkeys and on open-top buggies. Country doctors frequently 
 rode in their pleasant shade or rain-protection. So, too, did 
 sewing-machine agents, agents for pianos and organs, and, 
 indeed, nearly all town people. Farmer folk, it is true, but 
 they alone, abhorred such things as emblems of pride and 
 decadence and wealth and ostentation and utter effeminiza- 
 tion. 
 
 In the towns, too, there were large, very large, umbrellas 
 to be carried by hand. The largest of these were called 
 "family umbrellas." Under them all the members of any 
 given family would march to church with very becoming 
 pride and humility. We had no polygamists, but a widow 
 I knew who, under such a spreading, six-foot affair, was 
 accustomed to chaperone, rather to Biddy, her huddling 
 large brood to and from the Congregational Sunday School 
 and Church, Sunday after Sunday. Only of clear nights did 
 they fail to employ the umbrella. 
 
 Father bought one of these cover-all contraptions and he, 
 Mother, and the rest of us, all sticking close together under 
 the "circus tent," would march sedately through the two 
 full blocks to the Christian Church or Bush's Hall, there to 
 stand the contraption, tabernacle rather, in a corner be- 
 hind the stove at the back of the auditorium. Then we 
 would solemnly advance in single file to the Shastid seat or 
 pew. 
 
 the fate which made him appear before the world — even at the world's very "hub," Boston 
 — as something insignificant indeed. 
 
 As to his great discovery that child-bed fever (puerperal fever) is due to contagion and 
 can easily be prevented by the obstetrician's donning clean clothes and disinfecting his 
 hands, that great event was published, please to note, in 1842-43 (N. Eng. Quart. Jour. Med. 
 and Surgery, Boston, I, pp. 503-530). It has been sometimes asserted that the honor for this 
 discovery is due to Ignaz Semmelweis, of Vienna and Budapest, but Semmelweis did not 
 publish his work till 1847 ("Hochst wichtige Erfahrungen iiber die Aetiologie der in 
 Gebaranstalten epidemischen Puerperal fieber," Ztschr. d. k. k. Gesellsch. d. Aerate in Wien, 
 1847-48, IV, pt. 2, 242; 1849, V, 64). But Holmes in fact antedated Semmelweis by full five 
 years. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 379 
 
 Marching under such an umbrella was like perambulating 
 under a tent, only this tent was accommodating enough to 
 march in the same direction as we marched and at the same 
 rate of speed. 
 
 Many of the women in those days carried gaily-colored 
 sun-shades, which touchingly matched the gay tints of their 
 head-gear and gowns. Even some of the men carried colored 
 umbrellas — most commonly, I believe, green, but sometimes 
 red. The older gentlemen, who made no bones of sporting 
 a Lincoln shawl on week-days, could perceive no impro- 
 priety in carrying a green or red umbrella to church on the 
 Lord's day. They were not Puritans: no indeed. (Well, 
 some of them weren't.) 
 
 One day Father purchased a red, white and blue um- 
 brella: first a red segment, running from spire-top clean to 
 rib-tip, then a white segment running the same way and 
 distance, and then a blue segment. Then the whole series 
 began again, the entire cadoodle ending where so many 
 human arrangements have always ended — right where it 
 started. 
 
 Well, one day, Father and Mother were off in the country 
 together to see a bad case, and we three boys had had strict- 
 est orders to take that umbrella (the sun was very hot) and 
 not to fail to go to church under it. 
 
 Well, we started for church with very good intentions, 
 but, from the mouth of the alley near Dr. Doss's home, 
 some big rough boys began stoning our red, white and blue 
 contraption. These young ruffians, however, had not count- 
 ed on the presence of Brother Willie. Willie, promptly 
 furling the red, white and blue, not out of any sort or kind 
 of disloyalty to the country, but merely as a means for the 
 quick production of war material, engaged the enemy and 
 so becudgelled the ring-leaders with the flaming doodad — 
 it had a heavy stick inside it — that loud were the yells and 
 prompt the retreat as Willie, although with his colors furled, 
 chased on to victory. 
 
 Father, after that, was a good deal guyed by his friends 
 around town for disporting so elegant and colorful an affair 
 as a red, white and blue umbrella. The objection, you un- 
 derstand, was not to the carrying of an umbrella, or to 
 carrying a red, white and blue umbrella, but to carrying 
 
380 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 quite so bright a red, white and blue umbrella. So Father gave 
 up the umbrella, what was left of it, and bought him an 
 even larger one, but all of a very dead black, explaining to 
 the merchant as he took it that he had only acquired the 
 Joseph's coat affair in the first place so that umbrella stealers 
 would never dare to borrow it. It would always be identi- 
 fiable. As if to confirm his unassailed statement, he took 
 some white house-paint and with it displayed his name on 
 one of the black umbrella segments in letters that even blind 
 Samson could have beheld while the temple was going down 
 and raising impenetrable dust all about him, and then started 
 to carrying it around the Public Square. So much excitement, 
 however, was caused in the little town by this big umbrella, 
 this seemingly radical departure from conventionality, that 
 Father abandoned that do-dingus also, and Mother gave 
 it away — to a person who never carried it and who seemed 
 quite ungrateful about the gift. 
 
 Anyway, after my father had parted with the freak um- 
 brella, his medical dignity, just as after the palomino passed 
 into oblivion, was completely restored. 
 
 AH! 
 
 But now I myself was beginning to look more like a 
 doctor. Moreover, I was learning more easily than ever 
 before. Besides my school studies, which did not specially 
 interest me, I had already learned Spanish and something of 
 some other lingoes from a language teacher in the town (Dr. 
 Hiller); Syriac from Uhlemann's grammar; some of the 
 Indian dialects from various volumes; Latin and Greek — 
 with joy — from my father; and, with almost equal gusto, 
 German from Fritz Niebuhr. Night after night, in the 
 kitchen, when I had helped my mother wash and wipe the 
 dishes, here, at the back door, would come the secret tapping 
 of the F. S. S. (our boyhood's secret society), and when I 
 opened the door, in would stride Fritz. And let nobody 
 suppose he did not teach me good German. I had already 
 been placed by my father for one whole summer in the 
 exclusive custody of an old German lady, a Mrs. Mason, 
 with whom, so long as I stayed with her, I was to speak, 
 read and write nothing at all but German. So now, under 
 Fritz, I made further progress even more easily. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 381 
 
 I never can forget the linguistic ecstasy of those nights 
 — or Fritz. 
 
 As I became older, I also grew, as I thought, more digni- 
 fied. I did nothing again, no matter what, for the legal 
 tender of our Boyville — pins, not even whole papers full of 
 them. The lighted-candle processions, which formerly I had 
 taken much part in, I forswore altogether now. 1 
 
 Neither did I participate in the more adult and respectable 
 parades on the Courthouse Square, though again and again 
 I stood near by and watched them after hours and hours of 
 confinement in the office. 
 
 My chief recreation on the Public Square was in watching 
 the old-fashioned medicine shows — of which we had many, 
 all now buried in the far-away past. There would generally 
 be cowboy singers, two or three war-dancing Indians, then 
 last, and really "least" too, in importance (though you 
 never could have convinced those old-fashioned Pittsfieldians 
 of the fact) the so-called "doctor." He was always a great 
 bullock of a man, swarthy of hide, black of eye and hair. 
 The latter fell down his neck and shoulders in a glorious 
 cascade. It was surely not much proof of medical knowledge 
 in the head it seemed to grow from, for, after the show, I 
 actually saw the "doctor" on a number of occasions remove 
 his great cataract of a wig and lay it carefully away in a box. 
 After all it was not much more of a "fake" than the long- 
 tailed coats which "regular" doctors wore daily and the 
 equally removable plug hats they went to church in. 
 
 1 As kerosene lamps came into use, the old-fashioned tallow candles passed out. That 
 left on my mother's hands a very large quantity of useless tallow candles. So, when grown 
 men on the Public Square got to parading in water-proof caps and capes, while carrying 
 lighted kerosene torches mounted on painted wooden sticks — all this to exhibit their choice 
 of candidate for president of the United States — we boys, imitating, had had our own 
 political parades up and down the streets that ran by my father's house. After awhile 
 the supply of those otherwise useless candles began to give out. Then, one day, said my 
 mother: "Tom, do you want to make some more candles with me? You children seem so 
 very happy, playing. I so love too, as I sit a-sewing, to hear you all at play!" 
 
 We made the candles — scores of them, hundreds of them. And, after that, as we boys 
 marched, counter-marched, formed echelons and so forth, I whispered from time to time 
 to Fritz Niebuhr, Gus Heck, George Heck, Car Hesley, George and Herman Robinson, 
 Johnny Lovitt, and many others of the long, long list of those now mostly dead, "Shout 
 louder, boys! Shout louder! She likes to hear us play!" 
 
 Yes, "mostly dead." But the world goes on. And, even as I write these lines, I hear 
 in the street beneath my window, the shouts of other, then long unborn, children playing 
 on their homeward road from school. And I too, much to the astonishment of those present- 
 day children, sometimes up with my window and then cry, "Shout louder, children! Shout 
 louder! I like to hear you play." 
 
382 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 When the banjoing and the singing and the war-dancing 
 had brought together a large enough crowd, the doctor, 
 promising more music after his "medical lecture" (of course 
 to keep the crowd from scattering) would begin the lecture, 
 which, of course, was merely a sales talk. At the close of 
 the lecture, the sales themselves would begin — the real 
 objective of the evening. 
 
 A "come-on man" in the crowd would step up promptly 
 in response to the invitation, "Who'll be the first lucky man 
 to buy a bottle?" Then a come-on woman, perhaps saying, 
 "Cured my son-in-law's rheumatism, livin' over in Missouri." 
 
 And then the fun was on. 
 
 Sales would rise sometimes to a hundred, even two 
 hundred, bottles. At a dollar a piece, and little cost to the 
 "doctor" excepting for bottles and labels, the "clean-up" 
 was immense. 
 
 And it was all for cash. Again and again I saw people 
 who, for years, had paid my father not a cent for medical 
 and surgical services, rendered ofttimes in the middle of the 
 night, step up eagerly to pay out cash for the worthless 
 nostrums of a cowboy "doctor." 
 
 But this I will say in favor of the cowboy doctor. Never, 
 I believe, in any of his harangues, did he stoop so low as to 
 hold that diseases are produced by devil possession. Indeed, 
 on one occasion, one of this gentry even declared that the 
 germ theory was, as to most diseases "the absolutely correct 
 explanation' '—adding, of course, that the particular nostrum 
 which he sold was "death to all germs" and "life to all 
 people." 
 
 Thereby I understood, of course, that the germ theory 
 of disease was becoming so widely accepted that even he, 
 the street doctor, could cash in on it. 
 
 Yes, I learned a great deal from the long-haired, long- 
 pursed cowboy doctors — especially about human psychology. 
 
 And, incidentally, about regular M.D's. For, one day, 
 here, down to my father's office, while Father and I were 
 sitting in it, came old Dr. Dublin to complain to my father 
 about my "hanging around" that quack cowboy doctor's 
 "outfit. ' ' ' 'A mere child, ' ' defended my father, ' 'and curious 
 about everything." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 383 
 
 "But isn't he now a physician's apprentice?" So Dublin. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Well, then. It seems to me you might be teaching him 
 at least a little about the code of ethics." 
 
 "Very true," I put in, trying to trap the irate Irishman. 
 "Very true. And even that cowboy doctor favors that code, 
 has in fact spoken out strongly in its favor almost every 
 night he's been here." 
 
 "That's a lie!" cried Dublin hotly. "That's an absolute 
 lie! Each and every night he's spoken I've been on the 
 outskirts of his crowd and heard everything. And — " 
 
 "Oho!" I put in. "So each and every night he's spoken 
 you've been on the outskirts of the crowd and heard every- 
 thing. Well, it seems to me that, if a physician's apprentice 
 has no ethical right to listen to a quack doctor, a full fledged 
 physician himself has still less right to do so." 
 
 The irate physician was now so terribly enraged that he 
 could not talk at all. "What — when — why the devil — why, 
 Doctor Shastid — a boy like that — " 
 
 I was just on the point of remarking "You see, Doctor 
 Dublin, wrong as I was I was right," when up jumps the 
 Doctor, claps my father on the shoulder, and, laughingly, 
 declares, "Well, he ain't so bad a spalpeen after all: he 
 should be Irish." 
 
 And off he flew. 
 
 But he had not forgiven me for trapping him. 
 
 As I grew, I had to take on other fighters, and bigger, 
 than Jo Pawling. In my unspectacular body there was a 
 muscular power almost as great as that in the largest students 
 in the school. Moreover, my brother Willie, a born genius 
 in the art of boxing if ever there has been one, had taught 
 me something of pugilistic technique. Nevertheless I was 
 sad and depressed. 
 
 The recollection of the little white house, of which I 
 have already spoken, and the image of which, bright and 
 shining though it seemed, was continuously present like a 
 funeral pall to me — a constant reminder of the inevitability 
 of dissolution, the ultimate destruction of all that anyone 
 could ever construct — that recollection, I say, depressed me 
 and kept me depressed beyond the power of words to utter. 
 
384 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Then, too, I had, during an experiment on the eyes of my 
 pet pigeon, Billie, done a foolish, a most ignorant, thing 
 which had promptly even if unintentionally killed him. And, 
 finally, there were frequent headaches, due, as years later I 
 learned, to eye-strain, which could not be relieved except by 
 daily rest of the eyes and long, lonely walks in the country. 
 
 Noting all which things, my father, some months after my 
 sixteenth birthday, took me out driving with him into the 
 country. I had a strange feeling that all was not to be well 
 with me that day, and I remember distinctly that, as we 
 passed through the Public Square, a dog from somewhere 
 down the alleys, barked with a weird anger and strange 
 fretfulness. It made me almost superstitious, as if the bark- 
 ing of a dog could have had some bearing on my destiny. 
 After we had driven a few miles south of town, my father 
 whispered with an odd gentleness: "This is going to be a 
 somewhat different trip with me from any you have taken 
 before." 
 
 We were in the sleigh and driving the ever-rejoiceful 
 Nightshade, but even her continual animation, oft-repeated 
 whinnies and semi-caprioles at the constantly stimulating 
 air, conjoined with the ever-social jingling of the sleigh- 
 bells did not remove my curious fear of what was coming. 
 
 After a few calls made, Father drove to the place where, 
 in summer, he had occasionally stopped for both of us to 
 drink from a spring, at which times he had frequently re- 
 peated Coleridge's "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath." 
 But to-day, after halting his horse, and looking over the 
 miles and miles of frigid snowscape, he asked, "Have I ever 
 repeated to you Percival's 'The Coral Grove?' ' and, on my 
 answering that he had not, he repeated it all, sometimes 
 speaking in a rather quavering voice. 1 Then he cried, "It's 
 cold. Let's hitch and walk awhile." 
 
 1 Inasmuch as the poem in question, many years ago, used to appear in all school 
 readers and, beautiful as it is, is difficult to come by now-a-days, I here repeat it. The 
 younger readers may possibly also be interested. 
 
 THE CORAL GROVE 
 
 1. Deep in the wave is a coral grove, 
 
 Where the purple mullet and gold-fish rove; 
 Where the sea-flower spreads its leaves of blue, 
 That never are wet with the falling dew, 
 But in bright and changeful beauty shine, 
 Far down in the green and glassy brine. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 385 
 
 So we walked for a mile or more, and I could see he was 
 greatly excited. At last he said, "I may as well come to the 
 point. Our lives, yours and mine, can never be quite the 
 same again, Thomas." 
 
 "No, sir." 
 
 His words were simple, but they seemed to reach out and 
 wrap me up in tenderness and protection — yet also in fear. 
 All at once I understood. I was about to go to Inveni College. 
 "Maybe you can learn something there," said my father, 
 trying to look severe. Then all at once a flood of joy swept 
 over me. But, in the twinkling of an eye, came a horrifying 
 change! My father's words were ringing through my brain 
 like the tolling of a great death bell. No, life could never 
 be the same for me again. Said my father. "Just what is the 
 matter, Tom? Aren't you happy about going?" I said, "Yes, 
 of course I am. But I am homesick already." 
 
 2. The floor is of sand, like the mountain drift, 
 
 And the pearl-shells spangle the flinty snow; 
 From coral rocks the sea-plants lift 
 
 Their boughs, when the tides and billows flow. 
 The water is calm and still below, 
 
 For the winds and waves are absent there, 
 And the sands are bright as the stars that glow 
 
 In the motionless fields of upper air. 
 
 3. There, with its waving blade of green, 
 
 The sea-flag streams through the silent water, 
 And the crimson leaf of the dulse is seen 
 
 To blush like a banner bathed in slaughter. 
 
 4. There, with a light and easy motion, 
 
 The fan-coral sweeps through the clear deep sea; 
 And the yellow and scarlet tufts of ocean 
 Are bending like corn on the upland lea; 
 
 5. And life in rare and beautiful forms 
 
 Is sporting amid those bowers of stone, 
 And is safe, when the wrathful spirit of storms 
 Has made the top of the waves his own. 
 
 6. And when the ship from his fury flies, 
 
 When the myriad voices of ocean roar, 
 When the wind-god frowns in the murky skies, 
 And demons are waiting the wreck on shore; 
 
 7. Then, far below, in the peaceful sea, 
 
 The purple mullet and gold-fish rove, 
 Where the waters murmur tranquilly 
 
 Through the bending twigs of the coral grove. 
 
 — James G. Percival. 
 
THE DOCTOR WHO FATHERED A TRAMP 
 
 Part II — In My Youth and Early Manhood 
 
 My father went with me to Inveni. The place was more 
 than a hundred miles from Pittsfield — just think of that! — 
 and, besides, one changed cars on that trip four times. On 
 one of the railway trains and, later, at a junction-point, 
 (Peoria), and on the train after that, my father began to 
 remember a certain weakness in my make up. "Son," he 
 said, "for years I have noticed that, in all the affairs of the 
 intellect, you display a striking disposition to wander, to be 
 a mere vagabond, a tramp. Sometimes I find you with a 
 crude Nick Carter or a Frank Reid, again with last year's 
 seed-catalogue, once more with a Syriac grammar (which 
 your too indulgent mother bought you, to no purpose that 
 I can see) next with a comparative vocabulary of the North 
 American Indian languages. Next still, with something else 
 — Blackstone's Commentaries or Gray's Anatomy. Once I 
 think I caught you reading the Bible. 
 
 "As I say, you are an intellectual tramp, and — " 
 
 I burst out laughing. My father to lecture me for being 
 a mental tramp! My father! He who, on our rides together 
 over the hills to see the sick, had talked to me on almost 
 every subject that the mind of man had ever turned to — 
 from Abraham Lincoln's best holds in wrestling to "the 
 neuter plural always ends in a" \ 
 
 Again I laughed. 
 
 And then I was sorry. Tears were standing in his China- 
 blue eyes. 
 
 He swallowed once or twice very hard, blinked, and con- 
 tinued: "I'm sending you to Inveni at a great financial 
 sacrifice to your mother and me. Your brother Willie, 
 furthermore, has been at that institution for almost three 
 years, and he's stuck to the business and made a fine success 
 of it. I want you to beat that record — if you can." 
 
 If I could ! Why I could of course (I thought) and I would. 
 
 I was not able, however, to refrain from inveighing bit- 
 terly at the rigid curriculums of the colleges of those days, 
 especially of Inveni. I alleged there were different types of 
 mind, that my own (assuming, of course, that I had a mind) 
 
388 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 was not by nature one that took very kindly to a hard-and- 
 fast program laid down for its operations by any other minds 
 — minds which, perchance, did not understand its needs and 
 uses — if any. Especially in mathematics, I could not — 
 
 "Pah!" cried Father. "Such talk! Now you just forget 
 your wandering ways. If you don't, if you keep on at Inveni 
 in the way you have done at Pittsfield, you will, I predict, 
 to the end of your life, amount to little — just be a tramp, 
 a vagrant in the fields of intellect. And, if you do, you'll 
 meander into failure. 
 
 "Make no mistake about it, my son. Either you will 
 march in the straight and narrow path of the established 
 learning, or else you'll tramp to failure. 
 
 ' I did not then foresee that, some day, I would write a 
 book about my life and name it "Tramping to Failure" just 
 because of the expression which my Father had now used 
 about me and my many sorts of doings that led to nowhere. 
 
 "Now let's see," continued Father, "Which road will 
 you take — the broad and pleasant and crooked one? 
 
 "Answer me, my son. Do you mean to keep on tramping 
 and tramping to failure?" 
 
 "No," I assured him. "By all the " 
 
 "Don't swear, just say." 1 
 
 I just said, and he took my word. 
 
 A few minutes later we reached the drab little town, 
 Inveni, wherein the college of that name was situated, the 
 Procrustean college wherein my mental bones were shortly 
 after to be taxed and pulled on, wracked and wrenched, 
 stretched out of shape and made over into something else than 
 what God had plainly wanted them to be. 
 
 1 The habit of swearing, as a rule unconsciously, quite, I had contracted even as a very 
 small child at the Pittsfield Public Schools where there was more profanity and obscenity, 
 even among the very youngest pupils, than I have ever heard afterward or elsewhere, even 
 to the time in which I write. 
 
 And, to this day, although I have shed obscenity, and struggle still against profanity 
 (as a rule am wholly victor in the strife) yet — sometimes — I — 
 
 It always happens so quickly! That early, that childish, environment returns so like 
 a streak of lightning, and speaks through my mechanical old lips. And then I am ashamed 
 and ashamed. 
 
 My father, so strict about most other matters, was always rather lenient about my 
 profanity — not condonative at all, but lenient, because he knew the frightful temper which 
 tyranny at those schools had developed in me as well as the floods and cascades or profanity 
 which constantly assailed my ears. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 389 
 
 But I never forgot my father's expression, his prediction 
 that, if I did not change my ways materially, I would surely 
 go "tramping to failure." 
 
 HECTIC CAREER 
 "Nothing ever happens in a country practice," say some 
 medical students and doctors. These same persons no doubt 
 would also allege that nothing ever happens in a country 
 college, especially one that is very largely theological, where- 
 by too they would be mistaken. I formed at once an enmity 
 with the President of Inveni, partly because of the rigid 
 curriculum at that institution, with never an elective or 
 optional subject in it, and partly because of certain incon- 
 sistencies which I found in that high dignitary's principles 
 and actions. Thus, he would tolerate no use of tobacco on 
 the part of any student, and yet he would go about the 
 village, even the college grounds themselves spouting tobacco 
 ambier over very much of the landscape. Some of his other 
 teachings, though quite right in themselves, were abso- 
 lutely inconsistent with certain financial transactions in 
 which he had been engaged — to the very great loss of both 
 my father and myself. 1 But, to my father, this man could 
 do no wrong. He was, in a way, the head, in our state, of 
 the church to which our family belonged and to which 
 Grandfather and Grandmother Shastid, Grandfather and 
 Grandmother Hall, had likewise been adherents. My father, 
 though like any other scientist he was a man of liberal views 
 on religion, yet, even when all his reservations had been 
 deducted from his credo, he was still enamored of the family's 
 church — could not under any circumstances have given it up 
 or admitted a serious wrong in it. I, therefore, had to 
 remain at Inveni College: so much was certain — although 
 
 1 Detailed information about these curious manipulations can be found in "Tramping 
 to Failure," pages 40, 43 and 49 (photographic reproductions of stock certificates), and 
 94 to 97 inclusive. 
 
 A great deal of stock in "The Original Fourth of July Mining Company" was sold 
 throughout the state of Illinois, whereby bitter disappointment had come to many members 
 of our denomination. 
 
 I still have many of the papers and letters concerning the sale to us of this stock, as 
 well as a fairly detailed and well-documented record of the company. It was finally dis- 
 solved for failure to file in the office of the Secretary of State its legally required report, the 
 suit having been brought in the Circuit Court of Sangamon County by the Attorney General. 
 See People of the State of Illinois exrel Attorney General vs. Original Fourth of July Mining 
 Co.— No. 38517. 
 
390 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 at times I rejoiced to recollect the words of Charles William 
 
 Eliot, President of Harvard: " education does not 
 
 consist in following dogmatic courses of study, memorizing 
 little understood statements, or mastering set tasks, but 
 rather the joyous and free exercise of all the human powers 
 in the search for truth." How I longed to go to Harvard 
 College, to meet Charles William Eliot, to engage at Harvard 
 in "the joyous and free exercise of all my human powers in 
 a search for truth." 
 
 I still possess the letters 1 which, in those days, I wrote 
 to my father about my attempt to engage in "the joyous 
 and free exercise of all my human powers in the search for 
 truth" at Inveni — especially the reactions I was experiencing 
 there among the theological students [there were many of 
 these at Inveni, although it was a general as well as a theo- 
 logical institution] with respect to the truth about the causes 
 of disease. 2 
 
 One day in the spring I had got to talking with some of 
 these embryo ministers on the campus, when, all at once 
 and quite unintentionally, I happened to say something about 
 the "germ theory" of disease — something in favor of it, of 
 course. I have just stated that this was in the spring, and, 
 on that day, there was the old-time vernal magic, the soft, 
 blossomy wonder of the new-old miracle stirring in the 
 
 1 In fact all the hundreds of letters and other communications which, in the course of 
 more than forty years, I received from my father and mother, as well as all those which 
 I, in turn, transmitted to them, I still possess. I possess to this day even all the letters 
 that have ever been written to me by my former college mates, "Mushmouth" for example, 
 and by practically all other persons. Inasmuch as I used to report to my parents almost 
 everything that happened to me, giving often the exact words of important or interesting 
 conversations, I am able now, easily, even at this distant day, to reproduce the colloquies 
 and other events of those long-gone periods with great accuracy indeed. This fact I de- 
 clare not by way of excuse for any prolix method of narration, for that I shall seek to avoid, 
 but merely in order to explain the positive manner in which, even after all these intervening 
 years, I still can write or that curious institution herein called "Inveni." 
 
 I will add, because of its bearing on certain important matters to appear in later portions 
 of this book, that I have always kept quite accurate copies of all the letters I have ever 
 written — commercial, professional and social — to my parents and to everybody else. "Over- 
 particular," do you remark? It is one of the best of all habits to preserve such things. 
 
 1 may add for the benefit of several persons who will necessarily be specially interested 
 in this portion of my book that the letters and documents from its Inveni period were (after 
 being mislaid and believed for a number of years to have been lost) strangely and almost 
 miraculously rescued just as they were about to be committed to the flames in a stove. 
 
 2 I should at this point make clear that the name "Inveni," as well as all the names of 
 all the persons whom I met at that curious institution, excepting of course that of my brother 
 Willie, are absolutely fictitious. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 391 
 
 earth. I ought, perhaps, to have been content to enjoy that 
 warming and blossoming miracle, but, somehow, the thought 
 of my father was in my mind, and so, quite unintentionally, 
 I stirred up controversy. 
 
 All of a jump I was in the middle of an excited debate, 
 soon feeling very young, very callow and utterly ridiculous 
 — largely of course because so nearly alone in my opinion. 
 
 "Just what do you mean by 'the germ theory'?" inquired 
 one of the group of embryo preachers that had gathered so 
 suddenly and excitedly around me. "The theory that all 
 diseases are produced by bugs, of course. Yes, that's what 
 you mean." 
 
 "Gentlemen, as to this confabulation, include me out," 
 said the biggest and rosiest-cheeked, likewise the most dip- 
 lomatic. And off went he to join a group who were pitch- 
 ing and catching ball. 
 
 The rest remained, and instructive, as well as interesting 
 and exciting, it was to me then and is now to note the great 
 variety of opinions, or reactions, on the part of these embryo 
 preachers and self-sufficient scientists. 
 
 "I do not, "said I, "by the 'germ theory' mean that all 
 diseases or any of them are produced by bugs. Bugs, or 
 beetles, are Coleoptera (a fairly high order of animals) and 
 have nothing at all to do with the matter. But bacteria — 
 the lowest forms perhaps of all earthly life — purely vegetable 
 too, as Cohn, of Germany, has demonstrated, extremely 
 simple, and, some of them, though not all, extremely' dan- 
 gerous to human life. Neither do I say, nor does any germ 
 theorist say, that all diseases are due to them. The over-use 
 of alcohol, for example, is the cause of delirium tremens." 
 
 "Speculation!" piped a little fellow, superciliously. "Of 
 course not as to the alcohol." 
 
 "Not at all. Many diseases have been absolutely demon- 
 strated to be produced each by its own specific baterium and 
 by nothing else." 
 
 "How do you know such a thing?" 
 
 "In the same way, precisely, as that in which, in the 
 case of each disease, the discoverer of that disease's causes, 
 knew that he was right. Here are the requirements that must 
 be fulfilled before any given disease may be assigned to any 
 given bacterium as that bacterium's result. The require- 
 
392 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 ments, I may say, are those laid down by Koch of Berlin 
 himself." 
 
 "An atheist!" shouted the little fellow, contemptuously. 
 "That's what he is," confirmed another; "I've heard about 
 him." 
 
 "I'm not discussing, gentlemen," said I, "at the present 
 moment, the religion of any of bacteriology's chief founders, 
 but bacteriology — rather these particular bacteria which 
 have been discovered to be productive of disease. Not all 
 bacteria produce disease. Many, as Cohn of Berlin — to 
 mention his name another time — conclusively showed in his 
 little book, a few years ago, many bacteria produce, instead 
 of disease, the rancidity of butter, some the putrefaction of 
 cheese, some the bitterness and ropiness which occur in bad 
 wine, some the putrefaction of nitrogenous substances — the 
 so-called 'decay' of dead bodies. Still others, it is fairly well 
 proved, are of great value in the improvement of soil. The 
 kind we are chiefly concerned about just now, however, are 
 the pathogenic — which as you know means 'disease-pro- 
 ducing' bacteria." 
 
 "Be kind enough to tell us, Dr. Shastid," [the degree was 
 granted me ironically of course] "be kind enough to tell us 
 where bacteria, pathogenic and non-pathogenic alike, come 
 from — your imagination?" 
 
 "No indeed. They are omnipresent." 
 
 "Ever see one?" 
 
 "Yes, and many more than just one. — They are omni- 
 present, found in air, water, soil, in the mouths of men, in 
 their noses, on their hair, all over their bodies, in their urine 
 and their stools, in privy piles, in the manure from livery 
 stables, all over the sidewalks and in the roadways. In fact 
 a very great many bacteria can be found in the air, constitut- 
 ing a considerable proportion of the atmospheric dust." 
 
 "Snow, snow everywhere — on the ground and in the air," 
 chanted yet another miniature reverend. 
 
 One ministerial student, a lean fellow with a hacking 
 cough but a calm, careful and thoughtful eye, stepped from 
 the periphery of the circle nearer to the place whereon I stood. 
 "I am very much interested, Shastid," he declared, "in what 
 you were just about to say concerning the 'requirements' of 
 which you have just spoken and which, as you say, must be 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 393 
 
 fulfilled in the case of any bacterium before that bacterium 
 can properly be assigned as the certain cause of a given 
 disease. What are those requirements?" 
 
 "Those requirements," I replied, "which are well called 
 'Koch's postulates,' for first of all he laid them down, 1 are 
 these : First , the micro-organism in question must be demon- 
 strably present in every case of the disease in question. 
 Second, it must be cultivatable in pure culture. That means 
 that one of the germs must be found able, under proper 
 laboratory conditions, to colonize (reproduce its kind) not 
 only indefinitely but -purely — i.e., without producing any 
 other kind of germ than just its own kind." 
 
 "And how is that done, pray?" It was the little fellow, 
 once again, who was sneering and snaring — or attempting 
 to snare. 
 
 "In this way. At first, Koch cultured (colonized or repro- 
 duced) his germs in plates of liquid soup. Other germs than 
 those he had introduced into the soup would sometimes get 
 into the soup here and there from the atmosphere. At first 
 these germs — the one introduced intentionally and the others 
 which had got in accidentally — were fairly well separated, 
 but, as they reproduced, the different colonies of the differ- 
 ent kinds of germs got all mixed together. Then what the 
 man had, of course, was an impure culture — a culture con- 
 sisting of various kinds of germs. Through an accident he 
 found that the solid raw surface of a bisected potato would 
 also grow germs abundantly. Accidentally again, of course, 
 other germs than the one he had intentionally placed on the 
 potato would sometimes fall on the potato from the atmos- 
 phere, and, once again, each germ would produce a little 
 island, or colony of its own offspring. But — and here was 
 the great point — the different colonies, or kinds, of bacteria 
 did not get mixed up with one another, but each 'staid put' 
 — remained on the spot whereon it had grown, because the 
 potato, unlike soup, was solid. Koch then had a pure culture 
 — a culture consisting of one kind of bacterium only. More- 
 over, he could then take bacteria from that pure colony of 
 germs he had intentionally cultivated, and, placing them in 
 
 1 Koch did so in 1882. Berk klin. Wochenschr. XXI, 221-230. 
 
 Those postulates are beautifully termed by Victor Robinson "The Four Pillars of 
 Bacteriology." ("The Story of Medicine," p. 405.) 
 
394 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 a tube filled with sterile gelatin or gelatin mixed with beef 
 broth (the gelatin, mixed or unmixed, having been ster- 
 ilized by boiling) he soon would have his culture tube 
 absolutely filled with another pure culture of the same germ. 
 Placing germs from this tube into yet another tube of sterile 
 gelatin, he soon would have yet another colony filling an- 
 other tube, and so on indefinitely. 
 
 "In other words, any given germ produced always its 
 own kind, just as a rat does not produce, ever, a camel or a 
 whale, but, always, more rats. 
 
 "Now, as to the next requirement: Third, inoculation 
 with a given pure culture must produce the disease in ques- 
 tion in all the kinds of animals that are susceptible to that 
 disease. Thus, frogs, eels and turtles do not have tuberculosis. 
 Guinea pigs and many other species of animals do. The third 
 requirement, then, is not that a pure culture in question 
 shall produce the disease in question in animals that are 
 unsusceptible to that disease, but that it shall produce such 
 disease in such species, and those only, as are capable of 
 having that disease. 
 
 " Fourth, the germ in question must be capable, when 
 given in sufficient dosage, of producing the disease in ques- 
 tion in healthy individuals that are of any susceptible species 
 and that have not been rendered immune." 
 
 The crowd was for some time silent. At length the man 
 with the hacking cough and the clear, steady eyes, queried 
 once more — slowly and with care in the use of his words, 
 as if he felt that some great discovery which he himself was 
 about to make, in case he were careful, might be terribly 
 missed by him in case he were not so. ' 'The microscope, ' ' he 
 said, "the compound microscope was discovered by the 
 Jansens, was it not, very late in the 16th century?" 
 
 "Yes, that is true. And then, late — " 
 
 "And then, late in the next century Anthony van Leeu- 
 wenhoek, laying aside the compound instrument because he 
 had found that he could see into the world of smallness 
 better through single lenses than through the compounds 
 then in use, in case the single lenses were made with the care 
 which he was accustomed to giving them, he, I say, with 
 such simple instruments, first saw bacteria. Is not that right?' ' 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 395 
 
 Here very plainly was a man of unusual character, not an 
 ignoramus at all but a man that loved God's truth. "Yes," 
 I said, "That's all correct." 
 
 "I've been reading about these things," he went on, in 
 the same cautious, never-make-a-mistake manner, "and, as 
 I understand them, a man named Pasteur, over in France, 
 absolutely disproved the theory of spontaneous generation." 
 
 "Yes," I agreed, "that he did." 
 
 And that, then, appeared to prove to him that different 
 diseases, inasmuch as they were decidedly different from one 
 another, and therefore must be due to distinctly different 
 causes, set him thinking that diseases, many of them at all 
 events, must be due to living causes, and each disease to its 
 own one specific cause." 
 
 "Correct." 
 
 "Then he discovered the microscopic germs that caused 
 sickness in wines and beer, and, by mildly heating the wines 
 and the beer ('pasteurization' we now call it) he prevented 
 the development of those diseases?" 
 Yes again. 
 
 "And later he cured the two diseases of silk worms, also 
 cured and then prevented anthrax in sheep." 
 
 "Perfectly true." 
 
 "And next he prevented or cured anthrax and several 
 other diseases in human beings." 
 
 "Yes, he did." 
 
 "And then came onto the scene this fellow at Berlin — 
 what's his name?" 
 
 "Koch, Robert Koch." 
 
 "Yes. Yes, of course. And he's discovered the causes of 
 several other diseases of human beings." 
 
 "Yes indeed he has. Even tuberculosis." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Gentlemen," he almost whispered, looking round the 
 crowd. "My sweetheart died of tuberculosis." After a very 
 long silence, he repeated, "Died — of — tuberculosis." 
 
 Then, after a silence still longer, the same cautious, triply 
 earnest man began talking again: A wild delirium of joy 
 seemed to grip him, "Man," he almost shouted, "will, if 
 what you, Shastid, say is the truth, be on a plane of equality 
 with the gods — for a very long time at least. Endless life! 
 
396 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Endless life, without having to go through death to reach it. " 
 
 But a man with a red nose and a shiny bald head came 
 up closer, and, facing round the crowd, began throwing 
 chilly water upon his brother preacher's veins. "Immortality 
 on earth," he declared, "would be of no value. Only in 
 heaven could it have worth. In a world like this, with its 
 damnable treachery and its sin and so on, would anyone 
 wish to live forever? And don't you suppose that if any- 
 thing like this immortality from mere bugs had been on 
 God's program, He would not have prophesied about it, 
 prophesied repeatedly in his holy word?" 
 
 "Perhaps He has," said the cautious theologian. "There 
 are so many prophesies whose meaning we have not yet 
 discovered." 
 
 "That doctrine which Shastid so emphatically advo- 
 cates," rejoined the bald one, "is more exhilarating than 
 liquor, more soothing than tobacco, more deceptive than 
 both put together. Yet hell awaits sinners just the same — 
 hell and eternal suffering. There is only one gate into life, 
 and that is the gate called death. Thank God for that gate." 
 
 Turning to me, he started to "rip me up" quite thorough- 
 ly, but some non-, or perhaps anti-, theologian, or it may 
 have been a mere buffoon, cried out, "Let Shastid have his 
 say; he knows all about bugs. He thinks bugs, eats bugs. 
 Maybe he even sleeps with bugs — don't you, Shastid?" 
 
 "You ask my landlord," I countered. "He knows what 
 he gives me." 
 
 "At all events," went on bald-pate, "the causes of 
 diseases, all diseases, are clearly stated in the scripture. 
 Luke IV, 40-41: 'And when the sun was setting, all they that 
 had ANY sick with divers diseases brought them unto him; 
 and he laid his hands on every one of them, and healed 
 them.' I do not believe that any of your bacteria, as you call 
 them, or all of them together could ever experimentally 
 produce a single case of a single disease. I simply do not 
 believe it." 
 
 I replied, "It is not far to Chicago. Suppose we go up 
 there to a bacteriological laboratory, any one of your choos- 
 ing, and there test the matter out. All you have to do is 
 take up some anthrax bacteria into a hypodermic syringe 
 and then inject them under your skin. That would not be 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 397 
 
 painful, and if, as you say, bacteria are harmless, you would 
 suffer no ill consequences. More than that, you would be 
 rendering the greatest service not only to science but to the 
 truth of the scriptures on the particular point in question." 
 
 "I would gladly go," said my opponent, "but I have 
 not the money." 
 
 "I will pay your way, there and back, and your hotel 
 bills." 
 
 "But I should have to miss attendance at the college." 
 
 "We can leave Friday night, make the experiment Satur- 
 day morning, be back here at Inveni a little after noon." 
 
 "But I ought to be busy studying, even on Saturday." 
 
 "Nothing to prevent your reading your textbooks on 
 the train." 
 
 He drew a deep breath. "Besides," he evaded, "we might 
 not get back on Saturday and then I should have to miss 
 church." 
 
 "Wherever we are on Sunday morning, we can go to 
 church. Churches are everywhere in the land." 
 
 He looked from one to another of the surrounding future 
 ecclesiastics. Finally, "What do you think?" he said to 
 them as a group. 
 
 One, a little, nervous fidgety fellow, piped up, "I think 
 the test would not be worth an infinitesimal snap. Why? 
 Because we are all creatures of the imagination. If you shot 
 yourself with what are merely called anthrax germs, your 
 imagination might very easily produce anthrax in you just 
 because you would imagine yourself into having the symp- 
 toms." 
 
 "Yes, that's it," rejoicefully confirmed my chief oppon- 
 ent. "That's it. I might just imagine that I had the 
 symptoms." 
 
 "No way out in that," I persisted. "You have said 
 that none of the bacteria can produce a disease. I will, 
 with your permission, select a tube of germs whose very 
 name you shall not know. I will then write the name of the 
 disease which those germs are known to produce and mail 
 
 it to Dr , here in Inveni. He is an opponent 
 
 of the germ theory, so you can trust him. He is an honest 
 man, so I can trust him too. When you get sick, which you 
 will, and have been sick for some time, Dr , 
 
398 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 living here in Inveni, will open the sealed envelope contain- 
 ing the name of your disease, and, if you do not have that 
 very disease (which you could not possibly have imagined 
 yourself into having, because you did not know the name 
 of the disease or any of its symptoms) I will confess my 
 great mistake and in public." 
 
 But the good fellow was obstinate. "Even so," he 
 persisted, "I might imagine myself into some other disease 
 than the one named in the envelope, and I do not want to 
 get sick at all." 
 
 Then I had him, at least I thought that I had. Asked I, 
 "Can dogs imagine themselves into having a disease of any 
 sort or kind whatever?" 
 
 "Why no, I suppose not." 
 
 "Very well. Let us, not even in the presence of the dog, 
 select our bacteria, say those producing anthrax, load our 
 hypodermic syringe with it, then go into the animal room 
 and inject the dog — without even telling him what is going 
 on. If that dog does not have anthrax I will confess myself 
 mistaken and both science and holy writ will be the gainers. 
 All you theological students too can preach the result of the 
 experiment to all of the world so long as you may live. 
 
 "Remember. A dog could not possibly understand what 
 anthrax is, therefore imagine that he had it, even if you 
 told him he was expected to have anthrax. And we, it is 
 agreed, would not even tell him. And yet he would have 
 anthrax. I will stand all the expenses of the trip." 
 
 The theologian looked afar for a long time, and I knew 
 precisely what was passing in his mind. He was not really 
 considering how it could best be determined whether or not 
 certain bacteria are the causes of many diseases. What he 
 was doing was — considering how he could find a way out 
 of the consequences of what he knew would be a scientific 
 demonstration of the truth. At last he breathed hard again, 
 and the most of the group breathed hard in sympathy with 
 him. That meant that he thought he had thought of a way 
 out while the others were glad he had thought of it. 
 
 "I would gladly accept your offer, Shastid," he finally 
 said, "only for one thing. A dog has a right to its life. 
 That dog would have a right to live, and yet we should be 
 killing it." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 399 
 
 "How should we be killing it?" I pursued relentlessly. 
 "You have just declared that bacteria do not produce any 
 disease, that in fact they are perfectly harmless. Now you 
 say it would not be right to kill the dog, that that dog has 
 a right to live." 
 
 "It does have a right, and I would fight to keep him his 
 life as long as I myself had life to fight with." 
 
 "Very fine words," said I, beginning to get nettled. 
 "Very fine indeed. But are you aware that the dogs which 
 are used in the laboratories are simply dogs that have been 
 picked up by the pound-master, and, not being wanted by 
 their owners, are condemned to die in any case, laboratory 
 or no laboratory? No dog ever dies of experimentation that 
 was not going to die soon anyway. Now you say, 'That dog 
 has a right to live and I would fight to keep him his life as 
 long as I myself have life to fight with.' Very well, that 
 dog, dozens of him, are parting with their lives in medical 
 colleges everywhere. Have you been doing any fighting for 
 any one of him? Do you really intend to do any? If so, 
 then do you, to be consistent, intend also to fight as long as 
 you have life to fight with for the lives of those fifty or a 
 hundred times as many other dogs who are going to die at 
 the pound-master's hands? If so, just how will you do the 
 fighting? By interfering with the duties of a public officer 
 and going to jail? Even while you were in the jail, the 
 officer would keep on killing the dogs. The only effective 
 way of saving the dogs would bq, for you to pay the dog tax 
 — on all of them. And where would you get the money? 
 And, having saved all those dogs, you would have to keep 
 housing and feeding them indefinitely — yes, even although 
 their numbers ran into the thousands and the tens of thous- 
 ands. Could you do it?" 
 
 "I would turn the dogs back to their owners." 
 
 "After you had paid the pound-master's fees for every 
 one of them, plus the dog tax for every one of them, plus 
 transportation costs on every one of them — and only to find, 
 even then, that their owners did not want them which was 
 the very reason why they themselves had not paid the tax 
 in the first place, preferring to let the pound-master take them 
 away — which gets them (and us) back to the very place at 
 which we started." 
 
400 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 The man, caught, was turning white around the mouth 
 with anger. He shouted, "I do not believe in dogs' dying 
 for damnable experimental purposes." 
 
 "Which is precisely the same as saying," I added, "that 
 you think it better for dogs to die without benefit to science 
 — and, through science, to humanity and even other animals, 
 including dogs — than to die with benefit to science, human- 
 ity, dogs and other animals. 
 
 "But let us get back to the point. If we go to Chicago 
 and conduct our experiment on a dog instead of on yourself, 
 we should — if I am right— be merely slaying a dog that was 
 going to be slain anyhow; but, if you are right — as you still 
 no doubt believe you are — then no harm whatever would 
 come to the dog from the experiment. 
 
 "I submit, gentlemen, to all of you, that I have won my 
 case. If not, it is truly the fault of my opponent, who will 
 not submit the matter to a test. I will add that, if he likes, 
 I would use, or have used, on the dog, not indeed a germ 
 that would be necessarily fatal, but some other germ, the 
 nature of the sickness produced by which would be plainly 
 determinable and yet would not, with any probability, de- 
 stroy the animal's life. I will go still further and say that, 
 in case the animal does not die, I will personally redeem 
 him from the pound-master, bring him home to Inveni and 
 make him my dog and keep him in comfort so long as he can 
 live. Thus, I shall be not taking but saving the life of a dog. 
 Or, if the experimented dog should die, then I would redeem 
 some other dog out of the dog-pound, bring him home and 
 keep him indefinitely, so that, even in that case, I would 
 have saved one dog. — And [I wound up with not a little 
 bravado] I have here — I pulled out a bank-book and some 
 promissory notes containing the most of what my Fourth of 
 July mining investment [already mentioned herein] had left 
 me of my milk-money — I have here the proof that I am able 
 to do as I say." 
 
 There was one preacher who had not yet spoken or given 
 any sign. He was a suave man, and, I believe, an honest, 
 fair-minded one. "I have been very much interested," he 
 said, "in what Shastid has been saying in defense of the 
 germ theory. Nevertheless I believe there are one or two 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 401 
 
 flaws in it. I, for one, do believe that germs have been 
 
 Slainly demonstrated to be the causative agents of very many 
 iseases. Yet I do also believe that Jesus, in performing his 
 miracles for the sick, and in attributing his cures to the 
 casting out of devils from the sick peoples' bodies, was, in 
 fact, not condemning, but really confirming and ratifying 
 in advance (that is, prophetically) the present-day germ 
 theory of the causation of disease. Is not in fact a 'germ' a 
 'devil,' a (1) living thing which is (2) unseen (that is, 
 except by means of the microscope, a purely modern affair) 
 and which (3) is inimical to human beings, even as the 
 Hater of Humanity, even Satan himself, is inimical to 
 humanity?" 
 
 Then I said, "Let me understand you. You mean that 
 Jesus was really casting out disease-producing bacteria — 
 no more and no less than exactly the kind of bacteria that 
 physicians are fighting to-day and with so great success?" 
 "Precisely. I do mean that." 
 
 "Then," I declared, "your argument certainly fails. For, 
 mark you, the 'devils' that Jesus cast out could talk, even 
 argue with him. All the bacteria that to this minute have 
 ever been discovered have been entirely devoid of speech, 
 without vocal apparatus, without even the ability to make 
 a sound. Many insects exist which, though devoid of vocal 
 organs, yet, by friction of one part on another, can make 
 certain noises, certain mating signals. But no bacterium can 
 do that. The 'devils,' on the other hand, which Jesus cast 
 out, could talk, even argue. They were certainly not bac- 
 teria. Thus Luke, IV, 'And devils also came out from many, 
 crying out, and saying, Thou art the Son of God.' Thus, 
 moreover, Matthew, VIII, 29-51: 'What have we to do with 
 thee, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us 
 
 before the time? If thou cast us out, send us away into 
 
 the herd of swine.' 
 
 And then, as he fell silent, I began to become, like my 
 father before me, wildly enthusiastic. I started to tell that 
 group that the discovery of the microbic origin of many 
 diseases and of putrefaction [suppuration] in wounds would 
 soon result in the establishment of a new heaven and a new 
 earth — not indeed a perfect earth but a very much improved 
 one, while our views of the very nature of heaven itself, 
 
402 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 like all the other views of -humankind, had been enormously 
 altered for the better. No longer, as to earth, were night- 
 pots emptied into the alleys behind houses, or in the streets 
 in front of them, even then. And what was yet to come! 
 I tried to picture — if they would listen — if they would 
 listen — 
 
 I began to note that they were walking away from me, 
 that the chapel bell was ringing the commencement of an- 
 other class hour. 
 
 I also began to realize that many of the faces to which I 
 had been talking would be the faces of my bitter enemies 
 forevermore. 
 
 A fool there was ! 
 
 THE PROCRUSTEANS 
 
 A few days later I was walking through the campus with 
 the same theological student who, when I had been holding 
 forth to a group of such students, had taken so much interest 
 in my remarks — the man with the hacking cough and so on. 
 "Almost," said he, "thou persuadest me to be a germ theo- 
 rist. Yet here is another point. 
 
 ' 'Not all diseases have as yet had their causes ferreted out. 
 May it not, then, be that, among those whose causes have 
 not been found there are some whose causes are possession 
 by devils?" 
 
 "What you suppose," I replied, "must be treated for 
 precisely what it is — a supposition. Moreover, the causes 
 of a considerable number of diseases have been found and 
 demonstrated beyond doubt or cavil, and in not one single 
 instance of any kind of sickness was devil possession dis- 
 covered to be the cause of it. And yet we are told by the 
 sacred writers that Jesus healed ALL that were sick by 
 casting out devils, not just those that were sick with certain 
 diseases. Thus Luke, IV, 41: 'And when the sun was setting 
 all they that had ANY sick with divers diseases brought 
 them unto him; and he laid his hands on every one of them, 
 and healed them.' Also Matthew, VIII, 16: 'And he cast 
 out the spirits with a word, and healed ALL that were 
 sick.' 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 403 
 
 Without a word, this man turned and walked back over 
 the way we had come, and never again would he give me 
 even a word of kindly greeting but only a stiff nod. 
 
 It might even have been that what I had said to the 
 theological students at Inveni so early in my career there 
 was largely the cause of the troubles which I had with the 
 faculty at that institution about three years later. But 
 probably not. There were other and more active causes, for, 
 indeed, the faculty there, with only two or three exceptions, 
 were as rigidly shut-minded as was the curriculum itself. 
 They wanted all their students to study the same subjects 
 in the same books in the same way and arrive at precisely 
 the same conclusions concerning the same said subjects. All 
 of which I found abhorrent. 
 
 I was, as my father had ofttimes pointed out, an intel- 
 lectual tramp, a person interested in too many things. 
 Always there rang in my ears his words of caution, "Tramp- 
 ing to failure ! Tramping to failure!" Yet never could I quit 
 my tramping. It was a part of my being. And, indeed, after 
 the passage of all those many years, even to the snowy- 
 headed moment in which I write, I am still a mental tramp. 
 But now I realize that this tramphood of mine has been and 
 still is the better part of me by far. It has kept me open- 
 minded, not only in the matter of history and linguistics 
 and chemistry, physics and the Choctaw language, but, 
 through the liberalizing influence of such studies, also open- 
 minded in medicine. Yea, though I walk in the valley of 
 the shadow of one single specialty — the eye — I fear no evil of 
 shut-mindedness. 
 
 Even my leisurely conversations with my patients have 
 shown me, often, what I should do for their afflictions. 
 
 Meantime, as to Inveni. I — to myself, I never did use the 
 expressions to any other person so long as I remained in the 
 college — termed each professor the "Procrustes" of this or 
 of that subject. The President of the college I called "The 
 Grand Procrustes." 
 
 With him, the G. P., I took the more elementary work 
 in Latin — Caesar and Virgil. Concerning my work at this 
 time the G. P. wrote to my mother: "Sister Shastid. Yours 
 of recent date came to hand in due time. I am glad you took 
 
404 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 the liberty of writing to me concerning Tommie. He has 
 not spoken to me about his troubles, and I did not know 
 that he was being worried in any way about his studies. 
 He recites to me only in Latin (Caesar) and in this he is 
 doing nicely. There is no better linguist in the class. I learn 
 from the other professors that he is doing well in his recita- 
 tions to them. I do not hear of his giving trouble in any way. 
 He is sometimes absent from his classes in consequence of 
 headache or other indisposition, as he reports. I suppose 
 
 he is sometimes a little homesick " 
 
 In mathematics all was not so well. I have always been 
 a dullard in that subject — except quite recently. In natural 
 science, the Procrustes made glowing reports concerning me. 
 It was, however, with the Procrustes of ancient languages, 
 the man who taught Greek and all the Latin authors above 
 Caesar and Virgil that I formed my strongest friendship and 
 from whom I received my highest praise. To my father he 
 wrote, "Tommie is the best linguist who has ever attended 
 this college." How I loved him! He seemed indeed, to an 
 extent, to take the place in my affections of my father him- 
 self. Of this incomparable Procrustes — more, but of evil, 
 hereafter. 
 
 OTHER PAINS THAN THOSE FROM GERMS 
 From medicine man to man of medicine — that, to the 
 truly scientific doctor, is a long, an age-long, journey, 
 filled too with many pitfalls and beset with devious by- 
 paths wherein lurk the wild beasts of numerous superstitions. 
 One of the greatest discoveries, as many know by now, is 
 the fact that numerous diseases are caused by germs — mi- 
 croscopic forms of life. But germs are not alone the cause of 
 pain, incapacity, disease. There is, for example, a whole 
 group of troubles that are known collectively as "eye- 
 strain." The central part of an eye, from the convex (bulging) 
 glassy, watch-crystal-like front thereof clean back to the 
 deeps of the eyeball (where lie the optic nerve and its ex- 
 pansion, the retina) is transparent. The light, therefore, 
 which is reflected to the eye from all illuminated objects in 
 the outer world, passes through these transparent structures 
 to the fibres of the retina (which is really a sheet of inter- 
 lacing nerve fibres). The fibres of the retina are, in the back 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 405 
 
 of the eye, gathered together into a cable called "the optic 
 nerve," and in that cable the fibres run to the back part of 
 the brain, where the "seeing" takes place. Now the light 
 from the outer world, in order to make pictures of the objects 
 in that world, upon the retina (outspread sheet of nerve- 
 fibres) in the back of the eye must be "refracted" — i.e., the 
 light rays must be, as it were, "woven" into images. 
 
 For those images to be correctly woven, the surfaces of 
 all the transparent substances which the light has to pass 
 through to get to the retina, must be correctly curved. If 
 they are not correctly curved, the situation is much as if the 
 various parts of the compound lens in a photographic camera 
 had not been ground with its curves correct. But there is 
 this difference. The grinder who makes the various parts 
 of the lens for the camera knows that he must grind the 
 surfaces of those parts correctly — or lose his job. But Nature, 
 when making the parts of the compound lenses of our eyes, 
 is not always careful. The consequence is that the compound 
 lenses in our eyes are ofttimes very defective. Nature, by 
 way of partial compensation in advance of the delivery of 
 her job (the child's birth) supplies in all the eyes she makes 
 certain tiny muscles which, by contracting, can act on one 
 or more of the parts of our compound lenses in such a way 
 as to bend them, thus correcting more or less their faulty 
 surfaces. 
 
 But this is hard work for the little muscles — more, oft- 
 times, than they are able to bear. The result is "eyestrain." 
 
 Mark you, eyestrain is of various sorts, and, therefore, 
 here is a whole string of diseases, not one of which, as a 
 rule, is produced by a germ. Yet, mark you well once again, 
 not one of these diseases is produced by a "devil" either. 
 Grinding a spectacle lens in such a way that it exactly cor- 
 rects the defects in Nature's lenses in the eye, relieves the 
 distress — makes in fact of these imperfect eyes perfect eyes. 
 
 Now my father, open-minded as he was in the matter of 
 germ-produced diseases, was not at all open-minded in the 
 matter of eyestrain and the remedy therefor. In that respect, 
 of course, he was like thousands of other well educated 
 physicians. I remember quite well how, one day — well, it 
 was the time when Dr. Dublin had come down to Father's 
 
406 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 office, there to complain that I had been hanging around the 
 street-doctor's wild west show. And Dr. Dublin and my 
 father had both declared that a Dr. Arthur Prince at Jackson- 
 ville, fine physician though they did indeed esteem him, was 
 nevertheless making himself ridiculous by fitting spectacles 
 to young people. "As if," they both shouted and with great 
 laughter, "a disease with headache as its chief symptom, 
 any other disease for that matter, could be relieved by plac- 
 ing bits of glass before the eyes!" 
 
 I had eyestrain at Inveni, not the really moderate distress 
 which I had felt at Pittsfield but strain of a hellish, well-nigh 
 intolerable character. 
 
 It seems impossible now, that strange reluctance of the 
 scientific medical profession to give relief for eyestrain by 
 the one and only method whereby, even to this moment, 
 it can possibly be given. 
 
 Each and every time the headaches came, I "cut" my 
 classes, went off on a long, lonesome walk, and returned 
 refreshed. But ever, in a few more days, came the ceph- 
 alalgia again. 
 
 I consulted the village doctors. They, thinking I had 
 malaria, gave me medicines which merely made me sick. 
 Said Willie Botson, my room-mate, on a day of inspiration, 
 "Go up to such and such a jeweler. He'll give you a pair 
 of glasses that will put an end to your headaches." To that 
 jeweler went I, passed through what was called an examina- 
 tion, wore away his glasses on approval, 1 got full and ad- 
 equate relief, and wrote to my father about the magical bits 
 of glass. 
 
 Father replied, "Take those glasses back instanter to that 
 jeweler. If you don't, they'll ruin your eyes." 
 
 I became exceedingly melancholy. I thought myself about 
 to die of some mysterious disorder, and, once more, I recalled 
 the little white house, back in Pike County, and its long 
 black shadow. 
 
 In one of those terrible fits of head-pains I met the Grand 
 Procrustes and had with him a discussion as to whether or 
 
 1 The idea of having lenses ground, each to fit an individual eye precisely, had scarcely 
 been thought of, even by the best qualified M.D. eye specialists (of whom there were very 
 few) at that time. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 407 
 
 not the soul of each and every one of us is just a portion of 
 the All-soul, and whether the beasts and the trees, even the 
 rocks and the clouds, do or do not have souls. It seems 
 ridiculous now, but we both, as we argued, became bitter 
 and more bitter still. 1 
 
 RELIGIO PLANI 
 
 In 1866, on the 19th of July, there was born to T. W. 
 Shastid and his wife a man-child, and lo it turned out to be I! 
 I have ofttimes pondered why and how that particular child 
 turned out to be I. Often indeed, while still a boy, I ques- 
 tioned my father and mother on the perplexing point. Of 
 all the babies that had been born of human stock from Adam 
 on down and that were still to be born until "borning" 
 itself should be no more, why, why should that particular 
 man-child turn out to be I or me or the first person singular 
 or whatever else anyone might wish to call it. 
 
 My mother used to answer, "It turned out to be you 
 because your father and your mother were its parents." 
 But, even small-boy as I was, I could see that this was taking 
 for granted the matter to be proved, because, when she said 
 "your father and your mother" that was of course assuming 
 that the baby in question was already I, for otherwise the 
 parents would not have been "your" (my) father and "your" 
 (my) mother. 
 
 I also ofttimes pointed out that my brother Jon had like- 
 wise had my selfsame parents and yet that he had not turned 
 out to be I or I to be he. How so? 
 
 Then my father would ofttimes try to help my mother 
 with her answer, putting in: "The baby that turned out to 
 be you, turned out to be you not merely because it had your 
 parents but also because it had your birthday." But then, 
 of course, I would point out that my father, in saying what 
 he had said, was just twice as illogical as my mother had 
 been, inasmuch as he had not merely, like her, assumed the 
 very matter called in question when he had said "your" 
 father and "your" mother, but, in addition, when he had 
 said "your" birthday also. 
 
 1 This same subject we argued again, more than two years later, and that argument 
 contributed in some measure to my final severance of all relations with the school. 
 
408 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Why had the child that had been born (of T. W. S. and 
 L. M. S.) on July 19, 1866, turned out. to be I, in that way 
 making that day my birthday? 
 
 They could not answer. Neither has anyone else ever 
 answered — minister, philosopher, metaphysician, physiolo- 
 gist, embryologist, or any other person, even the politicians 
 who so clearly understand everybody else's business to the 
 uttermost detail and so very much better than do the persons 
 engaged in the business itself can understand it for them- 
 selves — neither, I say, has any other person of all the scores 
 I have consulted on this subject been able to inform me 
 why that bit of human tissue, enclosing the particle of life 
 it was later to love so well and that was born to such and 
 such parents on July 19, 1866, turned out to be I. 
 
 And, by the bye, this very fact has done a great deal to 
 convince me, although the church does not believe in pre- 
 existence, that, for beginningless ages before my birth, I 
 was already I, and that, likewise, for endless ages after my 
 so-called death, I shall still be I. In other words, the I's 
 have always had it (existence) and always shall. 
 
 May it please God that, after my body's dissolution, I 
 shall turn out to have been correct — for, of all the I's that 
 have had life, not one has enjoyed it more or more nearly 
 appreciated it to the full than have I. 1 
 
 1 True it is that modern psychologists inform us "every person makes his own mind," 
 makes it "out of the sensations he receives and the relations which he then notes as existing 
 among those sensations." But that very answer, precisely like those of my father and my 
 mother, assumes the truth of the very point at issue — the pre-existence of the maker of the 
 mind. For, if "every person" (the ego, the I) "makes his own mind," there then must 
 assuredly be an ego already in existence when the mind-making begins — unless, indeed, 
 Professor Psychologist means that the ego comes into existence either after it makes the 
 mind or simultaneously with the mind it makes — which is absurd. 
 
 Nor is the confusion of thought of which these thinkers are guilty in the very least 
 lessened by declaring, as some do, that the ego and the mind are identical, for, even so, 
 you have the maker and the thing it makes coming into existence at the same time. "The 
 mind is made out of the sensations received," say these people. But they never condescend 
 to tell us what there is in existence to preceive, to be conscious of, the very first sensation 
 of all. Without that pre-existent ego there never could be a first sensation, therefore any 
 later sensation, therefore any mind. 
 
 That pre-existent ego is, in my belief, just a part of the universal, eternally existent, 
 ego, the indestructible all-consciousness which pervades the universe — rather, which is, 
 which constitutes, the universe, and which, therefore, is God. 
 
 This is not the old-man-sitting-on-a-throne-and-flourishing-a-long-white-beard sort of 
 God, but it is at least a God that is perfectly consistent with the modern view of the uni- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 409 
 
 Now this religion of mine, which I had held for a long 
 time and which, partly, I had from my father, was naturally 
 a source of very great comfort to me — at least it would have 
 been but for the constant eyestrain. That, from time to 
 time, drove me almost into the darkness of despair. 
 
 Then, one day, there came to me a stunning experience. 
 
 I had heard from other students that, down at the 
 Christian Church, there was holding forth an evangelist by 
 the side of whom all other preachers in the world faded into 
 nothing. I had heard extravagant eulogies before, especially 
 about quack doctors, and I knew very well that, almost 
 always, upon investigation, the eulogy itself, rather the man 
 that had been so eulogized, had faded into nothing. Never- 
 theless, after innumerable urgings by many other students, 
 I decided at length to go down one evening and listen to this 
 John the Baptist of a modern world. 
 
 I went early, and yet the house was already crowded. 
 Even the sidewalk before the building was packed and jam- 
 med. Slipping round to the side of the building, I there, 
 together with some of the other boys, looked in at an open 
 window and suddenly — it was as if a door had opened before 
 me into heaven! 
 
 No other voice like that had I in all my few years heard. 
 It had in it that rousing suggestion of the infinite which we 
 all receive from a mighty pipe-organ, a sound that comports 
 with a great cathedral rather than a small church in a tiny 
 town. All the recesses of my soul seemed in that one moment 
 to be searched fully out, to be mastered as if by the voice 
 of God's own viceregent on earth and then turned over to 
 the Almighty for his sole purpose and use. 
 
 Sometimes there was in that glorious voice [I shudder to 
 recall it now] an actual tremolo stop pulled out, and then 
 there arose in my heart, my soul, an answering sweet trem- 
 ulosity. It was as if an actual organ or a great de Gesu 
 
 verse — namely, that matter and energy (conscious mind is just energy in one form) are not 
 two things but two phases, or manifestations, one of which is fundamental to the other. 
 And that one fundamental thing, to me, is Conscious Mind, or God. 
 
 I realize as clearly as anyone can do that this conception of the universe does not explain 
 how anything which is eternally existent can exist, or could ever have come into 
 existence. But how, for that matter, could there ever have been a time when there was 
 total non-existence? Non-existence, eternal existence for anything, these are fundamental 
 secrets of the Most High, secrets before which the human being can merely stand appalled 
 — and worship the only Mind for whom there are no secrets. 
 
410 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 violin, playing vibrato in one room, all at once awakened in 
 some weaker instrument, in a room adjoining, the chord of 
 corresponding notes, bringing that dead thing into life. 
 
 A minor matter in this curious experience was that the 
 speaker, a large, fleshy man, but with angelic countenance 
 and archangelic eyes, from time to time enforced his argu- 
 ment and appeal by poetic etymologies. Thus, he proved, 
 or attempted to prove, the truth and divine origin of the 
 Scriptures by showing that Adam's name is simply the 
 Hebrew word (ad-aw-maw) which means both "earth" and 
 "red," thus supporting the view that the Lord had actually 
 created the man, Adam, from the earth of Eden, or Mesopo- 
 tamia, an earth which is truly red. 
 
 And many other things he showed us by etymology from 
 a dozen or more languages — Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Chaldee, 
 Sanskrit — and I knew just enough about some of these 
 languages to understand that here before me stood a really 
 great scholar, this W. F. White, this man my father would 
 have been so glad to know, this man who could actually 
 teach the most difficult of derivations to all sorts and con- 
 ditions of men yet fill them all with a kind of joyous ecstasy 
 about it. 
 
 Next morning I found the theological students in an 
 ecstasy about the preacher too. One of them would have 
 "given anything in the world" if he could only have been 
 fat like White. 
 
 As for me, I was in a kind of craze both night and day. 
 I had had so many difficulties with the Bible, and I wanted 
 the truth, all of it! Not dodgings but the truth. The Scrip- 
 tures I firmly believed (and I do believe this still) contain 
 some of the greatest truths in all the world about Divinity. 
 But were not there other matters in the Bible that were not 
 truth? Was not Biblical ore both gold and dross? 
 
 A number of times on the street, when I saw this stately 
 man, I decided, as I went up toward him, to accost him and 
 ask him for an appointment whereat I might ask him in- 
 numerable things about the Bible. But, each time, my heart 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 411 
 
 failed me. I was thoroughly abashed in the presence of so 
 much greatness. Besides he might refuse to see me. I would 
 therefore just go to his house, the house wherein he was 
 staying, and see him without first asking permission. 
 Thus I went. 
 
 I said to him, as soon as I had been shown to the parlor 
 wherein he sat, "I am troubled by very many things in the 
 Bible." Then, abruptly, "Do you believe in the Ten Com- 
 mandments?" 
 
 "That is simple enough. Of course I believe in them — 
 and keep them." 
 
 "But which form of them do you believe in and keep?" 
 
 "Which form? There is only one form of the Ten Com- 
 mandments." 
 
 "Sorry I am, sir,", said I. "But will you let me have 
 your Bible?" 
 
 He handed the book over to me. 
 
 I turned to Exodus, XX and Deuteronomy, V, read and 
 then commented: These two statements of the Command- 
 ments are identical except as to one or two words. The 
 second, then, is merely repetition, and so say all the com- 
 mentaries that I have consulted. 
 
 "But," I continued, "in Exodus, XXXII, the statement 
 is made that Moses, as he went down out of Sinai with the 
 two stone tables containing these commandments, and ap- 
 proached the camp of the Israelites, beheld them engaged 
 in idolatrous orgies. And then says the Book, 'he cast the 
 tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.' x 
 
 "So Moses, it appears, did not even deliver to the Israel- 
 ites the Ten Commandments in that, their first, or provi- 
 sional, form, for we are told, Chapter 34, verse 1, of the 
 same book, Exodus: 'And the Lord said unto Moses, Hew 
 thee two tables of stone like unto the first : and I will write 
 upon these tables the words that were on the first tables, 
 which thou brakest.' 
 
 "But then the Lord proceeded to write on that second 
 set of 'tables' of stone not at all 'the words that there were on 
 the first tables,' but in actuality an almost entirely new set 
 
 1 The Revised Version was the one from which I quoted throughout this section, but 
 the Version "authorized" by King James of England reads practically the same. 
 
412 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 of Commandments. The first two and the fourth are indeed 
 substantially the same (no other gods — no graven image — 
 remember the Sabbath day), but all the seven other Com- 
 mandments are remarkably different. Thus, in the second 
 set, these fail to re-appear (take not God's name in vain, 
 honor father and mother, don't murder, don't commit adul- 
 tery, don't steal, don't bear false witness, don't covet). In 
 their places we have, for example (as tenth Commandment) 
 not 'thou shalt not covet,' but 'thou shalt not seethe [boil] 
 a kid in its mother's milk' — something quite different, I 
 think." 
 
 "Young man, are you troubled by a merely apparent 
 discrepancy like that?" 
 
 "I admit," said I, "that I am. Nor is it merely 'a' dis- 
 crepancy I am talking about. It is seven different discrepan- 
 cies, every one of them not 'apparent' but real and total, 
 and, besides, you yourself just now said that you yourself 
 observe all the Ten Commandments. Which of the two sets, 
 or forms, of the Commandments do you observe, the first, 
 or provisional, which was never even delivered to the Israel- 
 ites or any other body of men for their observance, or the 
 second, the definitive, final, set — the set which omits to 
 mention those seven important Commandments I have just 
 mentioned, and which, instead, commands us: to keep the 
 feast of unleavened bread; to refrain from labor not only on 
 the seventh day but on all days 'in earing time and in 
 harvest,' to observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of 
 wheat harvest and of ingathering; to have one's male children 
 all appear three times a year before the Lord; to avoid the 
 offering of the blood of God's sacrifice with leaven; to re- 
 frain from leaving the sacrifice of the feast of the passover 
 until morning; to bring always the firstfruits of one's land 
 unto the house of God; to refrain from boiling a kid (young 
 goat) in its mother's milk?" 
 
 The great man with the voice like that of a heavenly 
 organ rose to his feet. 
 
 "Young man!" he cried harshly, "Do you not understand 
 that Jesus, in all his teachings, ratified not that last form 
 of the Commandments, but the first one?" 
 
 "How," I cried, "could he have 'ratified' the form that 
 had never gone into effect, but which had merely been 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 413 
 
 written on the stones that Moses broke into pieces before 
 he had delivered them, and when, afterward, the Lord gave 
 Moses the Second Set, which was delivered, and which did 
 go into effect, and which all the Israelites were supposed to 
 have been living under all the centuries from then up to and 
 including even Jesus' own years? 
 
 "Besides," I added, "Jesus, when referring to The Com- 
 mandments,' ofttimes, as he is quoted in the New Testament, 
 throws matters into still greater confusion by quoting one 
 or more Commandments as they do not stand in either set — 
 the provisional, which were never adopted, or the final, 
 which were. Thus, Matthew, XXII, 36-39, 'Master, which 
 is the great commandment in the law? 
 
 4 And he said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
 with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy 
 mind. 
 
 'This is the great and first Commandment. 
 
 'And a second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbor as thyself.' 
 
 ' 'Now it is perfectly obvious that the first Commandment, 
 as quoted here by Jesus, only partly resembles the first Com- 
 mandment as that is stated in the Old Bible, either in the 
 provisional form or the final, while the second Command- 
 ment, as quoted by Jesus, not only bears no resemblance 
 whatever to the second Commandment as given in the Old 
 Testament (the first form or the final) but it does not even 
 resemble any of the Ten Commandments in any form what- 
 soever." 
 
 The reverend gentleman thereupon turned purple in the 
 face and cried, "You are an atheist!" I shouted, "I am not." 
 "But you are," he rejoined. "You are: get out." 
 
 I stared at him for a moment, unable to believe my ears 
 and eyes. This — this man — this mighty one who had spoken 
 in church with the voice of a very archangel, who had 
 seemed so all-wise, so understanding, so learned, so ex- 
 tremely accurate — so— so — to treat me like this! 
 
 I was amazed, astonished, outraged. 
 
 I could not for a moment even get away from the spot. 
 I was too weak to move. 
 
414 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 A preacher in Pittsfield might have said that. Yes. I 
 had expected such treatment there. But here, at Inveni! 
 In a college, where people were supposed to investigate 
 abundantly, to inquire, to search freely for the truth and 
 without reference to preconceptions! A place where people 
 were supposed to be like Hodgen and like my father — and 
 like Pasteur, Lister, Weigert, Koch! 
 
 I was not only amazed but I was much abashed and em- 
 barassed. Instead of leaving at once, I merely mumbled, 
 "But I had intended to ask you too what you thought of 
 the Germ Theory of Disease, but — but — now — ' ' 
 
 Then, to my further amazement, he handed me my hat, 
 and, smiling with O so sweet a countenance, began leading 
 me gently by the hand to the doorway. But all at once there 
 came to me the recollection of a man and a dog I had seen 
 in a store at Pittsfield. The man had spoken to the dog 
 about as the Reverend White was speaking to me now, 
 "Good doggie! Good, sweet little doggie! Come this way, 
 little doggie." And, having got the doggie to the door, 
 he suddenly gave him the toe of his boot — kuh-rack in his 
 ribs. And ki-yi went the doggie into the echoing distance. 
 
 I did not want the toe of that big fellow's boot, because, 
 although, in those days I could have whipped him thorough- 
 ly and easily, I realized only too well that I could not pos- 
 sibly afford to have a set-to with the Vice-president of the 
 College. 
 
 So — I admit that I ran. 
 
 To this day I am glad that I ran. It is always so much 
 easier to fight than to run. The big fellow, say, leads almost 
 always with his right at your face. You lean your head just 
 a little leftward, stepping a trifle forward on your toes for 
 reach, and sock him O so easily, so very, very safely too, 
 on the jaw or temple. He throws of course both hands up- 
 wards, and you send him a hearty greeting on his solar 
 plexus, murmuring at the same time pleasantly, "Excuse me 
 if I seem too rude." 
 
 And how foolish you appear to yourself then! And, 
 anyway, you must not fight a preacher, even should the 
 latter be angry and want to kick you. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 415 
 
 But — a curious thing. (It took me years and years to 
 remove my mind entirely from that strange man's influence. 
 So authoritative he was, so large, so impressive, so deeply 
 and richly spoken, so azurely, so heavenly-eyed, so master- 
 ful, that, although I knew him to be utterly mistaken in his 
 views that I heard him later express, that Biblical investi- 
 gation is always wrong and that only authority (the au- 
 thoritarian's own particular authority of course) can be 
 right, I felt — even in my dreams I felt — that his way must 
 be correct, the way of the unquestionable Giver of Being 
 itself. 
 
 I would not be bothering the reader with my above- 
 written experience — something which can easily appear to 
 him as an incident of no special consequence — except that it 
 illustrates clearly and very forcibly just what the great 
 regenerative principle of the world — the Germ Theory and 
 all its incalculable implications — had to contend with in 
 that not so very distant day and age. I had no room for 
 the tale in my "Tramping to Failure," which was mainly 
 the story of me, but this present volume, though also largely 
 an autobiography, is in addition the biography of an Old 
 World and an Old Human Race in the very process of chang- 
 ing into a new and entirely different race and world. This, 
 as stated before, is a story which can only be properly told 
 by putting together innumerable bits of tiny facts, each in 
 itself quite insignificant no doubt, yet all of which, taken 
 together, shall present a multidinous mosaic of marvellous, 
 of unparalleled, meaning not only for the present but also 
 for the future. 
 
 Would that the writer had more strength and skill with 
 which to present these things. 
 
 NOSTALGIA MALIGNANS 
 Even when first I had arrived at Inveni I was very home- 
 sick. On the second night I could not sleep because of the 
 dark nostalgia, and so slipped out of my rooming house and 
 walked to the Public Square. There, beholding in a drug- 
 gist's window a pestle and mortar much like those of my 
 father at home, I had a great spasm of homesick sorrow, 
 
416 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 crossed the Square to the Presbyterian Church, and, there, 
 seated in the bitter cold, wrote a sonnet on my sad condition 
 — watching from time to time the southing moon on my 
 left, and winding up by returning to my room half frozen. 
 
 Various events, from time to time, sufficed to allay the 
 bitter pangs of homesickness, but only for short intervals. 
 Then would come the grief again. Always I could see vividly 
 once more the plumed corn, nodding stately farewell as my 
 father and I drove by in the darkness, or hear the meadow 
 larks in the sunlight carolling across the endless seas of 
 billowing wheat. Or I could see the Public Square, with the 
 wagon-rutted road all about it, and the hitch-rail chewed 
 deeply by generations of horses. Or, turning the Shadel 
 corner of the Square, I could view, one block away, the old 
 Shastid homestead from the angle at which I had always 
 liked best to behold it. 
 
 Or, once again, I was seated in the old sitting-room at 
 home alone, while in the distant "kitchen" the rest of the 
 family were finishing their suppers. By the dim rays of the 
 Starlight stove, I would be looking over all the old familiar 
 objects — on the walls the colored prints of Currier and Ives. 
 Over yonder the iron safe (nothing in particular but receipts 
 inside of it) the two big book-cases, a bureau; then, on the 
 north wall, the long lounge and, above its cushions, the 
 great blackboard covered with etymologies in Latin and in 
 Greek. Grandfather Shastid 's big clock; my mother's few 
 flowers and her many big baskets of things to be mended ! 
 
 Always she wrote me to "Write! Write! Write!" I wrote 
 to her daily, yet always she replied as if I never had written. 
 (How I loved her for that inconsistency.) And my father! 
 What wonderful letters he penned! What marvellous de- 
 scriptions of the little room he had written about so often, 
 but always in a different way, the very room he sat in, 
 writing, and the clock ticked away, and, perhaps, a snow- 
 storm howled outside and he must hurry and close and get 
 away into the country. 4 'So you see us, Tom, and good-bye. 
 It was characteristic of him that, though invariably calm 
 and placid before a patient, whatsoever the outlook might 
 be, he was eternally worrying about his children. Especially 
 my brother Joseph, who had come upon the scene a little 
 over five years before, was an object of extreme solicitude 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 417 
 
 and anxiety to him. So-called "Letters" from Joseph to me 
 (letters I have still) he invariably enclosed, despite their 
 illegibility. 
 
 Always in my fits of homesickness I remembered the first 
 letter Father had written me after leaving me at Inveni and 
 getting back home. He had tried to make himself believe, 
 he said, for a very long time, that I was a little child again 
 upstairs and, as long ago, hiding behind a door so that I 
 might rush out and surprise him as of old. But, though he 
 had gone upstairs each hour for many hours for the first few 
 days, and had looked in every nook and hiding place, he of 
 course never had found me. So he had written me as soon 
 as a badly burned hand would let him write. 
 
 fi^t-d G4^> -£i&c^r »tz>cn^. qL0-**u*~~ 
 
 
 A Characteristic Letter-Ending from my Mother — Characteristic too, 
 no doubt, of Country Doctors' Helpmeets Everywhere who Have Sons 
 Off at College. 
 
 And now I was about to return to Pittsfield, the um- 
 bilicus of the world, the place at least where my own um- 
 bilical cord had been properly tied and severed, and con- 
 sciousness of life on earth and all that it ever could mean to 
 me had become mine. 
 
 How glad I was when, on the train, I saw the little town 
 of Inveni moving off into the distance ! 
 
 One hundred and thirty-five miles to old Pittsfield — how 
 long a distance ! Four or five changes of cars too — how un- 
 necessarily many! And how the minutes lengthened out the 
 
418 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 nearer I got to Pittsfield — longest of all were they on the 
 last little "leg" of the trip — the mere six-mile ride from 
 Pittsfield Junction into Pittsfield. 
 
 THE UMBILICUS AGAIN 
 
 My getting back to Pittsfield from my first term at college 
 seemed to be quite an event in the Shastid family. My broth- 
 er William had already gone to the northeast part of the 
 state to visit the best of his girls, but my Father and Joseph 
 and Jon, as I saw from the car window, had come to the 
 depot to meet me. As the train slowed down, they rushed 
 to the front end of my car. I ducked to the rear end and, 
 head down, slid out. In the dark I could see them in the 
 bright interior of the coach dolefully peeking between each 
 seat and the next and then, finally, getting off and crying 
 to one another, "He didn't come!" 
 
 Then I gave them the loud laugh and let Father, who 
 would do it, carry my satchel. And so — I leading the five- 
 year-old Joseph by the hand — we paraded up the darkening 
 street. 
 
 At home the house was all lighted up like a church on 
 Christmas Eve. Even the "hired girl's room" had a burning 
 lamp in it (we had gone off candles long before) and both 
 rooms of the cellar and the "big kitchen" and the "little 
 kitchen." A paper lantern was hanging over the front door- 
 way — wherein stood my mother, crying. 
 
 How easily people cried in those days! 
 
 Hardly had I got into the house when a messenger came 
 from the country — from a long way out in the country — a 
 badly contagious case, lightning too in the air and near- 
 approaching thunder. Father responded to the call, despite 
 his pride in his son's triumphant return from Inveni college. 
 Doctors must respond, or sons not go to college and people 
 not recover their health. 
 
 Next morning, whatever I said the others all agreed to 
 (the guest, especially a guest triumphant, is always right, 
 his old jokes things to be freshly laughed at). 
 
 Father had already arisen, when I awoke next morning, 
 and he had breakfasted and hitched up the new horse, 
 "Spook," with a view to taking me into the country on 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 419 
 
 some of our old drives. "The patient, last night," said he, 
 ' 'when I at last reached him through one of the terriblest 
 storms I have ever experienced, was " 
 
 "Dead already," said I — using the old joke. 
 
 But he would have no joke like that, and would laugh 
 not at all. Instead he said, "Before we start for the country — 
 There isn't any practice now worth speaking of; you know 
 how such things are: for a time no practice whatever, then 
 all of sudden so much you can't attend to it. So now let us 
 go round town again and meet the folks. Therefore, leaving 
 the rig at the hitching-post, to the Public Square went we. 
 Here, there, everywhere, we met "the folks." And with 
 how much pride he introduced me to them all. "My son 
 Thomas, Mr. Farmer; my second son. He's my apprentice 
 in the medical line, but he's going to college also and now 
 he's back for his first vacation. Thomas, this is Mr. Farmer. 
 
 One of the Mr. Farmers, when so introduced, as I remem- 
 ber distinctly, said straight out, "Well, he ain't much to 
 look at, anyway not like you air, Doctor. But then you 
 can't always tell from a mule's ears, just how fur he can 
 jump." 
 
 "Thomas, in his books, can jump long distances," replied 
 my father with dignity. 
 
 "In his books can jump? O you mean he skips a who' 
 lot." 
 
 ' 'Not he. But he makes long strides in his studies easily. 
 
 And we both strode on our way toward other people. 
 All the store-keepers (as merchants then were called) had 
 to be re-introduced — they might have forgotten me. Well, 
 they had. All the officials in the Courthouse too. But 
 mostly we spent our time with the druggists, the lawyers 
 and one or two doctors. But not with Dr. Dublin. He saw 
 us not at all as, before his office entry, he stood cough- 
 coughing and hoo-hooing and, later, passed us by on the 
 sidewalk hurriedly — nose in the loftier layers of the atmos- 
 phere. 
 
 Back at home we ate hurriedly, rushed then once more 
 up town for more introductions, and not back home until 
 shut of day. 
 
420 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Next morning, after breakfast, lo and behold! there stood 
 poor Spook at the hitching-post, precisely where my father 
 had tied her the morning before. 
 
 Just so distracting it is to have a wonderful son! 
 
 Father put the good old girl back into the barn and 
 hitched up Pinto instead. 
 
 As we drove along the northeast road from town and 
 passed the schoolhouse, I suddenly inquired, "Father, do 
 you remember the place there, back of the schoolhouse, the 
 'show grounds,' and what happened there a few years back?" 
 
 "Many things have happened there." 
 
 "This was not many years after I had become your ap- 
 prentice. The woman doctor — don't you remember?' ' Women 
 doctors were curiosities then and ofttimes objects of great 
 hilarity. But I — I certainly had my reasons for not even 
 smiling. So I went on to remind my father that, in what I 
 most presumptuously termed "the old days," he and I 
 together had attended a circus, there behind the schoolhouse. 
 What a day we had had — the peanuts, the lemonade, the 
 popcorn; the bright lights, the music, the incredible fairy- 
 land of tights and gleaming spangles ! 
 
 "Yes," added Father, "and, in the midst of all the beauty 
 and music, out runs a hideous clown, leaps on a tri-colored 
 barrel, and shouts, as if some one were wanting a doctor for 
 an emergency. Ts Dr. Shastid present? Is Dr. Shastid 
 present?' 
 
 "And you," I went on with the story, "a few years 
 before that, when similarly called for in a circus, had arisen 
 and cried, 'Here I am.' And the clown had shouted back, 
 'All right, Doc, sit down and we'll shew you the dangedest 
 best circus you ever did see.' 
 
 "So, on this particular occasion, you would not at first 
 rise and answer, but, when the clown shouted again and 
 even more seriously than before, 'Dr. Shastid present? The 
 little equestrienne has broken a bone,' you arose and, taking 
 me with you, went into the dressing-room." 
 
 "And there I found she had dislocated her shoulder." 
 
 "Yes, and that you had known her years before, that she 
 had studied medicine, and, making a failure of her medical 
 practice, had gone back into circussing. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 421 
 
 "Before we left, she implored you: 'Don't tell. Please 
 never tell that I have been a doctor.' 
 
 "Yes, I remember," said Father. 
 
 "Well, I have more to tell you about her — something 
 that happened before I left Inveni, but I never have written 
 you about it, because it always made me sad to try to write it. 
 
 ' 'Remember when I went over with the boys one day to 
 a circus in (mentioning a large town)?" 
 
 "Yes, I remember." 
 
 "Well, at the first part of that circus, I was happier than 
 a lark. The peanuts and the popcorn, the monkeys and the 
 elephants and the lions, and so on! 
 
 "But all at once I espied a man I thought I had seen 
 before — the man that was in the dressing-room when we 
 went to see Lolita. I spoke to him, asked what had become 
 of the little equestrienne. 
 
 'Ho!' he cried, 'You're that doctor's boy. O — Lolita? 
 She didn't last long after she'd got back to us. Broke and 
 died. She was a nut too. Tell you a secret. That nut was a 
 doctor. Yes, she was. She was really. She'd actually 
 studied medicine. Fancy — a good lookin' fool like that 
 studyin' medicine. Well, she's just as well dead, no more 
 sense than that.' 
 
 My father told me then of a woman doctor who, some 
 years before my birth, had come to a Pike County town for 
 a visit. Everybody was scandalized at her mere presence in 
 the county. Back in Missouri too, where she lived and 
 practised, rough men with nothing at all the matter, had 
 gone to consult her professionally, and, brazen with liquor, 
 had made obscene remarks and exhibitions concerning their 
 states. 
 
 And he told me too of the first woman doctor in Germany, 
 Dorothea Erxleben, and the first in the United States, Eliz- 
 abeth Blackwell. 1 
 
 1 Even to the present day these two pathfinders in medicine are treated with scant 
 courtesy. Thus, in my second edition of Garrison's "History of Medicine," Elizabeth 
 Blackwell is accorded less than half a sentence of five lines, and Dorothea Erxleben one 
 whole sentence of one and one-half lines on the same page (772) — but only as a footnote! 
 Most of the histories of medicine ignore these women completely. I will therefore now 
 endeavor to make them a little better known. 
 
 Dorothea Erxleben (born Leporin) was daughter of the physician, Polycarp Leporin. 
 She received her medical degree at Halle University in 1754, engaged in successful practice 
 
422 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 NURSES, SCHOOLTEACHERS AND 
 PHILANTHROPISTS 
 Nurses, too, in those days, were a different order of 
 beings from what they are now. Especially was this true in 
 
 at Quedlinburg, and died in 1762. The celebrated professor of veterinary medicine at the 
 University of Gottingen, Johann C. P. Erxleben, was her son.* 
 
 Elizabeth Blackwell, a sister-in-law of Lucy Stone, the famed 19th-century feminist, 
 and the first woman to receive a medical degree in America, was born at Bristol, England, 
 February 3, 1821. Her father was a sugar refiner who, in 1832, settled with his family in 
 New York City. Elizabeth, having been refused admission by almost all the other medical 
 colleges in the United States, was, finally, matriculated by the Geneva Medical College, at 
 Geneva, N. Y., the medical department of Geneva College, in 1847. The medical college 
 later disappeared and the name, Geneva College, was changed to Hobart College. She died 
 at her home in Hastings, England, May 31, 1910, aged eighty-nine. 
 
 For the following account of Miss Blackwell's curious entrance into the Geneva Medical 
 College, the strange reactions it produced there, and some of the later achievements of Miss 
 Blackwell in the field of medicine, I am deeply indebted to Mr. Clifford E. Orr, the present 
 secretary at Hobart College. I regret that I have here no space in which to recount the 
 origin and development of the various women's hospitals, women's medical colleges, etc., 
 in the United States. The following story, however, of Miss Blackwell's matriculation, 
 course of study, graduation, and subsequent career is quite in line with my endeavor in this 
 volume to picture the old-time medicine in contrast with the new. Whether or not the 
 admission of women to medical practice was part and parcel of the liberalizing effect pro- 
 duced by the admission into the world of the truth about disease production may be to 
 some extent a debatable question. I, however, believe that it was simply a part of that 
 liberalization, that enfranchisement of the human intellect, that seismic upheaval and 
 complete re-orientation of everything human. 
 
 Sketch by Mr. Clifford E. Orr: "Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (M.D. Hobart, 1849). 
 
 "In 1847, a young girl, a sweet-faced, blue-eyed blonde, Miss Elizabeth Blackwell, 
 applied for permission to enter the medical school of Hobart College. Somewhat to her 
 surprise she found her request agreed to by the student body. She did not inquire what lay 
 behind this unusual liberality of mind, but 'with a sigh of relief and an inspiration of 
 gratitude,' prepared for her journey to Geneva, New York. 
 
 "Time has explained the cordiality of that group of medical students. Some of them 
 thought the application a hoax practiced on them by a neighboring college. Most of them 
 were moved by that desire to embarrass the faculty which has not died out of the student 
 heart today. A contemporary ... a member of the class . . . has left us an account of the 
 incident. He describes the class of 150 young men as 'rude, boisterous and riotous beyond 
 comparison.' Into this class the Dean came one day with a letter from a physician in 
 Philadelphia asking the faculty to admit a young lady. The dean explained that the 
 faculty had decided to leave the decision to the students, and ... we may imagine him 
 pausing to make his point clear ... if one student voted no, a negative reply would be 
 returned. 
 
 "The whole affair assumed the most ludicrous aspect for the class, and the announce- 
 ment was received with the most uproarious demonstrations of favor. A meeting was 
 called for the evening, which was attended by every member. The resolution approving 
 the admission of the young lady was sustained by the most extravagant speeches, which 
 were enthusiastically cheered. The vote was finally taken with what seemed to be one 
 unanimous yell, 'Yes.' When the negative vote was called, a single voice was heard uttering 
 a timid 'No.' A general rush was made to the corner which emitted the voice, and the 
 recalcitrant member was only too glad to acknowledge his error and record his vote in the 
 affirmative. 
 
 "Thus accepted, Miss Blackwell arrived and took her place calmly. Fortunately she 
 was a calm young woman, for she had her troubles. A doctor's wife at the boarding house 
 table pointedly avoided any contact with her. Ladies stopped to stare at her in the street 
 as if she were 'a curious wild animal.' She was not allowed to attend an operation in the 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 423 
 
 the country and small towns. In the days whereof I write, 
 there was not, I believe, one trained nurse in all Pike and 
 Calhoun counties. There may have been a few in Adams 
 
 course, described in her diary as 'delicate.' She records that this prohibition 'annoyed' her. 
 Little folded notes dropped on her arms in lecture rooms. She shook them off. It must 
 be said, however, that few of her troubles seemed to come from the rude, boisterous and 
 riotous young men. She reports their conduct as admirable . . . that of true Christian 
 gentlemen. 
 
 "In her summer vacation she took a position, not without entreaty at the Blockley 
 Almshouse in Pennsylvania, where a violent epidemic of typhus excited her interest and 
 she chose this dark and dangerous disease as the subject of her thesis. The head doctor 
 was kind, but the young internes walked out of every ward as she entered, taking with 
 them the written record of diagnosis and treatment from the bed of each patient ... a 
 form of spite more destructive to their patients than to the competitor. 
 
 "The next year she received her medical degree from Hobart. She actually walked 
 up to the platform before all eyes and said: 'Sir, I thank you. It shall be the effort of my 
 life, with the help of the Most High, to shed honor on this diploma.' She was touched 
 and surprised that as she came down the graduates made room for her and insisted on her 
 sitting among them. How much more surprised would she have been, could she have known 
 at that instant that some day her portrait would be hanging in foreign medical schools, 
 that Hobart would request the honor of calling its first dormitory for women after her, and 
 that the Woman's Medical Society of Rochester would change its name to the Blackwell 
 Medical School. 
 
 "We have some amusing contemporary comment. She was described in a medical 
 paper as a pretty little specimen of the feminine gender. Another told how she came into 
 class 'with composure, took off her bonnet and put it under the seat, displaying a fine 
 phrenology.' 'The Baltimore Sun' observed that she should confine her practise to diseases 
 of the heart. Even 'Punch* noticed the event and wrote her a poem too long to quote in 
 full: 
 
 ' '-They talk about the gentler sex 
 Mankind in sickness tending 
 And o'er the patient couch their necks 
 
 Solicitously bending; 
 But what avails solicitude 
 In fever or in phthisic 
 If lovely woman's not imbued 
 With one idea of physic? 
 
 "Young ladies all of every clime, 
 
 Especially of Britain, 
 Who wholly occupy your time 
 
 In novels or in knitting, 
 Whose highest skill is but to play 
 
 Sing, dance or French to clack well, 
 Reflect on the example, pray, 
 
 Of excellent Miss Blackwell. 
 
 "A few years later, her sister, Emily, followed in her foot-steps. Both women studied 
 abroad for some years, and on their return decided with the help of a third woman, Dr. 
 Maria Zackrewska, to establish a hospital where women could be trained in the practical 
 work of their science. They met with great discouragements. They were told that no 
 one would rent a house for such a purpose, that female doctors were looked on with such 
 suspicion that the police would interfere, that if an accident should happen the trustees 
 would be held criminally responsible, and that it would be utterly impossible to raise one 
 cent of money. 
 
 "Undiscouraged they took a house in Bleecker Street and opened two tiny wards. 
 Instantly the hospital was overcrowded; instantly it began its long career of education and 
 service. 
 
 "The New York Infirmary for Women and Children, thus started, has always been 
 listed by the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and by the American Medical Association 
 
424 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 County or across the Illinois or Mississippi rivers, but I 
 doubt it. 1 
 
 Among the nurses that we had in those days were doc- 
 tors' wives, who now and then went out for a day or two 
 at a time, without cost to anyone but themselves, and 
 merely to assist their husbands in pulling their patient 
 through. This practice, from the nature of things, was 
 decidedly insufficient, for doctors' wives had much to do at 
 home in addition to the customary house work, such for 
 example as receiving and instructing messengers. Besides, 
 many a doctor's consort simply would not nurse for any- 
 body. "Nurse for one and not for others, and all those 
 others hate you." 
 
 The great majority of nurses were "neighbor nurses" — 
 women, sometimes men, who left duties at home unper- 
 formed in order, without money and without price, to be of 
 service to suffering humanity. The women among these 
 were ofttimes termed "granny nurses." God bless those 
 friendly neighbors, all of them. They soon learned to count 
 the pulse, to take the temperature, to give enemas, to help 
 with the urinal or bed-pan, to give medicines regularly, to 
 bathe the patient, to change the bed linen without forcing 
 the sick one to get up or causing him other distress or incon- 
 venience. To this day, the most highly trained nurse can do 
 but little more in the great majority of cases. In addition, 
 neighbor nurses, when the sick one was the wife and mother, 
 swept and scrubbed floors, dusted furniture, cooked for both 
 the well and the sick, washed and ironed the family's linen, 
 dressed and otherwise looked after all the children. She 
 worked, too, both by day and by night, picking up sleep 
 for herself in any odd intervals. 
 
 One of her duties, in case she was nursing for a patient 
 of my father's, was so to get the household quiet that my 
 father, ensconced in an easy chair and with feet on the seat 
 of a straight-back, could get a few "nods" for himself. 
 
 as a grade 'A' hospital. It has an excellent site for a hospital, on a sunny square in a 
 crowded east side district. It is entirely staffed by women. ... 45 of the most prominent 
 women physicians in New York . . . with a consulting board of both sexes." 
 
 1 At Quincy, county seat of Adams County, the county adjoining Pike on the north, 
 St. Mary's Hospital had been founded in 1866, and Blessing Hospital in 1872, but these 
 were still primitive affairs, and we had no ambulance to take patients to them. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 425 
 
 PICKING UP SLEEP 
 
 My father indeed had the strangest faculty of "picking 
 up" sleep. (I, of course, would always have had more sleep 
 at home than he.) He could settle down either on an easy 
 chair, as above mentioned or on a straw-stuffed lounge, or 
 even on a hard, dirty floor with a pillow beneath his head. 
 And then he would sleep as if Gabriel could never waken 
 him. And he went to sleep immediately too. No mere 
 Morpheus wooing. No tryings to sleep, and then, all of a 
 sudden, with a resounding snort — so many people do that 
 way, you know — to jump up out of it, and then try once 
 again to sleep. But off he would go instanter, and then stay 
 gone. Nor did he ever need Gabriel to help him wake up, 
 or even an alarm clock — things we did not have in those 
 days. Having noticed the time by the farmhouse time-piece, 
 and decided just when he'd awaken, he'd awaken at that 
 time. "How do you do it, Father?" I would ask. "O, every 
 man has a clock in his brain." "Supposing he has a brain, 
 of course." (Unimportant and very saucy comment from 
 the son.) 
 
 In very pleasant weather Father preferred to "make up" 
 sleep out of doors — in his buggy. All of a sudden he'd say 
 to me, "Tom, I believe I'm behind," settle himself back in 
 his corner of the buggy, and, with the wild bees buzzing in 
 the roadside flowers and the hot sun pouring down over the 
 dazzling landscape, he would pass into a dream like lightning. 
 
 Even when driving Black Jim, he would oft times tie 
 Jim up to a roadside tree, then sit down in a fence-corner 
 while I took a walk. 
 
 "The sweetest sleeps I've ever had," he frequently told 
 me, "have been those half-hour naps in a stake-and-ridered 
 bed — with the ever-busy birds unconsciously chirping away 
 for me — the best of all somnifera (hushababies)." 
 
 "There's one of the Pittsfield doctors," quoth I, once, 
 "that would not dare to sleep either in a buggy or, especially, 
 in a fence corner, in the daytime. People might think that 
 he had done the thing that he has so often done." 
 
 But my father would not share in my laughter, even 
 against the very man who had so often used laughter against 
 
426 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 him. "Too often," he protested, "when called up of a night 
 to see some patient in Pittsfield, I have noticed the doctor 
 you allude to, walking and walking the streets, hour after 
 hour, to keep himself from drinking. He has even implored 
 me to walk with him, to hold him away from his house, 
 from his office, to keep him from ringing up a saloon-keeper. 
 
 "He is, you see, in some sort a hero. At all events he 
 does endeavor to be good." 
 
 But back to our excellent neighbor nurses. 
 
 These good women looked to me like saints. And perhaps 
 they were. Every one of them now, I suppose, is, like my 
 good father himself, sleeping the sleep that precedeth the 
 resurrection. Sleep, sleep, sleep! How strange that we all 
 wake for so short a time, and then sleep and sleep and sleep ! 
 So long, so long! 
 
 Or is it our body alone that goes to sleep at death, while 
 our ego really, at death, awakens to a mental life far more 
 powerful, far more rejoiceful and in every way intense — a life 
 which it owned before it ever passed into a mortal body 
 and learned to call its dull residence therein "life"? 
 
 PROFESSIONAL NURSES 
 And then there were professional nurses, widows for the 
 most part. These had had no hospital training, but were 
 simply neighbor nurses, who for one reason or another, had 
 decided to make nursing a business, whereby to earn their 
 bread. They were mostly excellent women, but, unlike 
 neighbor nurses, they talked a great deal about the proper 
 hours for nurses, the proper wages for nurses, the way in 
 which nurses should be treated, and the things which they 
 had positively not undertaken to do. 
 
 SCHOOLTEACHERS 
 
 I should be remiss if I neglected to say how helpful were 
 the old-time schoolteachers to the doctor and his work. 
 In an unenlightened community the helpfulness of a class of 
 people who read good books and journals and who, in 
 addition, were superior intellectually, can hardly be exag- 
 gerated in a medical sense. Always these kind people co- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 427 
 
 operated with the doctor, tried to rid country-people of their 
 superstitions, to teach them how to think. Earliest of all, 
 among the lay people, were, I believe, the schoolteachers in 
 realizing the immense value to the world of the germ theory 
 and of Listerism. On this head I could relate a number of 
 interesting incidents, but must forbear. 
 
 PHILANTHROPISTS 
 
 Schoolteachers were almost always too poor to administer 
 relief to the needy sick in a financial way. Yet philan- 
 thropists we did have in our small-scale fashion. Chief of 
 all these helpers and probably the richest was a Mrs. Lucy 
 Wills — a sister, by the way, of Mrs. Purkitt, foster mother 
 of John G. Nicolay. Ever and again my father and I would 
 meet her in the cottages of the poor — helping here, helping 
 there. And always she gave with wisdom and real helpful- 
 ness. She was something of a philosopher, but always in a 
 practical way. And her religion was never of the melancholy 
 kind, nor of the exuberant either, but soft and quiet and 
 very sweetly helpful, so that all fear went out of the hearts 
 of my father's people as soon as they heard her speaking. 
 
 Even as to those who were not poor she would drive 
 long miles to take them delicious foods, encouraging news, 
 entertaining stories. 
 
 There were other philanthropists whom doctors met on 
 their rounds in those days, but no others like unto Lucy 
 Wills. 
 
 DOCTOR DRUGGISTS 
 It was, indeed, very difficult for the average layman to 
 catch the distinction between the selling of drugs and the 
 rendering of services by a physician. This was mainly due 
 to the fact that, in those days, physicians very largely dis- 
 pensed their own drugs. Over and over again, as "appren- 
 tice" in my father's office, I (attempting to engage a waiting 
 messenger in so delightful . a conversation that he would 
 take no note of the passage of time until my father, getting 
 back from the country, could respond to the call) would 
 have to listen to something like this: "I been to Wrexham 
 and bought medicine off of him fermy wife, an' it ain't 
 
428 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 done 'er no good. I been to Casal and bought medicine off 
 of him &VL it ain't done no good. An' then I been to Dublin, 
 that high an' mighty feller, an' he sold me some pills all 
 done up in silver leaf and gold packages, an' they ain't done 
 'er no good. Now I'm goin' to buy some medicine off of 
 your pappy — ef he don't keep stayin' away too long, an' 
 ef he thinks he kin sell me better medicine than them air 
 other doctors kin — there he comes now." 
 
 And the carefullest kind of examination and diagnosis 
 could never convince such a man that he wasrit just "buyin' 
 medicine." Medical skill, in fact, was something that many 
 of their minds could not conceive of. 
 
 So true was this that, indeed, some doctors never made 
 other than an "armchair diagnosis" — which means they 
 never left any comfortable seat for the mere purpose of ex- 
 amining a patient honestly. "Why bother," they would 
 ask, these armchair doctors, "to work and worry and fret 
 and stew and boil over and contrive, when the patient 
 doesn't know the difference, but merely after all believes he 
 is buying some medicine?" 
 
 Then there was another reason why doctors were so 
 often taken to be mere sellers of drugs. Large numbers of 
 doctors were in fact druggists, or, to put it more properly 
 perhaps, large numbers of druggists had medical licenses 
 and, so, quite incidentally, were doctors. 
 
 Just as examples, Dr. R. R. Pollock, of Nebo, and Dr. 
 John M. Smith, of Pleasant Hill, sold drugs as well as prac- 
 tised medicine. The former, in fact, advertised, * ' The Doctor 
 has, in connection with his practice, a well selected assort- 
 ment of drugs and medicines, which is found to be a great 
 convenience to the people in that vicinity." The latter: 
 
 " where he now resides, engaged in the practice of 
 
 his profession, and the sale of drugs, medicines, etc., and is 
 doing well." 
 
 And the doctor-druggist sold other things besides med- 
 icine. 
 
 Some people to-day believe that the idea of a drug-store 
 selling other things than drugs is purely modern. Let me, 
 
 1 See, for example, The Old Flag, Pittsfield, Illinois, April 13, 1871. 
 
STREET VIEW IN KINDERHOQK PfKECO.ILLS^ 
 
 AN OLD-TIME DOCTOR-DRUGGIST'S STORE AND SIGN— DR. ANDREWS' 
 
 Dr. Andrews sold in Connection with his Medical Practice Not Only Drugs but Groceries Also. 
 The Windows of the First Floor in His Building Displayed the Usual Insignia of the Old-Time 
 Pharmacies — Large, Ornamental Glass Jars, or Bottles, Filled with Brightly Colored Liquids — 
 Blue, Green and Red Chiefly. At Night, When the Coal-Oil Lamps Behind These Bottles Were 
 Lighted, the Effect was Rather Beautiful, Forecasting as it Did in Lilliputian Manner the In- 
 tensely Luminous, Highly Colored Electric Signs of the Present Day. 
 
 (From "Atlas Map of Pike County, Illinois": Andreas Lyter & Co., Davenport, Iowa: 1872) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE- 
 
VIEW ON MAIN STREET PLEASANT HILL ILLS. 
 LONG at OR CIV DCALERS/N 
 
 Stove i.T7n& Hollow Ware, also on hand a full supply ofHarness 
 Saddles &cffef»imgf promptly attended to w both lines. 
 dr j.h, south has a full supply of Americanfrench, 
 
 x!!u3 n r^h etr }' lcal$ - Drugs Medicines, HairB rushes, Dye 
 Stuffs, Patent Medicnes, Perfumery & Stationery. 
 
 ANOTHER OLD-TIME DOCTOR-DRUGGIST'S STORE AND SIGN— DR. SOUTH'S 
 
 Dr. South too was Rather More Interested in Medicines than in Medicine. Note Again the Lar°-e 
 Ornamental Glass Bottles. s ' 
 
 (From "Atlas Map of Pike County, Illinois": Andreas, Lyter & Co., Davenport, Iowa: 1872) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
v/cw or TM.WILUAMSON'Sdrug STOftC PITTSFIF.LD ULSJV.WXORNER PUCLIC SQUARt. 
 
 THE STORE AND SIGN OF AN OLD-TIME DRUGGIST 
 WHO WAS NOT ALSO A DOCTOR— T. H. WILLIAMSON 
 
 (From "Atlas Map of Pike County, Illinois": Andreas Lyter & Co., Davenport, Iowa: 1872) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 431 
 
pes. or Dr.F.M. CASAL washing-ton st. pitts field ills. 
 
 THE HOUSE AND OFFICE OF A DOCTOR WHO WAS NOT ALSO A DRUGGIST 
 —DR. F. M. CASAL 
 
 Nevertheless, Dr. Casal, like my Father, Dr. Dublin and Dr. Doss, Almost Always Supplied the 
 Medicines He Prescribed for His Patients — No Extra Charge. 
 
 (From "Atlas Map of Pike County, Illinois": Andreas Lyter & Co., Davenport, Iowa: 1872) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 432 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 433 
 
 then, reproduce a drug-store advertisement from The Old Flag 
 (Pittsfield, 111., April 13, 1871) : x 
 
 The common, in fact the almost universal, belief in those 
 days that a doctor was just a seller of drugs, only that and 
 nothing more, leads me to recall the time when a poor 
 family that had been treated by my father, day or night, 
 storm or sunshine, without money and without price, for a 
 considerable number of years, one day brought in — at least 
 the wife and mother did, a big basket full of bottles (bottles 
 my father had given her, mind you) and asked him to make 
 her a cash offer for them. "Your wife can clean them up," 
 said she, "till they're jest as good as new, and then you can 
 sell them again." The italics were hers, for she actually 
 spoke as if my father had already sold the bottles to her and 
 been paid money for them. 
 
 My father, characteristically, bought and paid cash for 
 the bottles. 
 
 THE "UNDERPRIVILEGED" 
 That incident reminds me that, one winter, there was 
 much concern in the churches, likewise among the municipal 
 office holders, about the poor of Pittsfield. So a mass meet- 
 ing was held to correct the situation, and I, though still 
 very young, attended. 
 
 Speeches were made by a number of ministers and by 
 town councilmen, wherein it was alleged that the little 
 town of Pittsfield was full to running over with what were 
 called — well to-day what would almost certainly be termed 
 ' 'the underprivileged. ' ' (The very word was a horrible piece 
 of dishonesty, for there was plenty of work in Pittsfield for 
 all willing workers, while those too sick to work — the truly 
 underprivileged — had been in truth well looked after. 
 
 When the speeches were over, there arose and went for- 
 ward to address the meeting — who but Mrs. Lucy Wills, the 
 philanthropist of whom I have already spoken . 
 
 *My copy of that issue was sent to me by Mr. Grant Criswell, Manhattan Beach, 
 California, a son of the aforetime editor and publisher of the journal in question. To Mr. 
 Grant Criswell, indeed, I am indebted for much other valuable information about old-time 
 patients and doctors in Pike County. 
 
434 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 me goods and prie«» 
 
 s 
 
 AKK, 
 
 ShGes, 
 
 HOBS. 
 202, 
 SO, 
 
 nlA 2w 
 
 'nds of 
 
 'UCKY 
 BT- 
 
 T, 
 MO. 
 
 Paints, Oitey 
 
 Drue*. Glass, Medicines. Dye Stuffs, 
 uors, Lin*, TWioe?Fl«Bf Hooks and Lioee, , 
 
 MARBLES, VIOLIN STRINGS, 
 
 Papers. Pons, Inks,, Envelops, fcc; Ifair 
 Brushes. Combs, I^ead Pencils, 
 
 California Brandv, Port, Angelica and 
 Catawba Wines, Lamp Wicks, 
 
 CHIMNEYS, HORSE BRUSHES, 
 
 Pocket Books, ^aUets, .Cloth , Brushes, 
 Mem Books, Sponges, Trot Lines, 
 
 FISH POLES, 
 
 ;y.. 
 
 Order* 
 
 And almost everything ever found in ft 
 
 WHOLESAIE, RETAIL & DRUG VARIETY STORE, 
 
 AH of wnicb I offer at 
 
 WHOLESALE OR RETAIL, 
 
 AT THE 
 
 Call when you come over and see fog 
 yourselves, at 
 
 217 MAIN STREET, 
 HANNIBAL, ^ - MISSOURI, 
 nl21y t B. BBQWN, 
 
 A TYPICAL DRUG-STORE ADVERTISEMENT IN THE 1870'S 
 
 The idea of a drug-store selling many other things than merely drugs is, contrary to present-day 
 opinion, not at all recent. Even in ancient Greece, as far back as the fifth century, B. C., the 
 pharmacotribae sold not only drugs but also burning-glasses, cosmetics and groceries. (See 
 Baas, "History of Medicine," page 97.) 
 
 (From The Old Flag — Pittsfield, Illinois, newspaper for April 13, 1871) 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 435 
 
 Said she, "I'll not speak long. All of you know I've 
 labored for years to dispense the wealth that God has given 
 me in the way that God would like me to dispense it— 
 that is, not with tears and maudlin sentimentality, but with 
 justice and reason and actual benefit whenever that is pos- 
 sible. 
 
 "A good deal has been made tonight of the fact that 
 many of the poor in this city do not own their homes. Now, 
 as you know, I am perfectly able to make good and I will 
 make good the following offer: (I see a great many of the 
 homeless in the back seats of this room.) To any grown 
 man of this town who has a family and who does not own 
 a home I will present, without money and without price, 
 one good two-story Pittsfield house and its lot, the house 
 well furnished too, on the one sole condition that the re- 
 cipient never uses either intoxicating liquor or tobacco." 
 
 She paused and the whole hall was very quiet. 
 
 ' 'Perhaps some of those in the back seats," she continued, 
 "did not understand me. 'To any man,' I said, 'who does 
 not own a home, I will present, without money and without 
 price, one good two-story Pittsfield house and its lot, the 
 house well furnished too, on the one sole condition that he 
 uses neither intoxicating liquor nor tobacco.' If he does 
 have money for things that only harm him and that keep 
 him from supporting his family, why should I present him 
 with a house and lot?" 
 
 No one rose to accept the offer. 
 
 After a while she went on again: "Now it is true that 
 the families of idle and wasteful husbands and fathers do 
 ofttimes suffer from the indolence and unthriftiness of those 
 who ought to be supporting them. In my investigations, 
 however, I have found that, in most of such instances, the 
 mother, by the help of the older children and by dint of 
 washing and ironing clothes for other families, has man- 
 aged fairly well. This, in fact, is true in almost all the 
 wasters' families, except where the mother or one of the 
 older children is chronically ill. Now, in such cases, I have 
 personally seen to it, assisted now and then by other women, 
 that such families are provided with fuel, clothing, food and 
 a few other necessary matters. The nursing has also been 
 seen to by willing neighbors, and the doctors of this city 
 
436 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 have furnished all the medical care and attention to these 
 unfortunates that even the richest persons could receive — 
 medical care and all sorts of medicines too, even the most 
 expensive." 
 
 It was the simple truth, as I, a doctor's apprentice, knew 
 quite well. 
 
 After a few moments, Lucy Wills, as every person in 
 Pittsfield affectionately called her, inquired, "Why! isn't 
 there even one man of family in this town who has no home 
 and who yet is not a waster? Well, perhaps there are some 
 that are not in this court-room tonight. So I will let the 
 offer stand for one whole month, and, besides, I'll put out 
 handbills, telling all about the offer, into the show-windows 
 round the Square. Remember, the offer is good for a month." 
 
 Just at this moment, up jumped a little, dirty-faced man 
 in the back of the house, and, as forward he weaved and 
 thrust through the thick crowd toward the lady speaker, he 
 shouted, "Be 'n no hurry, woman. Be 'n no hurry. I'm 
 comin' fer house an' lot: hain't no drinker!" 
 
 And behold it was one of the worst sots in Pittsfield. 
 
 Said Mrs. Wills, "Runikin, aren't you ashamed of your- 
 self, to say you haven't been drinking?" 
 
 "Not been drinkin' to say drinkin'," responded the man 
 with stubbornness. "Ain't had a drink fer a day till jest 
 now when me an' a feller — can't think of a name — but he 
 bought me six drinks just now an' paid fer 'em all himself. 
 Say, talk about being a waster, wouldn't I been a waster if 
 I'd wasted all them drinks?" 
 
 Now this may sound a bit funny here on paper, but, on 
 that occasion, the appearance of the little drunkard, whose 
 wife for many years had taken in washing to support herself 
 and her pitiful children, was such an object lesson to the 
 crowd, such a complete optoptic proference, as a lawyer 
 might have put it, that the whole assembly sat hushed. 
 
 Mrs. Lucy Wills, then, taking the hand of the drunkard, 
 began leading him out of the room — and, of course, toward 
 his home. He made not the slightest resistance for he was 
 in truth a kindly fellow, and the crowd dribbled slowly 
 away. 
 
 The Lucy Wills handbills appeared, in accordance with 
 the promise, in all the windows on the Square, but never 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 437 
 
 did any grown man with a family and without a home, 
 claim the two-story building, the lot and the furniture 
 which the handbills offered. Mrs. Lucy Wills told me so 
 herself long afterwards in the home of her sister, Mrs. 
 Purkitt, the aforetime foster mother of the famous John G. 
 Nicolay. 
 
 The Willses were all "good stock." No one ever had to 
 render any assistance to any of them, or to refer to them 
 apologetically as "underprivileged." They made their own 
 privileges and many other privileges too for many other 
 people. Mrs. Lucy had two fine sons, William and Vine. 
 To Vine, among other children, was born a daughter, 
 Malinda. To Malinda, who married a Walter R. Dilts, was 
 born a son who is indeed a credit to his ancestry — Dr. P. V. 
 Dilts. He practices medicine at Pittsfield now, and, in many 
 ways, is a blessing to his community. Whenever I see his 
 name in the old-town papers, I also see again his great 
 grandmother, whom I knew so well, and whom my father 
 and I so often met when "Practising in Pike." 
 
 Not to her was it given, as it had been given to her 
 sister, to salvage for the world a John G. Nicolay — maker 
 of America's greatest diplomat and her greatest president — 
 yet at least to many humble sick folk and to many humble 
 country doctors — those who had "taken the veil" — she was 
 like a ministering angel, for always there was "healing" — 
 I have almost said "in her wings." 
 
 QUACK DOCTORS AND QUACK DENTISTS. 
 POLYFORM 
 
 There were also those drug-stores that were really drug- 
 stores, drug-stores only. And these were the natural evening 
 rendezvous in Pittsfield for all the doctors — all at least who 
 could assemble without the use of firearms and who were not 
 busy attending the sick. 1 Even these apothecary shops, 
 however, sold quack medicines unblushingly, as many drug- 
 stores still do. 
 
 1 As far back as I can remember there were "honest-to-goodness" drug-stores in Pitts- 
 field. And some of the owners of these were men of unusual character and striking person- 
 
438 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Still more fraudulent, if possible, were the quack doctors, 
 dentists, bonesetters and bleeders with which the country- 
 side abounded. Hardly a single bonesetter had any knowl- 
 edge of anatomy. Hence he did not often reduce an actual 
 dislocation. But all the sprains, severe bruises and slight 
 arthritides that were brought to him and which he either 
 ignorantly or cunningly diagnosed as "dislocations" he 
 "reduced" with the greatest of ease. A week of immobiliza- 
 tion, then, with a splint and many bandages, and presto! 
 there you were quite sound and well. 
 
 As to the "neighborhood bleeders," we still had them, 
 though not so many as formerly, in that summer of 1883 — 
 the vacation of which I write. A writer in "Transactions 
 of Missouri State Medical Association," St. Louis, for 1883, 
 
 ality. One of the straightest, cleanest and most scholarly among them was Charley Harder. 
 Another was D. W. Hyde, whom I knew the best of all. (The others I knew but little.) 
 
 Hyde had his store in the first-floor corner room of the Pittsfield Hotel. In this store 
 it was that my father and I, of unbusy evenings, would drop in, take chairs and chat for 
 awhile. 
 
 "D. W." was always glad to see us, though sometimes apparently crabby and uncom- 
 municative. He liked best of all to talk to us in his gruff way about French history, French 
 affairs, French people. He loved, too, the French language, and, generally, held in his 
 hand a copy of Fenelon's "Telemaque." I was always greatly interested when, finger in 
 book for a book-mark, he would relate to us how the young Telemachus went in search of 
 his father, undaunted by the greatest of difficulties and dangers. When we applauded he 
 would beam, then ask my father the Latin etymology of some of Fenelon's expressions. 
 
 More gruffly even than toward us he would act toward many of his customers — some of 
 whom in fact he appeared to regard as merely afflictions to be tolerated. Rising with finger 
 still in book, he would ask, "What was it you said that you wanted?" Even as he weighed 
 out the drugs he would not lay his precious book down. 
 
 His chief abhorrence was the person (whose name was truly Legion) that came in 
 asking for so or so much "worth" of so and so. "Ten cents worth of quinine?" he would 
 sputter interrogatively and indignantly. "How can I tell how much even a found of quinine 
 would be 'worth' to you? I know nothing about your case — yet. Haven't examined you. 
 Do you have a chill each day?" And so on he would run. 
 
 "Well, here's your quinine. It ought to be 'worth' at least ten cents to you — though 
 I can't tell how much you yourself will be 'worth' when you get well again — worth to 
 yourself, to your family, to society. — Quit leaning on that show case." 
 
 To another such customer: "Fifteen cents worth of senna leaves? Why don't you ask 
 for two ounces of senna leaves, or some similar weight?" 
 
 "Because," said a certain little girl on such an occasion and quite logically, "I don't 
 know how much two ounces of the stuff would cost us, and I do know just how little money 
 we have." She began crying. 
 
 "There, there," comforted the good-hearted old druggist. "Don't you cry, honey. 
 I'm just an old curmudgeon that always makes a fool of himself. Here — take this worm 
 candy, sugar. It's the only kind of candy I have. That's a present from me. And the 
 senna's a present to your mother. We never charge for senna the first time a given customer 
 buys it." 
 
 "Well, what do you want?" (To another customer who had just entered.) "A postage 
 stamp or a good driving horse? Well, why didn't you say so? They're two for a nickel 
 and pretty bad cigars, I'd say." 
 
 He was really of a fine poetic nature, D. W., and kept on one of his walls a beautiful 
 picture entitled "The Circling Year." "I'm going to explain that picture to you sometime, 
 Tom," he said to me one day, "if these fool customers quit coming in long enough so I 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 439 
 
 declares, "This neighborhood bleeder was generally an old 
 gentleman, a married man of respectability and good morals, 
 and his calls were not confined to those ill of acute diseases; 
 but extended to pregnant women, for it was a very general 
 opinion that the abstraction of blood from women in this 
 interesting condition, especially if inclined to plethora, 
 soothed and quieted the brain, eased the aches and pains of 
 the body, and insured a more easy and safe delivery. But 
 these practices like- the fashions prevailing at the time, have 
 passed away and given place to more enlightened, rational 
 and health-restoring views." "These practices" may indeed 
 have "passed away" at that time in St. Louis, but they had 
 by no means passed away in the backwoods districts, such 
 
 can do so." And then one day, one night rather, when there were no customers of one 
 kind or another, he did interpret the picture to me, and the interpretation was very beautiful 
 indeed. I was touched to tears. 
 
 The customers who chiefly offended Mr. Hyde, as I have said already and say again for 
 emphasis, were those who, instead of ordering drugs by quantity, would want them by the 
 quarter's worth, the dime's worth, or — alas even so — the nickel's worth. 
 
 To one of these he made no haste to reply, but, instead, questioned, "Ever read Fen- 
 elon's 'Telemaque'?" 
 
 "Fennel's what?" 
 Fenelon * s ' Telemaque ' ? " 
 
 "Anything like dog fennel?" 
 
 "No." Sighing. "You wouldn't understand. Why don't you measure drugs in 
 apothecaries' weight? Why measure them in 'money's worth'?" 
 
 "Well!" the man cried, in amazement, "don't you know how much your drugs are 
 worth in money?" 
 
 "Stuff! Different amounts have different values. Don't you know that?" 
 
 "But don't you know how much value in a given drug a given amount of money has? 
 1 know only one of these things — the money end. You know both ends — at least you ortew." 
 
 "And never say 'ortew.' 
 
 "Well, I know damned well you do ortew. Gimme that medicine." 
 
 "Give me that money." 
 
 The man laid down his quarter. "Here's your medicine," said D. W. "And it's twice 
 as much as you'd get for your money at any other place. Don't forget that, if you want 
 to get mad." 
 
 There was another class of patients that D. W. heartily disliked, those who called him 
 "Doc." To those who did this low-down thing, he would answer, bitterly, "Don't call 
 me 'Doc.' I'm a respectable citizen." This was a way he had of teasing my father — who, 
 however, never let on. 
 
 There was still another class of customers whom D. W. Hyde disliked — those who took 
 him off to a corner and then whispered. Cupping hand to mouth, he would sometimes fairly 
 shout, ' 'Can't — hear — what — you — say. 
 
 To one of these whisperers he one day bellowed, "I can't understand whether you said 
 'liquor' or 'rubber.' And please quit leaning on that show-case if it is in the back of the 
 room. It's a good show-case." 
 
 "What show-case?" 
 
 "That show-case you're leaning on. Get off the glass." 
 
 "What glass?" 
 
 "That show-case glass you're leaning on." 
 
 "I ain't leaning on no show-case glass. I'm just restin' one hand on a piece o* news- 
 
440 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 as Pike County, although in truth they were in the act of 
 passing even there. 
 
 Not passing at all, however, were the travelling ' 'doctors" 
 and "dentists." Again and again we met in the country 
 peddlars of tinware, clocks and the like, with "Also Doctors 
 and Pullers of Teeth" painted in green or crimson on the 
 sides of their gaudy wagons. Country doctors, I here should 
 state, pulled in those days the most of the country peoples' 
 teeth, and my father was ofttimes called in incidentally to 
 render this then supposedly minor service. I held the head 
 and the spit-basin, not infrequently gave the anesthetic too 
 — ether, of course. Doctors then did not fill teeth or make 
 dentures. But, anyway, few people wanted filled teeth or 
 artificial teeth. Gradually these people became toothless — 
 though not necessarily rootless or painless. Many of them, 
 
 paper that happens to be lyin' on the glass. If the paper conducts the pressure on to the 
 glass, that ain't my fault, is it? I didn't never make no paper — ever." 
 
 His hand went suddenly SMASH through the glass. 
 
 "I'm truly sorry, Mr. Hyde," apologized the fellow. "I'll pay you for it — right now." 
 
 "No you don't," said Hyde. "That glass was already badly cracked — under the paper. 
 That's what I kept that paper on it for. You won't pay me for any glass that was already 
 cracked." 
 
 "Will you sell me now what I wanted?" 
 
 Hyde looked at him quizzically, "You trying to deceive some young woman?" 
 
 "No siw<?. Just to save my wife." 
 
 "But God wants all of us to have children." 
 
 "Not my wife he don't want to have no childern. The next baby'd be sure to kill 'er. 
 Ask Doc Shastid there. He used to be our family doctor." 
 
 My father spoke up. "The man tells the truth. The next child would kill her. The 
 last one almost did so." 
 
 "I don't want to be accessory to murder," said Mr. Hyde. So he gave the man a little 
 package. "But I'm not going to make any profit on any such transaction. The cost of 
 these things to me was [he mentioned the amount]. And that's the cost to you too. I won't 
 have any money-interest in things like these under any circumstances whatsoever." 
 
 I believed him then, and I believe him still. 
 
 The rough-seeming old man was strictly honest. He lived his religion, too, in all 
 other ways. He genuinely loved people. With all his heart he loved them. 
 
 I am told that, in May, 1894, the good old druggist sold his stock and, because of ill 
 health, retired from business. After that he was never quite the same: he missed too much 
 the pleasant associations of his work, the many fine intimacies, which, under a gruff ex- 
 terior, he had enjoyed so deeply. 
 
 I am also informed that, after he had retired, he, on a Sunday, in his own home, was, 
 by fate, made a witness in broad daylight to a terrible homicide committed in his own front 
 dooryard by a large young man on a very small old one. The big young fellow, in fact 
 (or so it is said) stamped the head of his little old victim out perfectly flat on the ground. 
 After that, D. W., it appeared, could never be happy again. "He seemed much like a tired 
 child," I am told. "He was most unhappy, and his mind, for solace, wandered back to the 
 scenes of his childhood in Vermont, the little town of Derby whence he had come to 
 Pittsfield." 
 
 I loved him and I love him still. I ofttimes see him in dreams with his finger for a 
 book-mark still inside his copy of Fenelon's "T61emaque," while he gruffly waits on a customer. 
 
 
GRANDMA HEATH 
 
 FIRST DISCOVERER OF LIVER AS A 
 CURE FOR PERNICIOUS ANEMIA 
 
 Mary (Nancy) M. Heath, whose maiden name 
 was Dunbar, was born January 1," 1791 (some 
 say 1785) the first white child born in Cincinnati. 
 She was brought up by Governor McArthur, cf 
 Ohio, and in 1813 was married to Wm. Jonathan 
 Heath, physician. Soon after her husband's 
 death in 1825, she rode on horseback from 
 
 Marietta, Ohio, to Naples, Illinois, where she 
 taught the first school in that town. In 1834, 
 the year the town of Pittsfield was laid out, she 
 removed to that village, where again she taught 
 the first school. She was also the first teacher of 
 my father and of Dr. Thomas Worthington, the 
 first physician in Pittsfield. 
 
 (Cont 'd over) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
Even when, after years of work, she retired 
 from teaching, Mrs. Heath continued to reside 
 in Pittsfield — -at 524 East Perry Street, just north 
 of what is now the East School Building. She 
 was always a great favorite at my father's house, 
 and, whenever she took a notion, would suddenly 
 pop in on us and visit as long as she liked. She 
 used to open my eyes and raise my hair by her 
 stories of the Indian raids on white settlers when 
 she was a young girl in Ohio. The accompanying 
 picture of her, though beyond all doubt authentic, 
 gives only a faint conception of the dramatic 
 character of her narrative and indeed of the 
 vivid, high strung make-up of the woman in 
 general. 
 
 A favorite all over Pike County, Mrs. Heath 
 was frequently invited to lead the parades in 
 Pittsfield and some of the outlying towns. When 
 she was not invited, she ofttimes led them any- 
 way. Sometimes she would lead on foot and 
 sometimes astraddle of a big horse. I have seen 
 her marching, uninvited, at the head of circus 
 processions, once using a broomstick as a baton 
 and again a pitchfork. After the music's close, 
 she pretended, on each occasion, to be angry at 
 the "untrained musicians." 
 
 After such parade leadings she would some- 
 times shout to the crowd, "I'm not eccentric; 
 I'm just full of the old Nick." Everybody laughed 
 with her and loved her. 
 
 After my father began to practice medicine, 
 she would have nobody else to attend her in her 
 numerous illnesses. Even when she was sick and 
 he was waiting on her, she was a very great tease. 
 Thus, once, when suffering from the flux, she 
 said to my father in my presence and in that of 
 a number of others, "Tommy, do you know why 
 I always want you and never that other Tommy 
 [Dr. Thomas Worthington]?" "No." Because 
 he always gives me quinine and castor oil, but 
 you always give me castor oil and quinine." 
 
 Dear old grandmother! She was a very good 
 historian and a fairly well read "doctor" — no 
 backwoods illiterate by any manner of means. 
 She had a number of other remedies too, of her 
 very own, besides that for "littleness of the 
 blood." One of these she called her "Guarantee 
 of Long Life." I forget now what was in it. But 
 
 I cannot forget the time when, in 1886, I went 
 with my father, to see "Old Gran'ma Heath" 
 once more, who was again very sick. I listened 
 to the "crepitant rales" and the weak but rapid 
 beatings of her heart. When we thought her al- 
 most gone, she suddenly opened her eyes and 
 whispered, "I said I'd live to be ninety-five, 
 didn't I? [She had really prophesied that.] My 
 Guarantee did it." 
 
 After a time she opened her eyes again, smiled 
 and said, "Remember the time, Doc Tommy, 
 when you got so wicked at school I took down 
 your pants and threshed you there before all the 
 other scholars?" 
 
 Father nodded. After a little she opened her 
 eyes again, smiled widely, and whispered, "Heav- 
 ens and earth, Doc Tommy! The fun I've had 
 in this life!" 
 
 Not long afterward she died. 
 
 Longevity has been a striking characteristic of 
 Gran'ma Heath's descendants. One of them, a 
 granddaughter, Mrs. Alice Wills Isanogle, reach- 
 ed, actually, the age of 96. And all whom I 
 know of her descendants have been, or still are, 
 very active in their communities, leaders thereof 
 in every sort of intellectual and other high en- 
 deavor. These notable traits I do not believe 
 have had anything at all to do with Grand- 
 mother's "Guarantee." They are simply due to 
 the fact that she herself, though "a mere wee bit 
 of nothing," as some of our Pittsfield people 
 called her, was a bundle of jovial laughter, of 
 interest in everything that ever happened, such 
 a joy in life as death itself could only fail to 
 quench. Merely five feet high and weighing less 
 than ninety pounds, she was nevertheless, even 
 in her ninety-fifth year, a vigorous market- 
 gardener and one who, though she knew herself 
 to be a doctor, never forgot her limitations. 
 
 (For the accompanying photograph of Grand- 
 mother Heath, as well as for some of the more 
 important facts in this legend, I am deeply in- 
 debted to two of Grandmother's great-grand- 
 daughters — Edna Floy Crawford Barcus (Mrs. 
 Geo. Barcus) and her sister, Miss Kate Crawford, 
 both of whom live at Chanute, Kansas.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 443 
 
 of course, died of their unextracted roots, and, as to the 
 toothlessness, most persons in those days did not, subse- 
 quent to marriage, care anything at all about their looks. 
 Many indeed believed that personal attractions were "ag'in 
 religion," and "jest only a trappin' contrivance of the 
 devil." As old Uncle Abe Butz, of the Oregon House in 
 Pittsfield, used to say, "Poor old G. .d d. . . .d human bein's, 
 they're so afraid God'll damn 'em hereafter, they go straight 
 ahead and damn themselves right now." 
 
 But much of the tooth-pulling, as I say, was done by the 
 clock-and-tinware peddlars who were incidentally "Doctors 
 and Pullers of Teeth. ' ' Much of the tooth-pulling which my 
 father would otherwise have attended to went to these 
 shysters of the country highways. But he was invariably 
 glad that he had lost that kind of practice. Eventually he 
 refused to pull teeth and referred one and all who needed 
 dentistry to Dentist Carey at Pittsfield or to dentists at 
 Griggsville and Pleasant Hill. And, two or three counties 
 away, at a place called Jacksonville, there was practising a 
 dentist, Dr. G. V. Black, who was rapidly developing 
 dentistry into a scientific profession for the world, rapidly 
 becoming known as the "father" of scientific dentistry, and 
 who, at this time in which I write, is known to many as 
 "the greatest dentist that has ever lived." 
 
 It was, verily, a time of great transition, those years, a 
 time wherein the world of almost utter darkness was ex- 
 periencing the commencement of a sunrise. As my father 
 used to exult, having in mind the people who then were 
 yet to exist, "I see their dear, still unborn, faces shining 
 hereafter in the light of a new, an incredible, day!" 
 
 POLYFORM 
 
 "Patent" medicines — meaning thereby of course propri- 
 etary mixtures — were in almost every kitchen, on almost 
 every clock-shelf, wherever we went. At one old lady's 
 the great cure-all was "Tom Edison's Polyform." It is not 
 generally known that Edison, among his innumerable activ- 
 ities, was also a "quack doctor." In addition to his bottled 
 "Polyform" Edison also "invented" magnetic belts, like- 
 wise a "preventive of yellow fever," which "prevented" 
 nothing, I understand, except sobriety. However, it was 
 
444 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 declared to be a positive killer of the yellow fever "bug," 
 an "insect" which Tom described as "walking along the 
 ground." 
 
 Strange it was that Thomas Edison, though not a money 
 maker, was always trying to make money — and was not 
 always over-scrupulous as to the way in which he made it. 
 Most of the lives of Edison make no mention of these matters, 
 but Mary Nerne's "Thomas A. Edison" goes into them 
 rather fully. In any case I want to go on record as believing 
 that, next to Pasteur, Lister, Weigert and Koch, Thomas 
 Alva Edison was the greatest benefactor the human race 
 has ever known. Thy "polyform" we do forgive thee, 
 Thomas, likewise thy "magnetic belts" and thy "killer of 
 the yellow fever germ," which "walks along the ground" — 
 either on or off stilts, and with or without a black cloak. 
 These things merely make thee a bit more human, Thomas, 
 and I, for one, do like thee all the better for it, ethics or no 
 ethics. Thine invention of the fluoroscope alone should cause 
 the medical profession to forgive thee everything unHippo- 
 cratic that thou mayest have done, and, if ever thou didst 
 make a dollar by thy quack remedies — a thing I plainly 
 doubt, Thomas — well, thou didst merely invest that dollar 
 in thy laboratory for the benefit of all mankind. 
 
 GRANDMA HEATH 
 
 Almost every woman of any great age in those days 
 thought herself a doctor. Among those most active in the 
 medical line was Mrs. Mary M. Heath, ordinarily known 
 as "Grandma Heath." She had been the first schoolteacher 
 in Pittsfield, but now was retired. She had a remedy for 
 almost everything she had ever heard of, and as soon as she 
 learned of any new disease, she devised a first-class remedy 
 therefor at once. She had had experience too, a great deal 
 of it, at the bedsides of the sick. She had taught my father 
 from the primer in his childhood, and, after her retirement, 
 had ofttimes brought her knitting or crocheting and stayed 
 at our house for two or three weeks hand-running. Especial- 
 ly I recall her remedy for anemia, or "littleness of blood." 
 That was merely liver, cooked liver or raw; liver of sheep, 
 liver of lamb, liver of cow or chicken or pig — no difference, 
 liver of any sort was good. When all other things had 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 445 
 
 failed, she found "by actual tryin'," that the best medicine 
 for ' littleness of the blood" was liver, especially the liver of 
 beef or of pig. She recited numerous cases wherein doctors 
 had failed to cure anemia and in which her copious liver 
 diet had succeeded to the limit. My father, when I asked 
 him if she really had cured cases of anemia on which actual 
 M. D's had failed would reply, "Well, I've known such 
 cases in her hands to get well, but, more than likely, they 
 would have got well anyway." 
 
 Everybody laughed at Grandma Heath and her liver 
 cures. Of course, everybody except the uneducated. The 
 ignorant were ready to believe any sort or kind of nonsense, 
 naturally. My very scientific father indulgently smiled 
 whenever Grandma wanted him just to try her liver diet in 
 "littleness of the blood," or anemia. "The butchers don't 
 charge anything for liver, why not try it?" Again he would 
 only smile. 
 
 Alas for poor Grandma Heath, the first discoverer of the 
 greatest of all remedies for pernicious anemia ! She was too 
 humble a person by far for any scientific doctor to pay the 
 slightest attention to her discovery and then to report it to 
 a scientific society or journal. 
 
 But, long after her death, Drs. Minot, Murphy and Cohn, 
 in Boston, Mass., made the discovery anew, reported it, 
 and — for their great service to mankind received the Nobel 
 prize. They had well deserved the prize, of course. They 
 had put the whole matter on a scientific basis and published 
 it to the world. 
 
 After these numerous divagations and explanations, I 
 return to the drive of that day with my father. When we 
 had passed through Griggsville and Perry and then gone 
 westward some eight or ten miles, and eaten our cheese and 
 crackers at a tiny village store, we drove south and east 
 again, and so, after a time, in sight of a weather-beaten 
 little one-room schoolhouse. Here he stopped to rest his 
 horse. "Father," I asked, "was it there that you used to 
 teach school?" 
 
 "No." And he mentioned the place in which, for two 
 terms, he had taught a village school — Perry, in the north 
 of our county. "What great advantages," he commented, 
 
446 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 still looking at the one-room shack, "the children of this 
 day have over the children of my generation. When I at- 
 tended school, I went, it is true, to the little brick building, 
 the Ross-Noyes School, there in Pittsfield on East Washing- 
 ton Street, but that was a palace compared with the other 
 country school-buildings of the day. And, even when I was 
 attending the little brick building, unusually warm as it 
 was, neither I nor any of the other children in Pittsfield had 
 shoes to wear, even in the very coldest weather." 
 "How did you keep your feet from freezing?" 
 "Simply enough. Mother would take a thick oak board, 
 say about two feet in length, heat it thoroughly at the fire- 
 place, and then I, with my little face wrapped up, taking 
 the hot board under my arm, would dash out of the house 
 door, lickety-split for the schoolhouse. 
 
 "As soon as my bare feet got too cold, I would throw 
 the board to the ground, place my feet on it and warm them. 
 When my hands got too cold, I would pick up the board, 
 and, holding it in my hands, start on the run again. Thus, 
 warming hands and feet alternately, I would finally reach 
 my school without having frozen even a finger or a toe. 
 Coming back home I would repeat the process. 1 
 
 "The school-buildings in those days throughout the 
 country-side were many of them only log affairs, each with 
 one fireplace and a stick-and-mud chimney. Nearly all had 
 one window only. A few had none at all. Those that had 
 a window got their light through that. Those that had no 
 window were lighted by a home-made tallow candle. 2 
 
 "School was generally of two 'terms,' a winter term 
 and a summer term. The winter term was generally attended 
 both by the older students and the younger; the summer 
 
 1 Photographs of the house from which he ran and the school which, with his board, 
 he attended — both of which buildings still stand and in the same old spots, will be found 
 supra, near the beginning of this section, "The Doctor Who Fathered a Tramp." 
 
 2 The one-room country schoolhouse is now disappearing in Pike County, as in many 
 other areas of the United States. The tendency is constantly toward amalgamation — cen- 
 tralization and an increasing number of rooms in each school. The cause? Automobiles and 
 hard roads. 
 
 The same cause is producing an even profounder alteration in country medical practice. 
 Instead of people being sick in thousands of tiny homes throughout the county, they now 
 are nearly all hurried immediately to a large hospital in the county seat. The old-time 
 country medical practice has in fact now, like so many other important human activities, 
 "moved to town." Of this — more hereafter. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 447 
 
 term by the younger students only. You see, in summer the 
 older boys and girls had so much work to do at home they 
 could not bother much about schoolin'. In winter the 
 larger children helped the smaller ones through the snow- 
 drifts. In summer they carried them through the mud, 
 across swollen streams, and so on, to the schoolhouse — 
 returning, however, at once to the farm and its unpostpon- 
 able work. 
 
 "Some of the schoolhouses were built not of logs but of 
 good mill-timber, with sideboards on it, shingles on top of 
 it, and a safe brick chimney inside. Some of the buildings, 
 even in the country, were constructed of bricks — but not 
 many. Occasionally schools were held in churches. One 
 was held for many years in the basement of the Christian 
 Church at Pittsfield. Grandma Heath was once teacher there, 
 later your Uncle Jon Shastid, whose school was called 'The 
 Pittsfield Academy' — not to be confounded however with 
 the John D. Thomson 'Academy.' The Thomson Acad- 
 emy, founded in 1849, taught the higher branches, the 
 Pittsfield Academy, not founded till 1857, taught both lower 
 and higher. There was one brick schoolhouse in the south 
 part of this county which, for years, had only an earth floor 
 — I know not why. Nearly all the log buildings had such 
 floors. 
 
 "The teacher's desk was generally a puncheon slab set 
 on two rough-hewn posts. The children sat on backless 
 benches, studying, three or four heads bent together over 
 each and every book. There were few slates, no blackboards. 
 In some schools the children were not merely permitted, 
 they were actually required, to study aloud — the same as 
 down yonder at this moment. After a period of such study 
 together, the entire school — young, old and in-between — 
 recited together. Beginning with the younger children, the 
 recitation moved on up to the oldest, rather the most ad- 
 vanced. Sometimes, as to more important matters, the 
 children all recited in concert. A great deal of attention 
 was given to spelling, and the spelling lesson was very 
 often recited in concert. I, too, when I taught, paid par- 
 ticular attention to spelling, also to pronunciation — getting 
 the pupils to say 'certain' for 'sartin,' 'joints' for 'j'ints,' 
 'drop' for 'drap,' 'creek' for 'crick,' 'follow' for 'foller.' 
 
448 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 I also spoke often on the derivation of words and the neces- 
 sity for many of those children to become doctors. 1 
 
 "In fact schoolteachers, in those days, ofttimes had to 
 function a good deal as doctors — amateur doctors of course 
 and for no extra pay. I, for one, used to pull out the little 
 folks' splinters and bee-stings, stop their nose-bleeds, put 
 cold water or wet leaves on their bumps, sticking-plaster 
 on cuts and scratches, bandages on sprained ankles. Some- 
 times I sewed up a deep wound, even pulled teeth. My 
 tooth forceps, however, I always took along home with me 
 at night. If I didn't, the rougher boys would steal them and 
 pull the girls' teeth. I even had to teach a few families the 
 use of fine comb and newspaper for ridding the children's 
 heads of 'travelers.' 
 
 "As to the discipline — " He broke suddenly off. Then 
 he began again, "Now, when I was teaching school — " 
 He paused and listened long to the hum of childish voices 
 coming up from the tiny weather-beaten building down be- 
 low. "When I was teaching — Well, I had but little trouble 
 with discipline. I recall, however, that one day in the 
 study period, I kept hearing amid all the din and hubbub 
 one childish voice saying, 'Our teacher's a gawky, our 
 teacher's a gawky.' I could not find out who the little 
 culprit was. When school had 'let out,' I heard that same 
 voice just outside the window bragging to some other child 
 about the perfectly safe way in which she had said to my 
 very face precisely what she thought of me. It was a tiny 
 sweet girl of about eight years. I ran out, caught her up, 
 and, much to her surprise, kissed her. When I set her down, 
 she cried in great astonishment, 'Ain't you goin' to whip 
 me?' I said, 'No, honey, not for a million worlds.' And I 
 never whipped any of them again. One day I did call up 
 a big strapping fellow for punishment, but he made some 
 comical remark, the whole school laughed — I louder than 
 the rest — and there wasn't any whipping at all any more. 
 I had excellent order too from that time onward. 
 
 "Often I went outside with them, played crack-the-whip 
 with the boys, ante-over and ring-around-rosey with the 
 
 1 It was the simple truth. Never did it seem to occur to him that there could be too 
 many doctors. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 449 
 
 girls. They studied all the harder for that. When playing- 
 hide-and-go-seek, I ofttimes, after hiding my eyes, counted 
 my hundred in Latin or in Greek. Thus they learned un- 
 consciously, even at play. 
 
 "I — I — " He seemed strangely moved. 4 T thought we 
 might go down to-day to this old schoolhouse and hear the 
 children recite, seeing there's so little sickness. But now I 
 think perhaps we had better get back again to Pittsfield 
 and the old house and barn." 
 
 And, at the barn, we exchanged horses — Pinto for Spook. 
 
 In leading the rig from the stable my father confessed 
 as to the mare called "Spook": "In addition to her other 
 disagreeable points, she's hard to catch, is bright gray in 
 color, is sway-backed and blind in one eye." 
 
 "Yes, and," I added, "Spook is not a good name for a 
 horse — even for a plug." 
 
 "That's the very reason why it is a good name," he 
 replied, jesting. "It's so bad that it's good. People say 
 to one another, 'See that new horse Doc's a-drivin'? Looks 
 like a ghost. It is a ghost — name's "Spook." Good name fer 
 a doctor s horse, eh?' And then they laugh, prod one another 
 in the ribs, and pass the joke to others." 
 
 "Look out for the code of ethics," I admonished. "That's 
 advertising." 
 
 "If it is, it's the kind they can't take you up before a 
 medical society for. Besides, there's no medical society in 
 this county." 1 
 
 Father halted Spook before our house. I got into the 
 buggy and he followed. Instanter — a transformation! Down 
 
 1 In fact there had been no medical society in Pike County since, in 1856, my father, 
 in Pittsfield, had begun to practice. Neither had there been one there at any time, so far 
 as he knew, since there had even been a Pike County. Indeed there never was established 
 in Pike County a medical society, until, in 1891, my half-brother, William, settling in 
 Pittsfield, had started the movement to found one. 
 
 But, in my father's time, such doctors as chanced to be on speaking terms with one 
 another, would stop side by side in a roadway, and, for a long time, discuss the ethicality 
 or unethicality of other physicians. No group of maiden ladies at a sewing-society meet, 
 ever dissected and discussed the virtues and the non-virtues of their absent-sister victims 
 with more thoroughness, emphasis, and, in general, metaphysical inconclusiveness, than 
 did these Academicians of the Pike County Roadside. 
 
 Or, if ever they did arrive at some definite conclusion, they never proceeded to put the 
 judgment into effect — except, of course, at long intervals, via the fistic code. 
 
 Over in Missouri a doctor was actually shot by a brother physician for saying that 
 "the germ theory was not unethical." 
 
 Still, "nothing ever happens in a country practice." 
 
450 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 the street and around the Square went we at lightning speed. 
 
 I, greatly alarmed, shouted wildly, "Father! Pull the 
 
 1**1 
 string ! * 
 
 "Whoa, Spook," almost whispered my father. 
 
 And Spook came to a gentle stop— nickered softly. 
 
 "Now, Spook, get up but not quite so fast." Thus he. 
 
 Spook nickered again, softly — I cannot tell you quite 
 how softly, and took up a gait of about five miles per hour. 
 
 And the secret of why my father, having tried Spook out, 
 had bought her, was a secret no more. She was half human. 
 A country doctor, in the silence and the dangers of the night, 
 in his exultations at victory over disease, in his cogitations, 
 his frequent self-condemnations at their conclusion, in his 
 ofttimes great bewilderment and grovelling melancholy and 
 despair — needs a friend. 
 
 Spook was a friend, somebody to talk with — about all 
 the various things that happen in a "quiet" country practice. 
 
 "Ever run away?" 
 
 "Yes, several times." 
 
 "Pull the string, did you — the contraption?" 
 
 "Never yet. You see, Spook runs like a mule. A horse 
 runs away because he is really frightened; a mule because 
 he wants to run. That's why a runaway horse will run off 
 a bridge or over a cliff or into a solid tree. A mule will 
 never do that, but always sticks tight to the road. And, 
 when he's through his gallavanting, he stops of himself." 
 
 So Spook, you see, was half human and half mule — all 
 the more human perhaps because she was half mule. 
 
 What finally became of her I do not know. At any rate 
 she did not stay with us long. I think my mother was 
 afraid of her, string or no string, and, perhaps — well, she 
 did not want a repetition of what had taken place near the 
 Kespohl brickyard, when Black Jim had been my father's 
 much too terrible "friend." 
 
 So, somewhat beyond the middle of the afternoon, we 
 were driving slowly south out of Pittsfield and by the side of 
 Oakwood Cemetery, my father continually and without 
 
 1 The explanation of the term "string," as above employed, has already appeared in 
 this volume and will appear again hereafter. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 451 
 
 uttering a word looking over at the family lot wherein some 
 time he was himself to lie. And so we kept on slowly, 
 slowly southward into the bright hill country, "The High- 
 lands." And when we had reached the top of one of the 
 brightest hills, the gray mare came to a stop of herself. 
 All was as silent as a day gone by. 
 
 And, as I watched, there in the utter quiet and effulgence 
 of that incomparable day the hills and the hollows them- 
 selves seeming to worship, there came upon me again that 
 greatest ecstasy I had ever known — the ecstasy I'd experi- 
 enced so often in my childhood. 
 
 My father, too, I ofttimes wish to think, was likewise 
 engulfed in that mood of eternity — I can think of nothing 
 else to call it — for at all events he did not speak for a very 
 long time, and, after a while, the mare started of herself. 
 
 And again he was wholly silent as we passed through 
 dreaming, dusking Martinsburg and then on even farther 
 southward, until, all at once he turned the nickering mare 
 to the east. 
 
 "We haven't had any practice at all this day," commented 
 my father, "but yonder comes a big fee for us just the same." 
 
 And behold! the shadows of the night had indeed been 
 closing until now the earth appeared to be lost in them 
 wholly, when all at once, as it seemed, like a gigantic, 
 newly minted coin, the great full moon solemnly pushed 
 above the rim of the world, apparently paused for a tiny 
 second, then rose, rose, rose — mountains and mad magic and 
 memories and what dreams! 
 
 An incomparable fee — the moon! Compensation for far 
 more than merely "the taking of the veil" ! 
 
 We sat together in silence again for a long time, thinking 
 of the hours before I had gone away — in silence golden till 
 the moon had reached her zenith and begun descending into 
 the wakeful west. 
 
 From afar came little voices of the night, sweetest, toy- 
 like syllables, noises out of distant fairyland — plaintive 
 sounds from far-gone childhood, which is all there is of fairy- 
 land anyway. 
 
 I grew sleepy and nodded. Father put his arm about me 
 as he had done so often in former years. 
 
452 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 It was good to be at home once more, I thought, as I 
 opened my eyes, and there was Will, waiting in his base- 
 ball suit before the big dark barn, the center of the circle 
 he was casting round him with a lantern. 
 
 He and Mother had become greatly alarmed about us, 
 the more especially as they both mistrusted Spook. 
 
 Will had just been starting to enter the barn, there to 
 hitch up another horse and drive out in search of us. 
 
 TRAMPING LITERAL AND MORE OFFICE WORK 
 It should not be supposed that my vacation from college 
 was spent altogether on riding the rounds with my father. 
 Often, especially of Sunday afternoons, I took long walks 
 with Fritz Niebuhr and Gus Heck to the covered bridge 
 out east on the Gravel Road — on which excursions we, by 
 agreement, talked nothing else than German. 
 
 On week days I walked with Henry Bailey or Brother 
 Jon to Maysville, even up to Chambersburg or to the bluffs 
 along the Illinois river. There, amid the honeysuckle, the 
 dog- wood and the wild crab-apple trees, Henry held the 
 book while I recited from Gray's "Anatomy." Sometimes 
 we walked north of Grandfather Hall's old place, and then, 
 joined by my cousin, Thomas Hall, we explored the fields 
 for Indian relics, found oodles of them, or went grave- 
 robbing in the numerous Indian mounds, from which we 
 exhumed gigantic femurs with incredibly protuberant lineae 
 asferae on them. 
 
 Henry and I even, one clear summer-night, walked clean 
 out to Metzgar Ridge, to see the great skyful of northern stars 
 there — walked out past the little farmhouse where, though 
 I then did not know it, my future Companion lived. She 
 slept peacefully, no doubt, while we passed her cottage, I, 
 at least, wholly unconscious that she existed. 
 
 Along the Bobtail Railway too, west of the First and 
 Second Bridges, Henry and I would pick up literally hun- 
 dreds of stone arrowheads, axes, and celts. This we did 
 the more easily just after moderate rains which washed the 
 soil from the relics and left them gleaming. Now and then 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 453 
 
 we purposely went out on long tramps in the heaviest of 
 rain accompanied by sharp lightning, and deep rolls of 
 thunder. 
 
 One day, like the outdoor lunatics that we were, we 
 set out from my father's house with heads bowed low against 
 the wettest rain that a man ever spit into. Nor did we 
 ever say once, "I wish this rain was over," but always 
 things like, "By the shade of old Hippocrates, this is a 
 dandy wetting — a swim without taking off clothes !" 
 
 As we passed through town there were ten or a dozen 
 deafening roars of thunder to each block. As we got out 
 into the farmlands, the road stretched and twisted far ahead 
 of us, beautifully dim and strangely shadowed. That was 
 one of the first of "the electric years" as people then called 
 them — years whose summers were filled with almost in- 
 credible displays of electricity. And, as we drew on past 
 Bay Creek and in among the windings of Duff Creek, there 
 came out of the heavens such a plentiful supply of lightning 
 that it seemed the whole world ought to incinerate immedi- 
 ately. Then — a dickens of a detonation! whereat the founda- 
 tions of the earth shook. The darkness became thicker, the 
 flood-gates of heaven opened, and there fell out onto the 
 roaring hills a flood that was full of wild cries and all 
 manner of uncouthness. 
 
 Henry Bailey shouted, ' 'Look there ! First farmer to-day. 
 
 And behold — Spook, and, behind her, in the sulky, my 
 father! 
 
 They were advancing through the swollen waters of 
 Duff Creek, now hoarse with the savages t of watery voices. 
 
 We ran toward that rig. Father, seeing, yelled, "My 
 stars! You two? Why you're a couple of precious — " 
 
 ' 'No !' ' we protested . ' 'Fun — just fun — lots of fun !' ' 
 
 "Well, then, I — suppose you're — two wise men. But 
 come get in — you can't cross that other winding of the 
 creek." 
 
 "O can't we?" We started toward the creek but it had 
 already reached us, was mounting round our ankles. 
 
 "You'll catch cold and die." 
 
 "Better keep warm then by walking," I countered. "We'll 
 keep close behind you to Pittsfield if you drive fast enough." 
 
454 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 He spoke to Spook, who responded. And we kept close 
 to the two of them through Stringtown, through Starva- 
 tion Hollow, and in fact all the way back to town. 
 
 Father had been that day to see a consumptive, who had 
 died in his presence. Many years later, Henry Bailey, then 
 at Chicago, or near there, died of the same dread disease. 
 
 MORE OFFICE WORK 
 
 Though larger grown, that summer, undoubtedly, and 
 more important too, I thought, I was still, as before, among 
 other things, a flesh-and-blood telephone for my father, and 
 I remember well one occasion on which my father, coming 
 in from the country where he had just witnessed the death 
 of a woman in miscarriage, asked me to go to her mother's 
 house there in Pittsfield and break the news to her gently. 
 I went to the house, broke the news with all the gentleness 
 at my command. 
 
 The old lady looked at me from her rocking-chair for a 
 moment, straightened her glasses, then inquired, "When did 
 she die?" 
 
 "About two hours ago." 
 
 "O pshaw!" ejaculated the old lady. "Then she's dead." 
 
 "Yes," I agreed, weakly, but knowing not what else 
 to say, "yes — O yes indeed, O pshaw!" 
 
 "You say 'O pshaw' too?" 
 
 "Yes, O yes!" I cried. "I always feel badly about any- 
 body's death." 
 
 "Say!" she burst out, with some appearance of indigna- 
 tion, "Whose funeral is this?" 
 
 I took my departure without offering further consolation. 
 
 Mostly I worked in the office — collecting accounts, re- 
 ceiving messengers and seeing that my father, as soon as he 
 came from the country, had ready to his hand a list of all 
 who were needing him, and so arranged that he could make 
 the next round in the most economical manner. Emergency 
 cases, of course, were given precedence, wheresoever the 
 patients might live. 
 
 Then I read and read and read. First of all, came anatomy, 
 Gray's Anatomy, which my father still insisted I must learn 
 by heart, now not only the bones but everything. Next 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 455 
 
 came physiology, chemistry and physics (medical), materia 
 medica and therapeutics, the practice of medicine, surgery, 
 obstetrics. Then too Reynaud's "History of Medicine" I 
 must learn almost by heart. In addition, tramp-like, I must 
 fool on my own account with Beadle's "Dime Novels," 
 Uhlemann's "Syriac Grammar," Rodiger's Gesenius' "He- 
 brew Grammar, ' ' two or three books on Spanish and Portu- 
 guese, besides certain word-books on the Algonquin lan- 
 guages. My father was quite particular that I should learn the 
 derivations of all technical terms, a subject of which he was 
 master, and a requirement which, although it may seem to 
 have been burdensome, yet made my medical studies far 
 easier for me. 
 
 Educative, too, in the highest degree, was my constant 
 association in the office with all sorts and conditions of men. 
 There I learned the importance of laughing at other men's 
 jokes, of taking an interest in Father's clients' families — 
 something quite easy for me to do, for I've always been 
 much interested in humanity — of remembering people's faces. 
 This latter task, for me, was difficult in the extreme. It has 
 always been difficult, not because I do not care about faces, 
 but because, whenever I talk with anyone, I seem to be 
 noting his mind and not his face — more accurately stated, 
 
 {>erhaps, to be reading his mind from his words rather than 
 rom his looks. 
 
 I had little difficulty in collecting money, and, if I do so 
 say myself, I was a better collector by far than was my 
 father. My father, for one thing, had the idea that his 
 people, although he loved them dearly, were all as tight- 
 fisted as they were hard-fisted. Knowing how long and tire- 
 some the work was whereby they made their money, he 
 simply took it for granted that they would part with it 
 unwillingly. What he never thoroughly learned was that 
 the average farmer had always a great pride in his own 
 generosity. If, therefore, at the outset, you simply assumed 
 he'd be hard to deal with, then you deeply offended him at 
 the beginning of the settlement, and, so offended, he would 
 indeed be difficult to deal with. "I'm a stingy cur, am I?" 
 would seem to be his attitude. "Well, then, a stingy cur is 
 what I'll be and that with a vengeance." 
 
456 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Knowing my people, I would, as a rule, running over the 
 ledger and totalling the account, say for example, "O yes, 
 and there's the account for Nellie — how is Nellie these 
 days?" 
 
 "Perfectly well. Yer paw shore did do a fine job for 
 Nellie." 
 
 "And your wife's broken leg?" 
 
 "Good as new. We certainly feel kind to your pappy fer 
 all the good things he's gone and done for us." 
 
 "The whole bill at the usual rates, Mr. Smilingfield, is 
 one hundred and thirty-eight dollars. But my father, I'm 
 sure, for the sake of his old friendship with you people [no 
 blarney about that, reader: they were almost all his excellent 
 friends] would want a deduction made. Tell you what I'll 
 do: I'll let you set the amount yourself that you think you 
 ought to pay." 
 
 The advantage of thus letting the paymaster participate 
 in the fixing of the amount was that it immediately made 
 of the whole situation a glorious appeal to his generosity. 
 It awakened no resistance to a fair and proper settlement, 
 but assumed that we were friends, as we truly were, and 
 that we would always remain such, as we generally did. 
 
 "No, you say," would ofttimes be the answer. 
 
 "I'd hardly want to do that," I would respond, "in 
 the case of old professional friends of my father's. You 
 might name an amount, and, if 'twould seem to be proper 
 then, I might make a suggestion — only a suggestion." 
 
 "A hundred thirty-eight, you say? Well, suppose we 
 call it a hundred fifteen." (My father would probably have 
 said ninety, or even fifty.) 
 
 I would close at once, write the receipt, and balance the 
 account in the ledger — during all which time Mr. Smiling- 
 field would be peeling greenbacks off his roll. "We've had 
 a pretty hard time lately," he would wind up. "But I shore 
 don't want to scrimp your pappy." 
 
 Always I would show to the paymaster his page in the 
 ledger, whereby he could plainly see I had revealed to my 
 "pappy" the actual amount received. That, too, was im- 
 portant. The paymaster, quite naturally, wanted the money 
 to go to the doctor who had done the work, not partly to 
 somebody else. That too made him feel more kindly about 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 457 
 
 the settlement. Not only was everything straight, but he 
 had had a chance to see the straightness, and the boy that 
 was straight with his father was likely to have a straight 
 father too. 
 
 But now and again, when I asked the paymaster to name 
 an amount he would like to settle his bill for, he would be 
 simply ridiculous. For example, were the bill, say, eighty 
 dollars, he would offer to settle for ten. As that would not 
 pay mere horse-feed and axle-grease, it could not possibly 
 be accepted. I would, however, take the offer kindly, and, 
 knowing the sort of man I had to deal with, I would fix 
 the amount too high — I mean too high considering the pay- 
 master's ability to pay — perhaps at sixty dollars. He, then, 
 would ofttimes say, "Well, I'll pay you fifty dollars." If so, 
 I would take it. If, however, he said twenty, or even stuck 
 to ten, I would conclude, "Well, I'd like to have you settle 
 the way you wish, but I remember my father saying that 
 nearly all those calls he made on your family were made in 
 the night and in storms and that besides, ofttimes, so worn 
 out were his horses that he had to employ livery rigs to go 
 out and see you all, and you know how much things like 
 those do cost. So I think I'd better just let you see Father 
 and settle with him. Whatever he does of course will be 
 right." Ofttimes the man, with a sigh, would then pay the 
 amount I'd suggested. 
 
 Some paymasters, however, were almost incredibly mean. 
 
 One of them, after selling his wheat (wheat brought 
 money in those days) came down from the Square to our 
 office, and asked the amount of the bill. I read it aloud from 
 the ledger, "Fifty-eight dollars." From an inside pocket he 
 took package after package of money in bills of high de- 
 nomination. Some he stuffed in other pockets, others he 
 pushed into a leather bag. Finally, he gave me a fifty-cent 
 piece. "All your father's work was worth." (My father 
 had saved his eldest boy's life.) Always a fool when angry, 
 I rose and slammed that coin in the curmudgeon's face. 
 
 When my father arrived and I told him what had happen- 
 ed, he first gave me a calm, a very, very calm lecture on the 
 folly of indignation, then, of a sudden, flew all to pieces, 
 
458 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 hurried up town and sued the miserly client, made him pay 
 the full bill too, every single cent of it, and with costs. 
 
 A similar man came in and offered to pay a hundred 
 dollar account with a five-dollar bill. "You'll pay the whole 
 thing," said I, in anger. 
 
 He hawked and spat. Then he extracted the money as if 
 it were an ulcerated tooth, emitting in fact a kind of yell 
 as he brought it out. "Receipt? No. I don't want no receipt. 
 If you ask me for that bill again I'll bust you and your daddy 
 both wide open." 
 
 But he afterwards re-employed my father. 
 
 THE EXAMINING SURGEON 
 
 My father was, in those days, "Examining Surgeon for 
 U. S. Pensioners." In that capacity he examined survivors 
 of the Mexican War, of the various Indian wars (but none 
 from the battle of the Little Big Horn) and, chiefly, from 
 the then rather recent Civil War. 
 
 Often I helped him with these examinations, which were 
 sometimes very colorful affairs. There was, for example, the 
 man who, led by a boy, came in alleging absolutely total 
 blindness. My father gave me the wink. I went out of the 
 room and, a little later and quite casually, handed the blind 
 man's tiny boy-guide a picture of Abraham Lincoln, at its 
 foot the words, "Our Martyred President." My father al- 
 ready had engaged the supposedly blind man in war-time 
 reminiscences, old jokes and gay laughter. Presently I hand- 
 ed the portrait — a large one — to the boy, saying, "That's a 
 picture of General Grant." 
 
 ' 'Let me see it !' ' cried the blind man, leaning over. ' 'That's 
 no picture of Grant — that's Abraham Lincoln. See! it even 
 says, 'Our Martyred President'." 
 
 "You read pretty well for an 'absolutely blind' man," 
 commented my father. And the impostor, accompanied by 
 his "guide," went out of the office without a word more. 
 
 Almost all the Civil War soldiers came in their war-time 
 uniforms of faded blue. The buttons, as I remember, were 
 brass and ornamental, and over the coat hung a heavy blue 
 cape. The caps had glossy visors, were of stiff material, and 
 
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 MY SECOND LIFE — 461 
 
PITTSFIELD ACADEMY. 
 
 This School will be open Tor the Reception of Pu- 
 pils of both sexes, on Monday, Sept. 6th, 1858. 
 
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 "3 an) AeaKcmaWU MwJJ. : ^jyf 
 
 TIEIR/IMIS: ^ 
 
 The academic year will consist of forty weeks, and be divided into ^f 
 four quarters of 10 weeks each. %$ 
 
 TUITIOJV— For common English branches, per scholar H 
 
 per quarter, S3 50 
 
 Higher Branches, - - - - - 5 00 
 Each scholar will be charged for the entire quarter in which he enters. 
 ff Pittsfield, 111., Aug. 3d, 1858.. JON SH 4STID. 
 
 '• Free Press" Job Print, Fiilsfield, HI. @$ 
 
 PROSPECTUS OF PITTSFIELD ACADEMY (1858) 
 (Reduced in Size) 
 In those days there were practically no public high schools in Illinois. The first was, 
 indeed, founded by Newton Bateman at Jacksonville in 1851, but hardly any others 
 were established till late in the 60's. The training in their primitive, privately owned, 
 "academies," such as this one of my uncle, Jon Shastid, had in general about one-third 
 the curriculum value of that in high schools of the present day. And that training 
 was about all that a matriculant in a medical college of the time had ever had — when he 
 had had any. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 463 
 
 flattened in front and behind with a lateral ridge separating 
 the two flat areas. 
 
 The old soldiers wore their army uniforms on the streets 
 and Public Square of Pittsfield, and not merely for show 
 either or to secure sympathy, for, ofttimes, we saw farmers 
 working in the fields with army uniforms on. 
 
 How I wish I had kept even one of the uniforms of those 
 old days! I could have had one for a dollar. 1 
 
 One of the pleasantest features of that summer was the 
 way in which the children of the town would hang around 
 the doctor's office, hoping to get a glimpse of the gleaming 
 white, ether-bleached skeleton. In case of a medical examina- 
 tion the window and door would suddenly have to be covered 
 on the inside with a cloth and a coal-oil lamp would have 
 to be lighted. But what the children really wished to see, 
 always, of course, was the skeleton. Once when I had open- 
 ed the door and invited the crowd of children in and then 
 had dropped the sack from the "little French lady," one 
 tiny girl gave a wild shriek, ran out of the office, and was 
 immediately followed by all the other children. 
 
 "All the other"? No. Not quite. There was one who 
 remained beside me. 
 
 ' 'Well !" I cried. ' 'Aren't you frightened too?" 
 
 1 There used to be in my father's house, in the "lumber room" upstairs, a number of 
 old trunks packed and crammed with old-time letters. Many of these letters had been 
 written before the introduction of postage stamps. There were therefore, almost certainly, 
 in those trunks, letters that were stamped with the very earliest stamps made. Many were 
 from relatives of ours who had fought in the Union army — my cousin, Dr. Lafayette Edwards, 
 for example, and my father's brother, William Shastid, who had died in the war, and from 
 my father's cousin, Harvey Williams. Many of these letters had been written on bloody 
 battlefields. All were full of deepest interest. 
 
 There were, I remember, a number of letters to my father from John G. Nicolay, private 
 secretary to President Lincoln, also a few from John Hay, first assistant to Nicolay. Whether 
 any letters from Lincoln to the Shastids were in those trunks I do not know; in fact I do not 
 think I ever examined closely more than one letter in a hundred. 
 
 Even at my father's death — years after the time of which I now am writing — I had not 
 thought to take any steps looking toward the preservation of all those important documents. 
 I who had always been so careful to preserve even the slightest trace of anything that might 
 some day have evidential value! 
 
 For some time after my mother's death (twelve years later than my father's) I did not 
 think to ask about the letters for a very long time. Then, one day, I thought about those 
 letters and their historical value, asked about them. 
 
 Then I was told that, shortly after the death of my mother, nearly all the trunkfuls of 
 letters had suddenly disappeared. Hardly a trace could ever be found of them. The doors, 
 village fashion, had gone unlocked both by day and by night, and then — suddenly the 
 letters had vanished and vanished they remain to the present time, all except a very few 
 envelopes from which the postage stamps had been removed and one very short note from 
 John G. Nicolay to my Uncle Jon Shastid. 
 
464 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Who* Me scared? By the Mighty, there hain't nothin' 
 in all this world that can scare me\" He thrust both hands 
 into his pockets, straightened up his shoulders and spat 
 vigorously right there on our floor. He was the half-fed son 
 of humble, downcast parents too. 
 
 Some time after that day he died. I think it was probably 
 during my second year at college, but have no record of the 
 matter. 
 
 At all events I oft times wonder why I, who so terribly 
 fear death, am living and living on still, while he who was 
 so plainly courageous as to death and to all things else, has 
 been sleeping for decades and for decades and for decades. 
 
 Peace be to his unscareable soul! He was a fine little 
 boy in every way. 
 
 HAIL AGAIN, BRIGHT DAY OF RAIN! 
 
 There was yet another day which I spent with my father 
 in the country, concerning which red-letter affair I have 
 abundant and clear notes. This was distinctly not a, day of 
 no practice, thereby greatly differing from that one in this 
 vacation which I have already described. 
 
 We arose and dressed at exactly sunrise — yet not to be 
 shot. 
 
 As soon as up, I looked out of my east window, as so 
 often I had done in what then seemed (to my seventeen 
 years) my far distant boyhood. And there beneath me my 
 father was coming out of the side-porch doorway. 
 
 All at once he stopped, looked up at me, laid a finger 
 on his lip, then pointed to a cherry tree in the yard. And, 
 sure enough, there, on the very lowest limb, was a little 
 bird of some sort singing for both of us a mighty catchy tune. 
 
 After breakfast, behind the new horse, Pinto, away and 
 away! Heaven lies behind us in our infancy, so Mother 
 Earth sang happily in her course, and my father began des- 
 canting once more on the recent developments in medicine: 
 Edwin Klebs, of Konigsberg, Germany, had not only, per- 
 haps two years back, discovered the typhoid bacillus, but 
 now also, wonder of wonders, the bacillus of diphtheria; 
 Loffler (a world-shaking event) that of glanders; Finlay, 
 of Cuba, seemed to have shown that yellow fever is trans- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE , 465 
 
 mitted by some kind of mosquito; and A. F. A. King 1 that 
 malaria is conveyed by yet another species of the same in- 
 sect; Koch, the little giant of Berlin, had successfully cul- 
 tured, stained and demonstrated the bacillus of tuberculosis. 
 "Can you imagine it?" my father asked. "That he did last 
 year [1882], but not until this year have I been convinced 
 that he had really done it. And Pasteur — Pasteur, the leader 
 of them all — he is still marvellously developing his various 
 preventive inoculations. 
 
 "And so the germ theory keeps marching on. Dr. Dublin 
 marches with it now. Some of the other doctors, indeed, 
 begin to see — " 
 
 My father was a very emotional man. He caught the 
 front rib of the buggy-top for support. The world, quite 
 evidently, was reeling round him. 
 
 We were driving south of Pittsfield, past Oakwood Ceme- 
 tery, now veiled by rain. There, a short distance from the 
 road, lay already Grandfather and Grandmother Shastid and 
 still others of our clan. I said, "There, Father, so far as science 
 can ever demonstrate, lie all of us eventually, and — germ 
 theory or no germ theory — forevermore." 
 
 But my father, "By no means." Then, quoting from an 
 ancient writer, "Never look for the ashes of futility beneath 
 the fires of life." 
 
 "In other words, forget the little white house." 
 
 "In other words, forget the little white house. The little 
 white house, with all the hopelessness and desolation it has 
 always symbolized for you, will itself some time pass into 
 ashes, into nothing; but 'In my Father's house there are 
 
 many mansions eternal in the heavens.' Think of 
 
 these houses beyond the Little White House." And so he 
 kept talking and driving, part time south and part time east 
 until, at length, he saw that the house he had wanted to 
 visit first was, as it happened, nothing but a tiny pile of 
 ashes and a few stones. 
 
 ASKING OUR WAY IN THE COUNTRY 
 It is strange and yet true that country doctors then, per- 
 haps as now also, were not infrequently necessitated to ask 
 
 1 Later a favorite teacher of mine at the University of Vermont. 
 
466 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 their way about. First of all, we would go to a blacksmith 
 shop for the needed instruction. Blacksmiths in those days 
 knew almost everything, it seemed. 
 
 BLACKSMITHING 
 
 In the horse-and-buggy days, the shoeing of horses neces- 
 sarily gave employment to large numbers of men. Every 
 here and there, by the side of the country road, would stand 
 blacksmith shops, not merely the shop of Mike McCarthy, 
 and the smell of burning hoofs together with the ring of 
 hammered horse-shoes on resounding anvils would fill the 
 air. The horse, in nature, does not need shoes, but, when 
 it becomes a burden-carrying or a burden-pulling animal, its 
 hoofs wear off too fast as well as in wrong directions. Hence 
 the coming of the smith — to trim the sole of the hoof to the 
 plane in which it should lie and then to nail the iron shoe 
 to the trimmed sole in order to slow down further hoof-wear 
 and also, through the calks of the shoe, to give the horse a 
 better grip on the ground. 
 
 I explain these simple matters because, in these days of 
 "chug-buggies" and criss-crossing airways, so few persons, 
 even those of middle age, have any knowledge of horse-shoes 
 or blacksmi thing. 
 
 DIRECTIONS 
 
 The blacksmith, on the day in question, was greatly sur- 
 prised. "I thought," said he, "that doctors knew every- 
 thing, particularly about folks." My father admitted that 
 he knew almost everybody in the county. Nevertheless, 
 people often died, especially when they had not had just 
 the right kind of doctor. And, often, they moved away, 
 especially the shallow-rooted ones. Then too, of course, 
 strangers often moved in. Messengers coming to a doctor's 
 office ofttimes did not know directions well themselves or 
 else could not plainly state them. And so on. Hence the 
 necessity for a doctor's going to the source and fountain- 
 head of all information about people. 
 
 After a little further banter like this, the blacksmith 
 deigned to reply: "Mr. Milo — O yes, Mr. Milo, he used 
 to live right there across the road, but, after his fire, he 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 467 
 
 moved to the Dumplin place out Martinsburg way. Then 
 he went to the Berler place a little nearer Pittsfield. — Say, 
 Doc, I had to ask my own way once a few weeks back, 
 drivin' down by the Mississippi. I says to a fellow, says I, 
 'Where does Wright Abbott live now?' I says. An' says he, 
 'The Wright Abbott's the wrong Abbott.' I says, Ts that so?' 
 I says. An' I takes him by the arms like this, kind o' friendly- 
 like an' embracin'." I saw by the look in my father's eye 
 that the blacksmith's grip was very painful. Grown men, 
 by the bye, in those days had a deal of fun "gripping" each 
 others' arms: it was a common amusement, but the black- 
 smith did not know my father's grip. My father, as if 
 nothing in particular had happened, reached out both his 
 long arms and fastened upon the blacksmith's biceps muscles. 
 Even with the power of iron vices gripped he them — and 
 held on. 
 
 A look of pained surprise came suddenly into the black- 
 smith's face. Tears jumped into his orbs and ran down his 
 cheeks. Still, he went on with his story much as if nothing 
 were happening. 
 
 ' T,' says I, 'I want you to tell me where Wright Abbott 
 lives, because,' I says, 'he's not the wrong Abbott but the 
 right one,' I says, just like that. 
 
 "Well, sir, the feller — ouch! — he's game an' says he, 
 'take the third turnin' on the left, first to the right, second 
 on the left, third to the right again, and sixteenth on the 
 left, and then wind through that big lot o' hazel brush over 
 by old Mr. What's-his-name's, pass through that moon- 
 shaped field (half-moon shape it is), let down the bars on 
 the furder side, cross the crick, cross it t'other way a little 
 furder on, cross it back again in a half or maybe a quarter, 
 an' anybody livin' within two or three miles of the place 
 you're lookin' fur can point it right out.' — O God, Doc, 
 don't squeeze so hard!" 
 
 "Tell me where Mr. Milo lives now?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "All right. Where does he live?" 
 
 "I already said he moved from the fire to the Dumplin 
 place, didn't I?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "An' after that to the Berler place?" 
 
468 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Yes. And where does he live now?" 
 
 "Right over there about ten rod from where his other 
 place burned down." 
 
 "You mean to say — " 
 
 "Mean to say that after he'd tried the Dumplin place an' 
 the Berler place he come on back to his own little farm an' 
 built him a new home jest a little distance from where his 
 old one burned down." 
 
 He pointed a little beyond the pile of ashes and stones, 
 and, sure enough, there beside a group of trees stood a new 
 house. 
 
 My father and his son both laughed heartily, bade the 
 blacksmith good-bye, and soon had driven to the new little 
 house. 
 
 But behold, when we had arrived at the place, it was 
 only to learn that Mr. Milo, shortly after his fire, had sold 
 his place out to the present incumbent and removed some 
 distance to the east and south. "Just go straight ahead 
 awhile and ask again." 
 
 It was the best instruction we had had that day. 
 
 MORE ABOUT BLACKSMITHS 
 There had been no malice in anything the smith had 
 said or done. Everything had been in strict accord with the 
 wit and humor of the time. In fact he knew all about all 
 the people in that and the surrounding neighborhoods, could 
 have given you the genealogy of every family, for behold 
 the blacksmith's shop in those days was the criss-cross 
 center for all the gossip, all the personal information of 
 every sort and variety about everybody and nobody. Let 
 anybody whisper down on Dumb Creek and it passed at 
 once to the nearest blacksmith shop as it would this day to 
 telephone central, and, from thence it would spread on 
 lightning wings to all the countrysides surrounding — in- 
 cluding of course a dozen or so more smithies from each of 
 which the news would once more radiate in every direction. 1 
 
 1 A stock joke of, and with, blacksmiths in those days was this. Customer: "How's 
 business — shoeing many horses?" Smith: "Naw, jest shooin' flies." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 469 
 
 On our way to the Milo place we were called in where 
 we saw a boy whose head had struck the knee of a playmate 
 while playing circus actors. The boy was in a profound 
 stupor and, next day, he was dead. 
 
 At another place a little girl had fallen on the sharp edge 
 of a dust-pan, splitting her nose longitudinally and deeply. 
 The father had blamed the mother for the accident, who, 
 thereupon, in anger, although she declared she had not been 
 angry, struck at her husband's nose with the same dust-pan. 
 The pan, however, instead of striking edgewise the length 
 of the nose, hit one eye instead with its corner, opening the 
 eye and allowing the lens and vitreous to escape. So poetic 
 justice once again had failed to be poetic. Hubby, of course, 
 was permanently blind in one eye. "Nothing ever happens 
 in the country." 
 
 STILL TOWARD THE MILOS 
 
 We came, at length, in a beautiful place, to a creek. 
 In the fields, on one side, waved innumerable banners of 
 corn; on the other boundless oceans, as it seemed, of ripened 
 wheat billowed and billowed again. There was a pretty 
 white house near by with a hedge of yellow roses, and 
 meadow-larks, from slanting rail-tips, cascaded all the world 
 with happy song. From time to time the shadow of a giant 
 cloud would darken the scene — and pass again. 
 
 I get out, lift the check-rein from the check-hook and 
 Pinto drinks his fill. The creek purls on and on, its old-time 
 melody. Pinto, satiated, emits a caressful little nicker with 
 his head turned toward the buggy. I am just about to re- 
 attach the check-rein when, all at once, over in the wheat- 
 field, where several men are on the point of starting a reaper 
 into the beautiful grain, a mighty tumult uprises. 
 
 Those who believe that Pike County, even in those days, 
 was a kind of Arcadia, a region inhabited by a simple and 
 untroubled folk distinguished only for contentment, rural 
 innocence and happiness, are probably much the same persons 
 as those who believe that, in a country medical practice, 
 "nothing ever happens." John Hay's "Pike County Ballads" 
 gives a much truer picture. So, too, do various reminiscent 
 articles of some years ago in the Pike County newspapers. 
 
470 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 In those articles it appears that, ofttimes, male applicants 
 for positions as teachers in Pike County country schools, 
 were, before securing an appointment, obliged to whip each 
 and every competitor in a brutal fist-fight. Even ministers, 
 especially evangelists, sometimes had to fight with their 
 fists in order to secure quiet at a meeting. All except the 
 "Shouting Methodists," who didn't want things quiet. 
 
 On this particular occasion, as I have said, a mighty up- 
 roar occurred over in the neighboring wheatfield. A town 
 farm-owner, it seemed, was berating his country hand for 
 alleged inefficiency and idleness. How true the charges were 
 I do not know, but, all at once, the "boss" yelled at the 
 hand a terrible and obscene curse. The hand, a much smaller 
 man than the boss, stepped forward — other hands restrained 
 him. The boss then grinned: 'twas not a pleasant sight. 
 As he reached the little fellow, he struck twice with his 
 right, once with his left — hard. My father advanced as 
 though to intervene, but stopped short. He was correct: 
 this was not his fracas. He could have been fighting all the 
 time had he fought small men's battles for them. 
 
 The big fellow, again grinning, measured his man with- 
 out mercy, stepped in and crashed a terrific right to his 
 mouth. The little fellow's arms fell to his side. Blood 
 trickled from his nose, down a crease at the corner of his 
 mouth. Stunned, partly blinded, he turned as if to move 
 from the scene. But the big fellow followed up, struck 
 again — from behind. The hand fell into the wheat as if 
 clubbed. 
 
 Into the field went the reaper. Father and I followed the 
 carried-off hand into the house, gave first aid, departed. 
 
 Whatever happens in human affairs, nature almost always 
 provides an environment either harmonizing or contrasting 
 with it. Upon this day there was contrast. The red and 
 yellow reaper clicked and clacked around the golden wheat, 
 and meadow-larks, from rail-tips, kept going tweet, tweet, 
 tweet. Bees buzzed in the hedge of yellow roses; sheep 
 called from an adjacent pasture; a dog in a near-by woodland 
 shouted joy at having treed some helpless animal; and, over 
 the entire scene, the genial day-star poured his glorious, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 471 
 
 his unparalleled benediction — even until we had reached 
 the Milos. 
 
 EATING IN THE COUNTRY 
 
 The Milos were all at the gate to welcome us. Not one 
 was missing. 
 
 "Why! Who's sick?" Thus my father. 
 
 "They hain't nary one of us sick. Didn't the feller tell 
 ye? We didn't want you for professional services. Doc. 
 We jest sent the feller to tell you an' Mrs. Shastid and 
 Tommy to come out an' eat dinner with us — took a sudden 
 notion-like." 
 
 The "feller" had simply said to us that the Milos had 
 wanted Father to go out to their house "as quick as he 
 could git there." He had, no doubt, forgotten the dinner 
 part of the message altogether, and, supposing that one 
 who needs a doctor must want him to come promptly, de- 
 livered the message as he did. Even so, he was fully as 
 accurate as the average messenger. Most messages were 
 delivered quite inaccurately in those days. Sometimes they 
 had been relayed several times before they reached my 
 father. For example, a man living fifteen miles from town 
 whose wife had been taken sick, would shout over the fence 
 to a perfect stranger in the road on horseback, "Be ye 
 goin' to Pittsfield?" "Goin' 'bout halfway there." "Well, 
 will ye tell some other feller that's goin' on furder to tell 
 somebody maybe that's goin' plumb to to tell Doc Shastid 
 to come out and see Hal Slimkin's wife — the one that lives 
 out in that thar big bend o' Spring Crick?" "Do my best — 
 gz^dup." 
 
 The various adventures of that message may easily be 
 imagined. That's why, so often, my father, when sent for 
 on a case of chills and fever, would place in his buggy not 
 only a complete obstetrical set, but several splints and ex- 
 tension apparatuses, a bottle of ether, another of chloro- 
 form, six or eight pounds of "galenicals," extra corks, extra 
 bottles, extra pill-boxes, a pocket operating set, various 
 sorts and kinds of ligatures, and an outfit for extracting 
 teeth. In his pockets, of course, he would always keep 
 clinical thermometers, several stethoscopes and the like. 
 
472 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 When specially nervous he would include in the buggy 
 box an amputation set — which he hardly ever used. 
 
 "At all events," commented Mr. Milo, when all of us, 
 seated at table, were "cussing and discussing" message car- 
 riers generally, "at all events, now that you've got here, 
 you ain't findin' we ain't prepared for you no such banquet 
 as that one that Uncle Abe Butz ain't gone an' not prepared." 
 
 "No indeed," laughed my father. 
 
 "Who's that that ain't done went and prepared nothin'?" 
 Thus Mrs. Milo. "That cussin' feller that's always settin' 
 out in front of the Oregon house cussin'?" 
 
 "Seen 'im cussin' once," said the older boy. 'Twas 
 terrible." 
 
 "I seen 'im an' heerd 'im too cussin'," said Mollie, the 
 daughter. "Didn't 'mount to much. Cud beat it myself." 
 
 "You, Mollie!" The father shook an admonitory finger. 
 "You ain't got no call to cuss none jest because you been 
 an' hearn rough hands a-cussin'." 
 
 "But this here Abe Butz," Mrs. Milo persisted, "Who 
 is he anyway? And why didn't he prepare nothin' fer Doc — er 
 whatever it was?" 
 
 MEET ABRAHAM BUTZ 
 
 This Abraham Butz was a "character." Even in Pike 
 County, Illinois, he was universally acknowledged to be a 
 "character." He spent the most of his time in a large chair 
 on the Public-Square sidewalk in front of the doorway to his 
 hotel, the Oregon House. He was tall, raw-boned, muscular, 
 not unhandsome, with the strong face and eyes of a fun- 
 loving hawk. 
 
 As a story-teller he could out-Abraham Abraham Lincoln. 
 For one thing he never acknowledged the validity of any 
 such laws of propriety as Lincoln now and then imposed 
 upon his own somewhat too exuberant narrational powers. 
 Yet Butz's stories all had point to them — Rabelaisian point 
 ordinarily, yet always point and point which, like that of 
 a doctor's lance, went down into the deeps of human nature 
 and exposed all the rottenness therein. 
 
 And his laugh! He had the heartiest laugh I've ever 
 heard, and seldom did I go to the Public Square without 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 473 
 
 hearing from one to half a dozen upsurgings of his laughter 
 resounding over all the region round about. 
 
 He was also intensely patriotic. Had his own private 
 fife-and-drum corps, and each morning on the anniversary 
 of the Battle of New Orleans, fair weather or foul, Abe Butz 
 and his corps were out early to celebrate. Even at 4:00 a.m. 
 my brother Will and I would be up, and, without breakfast, 
 be running to the Public Square, there to join the youthful 
 parade which formed the tail to Abe's fife-and-drum kite. 
 There would always, too, be his little six-pound cannon, 
 or else an anvil, in the Courtyard, and this from time to 
 time would racket like the crack o' doom. 
 
 Dear Old Uncle Abe! He and his corps had played for 
 General Jackson, and he himself had been a member of the 
 reception committee which had welcomed General Lafayette 
 on his last visit to this country. 
 
 Ofttimes we met him in the homes of the sick poor, 
 telling humorous stories and leaving luscious viands from 
 the kitchen of his hotel. 
 
 Abe, however, had many enemies, chiefly because he 
 liked whiskey and told such Rabelaisian tales. 
 
 Said a prudish old maiden lady to him one day — there in 
 broad daylight and on the public sidewalk in front of his 
 hotel — said she, actually, "Obscene and profane old man 
 that you are, your very name is offensive to me." 
 
 There was a large crowd of rough men standing about 
 Abe, as almost always there was, and, to the great em- 
 barrassment of the good, if very unwise, old lady, Abe 
 demanded of her, pretending to be deeply incensed, what 
 there was about his name that could possibly be offensive to 
 anyone. 
 
 She would not answer, but started to leave. Abe then 
 gave the wink to his onhangers and they made it difficult if 
 not impossible for Miss Prudish to leave the charmed circle. 
 Abe again demanded to know why she, and actually in 
 public, had called "offensive" his name, the name which 
 had been borne by both his dear father and his dear mother 
 before him. 
 
474 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "You don't answer," he commented in a voice that 
 sounded as if full of tears. "Well then I'll tell you why. 
 It's because 'Butz' sounds like the plural of the common 
 abbreviation for 'buttock.' And is there anything wrong 
 about 'buttock'? Listen, mad madam." 
 
 He drew from an inner pocket, to the great surprise of 
 everyone — of all things, a Bible! Then he continued: "In 
 Holy Writ I find the word 'buttocks' employed three times. 
 Second Samuel, X, 4, 'So Hanun took David's servants, and 
 shaved off the one half of their beards, and cut off their 
 garments in the middle, even to their buttocks, and sent them 
 
 away.' First Chronicles, XIX, 4, in the midst hard 
 
 by their buttocks.' Isaiah, XX, 4, so shall the king 
 
 of Assyria lead away the captives of Egypt, and the exiles 
 of Ethiopia, young and old, naked and barefoot, and with 
 buttocks uncovered ' 
 
 "Madam, there is nothing to be ashamed about in the 
 word 'buttocks,' or in its contraction either, 'butt' — least of 
 all in my own surname, 'Butz.' I assure you that it is a very 
 precious name to me." 
 
 And, as he gave the departure signal to his boon com- 
 panions, the lady in question made good her escape. 
 
 The story went the rounds of all Pike County, and no 
 one repeated it more lustily than did Mr. Butz himself. 
 
 It was a good lesson to the community too, which was 
 full of the silliest prudery in those days, combined with the 
 most outrageous ruffianism. Neither man nor woman who 
 had the slightest self-respect would ever utter the word "leg" 
 in mixed company. ' 'Foot, " it is true, could freely be spoken, 
 but not "toes" — my heavens no, not "toes"! 
 
 One day, as I was passing in front of the Oregon House, 
 Abe, as usual, was holding forth to a fair-sized congrega- 
 tion. "To think," he cried, "that women in this very com- 
 munity, women who are wearing bustles a yard wide, a 
 mile high and no mere man can tell how much of thickness 
 — bustles the very purpose of which is to advertise and em- 
 phasize the effect of their posteriors, at the very same time 
 object to the use by me of the posterior portion of my own 
 real, wholly unartificial and unmanufactured name." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 475 
 
 Now all this prelimination concerning Abe Butz is intro- 
 ductory to the joke (he was an overtime and all-time prac- 
 tical joker) which Abe had played on my father a good 
 many years before and which forms the answer to Mrs. 
 Milo's question which she asked of her husband. 
 
 One late wintry afternoon a messenger my father did not 
 know rode up to our house and declared that a Mr. and Mrs. 
 Beachham living out El Dara way had asked him please to 
 invite my father to come on out to a dinner they had pre- 
 pared that day in his honor. Contrary to custom the direc- 
 tions were specific indeed. A blind man who had gone 
 suddenly deaf and lost his dog could, stumbling through a 
 heavy snow-storm over rough ground and across broken- 
 down bridges, have found his way easily to the cabin with 
 his eyes shut. 
 
 Nevertheless my father was in a quandary. "The Beach- 
 hams? The Beachhams?" he repeated. "The only Beachhams 
 I have ever done any work for used to live near Barry. 
 After I had practised for them a number of years, they and 
 their two children moved away over into Missouri some- 
 where." 
 
 "Them's the people," confirmed the messenger. "They 
 moved back into Pike some years ago, an' now they're 
 livin' near the spot I've plumb described to you. Chicken 
 an' dumplin's to you, Doc." 
 
 So my father and I hitched up and he alone drove out 
 some fifteen miles through one of the worst snow storms in 
 the history of Pike County. Not so bad it was at first per- 
 haps, but, after a little, the snow fell in great, thick, world- 
 muting blankets. Even the earth, that night, had "taken 
 the veil." 
 
 My father at last, however, arrived at the spot the mes- 
 senger had so plainly indicated. There could be no mistake 
 about it. There was the little schoolhouse and there, close 
 by it, was the grove of trees. But, between the two, on the 
 place where the chicken dinner should have been a-waiting — 
 no chicken, no pleasant voices, no happy friends, no house, 
 no barn, no anything whatever but cold and silence and 
 ever-increasing snow. 
 
 Father drove to the nearest house that was a house, 
 asked about the house that was not one. 
 
476 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Beachhams? The Beachhams? No, Doc. They ain't 
 no Beachhams in this neighborhood, an' the house you 
 ask about burned down over fifteen years ago. But say, Doc, 
 come in an' have some chicken an' dumplin's." They would 
 take no refusal. Father stayed, and, weeks later, was called 
 to a case in the family — a family it was that had for a long 
 time been old Dr. Dublin's. 
 
 "But the next day, after the dinner," my father con- 
 cluded the narrative, which had mostly been retailed to us 
 by Mr. Milo, "the next day after the dinner, I passed along 
 in front of the Oregon House and old Mr. Abraham Butz, 
 much to my surprise, was grinning in front of the building. 
 He called out, O, Doc! How'd you like the chicken dinner 
 I prepared for you yesterday?' " 
 
 MORE EATING IN THE COUNTRY 
 Half the fun of "taking the veil" lay (still I speak of the 
 olden times) in eating in the country. For this reason I want 
 to record a few more facts about the subject, though briefly. 
 There were houses where we never ate, never were in- 
 vited to eat. I could tell by the look of the doors which 
 houses these were. The great majority of the homes, how- 
 ever, were "wide-open to the doctor." And that included 
 his voracious apprentice. Often we had taken our luncheon 
 with us — just in case. Occasionally we ate our salmon or 
 our cheese and crackers, together with "egg ice-cream," at 
 a country store. Most of the time, however, we dined 
 luxuriously at the houses of our friends — who, by the bye, 
 were of all sizes, shapes, complexions and nationalities. In 
 two things they almost always agreed: they were highly 
 hospitable and they were good cooks. 1 
 
 Take the Enderbins. The man and his father were 
 English, I believe. His wife was Pennsylvania Dutch. Mr. 
 Enderbin's mother, however, had been Pennsylvania Dutch, 
 so he himself understood about all that his good wife had 
 to say — unless indeed he had good reason for not wishing to 
 
 1 The most delightful places, however, at which I ever ate, were my grandfather's 
 house (Thomas Hall's) and the Vandermoolens' and Old Grandpa and Grandma Patchens'. 
 The two latter homes I sketched out briefly in 1908 (Bulletin, American Academy of Medicine, 
 Vol. VIII, 278 and 501). 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 477 
 
 understand it. (She was Amish, strictly religious therefore, 
 and a rigid disciplinarian, so he sometimes had good reasons 
 for not understanding.) 
 
 I, on my part, had not had a Dutch mother, so I was 
 ofttimes to be pardoned for my non comprehensibus . 
 
 1 Tress" meant to eat. Inasmuch as, in modern high 
 German, "fressen" means "to devour in the manner of a 
 voracious animal," I had little difficulty in understanding 
 Mrs. Enderbin's application of the shorter term to my own 
 proceedings at her table. Even when she'd say, as ofttimes 
 say she did, "It gives me so much pain in the bauch (belly) 
 whenever I green apples fress (eat)," I understood her with 
 ease. But when she'd say, "Look, Tommy, you've all your 
 milk fershutt," I felt in slight degree embarrassed. 1 For I 
 did have a way, when eating rapidly, of knocking my milk 
 over. 
 
 When Father and I had eaten, each, anywhere from a half 
 to a whole apple pie, she, though still hospitable, would 
 remark, regretfully, "And now the apple pie, she is all." 
 Whether she meant that the pie was "all" in or "all" out, 
 she never did specify clearly, so I took it for granted that 
 all the pie was both out (of the pantry) and in (the stomachs 
 of her guests). 2 
 
 How, tramp-fashion, I did love that Amish (Pennsyl- 
 vania Dutch) language. The trouble with my study of it 
 was that no one took the lingo seriously. There was nothing 
 at all then printed on the subject, and but little is printed 
 on it now. It was simply a 17th and 18th century dialect 
 of High German, brought during those centuries from Ger- 
 many into Pennsylvania and there commingled with a great 
 deal of old-time English. 
 
 I can still hear Mrs. Enderbin, as Father picks up his 
 
 Sill-bags and we start to leave the house shortly before 
 inner time, "What does it give to-day for dinner, Mr. 
 Doctor, Mr. Tommy? It gives chicken and apple pie. And 
 what means that? You stay to sit and you fress." 
 
 Again we sit and we fress. Again ofttimes, in imagina- 
 tion, I sit and I fress with them still. 
 
 1 Compare with the Modern High German, "verschiitten," to spill. Those familiar 
 with Amish will realize at once that I have somewhat altered the word which Mrs. Enderbin 
 did actually employ. 
 
 2 All, in Amish, does mean "all out." 
 
478 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 SKELETONS AT THE FEAST 
 
 But it must not be supposed that, hospitable as the great 
 majority of our clients were toward us, there were none 
 that were inhospitable, or that, even among the most hos- 
 pitable of all, none of our joyous dinners ended unhappily. 
 
 At one place a feast which had been joyous in the extreme 
 turned into a tragedy of darkest hue. We had left the house 
 of merry-making, my father and I, and had driven perhaps 
 ten rods when voices called behind us. Returning, as beck- 
 oned to do, we found in the house that the husband and 
 father, just as he had started for the cattle feed-yard, had 
 fallen dead. While my father was carefully determining the 
 fact of death, the wife and mother fainted. 
 
 Now it so happened that there was a great deal of faint- 
 ing in those days. One could scarcely go to church without 
 some one, ordinarily a young woman, fainting. Having at- 
 tracted sufficient attention to herself to be regarded as 
 "delicate," the patient would recover with certainty and 
 great speed. The cause which was commonly assigned for 
 the frequency of fainting in those days was the overtight 
 corsetting in which women then indulged. Waists, especi- 
 ally on Sundays, must almost absolutely disappear. There 
 was also the fact that, in all the popular novels of that time, 
 the heroine, if a lady indeed and in truth, was ever in 
 delicate health, fainted often and fell hard. 
 
 So when, on the day in question, the mother of the 
 family fainted at her husband's death, the remainder of the 
 family — mostly young women and still unmarried — paid 
 little attention to her fall. My father, however, having 
 examined her, gave her a quieting medicine and digitalis, 
 had her put instantly to bed, and absolutely forbade her 
 attendance at her husband's burial. 
 
 Later we learned that his instructions in this respect had 
 been disregarded, and so the patient, on her way back from 
 the cemetery, had died in the chair whereon she had ridden 
 in the farm wagon. 
 
 As to rank inhospitality toward the doctor, the most 
 unquestionable instance I recall of it was that of Mr. and 
 Mrs. Pennisock, wealthy stock owners. Without, I believe, 
 a single exception, when the medical services had been 
 
■H 
 
 m m* 
 
 '^ir 
 
 ABRAHAM BUTZ, ARCH-JESTER TO THE PUBLIC SQUARE 
 AND TO ALL PIKE COUNTY 
 
 (Original Photograph Lent by Attorney Oliver R. Barrett, Chicago) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 479 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 481 
 
 rendered and my father and I arose to go, no matter how 
 close it was to meal time or how plainly we smelled the 
 victuals cooking, either Mr. or Mrs. Pennisock, or some- 
 times the two in unison, would uninvite us thus: "We'd be 
 more than pleased to have you two eat with us, but we 
 always say, 'Doctors make their money too easy anyway, 
 for us to have to feed 'em besides'." Whereupon my father 
 would reply, quite easily: 'O we couldn't possibly stay to 
 eat to-day. Maybe some other time." 
 
 He always would keep away from the Pennisocks near 
 meal times whenever he could, but, in the practice of medi- 
 cine, you cannot time things as you will. You may for 
 example be approaching the Pennisock house at 10:15 a.m., 
 when, all at once, a near-by neighbor lady takes a notion 
 to have her baby — which isn't due for two months — at that 
 very moment. You get through at 11:45. You cannot 
 possibly stay and eat at the new-baby place, so what 
 do you think you can do? Go and drive all around for 
 one or two hours until the time approaches when you could 
 not possibly be expected to be wanting your dinner? Doctors 
 in country practice get to people when they can — if they can. 
 
 Old Mrs. Stettenhausen had likewise been peculiar in the 
 matter of dinner hospitality. Ordinarily we refused her in- 
 vitations, because she had too much to do for her sick people. 
 But then she would be offended because she thought we did 
 not like her cooking or felt ourselves above her. But if, 
 when we started our preparations for departure, neighbors 
 chanced to be present, she had a way of promptly getting 
 rid of them, you may be sure. 
 
 Thus, she would inquire in a loud, brazen tone, "How'd 
 you two like your eggs, you two — Doc and Tommy? We got 
 eggs enough for both of you. ' ' The neighbors would take the 
 gentle hint and "evaporate." 
 
 On one occasion after asking how Father and I would 
 like our eggs done, and we had said (the simplest way, of 
 course) "boiled medium or soft," she disappeared for a mo- 
 ment, came back and reported, "they ain't none o' the eggs 
 good, and we ain't got nothin' else than eggs." 
 
 The most hospitable houses we ever ate at were, I think 
 and as I have already stated, my Grandfather Hall's (of 
 
482 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 course), the Vandermoolens' and Old Grandpa and Grandma 
 Patchens'. But the first of these I've treated already herein, 
 while the other two I've depicted, howsoever briefly, else- 
 where. 1 
 
 And yet I surely do err. No more hospitable, grateful, 
 or generous people ever lived than the McLaplins. Theirs 
 was in fact about the eatingest place in Pike County. At 
 one time or another we must have eaten on their premises 
 at almost all the different times of day. The range and 
 supreme quality of their victuals was, in part at least, owing 
 to the fact that Grandma McLaplin, Mr. McLaplin's mother, 
 lived with them. Both the Mister and the Missus of the 
 house were capable eaters, but dear old Grandmother could 
 out-eat both of them. 
 
 She was bossy, too, especially in all matters relating to 
 cuisine. Thus she used to say to Father, "We baby-havin', 
 tater-hoein', corn-plowin', milk-churnin', midnight-darnin' 
 women ought to have somepin' to say about what's got to 
 be et." 2 And she had it to say and she said it. I do not 
 know that any of the others (there were only six children) 
 ever objected to any of her mandates. They probably vied 
 with her in capacity. 
 
 Like almost all the other farmers the McLaplins always 
 had grace before meals — a grace wherein they well-nigh 
 invariably spoke modestly, even slightingly, of the things 
 they had to eat. Thus Mr. McLaplin (Grandma now and 
 then said grace) : * 'May the Lord make us truly grateful for 
 the little we are about to receive — if he can do it. I don't 
 suppose he can." 
 
 For breakfast they had buckwheats — the real article, 
 stack after stack too — ; maple syrup — the real article again, 
 pint after pint too — , and genuine pig sausage — not mere 
 dog or horse meat — . Then they had all sorts of other things, 
 hot biscuits and honey and so on, winding up with a kind 
 of breakfast dessert consisting of plenty of ham and eggs. 
 
 For the midday dinner they had buckwheats — the real 
 article, stack after stack too, maple syrup, the real article 
 
 1 Bulletin Am. Acad, of Med., Vols. VIII and IX (1908 and 1909) in the brief series, 
 "Practising in Pike." 
 
 2 This strange group of compound, mouth-filling, adjectival participles had been in 
 common use among housewives for at least two generations before Grandma McLaplin's 
 own over-energetic day. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 483 
 
 again, pint after pint too, chicken and turkey and rabbit 
 and guinea fowl and mud cat from the Mississippi, and a 
 dessert of cookies and jelly tarts, with seven or eight sorts 
 of pie and layer cake. 
 
 By eventide they'd got shore hungry, and then came the 
 real meal, the food. People can't work all day and not eat 
 nothin'. 
 
 In fact folk cannot work as hard as they were accustomed 
 to working and not have no extra meals or so. Therefore, 
 between breakfast and dinner and again between dinner and 
 supper they had to have two very light snacks — just some- 
 thing to bridge over, say (a kind of Niagara suspension 
 bridge) and keep you from gettin' faint. 
 
 Sometimes they'd get up and eat in the night. 
 
 Not only when my father's care was being bestowed on 
 Mr. McLaplin or his family would Father and I, if we 
 happened in at meal times — which was practically the whole 
 of the time, or so it seemed to me — but whenever we drove 
 along the highway by their house, it would be, "Hey there, 
 Doctor an' Tommie! Come in an' have a little bite, won't 
 you?" 
 
 And would we? We just always did. 
 
 "The only objection we got to havin' you an' Tommy fer 
 our guests," Mrs. McLaplin, junior, would remark," is that, 
 no matter how hard we try to scrape a few little things 
 together, you don't neither of you never seem to eat 
 nothin'." 
 
 Well, that was true. We never did eat nothin'. 
 
 Neither did we never talk nothin' at all. Well, each 
 and every one of us talked nearly all the time — excepting 
 of course when Mr. McLaplin himself or his mother was 
 speaking. 
 
 Mr. McLaplin, though so modest whenever referring to 
 the substance of his meals was by no means backward when 
 speaking of his family. Thus, one time: "My father an' 
 all my people have been jest plumb — doers — doin', doin', 
 doin', all the time. Well, all except my youngest brother, 
 he warn't no good." 
 
484 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Pa," put in Mrs. McLaplin, "Doc and Tommy here'd 
 a lot rather hear the reasons why instrumental music's a sin 
 in the church er else know Mother McLaplin 's receet fer 
 them lemon pies." 
 
 "Lookee, pa," interrupted the oldest boy, "See what 
 Tm eatin'. Lookee, Doc. Lookee, Tommy." 
 
 4 'Now you shut right up, ' ' admonished the mother. "Go 
 get you that peach-tree limb and keep the flies off." So, 
 later, with one hand swishing off the flies, with the other 
 he fed himself chalk, flies, angle-worms and so on — all of 
 which he had stored in his pockets — when at length he pro- 
 duced a garter snake and seemed preparing to eat that when 
 his mother chased him from the house. 
 
 Meantime Mr. McLaplin kept on bragging about his 
 family. "Yes, all of 'em's doers except my youngest brother. 
 He run away with a circus when he was jest a little old 
 shirt-tail boy, an' he ain't been no good since. All my 
 brothers is rich. I'm so-so, an' my father was a doer before 
 me. He come of the right stock." 
 
 Said Mrs. McLaplin: "The preacher was in the other 
 day. I set fried chicken right in front of 'im, an' he turned 
 up his nose at it. I set buckwheats, medder butter and wild 
 honey on it, an' he went crazier'n a kitten with a ball o' 
 yarn." 
 
 "He come of the right stock," repeated Mr. McLaplin. 
 "He cut down the trees, he put up buildin's, he fit the 
 Indians, he killed the wolves — killed 'em with his hands. 
 He warn't afraid o' nothin' — fire ner hell ner brimstone. 
 He whipped a wild bull once. He built two-hole privies, 
 an* our kind o' women folks planted holly-hocks and sun- 
 flowers along the planks that led to 'em. He made more 
 money when he set down than when he stood up, 'cause 
 sittin' down he was always thinkin'." 
 
 "Jest what's the plumb signifiance of what you say about 
 the two-hole — er — privy?" crack- voiced Grandma. 
 
 "Why, jest this. People from the South they don't build 
 nothin fer the purpose — speakin' general — exceptions. Use 
 all outdoors, winter an' summer. Innervated by the hot 
 climate anyway. People from the midway states are more 
 energetic, but bein' selfish and not sociable, they build 'em 
 with one accommodation only. But us people from the 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 485 
 
 north an' northeast, even if we're kinder economical fi- 
 nancially, yet we got to get some talkin' done, an' so, bein' 
 that sociable, we go into the ark two by two, you might 
 say — though of course not male and female." 
 
 Grandma was not to be outdone. "My mother's folks," 
 she shrilled, "all built three-hole talkatories — one big, one 
 middlin', and one little. And I think — " 
 
 But the younger Mrs. MacLaplin broke in: "At dinner 
 time, Mother! I fight the subject!" 
 
 "Doctors can stand anything," rejoined the elder woman 
 belligerently. "And I think — " But the boy that had had 
 the garter snake now returned into the dining room — this 
 time with a large mouth organ. Lovingly he cupped the 
 shining instrument to his lips, blew softly along it for a 
 moment, and then — 
 
 My father started up. "We have to make that appoint- 
 ment, Thomas, by twelve-forty," he cried. (One doctor 
 who could not stand ^7zjy thing !) And away we went to the 
 soft nicker of the Halpin mare — who never had needed a 
 "talkatory." 
 
 CLEANLINESS BEFORE PASTEUR 
 My father was always delicate about his eating. For 
 this reason it was that he never could eat in a dirty room, 
 nor could he be comfortable if his hands or face were in the 
 least bit soiled. Hence it was that, even before the days of 
 antisepsis or the germ theory, he saw to it that the patient 
 and his room were kept clean and his own face and hands 
 and those of all the persons who waited on the patient. 
 
 And the results of his cleanliness were already apparent 
 before the causes therefor were even guessed at. Sometimes 
 he spoke of the work of Florence Nightingale, the Crimean 
 nurse, and of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, by way of clean- 
 ing up hospitals, and the marvellous benefits to humanity 
 thereby produced. So he understood clearly that cleanliness 
 is something helpful to the sick, understood it when 
 neither he nor any other person on earth could explain it. 
 That personal abhorrence of filth, too, prepared him for a 
 quicker acceptance of the microbe theory of disease causa- 
 tion and of antisepsis and of the innumerable world-con- 
 vulsing offshoots of those discoveries. 
 
486 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 The pride of Mr. McLaplin in his forebears' two-hole 
 privies I have introduced because, especially, it brings up a 
 very important phase of private sanitation. 
 
 Up to the time of Pasteur, in almost every town and city 
 of the civilized world, even in the towns and cities of the 
 United States, the commonest practice was to carry all night- 
 pots, in the morning to the front window, and, shouting a 
 word of premonishment, to toss the contents into the street. 
 There were no sewer connections with houses at all. 1 
 
 In the country, especially in parts where the weather 
 was apt to be pleasant even in winter, people as a rule ran 
 into a bushy area behind the barn or feed-lot, and there — 
 women and girls at one end of the area, men and boys at 
 the other end — obeyed the calls of nature. In the colder 
 climates, however, a one-hole privy would ofttimes, not 
 always, be erected. If the farmer was flush with his money, 
 especially if inclined toward luxury, the privy would be 
 built of larger dimensions. And, like Mr. McLaplin, many 
 a farmer, especially in the South, where such things were a 
 luxury, would brag that he was a "two-hole privy" man. 
 The women, of course, ofttimes planted rows of sunflowers 
 and holly-hocks not only around the building but also along 
 both sides of the path that led to it, so than an approach 
 to the toilet, especially in the leafy season of the year might 
 be made with more seclusion, dignity, et cetera. 
 
 And this brings us to the point. Ordinarily, provisions 
 induced by wealth and luxury are, incidentally, also better 
 sanitation. Not so, however, in the matter of human feces. 
 Stools deposited on the ground are quickly disposed of, 
 especially in the insect seasons of the year, by drying and, 
 especially, by heavy, quick- washing rains. So the stools 
 disappeared promptly. In a privy, however, the stools 
 neither washed away nor dried up and blew away. So, in 
 each and every privy, great pyramids and cones of infection 
 were built up and carefully preserved from destruction. In 
 fly-time, then, flies, mosquitoes and other common insects, 
 having dabbled at will in the mess, would, like so many 
 irresistible angels of death, wing their ununderstood ways 
 to the unscreened houses and there, settling on the food and 
 
 1 Even in the greatest palace of the world in the 17th and 18th centuries — that of 
 Louis XIV at Versailles — the sanitary arrangements were shocking in the extreme. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 487 
 
 drink — perhaps at some time when a man like our good 
 Mr. McLaplin would be expatiating on the excellence of his 
 forebears' outhouses — bring suffering and destruction, not 
 only upon the braggart himself, but, in addition, upon all 
 those whom he loved. 1 
 
 BACK TO THE MILOS' 
 
 We, of course, did not stay at the Milos' as long as it 
 has taken me to make this digression on "Eating in the 
 Country." A few good jokes, a few happy reminiscences of 
 long years of medical service in this appreciative family, 
 and then — all at once, there rode up on a well-lathered 
 horse and, through the open gateway, to the very house- 
 door of the Milos', a messenger without hat, without coat 
 or vest, with wide-staring eyes and drooped breathless lips. 
 
 "Doc, Doc!" he shouted, then seemed to be speechless. 
 "Doc! My wife. She's dyin'." 
 
 Mr. Milo lowered his drumstick, got up, wiped his 
 greasy hands on his trousers. "So soon!" 
 
 Mrs. Milo echoed tragically, "So soon! So soon!" 
 
 "You still live on the Linkwell farm?" Thus my father, 
 as he and I strode into the buggy. 
 
 "Over there a quarter. Went clear to town for ye. They 
 sent me here to get ye. Ye know me, Doc — always pay my 
 bills. Hurry!" 
 
 And so indeed it was. The man had ridden that long 
 distance to Pittsfield, only to find, when there, that my father 
 was actually eating at the Milos' — just one quarter of a mile 
 from the messenger's house. All those weary, sun-scorched 
 miles he had had to push his mount then, later back-track- 
 ing to the Milos' in order to summon my father. 
 
 In these present days he would not even have left his 
 home. He would, by telephone, have called my mother, 
 learned that my father was eating at the Milos', then have 
 
 J That matters in the South have greatly improved since the days of Mr. McLaplin's 
 freely expressed Northern pride, is shown by an article in Time, July 14, 1941. By this 
 article it appears that, in the state of Mississippi, under the auspices of the State Board of 
 Health, in just the period 1935-41, 156,706 new outhouses were constructed, all three-holers, 
 and with very great benefit to the public health. All these privies, however, were con- 
 structed with concrete floors and other arrangements for the constant disinfection and fre- 
 quent removal of the dangerous masses. 
 
488 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 called the Milos' and asked my father to come at once over. 
 Time lost, less than one minute. He had actually lost on 
 that day three hours or more. 
 
 How easy it is, these times, with automobiles, hard roads, 
 and telephones, for just one doctor to do the work of five 
 or six doctors of the olden days. Then, too, thanks mostly 
 to the germ explanation of many diseases, at least three- 
 fourths of the sickness has been stamped absolutely out — 
 just does not occur. 
 
 Still people will bewail the fact there are not so many 
 country doctors now as formerly? How could there be? 
 Why should there be? 
 
 Even if most of the country people did not go to-day to 
 the larger towns and cities to be seriously sick, and if ex- 
 pectant mothers likewise did not go to such places, there 
 to have their babies in the hospitals, even so, how could 
 there be so many village and country doctors as before? 
 How can a village or country doctor subsist on a fifth or a 
 sixth of the practice that used to belong to each of his old- 
 time predecessors? 
 
 And farmers in those days were ofttimes wealthy clients, 
 to-day they are nearly all poverty stricken— have to be helped 
 by the Government. 
 
 At the Linkwell farm the case proved to be none of the 
 sort that I could as yet be permitted to see. There had been 
 terrific hemorrhage, that I observed at a glance. The woman, 
 too, I noticed, as I left for the barn, was half-way uncon- 
 scious. 
 
 WAITING IN BARNS 
 
 It should not be exceedingly difficult for a "tramp" like 
 me to kill time in a barn. Well, it wasn't that day, and, in 
 fact, it never has been. Indeed I love barns, have always 
 loved them dearly — a fact for which my "Hayloft Univer- 
 sity" experience may have been partly responsible. 
 
 To this particular barn came "pronto" the household 
 watch-dog, a collie who, at first, showed me his teeth and 
 berated me roundly. I did not look straight at him, and, 
 in the beginning, spoke to him only gentle words enough 
 to convince him I was his friend, then sat down on a bucket 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 489 
 
 and began reading in a vest-pocket book. The inevitable 
 happened. Soon into the half-closed hand I had slyly 
 dropped down at my left, there poked a cold nose. I slightly 
 squeezed the nose, released it and dogum and I were friends. 
 Years later, when I was telling some of my dog experi- 
 ences to a fellow physician who also liked dogs, he informed 
 me — he had the reputation of being a lady-killer — that ' 'dogs 
 are just the same as girls: you have to use on them 'the 
 method of gradual approach.' And a farm-hand once in- 
 formed me, "Them as gets easy ain't worth gettin'." 
 
 Carlo, or whatever this dog's name was, agreed with me 
 that the day was very beautiful, that he had never seen a 
 finer cobalt sky in all his life. From time to time he sud- 
 denly bolted for the house, returning in a few moments de- 
 jected, tail low, eyes well-nigh closed, and a half-heard 
 whimper in his throat. 
 
 I talked with him for awhile about rabbits and foxes, 
 and it seemed like less than a minute when pandemonium 
 all at once broke loose. The sky had suddenly clouded, and 
 one of those electrical "tear-ups" for which that summer 
 was famous, had burst upon a horrified world. The vivid 
 lightnings ran down the golden gutters of the sky, and were 
 followed— sometimes it seemed even accompanied — by the 
 most incredible noises. Occasionally it appeared that the 
 very frame of nature had jarred loose. 
 
 Dog in my arms, I reclined on the hay. 
 
 Some hours later my father awoke me coming in. "Both 
 lived!" he cried triumphantly. 
 
 In the silence of the morning's splendor we drove onto 
 the Public Square of still sleeping Pittsfleld — sleeping at 
 least except as to a few drowsily brawling drunkards and 
 one solitary, vigilant night watchman — and so on down 
 toward home. 
 
 It reminded me of the time in my early boyhood when 
 we had driven into town by early morning light after only 
 one had "lived." 
 
 How old I felt — how old, how old! Longer it seemed I 
 then had lived, with my only seventeen years upon my back, 
 
490 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 than now I feel long after the completion of my three-score 
 years and ten. 
 
 What tricks time does play with us mortals! 
 
 JACKIE RIAN 
 
 There was in those days a little, good-natured stone- 
 cutter at Pittsfield who was greatly addicted to the bottle 
 but whom everybody loved. He was really fine at his work 
 — when his hand was not trembling. He used to say to my 
 father, "You an' Doctor Dublin has brought the most of 
 Pittsfield people into this world and Winans and Platner or 
 C. R. Lame will put them away out of it. Then I, like a 
 woman, will have the last word. Do I ever say a bad one 
 about anybody? No, I do not. And why? Their rilatives 
 tells me what to say — I have no choice." 
 
 But in fact he was one of the kindest of men. Had the 
 "rilatives" left him a choice, he would surely have chiseled 
 even higher eulogies than the rilatives themselves had ever 
 diet ay ted. 
 
 Ordinarily, I think, he employed Dr. Dublin, but now 
 and then he had my father. Sometimes he had an unseen 
 visitor, as well as my father and myself. 
 
 For example, one night we were called to see him at a 
 livery stable. The owner of the stable, who had known and 
 loved Jackie extremely, had gone suddenly out of town, 
 leaving in charge of the place a new hand, one who knew 
 not Jackie. 
 
 When we got to Jackie he was lying on a pile of hay, 
 cold, shaking and very much alarmed. He began about the 
 middle of his tale: 
 
 "So I told him I jest wants a little bit of a drink, my 
 t'roat is so dry. 'An' me wife has given all the saloon- 
 keepers notice ag'in me,' I says, 'an' me t'roat is so dry I 
 don't want to get drunk,' I says. 
 
 "So he says, T take a big risk,' says he, 'a-sellin' it to ye,' 
 he says. 'But if ye got two dollars,' says he, I give him five. 
 But he says, T don't give no change,' says he, 'an' damn you 
 don't drink here in the alley but take the damn stuff into 
 the livery stable,' says he, 'an' I bash yure face in if ye don't 
 go into the stable to drink it,' he says, 'an' not out here in 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 491 
 
 the alley,' I went in. An' I was shakin' so hard me teeth 
 jarred. 
 
 "I entered the livery stable and there wa'n't nobody 
 there I'm not lyin'. An' I laid down on the hay — it's no 
 lie I am tellin' — on the hay in the darkest of the stalls — 
 they kept some hay in the stalls because — an' the big man 
 sez to me, him with the lanterns in his eyes and the seeds 
 in his nose, and says, says he, 'Drink it up quick or I will 
 carry you of!.' 
 
 "Well, I drank it up quick, an' I got up brave. There's 
 a terrible poundin' in me head, Doc. But I felt cool an' 
 brave. So I says — No, I rushed for the buckets, ranged down 
 be the pump. But the buckets I see was full o' blood. The 
 flies wuz thick around thim, an' the smell was thick and 
 sick-like. An' the straw that they stood in was dirty, dirty 
 with blood, an' I went on an' seen the buggies each an' 
 every wan of thim was turned into a ghost-like, and scary- 
 like — although I knowed that in each and every white sheet 
 of thim there was only a buggy but the poundin' inside of 
 me made the buggies make me sick. 
 
 "An' that was where the new felly come into the stable, 
 the felly that didn't know me — if it'd been the older wan 
 they'd a known I was all right. 
 
 "But the big new felly he come in singin' about the place 
 to get some liver bein' the place that was the livery stable, 
 an' when he says 'liver' I couldn't get back into the alley, 
 and the liver an' the buckets o' blood an' the throbbin' 
 inside o' me head — well I all let go of every thin'. 
 
 "An' the big new felly he hit me in the stomach — it was 
 bad enough annyhow an' I tried to bash him in the eye. 
 But I was too weak an' he turned me round an' kicked me 
 an' hit me right here in the back o' me head. 
 
 "An' the thing that was deep in me heart was what 
 came into me imagination an' all night I've heard the snow 
 liftin' an* laid down, liftin' an' laid down, an' there's the 
 big felly now, an' me so cold — so cold [It was hot mid- 
 summer] an' me so cold — so cold — an' me so terrible afraid 
 of I don't know what — I'm terrible scairt now — There 
 he is, there he isY" 
 
 "There who is?" Thus my father. 
 
492 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "The felly that should have stayed in his grave an' come 
 into me stoneyard, an' instead of stayin' in his grave, an' 
 says he to me — There he is\ There he is\" 
 
 My father and I and two stalwart fellow-citizens who 
 happened to be passing were not able to control the little 
 fellow fully till my father slipped a tiny needle into the skin 
 of his arm. 
 
 And there were other occasions whereon Jackie was 
 visited by people whose stones he had graven beautifully 
 yet who would not rest content. 
 
 One time he came to my father with a great cock and 
 bull story about some men who had buried their nephew in 
 the south graveyard and who had later dug the nephew up 
 and broken his right upper-arm bone and reburied him — all 
 because they were going to start a damage suit against my 
 father for the broken bone. He had been out to the grave- 
 yard himself, said Jackie, and on the very spot had heard 
 the conspirators talking the matter over calmly as they had 
 sat on the grave of the nephew. 
 
 Jackie used to say that the reason why he drank so hard 
 was that he had such terrible pains in his head. 
 
 "When I can stand them no longer, I drink." Some of 
 the doctors laughed, saying, "Rip van Winkle too had his 
 reasons." His family prayed. His good priest also prayed, 
 prayed again and again. But Jackie's pains kept on, and 
 so did his drinking. 
 
 Long, long years after the time of which I am writing — 
 even long years after my father had been laid to rest in 
 Oakwood Cemetery — wherein Jackie had thought he had 
 heard the conspirators talking above their nephew's grave, 
 some or another doctor got hold of the little Irishman, 
 diagnosed the source of his head pains (which had merely 
 been mistaken by the other doctors for the results of his 
 drinking) pulled, or caused to be pulled, all, or the most, 
 of his teeth, had his suppurating tonsils taken out and his 
 nasal sinuses drained and disinfected. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 493 
 
 And behold! the little old town drunkard straightened 
 up and became a man — Hiberniantbropus erectus. 
 
 The pains bad been the cause of his drunkenness, not the 
 result. 
 
 Jackie soon paid every debt he owed. To the last red 
 cent paid he it. There was then no better man in the city 
 than Jackie. 
 
 How many millions of persons in the prior days had 
 suffered from such head pains, such agonies, without the 
 slightest possibility of obtaining relief! Then came along 
 that knowledge of the germ causation of many diseases, 
 followed, years later, by the no less important knowledge 
 of focal infection — infection in places which distribute germs 
 to other parts of the body, where, perhaps, the damage 
 resulting is far more painful and serious than in the focus 
 itself. 
 
 The sequence of events then, stated in time order, was: 
 (1) A lowering of resistance to germs in some spot of the 
 human body (generally some organ which, in the course of 
 evolution, has become a "disappearing" organ; as, the 
 tonsils, the teeth, the nasal sinuses, the vermiform appen- 
 dix). (2) A consequent invasion by germs of that spot of 
 lessened resistance. (3) A colonization (reproduction) of 
 those germs in that spot. (4) A throwing up of white 
 blood-cells all around that spot to "wall it off" from the 
 rest of the body — to confine the infection to the locality in 
 which it occurred, thus protecting the rest of the body. 
 (5) An occasional leaking out of the pus germs nevertheless, 
 through that white blood-cell wall, and then a carrying of 
 the pus germs by the blood stream to other portions of the 
 body — the heart muscle, the heart valves, the kidneys, 
 various nerves of the body, especially those of the head — 
 as in the case of him who later became Hiberniantbropus 
 erectus. 1 
 
 THE TRAMP TURNS HISTORIO-PHILOSOPHER 
 
 No, the pioneers did not have "greater opportunities by 
 far" than do the people of to-day — precisely contrary to the 
 
 1 I shall have considerably more to say about Jackie when I come to the time when 
 I myself was a full-fledged general practitioner of medicine, practising at Pittsfield. 
 
494 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 teaching of our schools and colleges. Nor were they people 
 of greater health and strength. They were, on the contrary, 
 almost every one of them, walking (or recumbent) museums 
 of pathology. Even the best of their doctors did not know 
 what to do for the most of their serious complaints. A 
 child with nasal sinusitis, for example, was almost in- 
 variably laughed at as a "snot-nose. ' ' A child with a crossing 
 eye (the eye that crossed almost always, sooner or later, 
 went blind) was merely derided as a "cock-eye." A cross- 
 eye in a girl was not infrequently regarded by her parents 
 (this is an actual fact) as a beauty-mark, as something 
 "cute." Any young person suffering from eyestrain was 
 regarded as "lazy" and a fit subject for corporal punishment. 
 Any person with a club-foot was regarded as "comical." 
 So, too, were stammerers — as, in fact, they still are to a 
 certain extent to-day, by morons, as witness the continued 
 popularity of plays presenting persons so afflicted in vaude- 
 ville or on the cinema screen. 
 
 As to the diseases which anyone could readily see were 
 diseases, take, for one single example, cholera infantum. 
 It killed, in many years, fifty thousand babies each single 
 summer — in one especially bad summer an estimated two 
 hundred thousand. Nobody, of course, looked on cholera 
 infantum as "amusing." A vast number, however, regarded 
 it as a "visitation of the Lord." After the establishment 
 of the germ "theory," the Lord quit visitating. The disease 
 was found to be a visitation of microbes, and one easily 
 prevented by metal door and window screens (instead of the 
 old-fashioned cotton mosquito-bar screens which stretched 
 at every breeze and which, therefore, with its enlarged 
 meshes, did not keep out the flies that bore the cholera in- 
 fantum germs). Further prevention was effected by sane 
 attention to the babies' milk and bottles. 
 
 Not merely in the matter of freedom from disease were 
 the pioneers of this country far more lacking in "opportun- 
 ity" than are the soft-charactered people of the present day. 
 They were also lacking in "opportunities" as to well-nigh 
 every other matter. The earlier settlers in most of the greater 
 areas of this country, in truth, went into the deep wilder- 
 nesses with scarcely more than a moving wagon, a plow, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 495 
 
 an axe and a gun. The wife was always with her man, of 
 course. From her head to her heels she, like him, was 
 almost always full of sickness, incapacity, pain. They were 
 both far more "underprivileged" than are the "under- 
 privileged" of to-day. But, like Columbus, they went on 
 and on. They fought their way through roadless prairies, 
 whole jungles of forest, over streams their horses had to 
 swim and over mountains that the people of to-day would 
 regard as strictly impassable unless on well-built highways 
 and in easy-riding automobiles. 
 
 Wild beasts, famine, pestilence (and nothing scientific 
 known about them either), no hospitals, few neighbors, 
 schools and churches poor and few and far between, and — 
 almost everywhere — treacherous savages waiting to burn 
 and to kill. 
 
 An old pioneer patient of my father's told me that, when 
 first he had settled, his wife, for many long years, had had 
 to watch the little clearing where he planted or ploughed, 
 with a loaded rifle in her hand. At night first one and then 
 the other of the two would stand guard at the cabin windows. 
 
 His father, in New England, used, for many years, to 
 stand guard, every Sabbath, in the tower of their little 
 church — watching for the approach of treacherous savages. 
 
 "But," says some one, "at the present day there is no 
 opportunity for a young couple to get such land at all as 
 the pioneers in those days got free. Hence the necessity for 
 the Government, in these days, continuing to support a con- 
 siderable portion of the population on dole." I answer, 
 "Let him regard those early taken lands as 'free/ who still 
 cannot comprehend the fearful price the settlers had to pay 
 for them, and paid for them gladly." Even as to payment in 
 money, there are, I understand, even at the present day, in 
 several of the States of this Union, very many lands, already 
 in an excellent state of cultivation, but which have been 
 bought by the state at tax sale, which can be purchased 
 actually for less than just the fencing of the fields would 
 cost if the fencing were purchased separately. And some of 
 these farms include gooa homes, cattle sheds, granaries and 
 barns — all of which the early settlers had to build for them- 
 selves. A friend of mine informs me that a friend of his 
 borrowed of a relative the small amount that was necessary 
 
496 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 to acquire one of these farms and that, then, the purchaser 
 and his wife, the very first year of their occupancy, sold 
 chickens, milk and eggs (alone) enough to pay back more 
 than half the borrowed money. 
 
 No opportunity — with states so anxious to get their tax- 
 sold improved farms back on the assessment lists! 
 
 No opportunity? I appreciate as well as anyone the 
 ravages which political theorists of various parties, especi- 
 ally those who have believed that America should be sucked 
 dry by every European holocaust, have committed in this 
 country. Nevertheless it is a fact that, taking things pre- 
 cisely as they stand, the modern young couple have a hun- 
 dred times the "opportunity" that was "enjoyed" by most 
 of the early settlers of the United States. 
 
 The one and only opportunity which the old-timers 
 possessed which the- new-timers lack was — guts, self-reliance. 
 
 Somebody should supply that article also to the new- 
 timers — free. 
 
 ODDS AND ENDS THAT SEVENTEENTH SUMMER 
 An old saw runs, "There are tricks in all trades but ours." 
 Yes, even in the practice of medicine there are tricks — were, 
 actually, in those far-gone, fine and simple old days. People, 
 for one thing, of that place and time, would have bitter, foul- 
 smelling medicine. Therefore a trick: even the pleasantest 
 medicines must have something added unto them to make 
 them bitter and foul-smelling. Then, too, they must have 
 plainly perceptible, thorough-going effects. No delicate, 
 dilletante medicines for those people. No amateur doctorin'. 
 No sit-ee. A purgative must purge, an emetic make you 
 heave Jonah. Or they were neither of 'em no good. 
 
 My father used to deplore the situation bitterly, but he 
 was helpless in the matter. 
 
 I remember when apomorphine first came into use. You 
 shot a tiny bit of the substance under the patient's skin. 
 And then the patient in a perfectly gentlemanly or ladylike 
 manner, as the case might be, gave a soft-like heave — a so-so 
 sigh such as anyone could use in Sunday School and not 
 attract attention from the teacher — and up would come — 
 well, whatever there was that had formerly been below. 
 
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 'ill,: 
 
 : .." "• 1'',' 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 497 
 
...<::■■ : ■■;:;.-:■: 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE— 498 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 499 
 
 But patients would have none of that gentility sort of 
 medicine. 4 Teared like nothin' ain't been a-doin' . " ' 'When 
 you doctor me, Doc, you got to doctor me: I know my con- 
 stitution." So an emetic would have to be administered 
 that in the words of one patient who was not particularly 
 opposed to the mixture of his metaphors, "would jest 
 nacherly knock the socks offin yer stomach." 
 
 So with all the other remedies. Anything to cure a chill 
 must make you mighty hot. Anything to cure a fever must 
 make you mighty cold. A sleeping medicine must make you 
 saw wood. A tonic must tone you "so's you could jest feel 
 'er all thoo yer anatomy." 
 
 Otherwise, why bother about sending for a doctor? 
 
 I can hear, even now, an old man patient saying, as 
 Father was preparing some ' 'heavy artillery' ' for him, ' 'Now, 
 Doc, remember! No medicine don't do me no good unless 
 it pukes and it purges. I got to be opened at both ends." 
 
 Of course when a patient was terribly sick, perhaps even 
 comatose, the doctor was at liberty to choose his remedies 
 with discretion. But, in the milder cases of disease, the 
 medicines must "go to it." 
 
 Then another thing. Whenever the granny-nurse said, 
 or even perhaps the mother of the family, "Doc, don't you 
 think the case calls for a little sheep-droppin' tea?" you 
 must always, at least in the beginning, agree with the ad- 
 viser. A moment later, you may modify your judgment 
 slightly by remarking, "Or, still better than the tea, I think, 
 though that s good in many cases ', is this mixture I sent off for." 
 Marvellous were the effects of medicines that the doctor had 
 sent off for ! And if, a little later, the doctor sent off for a 
 medicine "just to be used in this particular case," then the 
 results of that medicine were not merely marvellous, they 
 were actually miraculous — provided, of course, the patient 
 did ever get well. If he didn't, then "everything had been 
 done for him that could have been done." 
 
 Not only that, but medicines bought in Boston or New 
 York, to be used "in this particular case" always made the 
 paymaster far more willing to pay his bill than he would 
 otherwise have been — no unimportant matter when one is 
 practising in tight-wad families. 
 
500 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 I do not mean that my father ever pretended to have sent 
 off for medicines when he had not in fact done so; I mean 
 merely that, when he had sent off — and he was sending very 
 frequently — he was careful to use the truth to the psychologic 
 advantage of every person concerned. 
 
 Why not? I have seen patients who could not possibly 
 improve, under ordinary treatments, perk up, pick up, turn 
 about, and make a prompt recovery under drugs that had 
 been sent away for "just on account of this particular case." 
 
 The Reader should remember, in connection with all that 
 I have said on this special matter, what I have heretofore 
 stated about the old-time countryman's inability to under- 
 stand that a doctor's services ever consist of more — or of 
 very much more — than merely selling drugs. 
 
 Charlatanry? Nothing is charlatanry that makes a pa- 
 tient get well. 
 
 The great difficulty is that, when Doctor A makes use 
 of practical psychology to accomplish the cure of a patient, 
 it is perfectly ethical, thinks A. But when Dr. B. employs 
 precisely the same practical psychology for precisely the 
 same purpose, then it is extremely ^^ethical — again thinks A. 
 
 CODE FOR DOCTOR AND APPRENTICE 
 Another peculiar point about old-time patient psychology 
 was that a drug, to be really effective, must be mysterious. 
 Even its name must not be known to the patient or to his 
 sponsor. I cannot understand why, but, to the average non- 
 doctor, a knowledge on his part of the name of the medicine 
 or medicines that are being employed on any given case in 
 his family or among his friends, entitles him to suppose that 
 he understands that case completely — understands its origin, 
 its cause, its manner of effects, its complications, its various 
 stages and what is best for each of them and in all the dif- 
 ferent and numerous types of patient. It always makes him 
 suppose, indeed, that it — the mere knowledge of the name 
 of the drug — causes him instanter, and by itself alone, to 
 comprehend the ways of action of that drug in all its in- 
 tricate ramifications and almost endless possibilities. 
 
 There is only one remedy for this well-nigh universal lay 
 failing. Keep the names of your medicines to yourself. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 501 
 
 There are doctors who believe that this is wrong, that it is 
 somehow cheating the patient. Cheating him? Listen. 
 Eight or ten years back I gave a patient with glaucoma a 
 prescription for pilocarpin. Her granddaughter, making for 
 herself a copy of the prescription, then made from that copy 
 a number of other copies — and these she passed around among 
 her friends. To each recipient she said, "This is a copy of 
 Dr. Shastid's prescription for eye-wash. You and your 
 friends use it." You see she almost thought herself an 
 oculist because she had one of my prescriptions. 
 
 The consequences? I, of course, do not know one-tenth 
 of what must have happened to people's eyes just in con- 
 sequence of that fine young lady's colossal unwisdom. But 
 I do know that, in at least three instances, patients came to 
 me suffering with extreme iritis, for which they had quite 
 improperly (and, in one case, disastrously) been using my 
 pilocarpin prescription. 
 
 All merely because an unwise young lady had supposed 
 that the mere knowledge on her part of the name of a drug 
 I had used for some one in some kind of eye case had made 
 of her an authority on eyes. 
 
 So back to the olden times again. My father would 
 never tell patients the names of the drugs he was using. 
 No matter who it was that was asking for the name or how 
 importunate that person became in the asking, he would 
 not name the name. 
 
 There was a rule in the profession, too, against the keep- 
 ing of names of medicines secret. There was, however, a 
 code of common sense as well as a conventional code, and 
 I am proud to record the fact that my father, in that conflict 
 between codes, elected to abide by the code of common sense. 
 I am happy, too, to record that his son, even to this day, 
 does much of his prescribing by numbers, ' 'Collyrium No. 1, " 
 for example, means one sort of eye-medicine, Collyrium No. 2, 
 or No. 10, or 11, or 12 (and so on) meaning something quite 
 different. Then he sends his patient to a pharmacist who 
 holds the key to the numbers. And he instructs his patient 
 to take the prescription to the pharmacy he mentions and 
 to no other. The pharmacist, on his part, is ordered never 
 to dispense any of these formulas except on prescription. 
 
502 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 (No right-minded doctor, of course, would ever keep his 
 remedies secret from any other doctor.) 
 
 There is no other way to keep unwise people from fooling 
 with things they do not understand, and, possibly, doing 
 themselves and other people great damage. It is absolutely 
 the only way to prevent the "floating" of prescriptions — 
 the copying of some doctor's prescription and then passing 
 it all round the city as Doctor So-and-so's prescription for 
 this or for that. "When anybody in your family has that 
 trouble, use it. It's good." To call it unethical to stop that 
 dangerous sort of nonsense is itself dangerous nonsense. 
 
 Then, too, it is a fact that pharmacists are not all equally 
 capable and equally honest — contrary to the usual foolish 
 supposition. 
 
 There are "smart" patients, of course, who purposely 
 take prescriptions to druggists whom I do not know. These 
 druggists then sometimes call up and beg for the key to the 
 prescription. Their interest in the matter, of course, is to 
 make the sale — a purely financial, if perfectly natural, in- 
 terest. Sometimes, if you do not yield the key to them, 
 they suggest that you probably are getting a commission 
 from the druggists who do hold the key. The charge is not 
 correct, but you simply must expect it to be made. And, if 
 a patient, in the first place, has not sense enough to take a 
 prescription to the druggist to whom he was told by his 
 doctor to take it, he, if he gets angry at his doctor in con- 
 sequence and leaves him, is simply a patient well lost. 
 
 Patients who try to outwit their physicians and who 
 insist on treating other peoples' organs with remedies they 
 do not understand — in other words, "smart Alecks" — are 
 appropriately lost, without exception. 1 
 
 1 1 had, years ago, a young lad with severe eye trouble, for which I prescribed, among 
 other remedies, viosterol. The boy made a prompt recovery, also as a result of the viosterol 
 grew a number of inches in height. Now it so happened that the mother of the boy, in- 
 stead of taking my prescription to the pharmacist I had indicated, took it to a young drug- 
 gist who was a new comer in the city. This young druggist, although he saw and could 
 not help seeing that the prescription was specially directed to another pharmacist and to 
 that pharmacist only, nevertheless called up to ask that I give him also the key to the 
 prescription. I refused. Thereupon he had the mother call me up and beg for the pre- 
 scription. I at length, weakly, yielded. The young druggist was in bad financial circum- 
 stances, said the mother, was trying to get a start in life, and would I not please, please, 
 give him this little piece of business. As I say, I yielded. 
 
 And what was the consequence? The young druggist gave the mother a copy of the 
 key to the prescription — just as I had asked him not to do. The mother, from that copy, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 503 
 
 However, in the old times in Pike County, the situation 
 was much different. A doctor at a farmhouse seldom wrote 
 a prescription. Few people could pay both a doctor and a 
 druggist. And, besides, to hand out a prescription, perhaps 
 several prescriptions, instead of the necessary drugs, would 
 have meant that someone would have to make a long hard 
 trip to town to have the prescriptions filled — only to find 
 even then perhaps that the druggist did not have on hand 
 the drugs required, that none of the other druggists kept 
 them either. And, in any case, there was the long, hard 
 trip back home again. During the rider's long absence the 
 patient might have suffered severely, might even have lost 
 his one chance to get well. So it was easier, far easier, for 
 country doctors to keep profoundly secret from the laity the 
 names of the drugs they employed than it was for city 
 physicians to do so. 
 
 And this was where the "code" came in, a code whereby 
 my father and I, in the very presence of the people for whom 
 he was prescribing, could converse about the drugs and yet 
 not speak of them so that the patient could understand — 
 understand even that we were naming drugs. 
 
 made other copies and handed them to her friends, remarking that now they, too, could 
 make their children grow fast. 
 
 The result was, in at least one boy, a very bad case of hypercalcemia, with, probably, 
 permanent injury. How many other boys had been injured by excessive medication with 
 viosterol as a result of that young pharmacist's foolish indiscretion, I of course cannot know. 
 
 Sometimes doctors tell me, "O well, write your prescriptions in Latin, patients then 
 cannot understand them." They can't? Nonsense. Suppose I write, "Quininae sulphatis." 
 Can anybody in his senses suppose that the meaning, though expressed in Latin, is not per- 
 fectly apparent to a non-doctor? 
 
 In any case, an unwise pharmacist will, on request, hand the customer a copy of the 
 prescription, which, then, he or she can have filled either there or elsewhere — and so can 
 all his silly friends. Or the customer can, in the first place, make a copy for himself. 
 
 But, if I prescribe by a number, the prescription to be filled by a certain pharmacist 
 who holds the key to that number, and who will not yield the key to anyone, I then know that 
 foolish people are not going to go around with my prescription, using their wisdom on 
 other peoples' eyes. 
 
 And, mark you, I have even had people throw it up to me — people I had never pre- 
 scribed for or even examined, that they had tried my prescription for, say, glaucoma (Mrs. 
 Smartwell had given it to them) and it not only had not done a bit of good, it had actually 
 made them worse. 
 
 Finally, there is the fact that there are pharmacists and pharmacists. They are not 
 all alike. As in the case of doctors, some are good and some are so-so. I do not mean to 
 say that the pharmacists to whom I send my prescriptions are the only good pharmacists. 
 I cannot know all pharmacists. But I do mean to say that those to whom I send pre- 
 scriptions are men I have found to be capable and honest, and who, in addition, will not 
 pass my remedies around to the public or assist others to pass them. 
 
 I contend that I have just as much right to specify the pharmacist whom I wish to fill 
 my prescriptions as I have to specify a rhinologist to whom I wish to refer my nose patients. 
 
504 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 In the first place a drug was invariably referred to as a 
 "mixture." Then its more specific appellation was made 
 known by the use of its initial in some other connection. 
 More simple, really, than it sounds. 
 
 Thus, as my father with his pill-bags' strap transversely 
 laid over his thighs — one bag hanging down on either side 
 of him — would take from a bag a bottle of jalap and begin 
 to dose it out upon the powder papers, he would say, per- 
 haps, "This is that mixture that John used to like." That 
 meant. This is jalap (j being for John and also for jalap). 
 If I asked, "Why didn't Charley like it just as well?" that 
 meant, "wouldn't colocynth also have been good?" If he 
 answered, "Charley didn't like it," that meant that colo- 
 cynth would not have been good for this case. If he said, 
 "I would have given professor Samuel's remedy in this case, 
 only the professor belonged to a religious sect called Shakers 
 and he ofttimes preferred Quinlan's mixture," I knew that 
 the reason why he wasn't giving salicylic acid first of all 
 (as he would have done for rheumatism) was that the 
 patient had chills (was a "shaker") and that he, Father, 
 therefore wanted to give quinine (Quinlan's "mixture") 
 immediately — to produce "cinchonization." Ofttimes, too, 
 we had to use bits of other languages than English. 
 
 It was astonishing how much we could really express in 
 polyglot code without the slightest comprehension taking 
 place on the part of outsiders. Generally they did not even 
 understand that we were talking in code. 
 
 At one place, however, there was a big strapping son in 
 the family, about eighteen years old. When Father and I 
 had to talk about the case in our customary jargon, he inter- 
 posed, wishing no doubt to impress the rest of his family 
 with his ability to join in the discussion of the case with 
 the doctor and his apprentice. Said he, in the old, trite boy- 
 Latin, "Emay ancay otnay omprehendcay anyway ingthay 
 ouyay asay." Then he let out a yell of a laugh that could 
 have been heard a mile or more. 
 
 Said I to Father, disgusted at the young man's loud ap- 
 plause of his own sally, "Risus abundat in on stultorum." 
 
 " Autem non est stultus" replied my father quickly. 
 
 The young man's cheeks turned as red as his hair. He 
 shouted, angrily, "I can stand all this other talkin' but 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 505 
 
 I'm d....d if I stand for that there Catholic jabber." 
 "That isn't Catholic jabber," placated my father, "al- 
 though it is Latin. It is simply medical Latin, the kind 
 that was used by doctors centuries before the English lan- 
 guage was born, so that it now is used by doctors all over 
 the world. You want to study medicine don't you, Edward? 
 You've often said you wanted to study medicine some day, 
 and learn how to cure diseases." 
 
 "Know how to cure the most uv 'em now," concluded 
 Mr. Confident. "Mother showed me." And he soon seemed 
 to be pacified. 
 
 Once an old Irish lady, awe-stricken by the lingo she 
 could not understand, and filled with homage for the two 
 "docthors," cried out to the others in the house, "Sure 'tis 
 the Latin itsilf they be shpakin' in to one another — Latin 
 that all the best docthors kin shpake in and that all the 
 prastes amplify and employ whiniver they shpake to the 
 Creator av the Universe." 
 
 As an old-time poet once sang, or somehow uttered — 
 
 "Words of learned length and thundering sound. 
 Amaze the wondering rustics ranged around." 
 
 Only my Father would never have allowed "his" people to 
 be called "rustics." 
 
 On yet another occasion my use of Latin almost got us 
 into serious trouble. 
 
 That was in the house of old Mr. Scantlin. He had been 
 quite sick for a week or two. One day we walked into his 
 home to find him much improved. In fact he was up and 
 dressed and seated in a chair, laughing. 
 
 When Father had finished his examination he said to me, 
 "You examine him, son." When I too had examined, I sum- 
 med up my findings thus: "Mens sana in cordon sano." 
 
 The erstwhile patient leaped to his feet, crying: "You 
 can't call me that. I've been called that before." 
 
 And it took my father some time to convince the old 
 fellow that what I had just said in Latin was, "A most 
 remarkable mind in now a perfect body." 
 
506 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "O!" said the old fellow, as happy as a lark. "I thought 
 the boy was callin' me a Democrat." 
 
 "Democrat" and "Republican" were words to start 
 fights with in those days. 
 
 As can easily be seen from the occurrence just mentioned, 
 Father and I would ofttimes employ phrases or sentences 
 from some foreign language when it was not actually neces- 
 sary to conceal a depressing matter from the patient, his 
 relatives, or other bystanders, but just to keep (me) in 
 practice. 
 
 Thus, for example, I would say (in Spanish) "El enfermo 
 va bieri ' (the patient is doing well) far more frequently than 
 "El enfermo va trial " Father, who spoke little Spanish but 
 understood it somewhat, would generally reply in Latin, 
 perhaps "It a vero' ' (Yes indeed) or, as the facts might require, 
 "nullo modo" or "nequaquam" It was all good practice for 
 the apprentice. 1 
 
 But it was chiefly in the buggy that Father and I discuss- 
 ed the case. In the house it could be quite risky to discuss 
 it, spite of our code and the medical Latin, etc. 
 
 ^uch Spanish as I knew I had learned from a Doctor Hiller, a Christianized Jew who 
 belonged to our denomination (the Christian, or Disciples). He had appeared in Pittsfield 
 suddenly out of nowhere and had hung out a little shingle at the mouth of a stairway on 
 the east side of the Square, which read, "Dr. Hiller, Teacher of Languages." After a year 
 or two of scholastically if not financially successful teaching, he suddenly disappeared into 
 the nowhere from which he had come. 
 
 Some said that Doctor Hiller was a doctor of philosophy (Ph.D.) others that he was 
 an unfrocked doctor of divinity, others still that he was in fact a very common sort of doctor, 
 in other words an M.D. who had failed to acquire a practice anywhere. This latter, my 
 father once informed me, was the pitiful fact. I, however, always believed that he must 
 have been a Ph.D. also — in languages, of which he knew so many. At church we boys 
 always specially noticed a metallic-looking, overly bright something on the side of the 
 good Doctor's head, which we took to be a silver plate, and which a few of us declared 
 had been inserted to cover an artificial opening through which so many languages had been 
 poured into his brain. 
 
 Yes, Dr. Hiller eventually left Pittsfield also. Meanwhile I had learned from his dear 
 old melancholy lips my first few words of classical Hebrew. Also a little Italian. Also 
 much more Spanish — Spanish, which was so easy and so beautiful. While Dr. Hiller was 
 still in Pittsfield and for several years thereafter I subscribed to a Spanish weekly newspaper, 
 El Espejo — issues of which I soon could read from beginning to end without effort and 
 without referring to my Spanish dictionary. 
 
 Poor Hiller! He was just as much of a "nut" as was I about languages — which is 
 "some degree" of nuttiness. He may have been to some extent responsible, because of 
 his love for the old-time Hebrew language, for my writing the novel, "Simon of Cyrene," 
 a great many years later. 
 
 We never heard from Dr. Hiller after he left Pittsfield. As he was fifty years of age 
 or more while teaching in our town, he must have passed from earth long decades ago. 
 Here, at all events, are thanks, appreciation and the warmest possible affection for his 
 stimulating memory. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 507 
 
 Even on the highway, however, we had to be careful 
 that nobody had "got on behind." Boys not infrequently 
 and girls occasionally would step from behind a tree after 
 we had driven past it, and, seizing the backboard of the 
 buggy-bed, provide themselves with effortless locomotion. 
 Sometimes indeed one of them would clamber noiselessly 
 into the bed, curl up there quietly, and so listen to all the 
 confidential communications between Father and me. 
 
 "Vigiliam retrorsutn!" therefore became our motto very 
 early in our preceptor-apprentice relationship. 1 
 
 THE BOY WHO OUTRAN HIS OWN SHADOW 
 
 A long time back, O years before 1883, as I had ridden 
 with my father, there had been a red-headed, blue-eyed boy 
 who, from time to time, popped suddenly from' behind a 
 tree, or from under a bridge, or from the side of a roadside 
 stump or boulder. Sometimes, all at once, from the back of 
 our buggy, his voice would break into our conversation with 
 startling effect. 
 
 So often did these things happen, indeed, that almost 
 always as my father, whenever he wanted to tell me a secret, 
 would first peer round the curtain of the buggyhood and 
 look for Charley Brazier (only the name we had given him, 
 of course). 
 
 1 My father, sometimes, at our home, when playing with his sons, would try incidentally 
 to make us familiar with some of the simplest Latin and Greek words and phrases. Thus 
 when playing hide-and-go-seek with us and it came his turn to "hide his eyes" (as it 
 nearly always did, because Brother Willie was generally the "counter-out" and knew shrewd 
 methods for counting) Father, face to wall, would count his hundred first in Latin next in 
 Greek. Then with a mighty shout, like that of a giant ogre going after large quantities of 
 little-boy-meat, he would bellow, "Cavete! Hie venio, Gulielme (or Thomas, or ]ohannes)K % 
 And the big barn would be full, at first of ominous silence, then of resounding feet and 
 shouts of triumph — sometimes from Father, sometimes from ourselves. 
 
 And there was often the same merriment in the country — if practice were not pressing 
 and Father knew the family well enough to romp with the little folk. 
 
 "Dull and pedantic!" Does some one comment on this playing with Latin and Greek 
 among children? Not in the very slightest. Children always rejoice, don't they, in such 
 counting-out things as "Onery, orrery, ickery, Ann; Philisen, Pholisen, Nicholas, Jan; 
 Queevy, Quavy, English Navy, stinklum, stanklum, cherryco, buck"? And do they not 
 learn them easily? Well, so did Pike County children Jearn and rejoice in "Unus, one; duo, 
 two," and unbrokenly on to ''centum, a hundred." Then, "Cavite, hk venio!" 
 
 That isn't all. Some of those little children, because of the awakening of their minds 
 by the old country doctor, later attended college and learned Latin and Greek quite thor- 
 oughly. Several went on with their learning and became good doctors. 
 
 Wonder is the portal to knowledge, and Father led children to that portal even as the 
 Pied Piper of Hamelin had led other children long before into mysteries less desirable. 
 
508 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Not infrequently there he was too, and we never could 
 tell just how long he had been there. Plainly, however, he 
 had been listening with both ears simultaneously. 
 
 CHARLEY BRAZIER AND MY FATHER 
 (Line-Drawing by My Friend of After Years, William H. Schmedtgen, Chicago) 
 
 One day my father said to him, "You are welcome to 
 ride with us, you know, but just why do you walk along, 
 mile after mile, holding tight to the buggy-bed, or else sit 
 scrouched up inside of it? Better come and sit between us 
 here on the seat." 
 
 "O no," Charley responded, "You see I'm learnin' to 
 outrun my own shadder." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 509 
 
 Later, though, this smart boy admitted he had found it 
 difficult to do that, perhaps impossible. "Still," he con- 
 tinued, "I want to ride behind because I like our old, white- 
 headed doctor and want to study medicine with him some 
 day." 
 
 Thereupon my father halted the horse, and, taking some 
 human bones from underneath the buggy-seat, started to 
 teach him their names — but in vain. The lad, horrified be- 
 yond measure, expressed that horror in the choicest pro- 
 fanity. 
 
 One day his mother told us, "That boy's a born tramp. 
 He follows any doctor's buggy, anybody's buggy. And, 
 when he's got far enough away from home, he hitches his- 
 self to the back of some other buggy that's comin' back 
 home'ard. In fact he rides the backs o' buggies as the bums 
 rides the rods of a freight train. Shortly, he's jest a bummin' 
 tramp." 
 
 After that I had a fellow feeling for the queer little 
 bundle of rags. 
 
 Sometimes we met him coming down the road a-straddle 
 of a cow, which, evidently, had been trained as a saddle cow 
 in early life. He wanted a doctor's compliment on his riding 
 — got it, of course, with a hearty good will. 
 
 Years later we learned he had removed with his widowed 
 mother to Missouri, where, one day — well, on this particular 
 day in 1883, when I was riding with my father, a farmer, 
 trudging along the road, called out, "Hey, Doc! Heard the 
 news?" 
 
 "No, what?" 
 
 "Charley Brazier's dead. Cut all to pieces while ridin' 
 the rods on a Missouri Pacific." 
 
 When we had passed the farmer, my father said — 
 But now I must run first backward then forward in time, 
 as I have already run backward, to make this story complete 
 — revealing something which has never before been revealed, 
 yet also of necessity concealing a number of matters. 
 
 Away, away back in 1871, on December 29, there was 
 hanged in the Pittsfield jail a Bart Barnes, for the murder 
 of a Mr. Gresham near Pleasant Hill. The execution, as 
 
510 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 usual in such cases, was private, but thousands of persons 
 jammed the streets around the jail, and I, though but five 
 years old at the time, still remember with distinctness that 
 the mob reached all the way to our house and even far 
 beyond it. You would have thought Barnum and Bailey's 
 circus was showing in Pittsfield. 
 
 I also remember distinctly that, on the fateful occasion, 
 there was suddenly in our house a great confusion. My 
 father, for some reason I could not then comprehend, leaped 
 suddenly from his seat in our front doorway and ran into 
 his office. My mother too, all of a sudden was rushing about 
 the house with hot bottles and towels and basins full of 
 water. I somehow connected the Shastid confusion with 
 the hanging at the jail. And there was indeed a close con- 
 nection. 
 
 Now once more forward in time to yet another event. 
 In 1878 it occurred, when I was all of twelve years old — 
 therefore after I had begun to function as doctor's appren- 
 tice. A Dr. Brown, of Milton, twelve miles southeast of 
 Pittsfield, had been drugged and robbed, and a tramp who 
 had given the name of McDonald had been arrested and 
 jailed for the crime. Writs were also out for the arrest of his 
 several supposed accomplices. Just before the day of Mc- 
 Donald's trial, Dr. Brown, to the horror of the community, 
 was found in his dooryard dead of a gunshot wound in the 
 forehead. It was generally supposed that the Doctor had 
 been murdered by one of McDonald's accomplices to keep 
 him from testifying at the trial. Outrages had been com- 
 mitted by tramps in other parts of the county and the greatest 
 excitement prevailed, especially in Pittsfield. Governor 
 Cullom sent companies of militia to guard the jail and pre- 
 vent lynching. 
 
 Day after day mobs filled Monroe street even to our house 
 and beyond. Sometimes the excitment would die down a 
 little, but again it would flare out with redoubled fury. 
 
 On the day of the greatest excitement — that just before 
 the trial — two men, one supporting the other a little, walked 
 into our house to see my father. A moment later they and 
 my father and I were in the little office, attending to a man 
 with a stab-wound in the back from which came a frightful 
 hemorrhage. His companion admitted that he himself had 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 5H 
 
 done the stabbing. The other man, however, said that he 
 wanted no prosecution, no publicity. "Reasons enough," 
 declared he. 
 
 My father responded with disgust, "You are both un- 
 conscionable rascals, but doctors don't tell secrets." "Not 
 even on the witness stand?" "No, not even there." Then, 
 to me, "the first thing any doctor learns is to keep his mouth 
 shut. You two brawlers and killers must understand that 
 this, my son, is also my apprentice. He, like myself, knows 
 other people's secrets only for the purpose for which those 
 secrets were imparted to him. See to it, you two, that, in 
 your drunken revels, you do not yourselves tell on yourselves. ' ' 
 
 They evidently never did tell on themselves. Nor did 
 anybody else tell on them. 
 
 But now on this day of my 1883 vacation, said my father, 
 "Charley's dead. I couldn't help liking him either. But — 
 Do you remember, Tom, that day of the Brown excitement 
 when you helped me save the life of a man who had been 
 stabbed?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Well, on the day of the Bart Barnes hanging — you 
 probably cannot remember that far back — the same two 
 men came into my office, and, on that occasion, the shoe 
 was on the other foot. Rather, the stab was in the other 
 fellow. In other words, in 1871, on a day of mob excitement, 
 Jim Nougat had stabbed his brother-in-law, and, in 1878, again 
 on a day of mob excitement, the brother-in-law stabbed Jim. 
 In both of these cases the stabber and the stabbee were alike 
 in wishing to keep the affray a secret. 
 
 This boy, just now killed, Charles Brazier, was Jim 
 Nougat's son." 
 
 I pondered for some time. At length I asked, "Father, 
 was there any connection between these two stabbings and 
 the occasions for those two mobs?" 
 
 "Son," he answered, "there are almost always matters 
 connected with any trial at all which don't get into the 
 records." And he would never say more than that even to 
 me, his apprentice. 
 
512 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 MEETING ON THE ROAD 
 
 Oftener even than a farm wagon and its occupants we 
 would meet on the highway a freckled boy with a fishing 
 pole over his shoulder and a rag tied round a toe. As a rule 
 the lad would be looking back over his shoulder from time 
 to time. 
 
 Nearly all the children we met were either embarrassed 
 and silent, as the little girls almost always were, or else 
 excessively talkative and exuberantly kind, as the urchins 
 were quite frequently. 
 
 For downright meanness and discourtesy you had to 
 meet a grown-up. I recall one of these rough men of the road. 
 He had always seemed to resent my presence with my father 
 on his rounds among the sick. Said he on the day in question, 
 "Young man, what do you come along so much with your 
 father for? You can't practice medicine and I don't believe 
 you ever can." 
 
 I replied, "No? Well, I can always sit in the buggy and 
 talk with him or wait for him, and, on a beautiful day like 
 this, that's attending to my own business." 
 
 The man burst out, "If you was my boy, I'd sure blister 
 your hide." 
 
 My father, knowing I would understand the necessity, 
 pretended to rebuke me with sternness. He and the farmer 
 had then a good laugh about this and that, and away we 
 drove still farther into the country sunshine — I little know- 
 ing that, some years later, I would be the attending physi- 
 cian of that old farmer in his last illness. I, however, was 
 not what made it his last one. 
 
 The same farmer, I recall, was very superstitious, in fact 
 he believed in all the well known superstitions of the Upper 
 Valley in that day. He invariably made a cross with a sharp 
 stick in the road if he had to go back to his house for some- 
 thing he had forgotten; he would never shoot at a rabbit 
 if his gun had not been fired before on the same day; and he 
 never would stay in a house if the rats had left it, or in a 
 house whose next-door neighbor's barn had burned down. 
 He also believed that you never could get rid of malaria so 
 long as you had in your house an article you had borrowed 
 and not yet returned — no bad superstition, I submit. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 513 
 
 One day we met in the highway, and stopped to talk 
 with him, a young doctor (young doctors were young, in 
 those days). He was a tall, blue-eyed, red-headed chap, 
 rather handsome and prepossessing, but of melancholy coun- 
 tenance. I will not say where he had his office. 
 
 My father asked him how he was getting started, how 
 he liked practising medicine. 
 
 "Like the science of medicine well enough," responded 
 the young man. "But I don't like sick folks, don't like to 
 be around them, never did." 
 
 "Do you like people, people even who are not sick?" 
 Thus my father. 
 
 "Like 'em as long as they keep their distance." 
 
 My father whistled softly, looked afar. "Ever try loving 
 people of all sorts, whatever they may be? Ever hear of 
 'taking the veil'?" 
 
 "Yes, I've heard of it. Don't give a damn for it." And 
 off he flew behind a spanking bay. 
 
 "Comment unnecessary," commented my father. 
 
 But the doctor who did not like to take the veil, re- 
 moved a year or two later to St. Louis, where, I understand, 
 he was very successful. 
 
 MALPRACTICE IN THE COUNTRY 
 There was little malpractice in the country in those days, 
 but there were a great many malpractice suits. "Little mal- 
 practice" because almost all the doctors in that far back 
 time gave the best that could be given in the then condition 
 of medical and surgical science. Malpractice suits, however, 
 were common, and for these reasons: First, there were few 
 medical societies, which means that doctors, generally, did 
 not know each other well, and whatever or whoever is 
 unknown readily becomes the object of suspicion and fear. 
 Fear breeds hate, and hate breeds dishonestly instigated law- 
 suits. Second, owing to the great surplus of doctors in that 
 day, only a comparatively few of them could make a living. 
 Lack of success in full view of the success of others in the 
 same line of work, breeds jealousy. Jealousy breeds hate, is, 
 perhaps, a form of hate. And this hatred too, like that aris- 
 ing out of fear of the unknown, breeds revenge — including 
 the form which is known as the malpractice suit. 
 
514 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 At the present day, when doctors meet frequently at the 
 sessions of county, state and national medical societies and 
 at the sessions of various hospital staffs, it is practically 
 impossible for a malpractice suit, even should it begin, to 
 live — excepting only when universally acknowledged prin- 
 ciples of practice, such for example as asepsis or the ligature 
 of arteries to stop arterial hemorrhage, have been violated. 
 Suits based on mere differences of judgment among doctors, 
 a mere belief that some other treatment than the one ac- 
 tually adopted would, in the believer's opinion, have been 
 the better mode of handling the situation — such suits die 
 before they enter court. Each individual physician must 
 have a chance to exercise his own individual judgment in 
 each individual case. That, indeed, is the only principle 
 whereupon the art of healing — either medicine or surgery — 
 has any chance to progress. 
 
 But, in the time of which I write, the situation was very 
 different. Doctors, at least a fairly large proportion of 
 them, had then so little practical sense that they really 
 supposed that if Doctors A and B pulled each other down, 
 both financially and in the public estimation, both would in 
 consequence be elevated, greatly. At least they seemed 
 to have believed that. And, besides, being unacquainted 
 with each other, both A and B would be devilled continu- 
 ally with the usual fear of the unknown. 
 
 Among the sufferers from the consequent unjustifiable 
 law-suits, there was, as my father told me, our old-time 
 friend, Dr. Dublin. Strangely enough, the case in question 
 was one which lay within that special field wherein Dublin's 
 skill was undeniably excellent — fractures. 
 
 We had just passed Dr. Dublin, driving his blooded bay, 
 when my father made mention of this subject. Dublin's 
 gray-shot hair was thinning around his high forehead, and 
 there were lines of strain in his keen, powerful face. His 
 ordinarily bright blue and quite insolent eyes were dark and 
 haunted by haggard weariness and lurking fear. 
 
 The preceding fall, it appeared, a Mr. Buckboard, farmer, 
 had received a fracture of the right humerus (upper-arm 
 bone). Dr. Dublin avowed he had set the bone correctly, 
 

 THE YOUNG AND LANKY DR. DUBLIN IN HIS CIVIL WAR UNIFORM 
 
 DR. DUBLIN, OLDER GROWN 
 
 Profound Scholar, Excellent Surgeon, Impressive and Aristocratic Personality, Man of a Thousand Whims 
 and Crotchets. 
 
 This picture was taken, I understand, at the very time when the Doctor was deeply worried by his 
 over-hanging lawsuit. His usual commandatory expression, therefore, has in the picture given place 
 to one of sadness, almost resignation. 
 
 Dr. James H. Dublin was born in Dublin, Ireland, February 14, 1833. His medical degree was 
 received at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons at Dublin in 1854. For a time he practised in 
 Chicago, but in 1857 removed to Pittsfield. In 1861 he enlisted in the 99th Illinois Infantry, and in 
 November, 1865, was mustered out as lieutenant-colonel. From that time onward he practised at 
 Pittsfield until his death in May, 1896. 
 
 (The photograph for the first of these cuts was lent by Attorney Oliver R. Barrett, Chicago; that 
 for the second, by Miss Hattie Atkinson, Pittsfield, Illinois, now deceased.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
ANOTHER OF THE FINE COLLEAGUES OF MY FATHER 
 
 Dr. F. M. Casal was born of old-country Spanish 
 stock at Baltimore, Md., September 20, 1843. He 
 was educated at Washington University, St. Louis, 
 and at Rush Medical College, Chicago. At the 
 latter institution he received his medical degree 
 in 1854. Thereafter he devoted much time to 
 graduate study at Bellevue Hospital Medical Col- 
 lege and at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, 
 both in New York City. He settled at Pittsfield 
 in 1868, was married at the same place in 1870 to 
 Miss Amelia Atkinson. In 1888 he removed to 
 Santa Barbara, California, where he died in 1904. 
 
 Dr. Casal was a profound student in a general, 
 as well as a medical, way. His knowledge of the 
 Greek and Latin classics was amazing. He was 
 also a man of the very highest honor, a character- 
 istic which appeared to have come to him through 
 his old-country Spanish blood, even his name. No 
 doctor, when sick, ever needed to fear that Dr. 
 Casal, if in charge of the sick one's patients, would 
 play the slightest trick upon him, and no patient, 
 high or low, rich or poor, who had Dr. Casal as 
 physician, ever needed to worry lest his medical 
 attendant should be not fully interested in his case. 
 
 Dublin, my father, and Casal, indeed, were a 
 worthy trio of successors to that much earlier trio 
 — Worthington, Campbell and Hodgen. 
 
 Dr. E. B. Montgomery, of Quincy, Illinois, 
 writes concerning both Dr. Casal and Dr. Dublin, 
 using however the latter's actual name, as follows: 
 "Dr. Dublin was the first to do any major surgery 
 
 in our little Blessing Hospital here [at Quincy]. 
 I especially remember one large fibroid tumor of 
 the uterus operated on successfully by him. He 
 was a Dublin graduate, his speech was very mark- 
 edly an Irish brogue, and he had the strange faculty 
 of being master of those about him and of ac- 
 cumulating some wealth. Dr. Casal, who used to 
 come to Quincy with Dr. Dublin, was quite retiring 
 in manner and far less rough and much more re^ 
 
 fined than was his colleague 
 
 "I had known the organizer of the First Pan- 
 American Congress (in 1892), Dr. C. A. L. Reed, 
 of Cincinnati, since I was Secretary of the Missis- 
 sippi Valley Medical Society at its meeting in 1884. 
 He, knowing that Attorney Scott Wike was the 
 Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President 
 Cleveland and that he lived near Quincy [i.e., at 
 Pittsfield] asked that I use any influence I might 
 have in securing Presidential and other official aid 
 for that First Pan-American Medical Congress. 
 This I did. Drs. Casal, Dublin and your brother, 
 Dr. Wm. Shastid (the liveliest member of the pro- 
 fession at Pittsfield and the best of the speakers on 
 most medical occasions anywhere) were both, act- 
 ing through attorney Scott Wike, very efficient in 
 bringing about the organization of that Congress. 
 I also saw President Cleveland in Washington. 
 
 "Thanks to Government patronage and influence 
 the Congress was a great success and did much to 
 cement permanent professional relations with South 
 America." 
 
 (Original photograph lent by Miss Hattie Atkinson, Pittsfield, Illinois, now deceased) |'i f] 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 517 
 
 but, somehow or other, there was the arm, shortened per- 
 haps an inch and undeniably crooked and with a stiff elbow 
 joint. Two or three doctors, one from Pittsfield, two from 
 Adams County, including one surgeon of very great in- 
 fluence indeed, were willing to go into court and declare 
 that the mal-success in question could only have been due 
 to the unskilfulness or else the negligence of the doctor in 
 charge of the case. O yes, of course, the patient might have 
 interfered with the dressings and disaligned the fragments 
 of the bone, but then — how could that be proved? Well, it 
 just couldn't. 
 
 Now here is how I, a mere doctor's apprentice, I, the 
 deeply despised by Dr. Dublin, came into Dr. Dublin's 
 case — effectively . 
 
 As I rolled the matter round in my mind, I felt at first a 
 mere vague stirring of the memory. My father had never 
 had that case, yet I remembered something about it. What 
 was it? What was it? 
 
 All at once the recollection became sharp and clear. The 
 preceding fall (I had not entered Inveni till the following 
 January), I was one day walking down in the country road 
 for exercise while my father was engaged in a farmhouse. 
 I, so strolling, had come to within half a mile or so of the 
 place of the very Mr. Buckboard who was now the plaintiff 
 in this suit against Dr. Dublin. 
 
 And so what? Well, I happened — merely happened — to 
 recall that, as I had reached the wagon-gate of Mr. Buck- 
 board's place, there was the gentleman himself perched on 
 the gate with a wheat-straw dangling from his lower lip. 
 
 And, after our mutual salutations, he had told me he 
 was waiting for a Dr. So-and-so [an outrageous Y. of P. man] 
 to arrive from Adams County, who was going to break and 
 then reset his broken arm "properly." 
 
 At once I related my whole recollection to my father, 
 adding, "Had I just done as you have so often advised me 
 to do and written that important matter down, as I have 
 in fact written a good many things, I could now have a 
 clear record of the case and help Dr. Dublin out." 
 
 "Written record!" shouted my father. "You don't need 
 any written record. You do not even need to spend one 
 
518 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 minute in court. Let's drive to Pittsfield and then you can 
 tell Dr. Dublin what you know." 
 
 "Not I," I protested, "but you can tell him and all he 
 needs to know. That bad job is the work of the Y. of P. 
 and not of Dr. Dublin." 
 
 And so, back at Pittsfield, my father went up to Dublin's 
 office and told him my entire story. 
 
 "That boy! That — That — Smart Aleck of yours — You 
 think — " The Doctor could not believe that so unworthy 
 a speck of insignificance as I was could possibly be of the 
 slightest service to anybody. 
 
 But the value of my information on the case, as my 
 father shortly afterward informed me, soon became clear in 
 Dr. Dublin's mind, and so the Doctor had his lawyer in- 
 vestigate. Neighbors of Mr. Buckboard had been present 
 when the Y. of P. had rebroken the bone and re-set it. They 
 also were able to testify that, afterward, Buckboard had 
 cursed the very day whereon the Y. of P. had "done his 
 miserable work" and "ruined my arm." So angry was he 
 that he had even begun to talk to Dr. Y. of P. about a law- 
 suit for damages from him, whereupon Dr. Y. of P. declared 
 that what ailed the arm was not what he, but what Dr. 
 Dublin, had done. "Anyway," he had said, "I ain't worth 
 a dollar to pay a judgment with and Dublin could pay you 
 thousands. He ought to; he done you harm." 
 
 Buckboard saw the point. The man that ought to be 
 sued, the man that had done him damage in the case, was, 
 of course, the one that was able to pay a judgment. 
 
 More than even that, earnest enquirers went to Dr. Y. of 
 P. as if to ask his help for pains they had had in some bone, 
 and, by way of prelimination, asked if he was the same 
 physician who had helped farmer Buckboard out of his 
 trouble. And the Y. of P. had said, "Yes." (He took it 
 of course that Buckboard now was saying that the guilty 
 one in the arm matter was the one who could pay him a 
 judgment, also that the enquirers had had from Buckboard 
 a good account of the skill of him, the Y. of P. man, as, 
 otherwise, they would not have come to him.) 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 519 
 
 To make long short, the skilful lawyer of Dr. Dublin, 
 Wm. A. Grimshaw, not only suppressed the dishonest case 
 of Buckboard vs. Dublin, but, in addition, he had a most 
 excellent case against the Y. of P. and the somewhat wealthy 
 Buckboard for slander of a physician and for fraud and I 
 know not just what else. 
 
 The upshot was a payment of heavy damages to Dublin 
 by Buckboard and the removal into the far west of that 
 dishonest Y. of P. 
 
 All of which had come from the excellent information 
 supplied to Dr. Dublin by T. H. S., otherwise known as 
 "The Tramp." 
 
 Anyway, Dr. Dublin was a very good friend of mine 
 thereafter, was he not? 
 
 He was not. 
 
 No, not he. 
 
 He was too excellent a hater and too poor a forgiver. 
 Was not I the little cur that once had said to His Majesty, 
 referring to my father, "Wrong as he was, he was right"? 
 
 Was not I that? 
 
 Yes, indeed. 
 
 And Dublin? "Right as he was (in the Buckboard case) 
 he was wrong (in the case of me)" for I really had rendered 
 him a most excellent service. 
 
 But that very service seemed to irritate him so much 
 the more against me. 
 
 THE BEAUTIFUL SKULL 
 Now and then, on the Public Square, I met — at least I 
 behead — Dr. Dublin. Proud, majestic, implacable, he tower- 
 ed above me, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes awe-inspiring. 
 As a rule I felt strangely insignificant before him, like a tiny 
 ant in the presence of a being from a better world — I, the ant, 
 desecrating by my very presence, the soil whereon he found 
 it necessary to tread. 
 
 Sometimes I tried to speak to him. No use. I might as 
 well have cried "Hello!" to an archangel. 
 
 One day he acquired a dissectible demonstration skull — 
 a thing of beauty and a joy forever, even if not to its former 
 
520 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 owner and tenant. It had been most carefully cleaned, de- 
 greased and ether-bleached. The arteries had been picked 
 out in red, the veins painted in with blue. There was a 
 sagittal cut, a vertical cut, and there were cuts in other 
 directions, and the whole skull was hinged, here, there and 
 everywhere, with gold-plated hinges! 
 
 A skull quite appropriate for an aristocratic owner! 
 
 This skull Dr. Dublin brought down promptly to my 
 father's office, asking to leave it with him for awhile — but 
 added, "I expressly stipulate that this skull is not to be re- 
 loaned to any other person whomsoever, not even [he glow- 
 ered] to a member of your own family." 
 
 My father politely took the skull, kept it till next 
 morning — early — when he returned it with profuse thanks. 
 
 One day a schoolteacher came into my father's office 
 and told me, laughing, that recently he had asked Dr. Dublin 
 (the answer to be reported to a class at school), who in 
 your opinion, Dr. Dublin, are the three greatest physicians 
 alive to-day. And the big doctor, after a little vigorous 
 coughing and still more vigorous expectoration, during which 
 he whooped and hoo-hooed till the welkin rang, straightened 
 up, pounded himself on the chest, and declared, also quite 
 vigorously, 'The other two are Lister and Koch." 
 
 "Whether he was joking or in earnest," added the school- 
 teacher, "I don't know." 
 
 I, likewise, had me doots. 
 
 MY FATHER'S CONTRAPTION AND 
 DOCTOR DUBLIN'S GREEN TIE 
 
 After my father's accident near Kespohl's brickyard (here- 
 inbefore related) whereby he was thrown backward out of 
 his sulky on his shoulders and head, my father became very 
 timid about horses. And this timidity grew. 1 
 
 1 By a curious coincidence my father, long years after the time of which I now am 
 writing, but in nearly the very same spot, was again thrown out of his sulky backwards — 
 not by the same, but by another, horse. Whether he again was succored by the Kespohls 
 (real name) I do not know, but, after the second accident, his paresthesia, though still 
 somewhat in evidence, was nothing like so troublesome as it had been after accident number 
 one. "Similia similibus curantur," a homeopath might have exclaimed. 
 
 Even after the second accident, however, my father continued to sit at church in his 
 overcoat and muffler. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 521 
 
 At last, one day, there appeared upon the scene an agent 
 for a contraption — one in every way adapted for the en- 
 couragement of those who were timid about horses. This 
 contraption, patented, was one whereby the driver of a 
 vehicle could, in case his horse started to run away, simply 
 pull a leather string, and presto ! the horse was completely 
 detached from the vehicle, so that he could run and keep on 
 running as long as he wished, sans buggy, sans driver, sans 
 everything except a very small part of the harness, his own 
 peculiar personality and a large amount of fright. 
 
 The driver of the buggy, meanwhile, was to remain seat- 
 ed in his horseless carriage — long, too, this was, before the 
 time of automobiles — contemplating the peaceful serenity of 
 the country landscape — through which his own erstwhile 
 sufficiently contented equine companion was receding at the 
 rate of perhaps half a mile per minute toward the Pittsfield 
 portion of the distant horizon. 
 
 My father bit— and bought. 
 
 Then began pandemonium. 
 
 One would naturally have supposed that anybody, doctor 
 or layman, would have had a perfect right, if so his judgment 
 dictated, to buy, purchase, get hold of, secure the sole right 
 to and also acquire, any sort or kind of "contraption" that 
 he liked, provided it did not in any wise interfere with the 
 rights, privileges, interests, et cetera of any other person or 
 persons, including their right to use the roadway or at least 
 to drive around anyone else who happened to be stranded 
 in the middle of it, devoid of all available motive power, 
 means of getting forward, et cetera. 
 
 But so the good people of Pike County by no means 
 seemed to think. They appealed particularly to their rights 
 of free speech. 
 
 They asked my father, pointedly, how, in case he should 
 manage to release his horse in due time, and should thereby 
 and in consequence be left high and dry in the roadway, the 
 very monarch of all he surveyed, he could, nevertheless, 
 thereafter be able "to get on in the world." 
 
 My father pointed out courteously enough that better 
 it was to be left in this world e'en though devoid of all means 
 of "getting on" in it, than to be haled willy nilly into some 
 
522 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 other world, which might or might not be worth getting 
 on in. 
 
 Then they would respond, "Yes, but would it not be 
 better, far better, even assuming the desirability of remaining 
 in this world and of getting on in it, to maintain, rather 
 than to sever, relations with a perfectly blameless horse — 
 one which, for example, might have been quite justifiably 
 excited on seeing his own wet place in the road — and then, 
 having maintained those relations, to guide the poor horse 
 to the place where he should properly have gone — to wit, 
 the houses of the sick where people were awaiting the min- 
 istrations of a doctor?" 
 
 Again my father would reply, "A frightened horse does 
 not respond to guidance; he will even run into a tree or off 
 the sides of bridges." 
 
 The inquisitors, then, would follow up the investigation. 
 "If you do not like that trait in horses, Doctor Shastid, why 
 do you not drive a mule? Mules are cheap and strong and 
 handsome. Their wings are as the wings of the birds. And, 
 when running away, they stick to the center of the road." 
 
 Another type of man would question: "What would you 
 do, Doc, if your horse started to run suddenly? Then your 
 buggy would be goin' as fast as the horse was, or just about 
 that. Suppose that then you pulled the string and the horse 
 went off alone — what would keep your shafts up? Would- 
 n't the ends of 'em jab into the ground? And wouldn't then 
 the rest of the buggy heave a complete somerset so that 
 when you woke up in it — sayin' you did ever wake up — 
 wouldn't you be facin' in the wrong direction? 
 
 "Here you are, fer instance, out in the country. You're 
 ridin' toward a patient. All at once horse jumps into a run 
 — you pull string — horse goes off by his lonesome — shafts 
 stick into the roadway — buggy turns turtle and more turtle 
 — and there you are at last sittin' ca'm in your buggy and 
 facin' the wrong direction. 
 
 "Suppose you simply ignore all them air fractures and dis- 
 locations you've accumulated, even so you're facin' the 
 wrong direction. 
 
 "Suppose you air "a man o' spunk, and do get out and 
 turn yerself into a good-size locomotive, even so, you've got 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 523 
 
 to turn that buggy round right there in the road an' no 
 turn-table to turn 'er on, an' so forth." 
 
 It was no use. The jesters had it. They simply would 
 tolerate "no contraption" in a doctor's buggy. 
 
 My father attempted to show them that a doctor certain- 
 ly has as much right to one contraption in connection with 
 his buggy as a farmer has to fifty or sixty in connection with 
 his thrashing machines, mowers and hay cutters. 
 
 But it was all of no use. The people of Pike County, 
 farmers and townspeople alike, would have it that a "con- 
 traption" was as much a breach of professional etiquette as 
 it had been, some years before, for my father to drive a 
 palomino horse. 
 
 And then they began to revive all that old-time jocular- 
 ity about the palomino, the "circus horse" my father had 
 used to drive, "the ivory colored equine, with his white 
 mane and tail." "Did a pretty circus lady oncet drive 'er, 
 Doc? a pretty circus lady, with close-fittin' tights, so you 
 could see jest how she was made, powder an' paint on 'er 
 face and spangles in 'er hair, like the stars in the big sky?" 
 
 But my father was much more obstinate about the con- 
 traption than he had been about the palomino. The latter 
 he had given up easily. The people had been more or less 
 correct about that "circus equine." It had savored of levity. 
 But the contraption, it was a real, a decided, mechanical 
 advance, a contribution toward the safety of the world — 
 if people would only understand it and use it. 
 
 A pleasant feature of the situation was that my father 
 saw the humorous side of the rig-a-ma-jig quite as -plainly 
 as did his perfectly friendly tormentors. In fact I sometimes 
 thought he got more fun out of it than did they. Often and 
 often a group of farmers would gather around "the contrap- 
 tion buggy," discussing its pros and its cons with parlia- 
 mentarian seriosity, my father responding with equal serios- 
 ity, until, all at once, the crowd, no longer able to contain 
 itself, would "split," go into convulsions and wild yells, 
 so that the ancient hills of Pike County would awaken, join 
 in volley after volley of the most jocund din. 
 
 And the American people have always most dearly loved 
 those on whom they have had the best of their jokes. So, 
 
524 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 quite naturally, the flood of jokes about Father's contraption 
 served to make him more popular even than ever before. 
 
 So true was this that Dr. Dublin's great jealousy became 
 at length aroused in the matter. He saw in that contraption 
 merely an unfair, a highly unethical, device which my father 
 had purchased for the sole and simple reason that he wanted 
 to play a trick on him, Dr. Dublin; to make himself, Dr. 
 Shastid, more liked by the people, more talked about, more 
 thoroughly advertised and admired. He, Dr. Dublin, 
 could hardly understand what he, Dr. Shastid, could have 
 been thinking about when he had purchased that device. 
 He, Dr. Shastid, to do an unethical thing like that! Why 
 he, Dr. Dublin, was surprised! 
 
 One day when Dr. Dublin had been coughing and spitting 
 with all his customary relentless energy in the Courthouse 
 yard, and when my father at least had accosted him 
 courteously, the Doctor took my father to task about the 
 contraption in first-class Hibernian style. 
 
 Thereupon my father, who plainly held all the patent 
 rights to that contraption for the entire area of Pike County, 
 offered to make Dr. Dublin a perfectly free gift of a sub- 
 license to use that same patent-right for the same precise area. 
 
 And did Dr. Dublin accept the offer? He did not. He 
 flew up to the skies instead. What! be particeps criminis in 
 this matter? My God, no! My holy God, no! And of all 
 the Dublinese profanity that he poured out upon my father ! 
 
 But my father "laid for" Dr. Dublin — and got him. 
 
 Each St. Patrick's day "in the marnin' " the Doctor had 
 been accustomed to put on a large grass-green, perfectly 
 Irish-green necktie, or "cravat," and then to going about 
 where all his Irish friends were sure to see him. 
 
 Observing which happen again, the next March 17th 
 after he had purchased the contraption (I now run forward 
 to a time when I was at Inveni again) my father, so he 
 wrote me, with sober countenance but almost bursting with 
 internal laughter, stopped Dublin on the street, and, as well, 
 I know, as an accomplished actor could have done it, took 
 Dublin severely to task for being "unethical" in that he had 
 put on a glaring green necktie and exhibited himself pur- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 525 
 
 posely therein as a means of making a play for the Hibernian 
 practice. 
 
 Dublin turned purple and away at the same time. A few 
 days later he stopped us (I was then at home again) on the 
 Public Square and apologized to my father. ' 'By the Mighty !" 
 said he, "it was a dirty thing I did and an unethical, putting 
 on that tie and strutting around in it. I will wear it no 
 more." He was quite serious too. 
 
 And never did he wear it more, as I remember. 
 
 Yet he later got even with my father for speaking of 
 the "unethical" tie. Years later, on the Public Square, near 
 the jail, he pointed to that structure and cried, hoarse with 
 rage, "In there's where you belong, Shastid. You dirty. . . . 
 You sued a man. Don't deny it. You sued [he gave the 
 name] . ' ' 
 
 "The man plainly owed the money," defended my father. 
 "He had plenty of it and to spare." 
 
 "He owes me several bills," rejoined Dublin, "also several 
 other bills to several other doctors here in Pittsfield." 
 
 "All of which shows simply that the debtor is dishonest, 
 and that all you other doctors are foolish," was my father's 
 final reply. 
 
 A few years later all doctors were suing for such bills 
 as wealthy skinflints would not pay, and even the most 
 Pharisaical of physicians would not say that it was "un- 
 ethical." 
 
 All of which, in a way, goes to show how very much of 
 the so-called "ethics," medical and other, is simply a matter 
 of place and time — of custom, to express the matter clearly. 
 Indeed the very Latin word, "moralis," from which we have 
 our English, "moral," means "relating to manners, or cus- 
 toms." For a long time the mere letting his name appear in 
 the public prints by a physician, no matter how perfectly 
 true the fact or facts that were printed in connection with 
 the name, was regarded by the medical profession as a 
 crime of the blackest hue. Then, in the 1890's, the world- 
 renowned surgeon, John B. Murphy, of Chicago, began 
 using front-page newspaper space, and continued using it 
 for a long time and superabundantly in several of the Chicago 
 
526 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 dailies, and, a little later, the even more justly celebrated 
 Mayo Brothers did the same thing in many of the magazines 
 and newspapers of the world. This put an end to the non- 
 sense that the use of printer's ink by physicians is, regardless 
 of the ideas expressed, "unethical," and, to-day, even an 
 ordinary doctor may let a paper print a notice of the fact 
 that he has been, say, elected president of his local medical 
 society and may even supply the paper with a copy of his 
 photograph to accompany the article, and yet be fellow- 
 shipped by all his brother physicians as entirely "ethical." 1 
 
 1 It is a curious fact that physicians, as a rule open-minded and, despite the great 
 exception of the germ theory and Listerism, ready to change with the changes brought by 
 social and scientific progress, are, nevertheless, so utterly hide-bound in the matter of what 
 they call their "ethics." Even to-day they constantly refer to the Code of the American 
 Medical Association as if it were, by the very nature of the universe, something unalterable 
 — something like, for example, the Ten Commandments of the Bible. 
 
 This latter comparison, indeed, has been so frequently set up and with such positive 
 assurance that I wish now to refute its implied thesis absolutely — if for me it is possible 
 to do so. 
 
 The Ten Commandments are stated in the Bible three different times — twice in the 
 same form and once (on a later, and final, occasion) in a form that is very different. They 
 first of all appear in Exodus, XX. Next they appear in Deuteronomy, V. On both of those 
 occasions there is no material variation in the Commandments. (The appearance of the 
 Commandments in this, their primary, or provisional, form, twice, is due, according to 
 Biblical scholars, to the fact that the so-called five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Levi- 
 ticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) were not, in their present form, composed in the time 
 of Moses (15th and 16th centuries B. C), but in the 4th and 5th centuries B. C, and that 
 they are of a composite character. That is, as Sunderland, "Origin and Character of the 
 
 Bible," p. 45, points out: "All the Old Testament histories are compilations The 
 
 Pentateuch is not Mosaic, it is a mosaic." 
 
 The third appearance, however, of the Commandments, is in a decidedly variant form. 
 That is to say, as Moses, coming down from Mount Sinai with the slabs of stone in his hand 
 whereupon the Lord had written the first form of the Commandments, he beheld the Children 
 of Israel engaged in idolatrous worship. Exodus, XXXII, ig: "And it came to pass, as soon 
 as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf [the idol that they were worshipping] 
 and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and 
 brake them beneath the mount." 
 
 After which, Exodus, XXXIV, i, "And the Lord said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables 
 of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the 
 first tables, which thou brakest." Moses did as directed, and the Lord wrote upon the 
 tables a set of Ten Commandments which, as already stated, were quite different from the 
 first set (already twice recorded in the sacred narrative) although, singularly enough, "the 
 words" were to be those "that were in the first tables which thou brakest." 
 
 Now for the point of the entire matter. The original "Ten Commandments," those 
 which, for some reason, are taught to this day by churches and Sunday Schools as "The 
 Ten Commandments," as if there had been no other and later set, were, already, even in 
 the very time of Moses himself and by God himself, set aside by another set of Command- 
 ments — of so extremely little "permanence" was the first set. 
 
 The first, or provisional, form of the Commandments is already so well known to every 
 reader that, in that form, the Commandments need not here be repeated. The definitive, 
 or final, form, however, of the Commandments, is so thoroughly »«known, that no under- 
 standing of this footnote could possibly be had without a fairly complete setting forth of 
 the Commandments in that final form. The language is that of the Revised Version, and 
 the interspersed amplifications, reasons for and explanations of, the Commandments are, 
 for brevity's sake, here omitted: 1. Thou shalt worship no other god. 2. Thou shalt make 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 527 
 
 CONSULTATIONS 
 There was certainly one feature of the code of ethics, how- 
 ever, which deserved and still deserves the very highest 
 praise. I refer to the provisions regulating the manner in 
 which consultations were to be held. On this head I can 
 do no better than quote from a most excellent editorial in 
 Minnesota Medicine for January, 1940, pp. 57-58: "Physicians 
 in the preceding generation were very meticulous in the 
 manner in which consultations were carried out. The refer- 
 ring physician entered the room first, and, on leaving the 
 room, followed the consultant. The reason was obvious. 
 They then retired to discuss the patient in private. The 
 discussion of the case in private was a fundamental part of 
 the consultation which might well be perpetuated. Telling 
 the patient about findings or giving advice on the part of 
 
 thee no molten gods. 3. The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. 4. Six days thou 
 shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest: in earing time and in harvest shalt thou 
 rest. 5. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits, of wheat harvest, and of 
 ingathering. 6. Thrice in the year shall all your men-children appear before the Lord. 
 7. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven. 8. Neither shall the sacrifice 
 of the feast of the passover be left until the morning. 9. The first of the firstfruits of the 
 land thou shalt bring unto the house of the Lord thy God. 10. Thou shalt not seethe [boil] 
 a kid in its mother's milk. 
 
 Needless to say that only the first two of these supercessive Commandments and the 
 first half of the fourth could have the slightest validity, even applicability, at the present 
 day. Hence, perhaps, the fact that many ministers and Sunday-school teachers at the present 
 time, do not even refer to this, the final, form in which the Ten Commandments were laid 
 down, but, instead, they, passing over the later, resort to the earlier, Commandments as 
 if those alone had ever existed. 
 
 We may go still further and point out that the Commandment regarding the observance 
 of the seventh day as the rest day (a Commandment which appears in both the two pro- 
 visional and also the one final form of the Commandments) was not by the Jews themselves 
 observed, no not even by the very generation by whom both the first and the final forms of 
 the Commandments were, or are supposed to have been, personally received. Says Hastings' 
 "Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics," Vol. IV, p. 515: "Down to the time of Nehemiah 
 the rule for the cessation of labour on the sabbath day was disregarded (cf Neh. XIII, 15ff)." 
 In other words the seventh day of the week was not observed as a day of rest for about one 
 thousand years after the day-of-rest law had by Moses been promulgated. During the four 
 centuries just prior to the beginning of the Christian era, it was in fact observed. And, 
 after the beginning of the Christian era, it was observed until the time when Constantine, 
 first Christian emperor of Rome (4th century A.D.) merged the rest day with the Lord's 
 Day — in other words moved it to the first day of the week. 
 
 And from then to the present moment, more than sixteen centuries, the Commandment 
 relating to the observance of the seventh day of the week as a day of rest has been ignored 
 by all the Christian populations of the world, save two or three minor denominations only, 
 and even very largely everywhere by the Jews themselves. 
 
 Perhaps I may incidentally refer to the fact that this, the fourth, Commandment has a 
 first, as well as a second, part — a first part which, however, is as thoroughly disregarded 
 as is the second. "Six days thou shalt work." Note that the language is not at all permis- 
 sive, but absolutely mandatory — not thou mayest work, but thou shalt work. The almost 
 universal attitude even of Christian ministers themselves is highly favorable to "the five-day 
 week." Perhaps properly so, but what about the "absolute permanence of the Ten Com- 
 
528 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 the consultant is not to be tolerated unless he is specifically 
 requested to do so." 
 
 In this quotation I would make two changes. At its 
 close I would add "by the referring physician." At its 
 beginning I would change "in the preceding generation" to 
 "two or three generations ago." 
 
 My father and Dr. Dublin followed these rules, and 
 it made for friendly relations between them, also redounded 
 to the great advantage of the patient, because, in a perfectly 
 friendly consultation, each doctor contributes his very best 
 efforts toward the curing of the patient— something which can- 
 not occur when attendant and consultant get to wrangling be- 
 cause they have carried on the consultation in the patient's 
 presence. Over and over I have heard patients declare their 
 
 mandments"? What about their being "as unchangeable as are the very laws of nature"? 
 
 Consider also in the first (the never delivered) set of Commandments, the seventh, 
 "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Not one word against fornication. In the final set, 
 moreover, even prohibition of adultery has disappeared. "A perfect code of morals for all 
 time!" 
 
 Consider, too, in the never-delivered set, the ninth Commandment, "Thou shalt not 
 bear false witness against they neighbor." In classical Hebrew the word for "neighbor," 
 ray-ah, had a very narrow meaning, a meaning which Jesus very much enlarged long cen- 
 turies later. Ministers not infrequently tell us that this Commandment meant simply, "Thou 
 shalt not lie." Why, then, so many words that merely obscure the meaning? The entire 
 Commandment, moreover, in the final, the actually delivered set, was omitted. 
 
 Consider also, in the never-delivered but to-day ministerially ratified, set of Command- 
 ments, the tenth. In "a moral code perfect for all time" one might surely expect at least 
 some condemnation of human slavery. Yet, in this, the tenth, of the Commandments which 
 most ministers still ratify, we find at least implied approval of slavery; "Thou shalt not 
 covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, 
 nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's." Both 
 the makers of the Authorized Version and those of the Revised Version certainly translated 
 this Commandment with very great ambiguity in that they rendered the Hebrew "ebed" 
 (whose meaning is indisputably slave, one undergoing ^voluntary servitude) as "servant." 
 The Hebrew for "servant," one undergoing voluntary servitude, is sometimes na'ar, some- 
 times meshareth, never ebed. The grouping, moreover, of "maidservant" and "manservant" 
 with the ox, the ass, and other kinds of property, should suffice to put even a casual reader 
 on his guard in the matter. 
 
 And slavery, in those days, in Palestine, was white slavery! 
 
 Finally, no less a person than Jesus himself, centuries later than the date of the Com- 
 mandments (Matthew, XXII, 35-40) added to those very Commandments which have been 
 called by so many "the absolutely perfect code of human conduct for all time," the two 
 greatest Commandments of all: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and 
 with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first commandment. And 
 a second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." 
 
 So much for the "absolute permanence of the Ten Commandments for all time," "as 
 unchangeable as the very laws of nature," of which we hear so much and so continually 
 and with so little truth. There is no such permanence in the Ten Commandments or in 
 the Code of Ethics of the American Medical Association or in any other code or set of morals 
 that ever has been or can be devised. Man himself is continually changing, evolving, and, 
 with his continual evolution, even his morals and his religions can, must and do evolve also. 
 
 The only thing to me that is certain is that existence (God) changes forever, and that 
 we, who are of him a part, will necessarily change also. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 529 
 
 wish "that each doctor would always examine the patient 
 in the other doctor's absence, and that then they would do 
 the discussing in the presence of the patient. Suppose they 
 do get to quarrelling. Maybe in that way the truth about 
 the case would come out." 
 
 Such persons simply do not understand the nature of the 
 situation in a consultation: (1) A consultation is not some- 
 thing which has been arranged for the robbery of the patient, 
 but is an attempt on the part of both physicians to work out 
 the best possible mode for securing the patient's improve- 
 ment or cure. (2) This goal cannot be reached by means of 
 a consultation in the patient's presence — a situation in which 
 each doctor is necessarily forced to try to seem a better 
 doctor than the other. (3) If the doctors do get to quarreling 
 in the patient's presence and the patient is a very sick person, 
 the result may be exceedingly distressing to that patient, 
 even disastrous. (4) Even if the quarrel does not disturb 
 the sick one in the least, it will, even so, be much more 
 likely to bring into the open and before the patient not 
 "the truth" but about all the self-protecting falsehoods that 
 each of the quarrellers can devise. (5) It may, to be sure, 
 bring out some truth, as well as some falsehood about the 
 case, but the patient, being wholly unlearned as to the matters 
 in question, cannot possibly decide which statements con- 
 cerning them are true and which false. Indeed, I am inclined 
 to think, knowing patients as I do, that the average patient 
 would be far more likely in such a situation to regard the 
 utterly false as the true and the true as the utterly false. 
 
 Years later, when I myself was a physician practising in 
 Pittsfield, I, not my father, was one day called into con- 
 sultation with Dr. Dublin and his physician son-in-law. The 
 latter, a man of considerable ability, was, like Dr. Dublin, 
 a large-sized man, who, in most things medical, quite 
 naturally took his cue from Dublin, his preceptor — or former 
 preceptor. The two men were office-mates. 
 
 A young married woman who was visiting in Pittsfield, 
 had met with a highway accident, wherein the tibia of one 
 leg had been broken and both ends of the fragments had 
 been pushed completely through the skin and not only into 
 
530 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 the atmosphere but also into the roadway dirt itself. A bad, 
 a very bad, compound fracture therefore. 
 
 I, arrived at the house, found both Dublin and his son- 
 in-law there before me — which was right enough. My court- 
 eous salutations went unnoticed. I nevertheless, although 
 ignored, examined the patient, and, when the two other 
 doctors retired to discuss the case, I, though uninvited by 
 those two, did nevertheless at the earnest invitation of the 
 patient's father (at whose house she, the patient, was stay- 
 ing) followed the two other doctors into the yard for the 
 discussion. There again I was wholly ignored. "A clear 
 case," quoth Dublin. "Amputation absolutely necessary." 
 4 'Well, of course, ' ' agreed the son-in-law. Before they turned 
 to leave, I thrust in my words: "Disinfect, resect, and give 
 that leg a chance." 
 
 Both silently led the way to the house. Therein they 
 bluffly said to the patient, "An amputation or you die." 
 
 The patient turned appealing eyes to me: "Tom, did 
 you say that?" She, as a much younger pupil than I in the 
 Pi ttsfield public schools, had known me well for years. 
 
 For a moment I thought of saying, "These two other 
 doctors have ignored me completely, treated me as no doctor 
 at all. I, therefore, am no longer bound to them by our 
 code of ethics, and I, therefore, will, though it is contrary 
 to custom, tell you my views direct." But at once I thought 
 better of that, and so said to her only: "What I have thought 
 about this case I have, in accordance with our invariable 
 rules, told to the attending physicians, and I can tell it to 
 no others." 
 
 She thereupon began crying, and I went away. 
 
 But a stubborn little woman was she. She simply would 
 not part with that leg. So the attendants, wisely or un- 
 wisely, disinfected and resected. The patient got well, and, 
 though the leg was somewhat shortened, she used it gladly 
 and gracefully until her death long after. 
 
 But the sequel. Her father, on the south side of the Pitts- 
 field Square and in my presence (I happened to be going by) 
 paid the bill to the two attendants. Then he turned to me 
 and asked, "Your consultation fee, Doctor?" "Ten dollars" 
 [the customary amount]. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 531 
 
 Before he could pay me the money Dr. Dublin butted in 
 with the only piece of outright disingenuousness I had ever 
 known to come from him. Said he, "If we two had taken 
 Doctor Shastid's advice, your daughter would have lost her 
 leg." 
 
 "You mean to say," asked Mr. Allen, "that it was 
 Doctor Shastid who advised amputation, not resection?" 
 
 "Exactly," said Dublin. 
 
 "Then, when you two, after the consultation, came back 
 into my house and earnestly advocated amputation it was 
 because Doctor Shastid had out-voted your two votes and 
 got you two to condemn most bitterly the very thing that 
 you two really believed in?" He was an old horse-and- 
 cattle buyer and a keen, shrewd judge of human nature. 
 He had seen with perfect clearness that both these men had, 
 at the meeting in his house, paid not the slightest attention 
 to me or my views. 
 
 " Well -er- ahum," went Dr. Dublin weakly. Then he 
 turned to the gutter and began coughing and expectorating 
 in that old-time, far too vigorous, way. He was plainly 
 sparring for time. 
 
 When he had voided his phlegm, he began on Mr. Allen 
 again. "I would explain the matter fully, Mr. Allen," said 
 he, "but it is highly technical and very difficult for a 
 layman — — ' ' 
 
 But Allen broke in. "Even a 'layman' may understand 
 some things, Doctor Dublin," said he, "and among those 
 things are plain and simple words which he hears with his 
 own ears. When you and your son-in-law, trailed by the 
 young doctor here, went into my yard for the consultation, 
 I went to an open window in my house, and there, unheard 
 and unseen by any of you, stood and looked at and heard 
 all three of you. And you two attending physicians were 
 the ones who advocated amputation, while the young doctor 
 here advised resection — an attempt to save the leg. There is 
 therefore no use trying to tell me differently, for I saw all and 
 heard all clearly and distinctly. My own eyes, my own ears. ' ' * 
 
 1 Concerning this consultation I have letters of gratitude from both the patient herself 
 and her relatives — inseparably commingled, however, with confidential matters concerning 
 other persons, which I could not properly reproduce without extreme urgency. 
 
 Either soon before or soon after the above-mentioned consultation I was invited by 
 the Pittsfield branch of the Chautauqua L. & S. Circle to become a member of that body. 
 
532 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 So that was that. 
 
 Years later still, in southern Illinois, I was called to a 
 consultation in the home of a preacher-farmer, whose wife 
 had been suffering for days from severe nasal hemorrhage. 
 When I had examined the patient in the presence of her 
 attending physician (a general practitioner who, by the bye, 
 was one of those that did not believe in specialism) I sug- 
 gested that we retire for the consultation. 
 
 Thereupon the preacher-farmer husband urged that, as 
 the weather was inclement, we use for the consultation the 
 lower-floor, somewhat distant, bedroom in his large, ram- 
 bling house. 
 
 That we did, and I insisted to the referent that, as the 
 woman had a large septal ulcer, it should be at once cauter- 
 ized — the proper treatment, of course. 
 
 At first the attendant rejected the diagnosis. Then he 
 accepted it, but insisted that pledgets of cotton soaked in 
 adrenalin should, for a few days more (the treatment he had 
 been trying) be applied to the diseased spot. 
 
 "Meantime she may die," I objected. 
 
 "O, I think not," he concluded, carelessly. 
 
 He was the "boss "in the case. There was nothing for 
 it but to let him boss it. 
 
 Arrived in the sitting-room, where the patient and her 
 husband were, I of course was silent and so the referent 
 
 The message was delivered to me in person by the kind president of the Pittsfield Arc of the 
 Circle herself, together with a request that, as soon as possible, I address the Arc on some 
 topic of general interest connected with medicine. I promised to attend the very next 
 meeting as a member, and, soon after, to deliver the address. 
 
 Now the branch had a regular place of meeting — namely, the medical office of old Dr. 
 Dublin and his son-in-law, but never did it once occur to me that either of these men would 
 consider me persona non grata at a meeting of the Chautauqua Circle whereat I should be 
 present as a member of the Circle and not as a guest of the owners of the office. Besides, 
 both Dr. Dublin and his son-in-law had two or three times come down to the office of my 
 father and myself," there to consult with my father, and, each time, I had treated them both 
 with very special courtesy. 
 
 But, on this occasion, all courtesy was abandoned or forgotten. Dr. Dublin was not 
 present and only two or three members of the Circle had arrived. Dr. Son-in-law most 
 assuredly was present and in full force. 
 
 Rising to his height — six feet and some inches — he moved toward me in a towering 
 rage. "Get out!" he shouted. "I have merely come to attend the Chautauqua meeting," 
 I replied, meekly, and then explained, "I'm a member." 
 
 "If you don't get out I'll kick you out," he yelled. 
 
 "I got out" for the man was altogether too big for me. 
 
 Next day, two or three of the Chautauqua members came to me and said, "Doctor Shastid, 
 we're going to take up the cudgel for you in this matter: that man has no right to rule you 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 533 
 
 declared shamelessly, ' 'Doctor Shastid agrees with me that we 
 ought to continue the adrenalin pledgets for a few days 
 longer." 
 
 out of the Chautauqua Society just because he, too, is an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist. 
 He doesn't own the Society, by letting it meet in his office." 
 
 But I foresaw a split in the Arc if I allowed my friends to press my case, and that 
 would not do. I sent in my written resignation. 
 
 To prevent all debate, my election and resignation were ignored, and I was treated as 
 though I had applied for membership and then withdrawn my application. In consequence 
 I soon received the letter herewith reproduced. All this, of course, was a tempest in a 
 tea-pot, and has importance only because it is typical of the state of medical affairs at the 
 time in question — explaining, for example, why there was no efficient county medical society 
 in Pike County until 1900. Such an occurrence as that above narrated would at the present 
 time in Pike County be unthinkable. 
 
 
 
 
 
 A LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE PITTSFIELD, ILLINOIS, 
 
 CHAUTAUQUA SOCIETY 
 
 (Much Reduced in Size) 
 
 Soon after this letter was received I met its writer on the street, and so kind were her words, so 
 
 full of gentle appreciation of my work in Pittsfield, that, to this day, I never hear the name, Bush, 
 
 without a glow of friendly feeling. 
 
534 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Is that so, Doctor Shastid?" Thus the farmer-preacher 
 husband. 
 
 "I," I replied, "am only the consultant in the case. All 
 communications to the client must be made by the physician 
 in charge." 
 
 Mr. preacher-farmer then strode up to me as command- 
 ingly as Napoleon Bonaparte. ' 'Doctor Shastid, ' ' he cried in a 
 voice of thunder, "Do you know how to cauterize an ulcer 
 of the nasal septum?" 
 
 I was dumbfounded. But I answered, "Why, yes, of 
 course I do." 
 
 "And have you the drugs and instruments with you with 
 which to perform such an operation?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Perform it. Doctor Turpo, have you any objections to 
 Doctor Shastid's doing the thing that I want done?" 
 
 "Objections? Why, no." 
 
 The Doctor's face began to indicate he saw clearly he 
 was about to lose this battle of obstinacy versus specialism. 
 Protested he, "I told Doctor Shastid in our consultation that 
 he ought by all means to do a cauterization, but he would 
 have it that we keep on with the adrenalin for a few days 
 more." 
 
 "I," rebuked the preacher-farmer, "heard that entire 
 consultation. I posted myself in the closet of the room ad- 
 joining the room that you two talked in. Only the thinnest 
 of partitions separates that closet from the room wherein 
 you spoke. More: through a good-sized knot-hole in that 
 partition I saw you both, as well as heard you." 
 
 Dr. Referent was silent — completely. 
 
 I cauterized. 
 
 No more bleeding ever occurred. 
 
 But was Dr. Turpo my enemy forever after? Of course. 
 
 I have had other experiences which fully convince me 
 that, in the home, eavesdropping on consultations by some 
 member of the patient's family is a regular and highly 
 thought of proceeding. Govern yourselves accordingly and 
 "lie not," as Mark Twain once said, "where there is no 
 possible chance for the lie to succeed." 
 
 "The home enemy knows the terrain." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 535 
 
 Many more consultation stories could I tell, all revelatory 
 of human, or doctor-human, nature. But time and space 
 forbid. So, back from the 20th century and the early 1890's 
 to the early 1880's — 1883, to be specific. 
 
 SEEING PATIENTS HOME 
 
 Not to speak about young unmarried doctors who in- 
 dulged in the old-fashioned and now decidedly abandoned 
 practice of seeing lively, bright young ladies home from 
 church, I want to talk about all kinds of doctors seeing all 
 kinds of patients to their last, solemn home and long — 
 about six feet and millions of years long. 
 
 Ordinarily a doctor did not "see home" his own patient. 
 It looked too much, as an old joke put it, like a tailor 
 carrying home his work at night, or, as we might have it 
 to-day, like a ranch-boss a-headin' for one of his victims' last 
 round-up. Even the funeral of another doctor's patient no 
 physician ever really and truly delighted to attend. It 
 looked somewhat "unethical" — too much like advertising 
 the fact that this patient did not have me — hence, good 
 people, what you see here is an actuality this day. 
 
 Almost always any doctor could get out of attending any 
 funeral, excepting his own and those of his closest relatives, 
 by the graceful, dignified, and self-advertising expedient of 
 having some or another great hurry-call into the country 
 "just at the moment I was starting for the church." 
 
 Sometimes, nevertheless, and however rarely, a doctor 
 could not evade attendance at the funeral of one of his own 
 patients. A case of the sort in my father's practice recurs 
 to me vividly. Father had been attending a youngish 
 countrywoman for some or another not very serious ailment. 
 No blood-pressure apparatus existed in those days, in fact 
 one never thought about the blood-pressure then; otherwise 
 my father, in this particular case, would not have remarked 
 at the close of his last visit to the patient, "I'll not need to 
 come back again, I think." 
 
 A few days later, as we chanced to be passing the house 
 of these people, the aged mother of the patient came out, 
 hailed us, and asked us to come in. 
 
 On entering, we found not the patient, but her corpse. 
 
536 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Then we were informed that, some days after my father's 
 last visit to the patient, she had suddenly, after hearty 
 laughter, "keeled over and died." "And now, Doc," added 
 the mother, "the preacher who was to have preached her 
 funeral, the Reverend Dollmyer, is sick himself and can't 
 come and we all want you to come and preach it." 
 
 My father looked horror-stricken. Merely to attend the 
 funeral of one of his own patients was bad enough, of course, 
 but, in addition, to preach her funeral! And then — he was 
 not at all a preacher but a doctor, never had preached a 
 funeral sermon in his life and seldom had spoken in public 
 on any occasion whatever. 
 
 All these things I saw running through his mind, could 
 not have kept from seeing them. 
 
 He made prolific excuses. 
 
 The family overruled them all and with many tears. 
 They would rather, they said, have had my father preach 
 the sermon anyway than any preacher they had ever known. 
 He was the very best Christian, the very best man, they 
 asseverated, that they had met in all their existence. (How 
 I honored them for saying that !) 
 
 The upshot was that my father consented to preach at 
 the funeral — which was even then due to take place at a 
 near-by church. (The undertaker was already at the house, 
 waiting.) 
 
 The procession soon formed, and slowly we drove to the 
 little brick church, which stood by a grove of oak trees, 
 near which gleamed numerous leaning grave stones, marking 
 the last long homes of so many who had already relinquish- 
 ed their hold on mortal life. 
 
 Unspeakably depressed, I started to ask my father if he 
 would not let me "cut" the obsequies. But, placing a hand 
 upon my knee, he whispered sadly, "I need you." Then he 
 asked me, "Don't they generally, first of all give a little 
 'life' of the deceased?" 
 
 Leaning forward, he asked the husband, who was sitting 
 on the front seat, "Where and when was she born? What 
 day did she die?" But the undertaker, at the same time, 
 started talking to the husband, and the questions were not 
 answered. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 537 
 
 In the church I, as well as my father, was shown to a 
 chair in the pulpit. 
 
 My father, visibly embarrassed, rose and announced, 
 "Let us sing 'Jesus, Lover of My Soul.' They sang. 
 
 He read from the Bible the whole of the 15th chapter of 
 First Corinthians, and by then he was greatly composed. 
 The text he took from that chapter was "The last enemy 
 that shall be abolished is death" — not a text a preacher 
 would probably have chosen, but natural enough for a 
 doctor. He gave to that text, too, its clear implication of 
 unending life. 
 
 At the last he presented a brief biography of the deceased. 
 Knowing almost nothing whatever of her life, he was 
 naturally and painfully restricted to glittering generalities 
 — exceedingly glittering. "Born not so many years ago," 
 he ventured, "in one of the finest of families," she married 
 an exemplary man, one who had always led the kind of life 
 that Jesus had advised for all of us. (He did not say the 
 husband had been a Christian, because in fact he did not 
 know whether he had ever or had not ever been a church 
 member.) And so on. He at all events made that wife out as 
 "a paragon of all the virtues." Not one virtue there is, but 
 he mentioned it with all tenderness and reverence and as if it 
 belonged by some very law of nature to the deceased. (Al- 
 most all women are good, aren't they?) 
 
 At the interment he was, of course, less excursive, but 
 even there he was laudatory in the extreme. 
 
 A day or two later, on the Public Square, old Uncle Abe 
 Butz, a free-thinker if ever there was one, addressed my 
 father, laughed heartily and remarked, "That there sermon 
 you preached at Mrs. Mollikin's funeral was shore out o' 
 place. Paragon o' all the virtues, eh? Ef there ever was a 
 virtue she did have, nobody else but you must ever a noticed 
 it. Listen here, Doc; jest a few days afore that high-flyer 
 took down sick her husband sued her for divorce, chargin' 
 adultery. She'd tried to kill 'im too, so't he didn't sleep or 
 eat none at all at home no more. Been married afore, she 
 had, and divorced for adultery. And her brother had forged 
 a note on this husband an' liked to a went to jail fer it. 
 Paragon o' all the — Ha, ha, ha!" 
 
538 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Said I to my father, "Your 'glittering generalities' glit- 
 tered brightly, Father, but they were not sufficiently general. 
 Better preach hereafter concerning any one you know little 
 or nothing about, on this theme only, 'Faults he had, as 
 who has not, but merits he had also — great merits indeed, 
 which I need not enumerate.' That will fit about anybody — 
 like a great big, good-sized coffin." 
 
 But, at that interment, I had been much worried by a 
 certain little boy. So I now must go back and finish the tale, 
 the latter part of which is so extremely grotesque I hesitate 
 to tell it. 
 
 During the burial and while my father was speaking at 
 the grave-side, some quick movement or other, off at a little 
 distance near a clump of trees, attracted my attention. Mov- 
 ing slightly, I saw a small boy in the act of turning hand- 
 springs — actually. Again and again he turned handsprings — 
 joyfully, gleefully. No doubt he was some half-witted little 
 fool attempting to show off. (I later learned that he lived 
 hard by the churchyard and that he was therefore probably 
 inured to the sights and sounds of mortality — the sad trap- 
 pings and paraphernalia of woe, the falling of earth on 
 coffin-lid, and so forth.) Burials, in those days, took longer, 
 much longer, than they do now. The bystanders seemed to 
 be fairly fascinated by burial scenes. On this particular day 
 the interment, for some reason, took long indeed, and the 
 clown of a boy continued with his endless acrobatics and 
 even comical face-makings. 
 
 To me in truth he seemed like an emblem of the spirit 
 of Nature, mocking the vain words of man and his promises 
 of endless human life to himself and his fellows hereafter. 
 
 Long did it take me to recover from the melancholy be- 
 gotten in me on that day — though I never told my father so. 
 
 THE UNGRATEFUL MOTHER 
 I have always associated that very eventful summer of 
 1883, especially the latter part of it, with the name of one 
 of our most beloved patients — Miss Oleander Freemartin. 
 
 I had known her since I had been but a very little boy. 
 She had always been what was called contemptuously an 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 539 
 
 "old maid." She was really quite lovely in appearance: a 
 good-natured, somewhat disappointed but never disappoint- 
 ing, countenance : no predominating features at all excepting 
 perhaps the eyes. These seemed to be quite loving in expres- 
 sion, also quite astonished. They were large and round and 
 decidedly blue. Not the thin, or washed-out, gray that so 
 many persons call "blue" in eyes, but a rich cobalt blue, a 
 perfectly blue blue, a heavenly azure. They seemed to look 
 out upon the world in astonishment, in absolute amazement, 
 along of course with a kind of apologetic but yet profound 
 affection. You have seen dogs look that way. Oleander's 
 may have acquired their amazement, I used to think, from 
 watching me eat her hot biscuits and honey — or, rather, my 
 father, who ate even more of them than I did and faster. 
 Never would she take a refusal kindly when she invited us 
 to stay and eat dinner. Like our country people generally, 
 she was made "shore proud" when the doctor and his ap- 
 prentice "thought right" [were kind enough] to stay and 
 eat with her. Whenever we could not possibly stay, we 
 had much trouble in convincing her that we would have 
 stayed gladly and have eaten with her only that sickness 
 elsewhere was pressing, so that we should have to be con- 
 tent to gobble a snack of cheese and crackers while our buggy 
 wheels kept spinning along. 
 
 Oleander lived with her widowed mother. I had learned 
 that, on her father's death-bed, she had promised to stay 
 and look after her somewhat sickly mother till that mother 
 too had died. She had also promised her father never to 
 marry "that good-fer-nothin' Pinkbo: Doug. Pinkbo — you 
 know who I mean. His father an' me quarrelled about our 
 division fence, an' I don't want no mixin' o' his blood an' 
 mine." 
 
 She had stayed and looked after her mother. Doug. 
 Pinkbo had called a time or two but had had to go away 
 quickly. My father had informed me years before that sum- 
 mer that, even before I had come upon the planet, he, my 
 father, had gone into the Freemartin home one day to see 
 the mother and that there had lain the old lady scolding 
 and abusing Oleander terribly because she simply might have 
 gone out the night before to meet Doug. Pinkbo and possibly 
 to kiss him. 
 
540 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "And Douglas," said my father, "is quite heart-broken. 
 He never has married." 
 
 A quite old story, but here it was before my eyes — which 
 was something quite different, because I could see for myself 
 that, old as she was, this maiden lady was a woman whom 
 the right sort of man could love quite terribly. 
 
 "What on earth is the matter with old Mrs. Freemartin?" 
 I asked. "She seems never to get well." 
 
 "Slight leakage of a heart-valve: nothing important. 
 Lazy to the bone! Inertia malignans is her chief difficulty. 
 And Oleander, for long years, has suffered from heart disease 
 of the most literal and serious character. Overwork is her 
 chief difficulty. She, the sick one, toils both day and night 
 to support and to care for her mother. She milks five cows, 
 makes cheese and butter, feeds and beds the horses, makes 
 and hoes garden, nails up the fences. She has even mauled 
 rails. She washes and irons, does all the housework of 
 course. They have sixty-five acres of fair land which they 
 rent to a near-by farmer. So they manage to live. The old 
 lady, of course, is really too old to work now, but never 
 has she done much — but play at being sick and take ad- 
 vantage of her husband's dying request of Oleander." 
 
 "What kind of man," I inquired, "is Douglas Pinkbo?" 
 
 "Doug? Why! one of the very best." He sighed. After 
 a time he added, "The man has been quite constant." 
 
 One day, late in that summer of 1883, as he passed along 
 by the Freemartin place, my father exclaimed, "O, I meant 
 to tell you. Oleander Freemartin died last night." 
 
 After a very long time I said, "She had beautiful blue 
 eyes, didn't she, Father?" "Yes. O yes." I thought again 
 of the Little White House. 
 
 I SEEN IT MYSELF 
 Near by the Freemartins', for so in a world like this the 
 tragic and the comic do ofttimes shake each others' hands, 
 dwelt old man Macllfire, a chap so old that he cared for 
 money no longer — which is fairly old for any man of Scotch 
 ancestry. Neither did he care any more to work, which is 
 also rather old for a man with Scotch blood in him. All 
 he seemed to care for was to sit in a rocker on his front 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 541 
 
 porch, squirt ambier and tell stories. "Sit and rot and go all 
 to pot," he used to call it. 
 
 He cared so little for his people — except in case they 
 would listen to his stories — that, whenever my father went 
 in to see them, he would not even go inside with him, and, 
 when my father came out, instead of inquiring about the 
 physical condition of his relatives, he would try to tell my 
 father a funny tale. 
 
 And almost always his stories would be of personal 
 experi ences . 
 
 I recall a typical story which he told me one afternoon 
 that I spent in his company — recall it perhaps because on 
 that particular day, he, contrary to custom, got down off 
 the porch, walked some distance in the yard with me and 
 then sat down on a bucket ' 'in under' ' an elm. I, for my part, 
 sat on a honey-comb stone near by, and listened. 
 
 "One day, Doc Tommy, Tip Barber, in Pittsfield, he 
 went to old Uncle Abe Butz, settin thar in front of his 
 Oregon House and sold him a black hen. 
 
 "Abe pays him for the hen and says, Take 'er into the 
 back yard and put 'er in the coop.' 
 
 "Tip takes 'er an' puts 'er. 
 
 "Pretty soon he comes back an' says again to Abe, 'Got 
 another black hen I could spare ye.' 
 
 "Abe pays 'im an' says, 'Take 'er into the back yard 
 an' put 'er in the coop. It's a nice hen, got any more?' 
 
 "Tip grins and says, 'One more.' 
 
 "An' after he takes 'er an' puts 'er, he takes 'er out ag'in, 
 an' in a few minutes goes up to Abe ag'in, sayin', 'Here's 
 t'other black hen.' 
 
 "Abe pays him an' says, 'It's a nice hen, got any more?' 
 
 "Tip grins an' says, One more.' 
 
 "An' after awhile Tip shows up with a black hen ag'in, 
 an' Abe starts to pay him. But all at once he don't pay 'im. 
 An' he grabs Tip by the arm an' says, sezee, 'Come back out 
 here with me, you d. .n young scoundrel.' 
 
 "An' lo and behold in the back yard, at the coop, they 
 finds they ain't no hen to be found in it ceptin' only the 
 one they had just brought with 'em. 
 
 "An' at that Tip he splits laughin' and Abe he laughs 
 too an' won't let Tip give 'im back any of the money. 
 
542 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Don't you believe that? Don't you think it's so? Well, 
 then [as if adducing evidence] I seen it myself. 
 
 "Tell you another time — See how fur I can spit? I spit 
 furder an' furder every day. — That same Tip Barber, his 
 father took him east an' put 'im on a ship fer a long hard 
 voyage to take the wildness out of 'im. But when Daddy 
 Barber got home, why there was Tip, the son, a-waitin' 
 fer 'im. 
 
 "Don't you believe that? Don't you think it's so? Well 
 then [as if advancing evidence] I seen it myself. 
 
 "Ever tell you about yer pappy an' Christopher Brass's 
 right hand?" 
 
 "No. Any kin to Benjamin?" 
 
 "Benjamin Brass's brother. Well, your pappy done 
 somethin' terrible in that case, an' I was by an' seen 'im 
 when he done it. Chris 'ad got his hand cut in the hay- 
 cutter, an' a young feller came over the river from Missouri 
 an' bandaged it up an' says, 'Don't take off the bandages, 
 young man, till I come over again an' tell ye to.' 
 
 "Well, it was like the boy stood on the burning deck till 
 his father come back and his father never come back. An' 
 Doc Youngmeier he never come back nuther. 
 
 "An' so Chris's hand gangrened greener 'n grass, an' he 
 called yer paw. 
 
 "An' yer paw says, 'Why, three fingers of this hand is 
 all gangrened,' he says, 'an' so they'll have to come off.' Jest 
 like that he said it. 
 
 "But Chris he says he'll be glorifiedly d. . . .d if he ever 
 has the fingers off. 
 
 "But next day he was terrible — chills an' all that. An' 
 he sent for your pappy again, an' yer pappy cut 'em off. 
 He give the ether himself an' then he cut 'em off. 
 
 "Say, don't you believe that? Why, I seen it myself." 
 
 To tease the old fellow, I affected to be incredulous. 
 
 "You don't believe me? I'll ask your pappy an' let him 
 tell you. Here he comes now." 
 
 I turned so that my father could see me without the 
 story-teller doing so. And I gave my father a big wink. 
 "Father," I asked, "Did you ever cut three fingers off for 
 Mr. Christopher Brass?" 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 543 
 
 "That hand right there," shouted the old fellow, proffer- 
 ing his right hand. "That hand right there!" 
 
 I took up the hand, looked at it critically, then com- 
 mented, "Why its fingers don't seem to be off." 
 
 ' 'No, not that there hand, ' ' corrected Mr. Macllfire. ' 'But 
 that there hand o' his'n. 
 
 "Didn't you take them 'ere fingers off fer Chris, Doc? 
 Answer me, I want to prove it to your son." 
 
 Father looked afar and stroked his chin. "I — really — 
 forget." 
 
 The old man arose in great excitement. "You forget? 
 You forget? You ain't goin' to help me prove it? Look-a- 
 here, then. It was you that spoiled them fingers in the first 
 place. I told it different jest to let you down easy to your 
 boy. But facts is, son [he turned to me] your pappy got 
 hold o' that case when it was goin' toward recovery, an' 
 he pufsomethin' into the wounds to make them 'ere germ- 
 bugs get up an' dust out of it, an' sir, the bugs got up an' 
 dusted but the medicine he had dusted 'em with, it spoiled 
 them air fingers, an' so he had to cut 'em off." 
 
 "O-h-h!" cried my father, "You mean that case. No, in 
 that case I didn't use any medicine at all to drive out the bugs. 
 What I did it with was your oldest son's dinner horn. I 
 blew it and the bugs heard it and came running out of the 
 fingers to get some of that fine lemon pie your son's wife 
 used to make." 
 
 The old man looked mollified. 
 
 " 'Twas fine pie, wa'n't it?" 
 
 "It certainly was," continued my father. "And now I 
 recall how skilfully you held my case of instruments for me 
 while I operated — held them just exactly right." 
 
 The old man smiled clean round to his ears. To me: 
 "Told you I seen it myself." 
 
 MOUNT OLYMPUS 
 
 "I'm going to take you to-day," said my father, "to the 
 toughest place in all Pike County — the Devil's Dooryard" 
 
 "We already," I said, "have Hell's Half- Acre in Pitts- 
 field, and Starvation Hollow near Detroit. Now we are 
 going to have a spot in the country called, 'the Devil's Door- 
 
544 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 yard'. We are all without exception going to Hell or some 
 similar place." 
 
 Ignoring the flippancy, he called my attention to the fact 
 that, spite of the drought, we were driving past doors of 
 wealth and beauty, past fields of waving grain and ripening 
 corn, pumpkins on the vine and so forth. "And look at the 
 sapphire sky, not a speck in it. Know what that means?" 
 
 "More drought." 
 
 "No. Heavy rains. Nevertheless, some day, before your 
 vacation's over, I'm going to drive you to Mt. Olympus." 
 
 "I've never seen your mountain yet," I answered and 
 begged to be taken to the place soon. So, after we had 
 made that visit in the Devil's Dooryard (concerning which 
 delectable location the least said the better), he suddenly 
 cried, "By the bones of Bacchus! We'll go now, dust or no 
 dust!" 
 
 Men wore linen dusters in those hot days. On this par- 
 ticular day there was hardly a venturer forth but had a 
 duster buttoned to his very chin. Nay more, each and every 
 one of them had his bandanna up before his mouth and 
 nostrils to sift out some of the rising dirt that covered his 
 clothing and buggy and horses in layers. 
 
 How distinctly I remember each tiny event of that day! 
 At a certain spot, the road angled sharply left, dropped into 
 the bottom land and then forked. One fork led across an 
 old bridge, and a sign on the bridge warned the world that 
 this was private territory. 
 
 My father stopped, hesitated. South of the bridge there 
 was a rich bottom land with its big red barns and numerous 
 haystacks like an African kraal. Farther, a tangle of willows 
 and cottonwoods. 
 
 A man in the center of a dust cloud out on that wide 
 bottom field waves us onward in the way that we would go 
 — shortest cut to Mount Olympus. 
 
 "Father!" I cried, when we had got down into the creek 
 bottom where the dust was not so bad. "Father, why do 
 men still wear big beards? Why do not they go clean-faced, 
 in fact? Beards can only be germ-traps and death-traps. Why 
 do doctors especially not go clean shaven? Why not all 
 surgeons at least? Their beards must make them very septic. ' ' 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 545 
 
 "If they wore no beards, there still would be their head 
 hair. Why cut off the beards?" 
 
 "But over the head a carbolized cap could be worn. 
 Also a carbolized linen suit could be put on over the whole 
 body at operations." 
 
 But my father only laughed. "Things will never go so 
 far as that," he said. 
 
 But afterwards, of course, they did — and farther. And 
 I (like thousands of others, probably) had invented these 
 useful things to no purpose. To be of any avail it is neces- 
 sary not merely that a measure be "invented," or invented 
 and even well publicized. It is necessary also that it have 
 a good strong sponsorship from exactly the right persons. 
 What about Grandma Heath and her liver therapy for 
 "thinness of the blood that nothing else will cure"? 
 
 What about, for that matter, the successful "vaccina- 
 tions" (cow-pox inoculations for the smallpox) by the 
 Dorsetshire farmer, Benjamin Jesty? He indeed did not 
 merely make an incidental suggestion in a buggy (a worth- 
 less matter indeed) as little I had done about the close- 
 shaving, etc., but he had put the matter to the test in hun- 
 dreds of cases, "and yet his plebeian efforts were in vain." 
 Not till the doctor, Edward Jenner, had taken up the matter; 
 nay, not till, following Jenner, the vaccinial method had 
 been espoused by John Hunter, of London, Stromeyer, of 
 Hannover, Brenner, of Berlin, and other persons in high 
 places, did anything come of it. 
 
 And have not scores and scores of artists, musicians, 
 creators of all sorts, gone unrecognized till after their deaths, 
 when some or another sponsor, taking up those things of 
 mighty value, have made their value recognized? 
 
 What a world, wherein value has no value till influential 
 persons step forth and point the value out! 
 
 So too in the establishment of medical practices. The 
 greatest doctor in the world can secure no practice in a 
 village till Mr. and Mrs. Bigbug there — who know no more 
 about the matter than does anybody else — emphasize to the 
 rest of the village the merits of that doctor. 
 
 So, on that day, to Mt. Olympus, a rough, almost a 
 mountainous, farm which my father had bought some years 
 
546 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 before, not at all because he had thought it profitable but 
 because he had thought it supremely beautiful — much like, 
 indeed, the region round about Olympus in old Greece. And 
 then — he had scarcely more than glanced at Mt. Olympus 
 ■ — until now. Now we would see Mt. Olympus. 
 
 Always the many sick had hurried him away — until now. 
 
 We had eaten our lunch and passed on — miles and miles 
 and still more miles! Rougher miles too, continually. 
 
 "I can't say," said my father, anxiously, "that I like 
 the appearance of those clouds in the west. How quickly 
 our storms move toward us this year! Nevertheless, O Zeus, 
 we come — Zeus and Hephestus and Hermes and Apollo and 
 Poseidon and even Dionysus (called by the Romans, Bacchus) 
 ho, all of you, we come!" 1 
 
 The sunlight still poured down with dazzling intensity, 
 but my father still looked back — we were moving eastward 
 now — into the west with great concern. "That big cloud," 
 said I, "is only bluffing." 
 
 In several miles we met but a single farmer. "Where be 
 ye goin', Doctor?" "Down to Mt. Olympus." "O, goin' 
 to see yer rock farm?" "Yes." "Well, ye can't make it. 
 All the bottom's up an' bilin'. I had to turn back an' I know 
 each inch of the road. Giddap." 
 
 "Well," said my father, "the quickest way back to Pitts- 
 field is to go half a mile farther, then turn north and go 
 Martinsburg way." 
 
 Lightning coursed across the sky, followed by claps of 
 tremendous thunder. 
 
 We could see the rain already sweeping veil-fashion 
 across many of the distant hills. 
 
 All at once a cold gust straight out of nowhere struck 
 us, sent dust in every direction. 
 
 Then we entered an oak forest. The overhanging branches 
 of the trees formed a deep, winding tunnel, through which 
 crawled our little-used road. From time to time we pre- 
 tended to glimpse Oreads and Hamadryads darting and whis- 
 pering all about in the dim ways of the forests. "O all ye 
 
 1 A friend of mine has recently written me that "Mount Olympus" is simply the north- 
 west quarter of the southwest quarter of Section 33 in Township 6 south of Range 4 west 
 of the fourth principal meridian. 
 
 Well, I wonder! 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 547 
 
 nymphs, so friendly unto men, grant ye that my son shall 
 behold this day and leisurely the sacred mount, whereunto 
 I, a disciple of Asklepios, so long have wished to lead him." 
 So prayed my father to the Olympians. 
 
 His wish, however, was not granted, then or for years 
 later. Even long after that stormy day, when I, myself be- 
 come physician, was practising at Pittsfield, we never did 
 manage to get up any more to Mount Olympus. Only when 
 I was a middle aged man and had removed to a distant place 
 for practice and was one day at home on vacation, did that 
 dream of so many long years for us become a reality. 
 
 "Dangerous among oak trees — the lightning," explained 
 my father, as he restarted Chiron, our horse — which had 
 been resting. And soon we left the shelter of the woods to 
 find that the sky had taken on an unearthly yellow aspect. 
 "Terrible tempest coming!" shouted my father, something 
 which indeed proved true. 
 
 But before it struck us, there came driving toward us, 
 as I remember, from Martinsburg way, a doctor whose name 
 I now forget, but who was something of a wag. Chiron, 
 our horse, an old gelding but a new acquisition of my 
 father's, seeing a mare in a near-by pasture, neighed at her 
 with imperious challenge. The wag of a doctor looked up 
 in surprise, stopped suddenly alongside us and then, taking 
 on an expression of pity, remarked, "Horses, like men, are 
 fools — if they do not know their limitations." 
 
 So on we sped, seeking to attain a near-by barn and house 
 upon a height, before the storm should break in fullest 
 violence over us. Into the barn we drove, but, seeing the 
 roof defective, we left the horse and buggy in that place 
 and fled to the near-by cottage. 
 
 As we dashed inside, my father called out, "How well 
 I remember this house!" 
 
 "What! You have practised here?" 
 
 "Yes. After a year of practice in Pittsfield I removed to 
 Pleasant Hill — over yonder — to accept a partnership with 
 Dr. John A. Thomas — one of the most capable and skilful 
 physicians in the Mississippi Valley. While officing in 
 Pleasant Hill I made many a visit to this house — and how 
 
548 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 well I remember the first day I ever came here. After I'd 
 been here a few minutes I stepped out to the well to get 
 some water, and an 'old hound dog' came creeping toward 
 me on his belly. That was so strange an experience for me 
 with a dog — you know how greatly I fear dogs and how 
 much not all but many dogs dislike me because of my mis- 
 trust of them. Well, I have never forgotten the incident of 
 the old hound dog — an incident which later had seemed to 
 presage the appreciation and affection which soon and al- 
 ways were to be felt for me by that young couple." 
 
 "But you never have told me about that dog and that 
 couple and this house before." 
 
 "No, too wild, too heart-breaking, a story." 
 
 I pointed to a spot on the wall. "Had this name here 
 anything to do with the story?" 
 
 He went and read on the wall, over where he declared 
 the young couple's bed had stood, in large clear letters — 
 Emily. 
 
 He stood and looked at that word some time longer with 
 intent fascination. "It rains harder," he said, as thunder 
 pealed again and the deluge increased. "Harder — as if the 
 world were full of groans and tears." 
 
 "Tell me about Emily, Father." 
 
 "No, no." 
 
 But I persisted. 
 
 At length he murmured, "Well — why not? 
 
 "Thomas, it was on the very day of my first wedding. 
 I, in my room at Pleasant Hill, was at last completely at- 
 tired in my wedding clothes and about to start for the home 
 of my bride away down in Calhoun County. 
 
 "I had promised to be early, but, all at once, here came 
 a young man on a foaming horse, begging that I come to 
 this place and see his wife. 
 
 "Explaining, I refused to go. 
 
 'But she's dying and we've just got married.' 
 
 "I had two hours to spare so I finally consented and 
 drove my waiting rig as closely behind the young horse- 
 backer as the strength of my horse would permit — and he 
 was a noble, gifted, fellow, a prince of speed and high intel- 
 ligence. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 549 
 
 "When I had arrived, the young bride was in the midst 
 of an abortion." 
 
 "What — you don't mean — " 
 
 "Yes, but the child was not the husband's — so the bride 
 herself informed me. Nor could the husband keep his lady 
 silent. The hemorrhage was terrific. She thought she was 
 dying, so she made her full confession, asking me to pray 
 for her — as if she had been a Catholic and I her priest." 
 
 "You prayed?" 
 
 "Yes, I prayed. And now I am glad that I prayed. She 
 was a very fine woman. She told me, between her screams 
 and in spite of my numerous protests — here in this very 
 room it was — that she had been engaged to marry another 
 man — a wild young fellow, a gambler, even a thief, but 
 handsome indeed. Fascinated, she let him have his way. 
 Then he promptly departed — as such fellows generally do. 
 
 "Then the next suitor came along, the one who had just 
 come to my office. He, in turn, was attracted by the woman. 
 At first she had rejected him scornfully, but soon, so fine a 
 man he was, so utterly and absolutely different from the 
 scoundrel she had been engaged to, that she fell deeply and 
 truly in love with him — told him in fact her entire story. 
 
 "Thereupon he had answered that he loved her so truly 
 that he would forgive her everything — anything whatso- 
 ever, if only she would be his wife. 
 
 "She agreed if only he would let her do one thing — get 
 rid of the other man's child. 
 
 "He refused absolutely — so good and true and loving and 
 forgiving he was. 
 
 "And thus it was agreed. 
 
 "But, as the time was nearing for her delivery, she, 
 shamed for the shame she would have brought, as she 
 thought, upon her excellent husband, went off into Missouri 
 somewhere, she said, to secure the performance by a doctor 
 of an abortion. Was refused. Having read somewhere of 
 how such things are done, she attempted on the very day 
 before the day she came to this house which her husband 
 had had constructed for her — the day, that is, before the 
 day of her wedding, she — poor child — with no better tool 
 than a piece of wire she had found in her father's barn, 
 attempted to abort herself. 
 
550 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Half dead, she went through with the wedding, was, 
 even as she spoke, almost in articulo mortis. 
 
 "Thank God that I saved her. 
 
 "Then I leaped into my buggy and, already quite late 
 for my wedding, spoke sharply to my horse. He was off 
 like an Arab. Never did I touch him with the whip. Several 
 times I urged him with my voice. Faster and faster he flew. 
 
 "Thomas, I loved that horse, and I hope that he has 
 forgiven me. He showed no signs at all of slackening, no 
 signs even of fatigue, but just as I stopped him at the house 
 of my own heart-broken bride — he fell dead." 
 
 "Dead!" 
 
 "Yes, and now you know just why I often drive so 
 slowly, excepting in fact only when practice is pressing 
 hard indeed. 
 
 "But, as to the couple that used to live here. Often I 
 came to see them. First one was sick and then the other. 
 The wife became pregnant again. To the man she loved she 
 bore a fine little girl. Presently the mother died, from some 
 mysterious cause I never could quite fathom. A few days 
 later the baby died too. 
 
 "The father lived on here for two or three years quite 
 alone. Then he moved out of the country. 
 
 "Others bought the place, but, somehow a curse had 
 taken it — so superstitious people said, and, half the time at 
 least, the place has been untenanted. See it now: fences all 
 gone, barn almost in ruins — very little roof and no doors." 
 
 "Father," I cried, "did you — did you — ever tell the 
 authorities about that attempted abortion?" 
 
 As chance would have it, at that very moment there came 
 a flash of lightning most intolerably bright and then a peal 
 of thunder which sounded as if all the trumps in heaven had 
 blown at the same time. 
 
 In a moment I saw that a tree which had stood in the 
 yard behind the house had been stricken by the bolt, thrown 
 into a thousand pieces. 
 
 At the same time a wild cry rang from the direction of 
 the barn, and our horse, old Chiron, came tearing to the 
 house, round which he ran some three or four times. My 
 father dashed out, caught him, held his head under one arm 
 and stroked his nose, while crooning to him mercifully. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 551 
 
 The horse had merely yearned for human assurance, and, 
 having got it, nickered gratefully, let us into the buggy, the 
 sky "broke," and away we went homeward among the 
 fresh green pastures and forests and fields of a still living 
 world. 
 
 But soon there came up a biting wind, a lonesome, loud- 
 complaining wind which, as winds in late midsummer so 
 often do, mourned in far fence corners, in the woodlands 
 and in stubbly fields, calling for the days that have vanished 
 forevermore and refusing to be comforted at all. 
 
 THINGS ARE EVER DYING 
 In a few days there was actually frost, hoar frost. 
 There had been horse-mint and ox-eyed daisies all along 
 the roadsides, in the fields golden rod and masses of wild 
 sunflowers; but now these were soon gone. The distant 
 hills were beginning to assume that melancholy haze which 
 hints at the coming of Indian summer. 
 
 My father spent much of his tender-voiced time as we 
 drove along the road (at least when not admonishing me 
 to be less of an intellectual tramp, to cease if I could my 
 mental wanderings, my interest in so many subjects) in 
 identifying one after another the autumnal sounds which 
 arose to disturb the far silence of the hills. There was the cry 
 of a startled kill-deer, the full-throated sobs of a brown 
 thresher, the grunts and squeals of a drove of foraging pigs, 
 the resonant boom of a barred owl, the continual metallic 
 contradictions of a katydid, the despondent bugle of a 
 deep- voiced hound. In the evening there would come the 
 plaintive tinkle of a cowbell, far away as fairyland itself. 
 
 Also from a distance in the still, desolate woodlands, 
 there would somehow, as we drove, come to us from the 
 fallen bark and the dying leaves the odors of slow detach- 
 ment and increasing mortality. 
 
 One night, a heavier frost! Then, through all the mel- 
 ancholy haze and drabness and the odors of constant dis- 
 solution there all at once shone out a paradise of color. Jack 
 Frost had painted the world, especially the sumachs and the 
 maples, with all his most gorgeous coloring. Standing under 
 a maple by a farmhouse while waiting for my father was 
 
552 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 then like being under a great tent whose roof and walls 
 were translucent with scarlet and gold. 
 
 In town the courthouse yard was full of sad, rustling 
 leaves and heavy-headed horses hung over the hitch-rails 
 despondently. At home my father was full of sadness. He 
 thought it must be due to the season of the year. 
 
 But I knew better. Pittsfield was sadder than it had used 
 to be. While still at Inveni I had thought so often of being 
 back in Pittsfield, and, every time, I had thought of the 
 place as one of extreme jollity, of continual smiles, of almost 
 endless happiness and merry-making. In my dreams I had 
 simply revelled in Pittsfield' s echoing laughter. 
 
 And yet, as I got back home at the railway station, there, 
 even with my brothers and my father to meet me and to 
 greet me heartily, I saw that the place was sadder by far 
 than I had ever supposed it could be. 
 
 Pittsfield the merry, had vanished forevermore — like Joy 
 himself, "whose finger is ever at his lips bidding adieu." 
 
 Rather, it was the care-free eyes of my childhood that 
 had vanished. Five short months at college had given me 
 in exchange a pair that saw more realistically. Though I 
 still loved Pittsfield (and ever shall I do so) I then could 
 behold it more nearly as it was and had been : a collection of 
 excellent people, but sad — as people always are in every 
 spot and portion of the earth— sad, in the universal struggle 
 to live, to keep themselves and their offspring out of the 
 shadow of the Little White House. 
 
 MY MOTHER 
 
 But then there had been actual changes too in Pittsfield 
 — in some of its people as well as in myself. My father, for 
 example, had graver grown, somewhat sadder, even in those 
 few months that I had been away. I did not then dream 
 that my absence could have had anything to do with the 
 matter. He had "taken the veil," had he not? Well, taking 
 the veil meant many a hardship, many a bitter disappoint- 
 ment, many agonies unspeakable. It did not occur to me 
 what his sorest trial, his heaviest burden, might have been. 
 
 And then there was my mother. She too had changed, 
 changed even in more ways than my father. But then she, 
 too, had "taken the veil." Every true wife and mother has 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 553 
 
 taken a veil, though she may not realize the fact. There is 
 not much difference, after all that's been said on the subject, 
 betwixt "the cloister" and "the hearth." And the doctor's 
 wife? There indeed, at least in the old days, was a person 
 who had taken on cloistral duties, even through vows 
 unspoken. No solitary she, of course, yet her life was never 
 one minute her own. In the case of my mother those duties 
 were even more arduous, more burdensome by far, than those 
 assumed by the average country doctor's wife — that partly 
 because she was a half-way doctor herself, partly because of 
 her headstrong devotion to the poor, whether they were or 
 were not sick. 
 
 It was at least true in her case that "though men work 
 from sun to sun, a woman's work is never done." At all 
 events, get up in the night when I would, and come down- 
 stairs for, say, a drink from the water-bucket just outside 
 the front door, there was my mother, still up, setting the 
 salt-rising for the morrow's bread, or "righting" the baskets 
 of rotten-specked apples, or sewing and patching and darn- 
 ing and "making over," or writing letters to slow-pay pa- 
 tients, or posting my father's soon-out-of-date ledger — 
 glancing ever and again at Grandfather Shastid's old clock 
 as if she were literally racing with Time himself. 
 
 And always she seemed to take things in the hardest 
 way, to brook no slightest suggestion for easement in her 
 work. If Woman, in her infinite wisdom, decides that, to 
 clean a house properly, it ought to be taken apart, one 
 stone, or brick, from another, who is man — at all events, 
 mere seventeen-year-old boy — to criticize her ideas? 
 
 Her spirits, at times, that summer, were joyous. But 
 still she gave no more music lessons. Indeed so far as her 
 own playing was concerned, her piano and guitar were as 
 silent as were the cytherae of long-gone Rome. And never 
 that summer did I hear her carolling, "Bird of beauty whose 
 bright plumage sparkles with a thousand dyes." Then too 
 there were other changes. She had grown careless, quite 
 careless, about her attire. Concerning the cause of that I 
 could not in the least guess, until, one day, it came out from 
 her enthusiastic comment on some or another sermon she 
 
554 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 had then recently heard that she had become convinced that 
 true religion teaches we should not dress at all well so long 
 as others live round us who cannot do the same. 
 
 There was no reasoning with her on this head, no telling 
 her she was not so bright and beautiful as formerly she had 
 been. Religion was all in all to her, and, besides, religion 
 to her was the particular religion of her church and of some 
 particular minister whom she had chanced to listen to and 
 especially of one who had gotten farthest from the scientific 
 conceptions of human beings and human life. 
 
 Possibly she had got to thinking that "bright plumage" 
 is sinful even in the harmless bird of which she had sung. 
 
 Saddened much about these matters I one day opened a 
 bureau drawer wherein, as a boy, I had been accustomed to 
 finding my pocket handkerchiefs whenever I wanted one. 
 Looking into that drawer on that particular occasion, I 
 found not boyish pocket handkerchiefs but bolts of bright, 
 beautiful and expensive feminine fabrics. I looked then 
 through all the other drawers of the bureau, and, in each 
 and every one of them, there were bright and beautiful 
 feminine fabrics — or garments. 
 
 "Thank God!" I cried to myself. At least her religion, 
 even though it does forbid the putting on of beauty, still 
 permits her to have beauty where she can occasionally feast 
 her eyes upon it. Perhaps, in heaven, it will not be thought 
 sinful to be arrayed in glory — to be as the angels — because 
 forsooth there are people, black with smoke, in hell. 
 
 Think of the lilies of the field too, even in this world, 
 and how they stand arrayed. Are they to be condemned 
 because there are plants which never can blossom? 
 
 But she looked older too, as well as less beautifully gar- 
 mented, and there were wrinkles, several of them, beginning 
 to show in her erstwhile marble-like face. 
 
 I never dared to talk to her about the germ-causation of 
 diseases, and I never quite knew her thought upon the subject. 
 She was science-minded, and yet — 
 
 The "bird of beauty whose bright plumage" had "spark- 
 led with a thousand dyes" was sparkling no longer. She, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 555 
 
 like housewives generally in that day, had lost all thought 
 of beauty — lost it at least in relation to themselves — and had 
 become the usual household drudge. No, not the usual 
 drudge. Instead, one of swift and tireless energy, of a 
 veritable heavenly inspiration in everything she did. Never- 
 theless, I could not at any time induce her to sing for me 
 again "The Bird of Beauty." "Pshaw!" she would say to 
 me. "Such things are not for me any more. They are world- 
 ly in any case." 
 
 For a time, in addition to all her other activities, she, 
 with the strange contradictoriness of womanhood, kept 
 many birds in the house: mocking birds, canary birds, and 
 — beauty of beauties! — red birds. But, after a little, finding 
 herself unequal to so much extra work, she gave all the 
 birds away, and, responding to my bitter remonstrances to 
 her, cried: "Work! Work! I must help Father put all you 
 boys through college. Is there not greater beauty in that?" 
 
 Later, her flowers went too, and then there was nothing 
 at all but work — and the inspiration that gleamed and 
 glowed behind it and all through it. 
 
 She loved the work no doubt far better than she ever 
 had loved the music, the birds, the flowers. Yet always I 
 thought I saw that, with the departure of these things out 
 of her home, there* had departed also something from her- 
 self that should never have gone. Perhaps I only imagined 
 that, but, when I was back at home from Inveni the follow- 
 ing Christmas holidays, I beheld her one afternoon standing 
 in the deep snow of our back yard, hands actually folded 
 before her and her eyes glowing as if with celestial radiance. 
 So I went up to her and asked her for what she was listening. 
 
 "Not for but to," she answered. "Don't you hear it? 
 Notice. The sweet ninny — the bird that keeps on calling 
 'Sw-e-e-t Ninny! Sw-e-e-t Ninny!' the whole day through. 
 The country people all call the bird, after its plaintive song, 
 'the sweet ninny.' 'Ninny' means 'silly person.' Father 
 says the word is from the Spanish Nino, a child." 
 
 And, sure enough, there on a bough of a leafless pear 
 tree, was a black-cap chickadee, pouring out his little sweet 
 heart in cry after cry that indeed sounded much like 
 "Sw-e-e-e-t ninny! Sw-e-e-e-t ninny!" 
 
556 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 So sad it all was that I thought the bird must be crying 
 for some one long ago gone, some one never again" to be 
 seen or heard upon this earth. 
 
 Years later, as I stood by my mother's grave, this chick- 
 adee scene came suddenly back to me with a poignancy 
 absolutely unspeakable and intolerable. "Yes, Mother," 
 I cried, in my heart, "now I am the chickadee in the cold, 
 crying after you — the sweet ninny indeed — who, for so many 
 years so terribly struggled and at so fearful a cost to your- 
 self to help four boys who could not even understand your 
 gracious value till you had become dead." 
 
 And almost all the other mothers of that day too were, 
 likewise, "sweet ninnies," trying to assist their children to 
 become the marvels of greatness which they never could 
 have been but which their mothers had always been quite 
 certain that they could. 
 
 JACKSONVILLE EPISODE 
 
 Before I proceed to relate what happened in my last days 
 at Inveni College, I must speak of an experience which I 
 had in a medico-professional way at Jacksonville, 111., a 
 place at the time of twelve or fourteen thousand inhabitants 
 about forty- two miles east of Pittsfield. My mother had 
 oft times pointed out that, while the instruction I got from 
 my father was thorough indeed as far as it went — thorough 
 and likewise scholarly — it yet was somewhat lacking in one 
 important department of medical activity — surgery. So one 
 day, in that first vacation of mine from Inveni — that, namely 
 in my seventeenth summer — she suggested to my father and 
 me that I ought undoubtedly — the Drs. Prince at the Prince 
 Sanitarium in Jacksonville being as they were such excellent 
 friends of my father — that I ought, I say, as soon as possible, 
 to enter that Sanitarium as a student, or medical apprentice, 
 for at least a few active weeks of experience in the surgical 
 field. 
 
 "Too young yet!" my father objected. "Next year will 
 be soon enough." 
 
..:? ■* 
 
 i 
 
 *%. 
 
 MY MOTHER, LOUISA MINERVA (HALL) SHASTID, 
 IN THE SUMMER OF 1883 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 557 
 
MY SECOND LIFE — 558 
 
sir 
 
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 wmm 
 
 P. 
 
 ■.^;irr^^K : ^9. rr^^m.^::.. 
 
 DOCTOR GREENE VARDIMAN BLACK'S FIRST OFFICE— AT WINCHESTER, ILL. 
 
 (Center Building, Upstairs) 
 (Ex Blacks' "From Pioneer to Scientist," p. 86) 
 
 Dr. Carl E. and Mrs. Black, in their life of the 
 Doctor's father, "From Pioneer to Scientist," 
 p. 87: "The life of our young pioneer seemed to 
 be taking a definite direction when he located in 
 Winchester, Scott County, Illinois, in 1857. We 
 do not know the exact month and day. Here he 
 first hung out his sign, 'G. V. Black, Dentist.' 
 He had no diploma in a gilt frame to hang in his 
 office. He had no school certificate or educational 
 credentials of any sort. He was wholly a product 
 of pioneer environment." 
 
 It seems incredible that any man who had so 
 
 begun life in a professional way could have at- 
 tained to the title so readily and well-nigh uni- 
 versally bestowed upon him: "Father of Modern 
 [or Scientific] Dentistry." Yet so it is. Abraham 
 Lincoln, with very little aid from others, did in 
 fact r^-make the political world by means of the 
 great, new democratic ferment he injected into it, 
 but G. V. Black made the world of dentistry 
 almost ab initio and almost without assistance 
 of any sort. Or, to institute a more relevant com- 
 parison, Hippocrates himself does not stand out 
 quite so plainly above all other physicians as 
 does G. V. Black above all other dentists. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
BUST OF G. V. BLACK 
 
 As one Enters the Memorial Rooms at Northwestern University Dental School. 
 
 (Picture and legend ex Blacks' "From Pioneer to Scientist," page 364) 
 
 A full length seated statue of G. V. Black was erected in Lincoln Park, 
 Chicago, August 7, 1918, by the American Dental Association. In August, 
 1922, his bust was unveiled in London, England, at the Dental School of the 
 University College Hospital. Similar tributes have likewise been erected to 
 his honor in various parts of the world. And his estimation still increases 
 with l lie passing of the years. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 561 
 
 The next year, then, in my summer vacation, I, at the 
 time in my eighteenth summer, went over to the Prince 
 Sanitarium at Jacksonville to see more surgery. l 
 
 Jacksonville, in those years, was, despite its small size as 
 a city, not only a thriving railroad intersection, but also a 
 great intellectual center. First of all, of course, the place 
 was, notably, the seat of the State Central Hospital for the 
 Insane, also of other State hospitals, as for the blind, the 
 deaf and dumb, and so on. Then there was the private but 
 extensive Oaklawn Retreat for the Insane. The Passavant 
 Memorial Hospital was there, and the Hospital of Our 
 Savior. There were numerous industrial plants, as railroad car 
 shops, woolen and planing mills, ice factories, meat-packing 
 houses, and fence works. On the whole a place with plenty 
 of "clinical material." There were educational institutions, 
 a number of them: The Illinois Female College (M.E.), the 
 Jacksonville Female Academy (non-sectarian), The McMur- 
 ray College for Women (1847), the Whipple Academy, a 
 Conservatory of Music, and, wonderful to relate, Illinois 
 College (1829) from which fine institution had already gone 
 forth men that had led the nation. (At the very time when 
 I studied in Jacksonville, William Jennings Bryan, an Illinois 
 College graduate, was, as yet, no great celebrity, but was 
 practising law and shaking hands in that city. Twice I met 
 him at the Prince Sanitarium, and often I heard him praised 
 there in his own home town as a remarkably fine speaker — 
 which he certainly was. Uncle Billy Greene's career at Illinois 
 College I have already adverted to.) 
 
 GREENE VARDIMAN BLACK 
 A number of notable scientists lived in Jacksonville, 
 among them one whose memory will surely never die — Dr. 
 Greene Vardiman Black, "The Father of Modern Dentistry." 
 Merely to list his achievements would be too long, consider- 
 ing the central purpose of this book. Suffice it that he 
 "changed dentistry from a trade to a noble profession"; 
 
 1 My records for the summers of 1883, 1884, and 1885, being decidedly scanty and de- 
 fective, it is, I find, barely possible that the weeks which I spent with the Princes could 
 have been in the summer of any one of those three years. Most probably, however they 
 were in the summer of 1884 — my eighteenth. 
 
562 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 that he discovered the cause of dental caries; that he made 
 gold the most practical filling material; that he invented 
 and introduced the first dental engines; that he compiled 
 the international nomenclature of dental operations; that 
 his books on operative dentistry were used as standard 
 English textbooks longer than any other; that his "Dental 
 Anatomy" is the standard text on its subject to-day; that he 
 made amalgam a practical, durable filling; that he more than 
 any one else brought about the reception into dentistry of 
 the Germ Theory of Disease, also the reception by both the 
 dental and medical professions of the Theory of Focal In- 
 fection by the Teeth. And this does not even mention his 
 career as a teacher of dentistry in many dental colleges 
 (Missouri Dental College, Chicago Dental College, Dental 
 Department of the University of Iowa, Northwestern Uni- 
 versity Dental School, and perhaps others) in which phase 
 of his work he reigned supreme. His career as dental teacher 
 culminated in the deanship of the Northwestern University 
 Dental School, "the largest and most influential dental school 
 in the world." 1 
 
 THE PRINCE SANITARIUM 
 Is it any wonder that Jacksonville, 111., was renowned 
 throughout America as "The Athens of the West"? 
 
 The Princes, father and sons, were the early precursors, 
 one might even say the harbingers, of the Mayos, brother 
 and brother. They did not have such reputations, quite, as 
 did the Mayos decades later, yet their names and fames were 
 very, very high and reached to every portion of the Missis- 
 sippi Valley, to say the least. 
 
 Dr. David Prince (no middle name or initial) was born 
 in Brooklyn (or Brooklyne), Windham County, Conn., 
 
 1 Dr. Greene Vardiman Black had two sons who also became eminent — Dr. Arthur 
 Davenport Black in dentistry and Dr. Carl Ellsworth Black in medicine. 
 
 Dr. Carl Ellsworth Black, born 1864, still lives and at Jacksonville. Dr. Arthur Daven- 
 port Black, born at Jacksonville, November 15, 1870, became dean of the Northwestern 
 University Dental School in 1898, and died in 1937- 
 
 Dr. Greene Vardiman Black was born in a very humble farmhouse in Scott County, 
 Illinois, August 3, 1836. On that same spot he passed away, August 31, 1915- Like many 
 another famous man, he had crept back to his well-loved childhood's home to die. 
 
 The authoritative biography of Dr. Greene Vardiman Black is "From Pioneer to 
 Scientist," by Carl Ellsworth Black and Bessie McLaughlin Black [his wife], Jacksonville, 
 Illinois. (Bruce Pub. Co., St. Paul, Minn., 1940, pp. 594.)' The same work contains also a 
 biography of Dr. Arthur Davenport Black. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 563 
 
 June 21, 1816. He studied medicine at the College of Physi- 
 cians and Surgeons, western district, Fairfield, N. Y., and at 
 the Medical College of Ohio, at Cincinnati, whence he was 
 graduated in 1838. For a year and a half he was associated 
 in practice with Dr. Reuben D. Mussey, at Cincinnati. In 
 1840 he settled at Payson, a very small town in Adams 
 County, Illinois, where his father's family had settled five 
 years before. Then at Quincy, in the same county. 1 
 
 In 1843 there was established at Jacksonville a medical 
 school, the Medical Department of Illinois College. This, 
 by the way, was the very first medical college in Illinois. 2 
 Dr. David Prince in the year that the college was founded 
 removed to Jacksonville and became its first and last pro- 
 fessor of anatomy and surgery. It is well to remember that 
 Prince was the first professor of surgery in an Illinois medical 
 college. The school was housed, it is interesting to note, 
 in that particular building of Illinois College which was 
 and still is known as Beecher Hall. This, the first, college 
 building in Illinois, had been named for the first president 
 of the college — Dr. Edward Beecher, son of the famous 
 minister, Dr. Lyman Beecher and brother of the still more 
 famous Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, 
 author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," etc. 
 
 But the school, fine institution though it was, went under 
 in 1848. Concerning the reason for its dissolution, Dr. and 
 Mrs. Carl E. Black, in their most interesting volume, 
 "Illinois College Medical School," at page 35 say: "Just 
 
 1 Some authorities will have it that Dr. David Prince never practised at Quincy. A 
 family letter, however, kindly supplied me by Miss Clara Stocker, of Duluth, Minn., a 
 granddaughter of Dr. David Prince, sheds light upon the question. The letter is headed 
 "Quincy, 111., March 18, 1899," and is written by Mr. Edward Prince, of Quincy, a brother 
 of Dr. David, to his sister-in-law, Lucy, Dr. David's wife. He, according to the letter, has 
 been personally collecting biographic data for Lucy from his sister, Ann, down at Payson. 
 
 In the letter to Lucy, Edward says : " thence came to Quincy and practiced medicine 
 
 there, thence to Payson and practised medicine, thence to Jacksonville in 1845, thence to 
 
 St. Louis, thence to Jacksonville I presume by looking over the files of Quincy Whig 
 
 — which I believe are in existence — I could identify the exact time when the Dr. lived in 
 Quincy, but I understand that Drs. Walker and Jones cannot delay their report." 
 
 From that letter it would appear that Dr. Prince practised at the good-sized town of 
 Quincy before practising in the village of Payson — which I rather believe to be an error. 
 It does, however, corroborate much other evidence that Dr. David Prince did at one time 
 practice in Quincy. The entire letter, furthermore, makes fairly clear to us the not very 
 surprising fact that Dr. David Prince, very brilliant surgeon though he was, nevertheless 
 had a difficult time establishing himself in practice. John T. Hodgen, too, we may well 
 remember, had the same "hard sledding" precisely. 
 
 2 The first diploma was issued by this institution in 1845 to Augustus Frederick Hand — 
 a document now most carefully preserved by the Chicago Society of Medical History. 
 
564 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 why the project, which had apparently had so satisfactory 
 a beginning, was so abruptly and unceremoniously discon- 
 tinued does not appear. It does not seem to have been on 
 account of debt, for there is nothing in the records of the 
 Board of Trustees to indicate the existence of debt incurred 
 by this department. Nor would it appear to have been 
 because of the pressure of competition, for at the date of 
 discontinuance of this school only one other, Rush Medical 
 College in Chicago, had been established in this state. The 
 attendance seems to have been fairly satisfactory and in the 
 main was on the increase. Compared with the other depart- 
 ments this one had by far the largest attendance and its 
 students paid the largest fees and were in attendance the 
 shortest time. Considerable money and energy had been 
 spent in accumulating apparatus, library, etc., which for 
 years remained stored away in dusty uselessness in the old 
 
 library in 'Beecher Hall.' In this school, like many 
 
 others of its day, there was a mortal conflict between the 
 faculty of the college proper and the sciences of which 
 medicine even then formed a conspicuous part. The pro- 
 fessors of Latin and Greek, and the honorable field of math- 
 ematics and the gentle and inanimate sciences of chemistry, 
 botany and geology felt a repugnance for the men of the 
 dissecting room. From all the writer has been able to learn 
 the 'Anatomy Question' was more important than any other 
 single factor in discontinuing this pioneer medical school." 1 
 
 Immediately after the closing of the medical school Dr. 
 Prince removed to St. Louis, there becoming a fast friend 
 of the much younger John T. Hodgen. To Jacksonville, 
 however, Prince returned in 1852. During the war he became 
 brigade surgeon in the Army of the Potomac. A good while 
 he spent in Libby prison. After the war he spent one year 
 
 1 Also highly interesting is what the Blacks, in their aforesaid volume, at p. 18, say- 
 about books and board at that time: "Medical books must have been very difficult to 
 obtain, as a note in the catalogue mildly suggests that the student come 'supplied with 
 text-books.' Few medical books had yet been published in America by American writers. 
 England and France must furnish most of those required; and St. Louis, a hundred miles 
 away, was the nearest point at which they could be obtained. Nor could one 'run down 
 on the morning train' and be back before supper, but must either ride twenty-five miles to 
 the river and then go one hundred miles by boat or make the whole journey on horseback 
 or by wagon. 
 
 "Notwithstanding the scarcity of money and the limited resources of these pioneers, 
 the price of board was fully as high as it is at present in communities of the same number 
 of inhabitants." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 565 
 
 in New York City to assist in writing the official history of 
 the medical and surgical branch of the Service. 
 
 Then he returned to Jacksonville, 111., there to found in 
 1867 the Prince Sanitarium. (See illustration.) That insti- 
 tution was at once successful. While at its head, however, 
 Prince found time to write many papers. Two of these he 
 read before the International Medical Congress — one at 
 Copenhagen and one at London. He also wrote four books: 
 "Orthopedics" (1866); "Plastics" (1868); "Plastics and 
 Orthopedics" (1871); "Galvano-Therapeutics" (1874). All 
 were published by Lindsey and Blakiston, and all showed 
 a high degree of skill and originality. He also invented a 
 number of valuable surgical instruments. 
 
 Prince, in fact, was a born surgeon. In orthopedic and 
 plastic surgery he perhaps had not his equal in the Mississippi 
 Valley. It became almost a rage throughout the Upper 
 Valley for doctors to send him all the cleft-palate cases they 
 could find. I once assisted him in the performance of five 
 cleft-palate operations in one single day. 
 
 But Prince was a good all-round surgeon too. He op- 
 erated for cross-eyes and cataracts literally by the hundreds. 
 (Incidentally, in my early boyhood, he operated on my 
 grandfather, Thomas Hall, for two cataracts on the same 
 day, and on both of them quite successfully.) 
 
 He was, indeed, quite swiftly becoming even more widely 
 known as an oculistic than as an orthopedic and general 
 surgeon. All at once, however, as it seemed, there appeared 
 in the Sanitarium David's equally gifted son, Arthur Edward 
 Prince, who had just received his medical diploma from the 
 University of the City of New York, and who now, at his 
 father's Sanitarium, took over immediately the entire prac- 
 tice on the eye, ear, nose and throat. 
 
 That was in 1878. Afterwards (in 1887) still another son 
 appeared upon the scene, Dr. John A. Prince, who also be- 
 came a surgeon of note. But back now to the summer of 
 1884. In that summer (or, as I say, it may have been earlier 
 or later) I, at my father's request, was admitted to a few 
 weeks' study and a chance for observation at the famous 
 institution of the Princes. 1 
 
 1 Thus much space I give to the lives of the Princes because, great men though they 
 were undoubtedly, all three of them, they have been treated in most of the biographical 
 
566 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 I BECAME WHAT I ALREADY WAS, A DONKEY— 
 SO TO SPEAK 
 The very first operation at the Princes' that I took an 
 assistant's part in was an ovariectomy (also called "ovar- 
 iotomy"). At the time, the so-called- "Lister's Donkey 
 Engine" was absolutely all the rage. It was a rather simple 
 apparatus (see illustration) whose function was, by throw- 
 ing a spray of dilute carbolic acid, to kill, principally, the 
 
 LISTER'S SO-CALLED "DONKEY ENGINE" 
 
 At the right of this engine stood the "donkey," or surgeon's apprentice, working the handle of the 
 engine. From the spray-tube at the left would in consequence pour out a cloud, or spray, of weak 
 carbolic acid solution. 
 
 (Cut reproduced from Dr. Charles Singer's "A Short History of Medicine," by permission 
 both of Dr. Singer and of the Oxford 'University Press.) 
 
 dictionaries and histories of medicine with scant courtesy indeed. Thus, Atkinson's "The 
 Physicians and Surgeons of the United States" (1878, p. 638) devotes to Dr. David Prince, 
 even then a famous surgeon, exactly thirteen lines. Stone's "Biography of Eminent American 
 Physicians and Surgeons" (1894) vouchsafes neither to David nor to his two prominent sons 
 so much as a single word. (Packard's "The History of Medicine in the United States" treats 
 of its subject to the year 1800 only.) Mumford, in his "A Narrative of Medicine in America" 
 (1903) does not know of the Princes' existence. Kelly's "Cyclopedia of American Medical 
 Biography" (2 vols., 1912), does not mention the Princes. Kelly and Burrage's "American 
 Medical Biographies" (1920) is the first work of its kind to show adequate appreciation of 
 these men. Yet even the only Prince sketch (that of David) in this veritable magnum of us 
 is marred by a typographical error in its heading ("1896" for the death date, instead of 
 1889) and by its almost incredible conclusion, "He died in Jacksonville, December 19,1896, 
 survived by two sons, who were physicians, and a daughter the wife of a physician." Even 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 567 
 
 micro-organisms in the atmosphere, incidentally those on 
 the surgeon and the patient. It was not hard to work that 
 machine, not in the slightest. 
 
 At the close of the operation the great operator said to 
 me, as he washed his hands thoroughly, wiped them and 
 
 WEIR'S ANTISEPTIC SPRAY 
 
 Lister's Donkey Engine was soon superseded 
 by what was called the Steam Sterilizer. In 
 that apparatus, which appeared in many 
 forms, steam took the place as a motive force 
 of the "donkey" in the Lister engine. It, too, 
 like the Lister engine, threw a dilute carbolic 
 acid spray. A very much favored form of the 
 Steam Sterilizer, or Steam Spray, was the 
 "Antiseptic Spray" of Professor Weir. Con- 
 cerning this apparatus Tiemann's "American 
 Armamentarium Chirurgicum" for 1889, at 
 page 49 says: "The best spray-producer is that 
 devised by Lister himself. It is, however, 
 quite costly, ranging in price from fifty to 
 seventy-five dollars, and it was to meet this 
 objection that the one before you has been 
 constructed. With its diminished cost some of 
 the improvements of Mr. Lister's lamp have 
 
 been sacrificed. It is, however, essentially the 
 same. Its hollow wick, readily raised or low- 
 ered, affords a great and controllable heat. 
 The spray-tube is in this apparatus fixed, an 
 objection which in the majority of cases is of 
 no moment. It will supply spray for over two 
 hours. It therefore requires only that the 
 boiler — containing twenty-two ounces — should 
 be, as well as the lamp, full at the beginning of 
 the operation; and, with this precaution, it 
 has been found practicable to dispense with the 
 expensive and tell-tale windows of glass be- 
 longing to the original imported instrument. 
 The accompanying wood-cut gives a good 
 representation of the lamp." 
 
 (For permission to use this cut, as well as 
 for the cut itself, I am indebted to Messrs. 
 George Tiemann & Co., New York City.) 
 
 the names of those .two brilliant sons not mentioned, either here or elsewhere in the volume! 
 In Garrison's "History of Medicine," first edition (1913), second edition (1917) and fourth 
 edition (1924), we look in vain for a mention of the Princes. Even in the edition of 1929, 
 which is said by a high biographical authority to contain a sketch of David Prince at p. 761, 
 we find no mention of any or the Princes. Neither David nor any of his sons so much as 
 mentioned in the index of any of the editions of this greatest of all one-volume histories of 
 medicine! 
 
 Sigerist, in his marvelous "American Medicine" (1934) ignores the Princes absolutely 
 — as, in fact, he ignores Joseph McDowell, John T. Hodgen, John B. Murphy and other 
 great men of the West. 
 
 Really valuable and appreciative information concerning the Princes we find in the 
 sketch by Robert J. Patton, entitled "A Pioneer Surgeon: David Prince" (Univ. of Mich. 
 Med. School, November 23, 1933), also in "Master Surgeon: David Prince" by Carl E. 
 Black, M.D., (Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics, February 1, 1934, p. 242 fF). 
 
 It is greatly to be hoped that, in the future, the lives and works of the three Princes, 
 father and two sons, will be even more fully recorded. Especially the ophthalmic instru- 
 
568 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 pulled his shirt sleeves down: "Thomas, you certainly did 
 work that Lister-engine beautifully. You showed remark- 
 able skill: you will some day be a surgeon." Astounded at 
 the words, I looked straight into his eyes. And there was 
 an old, kindly joke-maker peeping out of them. He pinched 
 
 ments invented by Dr. Arthur Prince — for example, his corneal thermophore for pasteurization 
 of the cornea — should be made a note of. There has been, of course, no intentional neglect 
 in these matters, but precisely the same fate has overtaken the Princes that has overtaken, 
 say, Joseph Nash McDowell. McDowell in his day was probably the greatest teacher of 
 anatomy and surgery in the Mississippi Valley. Yet — look e.g. in the very latest edition of 
 Garrison's "History" for the slightest word about him. Alas, poor Yorick! 
 
 Dr. David Prince died in Jacksonville of pneumonia, December 19, 1889. He lies now 
 near Jacksonville in Diamond Grove Cemetery — one of the many burial places which he 
 had ofttimes been accused of robbing for the securement of sufficient dissecting material. 
 Later, a boulder was unveiled with suitable ceremonies at the site of his former home. 
 Famous physicians and other men of note from many states were present. 
 
 Dr. Arthur Edward Prince was born in 1855. After his father's death, he and his very 
 much younger brother, John (born 1863) removed to Springfield, Illinois, where they -estab- 
 lished "The David Prince Sanitarium." Dr. John died January 1, 1911; Dr. Arthur, October 
 21, 1930, of carcinoma of the lungs. 
 
 The descendants of Dr. David Prince are as follows : (By his first wife, Mary Jane Dawson, 
 a schoolteacher in Cincinnati, whom he married in 1841 and who died in 1849, four children, 
 all of whom died very early in life.) 
 
 Dr. David Prince — Married i8j2 — Lucy Manning Chandler (Died 1900), 
 Daughter of Judge John Chandler, of Fredonia, N. Y. 
 
 Dr. Arthur Edward Prince 
 
 Married 
 
 Charlotte Smith Hitchcock' 
 
 (Now at Springfield, 111.) 
 
 (Children) 
 
 Lucy VirginiaPrince, 1888-1934 
 
 David Chandler Prince, b. 1891 
 
 (Now at Schenectady, N. Y., 
 
 Mgr.Com. Eng.,Gen'l El. Co.) 
 
 Married 
 
 Winifred Notman 
 
 (Children) 
 
 David C. Jr., 1920 
 
 George Notman, 1922 
 
 Winifred Chandler, 1925 
 
 Edward, 1928 
 
 (Children) 
 
 Stella Prince (1858-1925) 
 
 Married 
 Dr. Samuel M. Stocker, 
 
 Jacksonville, 111., 
 
 Later, Duluth, Minn. 
 
 (Children) 
 
 Clara Stocker 
 
 (Now at Duluth, Minn.) 
 
 Dr. John A. Prince 
 
 Married first 
 
 Helen Bullard (deceased) 
 
 (Child) 
 
 David Prince, 1890 
 
 (Now at Atlanta, Ga.) 
 
 Arthur Prince, 1888-1902 
 
 David Prince 
 
 Married 
 
 Gertrude Jeannette McKinney, 
 
 of Chattanooga, Tenn. 
 
 (Children) 
 
 Jacqueline, born 1937 
 
 David, born 1940 
 
 Mary Prince, 1893 
 
 (Now at Edinburg, 111.) 
 
 Married 
 
 Amos Richardson 
 
 (No Children) 
 
 Dr. John Prince 
 
 Married second 
 
 Eva Cross 
 
 (Now at Beverly Hills, Cal.) 
 
 (Child) 
 
 Isabel 
 
 Married 
 
 Walter A. Wilde 
 
 (Now at Beverly Hills, Cal.) 
 
 For information about the Princes I am greatly indebted not only to Dr. Robert J. 
 Patton's excellent article above referred to and to Dr. Carl E. Black, but also to Mrs. Arthur 
 E. Prince, Mrs. David Chandler Prince and Miss Clara Stocker. 
 
m 
 
 £i 
 
 J.gfJ|fpjff*; : «» 
 
 9 . 
 
 
 f '« 
 
 | ? ;«i:r mmSt%l 
 
 w'Miis^m 
 
 BEECHER HALL, JACKSONVILLE, ILLINOIS 
 
 This building, long affectionately known as "Old Beecher," was not only the 
 first building erected by Illinois College, but it was also the first college build- 
 ing erected (1829) in Illinois. It also housed the first medical school in that 
 state. It was named for the first president of Illinois College, Dr. Edward 
 Beecher, son of the eminent divine, Lyman Beecher, and brother of the still 
 more eminent Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of 
 "Uncle Tom's Cabin," etc. 
 
 This building, "now used as a home for the literary societies of Illinois 
 College," presents on the brick wall just south of the entrance door a tablet 
 which is pictured hereunder. (I duplicate the words in type, because, in the 
 photograph of the tablet, some of the letters are partly concealed by vines.) 
 
 \ 
 
 
 s:M 
 
 
 "IN THIS BUILDING ILLINOIS 
 COLLEGE ESTABLISHED THE 
 FIRST MEDICAL SCHOOL IN 
 ILLINOIS IN 1841: OPENED TO 
 STUDENTS THE FIRST DAY OF 
 NOVEMBER, 1843: CLOSED IN 1848" 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 569 
 
mi:r;Mr **:P# %.:.. Ilil fell 
 
 THE PRINCE SANITARIUM, JACKSONVILLE, ILLINOIS 
 
 This Mayo Clinic, as it were, of an early day was founded by Dr. David Prince 
 in 1867. The structure was not an original building, but an enlarged and 
 worked over residence. In 1878 Dr. David Prince was joined in his work at the 
 Sanitarium by his older son, Dr. Arthur Edward Prince, and, much later, by 
 his other son, John. Dr. David died in 1889. A few years later the two sons 
 removed the Sanitarium to Springfield, Illinois, naming it then "The David 
 Prince Sanitarium." The building shown above was torn down in 1916. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 571 
 
 my arm playfully and walked off. A short, thick man, with 
 a big head, a quizzical smile and few words. 
 
 "Just what did Dr. Prince mean?" I asked — merely to 
 get acquainted — of one of the assistants, who was still ban- 
 daging. 
 
 "He meant," replied that young doctor, "that this," 
 touching the apparatus I had just been working, "is the 
 engine and that you — pointing at me a jocular ringer — are 
 the donkey." 
 
 "Tell me something new," said I, and we were friends 
 forevermore. 
 
 Dr. G. V. Black I saw a number of times at the Sani- 
 tarium, conferring with Dr. David, but I never did get ac- 
 quainted with him. His medical-student son, however, 
 Carl Ellsworth Black, who was also an "apprentice," or 
 observer, at the institution, I did meet now and then, and 
 the acquaintance so begun ripened many years later into a 
 fine friendship. 
 
 BACK TO MOTHER 
 
 The days flew by, indeed "as swiftly as a weaver's 
 shuttle. ' ' Much of my time I passed with Dr. Arthur watch- 
 ing him at his magical cataract operations or at the removal 
 of adenoids. Still, I often worked as "donkey" too at the 
 Lister engine, watching the skilful fingers of old Dr. 
 David, more and more skilful daily, I thought — as, of 
 course, I grew more and more able to appreciate his dexterity 
 and judgment. 
 
 Then, all at once, the golden days were gone. I must 
 now return to Pittsfield, and, next, to Inveni. 
 
 LAST DAYS AT INVENI 
 
 Time, in my last years at Inveni College went swiftly 
 indeed. 
 
 My brother William, in June of 1884, received his bach- 
 elor of arts at that institution, and, in the following Sep- 
 tember, entered The Jefferson Medical College, at Philadel- 
 phia. I was supposed to graduate at Inveni in June, 1886, 
 two years after William's graduation there. But, meantime, 
 various things were happening at Inveni. 
 
572 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 My father and mother, it is true, were receiving ever and 
 again from the Inveni authorities letters praising my work 
 at that institution very highly. Some of these I have already 
 reprinted in my "Tramping to Failure." One that gave me 
 special pleasure was written to my father by the professor 
 of Latin and Greek. It declared that I was the best linguist, 
 especially the best in Latin and Greek, that ever had at- 
 tended Inveni College. 
 
 Nevertheless, my unorthodox views in science, especially 
 those relating to the causation of many diseases, had made 
 me enemies not only among the theological students in our 
 little school but also among the faculty members themselves. 
 Was it any wonder, when even the members of the medical 
 profession, a large majority of them at least, were still 
 bitterly opposing clean (aseptic) surgery and even the germ 
 theory of disease — a "theory" which then had become a 
 thoroughly demonstrated fact? 
 
 Then, too, there was my boxing. I boxed a great deal, 
 and, spite of my smallness of stature and shortness of arms, 
 I had little difficulty in whipping most of the largest and 
 quickest both of the students and of the town's youth. That 
 came largely from my strength, which was surprisingly out 
 of proportion to my size, but also in great measure from my 
 knowledge of the difference between short-arm and long- 
 arm technique. The faculty could not understand at all the 
 difference between boxing and fighting. It was just all 
 "fighting." Or, if any difference, they seemed to think that 
 boxing was much the baser, the more thoroughly despised 
 and despicable, form of contest. A man might, in a pinch, 
 "fight" for a very good cause. But, for two sane men, 
 without any issue whatever except to be a-fighting, to beat 
 each other around unmercifully — sometimes into insensibil- 
 ity — was about the vilest form of human effort: so they 
 thought. 
 
 Besides that form of human effort which they so greatly 
 despised and which I so much loved, I indulged in various 
 other forms of "tramping" (to use my father's name for it) 
 i.e., indulgence in too many subjects of interest. This tramp- 
 ing, merely in and of itself, was particularly obnoxious to 
 several of the Inveni faculty, irrespective you understand of 
 any ill effects which it might have been alleged (but could 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 573 
 
 not truthfully have been alleged) to have on my work inside 
 the limits of the college curriculum. That curriculum was 
 in itself a sacred thing — like, for example, the Biblical 
 doctrine that all 1 diseases are produced by devils — disease- 
 producing spirits that are sent by Satan to torment people 
 and that can and do speak human language and that can 
 even argue about what is and what is not the proper kind 
 of interference with devils. 2 
 
 Indeed I do believe that the faculty, at least the most of 
 them, hated my excursions into extra-curricular fields very 
 largely because it was broadening, because it made the ex- 
 cursionist far less bound and shackled to the ideas underlying 
 their own rigid curriculum. It was not merely the germ 
 theory of disease-production which emancipated the free- 
 ranging scholar. 
 
 Again and again I was given quite plain indications by 
 certain members of the faculty that it would be well pleasing 
 unto them if I did not take so strong an interest in, for 
 examples, the earthworm, the various revelations of the 
 microscope, even the Gypsy language and various Indian 
 dialects. 
 
 It hurt me deeply that, at this institution, I was not 
 allowed to work on my own subjects, or, at all events, on 
 the subjects of the faculty's curriculum in my own way. I 
 began to acquire a repugnance toward colleges — all colleges, 
 especially all college presidents. 
 
 I had heard, to be sure, as I have already stated, about 
 President Charles William Eliot and his elastic, or "elec- 
 tive," system at Harvard, and I loved both him and that 
 system — loved them both beyond the power of any mere 
 words to express. But he and all that — I might as well have 
 reached for the moon. 
 
 1 Examples, Luke, IV ', 40-41: "And when the sun was setting, all they that had ANY 
 sick with divers diseases brought them unto him; and he laid his hands on every one of 
 them, and healed them. And devils also came out from many, crying out, and saying, 
 Thou art the Son of God." Matthew, VIII, 16: "And he cast out the spirits with a word, and 
 healed ALL that were sick." The exact language here given is that of the Revised Version. 
 
 2 Matthew, VIII, 28-32: "And when he was come to the other side into the country of 
 the Gadarenes, there met him two possessed with devils, coming forth out of the tombs, 
 exceeding fierce, so that no man could pass by that way. And behold, they cried out, saying, 
 What have we to do with thee, thou Son of God? Art thou come hither to torment us before 
 the time? Now there was afar off from them a herd of many swine feeding. And the devils 
 besought him, saying, If thou cast us out, send us away into the herd of swine. And he 
 said unto them, Go. And they came out," etc. 
 
574 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 My life was rendered still less endurable by a continually 
 increasing eyestrain — something that the greatest physicians 
 of that distant day seemed unable to remove, even to di- 
 agnose. This eyestrain made me much more irritable, more 
 quarrelsome, than I otherwise should have been. That irri- 
 tability, plus an inborn hatred of injustice in any and all of 
 its forms, plus, possibly, some desire to display my knowl- 
 edge of the fistic art — itself an obvious form of my tramping, 
 my dabbling into many subjects — all these three motives 
 combined in some proportion or another to lure me into 
 serious difficulties. 
 
 Finally I one day quarrelled with a member of my own 
 (the senior) class and whipped him to a standstill for cruelly 
 imposing on a feeble underclassman. 
 
 I thought at the time I was doing it that I did it simply 
 for the sake of unadulterated justice. Later I began to re- 
 alize that I had done it partly if not wholly in order to 
 exhibit my boxing prowess. 
 
 O the tramping, the tramping! How it got me into 
 trouble then — and still does. 
 
 THE SHOW-DOWN 
 
 And now (one of the very few times that I shall have 
 done so) I will quote a little from the first of my "lives," 
 my "Tramping to Failure." Indeed I may add that I have 
 almost altogether, throughout this entire volume, avoided 
 so far as possible even the indirectest narration of events 
 already set forth in the earlier book. 1 
 
 The offended senior talked over to his side two others 
 of our class — there were only five of us, all told, though 
 the lower classes numbered well into the hundreds — and 
 these three fellow seniors, for reasons, were influential with 
 the President, perhaps with others of the faculty. And it 
 was even more than easy, for reasons already apparent, to 
 be influential with at least the President against the in- 
 terests of a mere "tramp" and Fourth-of-July-Mining-Stock 
 "sucker." 2 
 
 1 The Inveni of the present day (under the old-time, but actual, name the institution 
 carries on) is a wide-awake, strictly modern affair, with an elastic, or "elective," curriculum, 
 and teachers who have mostly had their training in the broader-minded universities of the 
 world. 
 
 2 For much other documentary evidence relating to my departure from Inveni College, 
 in addition to that a few pages farther herein, see my "Tramping to Failure." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 575 
 
 On a day, as I learned from a friend, those three fellow 
 seniors had made their boasts about the college that I was 
 not to be allowed to graduate, but, instead, was to be de- 
 moted to the junior class. Who but the President himself 
 had decided that this should be so? 
 
 I went to the President and asked him what about the 
 matter? 
 
 He threw back his head and laughed heartily. "Pre- 
 posterous!" he cried. And he spoke in the highest terms of 
 the work that I'd been doing. 
 
 For a time my headaches became so intense that I went 
 off for a few days on a pedestrian excursion. On my return 
 to Inveni, my headaches appeared to be much better. All 
 the college atmosphere, however, seemed charged with the 
 wrong kind of electricity. A few of the students acted very 
 strangely toward me. 
 
 Came to me one day old Mushmouth Jones — my friend if 
 ever I had one. Said Mushmouth, "You're going to be 
 demoted — sure. You remember what I wrote you during 
 the holidays about Dillingham and what he said to me 
 about your mixing into his quarrel and giving him a licking? 
 Well, while you were gone on your long walk, the senior 
 class (all its four members other than yourself) held a secret 
 meeting — it would have been secret anyhow, even if you'd 
 been here — and he and Yinner and Sellback, all three agreed 
 that, if you graduated they wouldn't. Rooner opposed 'em 
 tooth and nail — good old Rooner — but he couldn't help you. 
 So they all went to the President's room, and Rooner again 
 talked for you but the three out-numbered him — and, in a 
 place like Inveni, numbers are what count. Savvy?" 
 
 Much hot anger had been banked up in me for three 
 glowing years. I darted over to the President's office in the 
 otherwise deserted Chapel building. The President was in. 
 I shouted, "Then it is true!" 
 
 He smiled in a calm and curious manner, drawled, "Is 
 what true?" 
 
 "The rumor I'm not to graduate?" 
 
 "No-o-o. I told you that before." 
 
 "But I've just heard that the class appeared before you 
 while I was out of Inveni, and that all but Rooner asked 
 
576 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 you not to graduate me but instead to demote me to the 
 junior class." 
 
 As heartily did he laugh as on that other occasion. ' 'Paid 
 your tuition yet for the term about to commence?" 
 
 "No, and I will not pay it if I'm to be demoted." 
 
 Reaching across the table, he picked up a tuition blank, 
 murmured, "Strange that you do not take my word," and, 
 in accordance with the custom of the place, filled in the 
 upper part of the blank and signed it. "I've looked into 
 your situation thoroughly," he said, "and found that not 
 only are you a senior in good standing, but that, in addition, 
 you're decidedly ahead of the class in your work and that 
 you therefore have but these two subjects to finish in order 
 to be ready for graduation — zoology and geology. [See the 
 illustration.] Now go over to the Bursar's office and pay 
 your little twelve dollars, and you'll feel better satisfied." 
 
 Grabbing the blank with delight, I cried, "I'm sorry — 
 very sorry — to have been so suspicious, but the blank — it 
 doesn't quite say — quite say — that I really am a senior and 
 that I need to complete merely the subjects that you men- 
 tion, in order to be able " 
 
 "You run right along. It doesn't need to say that. I've 
 told you already, and on me you can rely." 
 
 I rushed to the Bursar's office but it was closed. 
 
 Two days later I heard more rumors about my trouble, 
 and, remembering once more the Fourth of July Mining Co., 
 went again before the President more suspicious than ever, 
 and declared that I would not pay the tuition until he had 
 given me in writing a very specific statement that all I had 
 to do to graduate was to pass on those two subjects. 
 
 To my utmost astonishment he, arising, said: "I think 
 I had better investigate this matter once more and be certain. 
 Come tomorrow, and I'll give you my decision." 
 
 On the morrow I appeared in his office, and he said, 
 "Having investigated still more fully, and conferred with 
 all the faculty, I find you have yet to finish not two but 
 three subjects — zoology, geology and Demosthenes. — Now 
 go on and pay." 
 
 "I do not," said I, "object to taking Demosthenes again, 
 though I have already taken that subject and passed in it. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 577 
 
 But I will not pay the fee for the coming term without first 
 receiving a plain, specific statement, all in your own hand- 
 
 ^Or%Y 
 
 ZZ_i8ML 
 
 M t 
 
 On presentation of the Bursar's receipt for tuition and other 
 fees, is permitte'd to enter the following Classes in ^CX )Q College 
 
 for the„../Z&uAzZZ. Term. 
 
 YYCT 
 
 President. 
 
 JXX\| Illinois 
 Received of j^x/JL^ 
 
 For Tuition 
 
 Janitor's and Apparatus Fees 
 
 X A X r\ 
 
 £rp 
 
 Bursar. 
 
 At Top: President Osgoode's first statement, given after having looked into my situation "thor- 
 oughly." At Bottom: the Bursar's receipt, written three days later — i.e., after I had received 
 from the President a holographic and very specific statement given me after he had "investigated 
 still more thoroughly and conferred with all the faculty" — which statement also he later went 
 back on. 
 
 (Reduced in size and with some of the proper names covered with X'd paper) 
 
578 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 writing and to the same effect as what you now have 
 told me." 
 
 Thereupon he wrote out for me, all in his own hand, the 
 certificate herewith reproduced, which he called a "gradua- 
 tion permit," and which, surely, would have satisfied "a 
 Philadelphia lawyer." 
 
 Then commanded he, "Pay." He did not think to add 
 the Demosthenes requirement to the Bursar's blank, nor 
 did I think to remind him. 
 
 I went to the Bursar's and paid, but, going back to my 
 rooming-house, was overtaken by Dillingham and Yinner, 
 each of whom curtly and emphatically declared to me that 
 (1) they hated the ground I walked on (2) that it had been 
 expressly decided I was not to graduate that year. "We 
 had it from the President straight this very unforgettable 
 minute," said they. 
 
 I hurricaned back to the President. He admitted every- 
 thing — now I had paid. But he added, "The trouble was 
 that I gave you the permit without sufficient investigation. 
 Your professors are all against you." 
 
 KXXS 
 
 » 
 
 
 
 4>Z^ *£. 
 
 uxxm 
 
 The holographic and very specific statement given me by the President of 
 Inveni after he had "investigated still more fully and conferred with all the 
 faculty." Considerably reduced in size and with some of the proper names 
 covered with X'd paper. 
 
 (For much other documentary evidence relating to my departure from 
 Inveni College, see my "Tramping to Failure.") 
 
DR. DAVID PRINCE 
 Founder in 1867 of the Prince Sanitarium and from then till his Death in 1889 
 a Surgeon who Ranked with McDowell and Hodgen. 
 
 The above is a zinc etching of a pen drawing made when Prince was in his 
 prime. This drawing possesses high value not only because it faithfully trans- 
 mits the thoughtfully earnest yet also gently humorous character of its subject, 
 but also because it was made by the hand of Prince's chief friend — him who 
 was almost universally then, and still is, termed The Father of Modern 
 (Scientific) Dentistry, Greene Vardiman Black. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
DR. DAVID PRINCE 
 
 From this picture the suggestion of eye-closing good humor apparent in the 
 pen-and-ink sketch by Dr. G. V. Black is absent. In fact this photograph 
 shows precisely the expression of stunned and well-nigh abhorrent sadness which 
 I observed on Dr. David's countenance one day when a nurse entered the room 
 announcing the almost incredible news that Mrs. So-and-so [a patient in the 
 sanitarium] had just then suddenly died. 
 
 (Original photo lent by Miss Clara Stocker, Duluth, Minn., a grand- 
 daughter of Dr. David Prince.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
.^m- 
 
 M : m 
 
 DR. ARTHUR EDWARD PRINCE, IN HIS PRIME 
 
 At the Prince Sanitarium, which he entered in 1878, eleven years after 
 its foundation, he did all the work on the eye, ear, nose and throat, in 
 which specialties he was highly renowned. He published a good many 
 articles and invented numerous instruments and procedures. Especi- 
 ally remembered by the profession are his: Corneal Thermophore, for 
 pasteurization of the Cornea; Trachoma Forceps; Advancement For- 
 ceps and Advancement Needle (both used in certain cross-eye op- 
 erations); Pterygium Divulsion Hook; Cauthoplasty Needle; La- 
 crimal Syringe. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
A STUDENT PICTURE OF DR. ARTHUR EDWARD PRINCE 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 582 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 583 
 
 I felt myself growing old with rage. Attempting to move 
 my tongue and lips, I could not even get connected with 
 them. I wished to step toward him, was ataxic. 
 
 A sudden idea! I would talk to the other professors! 
 Somewhat calming was the thought. 
 
 I went and talked with each of them. And every one of 
 them said, "You have my vote," until — 
 
 I reached my dearly beloved Professor of the Ancient 
 Languages. He had just dismissed a class and was talking 
 to two or three students who had loitered. 
 
 As I looked upon his quiet, kindly face, I felt a tremen- 
 dous uprush of full assurance, a firm conviction that only 
 President Osgoode could be really against me. 
 
 In a very few moments I related to him all that had 
 passed between the President and myself. 
 
 Then, all at once, this man was baring his soul to me. 
 "You've fooled away your time," he said, "on Gypsy and 
 Choctaw. Besides you're not even a gentleman. You should 
 never have questioned your demotion when it was announced 
 to you and to the world by the President." 
 
 So here was the trouble (or pretended trouble) after all — 
 here with my favorite professor — the man I had loved al- 
 most equally with the father that had borne me in his arms. 
 Then I did a very foolish thing, though one for me quite 
 natural. 
 
 "You!" I cried, shaking from head to feet with amaze- 
 ment and paralyzing rage. "You! Why, surely you don't 
 say — that I — when studying Gypsy and Choctaw, neglected 
 my Greek and my Latin. You wrote to my father — " 
 
 He himself was shaking. But he drew slowly from his 
 pocket a little black book, and, in a high-pitched voice, 
 declared, "I tell you I have no record here of your having 
 passed, or even ever having taken an examination in any sub- 
 ject whatever that has been taught you by me." 
 
 I promptly stepped between him and the door, for he 
 was starting to leave. The language of the Pittsfield Public 
 Schools, barring only the obscenity, flew in a mad torrent to 
 my lips. 
 
 First I spat out an oath or so to get my throat loose. 
 
584 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Then I cursed him to some effect. I cursed him red and 
 I cursed him white. Going beyond the mere pale language 
 of the unresourceful public schools, I cursed him in German 
 and I cursed him in French. I even gave him long, poly- 
 syllabic maledictions in both of his classical languages, and 
 I made a quick and accurate job of it too. 
 
 I bade him, as he attempted to speak, to be silent, and, 
 like the fool that I was, threatened to whip him if he stirred. 
 
 He sank into his chair — that blessed cathedra from which 
 he had so often and so enthusiastically praised my lin- 
 guistic work. 
 
 I cursed him up out of the chair. I cursed him clean 
 across the room. Cursed him back to his professorial throne. 
 Made him sit once more down in it and listen. 
 
 I reminded him of the letter he had written to my father 
 wherein he had emphatically stated I was the best linguist 
 that ever had come to Inveni College. 
 
 I explained to him his motives (for these, by then, I 
 clearly perceived) which had caused him to become the will- 
 ing tool of an unjust president. (Six mere hundred a year, 
 I had heard, for a salary!) 
 
 "Liar!" he cried. But I paid no attention, for there, 
 suddenly, beside me walked Mushmouth Jones. "Don't 
 waste truth on him" said Jones. 
 
 Back in the President's office I told that evasive official 
 all the kinds of things that he was, omitting nothing what- 
 ever, not even his connection with "The Original Fourth 
 of July Mining Company." I even descanted on the financial 
 status of the so-called college whose president he was, an 
 institution so poor that even for twelve dollars— great God, 
 for a tiny sum like twelve dollars — " 
 
 Old Mushmouth prodded me and pointed to the President. 
 
 Mushmouth and I were standing. The President, seated, 
 had his left arm hanging by his left side, his right laid loose, 
 perfectly limp, across the back of his disreputable chair. 
 
 Not one of us for some time spoke. Then all at once I 
 thought that the President's gaze became strangely inten- 
 sified. The pupils enlarged blackly, something appeared deep 
 down in them and far beyond — or did I just imagine it? — 
 painful to see. I beheld in imagination and with childish 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 585 
 
 astonishment all the protracted struggle this man had un- 
 dergone while endeavoring to keep his little school alive; 
 the wrenching need of money both by the institution and 
 himself; all the fakery, the sham, the hollow pretense at 
 having a good college, this school that might really have 
 come to the fore in better circumstances; even the financial 
 necessity for the favoritism so sedulously practiced by him 
 and some of the other professors toward the whole body of 
 students and also toward each of the various classes — the 
 necessity, that is, forever to side with the largest, at least 
 the most influential, number whenever a rift appeared. 
 
 With a pang at my heart — a pang that made me almost 
 angry at myself — I saw, I believed, the entire story: the 
 continual defeat, the repeated frustration, the intolerable 
 despair. 
 
 "Good-bye, Tommy," said the President. He arose and 
 gave me his shaking hand. I took it. I could not then 
 foresee how often this man, directly and indirectly, was to 
 come into my life thereafter, or in what harmful ways. 
 
 Yes, I gave him my hand. But still I insisted, as a matter 
 of self-respect alone, that he should remove at once my name 
 from the register of students. "You'll take it off — clear off?" 
 "Yes, I'll take it off." "And at once — and say that the 
 removal was made at my request?" "Yes, I'll do that: there 
 shall be no blot on your record." 
 
 I mumbled a strange good-bye, and, Mushmouth with 
 me, left him. 
 
 A strange good-bye indeed! And what a world it is of 
 oddly mixed commotions and emotions! For a moment I 
 felt a desire to go back and say to the President I was sorry 
 I had talked to him so. Yet I could not quite do that. 
 However sentimental I might be feeling at the particular 
 moment, I was right and he was wrong. And whatsoever 
 the forces might have been that had thrust him into what I 
 considered his wrong-doing, he was, nevertheless, clearly 
 doing wrong. Mushmouth agreed with me. 
 
 The next morning the old professor of mathematics (what 
 an insane world this is, I never was good in mathematics) 
 came quietly to me at my rooming-house, and, putting a 
 sweet arm about my shoulders, said, "You had at least my 
 
586 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 vote — Tom." The professor of modern languages too, Carl 
 Swiss, came to me on the street and bade me a gentle good- 
 bye. 
 
 All day the car- wheels drummed and drummed. 
 
 At night I reached Pittsfield and the old, dear house. 
 
 As I opened the door and walked in, there, before me, 
 book in hand, sat my father, looking very aged and, having 
 driven far that day probably, worn out. How my heart 
 yearned toward him! 
 
 I said, just as softly as I could, for I loved him dearly: 
 ' 'You were exactly right, Father. I have tramped to failure. 
 
 I GET "THE BUM'S RUSH" AT ILLINOIS ALSO 
 
 I was out with Father in the country early next morning. 
 The night before he had refused to listen to my story — 
 being too exhausted then to hear it — and so we had all gone 
 at once to bed. 
 
 But, in the night, my mother had arisen and come up- 
 stairs to me, being unable to wait until dawn, and, as she 
 sat near my bed, she asked for my "side" of the tale. When 
 I had got through, "I," said she, "had expected so much 
 of you. We had had such glowing accounts from your pro- 
 fessors. I do not think that you should at Inveni have 
 mentioned the Fourth of July Mining Company. Why now 
 not just forget such things? We all must forgive and forget. 
 The germ theory of disease too, what does it matter? True 
 or false, why argue about it? And all those various subjects 
 that were not in the curriculum. You got your lessons — true 
 enough; but these outside subjects only angered your pro- 
 fessors . Why have you played around with them?' ' My mother 
 to say such things! She who had bought me the Syriac 
 grammar, various books on the Indian languages, Gypsy 
 folk lore, and so on! 
 
 I knew better, even then (some times) than to argue 
 with women, so said only "I was unhappy." 
 
 She looked at me gravely and penetratingly, went down- 
 stairs without another word, and wrote a long letter wherein 
 she "cooked" the entire faculty of Inveni and cooked them 
 with the facts alone. Having addressed the letter to the 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 587 
 
 President, she gave it to me to mail. "Don't you fail to 
 post that letter," she admonished as I started uptown. 
 I fail to post that letter! 
 
 In the country with my father I poured out a swift, 
 staccato account of the tragedy, the whole Inveni tale. 
 
 His eyes grew sharp, and hard and cool, and his mouth 
 was like a distorted scar. 
 
 I remember even how the world appeared to me that 
 blustery winter's day. The wind so loud, so cold, so full 
 of hostile song, the drifts so deep, the doors of all the 
 houses seeming so tightly shut, so inhospitable, against us. 
 
 When my father at length spoke it was to ask a question, 
 and that he did with very odd gentleness. "Do you want 
 to know what has been going on in the world of late with 
 regard to the germ theory?" 
 
 Strange question to ask! 
 
 "You know that I do." 
 
 And he told me about the germ theory all that he had 
 not written me since the December holidays. Then he wound 
 up with another glorious apocalypse — a prediction that the 
 germ theory would turn out to be the most important and 
 most beneficent event in the history of mankind, "either in 
 times past or in times still to come, to the very ending of 
 the world." 
 
 I, quite naturally, agreed with him, for had he not oceans 
 of evidence spread out plainly before him? But there came 
 to me at that time one of the earliest premonitions I ever 
 had had with regard to the work I was yet to do against 
 the one Satanic agency which, possibly, is even more de- 
 structive than disease — namely, war. I said to my father 
 that whosoever could devise any sort or kind of procedure 
 that would check wars, even if it were only wars of the 
 worst description, the international sort, would be doing al- 
 most as much to lower the death-rate of the human family 
 as the germ theory itself could accomplish. Then, as to the 
 deterioration of the human intellect and moral character, 
 was not war, with its remote as well as its proximal effects, 
 even more destructive of these things than sickness itself? 
 
 My father agreed with me as to the need for an effective 
 control of some sort for war. Yet he disallowed my state- 
 
588 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 ment that war was more destructive, either physically, 
 mentally or morally, than disease. And he went on pointing 
 out why he disagreed. All at once he asked, "Did you, in 
 addition to your tramping — which must itself have offended 
 those sticklers for a rigid curriculum — did you not, in addi- 
 tion to that, say or do this, that, or the other thing which 
 might have given offense to the Inveni authorities?" 
 
 I told him of the fight I had had with Dillingham, my 
 boxing contests generally — of which, already, by letter, I 
 had apprized him. "And then," said I, "in the course of 
 my discussions with the President as to the Dillingham 
 matter and as to whether or not I was to be allowed to 
 graduate, I happened to mention your views about the germ 
 theory, and, thereupon, he took me severely to task for speak- 
 ing in favor of that theory. 
 
 "I also, one day," I said, "when a theological student 
 declared in my presence that there was not one thing in the 
 Bible, Old Testament or New, that could not be fully dis- 
 cussed in mixed company anywhere and without hesitation, 
 
 I, I say, spoke up at once, referring to the aged King David's 
 bad case of impotence and its treatment with the virgin who 
 was laid in his bosom (1 Kings, I, 1 to 5). Also of the nu- 
 merous other old-time stories of sexual matters which could 
 not possibly be used in mixed company: the numerous in- 
 stances of prostitution, of horrible incest, of homosexuality, 
 of the woman preacher who taught fornication (Revelation, 
 
 II, 20), of the young man who had sexual intercourse with 
 ten women in public (II Samuel, XV, 16; XVI: 21-22), and 
 so on almost innumerably. 
 
 "This same theologue came to me one day," I said, "and 
 declared, 'The trouble with you, Shastid, is that you do not 
 understand that the causes of things have changed since 
 Bible days. You, for example, believe that, because many, 
 perhaps most, diseases are now caused by germs, they must 
 have been so caused in the time of Jesus. I take the position 
 that the causes of disease, even the cause of the same disease, 
 was very different then from what it is now. The cause of 
 most diseases then was devils. The cause of the same dis- 
 eases now is demonstrably germs. That is the difference, a 
 mere difference in time, but a difference you cannot compre- 
 hend or appreciate, and so the whole matter is settled.' 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 589 
 
 'Not so fast!' cried I. 'When did the change in the 
 causation of disease take place? In the time of Jesus, you 
 say, all diseases were caused by devil-possession. If so, 
 when did diseases cease to be caused by devil-possession and, 
 many of them at least, begin to be caused by demonstrable 
 germs — microscopic plants and animals? Not in the time 
 of the early church assuredly, for the earlier followers of 
 Jesus kept right on, according to their own statements, 
 which still we can read, curing all diseases by casting out 
 devils. Soon they had a special set of priests, known as 
 "exorcisers," or "exorcists," whose chief, or entire, duty was 
 to cast out devils for the healing of the sick. St. Augustine, 
 Gregory the Great, and other fathers of the church refer to 
 these exorcists frequently and with full belief in their powers. 
 In the middle ages the belief in the devil-causation of disease 
 was even, if possible, still more firmly established, and vast 
 fortunes were paid to the church by wealthy persons for the 
 treatment of their corporeal afflictions by exorcism. Even 
 in the 17th and 18th centuries European monarchs kept by 
 their sides their own family exorcists, in whose ability to 
 cast out disease-producing devils they and the church 
 alike had fullest confidence. 
 
 'Until the 17th century there had been no instru- 
 ments capable of revealing to human eyes the actual 
 producers of many diseases, and not until this present 
 century (1871 to 1876 in fact) did Carl Weigert, of Berlin, 
 show the way to stain bacteria — many of which, without 
 the staining, cannot be seen even with a microscope, because 
 they cannot, without the staining, be distinguished from 
 the media in which they are found. [The bacteria of tuber- 
 culosis, for example, are mostly found in the sputum (spit-out 
 matter) of consumptives. Put that sputum under the mi- 
 croscope and still you do not see the germs. Apply then the 
 stains. The germs stain in one way, the rest of the sputum 
 in another way, and so the causes of the tuberculosis lie 
 plainly revealed.] 
 
 'But, in a word, the germ-causation of disease has 
 been discovered and proved by Pasteur, Lister, Weigert and 
 Koch just recently — for all these men are still living. 
 
 'And now do you mean seriously to tell me that the 
 cause of all diseases has remained the possession of human 
 
590 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 bodies by the emissaries of Satan (devils) until just that 
 precise time when men became able to investigate the causes 
 of diseases and that then^ at that -precise moment ■, the cause of 
 diseases changed — ceased to be devil-possession and became, 
 almost at a jump, at least in the case of many diseases, 
 demonstrably something else? 
 
 'Do you not think it peculiar that such a gigantic 
 change in disease causation should wait until that very 
 moment when men became able to investigate disease causa- 
 tion? 
 
 Is it not far more likely that your view is a mere 
 assumption devised solely for the purpose of supporting a 
 conception of disease causation which cannot bear com- 
 parison with the facts?' x 
 
 "He walked away muttering, and, like some others, be- 
 came my enemy. 
 
 "Still other students of theology, however, with whom 
 I spoke on the subject of the germ theory, were broad-minded 
 indeed, and — strangely, I thought, and yet it was a fact — 
 the older the men the more broad-minded they ofttimes 
 were." 
 
 My father did not at once speak to the point but began 
 to tell me about some experiments of his own. He had a 
 way of doing that, of talking lightly about one thing while 
 thinking deeply about another. He said he had been work- 
 ing on a method for rendering quinine either tasteless or 
 palatable. (Quinine was used in enormous quantities in 
 those days and was a nauseous draught: capsules had not 
 come into general use and pills ofttimes were insoluble. 
 People, too, were ceasing to demand nauseous draughts and 
 beginning to ask for agreeable mixtures instead.) When I 
 reminded him he had been working on a palatable, or taste- 
 less, quinine for many years, he replied, "Yes, but I'm nearly 
 successful now. I'm working too on the effects of glycerine 
 and other emollients on gutta percha splints. Such splints 
 are too hard, immoldable. Then too I am working on a way 
 
 1 Fossils of prehistoric man show the remains of many disease-producing micro-organisms 
 together with the lesions which they had produced and which the same species of micro- 
 organisms still produce to-day. The sciences which treat of these matters are known as 
 "paleopathology" and "paleobacteriology." 
 
DR. CARL ELLSWORTH BLACK 
 (Recent Portrait) 
 
 Son of Dr. G. V. Black, "Dr. Carl," as he is familiarly known, is himself a 
 renowned surgeon and writer on surgical subjects. Among his most important 
 contributions to medical literature is the biography of his father and brother, 
 frequently adverted to herein, which he wrote in collaboration with his wife, 
 Bessie McLaughlin Black, and which is entitled "From Pioneer to Scientist." 
 
 Well indeed has it been declared that the biography by Dr. Carl and his 
 wife is "the history of dentistry in the nineteenth century." 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 593 
 
 to change one species of bacterium into another — a harmful 
 kind into a harmless. Then — 
 
 "My son," he cried out suddenly, and returning to the 
 idea which a few moments earlier we had dropped, "the 
 Bible needs no lies to support it. If it did it would be no Bible. 
 Besides, there is something greater by far than even the 
 Bible. That is truth. The Bible is great only wherein and 
 insofar as it speaks truth. It is sometimes mistaken, demon- 
 strably so, and, when it is, we should frankly admit the 
 fact — not thereby at all undervaluing the truth that is in 
 the book. 
 
 "Had you, my son, told lies about the germ theory or 
 about the Bible, in order to support the Bible wherein it is 
 plainly mistaken, I should not have been proud of you — but 
 ashamed. 
 
 "Nevertheless, it might have been well to be silent alto- 
 gether on matters wherein you could not speak the truth 
 without being harmfully misjudged." 
 
 I answered promptly, "But you, dear Father, here in the 
 very place where you were making a livelihood both for 
 yourself and for your family — you spoke out the truth, did 
 you not — the truth about the germ theory and Listerism? 
 Yes, you spoke it out. In the presence both of devils and of 
 angels you spoke it. And you stood steadily by that truth. 
 There was not even hesitation in your mouth. I have only 
 done likewise, save that I was not so efficient or courageous 
 as were you." 
 
 He was silent a long time. Then, "It was all my fault. 
 I should have sent you to your Charles William Eliot — to 
 Harvard. There men may speak their minds." 
 
 "Yes," I responded, "and use their fists in the cause of 
 justice, and do a great many other things. But — there were 
 jour boys, Father." 
 
 "Yes there were four, and not one too many." 
 
 Nevertheless, my father decided that, before I started 
 into medical school, I should enter some other academic 
 college than Inveni — no place so expensive as Harvard how- 
 ever — and there go on to graduation. 
 
594 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 I, therefore, wrote to the President of Illinois College, 
 E. A. Tanner, but was, in effect, given "the bum's rush," 
 because of a letter which had been received by him from 
 President Osgoode concerning me. 1 
 
 To other schools I wrote, but always with the same 
 result. Not infrequently the President of Inveni had written 
 to the school before I had even applied to it — warning, as it 
 were, the institution to be on its guard against me. Always 
 he referred to my "graduation permit," but declared it had 
 been given without sufficient investigation and that it, 
 therefore, later had been revoked. 
 
 Twice, much angered, I childishly wrote to President 
 Osgoode, demanding the return of "that twelve dollars," 
 on the ground that he had obtained it by first giving me a 
 graduation permit, and then, when the school had got my 
 money, cancelling the permit and not returning the cash. 
 He did not on either occasion answer. 
 
 I began to see that the midget institution, Inveni, was 
 not by any means a joke. Through the persistence and bit- 
 terly revengeful spirit of its President, it was being used as 
 an extremely destructive force against me. 
 
 The President, in time, became to me a veritable night- 
 mare. I dreamed horrible dreams about him. I was on a 
 cliff and he was attempting to push me over, or I was on a 
 burning ship and he, although he had a large life-preserver 
 of his own, was attempting to take my little one away from 
 me. Once he had me before a great benchful of judges, and 
 to them he made out (as in fact he had done to all the col- 
 leges to which I had written, but now in a hard, ringing 
 speech instead of a letter) that I had been a fighter, a pugil- 
 ist, a mere common bruiser, also that I had been a dancer 
 
 1 1 still possess two holographic letters by the President of Inveni, one written on 
 January 28, to my father, and one on January 30, to my mother, both in 1886, and both 
 professing to answer the letters of firm protest which my parents had sent him against my 
 treatment at Inveni. These letters — among the most curious I have ever seen — are far too 
 long for reproduction here. They both, however, boil down to about the same indictment 
 that the President had made me personally — I was nothing but a boxer, etc. Nevertheless, 
 the writer strongly (and strangely) urged that I return to Inveni for another year of study 
 and then — graduation! 
 
 I was not good enough for other colleges but was good enough for his! 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 595 
 
 [in all my life I had never learned a step] , that I had played 
 cards, even though only for fun, that I had been profane — 
 
 Maiii* 
 
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 fh^J^M, 
 
 
 //^(Wl^^kyN S*\j£K 
 
 
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 /^/&/Lus~jC Gft^/tZ^Lf^ ^^^cJ^My <ZO ^^MC^—- 
 
 
 THE "BUM'S RUSH" AT ILLINOIS COLLEGE 
 
 The first page of a letter from President E. A. Tanner, of Illinois College, to 
 the Tramp. As in a number of other letters, the objections offered were actually 
 not so much to myself as they were to Inveni. Some of the proper names have 
 been covered with X'd paper. 
 
596 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Interrupting I attempted to tell the judges that all the 
 matters alleged, even if true as stated, could not explain my 
 demotion from the senior to the junior class and that that 
 was the matter in question, not an expulsion from the school, 
 inasmuch as I had not been expelled. Also, anyway, what 
 about the "Original Fourth of July Mining Company"? 
 What about — 
 
 But the shoutings of "silence" which came repeatedly 
 from the judges prevented my speaking effectually, and 
 quickly a dark giant came, led me away, and cast me into a 
 dungeon along with hundreds of more literal tramps. 
 
 Jean Valjean, I thought, had had rather an easy time 
 with Javert. 
 
 One day I discovered that scarcely any of the medical 
 colleges in the United States had as yet set up any admission 
 requirements of an academic character. Said I to my father, 
 "Please drop this vain endeavoring to get me into academic 
 colleges, and, instead, put me into a medical school forth- 
 with. I know my Greek and Latin, and, with a medical 
 degree, I can make a living — at the worst." 
 
 He, therefore, wrote to The College of Physicians and 
 Surgeons in the City of New York (the Medical Department 
 of Columbia University) and — here was I now on the train, 
 dark inside with thoughts of old Inveni. 
 
 By an effort of the will, I threw the gloom off, and began 
 writing on a bit of paper certain resolutions for my future 
 guidance. I have them still, and here they are: 
 
 1. — Not to be a tramp any more, but to study medicine 
 and that only. 
 
 2. — To give up anger — once and forever, now and etern- 
 ally. Yes, by Hercules himself and Hippocrates also I would 
 give it all up. 
 
 "He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; 
 And he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh 
 a city." 
 3- — To quit boxing — quit it forever and a day. 
 Most people know no difference between this excellent 
 "sport" and "fighting," and, if you box with even the 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 597 
 
 finest of art, they will call you a "bruiser" and a "thug" 
 just the same — the dirty, low-browed, scandal-mongering 
 libellous scamps! 
 
 4. — To quit being so terribly no account for days when- 
 ever I saw a funeral procession. 
 
 5. — Once again: To quit being a tramp — attend to just 
 one thing, and, to that sole unity, to give my very soul. 
 
 These resolutions I wrote to my mother jerkily, as I rode 
 along on the way to Gotham. 
 
 Then I forgot them all ! 
 
 Even on the latter half of my very way to Gotham I 
 forgot them, began to promise myself that, some day, I 
 would drop my medical practice, wheresoever I might be 
 "located," and seek out President Eliot and his school for 
 tramps. 
 
 Those resolutions, however, did certainly do my poor 
 old parents a great deal of good. 
 
 They two kept the letter in a very special box, apart 
 from all my other missives, for something like forty long 
 years, and read it as carefully and frequently as if it had 
 been a new gospel text. 
 
 For that reason I am glad indeed I wrote it. 
 
 I was also glad, even as I journeyed along toward Gotham, 
 that I had written it. In fact I pondered my rules for a time, 
 and committed them to memory — until, as the night came 
 down, I began to imagine — for I was still only a child, a 
 little sentimental fool — how much the innumerable night- 
 falls must, throughout the ages, have meant in the hearts 
 of grief-stricken men. I attempted to add something of my 
 feeling to my mother's letter, but, making a queer mess of it, 
 wound up by holding my hat to the side of my face so that 
 I could watch the villages and farmhouses slip by, hour 
 after hour. 
 
 And I remember the pang of sorrow I felt over each little 
 star of light as it flashed out in some farmhouse window, 
 because I never could be part or portion of the human circle 
 that I knew was gathered round about it. Finally I fell 
 alseep while dreaming that my mother was saying to me, 
 
598 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Try, my son, to help these people. Free them from some 
 of their troubles — sickness, worry, fear, war." 
 
 I exclaimed, "A boy like me!" 
 
 "Wake up, wake up!" she cried, "and see that you are 
 a boy no longer." 
 
 I did awake, but it was only the conductor shaking me, 
 and — I was still a boy. 
 
 But, in later years — for one whole decade I completely 
 forgot the matter — I have often remembered that dream by 
 the side of the night-filled window-pane. 
 
 I have really tried to live up to the dream, but, as you 
 saw at the beginning of my other "Life," I was foredoomed 
 to a considerable percentage of failure. 
 
 GOTHAM AT LAST 
 Arrived in New York, I went at once to the college 
 (Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third Street), matriculated, 
 went at once out and secured a room at 56 Lexington Avenue. 
 
 THE END OF AN OLD AGONY 
 As I have said, I got me, first of all things in New York, 
 a room and a room-mate at 56 Lexington Avenue. But there 
 I stayed less than a month. My room-mate, an excellent 
 middle-aged doctor who long had practised successfully in 
 the Northwest but who never had taken his degree and had 
 now come back to get it, made too hilarious fun of my 
 "household gods" — the bits of home I had brought with me : 
 the Indian bead-bag, the queerly colored stone, the curtain- 
 hook, and so on. Whenever I took these articles out and 
 looked upon them lovingly, he exploded into guffaws. Then 
 too he had a way of smoking and telling stories till nearly 
 midnight, and then, all of a sudden, beginning to study aloud. 
 I, bereft of sleep at night, was dauncy all day. I gently pro- 
 tested — in vain, grew tired of the situation, moved to 313 
 East Nineteenth Street, where I had a fine large room to 
 myself and also where I took a vow — never at all to be 
 broken — that I would have no room-mate ever again there- 
 after. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 599 
 
 Even before I left Lexington Avenue I had gone to con- 
 sult our professor of ophthalmology — Cornelius Rea Agnew 
 — about my then almost incessant headaches and flaming 
 pains about and in my eyes. 
 
 I never can forget my magical meeting with that famous 
 old professor. 
 
 He was of middle height and slender build, dark-eyed, 
 dark-complexioned, and, at that time, with the remains of 
 a raven blackness still lingering in his rapidly whitening 
 hair. He was gently dignified in manner, and, even in serious 
 conversation, had a way of smiling softly from time to time, 
 as if a pleasant undercurrent of thought were playing beneath 
 the more immediate matter. 
 
 I recall especially the manner in which, when he had 
 handed to me the folded bit of paper containing the results 
 of my test, he took me by the shoulders, and, looking me 
 full in the eyes, said in that kindly voice that all who knew 
 him remember still, "Young man, be there in you much or 
 little, the glasses you will get in accordance with this pre- 
 scription will prove to be a turning-point in your life." 
 
 I ran with that prescription almost all the way to Clair- 
 mont and Hahn's — a lens-grinding shop in the basement of 
 the P. and S. building. 
 
 "Come back day after tomorrow," instructed the clerk, 
 as I handed him that paper slip. 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Tomorrow, then." 
 
 "No." I struck the wooden desk as hard as I could. 
 "For more than nineteen years I've been waiting for those 
 glasses, and I want them NOW!" 
 
 Open flew his eyes. "Impossible! Say two hours, though. 
 I'll do the best I can for you." 
 
 I was back at the end of that time, got my glasses, and, 
 having paid some nominal price for them, walked out into 
 a newer and better world. 
 
 Thank God there was a newer and better world to walk 
 out into. 
 
600 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 TRAMPING 
 Much I tramped on the streets of New York — both phys- 
 ically and mentally. In second-hand book-stores I picked 
 up many an odd subject and away and away I went with it. 
 
 In my New York room I sometimes tramped even more 
 than on the streets: studied Swedish a little, Hungarian a 
 little more, Gypsy — I never could give up Gypsy — read now 
 and then the life tale of some or another mediaeval or ancient 
 medical worthy. 
 
 But mostly I stuck to the textbooks of the medical school. 
 
 I see the old skull once again, as he looks down on me 
 from my mantle of a night, grinning with that never-chang- 
 ing friendliness, that old, well-known hollo wed-eyed en- 
 couragement. "Work! Work!" he seems to insist. "Too 
 soon you will be like me, and then it will be too late to 
 work. Work! Work! Stick! Stick! Stick ever closer to 
 your job. No tramping, mind you!" 
 
 In my closet always I kept an extra "part" — an arm, a 
 leg, a head. As a rule, a head. These parts I had somewhat 
 surreptitiously, but still with the attendant's full knowl- 
 edge, removed not indeed from the college dissecting-room, 
 where a strict account, as I knew, was always kept of all 
 the bodies, but from the morgue. A little side-slipped "con- 
 sideration" always rendered this possible. I had a small 
 refrigerator box, under lock and key, and dissected, read, 
 thought it all out at my tramp-like leisure. It was the only 
 way, that leisurely one, in which I ever could study satis- 
 factorily. 
 
 From time to time, there in New York, I, for a breathing 
 spell, would throw open my front window and, first, look 
 down at the pigmy, foreshortened multitudes which filled 
 the roaring street continually, then up, up at the infinite 
 grandeur of the blue-black dome — the all-embracing milky 
 way, the varied constellations, the silent indifference, the 
 ever-unchanging remoteness, perhaps the absolute lifeless- 
 ness, hopelessness and meaninglessness of it all. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 601 
 
 And then, before I could get to thinking too strongly 
 about myself as a mere atom of nothing on a mere planet of 
 nothing, "moating," as it were, from a void of darkness 
 back into a void of darkness again, I would attack once 
 more the well-loved studies. 
 
 And strange it was how much the skull upon the mantle 
 kept me from homesickness and from all those morbid 
 thoughts about the little white house and its long black 
 shadow which had followed me so far and so depressingly. 
 
 It was, of course, my constant association with the skull, 
 as well as the fact that I had been accustomed to handling 
 and studying a skeleton in my father's old office, which had, 
 for me, removed from these almost universally accepted em- 
 blems of mortality even the very last tendency to produce 
 melancholy or depression. 
 
 It was all a matter of use — familiarity. No doubt had I, 
 after the death of the farmer at the little white house, moved 
 into the place with my parents and my brothers, I should, 
 before long, have played about in its yard with absolute 
 indifference to what had happened once within the building, 
 at night have lined up with my brothers on the back stoop 
 to have our little "trampers" washed, and then, very happy 
 indeed, have dashed upstairs to bed — just as we always had 
 done in the old home at Pittsfield. 
 
 At all events I did not do badly in those days. 
 It was fine to have one's eyes so good and strong, so 
 clear and so absolutely tireless. 
 
 I worked like a dog and felt like a god. 
 
 VACATION AND RETURN 
 The time soon came to leave Gotham for home. 
 I was walking, one day near the close of the "year," in 
 the main hall of the College, when, all at once, I saw ap- 
 proaching John G. Curtis, whom I had improperly detested. 
 He smiled, actually smiled, put out a hand, said, "I have 
 watched your work, Dr. Shastid, and have also talked with 
 your quizmasters. We are glad to have such men as you 
 come back to the College. Come." 
 
602 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 MORE TROUBLE FROM THE G. P. 
 One day, still later, he called me into his room, and, with 
 a very strange look on his face, handed me a letter he had 
 just received from the Grand Procrustes at Inveni. It was 
 a most unworthy affair indeed, that letter, attempting as it 
 did to make impossible for me any further study of my pro- 
 fession. It did not, however, succeed in its purpose. 
 
 I started to tell Dr. Curtis the entire story of my experi- 
 ence at Inveni. 
 
 "Enough!" he cried. "That kind of school!" 
 
 He tore the letter to shreds, threw them all around him. 
 
 That, however, was not the last of the opposition I en- 
 countered in the course of my manhood years from Inveni. 
 In fact the fight upon me by that narrow institution had 
 hardly begun. There came indeed, much later, a time when 
 I faced the stern necessity to whip Inveni to a fair conclusion 
 — in which necessity I had, most fortunately, the aid and 
 assistance of a mighty and justice-loving friend. 
 
 Such matters, after all these years, I go into not with the 
 slightest desire to hurt the feelings of anybody (if indeed 
 any still live whose feelings could now be hurt by these 
 memoirs), but only to show how far we have come in mat- 
 ters educational, in other words to present by concrete 
 example — the most forcible means by far — the faults of the 
 old-style denominational colleges, with their inadequate en- 
 dowments, their still more inadequate faculties, their rigid 
 curriculums, all their narrow-mindedness and lack of the 
 very qualities they professed to be developing in their stu- 
 dents. God forbid that I, after all these changeful years — 
 not in the burning ardor of quick youth but in the calm 
 iciness of old age — should revive even the slightest dis- 
 agreeable fact with any such revengeful and unworthy 
 purpose as that with which the President of Inveni steadily 
 and inexorably "hounded" me around from one institution 
 of learning to another. 
 
 Dr. Curtis had asked me to return to Columbia in the fall. 
 Return I did. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 603 
 
 ^UPHYSlOIAN^SURGEONiP^ 
 
 lOOOooooooooooooooSoooo 
 
 OFFICE ON MONROE ST., OPPOSITE M. E. CHURCH. 
 
 , mintim, mttr«.D, • 
 
 yutuuici, Stt 
 
 < / « 
 
 188 V. 
 
 
 
 
 'tf-Z^^^^Z*!^ 
 
 ^s^Z^^f 
 
 A largely self-explanatory letter, except as to the fact that, when I arrived in 
 Washington, my father's old-time friend had met with some great sorrow, 
 I forget now what, and so I never met him. (Reduced in size.) 
 
604 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 At that time the College had been moved to the new 
 building on Fifty-ninth Street, just opposite the Roosevelt 
 Hospital. A palatial affair it was too, and far more beautiful 
 than ever had been the little brick shack on Twenty-third 
 Street. Yet there was always lacking for me this or that at 
 the new and more sumptuous building. It was not merely 
 that the benches at the new building were very hard to sit 
 on and also shaped so badly as nearly to break our backs, 
 but it always seemed that the real spirit of the school had, 
 somehow, been left behind in the old building. 
 
 I "quizzed" in those days with the Dawbarn, Thompson, 
 Symonds quiz, and, in that way, became incidentally ac- 
 quainted with Dr. Chas. H. May, my first instructor in the 
 ophthalmoscope, and Dr. A. E. Davis. Both these men were 
 among the world's most famous ophthalmologists, and I 
 was long very happy in the possession of their fine friend- 
 ships. Both now are dead. 
 
 MEDICAL COURSES 
 
 A course for the M.D., in those days, consisted of two 
 short, very short, years, of from three to four months each. 
 The first year you took all the studies in the curriculum, and, 
 the second year, you took them all again. The only ex- 
 amination you had to pass was at the close of the second 
 year — on the twice-taken entire curriculum. The P. and S. 
 (Columbia), however, had risked a daring innovation. It 
 had, first, enlarged its "years" to seven months each. In 
 addition it had, just before my admission to its freshman 
 year, established "a three-year graded course." But it had 
 also retained its old-time two-year course, consisting of the 
 entire curriculum taken twice and then at the close of the 
 one and only examination. 
 
 The work in the two-year course and in the three-year 
 course was practically the same thing. The one and only 
 difference was that, in the three-year course, you gave your- 
 self more time in which to perform the same work — three 
 years instead of two in which to cover the same curriculum 
 twice. 
 
 No, there was yet another difference. Once started on the 
 three-year course, you were not permitted to recall your 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 605 
 
 decision and to complete that very same work in just two 
 years. Not even although the two-year students were ac- 
 tually doing it in two years, I repeat, could you, if a three- 
 year man, recall your decision. 
 
 A WORD FROM VERMONT 
 
 The P. and S. "year" was to close in March. One day 
 about the end of February, I received from the Medical 
 Department of the University of Vermont a neat little cir- 
 cular and catalogue. Therein I learned that, at the northern 
 institution, the college year began just about the time when 
 the year at Columbia was closing. And it lasted till late in 
 July. 
 
 That meant that if, immediately after the end of this, 
 the second, year of my three-year graded course at Columbia, 
 I proceeded to Vermont, I could, if I passed the final examina- 
 tions there in July, receive my diploma and degree — instead 
 of wait-wait-waiting till the last of March at Columbia the 
 year following. 
 
 "the: western umoftr temsgr aph company. 
 
 
 NOfcVJK 
 
 t h Ave, and ffiti St ^ 
 
 ^&- ^i&u&a&iaC 
 
 X^gy^ 9 nut/* 
 
 f / 
 
 fc ^^-. jf^y^ 
 
 ALTHOUGH I HAD BEEN WRITING OR WIRING TO THEM DAILY! 
 (Reduced in size, of course) 
 
606 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 I knew that, at Columbia, I, quite as well as the most of 
 the two-year students there, could pass on all the studies of 
 the whole three years at the close of the then approaching 
 examinations. If I should be permitted to take all the ex- 
 aminations at that time, and should pass, that would save 
 more time than even it would to enter Vermont and graduate 
 there in July. 
 
 I went at once to Dr. Curtis, laid the entire matter before 
 him. Might I be permitted, I asked, to take in March (as 
 all the two-year students were in fact to take) the final ex- 
 aminations on all the studies of the curriculum? 
 
 Talk about uncontrolled anger in little me! 
 
 Professor John G. Curtis, much to my surprise, raved 
 like a holy madman. 
 
 No. A thousand times, No. I should only be permitted 
 to take the examinations in Anatomy, Physiology, Chem- 
 istry and Physics. I had started in to finish in three years, 
 so till the end of those full three years I must continue. 
 
 There was really no point whatever in his position, other 
 than the desire to have in his school some three-year men. 
 But to that position he stuck just the same. 
 
 At the close of March I took all the examinations which, 
 as a three-year man, I was permitted to take. And, in con- 
 sequence, I received a neat little certificate which, in some- 
 what complimentary language, declared that I had com- 
 pleted all the work of the first two years and passed the 
 examinations relating thereto successfully. 
 
 I took that bit of paper, and, at once, without any more 
 preliminaries or hesitations, hied me away to another hand- 
 out. 
 
 YET ANOTHER HAND-OUT— VERMONT 
 
 Hardly had I reached Burlington, Vermont, and got 
 settled in my rooming-house (at 21 Grant Street) when there 
 came a more than courteous letter from Dr. Curtis, urging 
 me to take my degree at Vermont, just as I was intending to 
 do, and then, in the autumn, just as I was intending not to do, 
 to return to Columbia, and there, in the following spring, 
 to take my ad eundem. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 607 
 
 I was, of course, considerably mollified — to be so honored 
 by Dr. John Green Curtis. But I, too, was stubborn, and I 
 told him, in a more than merely courteous reply, that I 
 wished to become an oculist and that my oculistic training 
 could readily be taken in Europe within the time that he 
 wished me to spend further at Columbia. 
 
 MEDICAL DEPARTMENT, UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT 
 OLD PEARL STREET BUILDING 
 
 The first glimpse which I had of life at little Vermont 
 was somewhat comical. 
 
 As I approached the portal of the building I heard loud, 
 but grave, voices in an open-doored room on the right. 
 
 Entering, I beheld in the apartment a score or more of 
 students holding a "mock quiz." 
 
 One who pretended to be the master was asking, "Doctor, 
 what is the best cure for sleep-walking?" 
 
 "A paper of tacks. Dose — three tablespoonfuls scattered 
 about the floor before retiring." 
 
 A very old joke, but, at the time, quite new to me. And 
 then there were others — till the real quiz-master arrived. 
 
 I do not think that I ever have learned quite so much in 
 a given length of time anywhere else as at the University of 
 Vermont. For this there were several reasons. First, the 
 climate was delightful, very cool and bracing even in June 
 and July. Second, the school was not too large. Each teach- 
 
608 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 er, therefore, could, if he liked, give to each student a con- 
 siderable amount of individual attention. Third (but by no 
 means least) the professors were neither narrow and bigoted 
 nor uninterrogable by the students. 
 
 Methods of education are, I think, ofttimes bad, not be- 
 cause of what they are in themselves, but because of the type 
 of student to whom they are applied. In my own case, the 
 method simply had to be adapted to my particular way of 
 work, or I could not learn. I seldom wanted to know next 
 what stood next on the page of the book, but always what 
 needed to stand next in my mind. When, that is, I sprouted 
 in my mind a tiny sprig of knowledge, that sprig at once 
 put forth little buds — to speak more literally, questions. 
 Those questions I wanted answered at once — no delay. I 
 had, therefore, at Inveni, been said to possess "a disorderly 
 mind." Sometimes I had actually got to thinking that the 
 judgment was right. Yet now I knew that that apparent 
 disorderliness was the result of (for me) the very best and 
 highest and most useful of all possible methods, systems, and 
 arrangements. 
 
 What I wanted was not to hear a professor, or a quiz- 
 master, ask systematic questions of a class, a majority of 
 whose members did not care a tinker's support for the entire 
 subject. I had to get the professor or the quiz-master off to 
 one side and do the questioning myself. All eager students, 
 in fact, do not want, I believe, to answer questions, but to 
 ask them. Yet forever and eternally teachers ask and ask 
 and ask. 
 
 At Inveni a question asked by a student had been well- 
 nigh equivalent to a personal insult. 
 
 At Columbia a question would indeed sometimes be 
 answered, and yet, as a rule, in such a way that the student 
 did not care to ask another. The professors were mostly men 
 in medical or surgical practice, their time was enormously 
 and financially valuable, and the number of students far too 
 great to permit of any considerable amount of attention 
 being allotted to any one of them. There were, of course, 
 quiz-masters (privately employed) but these also asked ques- 
 tions of their own and gave little time to answering those of 
 the students. One or two inquiries could be permitted to 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 609 
 
 the entire class of students at any given recitation, and that 
 was all. 
 
 It is quite different, of course, at Columbia Medical now, 
 where the instruction is probably second to none in the 
 world. 
 
 But, at Vermont, even then, I could question to my 
 heart's content. 
 
 That, at least, was true of Dr. Grinnell himself (the dear 
 old red-headed dean), 1 of A. F. A. King, of "Old Towles, 
 from Virginia," of J. Williston Wright, of that most excel- 
 lent quiz-master, Wm. B. Gibson, true in fact of each and 
 every teacher there — except indeed one. That one was 
 Rudolph A. Witthaus, professor of physics and chemistry 
 both there and at the University of the City of New York. 
 Whenever I asked a question of him, he answered it with a 
 sneer, almost a curse. If I asked a second, he snarled, well- 
 nigh bit me. I soon quit asking questions — of that man. 
 
 And then my old-time tendency to anger, to hate, return- 
 ed. To whatsoever institution I went, there, somehow, was 
 some or another man for me to be roiled at. This Rudolph 
 A. Witthaus I hated as never I had hated John G. Curtis or 
 even the Grand Procrustes at Inveni. 
 
 In truth I admired the man as a fine expounder of technical 
 knowledge, as an expert chemist and as a toxicologist whose 
 brilliant reputation shone round the world. And yet I hated 
 him most terribly. 
 
 A tiny volcano once again, burning itself out into dust 
 and ashes. 
 
 And just because I hated the man so terribly, I was much 
 more than merely certain that he, likewise, was spending 
 his precious time on hating me. ' 'My born enemy' ' I thought 
 him, again and again. 
 
 At little Vermont too there was among the students a 
 very earnest spirit and appreciation of the teachers' work. 
 Never before, I believe, have I seen a finer set of under- 
 graduates, better behaved or more steadily industrious. 
 
 1 On a day, after one of his lectures, I spoke to him in the hall about a matter concerning 
 which I had had much difficulty. "Come down to my home tonight," was the reply. 
 I went quite early, expecting to receive but a few moments of his time. But the dean, 
 having placed me in a large rocking-chair, himself took another, and then discoursed like 
 an archangel on the entire subject of smallpox — time, about two hours. (See my complete 
 sketch of this man in Kelly's "Cyclopedia of American Medical Biography" (1912) Volume 
 I, 363-4.) 
 
610 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 One of the most brilliant men in the class, and, possibly, 
 the most capable student of medicine that ever I have known 
 at any institution, was Frederic W. Sears, later widely known 
 as neurologist and psychiatrist and now deceased. 
 
 PHYSICIAN^SURGEON 
 
 Q<boooooooooooAoooooooooAo&Ae6 < i. 
 
 JBSSiSSSSSSSaBSSISSSaBSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS 1 
 
 £^w?T 
 
 
 My father's certificate of my apprenticeship 
 under his tutelage — a copy which he himself 
 very thoughtfully kept. The original was 
 handed in by me to the faculty of Vermont 
 College of Medicine as a pre-requisite to 
 graduation. 
 
 This document, it is true, does not state that I 
 had studied medicine under my father for 
 twelve years (1876 to 1888) as it might very 
 properly have done, but that is only because 
 the printed instructions which had been issued 
 by the College about this requisite for gradua- 
 tion plainly demanded that the certificate 
 should declare that the candidate "has had the 
 equivalent of three years study in medicine 
 under his direction," etc. My father, with his 
 usual caution, drew the certificate precisely in 
 accordance with those instructions. The facts, 
 however, in the case went far beyond the 
 College's requirements. 
 
 The reason why the College required only 
 the "equivalent" of three years study under a 
 preceptor was that, in those days, almost with- 
 out exception a medical apprentice never did, 
 or very well could have, studied with his pre- 
 ceptor for even one single year continuously. 
 He, if in school or college, could work with or 
 for his preceptor only in the vacations — sum- 
 mer, Christmas, Easter — and, in other parts of 
 the year, on Saturdays and Sundays. If indeed 
 he were only a hired man on a farm, attempting 
 there heroically to earn and save enough money 
 to pay his expenses later at a medical college 
 (and the great majority of medical apprentices 
 then were just such laborers) he could actually 
 work for and study with his preceptor only in 
 winter, or, at the most, say from November 1 
 to April 1. 
 
 (Certificate reduced in size, of course.) 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 611 
 
 Time came for the final examinations. 
 
 At these I stood seventh in the class. The best ten were 
 then selected for "a further [private] competition in all the 
 various branches." The best five out of the ten were to 
 receive, each, a special diploma of examination honors. 
 
 Then, at the Howard Opera House, like a burst of thun- 
 der, President Buckham of the University, saying to us lined- 
 up candidates, "By virtue of the authority vested in me," 
 and so on. 
 
 After the banquet and all the rest of the formalities and 
 festivities, and a try at a little sleep, I started for the train 
 — afoot, to save bus hire. 
 
 At all events, I carried in my satchel a letter from my 
 "born enemy," Professor Rudolph A. Witthaus, a letter I 
 am weak enough to reproduce herewith. He had said as, 
 at his own instance, he had given it me, "Use it, Doctor, 
 whenever, in Europe, you think it may do you any good." 
 
 I also carried in my satchel (in addition of course to the 
 usual diploma) a special diploma of examination honors. 
 That special diploma I love to this minute with a peculiar 
 and unreasoning affection. Why? Nobody else than myself 
 knows that I have it, or could care much if he did. I never 
 could hang it in my office without the appearance of boast- 
 ing to my patients. My parents, who looked upon it often, 
 are both dead. In my drawer at a bank it lies in cylindrical 
 state along with similar mementoes, and even I seldom gaze 
 upon its magic words. Yet it is always in my heart like a 
 little happy tune — the first and greatest honor I ever pos- 
 sessed. There never could be another quite like unto it — 
 perhaps, first, because, when I received it, I had failed at 
 Inveni; and, second, because, as I have tramped to failure 
 after failure, the few later honors that have come to me 
 have found me dull and cynical and only mildly thankful 
 for any invitation to happiness. 
 
 All day long, as I rolled southward in triumph, I was 
 unable to make up my sleep — not merely because I was seated 
 upright and because the train was as jolty as any mythical 
 affair in Arkansas, or because, at last, I had actually become 
 a son of old Hippocrates, but more, far more, because of the 
 
612 MY SECOND LIF£ 
 
 fine, even brotherly, comradeship which in the last few days 
 I had experienced among those dignified professors. 
 One example of this friendliness must suffice: 
 As I was going to the office of Professor A. F. A. King, 
 to take my "oral" in obstetrics, I, when mounting the stair 
 to his room, slipped and fell hard. The steps were dirty, 
 
 R. A. WlTTHAUS, LABORATORY OF CHEMISTRY 
 
 P80FSSSOB OF CHtMlSTftV. * 
 
 „ HY *; 9 ies University of the City of New York. 
 
 SWcNccif ■Pepaitmctit. 
 No 4A0 EAST 26th STREET. 
 
 ^ q^^-yd&J&LrSJU — 188 P 
 
 A. 
 
 
 (^AA> cS^W*-^ 
 
 A GENERAL LETTER OF INTRODUCTION FROM MY "BORN ENEMY' 
 
 Professor Witthaus, being head of the Department of Chemistry and Physics 
 at the University of the City of New York, as well as at the University of 
 Vermont, chanced to use for this letter a sheet with the New York University 
 heading upon it. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 613 
 
 because of the dusty streets without, of the wide-open 
 windows, and of a strong breeze. I therefore arose with my 
 hands and clothing in a disreputable condition. Yet I had 
 to go on at once into that office. 
 
 There I apologized, of course. And the good professor 
 actually arose and came and brushed me off, with many a 
 half-smothered condemnation of the janitor and the weather. 
 
 I sat down, decidedly confused, and, at first, unable to 
 answer questions. So Professor King reached into a drawer 
 of his desk and handed me a great, round, rosy apple. "Eat 
 that first," he suggested. "Then talk." 
 
 I ate, and I answered, and I received, as he informed me, 
 "a full one hundred." 
 
 I shall never forget the world-renowned man who, seeing 
 before him a boyish and embarrassed examinee, thought of 
 the homely expedient of having him eat an apple. 
 
 And then — New York again. A few days wait there for 
 my ship to Europe. 
 
 STILL ANOTHER HAND-OUT— VIENNA 
 
 I had actually left New York without first returning to 
 see my doleful parents. Financial necessity, rather than in- 
 creasing manliness! For days on the ocean I saw eternally 
 the old, seemingly neglected barn at home, or the familiar 
 ash-hopper with my little mother vigorously raking leaves 
 beside it, or her and me in the basement of the house 
 together, pouring hot tallow into candle moulds. Over and 
 over I recalled with shameful tears that early January morn- 
 ing when, just before leaving the first time for Inveni, I 
 rose and, stepping softly to the little east window of my 
 bedroom, gazed out over all the dear familiar objects of the 
 yard — motionless and wholly muted by the snow. 
 
 Long did I stand there — long — impressing on my child- 
 ish memory each tiniest characteristic of the well loved 
 scene. I might possibly, at some time, forget one of them. 
 
 I was going to be away so far, so far! A hundred miles 
 at the very least f 
 
 When, at length, I turned to leave the window, my 
 father, who had entered the room without my knowing it, 
 
614 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 stepped up, put his arm around me and we both kept looking 
 for some time into the yard. 
 
 After that, in the bus together, we were leaving the home 
 behind and dashing into the darkness, my mother's voice 
 calling after us forlornly. 
 
 Via Liverpool to London. There, of course, I visited 
 "Moorfields" and other hospitals. 
 
 Thence to Edinburgh. 
 
 Nowhere could I find in all that very Great Britain the 
 facilities for practice on the eye, ear, nose and throat which 
 I had heard were constantly offering at Vienna. Dr. John B. 
 Wheeler in particular, Assistant in Surgery at Vermont, one 
 of the skilfulest surgeons and friendliest of men, had so pic- 
 tured and glorified Vienna to my excited imagination that I 
 could hardly have done otherwise than go there ultimately. 
 
 Next, then, departure for "Wien." Leith, Middles- 
 borough, Antwerp! Cologne, Nurnberg und so weiter — 
 eben so weit wie Wien ! 
 
 In Wien, or Vienna, first of all, I resided at Tiefer Graben, 
 Numero 36, bei Herr Gesund — of all things, for a doctor! 
 Later I removed to Furzehn Alsterstrasse, Alservorgrund, 
 Zweite Stiege, Zweiten Stock, Thiir acht-und-Zwanzig. And 
 I paid ten kreuzer nightly to the Hausbesorger if I stayed out 
 later than ten o'clock — a custom it was in all the rooming 
 houses of Vienna at the time. 
 
 I am also an "ausserordentlicher," if you please, at the 
 University. 
 
 Shades of old Hippo, how we worked in that university! 
 No one there, to be sure, could in the least help working. 
 
 Those were the days of Billroth and of Eiselsberg, of 
 Griinfeld and of Heitler; best of all, of Schrotter and Politzer, 
 of Stellwag, Konigstein and Bergmeister. 
 
 I, tramp-like, had, of course, to take at least a little work 
 outside my own four specialties, hence "fractures and dis- 
 locations" with Eiselsberg, "physical diagnosis" with the 
 old magician, Heitler, and, to cap the climax, "Endoskopie 
 der Harnrohre and Blase," with that curious half-clown, 
 half-genius, Herr Josef Griinfeld. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 615 
 
 Mostly, of course, I worked with Konigstein and Berg- 
 meister. 
 
 Was there ever such another Augenspiegelcurs as that of 
 the eloquent Konigstein? I doubt it. 
 
 It was in that Curs that I, by means of my ophthalmo- 
 scope, first gazed inside the eye of any animal — a frog. 
 
 And there I beheld, O miracle of miracles, the great, oval 
 red corpuscles, as they formed and broke ranks, reformed, 
 twisted, distorted, straightened out again, went single-filing 
 into the narrow tubes called "capillaries." What a peep 
 into the workshop of Demiurgus. 
 
 Even as a boy I had been much interested, though only 
 in an amateurish way, in those mysterious organs, the eyes 
 of animals, and now my old-time curiosity was reawakened. 
 
 But I must stick, stick. So I stuck almost entirely to the 
 human eye, ear, nose and throat. 
 
 OTTO BERGMEISTER 
 
 Most interesting of all my teachers at Vienna was that 
 nervous tornado and deafening cataract of cosmopolitan 
 lingo and jocular sarcasm known as "Bergmeister." 
 
 With him I had an Augenoperationskurs. Wunderschon ! 
 The attendance at the course was strictly limited. I, some- 
 how, got in. And then, as it seemed, I never cared to get out. 
 At all events I took that course three times, each time more 
 enthusiastically than before. And whatever I, in the way 
 of operative eye-skill later had have may, it is due, gros- 
 stenfalls, to Bergmeister. 
 
 What a magician of an operator ! His fingers had all the 
 fine touch and technik of Joachim, the violinist (whom I 
 heard in Vienna). 
 
 And what an expositor too ! Nothing was anywise com- 
 plex, abstract, difficult or unengaging, as it came from the 
 lips of Bergmeister. 
 
 He had a curious way of "joshing" his students while 
 they tried to operate — first on the dead eyes of cattle and 
 pigs (fastened, of course, in the ophthalmophantome) and, 
 later, on the eyes of human cadavers. 
 
616 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 it- /rn 
 
 ^%~e 
 
 
 Ctsir**^ uQLajL/ 0LAA-** JL&C*,^ ~ZA*t**j ~<Jsf<-Asi. 
 
 A SPECIMEN PAGE FROM A LONG, CHARACTERISTIC LETTER FROM MY MOTHER 
 
 Characteristic too, no doubt, of country doctors' 
 helpmeets generally who have children off at 
 college. This letter was the first that I received 
 from my mother after sailing for Europe. 
 
 The request that I keep a diary was typical 
 not only of my mother, but also of my father, 
 and, years later, of my wife. The Companion, 
 indeed, for the most of our married lives, kept 
 diaries herself, and these, too, have been a source 
 of decided accuracy in much that I have written 
 both in this volume and in "Tramping to Failure." 
 The necessity for possessing and using such 
 sources of accuracy (if I am not making far too 
 
 long a legend here) was once especially demon- 
 strated to me when, having written solely from 
 memory of my experience at "The Little White 
 House" in Pike County for The Bulletin of 
 the American Academy of Medicine in 1907 
 and 1908, I, long afterward, attempted to write 
 of that same experience in my "Tramping to 
 Failure." On the latter occasion it occurred to 
 me that I ought to look up what I had said about 
 the Little White House in my childhood's diary. 
 That I did, and the consequence is that the ac- 
 count of the same experience in "Tramping to 
 Failure" is more accurate by far than is that in 
 the Bulletin. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 617 
 
 o-JL //! ~z>/fc jl^^Z^i o*U4 <n~> 
 
 ? 0*>-r~b>l /^At^^4^vvv A/ ' far* ch> 
 
 
 PAGE 3 OF THE SAME LETTER 
 
 Just why my mother asked what perfumery I used on my socks I do not know. Whyl I never 
 had used perfumery on anything! Her request, too, that I write "every day" I thought funny at 
 the time. It seems not funny now. 
 
618 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "It's good, Herr Doctor, that the subject you just 
 have operated on is dead. Poor girl, if living and you so 
 upon her eyes operirt hat ten, then the beautiful mademoi- 
 
 S^-<p<. -As^uLsf ~CyisO~i~o Qst*L*^*e ->v-n Ckyi^A OsL*tSn<*M~ ^x> 
 
 yV)sH*<ir>~ Qirfbi Jr OC^U 0/u^>Lc JX**4^*£ -sCs^isCZZ* 
 &*~* dtX^Syt~>~j ffl+n &ts^ &**-*( Cyv^ -^■*3^< 
 
 '*4 
 
 J.iLLkj 
 
 THE LAST PAGE OF THE SAME LETTER 
 
 "Halpin" was Mr. Patrick Halpin (whom almost every one in town called "Halpin") owner of 
 the Halpin Marble Works, wherein Jacky Rian, herein commemorated later, did his highly 
 skilful stone-cutting. 
 
 The "Money Order" was my graduation present. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 619 
 
 selle would never, in all this world, one single time married 
 been have." 
 
 Again, "Would you believe it? O well! Es macht nichts 
 aus. Subject's dead. You couldn't have made him any- 
 blinder, Herr Doctor, anyway. Maybe he'll see in heaven. 
 God, at least, is a good doctor. Let us pray — in Latin it is 
 best. — Now your turn, Herr Doctor. When you try, always 
 pray a very little at the outset. But see what you can do. 
 I'll shut my eyes till you've finished. Terrible — very ter- 
 rible." 
 
 Sometimes he would take another tack — irony! 
 
 "Ausgezeichnet, Herr Doctor! Not in all my life have 
 I ever seen any cataract-extraction done like that ! Not that 
 it is so very good, maybe! But it is different! My God, how 
 it is different! Still it is always well to be original too. 
 
 "Next, Herr Doctor Kishimoto! Take the cataract knife 
 in your good soft fingers so, soft fingers so. And now show 
 me if you cannot imitate the very fine thing which, some 
 time ago, you me do seen have. 
 
 "So ist es gut! Not quite so original aber, ist es am besten. 
 Der Herr Doctor von Kishimoto, he is really very good 
 operateur." (That was an actual compliment.) 
 
 Then again, as still another attempted to operate, "Aus- 
 gezeichnet!" (Loud enough to awaken the dead and dis- 
 sected.) "Never before in all this world has another so fine 
 an operation as this by the Herr Doctor von Schanks per- 
 formed been!" 
 
 He would pirouette on his left big toe, suddenly seize 
 the knife himself and begin to operate, while you held your 
 joyous breath to watch that miracle of surgery. 
 
 You never went to sleep in Bergmeister's course! 
 
 And you never forgot a thing you learned there, either. 
 
 Once when a student remonstrated, "But, Herr Professor, 
 why always hold the Beer's knife at that angle and not at 
 this one?" Bergmeister's head bent low, his lips almost 
 touching the stupid one's ear. Then he shouted, "It is a 
 sec-r-r-et. It's because the patient wants to SEE again!" 
 
620 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 WILHELM II 
 
 I remember the morning when I went up to that Herr 
 Professor's lecture hall, and had not yet heard the great 
 news. 
 
 Wilhelm II had come to the throne of Germany (June, 
 1888), two or three months before. One of the first things 
 he had done was to issue two addresses — one to the army, 
 the other to the navy — in which he had advocated peace to 
 the limits of his utterance. These addresses he had later 
 (June 18) backed up by a powerful address to the Prussian 
 people of similar import. After his formal induction into 
 office (June 25) he started on a tour of Europe, and, while in 
 St. Petersburg, Stockholm and Copenhagen, explained that 
 
 the obj ect of these visits is to maintain the peace of Europe. 
 I did not then know that propaganda against him as a 
 militarist was already issuing out of the chancelleries of 
 certain opposing governments. Otherwise, I should better 
 have understood his intense anxiety to make clear his posi- 
 tion as that of a lover of peace. 1 
 
 All at once, like a Jupiter thundering out of a clear sky, 
 he had done (it was said) some or another fiercely bellicose 
 thing — a mere gesture, of course, but a fiercely militaristic 
 one nevertheless, which had given the world of pacifists a 
 very stunning shock. 
 
 That was the "great news" concerning which the good 
 Professor Bergmeister now spoke. Had I not heard? Wil- 
 helm II, the supposed pacifist, was indeed and in truth, as 
 many had suspected and declared before his accession to the 
 throne, a militarist — body, bones, hoofs and horns. 
 
 The Herr Professor was all of a tremble. I noted, and 
 he noted that I noted. (Austria and Germany were not great 
 friends then, in spite of the Triple Alliance of 1882.) 
 
 "Why are not you, also, a-trembling?" he asked. 
 
 My first feeling was simply one of pride in America and 
 Americans. I said I knew nothing at all about Wilhelm II 
 to tremble about, and that we, in the United States, were 
 
 1 I hold, of course, no brief for any kaiser, king, czar, or other autocrat or aristocrat. 
 
 The following words of the Kaiser would, indeed, suffice to condemn him in the mind 
 of any believer in democracy: "My grandfather, the great and glorious ruler, issued from 
 his residence in Coblentz, and ascended the throne as the chosen instrument of the Lord." 
 ("The Kaiser's Speeches," Harper and Brothers, page 283.) 
 
 I am merely attempting to show, as we now know it, the truth about the situation 
 in 1888. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 621 
 
 not in the habit of trembling at the words or deeds of any 
 sovereign. I very much wanted to add that I heartily wished 
 that all the crowned heads in all this king-cursed universe 
 were at the bottom of the bottomless pit, but thought better 
 of that idea when I remembered this good professor's love, 
 of which I had heard much, for the dear old Francis Josef, 
 then ruling in Vienna. 
 
 He told me why I, too, ought to tremble, why all men in 
 the world should tremble. "Wilhelm the Second will not, 
 at first, make war," wound up Professor Bergmeister, "but, 
 eventually, he will bring this planet to ruin down. He — he 
 is a mere drinker of human blood." 
 
 Other students began arriving. Professor Bergmeister 
 ceased to speak. Here, in addition to Austrians, were also 
 Germans, Italians, French; a very great variety of Americans; 
 some impassive British and Scotch; certain inflammable 
 Irish; Bulgarians, Lithuanians, Turks, and Russians; even 
 Mesopotamians and nervous, highly alert-looking Japs. 
 
 And they all had read the papers and all seemed more or 
 less excited, each after his own kind, because of the long 
 anticipated thing which had in fact occurred — Wilhelm II 
 of Germany had, quite unintentionally perhaps, revealed his 
 secretly mailed fist. 
 
 He was, they said a blustering, tyrannical, young blath- 
 erskite and slaughter-hungry scapegrace. A wild hyena! 
 A man with one arm only and only one idea. And that one 
 idea was blood-and-death ! 
 
 War ! War, eventually, for all of us ! That was what it 
 meant, the nature of this one man. 
 
 Bergmeister seemed very busy assorting his instruments. 
 Nothing at all said he any further about that threatening 
 Armageddon. He was not a foreigner. Not quite so safe it 
 was for him to discuss overambitious royalties. He could 
 not tell to-day what attitude, tomorrow, the Austrian gov- 
 ernment might need to assume. 
 
 After the lecture and the practice work which followed 
 it, I chanced, not altogether without my own volition, to 
 be among the last of that cosmopolitan group to leave the 
 room. 
 
 Before we had quite all gone, said Professor Bergmeister, 
 "Some of you students will perish in the great war." 
 
622 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 The man was perfectly right. The war was pretty long 
 deferred. It had, too, when it came, been much more surely 
 engendered by Professor Bergmeister's own well-loved Francis 
 Josef and his half-witted prime minister, Berchtold, as well 
 as by that prince of all bloody butchers, Nicholas Romanoff, 
 than it had by the much more greatly dreaded Wilhelm II 
 of Germany. But, when at last it came, a number of "you 
 students" did indeed and in truth pass into the great beyond 
 by way of the wholly unnecessary Armageddon. 
 
 The talk about the war filled up my soul with gloom 
 again. Why war — the purely senseless way to settle things? 
 Did the peoples themselves want war? I did not know, did 
 not much trouble myself to investigate. 
 
 The Little White House in Pike County, Illinois, and its 
 big black shadow, which for so long a time had been for- 
 gotten, began now to appear and re-appear in my numerous 
 dreams. It haunted, too, the most of my waking hours. 
 
 When its shadow became almost intolerable, I would go 
 out into the animated and colorful streets of Vienna and 
 walk for long hours. The only proper antidote for thoughts 
 of death is scenes of vivid and picturesque life. 
 
 Then, too, there came, almost daily, the letter from 
 Father or Mother, or from both. They had promised two 
 letters per week and had made it from seven to fourteen. 
 What should I ever have done without those letters? All of 
 them I still possess, and all of them are priceless — now that 
 no letter can ever arrive from either parent again. Also at 
 Vienna, as at all my other colleges, my father and mother 
 wrote me repeatedly as if they had not heard from me for 
 many years. Sometimes they even telegraphed — although I 
 had been writing or wiring to them daily. 
 
 I believe, but cannot now be sure, that the -occasion 
 which had so disturbed our good Professor Bergmeister, and, 
 in that way, myself, was the Kaiser's speech at Frankfort 
 on the Oder, which he had made on August 16, 1888, and 
 which, in the war-time words of Poultney Bigelow, "set all 
 tongues wagging as though he had already signed a decla- 
 ration of war." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 623 
 
 DREAMING 
 
 At last, in April, I gathered up my "Zeugnisse," and 
 packed my little trunk. 
 
 After so very much arduous work performed, I was en- 
 titled, I thought, to go dreaming again. 
 
 "Then longen men to gone on pilgrimages." 
 
 I did indeed dream over the still, blue, meandering canals 
 of storied Venice; over the Roman Forum, with its memories 
 of magnificent human powers; over Padua, with its sad 
 recollections of Galileo, the wanderer, who had suffered for 
 wandering's sake. Even as I hung out of the windows from 
 the leaning tower of Pisa and thought of the first queer 
 pictures of the place which ever I had seen — in school 
 geographies back in Pittsfield — I dreamed again, and — of 
 home. 
 
 "Won't you come back home, Tom, where the 
 meadow-larks are singing?" 
 
 I became indeed far too nostalgic to dream of anything 
 else then than just home. The idea took complete possession 
 of me. 
 
 "I remember, I remember the house where I was 
 born, 
 The little window where the sun came peeping 
 in at morn!" 
 
 and where, in my own bedchamber, my father and I had 
 stood with our arms around each other that early morning 
 just before leaving together for Inveni. 
 
 Among other things he had said to me, that morning, 
 was this: "You are just leaving home, Tom, for the first 
 time. One thing there is that I want you to remember 
 through all the moments of your life and mine. That is this : 
 No matter how far you go, or how much you may accom- 
 plish or fail to accomplish, or even how bad you may become 
 (for bad any man may become at times) there will still be 
 one old white-headed chap back here in Pike County want- 
 ing to help you. To the last penny of his means and the 
 last gasp of his breath he will stand by you and assist you 
 — always. You may and you must depend upon that." 
 
624 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 So — a few brief days in Switzerland, France, and, again, 
 England. Then, one night — I had beaten my schedule by 
 six or seven hours — I was walking up from the Pittsfield 
 Wabash depot to my parents' house all alone. I turned the 
 corner by the old cottonwood tree (whereon our boyhood's 
 nicknames or initials had all been so long ago engraved) 
 and then proceeded toward the front of the building. 
 
 But my mother, although she had not known the precise 
 time of my arrival, still had surely felt that I was coming 
 at that very hour, a doctor. 
 
 So, there in the deep darkness, framed by the first outer 
 doorway that ever I had learned to know, she actually 
 stood — holding in her hand a lighted lamp — just as, in 
 former days, she had so often stood, when Father and I had 
 been returning from long rounds among the country sick. 1 
 
 She did not understand, of course, just how much she 
 symbolized there to my excited imagination. She only knew 
 that "Tommy" had come back. 
 
 But all my life (as it appeared to me) she had been stand- 
 ing just as then she stood, before some or another doorway 
 into something very good and happy, holding in her hand 
 a brightly shining lamp for her son's guidance. 
 
 PITTSFIELD: "ROUGH-AND-TUMBLE" PRACTICE 
 
 When I got back to Pittsfield from Inveni the last time, 
 got back with a demotion from the senior to the junior 
 class, got back "failed," my father had not, contrary to his 
 custom at the beginning of my vacations, taken me round 
 the Pittsfield Public Square for re-introduction to our fellow 
 citizens, to be as it were "exhibit A." Seeing which I had 
 somehow got it into my mind that perhaps my father was 
 no more very proud of me. 
 
 So I had said to him, one day, as he took me into the 
 country, "Father, do you still want me to be a doctor?" 
 
 "Well! What a question ! Why ask?" 
 
 "You have not seemed to be quite so proud of me since 
 I returned for this vacation — haven't — that is — well, haven't 
 
 1 I first so pictured her to the medical profession in Bulletin of the American Academy of 
 Medicine, 1907 and 1908 (Vols. VIII and IX) passim in a series of sketches entitled "Practis- 
 ing in Pike." Many years later the same picture of a mother was actually painted and 
 with almost precisely the same words in a very famous novel — by accidental resemblance, 
 as a matter or course. 
 
' IflfiSff S l 
 
 m\;M. 
 
 m 
 
 
 
 
 
 B I Hi 
 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 625 
 
THE TRAMP, ALIAS "THE YOUNG DOCTOR," ALIAS "DOCTOR TOM" 
 As he began to practice Medicine at Pittsfield, Illinois, in 1889 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 626 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 627 
 
 — taken me round the Square and about in the country, to 
 introduce me and tell people that I am back." 
 
 "That is only because people may have heard from the 
 President of Inveni about — well, heard the things that a man 
 like him would certainly say." 
 
 "No other reason?" 
 
 "Absolutely none — but you, Thomas, do you still desire 
 to 'take the veil,' to practice with me, after your graduation 
 in medicine, here in this little town and in the country?" 
 
 "I have always wanted to practice medicine beside you, 
 Father," I truthfully asserted, "ever since I was knee-high 
 to your pill-bags." 
 
 Now that I was back again — only, this time, with a 
 medical degree and certain wonderful certificates from Vienna 
 — he asked me the same old question about "the veil," and 
 when I had answered in the old way, he gave me a little 
 squeeze, as so often he had done in my boyhood, turned the 
 horse south (we happened to be merely driving then, with 
 very little sickness) and so on out past Oakwood Cemetery, 
 past Llewelyn Stone's, past the turn-off to the George Goode 
 place, then across Honey Creek, and, taking the south fork 
 of the road and ascending a lofty hill, we came to a stop, 
 as ofttimes before we had done, on the hill-top just between, 
 as I remember it, the W. T. F. Petty place and the E. 
 Moomaw place. 
 
 Stopped stock still and never a word from either of us. 
 
 Soon the horse stopped breathing audibly, all the world 
 was deeply silent — and bathed in ineffable light. 
 
 As in former days, so once again I worshipped the Great 
 Mind which is the universe and of which I was a part — 
 not the ridiculous figure of an old man in a white beard, 
 peering through spectacles and seated on some merely human 
 "throne" in some particular locality, but the Great Mind 
 which IS all, never localized but universal. 
 
 I had a feeling that my father, too, might perchance, 
 like me, be worshipping, finding, like me, his most inspiring 
 cathedral to be the lofty, sunlit countryside and its most 
 expressive music, the all-embracing silence. But I feared to 
 ask him about this matter lest, possibly, 1 had been utterly 
 mistaken. 
 
628 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 When we had gone on a little distance, he discussed with 
 me the question whether it was best, in any case, for a new 
 doctor to "try a solo role" in medicine, sitting back then 
 and waiting for patients who might never arrive. "I should 
 always be by you, Tom, to advise you. And, besides, think 
 of this practice, rather this companionship, here in this 
 one neighborhood of Martinsburg township. I have in this 
 one countryside enough friendships of the first order to 
 satisfy the life of any one man: Otto Jaritz and his family; 
 the Turnbaughs and their families; 'Uncle' Tommy James 
 and his family. All these and their families: Elliott Baker, 
 J. Jaritz and Fred, S. and C. Zumwalt, the Ransoms, the 
 Pettys, the Moomaws, the Goodins, and scores and scores 
 of other lovable people, not to forget Sam and William 
 Worley, the two most delightful bachelor farmers I have 
 ever known. Can such fine friendships ever be formed in any 
 great city? 
 
 "Then think of all the other townships in this county, 
 and of the villages and towns, including Pittsfield itself and 
 the house wherein you were born." 
 
 I thought of them. In fact they were always present in 
 my mind, at least subconsciously. 
 
 But now I thought it about time to quit being serious, 
 and so, when my father asked me if I had been "figuring on 
 any new things," I, although I understood him perfectly, 
 replied, "O yes, on a large number — medical, surgical, his- 
 tological, pathological and even biological. Mostly I've 
 worked out biological innovations." 
 
 "You have!" with genuine surprise. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "And just what, pray?" 
 
 The one thing I could think of was, "My only practical 
 invention, so far, in biology, is a device for making yellow 
 hens lay square eggs." 
 
 "My stars! Why do you want to produce square eggs?" 
 [Hens to lay square eggs was an old joke, even in those days.] 
 
 "Because — er — they'll make a square meal. Also because 
 they'll — er — both pack more economically and break less 
 easily than the present shape." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 629 
 
 "I see, I see. Well, why don't you breed white hens to 
 do the same thing?" 
 
 "I'm working on them to produce eggs with soft-rubber 
 shells and antiseptic interiors." 
 
 "No break, no rot!" 
 
 "Exactly. No break, no rot." 
 
 "And domineckers?" 
 
 "Er — I thought we'd keep domineckers just as they are, 
 seeing as how both they and their eggs pack just right in 
 country doctors' stomachs." 
 
 My father was a good pal and he took this oblique criti- 
 cism of his appetite for country chicken in good part, adding, 
 however, "When I asked you if you had been figuring on 
 any new things, I meant — O, figuring on better facilities, 
 greater conveniences for the two of us in practice. The old 
 office has done me pretty well for many years, but even for 
 me it is somewhat crowded now. Then it never can be 
 heated, excepting only by the crude method of opening 
 either our bed-room door or our parlor door to let heat 
 from other rooms come into it." 
 
 "We shall miss," said I, "in an outside office the music 
 in that parlor of both Jon and Jo. This very morning, sitting 
 in that office, I heard Joseph, the little scamp — well, there 
 was a soft whisper of melody from his piano then a crash of 
 golden chords as if heaven's gate had opened to our innermost 
 ears. 
 
 "Do you remember the time when a crazy man was in 
 our office and you went out, and (while I kept the man busy) 
 you got Jon to go into the parlor and play a pacifying theme 
 for him — to intensify the effect of the bromide you had given 
 the lunatic — rather, let him drink on his own motion?" 
 
 "And it worked." 
 
 "How long ago that seems!" (And how long ago it did 
 seem then — then in my twenty-third year! And, strangely, 
 how very near it does seem to me now !) 
 
 "And you, Thomas, shall plan the new building yourself 
 and shall mark the very spot in the orchard (where you boys 
 used to play) that the office shall stand on. Your Uncle 
 Joseph Hall shall have the contract and his first assistant 
 shall work with him. And you shall take the Truax and 
 Tieman catalogs and shall mark on every page the instru- 
 
630 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 ments you think we ought to have — every single one of them 
 you wish. Nothing that you want but I will buy it for you 
 just so long as my money holds out." 
 
 I suddenly looked up, quickly looked away again. I had 
 seen in his face the realization of a thousand wishes, ten 
 thousand brilliant dreams — and found it all poignantly in- 
 tolerable. 
 
 "Still want to take the veil, Tom?" 
 
 "I would not miss it for a million worlds." 
 
 I did not then know how ill adapted I was for the veil, 
 how wonderfully adapted was he. 
 
 That night we worked in the orchard till late, staking 
 here staking there. It was an important project, that of the 
 fine new office. That structure was to be the pride among 
 doctors' offices in western Illinois. It must all be built just 
 right, therefore. 
 
 In that office Father and I were to work permanently 
 together, so he said to me. 
 
 Permanently ! 
 
 DELLA WREN 
 
 My father said one day, "Come and see a patient with 
 me here in town: it's well to get acquainted. This patient 
 is just a young woman, but she is very sick; her heart is 
 leaking like a basket and her skin seems polished with the 
 polish of completed gravestones." 
 
 We entered the house. 
 
 All at once I recognized that patient. In spite of my 
 dignity I smiled. 
 
 Many years before — it seemed many years then — when I 
 had been in the fourth grade at school, there had arrived a 
 certain St. Valentine's day. I, because I was snub-nosed and, 
 perhaps, otherwise not good to look upon, was beginning 
 to think that, almost alone of all the boys in that populous 
 room, I was about to be left without a valentine. 
 
 At all events, there seemed to be no other lad than my- 
 self upon whose desk a bright and blushing maiden had not 
 dropped a tender missive. 
 
 All at once, up to my desk — actually! — came pretty little 
 Delia Wren and dropped her tribute — a tiny gift indeed, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 631 
 
 but not at all lacking in delicate colors and subtly trimmed 
 all about with the very daintiest of paper lace. In the center 
 stood a tall, handsome couple, in pale-pink moonlight, and 
 underneath the picture ran this sweet confession — " Tis 
 You Alone I Love." 
 
 I glanced timidly up, my heart somewhere outside my 
 bosom, perhaps all over me, and my cheeks like fire. "I 
 mean it," she managed to mumble, and, running to her desk, 
 sat down quickly, bowing her head in her folded arms. 
 
 After that, I frequently saw her in the schoolyard, but, 
 when she saw me seeing her, she colored and ran away like 
 a deer. 
 
 So I never had told her how happy she had made me. 
 (I possess that valentine still, in my old age still I have it. 
 It had cost perhaps five cents, and money could not buy it 
 even yet.) 
 
 But my father, that day, knew nothing of the valentine. 
 He had listened to the heart, the heart that once had loved 
 me. It was a badly ruined heart too, destined soon to stop 
 forevermore. 
 
 My father, even then, as it happened, was admonishing 
 me — speaking to the patient's mother (or nurse): "Yes, 
 you are right. A doctor learns to notice clearly many things 
 that any other person could never see at all. Otherwise, he 
 doesn't last long as a doctor." In this oblique manner my 
 father not infrequently imparted instruction to his son. 
 
 But, in that particular case, I had noticed matters that 
 my father had never seen and which he never knew of after- 
 wards. I noticed that Delia Wren had not forgotten the 
 valentine, and she noticed that I had noticed — though neither 
 had said one word about it. 
 
 And each was very glad that the other had remembered. 
 
 UNCONVENTIONAL MEDICINE 
 
 The unconventionality of those days is shown by some- 
 thing which had occurred between my two medical student 
 years, when I was at home on vacation. Father had sent me, 
 for the practice it would give, with tooth forceps to remove 
 a "snag" for some one in the far west end of town who was 
 
632 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 too sick to come to our office. I was actually carrying the 
 forceps in my hand to keep from forgetting that I must 
 really go somewhere to extract a tooth. I had got but two 
 blocks from home when I met Mrs. CI. Swan nervously 
 guiding her little darting brood toward the Christian Church 
 Sunday School. One of the brood, however, was, instead of 
 darting, lagging pitifully behind and holding hands to 
 swollen jaw. The mother appealed to me to use those 
 forceps. I started to comply, but the patient would not 
 "open, open." 
 
 Then did anxious mamma back Mr. Recalcitrant fast 
 against the church wall, and, prying open his mouth herself, 
 nip the milk tooth with her fingers — whereupon out came 
 the acher secundem art em, before a large and admiring crowd 
 too that stood on the Christian Church steps. 
 
 Mothers were like that, most of them, in those days. 
 They loved their children dearly but would tolerate no 
 "monkey business." 
 
 The boy who lost the tooth was, having grown up, long 
 ago gathered to his fathers. His name was Harry Burr Swan. 
 In manhood he became editor and owner at Pittsfield of 
 The Pike County Republican, a paper long before owned by 
 John G. Nicolay, the man who made Lincoln president and 
 who had become Lincoln's campaign secretary, later his 
 private secretary at Washington. Harry, in his capacity as 
 editor, developed what seemed to me a new type of news- 
 paper. His journal was never stiff and formal, but always 
 unconventional, neighborly, friendly, jovial, full of sweet 
 laughter, and, alas, at times, of course (for misfortunes do 
 occur in the country) of bitter tears, an esteemed friend of 
 hundreds of families in Pike County — almost, in fact, a human 
 thing itself, so full it was of constant human interest. 
 
 This editor too, like his editor and publisher father, yet 
 to be mentioned in this volume, ever sustained close medical 
 relations with my father and my half-brother, Dr. Will 
 Shastid, and in much the same ways. Anything to improve 
 the public health, for example, was always advocated per- 
 sistently and whole-heartedly by the human interest sheet 
 of Harry Burr Swan. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 633 
 
 WHAT TO BE SQUEAMISH ABOUT— THEN 
 People in those old days knew exactly what and what 
 not to be squeamish about mentioning. Thus, it was thought 
 improper for anyone, at least in mixed company, to mention 
 a woman's toes, though perfectly proper to speak of her feet. 
 It was also, strangely enough, quite permissible to mention 
 either the toes or the feet of a man, yes even of a perfect 
 gentleman. It was also quite all right to speak of anybody's 
 ankles. But it was almost equal to obscenity, profanity, 
 irregularity, irreligiosity and high treason combined, to men- 
 tion the "legs" of any human being, male or female. Many 
 persons in fact would speak of the "limbs" of horses, cattle, 
 sheep and swine. Passing by certain other portions of the 
 human geography which even a doctor could not in those 
 days refer to except with bated breath and head respectfully 
 averted and eyes directed into the far distance as if he were 
 really thinking about something other than the matter in 
 hand, we now, in greatest confusion, make gradual approach 
 to the subject of hips. Seeing that these appurtenances to the 
 human body were ofttimes strikingly prominent in fleshy 
 persons, also ofttimes, with or without cause, vigorously 
 kicked in those rough and ready days, it would have seemed 
 to be something of an inconsistency that they never could 
 be alluded to at all in mixed company by even their most 
 delicate and respectable names. 
 
 Men, indeed, when women were not present, ofttimes 
 mentioned the hips in the commonest and vilest of terms, 
 sometimes even prefacing such words with and following 
 them by the most outrageous profanity, such as (I slightly 
 moderate the language) "O he fell, and, G. . . . d. . . . him, 
 he lit on his G. . . . d. . . . [here the dictionary synonym for 
 "hips"] and I'm just be G. . . . d. . . . if he ain't been no 
 account ever since. Say, he can't even set down on no hay 
 pile, he's that stiff an' formal." 
 
 Some of these verbal vagaries of masculine society had, 
 years before, struck my childish intellect, though not as 
 comical yet as scientifically informative of certain adult 
 states of mind, and I therefore placed them in my diary, 
 where, later, they were discovered by my father and con- 
 demned to be burned — the paper on which they were written, 
 along with them. 
 
634 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 The things were not in fact destroyed, but, at this very 
 much later period, lie before me, with, of course, many can- 
 cellations, deletions, and supplementary dashes, and so have 
 suggested this particular section of the present volume. 
 
 And why? Because those written notes, foul as they were, 
 at least in their pristine form, are quite informative of the 
 really prudish nature of many viley obscene men. For those 
 foul-mouthed fellows, incredible as it may seem, would, 
 when in their doctor's office, suffering terribly perhaps from 
 piles, fistulae, and similar diseases, have a hard time bring- 
 ing themselves round to telling their physician the location, 
 not to say the general nature, of their hidden troubles. 
 
 One time indeed an oldish farmer, a generally very com- 
 monsensible person, sat in our office for fully half an hour, 
 doing his best to bring out a terrible confession. Father, 
 somehow guessing his trouble, relieved the tension by nar- 
 rating a comic story he had recently heard about some wholly 
 imaginary person who had had a case of piles. 
 
 "That's it! That's it!" shouted the old man. "That re- 
 minds me what I come to see you about — that thing you 
 just said. I'd forgot plumb and clean what I'd come fer. 
 Blast if I didn't! I'd really forgot it." 
 
 And this fastidious nonsense from an old fellow who had 
 the reputation around town of being the foul-mouthedest 
 critter Pike or any other county had ever produced! 
 
 Indeed there were a great many of these male sufferers, 
 some of whom, like the man just mentioned, were as free 
 as the winds with their language among their familiars, who 
 nevertheless were prevented by mere over-fastidiousness from 
 confessing fully to their kind old family doctor about their 
 rectal, anal and geni to-urinary diseases. A few who had no 
 euphemisms, just couldn't talk to him at all. 
 
 Among the women the squeamishness was much worse, 
 far more inconsistent. A woman who would not have dream- 
 ed of speaking of her toes or ankles to any living man but 
 her husband would not in the least be squeamish about dis- 
 playing her breasts on occasion. Over and over again I have 
 seen a woman in a grocery store, a dry-goods store, or 
 similar crowded emporium, unbutton her blouse freely, flop 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 635 
 
 out a breast or two, and go to suckling her infant as non- 
 chalantly as if she had merely produced a milk bottle. Nor 
 would she turn even a tenth of one degree to shield herself 
 from public view. Why it was that a woman who would 
 gladly submit to an examination for the purpose of deter- 
 mining whether or not she was pregnant, and who would, 
 of course, gladly accept the services of her family physician 
 in childbirth, never could bring herself to consult him about 
 any disease whatsoever in the genito-urinary or rectal and 
 anal tract, I do not know. But I do know that that was a 
 fact. 1 
 
 Not till about 1890, when a Miss Virginia Dinsmore, 
 M.D., who lived at Jacksonville, Illinois, began making 
 regular trips to a hotel in Pittsfield, did the women of Pike 
 County decide to have their recto-anal and genito-urinary 
 diseases attended to. Then her waiting-room at the Pitts- 
 field House was always crowded to the limit with women 
 whose diseases of the kind described should have been at- 
 tended to and could have been attended to years, yes and 
 even decades, before. Many women would not go even to 
 Dr. Dinsmore. 
 
 Doctor Dinsmore now has been in the past for several 
 years, but many (not all) women, their squeamishness con- 
 quered, continue to have their ailments, all their ailments, 
 attended to properly. 
 
 A Pike County woman of the long ago, while I was 
 practising medicine in Pittsfield, when I suggested that she 
 have a rectal and anal examination by me in the presence 
 of my mother, sternly refused on the ground that God would 
 not like to have her do that. When I suggested then that 
 she go to St. Louis and have a woman specialist there look 
 after her troubles, she answered, "God would not like to 
 have me do that either. " 
 
 I am certainly a strong believer in the Great Mind of the 
 Universe, but I sometimes wonder just how so many people 
 know so much more about exactly what God wants and 
 what God doesn't want than do I. Perhaps they get their 
 
 1 Also if a young woman were seen on the streets of our little town after 8:00 p. m. 
 without a proper escort — well she'd better have a mighty good excuse and, besides, be sure 
 to tell it to a fair-sized number of the elderly women next morning before something else 
 got started. 
 
636 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 superior information from the Bible, but I read the Bible 
 too and have studied it much more thoroughly perhaps than 
 have the most of these others. And still I seem to lack the 
 precise and very exact information which these other people 
 say they have about what God wishes and does not wish. 
 
 Then too I am bothered by the fact that many of the 
 persons in question have "known," for example, in 1889, 
 that God does not wish women to have recto-anal or genito- 
 urinary examinations and treatments, even by a woman 
 doctor, and yet (even the very same persons) knew in 1890 
 that God does wish that very thing. 
 
 All these matters remind me of a story that a Duluth 
 doctor told me just a few years ago. He said that, one cold 
 day, as a well-dressed woman came into his consultation 
 room, he was called by his office secretary to go out and 
 speak to somebody in his waiting hall. Before leaving the 
 consultation room he said to the bundled-up patient, "Just 
 take off your things: I'll be back shortly." 
 
 Returning, he found the lady in his consultation room 
 standing nonchalantly by his examination table and as 
 naked as a needle. She had indeed taken her things off — all 
 of them, and without further ado. 
 
 Which occurrence may or may not be typical of these 
 later and very much altered times. 1 
 
 1 The curious efforts of parents in those days to keep from telling their children the 
 truth about conception, pregnancy and child-birth, I have little space for in this book. 
 Suffice it to say that, generally, one or the other of the following replies would be given 
 to the questioner: "O the doctor found the baby lying by the side of the road." "He found 
 the baby under a rose-bush." "He brought the baby in a long black leather box." "You 
 asked me how did the doctor get the baby to put in that box? O, he prayed to God for it." 
 
 Once, however, at a not so squeamish place, about the following dialog, in my pres- 
 ence, took place: 
 
 "Where do mothers get their babies, Ma?" 
 
 "When a sow pigs, Son, where does she get her piggies?" 
 
 "Right out of her own self, Ma. I done see our sow git 'em." 
 
 "Well, as to this one thing, Son, a ma ain't no better'n a sow. She gets her piggies 
 too right out of her own self. Now you run along an' split them big sticks o' wood I laid 
 out fer ye. An' don't come back in askin' no more indelicate questions. I don't want to 
 be indelicate with ye an' I don't want to lie to you nuther. So off ye go to yer work, an' 
 leave indelicate questions to be answered by the doctors." 
 
 She was simply anticipating the "tell everything" attitude, characteristic of these 
 later days. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 637 
 
 AN ILLEGITIMATE FATHER— IN HIS HEART 
 
 We went, early that summer, my father and I, a number 
 of times to a farmhouse where a solitary child — she was 
 little more than that — lived with her parents; There was a 
 baby sick at that house, concerning whom my father was 
 greatly worried. 
 
 One day as, pill-bag-strap stretched over his knees, he was 
 preparing to dose out powders, he suddenly discovered that 
 his supply of powder-papers had been exhausted. "Get me 
 a piece of white paper quickly," he said to me, "we must 
 go to so many places yet to-day." 
 
 The old folks and the girl all looked round, apparently 
 finding no white paper. 
 
 I, happening to see a sheet of loose letter paper sticking 
 out from the leaves of a Bible on the bureau, promptly drew 
 it out, and, seeing my own name twice in some writing 
 there was upon it, I naturally read the whole — the girl, 
 however, first crying out, "No! No!" then running out at 
 the back door. 
 
 The sheet of paper read, "Dr. Thomas Hall Shastid and 
 [here followed the girl's own name] were united in holy 
 wedlock on [such and such a day, and so on]." The last 
 part of the inscription ran, "There was born to them [on 
 such and such a day — about two days after the marriage 
 date] a son, by name [here ran the name — my own]." 
 
 It may seem a silly thing, this romancing of a dreamy 
 country girl, but, when I read on that paper the name of 
 my own [supposed] son and namesake, my heart gave a 
 great jump of joy, and a great jump of joy it gives me again 
 whenever I think about him. My son, my son! And bear- 
 ing my own name too! I was proud beyond the power of 
 any words to express my exultation. The child of course 
 was not mine. But the mere thought of having a son ex- 
 alted and intoxicated me. 
 
 I asked quite gently of my father Einai nothosl (Is he an 
 illegitimate?) Kai malista (most certainly) was the reply. 
 Also in such Greek as I happened to remember, "A boy?" 
 He shook his head. ' 'Can it live?' ' Again he shook his head. 
 In English: "It is a blue baby: look and see." 
 
638 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 In the buggy I got the poor girl's story, then told my 
 father what I had seen on the paper in the Bible. "Well for 
 you, Thomas, it is that you returned after nearly two years' 
 absence. — The girl is really a good child, but intensely im- 
 aginative, a dreamer. The father of her child, more un- 
 fortunately still, is her own uncle, and she, even yet, has 
 not attained to the age of consent. Say nothing — a doctor's 
 first duty is to keep his mouth shut." 
 
 And away he went on the absolute necessity of a doctor's 
 understanding that confidential matters are confidential ab- 
 solutely. But I too was off, like the girl herself, a-dreaming — 
 not about her at all, but about my son, in case I should 
 ever have one. 
 
 I have never yet had a son, but always I have been hungry 
 — quite starved indeed — for a son. 
 
 And, foolish as it may seem, I never can think without 
 excessive joy of the notation which, that day, I found in that 
 Bible, of Thomas Hall Shastid and his blue-baby mythical 
 son by the same name — a notation not written in the Bible 
 itself but, diffidently, as by one who knew that she was lost, 
 on a separate piece of dream-paper and laid loosely in the 
 Holy Book — whence, at any time, it could be withdrawn 
 and sent up the chimney like any other vapid dream, glorious 
 or inglorious. 
 
 Several of my men friends, in the course of my long life, 
 have had illegitimate sons, daughters too, and, in each and 
 every instance, they have treated their offspring as hideously 
 shameful things, things to be kept permanently out of sight, 
 or murdered. Had I a son, so dearly would I love and cherish 
 him, yes although he were an illegitimate, that I would 
 bring him out into the clearest light, give him my full name 
 before all men, write it together with my own in the open 
 pages of the holy volume. 
 
 But, alas! I have no son, not even an illegitimate son, 
 excepting only in my heart. There he is, there in my heart 
 — my son, my son — whatsoever else he may be or howsoever 
 wicked — and I worship him without ceasing. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 639 
 
 FORGIVENESS 
 
 Day after day the sounds of saw and hammer were heard 
 in that part of our yard where I had staked out the new 
 office. Day after day the side-boarding went higher. Yet 
 practice was light, and so, one day, Father said to me, 
 "Let's drive up to Perry and call on your Uncle Jon." 
 
 On the way I dropped this information, "Our old friend, 
 Harfield, I've just heard on the Square, has moved to some 
 place near Perry." 
 
 "He has!" Astonishment. "Well [ruminatingly] I think 
 it would be better if we did not meet him — although a 
 number of times I've seen him in Pittsfield, but, somehow I've 
 always avoided a conflict." 
 
 And this leads me to say that once, when on vacation 
 at Pittsfield, from Inveni College, a very distressing occur- 
 rence took place which now I shall have to relate. I re- 
 frained from telling it in connection with the other events 
 of that vacation, because I wanted to save it until now. 
 This is what had happened. 
 
 The reader will no doubt remember that, in my child- 
 hood, my father had one day been attacked by Harfield, 
 rather his son, and that, in the contest following, my father 
 had come off easily first. 
 
 Well, some years later, when I was at home from Inveni, 
 and was seated in the living-room, a bleak December wind 
 was moaning round the old home. Sometimes it would die 
 completely away, but again it would beat at windows and 
 doors like evil spirits determined to crash in. 
 
 All at once there came a kind of falling at the door. I 
 arose, pulled the door open, and in staggered my father, 
 worn and piled over with snow from a long horse-back ride. 
 I drew out the lounge from the blackboard to the stove, and 
 Father lay down on it, almost instantly going off to sleep. 
 I did not even offer to fetch him food from the kitchen, 
 where my mother was getting supper. Plainly he needed 
 rest above all other things. 
 
 Hardly had he fallen asleep, however, when suddenly a 
 blast shook the house as if the entire frame of the earth were 
 reverting to things wild and elemental. At about the same 
 moment came a human — or was it an inhuman? — knocking. 
 
640 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Father awakened. At his wish I went to the door and 
 admitted a strange-looking man — a big, bulky, strongly- 
 built fellow with no neck whatever. His great, cannon-ball 
 of a bald head sat flat on his shoulders. His lips were big 
 and thick, his nose quite flat. His ears looked almost 
 ridiculous, so small were they for that head. 
 
 Yet he seemed good-natured too, as he stood by the stove 
 dripping snow-water on the zinc. 
 
 "Want you out to Harfield's, Doc." 
 Harfield ' s ! Nonsense ! ' ' 
 
 "They do though." 
 
 "I'll not go." 
 
 "They're all right now, Doctor." At this moment my 
 mother entered. "He don't hate you none no more, Harfield 
 don't. I was sorter foresmellin' a ruckus when he asked me 
 to come, but he's truly repentant. Been sorry ever sence 
 that time — well, you know when. Remember me, Doc?" 
 
 My mother put in, "You're the man whose wife was 
 bleeding to death about twenty years ago and Dr. Shastid 
 saved her life." 
 
 "Right, Mrs. Shastid. An' we ain't had no sickness 
 sence, er we'd sent fer yore husband. And we're grateful, 
 Doctor. Both the Harfields is sorry the way they've treated 
 you too. Both is ashamed, and both has said more'n once 
 they's sorry they ructioned with you, because you was the 
 best doctor in the county." 
 
 My father addressed his reply to me. "It is never well 
 for a doctor to treat anybody with whom he has ever quar- 
 relled." 
 
 But my mother intervened religiously. "Forgiveness! 
 Forgiveness!" she cried. "A Christian's first duty is for- 
 giveness. And not merely seven times shall you forgive," 
 she added, "but seventy times seven. And as you do unto 
 others — Perhaps, too — At all events our first and our last 
 duty is forgiveness." 
 
 My father arose, and I helped him to re- wrap. He had 
 not offsaddled and he went out into the night to his still 
 awaiting horse, the messenger going well before him. 
 
 In the course of a very few hours I, sleeping on the 
 lounge, was awakened by my returning father. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 641 
 
 He came back with eyes not young but aged, not blue but 
 gray, "like pale ice in a polar dawn." His body all at once 
 slumped forward onto the lounge. From the top of his head 
 a thin red trickle rolled. 
 
 The messenger, we afterwards learned, had been quite 
 honest in the matter — a perfectly innocent dupe. But as 
 soon as my father had entered the house of the senior Har- 
 field, the younger had stepped from a place of concealment 
 and, with some weapon, struck him hard upon the head. 
 
 Now it had so happened that Mrs. Blacksmith — like all 
 dear good souls among women — had, seated at her window 
 across the road from the Harfield house been greatly sur- 
 prised at the arrival of old Dr. Shastid at the Harfields'. So, 
 immediately, she had called her husband out of the back 
 part of the house and told him of the wonderful thing she 
 had seen. Thereupon Mr. Blacksmith, smelling an entire 
 basketful of mice, plunged quickly across the highway — 
 just in time to behold his old friend, the Doctor, kicked 
 clean out of the front door. 
 
 Then had entered he, the blacksmith, into the Harfield 
 residence and laid waste not merely the Harfields themselves 
 but everything within their domicile located, being or situ- 
 ated, or to them or unto them in anywise belonging or 
 otherwise appertaining. 
 
 In other words, he licked everything in sight, animate 
 and inanimate, both on my father's account and also on his 
 own. 
 
 My father made a quick recovery, but the results of his 
 forgiveness of the Harfields had rankled in his red-hot 
 bosom for years, so that now, as we neared Perry, my in- 
 formation that both the Harfield families had changed their 
 residences to somewhere near that place, fanned the tem- 
 perature in his bosom from a red heat to a white. 
 
 THE WAR IN THE STICKS 
 But, at a little farmhouse on our way, we were, very 
 fortunately, called in to extract a tooth for a young colored 
 man. My father's right hand being sore, he turned the 
 victim and instruments over to me. I cut away the gum, 
 applied the forceps, then — pulled and pulled and pulled. 
 
642 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 I had to take a rest. "Are you a dermis, a sure 'nuff 
 dermis?" asked the young colored man; "a dennis — a man 
 whut pulls teeth?" 
 
 "Let me have the forceps," said Father. A slight twist, 
 even with the sore hand, and the strongly anchored tooth 
 was out. 
 
 Father was like that. His gorilla-resembling arms and 
 hands never failed at what they attempted. 
 
 As to the young colored man, after he had spat out the 
 frothy blood, he declared to me, "I'd meant to whup you 
 an' whup you good fer bein' no dennis whatever but seein' 
 that big-pronged tooth an' how easy your pappy pulled it, 
 I guess I better wait ontwell I catch you out alone some time. 
 
 And he made the welkin ring with his hearty laughter. 
 
 Now my "Uncle Jon," whom we were just about to 
 visit for two hours, was my father's brother, Jon Shastid. 
 In his youth and early manhood that uncle had been a school- 
 teacher of remarkable ability, at Pittsfield. Later, at Perry, 
 he had become a very successful merchant and money-lender. 
 Though a man of great learning and of high moral courage 
 (despite the fact he was a money-lender) he was physically 
 as timid as my father was courageous. Never could he ad- 
 minister corporal punishment to a student, even in those 
 days when corporal punishment was regarded as more neces- 
 sary to "schooling" than was "reading, writing and arith- 
 metic." When he first applied for a position as school- 
 teacher, he stated frankly in his application that, contrary 
 to custom, he could not possibly fight other applicants for 
 the position even should he fail thereby to get the job. 
 Neither could he administer corporal punishment to anyone. 
 But he guaranteed perfect order in his school — and so he 
 got his school. 
 
 Nor did he at any time fail to keep excellent order — 
 though I have several times heard from contradictory sources 
 that he did in fact, sometimes, administer some chastise- 
 ment. 
 
 Well, it was this good, timid and highly religious uncle 
 that we were now about to visit. 
 
 Arrived at Perry, we went, first of all, to my uncle's 
 store. Just as my father was tying old Chiron to a post, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE — 643 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 645 
 
 who should come dashing up on horseback but the elder 
 Harfield, shouting, "Good God A'mighty, Doc, my wife's 
 bleedin' to death. Come on an' save 'er. I pray, Doc, I pray." 
 
 My father was not to be fooled again by any Harfield. 
 Therefore said he to this man who now asked to be trusted 
 again, "Come down off that horse." 
 
 Harfield failing to dismount immediately, my father 
 hauled him presto off the horse, struck him squarely in the 
 mouth. It was a vicious blow — from a hand too that had 
 done so much of kindness in its many years. 
 
 "I don't blame you," cried Harfield, much to my surprise. 
 "But my wife — " 
 
 "Fight!" cried my father. 
 
 Harfield 's face in a split second changed. Its look of 
 intense supplication altered to one of extreme belligerency 
 and coolness. "Come over to that corner," he said, almost 
 under his breath. "Too many people here." 
 
 He led the way to an opposite corner of the street, where 
 stood the house of my uncle's father-in-law, a Mr. Joseph (?) 
 Cockill, wherein however my uncle and his wife resided. 
 
 My father followed at his heels, and, knowing one of 
 the old tricks of fighting, ducked just short of the corner. 
 Harfield' s blow passed over his head, and then my father, 
 before Harfield could recover, stepped in close and gave him 
 such a battery of infighting to the solar plexus as I would 
 hardly have deemed possible, my father being well-nigh 
 sixty years of age. 
 
 All at once my father switched to a long right on the 
 jaw, and Harfield fell like a helpless stone. 
 
 Up came he, however, immediately, rather dazed but 
 still challenging. "You can't do that over on the other 
 corner" — pointing to the corner he and my father had just 
 come from. 
 
 Side by side they walked back to the store corner, and 
 again my father ducked the treacherous blow — stepped out 
 of reach, rather. 
 
 Went in again, ducked and countered, and Harfield again 
 went down. 
 
 Again rose, said, "You can't do that back on the house 
 corner." 
 
646 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "I can do it on any corner in the universe," replied my 
 father, although, very obviously, the slow-walking Harfield 
 was merely, each time, playing for a little respite in which 
 to recover from blows received. 
 
 At the house corner, once again, Harfield went down. 
 Once again too he asked for a chance to try the other corner. 
 
 Tried that. Again lost. Asked once more for a round at 
 the corner of the house. 
 
 As the two started for the house corner, I saw with a 
 strange exultation a young man dash up on a horse, leap 
 off and stand at a little distance beyond the corner. It was 
 Harfield junior, a man in life's very prime. For a moment 
 I, being smaller, but active and strong beyond general belief, 
 thought to rush over and take the Junior job myself. Then 
 I repented. My father was as fresh as a young greyhound 
 in a race. Senior was already well-nigh licked. Why not 
 then let Father finish both the Harfields — he could whip 
 either one alone easily — and have the whole glory to himself? 
 
 My father had not seen young Harfield: that became 
 suddenly plain to me. But, at that very moment, Senior 
 turned short, struck, passed his fist over my father's shoulder, 
 and then I saw Junior leap to the fray with a large open 
 knife in his hand. 
 
 And then I beheld — of all the impossible things on this 
 planet ! — my timid old Uncle Jon rush out of his house-door 
 and, reaching the back of Junior, throw his arms around him 
 and hold him tight. 
 
 Senior being hors de combat, my father cried, "Let him 
 alone, Jon!" 
 
 But "Jon" would not let go of Junior. 
 
 All at once "Jon" fainted dead away and fell backward, 
 ka-rumph, on the sidewalk. 
 
 Junior swept a vicious knife-blade arc at my father's face. 
 
 Father was out of distance, in again, struck right-left- 
 right. Junior joined pappa in happy dreamland, and my 
 father turned his attention to "Jon." 
 
 We took "Jon" into the house and worked rapidly over 
 him for several hours — him who had not been hurt at all 
 excepting in his physical timidity complex, whatsoever that 
 is. At all events he was the real hero of the day. I do not 
 suppose that any ordinary person can imagine what his 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 647 
 
 interposition in that fracas had cost him, mentally, spiritu- 
 ally and philosophically. 
 
 In a place and at a time when frequent fighting appeared 
 to be essential, he had absolutely no fighting instinct what- 
 ever. And yet he had fought — in his own peculiar way, of 
 course. 
 
 This story would be incomplete without the wind-up. 
 As my father used to remark, "The sting of a story is always 
 in de tail." So it was in this one. It turned out later (con- 
 densing I am, considerably) that Senior Harfield's wife had 
 really been sick, wounded rather, having fallen on a butcher 
 knife and severed an artery. Harfield had galloped to Perry 
 for a most excellent surgeon — my cousin, Dr. Frank L. Hall 
 — but the Doctor, a member of the Legislature, was off on 
 official business then, so Harfield, catching sight of my 
 father and knowing that time was of the essence of the 
 situation, appealed quite naturally, but of course incredibly, 
 to him — the man whom he and his son had quite treacher- 
 ously beaten up so many years before. 
 
 My father, some time after the Perry fracas, relating 
 these facts in full detail to me, commented, "Harfield, long 
 years ago, asked me to forgive him and go to his aid. I did, 
 and that turned out to be a very wrong thing to do. Now, 
 recently, he asked me again to forgive him and to lend him 
 my assistance. I naturally refused, and so — almost cost his 
 wife her life. What is a person in a world like this to do?" 
 
 "Be dead," said I. "Only the dead can make no mis- 
 takes." 
 
 Nevertheless, even after my father had learned that Mrs. 
 Harfield senior had really been in very grave danger on that 
 day of the Perry combat, he appeared for a number of years 
 to be listening almost continually for the sound of approach- 
 ing violence. 
 
 No more trouble, however, came. In fact the Perry com- 
 bat was, I believe, the last fight I ever saw in Pike County 
 till one of quite recent years — when, in my old age, I was 
 back at Pittsfield on a visit. 
 
648 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 CHANGES, CHANGES! 
 
 And well it was for my father that no more fights were 
 necessary. There had been changes in him during my long 
 absence of nearly two years in New York, Burlington and 
 Vienna. "What did you do, Father," I asked one day, "for 
 an apprentice while I was gone?" 
 
 "O just what I had done while you were still here but 
 had not yet become my apprentice. What, in fact I had done 
 in the first years of my practice in Pittsfield. I was at that 
 time not only (as you know) doctor and doctor's apprentice, 
 likewise my own druggist, bottle washer, office janitor, 
 legging-cleaner, axle-greaser, hostler, equerry, buggy wash- 
 er, and so on, but I was also, as quite recently, for a good 
 part of the time my own patient. I have not been quite so 
 well since you left me the last time, but I'm getting older 
 of course. Do you remember the time, Tom, at the depot 
 (you were with me) when the Republicans with torches and 
 uniforms were entraining for a rally at Barry and a Democrat 
 named Kibler on the railway platform got into an alterca- 
 tion with Elliott Baker on the passenger-car steps? Baker 
 leaped at Kibler and I grabbed them both and held them 
 apart. Couldn't do it now." 
 
 It was the truth. He could not have done it then. 
 
 In my mother too there was a difference. When I had 
 first got home she looked but little altered, although she 
 still was busy not only at her household duties but also in 
 semi-professional assistance to my father — making his pills 
 and filling his capsules, meeting messengers from the sick 
 and ofttimes considerately collecting long overdue accounts. 
 However, there was something gnawing inside her heart, 
 and, as time advanced, it gnawed more deeply. Then I 
 found out what the trouble was. Shortly after I had returned 
 to New York for my second year there, she had written me 
 wailfully, to wit: The day after I had departed from home, 
 she had found in the smoke-house — a half-smoked cigar! 
 Did I know anything at all about it? She would almost 
 rather see me dead, and so on. 
 
 She began the letter with a very long and painful intro- 
 duction — one that well-nigh broke my heart. "The place 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 649 
 
 of the first-born is a very special one in any woman's breast," 
 she wrote. "A shrine. A place for him who is next to her 
 God!" I had never thought I had meant so much to her 
 as that. "To have that shrine desecrated, to have it ruth- 
 lessly torn down by the being it was meant for, and made 
 a thing of sordidness and all unrighteousness," and so forth 
 and so on. 
 
 Then came the finding of the cigar — at least the stump 
 thereof. Then the questioning, quite to the point. Finally, 
 one of the sweetest and tenderest of prayers. 
 
 My Mother Collecting An Overdue Account 
 (Line-drawing b'y my Long-Time Friend, Wm. H. Schmedtgen, of Chicago, Years Ago Deceased) 
 
 All at once and quite characteristically, I flew angry. 
 I wrote her a hot letter, pointing out — quite logically of 
 course — that, if she could still retain her membership in a 
 
650 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 church whose head, the President of Inveni College, still no 
 doubt spat tons of tobacco juice over the entire landscape 
 wherever he went, she might perhaps find a little pardon 
 in her heart for me, her first born. 
 
 But, next day, I recalled that there is no use arguing with 
 anyone about his (still less her) religion, or her church, or 
 the head or the tail (which was I) thereof. 
 
 So I sat me down and wrote a new letter — one I actually 
 sent — and in it I promised never again and so forth. 
 
 Yet, when home I arrived, I could see that I had given 
 her a deep and lasting hurt. And she was aging on account 
 of it. 
 
 Never, in truth, have I smoked again. In that way, 
 perhaps, in the course of more than half a century, I have 
 saved, no doubt, interest and all included, several thousand 
 dollars — which dollars politicians have largely taken from 
 me (the old-age pension, so to speak, which I had provided 
 for myself) and passed it on to others, very largely to spit 
 and smoke away. 
 
 Anyhow, I have saved my heart and blood-vessels a great 
 deal of strain, and my dear good mother more or less anxiety 
 about my soul's salvation. 
 
 But still she would keep on aging a little that summer 
 because, well just because it is a universe of change and 
 people all change because they are essentially bound up with 
 the universe. And then too there is a special law for those 
 who work too hard — for they change faster still than need be. 
 
 Things, too, had changed as well as people. A few of 
 the store-fronts on the Public Square had changed. A few 
 of the older buildings had gone. There were one or two 
 cement sidewalks. Geese, ducks, hogs and cows no longer 
 grazed in the streets, therefore no longer left on the sidewalks 
 their "islands of delight." Night-pots were not so fre- 
 quently emptied in spaces between sidewalks and roadways, 
 or even in front dooryards. Not only two-holed, but many- 
 holed, privies had been constructed in various backyards, 
 so that people of the same sexual persuasion could enter 
 these structures not only two by two as had those who had 
 entered the Ark, but even by threes or in still more con- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 651 
 
 siderable groups — whereby many were enabled to participate 
 at one and the same time in the discussion of — whatsoever 
 the themes may be which, customarily, are disposed of in 
 such places. It was cautiously whispered over the town that 
 a certain highfalutin' citizen was intending to have a bath- 
 tub set up in his house, but this rumor appeared later to be 
 only a base fabrication. Wire screens, however, had already 
 and indubitably appeared at many doors and windows, 
 whereby the health of the body politic (if not political) was 
 greatly improved. A few of the house-yards had begun to 
 get along without fences. Charley Obst,the photographer, 
 had got a new camera, and had arranged his vast collection 
 of Indian relics in quite a novel manner. 
 
 Change! and nearly all in the way of improvement. 
 
 Out in the country the alterations were more obvious 
 still. Many of the forests had been all cut away, others 
 much reduced in size. The highways had been somewhat 
 straightened out. A few of the loveliest curves had dis- 
 appeared entirely. The hill-tops almost everywhere had 
 been cut down, and the clay thus secured had been laid 
 down in the valleys. Even the fences had changed. Instead 
 of the old-time Virginia fences — stake-and-ridered, or rail, 
 fences — there were short, straight posts and straight, par- 
 alleled, barbed wires tightly stapled across them. Somehow 
 the birds did not appear to love the wires of these modern 
 fences as well as they had loved the Virginia rails. They still 
 sang and still they balanced and teetered on the top perches 
 of the fences, especially at wheat-harvest time, but, even so, 
 they appeared to sing with a very plain difference. One 
 day my father expressly stated that he believed the birds 
 were missing the old-time fences. 4 They do not, ' ' he alleged, 
 "appear to love the products of the great steel plants which 
 are springing up all round in the cities." 
 
 The parallel wires in the fences did their best to make 
 us forget the fences of the older times, and hummed and rose 
 and fell and hummed again and ofttimes sobbed like the 
 Aeolian harps which the generation just gone had some- 
 times set beneath their window-frames. But the "birds of 
 beauty whose bright plumage sparkled with a thousand 
 dyes," likewise those of dullest livery but sweet tonality, 
 seemed to feel alike that something somehow was wanting 
 
652 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 from the scene. Both kinds indeed appeared to be slipping 
 into the past, at least the past of Pike County. Many species 
 indeed never came back any more at all from the Southland, 
 even in midsummer. 
 
 Some of the covered bridges too had passed away. Also 
 many of the log houses, and been supplanted by structures 
 of frame. Brick farmhouses had almost entirely vanished. 
 
 One of the chief changes in the country had been the 
 almost total disappearance of the roadside blacksmith shops. 
 Farmers of large acreage — my uncle, Calvin Hall, for ex- 
 ample — had kept their own private blacksmith shops on 
 their farms, and, largely, still did their own blacksmithing. 
 The roadside shop, however, had largely given place, -pari 
 passu, to the advancing business of the steel plants in the 
 cities. (The country saw-mill, too, had about disappeared 
 with the disappearance of timber, and the country "flouring 
 mill" had largely become antique: these had never been the 
 features in the landscape or the factors in the social life of 
 the community that the blacksmith shops had been.) 
 
 One day in that summer of 1889, as my father and I, in 
 the country, were discussing the great new office we were 
 building and all that it should mean to Pike County, my 
 father, of a sudden, began walking his horse, which limped 
 slightly because of the absence of a shoe from the off-hind 
 foot. In a very few minutes we had checked rein beside a 
 smithy. 
 
 My father, as the custom then was, shouted to the black- 
 smith from the buggy-seat: "Shoe loose! Shoe loose! Shoe 
 loose!" 
 
 There had been a brief pause in the ringing of hammer 
 on anvil. -Now the sound was resumed. 
 
 Again my father shouted, this time like Jupiter unto 
 Vulcan, "Shoe loose!" 
 
 The hammer ceased ringing, and the smith came to the 
 door, and behold! it was the same man who, years before, 
 had helped my father "handle" the Harfields. 
 
 "Ho, ho! Doc an' Tommy! Come in! Gettin' deaf an' 
 old!" 
 
 "Changed your shop!" So Father. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE — 653 
 
MY UNCLE JOHN SHASTID'S GENERAL STORE AT PERRY, ILLINOIS 
 
 At the front right-hand corner of this building began my father's 
 last fight with the Harfields. 
 
 (From "Atlas Map of Pike County, Illinois": Andreas, Lyter & Co., Davenport, Iowa: 1872) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 654 
 
My Uncle Jon Shastid's later residence at Perry, Illinois. At the corner of the 
 fence my father's last fight with the Harfields was concluded. 
 
 (From "Atlas Map of Pike County, Illinois": 
 Andreas, Lyter & Co., Davenport, Iowa: 1872) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 655 
 
My Uncle Jon Shastid's earlier residence at Perry, Illinois. This place had 
 nothing to do with the Harfield-Shastid fight, but the picture is presented 
 because it shows the kind of sidewalk, picket fence and many other features 
 that prevailed in Illinois towns and villages from 1870 to 1900. 
 
 (From "Atlas Map of Pike County, Illinois": Andreas, Lyter & Co., 
 Davenport, Iowa: 1872) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 656 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 657 
 
 "Yes. Harfields moved; I moved. Say, Doc, heard you 
 licked 'em both t'other day." 
 
 Father narrated everything, the while I sat on the edge 
 of the cooling-tub. Finally Frank, our horse, with his new 
 shoe properly affixed to him, was carrying us toward home 
 at a rapid gait. I looked backward at the dear old smith, 
 who, bareheaded and in his leather apron, stood in the 
 middle of the road, waving and waving a good old hand 
 after us till a cut-down hill had hidden him from view. 
 
 READIN', WRITIN' AND STEALIN' 
 
 There were changes too in Pike County farmers. Always 
 there had been in our territory many farmers of much intel- 
 ligence, men who read and wrote and who thought deeply 
 on important subjects. Now there were more of these. 
 There were still, however, here and there, some farmers 
 whom the more advanced people of their neighborhood in 
 the country termed "moss-backs" — which reminds me of one 
 that I met in the road one day as I rode in the country alone 
 that first summer of my practice. 
 
 After I had introduced myself and he seemed quite unim- 
 pressed, he asked me, "Got book larnin', have ye?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Think book larnin 's good fer ye?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 ■ 'Well, I don't. I don't believe in no readin' or no writin' . 
 Either one of 'em '11 make a man steal." 
 
 "Are you a religious man?" 
 
 "Ain't no thin' else." 
 
 "Is there anything in the Bible to justify your saying 
 what you just have said about reading and writing?" 
 
 "Shore is. In the last verse of the first chapter of Ec- 
 clesiastes King Solomon says, 'He that increaseth knowledge 
 increaseth sorrow.' An' it's a fact that either readin' or 
 writin' '11 make a man steal. Think you need book larnin' 
 to doctor people's sickness with?" 
 
 "Yes, have to have it." 
 
 "No, you don't have to have it, not to cure nobody's 
 diseases. You have to be born a doctor, or you can't never 
 be no doctor. Ever think o' that?" 
 
 "No, I never have thought about it a great deal." 
 
658 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Well, ye'd better think more about bein' born a doctor, 
 less about learnin' readin' an' writin'. I got a boy that 
 studied readin' an' writin' — in a school too. He got so's 
 he could write a'most anything, his own handwritin' or 
 anybody else's. He's in jail now, accused o' forgery." 
 
 OLD-TIME LOG HOUSE AND VIRGINIA RAIL FENCE 
 (From my "A Country Doctor" [1898] page IS. 
 Line-drawing by Wm. H. Schmedtgen, Chicago) 
 
 "Hew?" 
 
 "Yes. He is. But I'm goin' to get him out easy, even ef 
 I ain't got no book l'arnin'. Goin' to swear that the feller 
 whose name he wrote told him in my presence to write his 
 name fer 'im because he — the feller whose name he writ — 
 had a sore thumb. Well, I guess it's so — maybe. Anyway 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 659 
 
 my son had sold 'im some seed pertaters that he hadn't never 
 paid my son enough fer — so the check was to pay fer what 
 the feller still owed my son. Anyway I remember it that 
 way an' I'm goin to remember it that way. But ef my son 
 hadn't learned no readin' er no writin', he couldn't never a 
 got into no sich mess." 
 
 "So you're going to swear to all of that?" 
 
 "I shore am." 
 
 "Why! that'll make you particeps criminis." 
 
 "I may be particeps by crickey, er whatever ye called 
 that thing, but I'm strictly honest an' I'm not goin' to 
 have no forgers in my family, so I'm goin' to get that there 
 boy out o' that there jail. — An' you too, little Doc, ye'd 
 better start learnin' born medicine (usin' the brains that God 
 give ye, whatever that was) an' quit learnin' to read and 
 to write, an' stay like me — strictly honest." 
 
 As he turned into a side lane I felt somewhat confused. 
 
 This old chap, I later learned, had actually once been a 
 school trustee. 
 
 I'M FOLLERIN' MEDICINE 
 
 On another day that* summer, as I drove along alone I 
 was overtaken by a farmer on horseback, who asked, "Have 
 you seen young Doctor Shastid passing this way?" 
 
 "Z am young Doctor Shastid," I answered. 
 
 "Say that again. Whafs yer name?" 
 
 "Shastid." 
 
 He gave me a quick, sharp look, and, with one of the 
 nastiest sneers I have ever in my snub-nosed life experienced, 
 cried out, "What do ycf oiler?" and was on his doubting way. 
 
 But, as a rule, even the farmers who did not know me 
 were courteous, affable, kind, despite my youthful, raw and 
 very unconvincing appearance. 
 
 CHOLERA INFANTUM 
 The most important change of all, however, was that 
 from mosquito netting to wire screening for windows and 
 doors. In old days I had once, with my father, in one single 
 
 Seriod of twenty-four hours, seen precisely fifty cases of this 
 isease. In many an epidemic over half the babies had died. 
 
660 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 This particular summer, thanks largely to the wire screens 
 at windows and doors, also of course to some extent to the 
 clean milk bottles and milk, not a child had died of cholera 
 infantum and only two or three had even been sick from 
 that great scourge. 
 
 How plainly I remember that happy evening as I was 
 driving homeward with my father! How he rejoiced in the 
 germ theory and all that it had done for mankind ! We were 
 coming into town on the Griggsville road, and now, just 
 east of the Dutton Spring, were driving across the bridge 
 east of the place where Bay and Panther creeks join in a 
 common bottom. I noted how nearly all the old-time 
 "monarchs of the forest" had been cut away from round the 
 confluence of the streams. 
 
 A little sassy blue jay flitted from its nest in the crotch 
 of one of the smaller trees that had been left and lighted on 
 the parapet-rail of the Bay Creek bridge. It kept dipping 
 its head and flirting its tiny tail. 
 
 "When we are happy, then all else seems happy," com- 
 mented my father. "I have a presentiment this day that, 
 when we get back home, some piece of good news will be 
 awaiting us." 
 
 And so indeed it proved. As we drove round the corner 
 of our house, there, unable to wait, so fine was the news 
 that she had for us, my mother was out on the public side- 
 walk, bareheaded, pacing to and fro, and crying out before 
 we could step from the buggy, "Good news! good news! 
 The first messenger has been here that specially asked for 
 'Doctor Tom.' Said no one else than Doctor Tom would do, 
 but that the case could wait till morning." 
 
 So we all three went straight back to the north of the 
 yard and into the skeleton office and sat down on the saw- 
 horses and whatever else came handy, and planned and plan- 
 ned and planned. What a beautiful office this was going to 
 be, said my mother, and how happy we all should be when 
 it was fully finished and equipped. How happy, how happy, 
 how happy! 
 
 Well it was for all us three that, with our merely mortal 
 vision we could not perceive the terrible events in store for 
 Pike County and even for my father in the fast nearing days 
 of death, darkness and unspeakable desolation! 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 661 
 
 MY FATHER BUYS ME A HORSE 
 
 There were, of course, two doctor Shastids in the town. 
 To distinguish us apart, people called me "Doctor Tom" 
 and my father "The Old Doctor." After my father's death 
 — far later than the time of which I write — the affection of 
 Pike County people for my father continued to increase until, 
 at length, they applied the designation, "Doctor Tom," to 
 him alone, while me they largely forgot — all of which was 
 sufficiently proper, I admit. 1 
 
 At the time of which I write, however, I was still ' 'Doctor 
 Tom," alias "the young doctor," and, naturally, because 
 quite inexperienced as compared with my father, the one 
 less often sent for. Therefore, that summer, though my 
 father had me by him, the brunt of the work was still upon 
 him. To me at the office, of course, came cases of the eye, 
 ear, nose and throat, and, in the country, it was merely fun 
 to stop at some farmhouse and check a diarrhoea or splint 
 a broken finger bone. The dislocations of the hip, the com- 
 pound fractures, the bad obstetrical presentations, the all- 
 night hemorrhages, and so forth, these were my father's 
 sore trials and heavy burdens. No wonder he was looking 
 still older. 
 
 In spite of which and of many other pre-occupations, my 
 father suddenly said to me one day, laying a hand excitedly 
 on my knee, "One thing we've forgotten. Whoa!" Frank 
 stopped stock still in the road. "One thing we've forgotten." 
 
 "We — forgotten! What?" 
 
 "A horse!" 
 
 "A horse?" 
 
 "Why yes, of course, a horse. A horse like this horse, 
 only a much better one — if there is any. You must of course 
 have a horse of your own — though always you may use my 
 horses when you wish to. You must have a horse of the 
 very best. Horse, buggy, pill-bags — we've forgotten all of 
 them, thinking too much about the office. A horse now — 
 A Columbus Buggy Company's buggy; that's settled. Not 
 a Columbus Buggy, but a Columbus Buggy Company's buggy, 
 
 1 The use of the name above-mentioned — Doctor Tom — as a term of esteem and endear- 
 ment for my father appears to have remained a memorable affair to many Pike Countians. 
 At all events a rather large number of the older people, learning of my intention to write 
 my "reminiscences," have asked me to "be sure to tell how everyone used to love to call 
 my father "Doctor Tom." 
 
662 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 is what you want: there's a very great difference. But a 
 horse — now how shall we get the horse? The pill-bags — 
 Truax has just the kind you want: I'll show you. But the 
 horse! He or she should be young and large and very, very 
 gentle — one brought up by the entire family, every member 
 of which has understood clearly that a horse is the timidest 
 of all animals, therefore an animal that should never be 
 frightened by whip or spur or any unkind word, but loved 
 and petted from the minute of his birth and made to under- 
 stand that all human beings are his friends. He must have 
 speed and endurance, intelligence and sociability, and — " 
 
 "In other words, a palomino." So I. 
 
 "Why a palomino?" 
 
 "Only one that can fulfill all your requirements." 
 
 "But he's unethical. There are rich bays and bright 
 sorrels and midnight blacks. I have only to let my clients 
 round the country know I'm wanting a horse for my son to 
 get round to see them with. It'll be easy to get the right 
 sort — dead easy. You'll see. It'll be very easy." 
 
 HELL IN THE SIDE 
 
 A patient of mine in whom I diagnosed appendicitis and 
 who afterwards almost lost his life from that disease, was 
 asked one day in my presence by another patient, "What's 
 appendicitis?" "It's hell in the side," said the first patient, 
 and, as a description rather than a definition, the answer 
 was perfect. 
 
 I got appendicitis myself in that summer of 1889- It was 
 "hell" in my side. 
 
 I had been having touches of appendicitis, just at rare 
 intervals, for a number of years. But now, in this summer of 
 1889, I began to have it in dear, I might almost have put 
 it "dead," earnest. Every time I stepped into or out of a 
 buggy — which, naturally, was often — I had a great increase 
 in the pain. My father, quick as he was in general to take 
 up actual advances in the science and art of medicine, was, 
 somehow, slow to believe in the existence of appendicitis. 
 "Never to this date have I seen a single case," he used to 
 remark. So too said almost all the other doctors in the 
 civilized world. Reginald Heber Fitz, an American surgeon, 
 three years before (in 1886) had conclusively demonstrated 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 663 
 
 the causation and pathology of appendicitis. 1 Yet here were 
 almost all the other doctors, believers and non-believers in 
 the germ theory alike, declaring positively that they never 
 had seen a case. They had seen cases by the hundreds of 
 thousands but simply had not recognized them — called them 
 typhlitis, inflammation of the bowels, chronic peritonitis, 
 and so on. It was a strange state of affairs. I consulted a 
 number of large city surgeons, but no difference. "Live 
 quietly, take things easily: you'll eventually get well — 
 perhaps." 
 
 I "take things easily," with the new office built and 
 outfitted, with new patients coming to see us daily! Pretty 
 soon we had almost as many patients arriving from sur- 
 rounding counties as we had from Pike. Calhoun County 
 alone was sending a quota of patients out of all proportion 
 to her population. 
 
 "Take it easily!" 
 
 Sometimes when a lull in practice came for, say, ten or 
 fifteen minutes, my mother would rush over from the house 
 and cry, "The front room is the prettiest, Tom. I don't 
 believe you've ever looked at it. See how well Hodgen's 
 picture looks where I put it, and Father's diploma and the 
 old microscope and the book-cases — yes, and the picture-rail 
 and the wall-paper too. Young John Hull has such good 
 taste about such matters. How beautiful they all are ! Come 
 and lie down for a minute and let me rub your head: that 
 always eases the pain in your side. Let me rub your head a 
 little while you look around at the beauty of the room. 
 Your father and I have tried so hard to make this room — 
 And now Father will soon be back from the country or 
 patients coming in, and you won't have lain down and 
 looked around at all. You never stop to live, Tom. You 
 never stop to see anything but books and patients. You 
 never see even your own mother. No, you never see even 
 me. — And why don't you always get into the buggy first, 
 
 1 Inasmuch as it has ofttimes been asserted that Reginald Heber Fitz, one of the greatest 
 of surgeons, was only a "Y. of P.", I am pleased to correct that misunderstanding. Dr. Fitz 
 in fact received his medical degree at the Harvard University Medical School in 1868. 
 Inasmuch as the first registration of physicians in Massachusetts (Fitz was practising at the 
 time in Boston) did not occur till 1894 and then did not mention Dr. Fitz's degree, the 
 American Medical Association Directory, First Edition (1906) erroneously, but quite ex- 
 cusably, listed Dr. Fitz as having once been a Y. of P. physician. The error was corrected 
 in the Second Edition of the Directory. 
 
664 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 before Jo unties the horse for you? It hurts you so when 
 the horse starts before you get in and settle down. You 
 must have a quieter horse." 
 
 Father tried indeed to get me a horse that answered to 
 all requirements. 
 
 First of all, however, and though it may seem to older 
 persons quite unnecessary, I must explain what I mean by a 
 buggy. The English buggy and the American buggy were 
 two very different vehicles. The English affair was two- 
 wheeled, one-horsed, topless (hoodless). In India, I under- 
 stand, a buggy was the same affair as in England except that 
 it did have a hood (head or top). In the United States a 
 buggy was a more substantial vehicle by far. It had always 
 four wheels, could be drawn by either one or two horses, 
 and possessed a hood, or top, that could be let down partly 
 or completely and which was regarded as an essential not as 
 an adjunct. The American buggy was always well made, 
 substantial, built like a country doctor himself, substanti- 
 ally — to stand rough roads, storms, floods, runaways, and 
 other countryside contingencies. 
 
 A heavier buggy we had for the family's use, for example 
 making a trip down to Grandfather Hall's and back — about 
 22 miles — all in one day. 
 
 A sulky my father also had — a two-wheeled affair, drawn 
 always by one horse, and devoid of top — except, often, a 
 great umbrella that turned on a' universal joint — and even 
 of a back more than three to four inches high. In case the 
 horse should start up suddenly, you just went out of the 
 sulky backwards and lit on your shoulders or head — as I 
 have already related that my father did alight (twice) near 
 Kespohl's brickyard, with resultant paresthesia for the 
 remainder of his life. 
 
 Sulkies were especially useful when roads were muddy 
 or rough. 
 
 If roads were still muddier or rougher, then there were 
 saddle and bridle and horse — for reasons quite obvious. For 
 reasons that are equally obvious, horseback riding was not 
 good for people with chronic appendicitis. 
 
 All these vehicular paraphernalia had, in the country 
 doctor's case, to be substantially constructed. The horse 
 
The Mother Who Had Found a Cigar Stump. "And the place of the first-born 
 is a very special one in any woman's breast." 
 
 As will be seen, she did not mind wearing jewelry in a picture. "Pictures 
 are only for relatives and some distant friends, therefore never can give offense 
 to the destitute at home." 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 667 
 
 must be strong and enduring. The buggy, too, must be (in 
 my father's opinion) built of Norway iron. He bought, I 
 think, the "Columbus Buggy Company's buggy" exclusive- 
 ly — not the "Columbus buggy," which was an altogether 
 less enduring affair. Even so, he bought a new buggy every 
 three or four years. 
 
 Only Father himself seemed not to wear completely out 
 — at least not then. 
 
 PILL-BAGS 
 Pill-bags, oft termed "saddle-bags," consisted of a pair 
 of all leather bags, united by a broad leather strap two feet 
 or so in length. Each bag was a "mirror-image" of the 
 other: that is to say, the two were precisely alike saving 
 only that one had its flat main-side toward the right, the 
 other had its corresponding aspect toward the left. Each of 
 the other main sides was flat below but half-arched at the 
 top, so that, when the doctor was carrying his bags by the 
 strap with a hand, the two flat main-sides came together 
 and the half-arches at the tops together formed one good, 
 strong, neat-looking arch. 
 
 When a doctor was about to make a trip on horseback, 
 he first threw the pill-bags transversely across the horse's back 
 immediately behind the saddle, with the broad, leather con- 
 necting-band fitted neatly to the horse's back. There were 
 generally two small, strong loops at the back edge of the 
 saddle, to which two strong thongs from the front edge of 
 the connecting-band of the pill-bags would be tied, thus 
 preventing the bags from falling off the horse. Each bag, 
 right and left, rested on the upper part of the side of the 
 horse. 
 
 In my childhood and youth I did not as a rule accompany 
 my father on his horseback journeys. When we drove in the 
 buggy, however, I, as soon as we had stopped at a farmhouse 
 and dismounted, proceeded to take the pill-bags out from 
 under the buggy-seat and then to start for the house. My 
 father, meanwhile, would be tying the horse and either 
 blanketing him or, in hot weather, adjusting his fly-net. 
 
 In the house my father would, of course, first question 
 carefully the attendants and then the patient on the course 
 
668 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 the case had been taking since last he had been at the house. 
 Then, next, he would re-examine the patient — in such a casual 
 way that, ofttimes, the patient did not know how carefully 
 he was being examined. 
 
 A DOCTOR'S BUGGY OF THE OLDEN TIME 
 
 "Unus, one; duo, two!" 
 (From my "A Country Doctor" (1898) Frontispiece. 
 Line-drawing by Wm. H. Schmedtgen, Chicago) 
 
 Re-seating himself, my father would pick up his pill-bags, 
 lay the broad leather band transversely across his lap, and 
 then take out the various materials for the preparation of the 
 medicines to be left for the patient's use. Each bag consisted 
 of two stories, lower and upper. From the lower, by loosen- 
 ing a buckle, he could draw forth a drawer with compart- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 669 
 
 ments, each compartment containing a labelled bottle filled 
 with medicine. The upper story, also when unbuckled, 
 revealed powder- papers, pill-boxes, boxes of ointments, 
 spatulas, and so forth and so on. 
 
 HOW A DOCTOR'S BUGGY OF THE OLDEN TIME LOOKED 
 
 AFTER BLACK JIM HAD GOT THROUGH WITH IT 
 
 (From my "A Country Doctor" (1898) Page 24. 
 
 Line-drawing by Wm. H. Schmedtgen, Chicago) 
 
 Before leaving a house, in this summer of 1889, my father 
 would almost always broach the subject of a horse — a horse 
 that might be fitting for even a man like me to get started 
 into practice with. 
 
670 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE! 
 But, almost always, the family did not know of any such 
 paragon of a horse as the type my father had described — one 
 that could run away and run fast but yet just wouldn't, one 
 that was strong and sturdy and steady and straight and 
 honest and reliable and kind and affectionate and free from 
 roars and spavins and all similar monstrosities and unac- 
 ceptabilities. One that was not too young, yet not old. 
 One that was speedy and yet had endurance. One that would 
 not jump off a bridge, and that yet, in case of necessity, 
 would swim a swollen stream and carry the rider safely on 
 his gracious errand of mercy to the sick. 
 
 OLD-TIME PILL-BAGS WHEN NOT IN USE 
 (From my "A Country Doctor" (1898) Page 20. 
 Line-drawing by Wm. H. Schmedtgen, Chicago) 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 671 
 
 Then, too, the horse must be good-looking — rather, at 
 least — yet not too beautiful either — nothing like a palomino, 
 for example, a mere circus horse. That would be quite un- 
 ethical, too loud, attract too much attention, be in the nature 
 of publicity-seeking. 
 
 "Why, Doc," some of them would criticize, "I should 
 think that's what you would want. Hamlin's Wizard Oil 
 people drove through here the other day, and did they have 
 palominos? They had palominos — six of them, and each one 
 prettier than the others. And their big long wagon, it was 
 painted blue and yellow and green and red — and all fancied 
 up in picters. 
 
 OLD-TIME PILL-BAGS WHEN IN USE 
 (From my "A Country Doctor" (1898) Page 29. Line-drawing by Wm. H. Schmedtgen, Chicago) 
 
672 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "And they did business, now believe me. A dollar a bottle 
 and six hundred bottles the first evenin'. But we ain't got 
 no palominos here nohow. Ner picter wagons. Nothin' 
 but plow-horses an' farm-wagons. But a feller down over 
 the hill's got a plumb race-horse — he et his owner's shoulder 
 off the other day. You dressed it!" 
 
 It became increasingly evident that the securement of the 
 proper kind of horse for me would be a difficult task. 
 
 OFTTIMES THE APPAREL DOTH PROCLAIM 
 THE HORSE 
 
 The first Candidate for royal carrier of his majesty, the 
 young doctor, came one morning in the shape of a sorrel 
 mare that was actually carrying two men, each one almost 
 as big as two of me. She was a sight to behold, driven with a 
 rope bridle and not caparisoned with any sort or kind of 
 saddle, but caked all over with mud. There were places 
 where you could see that she was sorrel, but not many. 
 
 The mud and the mare and the men and myself were all 
 standing in front of the old office door. I was looking at the 
 horse rather scornfully. My father, of a sudden, rushed out 
 of the new office door in considerable excitement, crying, 
 "That's your horse, Thomas! That's your horse!" 
 
 "That my horse!" I shouted, nose in air. "I'd rather 
 hoof it." 
 
 "Hoof it you may," shouted the front rider. (The other 
 rider was his son.) But my father: "Hold on, hold on! 
 Take no offense, either of you. Here, Thomas, don't mind 
 the mud. See how she's thrown up in the withers, and notice 
 her eye. See that power in the hips. [She was springing 
 around.] I regard her as a treasure. And only a hundred 
 and twenty-five dollars." 
 
 Appendicitis had made me irritable. "A hundred and 
 twenty-five?" I asked contemptuously. "Or did you say 
 t-w-e-n-t-y five?" 
 
 "We don't beg no d. .n doctors to buy no d. .n horses," 
 roared the indignant father, and, nudging his horse with his 
 knees, they were off like a shot — the entire quartette : father, 
 son, horse and mud. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 673 
 
 "I worked a long time before I could get them to part 
 with that horse," my father reminisced pathetically. "I 
 kept the whole matter as a surprise for you, Tom. But they 
 ought to have curried and rubbed her before they brought 
 her in." 
 
 Next day late, Mr. Charles Barber, a young banker of 
 Pittsfield, an erstwhile buyer of horses and a lifelong ac- 
 quaintance of mine came laughingly down from the Square 
 to see me — and to gloat. 
 
 "You turned that horse down! I paid them what they 
 wanted as soon as I knew what it was. That mare's cheap 
 at a thousand." 
 
 "Yes, real estate's going up," I ventured, but shuddering 
 inside. 
 
 "We put her on the race-track without taking the mud 
 off her. She made a full mile in two thirty-six. [I may be 
 mistaken about that figure now.] Say, Tom, I'm glad you're 
 a better doctor than you are horse-trader." 
 
 "But I rather love horses," I cried, determined to be 
 right about something. 
 
 "Same way about women," he countered. "Them that 
 loves 'em most knows the least about 'em. Anyway, you 
 lost the opportunity of a century to get a great horse for a 
 song." 
 
 "No singer am I," I said, for excuse. 
 
 "Better take lessons." And away he went, humming, 
 "Do, ray, me." 
 
 That ended my first attempt to buy, rather not to buy, 
 a horse. I had, without genuine success, succeeded in not 
 buying it. 
 
 Next day a man came in with a midnight black and left 
 it with us "to try for a few days." My father called in a 
 horse trader of the town, John Allen by name, a good friend 
 of his and a very honest man — withal a rather silent one. 
 He looked the horse over critically, said, "Good tradin' 
 horse," and went away. 
 
 So, next day, did the horse. 
 
 Of another trial horse John Allen remarked, "Too much 
 like Black Jim." 
 
674 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Then there came a team of ponies, also on trial. They 
 fought like Irish gorillas and tried to eat each other up 
 on the first day. It was good-by ponies. 
 
 Then there came a horse that certainly had speed, a 
 large dappled gray. Father sat beside me in the buggy. 
 I said "Go." He flew. 
 
 Five miles out, I turned him, started back to town. Again 
 he flew. 
 
 'This is the horse," adjudged my father. 
 
 One block from our home he stopped stock still. He was 
 absolutely the most inert piece of motionlessness that ever 
 I had seen. In sight of our home were we and yet unable to 
 reach it — at least in the company of the horse ! 
 
 Then there were horses with the heaves and horses with 
 the spavin. One horse would have one spavin (inflamed 
 joint), another horse would have two spavins, another three, 
 and on — either to the numerical or the anatomical limit. 
 
 The most beautiful horse that ever I have seen, I think, 
 excepting Father's early palomino, was a bright rich bay, 
 which, one day, was left with us on trial, and, the next day, 
 had "blind staggers" — whatever that is. I never want to 
 see another case. 
 
 BLACK HAWK'S SON 
 
 One day late in the summer but early in the morning, 
 there came down to our office a young man named Masterson. 
 "Got just the horse for you," he alleged. "A son of Black 
 Hawk." "Who's Black Hawk?" "The greatest stallion 
 this county ever has seen." "His son a stallion?" "No, 
 gelding. But a goer." "How fast can he go?" "I ain't 
 never dared to let him go his best yet, but, at his slowest, 
 he's faster than you'll ever want him to be. Why, he's a 
 son of Black Hawk. There he is now." 
 
 I stepped through the doorway and spoke to that horse. 
 Instantly he threw his head up and I loved him. Both fire 
 and affection in his eye! 
 
 I spoke again and he started to come to me as if he had 
 been loving me always. The hitching-strap restrained him. 
 So he nickered. 
 
 That nicker! The soft, velvety nicker of sweet sympathy 
 and perfect companionship that the country doctor loves so 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 675 
 
 well to hear when, leaving his horse, he starts for the farm- 
 house door, and again when, leaving the farmhouse door, 
 he starts back toward his loving faithful one. 
 
 "I need to go to Milton," said I to the owner of the horse. 
 "Can you come along and drive me?" 
 
 "Why — well — yes, I s'pose." He seemed hesitant some- 
 how. 
 
 But soon we were on our way. 
 
 And what a slow way! Black Hawk's son did fairly well 
 for about the first two miles. Then he was tired. Not un- 
 willing, just tired. A rather small horse, he did his utmost. 
 He would start up, even without whip or word, hit a fair 
 gait for a hundred yards or so and then — just sag down into 
 slowness. Sometimes, turning, he would talk back to me 
 as if he were trying to tell me he would go much faster if 
 he could. 
 
 We got back late in the evening. But I loved that horse. 
 
 I love him still, although I never bought him. 
 
 Like the son of many a great man, this son of a truly 
 great horse had somehow not received the right arrangement 
 of his genes — so as to make gene-yus. 
 
 No, I never bought him, and, that time at least, my 
 "horse sense" was correct. 
 
 Then, one day, along in the autumn it was when practice 
 was not heavy and Father and I therefore were riding the 
 rounds together, he suddenly pulled up. A pair of spanking 
 blood bays were coming down toward us. Good looks and 
 fire they had and extreme gentleness : you could see it all in 
 them, everything. 
 
 "Just the team you want," commented my father with 
 happiness. 
 
 The driver of the team was a stranger to us both. ' 'What'U 
 you take for your horses?" inquired my father. 
 
 "Whoa! Them horses? They ain't for sale: they belong 
 to the Czar of Rooshia." 
 
 And away he went, without looking back. 
 
 "It never rains but it pours." We saw four or five more 
 excellent "buys" that day, but they must all have belonged 
 to "the Czar of Rooshia." Anyway they were not for sale 
 at any price. Some farmers love horses too. 
 
676 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 At home, still later in the season, a man came in one 
 day with a very lovely goer, and we were about to buy him 
 when we learned of some curious trickery. The horse had 
 recently belonged to a neighbor of the would-be seller. The 
 tricky one, slipping in to his neighbor's barn one night, 
 blew, or was said to have blown, a kind of rosin dust all 
 over the horse's teeth. This made the horse quite sick (so 
 we were told). The horse ate nothing for a week. Then the 
 trickster bought him for a song, rehabilitated him with 
 arsenic till he looked and "zoomed" in fact much better 
 than he had ever done before. 
 
 But the would-be seller and his son quarrelled. The son 
 "leaked" to the former owner of the horse. Result: the 
 title reverted to the former owner, and again I had no horse. 
 
 MY UNCLE JON'S BARGAIN 
 
 And now came the climax of our horse-buying. My uncle 
 Jon Shastid wanted to sell to my father as a gift for me a 
 little brown mare. She was pensive, slow-minded, physically 
 sluggish also — at times one might almost put it "motion- 
 less." You always had to have a good, long, strong stick 
 and beat her with it hilariously. Then she would step out 
 into the road — and stop. If you beat her more hilariously 
 still she would step out into a slow trot for about ten steps, 
 and then again subside. You never felt sorry for the beat- 
 ings that you gave her, for she never appeared to mind them 
 much herself. 
 
 A hundred dollars was her price. 
 
 ' 'What — do — you — think?" asked mine uncle — who, while 
 teaching school, had got into the habit of using unmisun- 
 derstandable monosyllables, with "great open spaces" be- 
 tween them. 
 
 Though he was a man of much erudition, his speech was 
 as slow as the gait of his mare. 
 
 I replied, "I think that your price is seven or eight 
 hundred dollars more than the little mare's value." 
 
 My uncle raised deprecatory hands, slowly groaned: 
 ' 'She'll — bring — more. 
 
 I laughed. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 677 
 
 But in the afternoon of that day mine uncle returned, 
 holding in his hand a check for one hundred and fifty dollars. 
 It was signed by a Mrs. Stacy who lived there in Pittsfield 
 and whose name was good for more, far more, than the 
 check's amount. 
 
 Now, Mrs. Stacy was a very stout old person, one whom 
 I dearly loved, but one who fairly billowed with excessive 
 adiposity as well as with kindliness. Her most active ex- 
 ercise in fact had consisted, for years, in a good long daily 
 buggy drive of six or seven blocks behind a horse almost as 
 incredibly adipose as was she herself. Many were the kindly 
 smiles in Pittsfield as Mrs. Stacy would come rushing down 
 the street at the frightful speed of one-half mile per hour — 
 part time crying out to the horse, "Get up there now, you, 
 get up there," and immediately following that exhortation 
 with "Here now, I won't have you running away." 
 
 All the while, whatever, or whichever, she cried, the fat 
 old plug would keep on in her predestined, if well-nigh 
 incredible, course, as steadily and as unerringly as do the 
 stars themselves in their unchangeable orbits. 
 
 But even catastrophies among the stars do occur. 
 
 So, too, as to Mrs. Stacy's horse. A catastrophe occurred 
 to it — and to her. 
 
 It got up energy enough one day to lie down and not 
 arise again.. 
 
 So now Mrs. Stacy was needing another — a like-minded, 
 like-bodied horse. 
 
 She actually wanted another very slow horse. 
 
 Mine uncle had that kind of horse. Heaven knows that 
 he had it. 
 
 He one day spoke to her about it somewhat indifferently 
 and she became at once enthusiastic. 
 
 Mine uncle asked her two hundred dollars for the little 
 fat brown mare, long strong beating-stick thrown in. 
 
 She made it a hundred and fifty — not wanting to be too 
 liberal, and mine uncle accepted the offer — not wishing to 
 be too greedy. 
 
 And he showed me the check — not meekly, modestly 
 and with all that gentle courtesy which is due from a success- 
 ful uncle to a worthy young nephew, but triumphantly, 
 blatantly, exultantly and with far too excessive pride. 
 
678 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 I had, sometimes, in my speech, referred to mine uncle 
 in his very presence as "collegiate," "academic," and "im- 
 practical" — something of a mental "tramp" perhaps. He 
 now was untactful enough to refer to those old-time terms 
 of modern endearment, adding that he thought he ought 
 to give me just a little bit of "academic" advice. 
 
 "Such as what?" 
 
 4 ' Such — as — this . When — having — any — kind — of — thing 
 —to — sell , find—some— person — who — wants — that — kind— 
 of — thing. Then — the — thing — sells — itself. 
 
 "Did you think that I would like that kind of thing?" 
 
 He replied more rapidly than was his wont. "Nobody 
 ever can tell what a man like you might do." 
 
 And so it went on. Horses came and horses went, but 
 my horselessness went on forever. Even to the very day I 
 left Pittsfield I was still horseless, still using my father's 
 horses. He was more than willing that I should have a 
 horse, a fine horse at that, even two fine horses and at his 
 sole expense. I too was more than willing. And there were 
 people who would be glad to part with their horses. Yet 
 never a horse got I. 
 
 It seems strange, in fact impossible, that I who have 
 always loved horses almost as I have loved dogs, who have 
 even idolized and adored some horses, have, nevertheless, 
 not even for a minute of my whole life, so much as owned 
 a pony. 
 
 My father was physically not doing well. That was not 
 at all because we had been unable to secure a horse fitting 
 for the prince of young physicians. I drove my father's 
 horses even at the busiest times, or, if they all went lame, 
 then a plug got I from one of our several livery stables. 
 Even, at times, a most excellent roadster I managed to pro- 
 cure from one of those old-time institutions. There was for 
 example a black-bay ("Phoinix," we called him because of 
 his color) with a "blaze" of utter whiteness running down 
 his spirited and affectionate face. Each side of every livery 
 stable had a row of small windows with, in the day-time, 
 a horse's head protruding through each. Of all the sixteen 
 or seventeen protruding horse-faces on that day I beheld 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 679 
 
 only the lovely countenance of Phoinix — but I must cease 
 talking about horses. 
 
 My father, I say, was not doing very well. As the autumn 
 passed he did worse and worse. Nothing in particular ap- 
 peared to be the matter with him, except overwork. Over- 
 work he had always had but now he was getting older in 
 addition. Moreover he used to say that he had a sense of 
 impending disaster — whether one immediately at hand or 
 one to occur years thence, he did not know. He was not in 
 the least superstitious, could not possibly have believed 
 in premonitions. Yet, of recent years, I have thought again 
 of that constant feeling of his not only in connection with the 
 terrible disaster which soon was to come to the entire world, 
 but also, in far later years, of the disaster which came to him 
 personally in consequence of his very overwork, of his too 
 great kindness to a certain sick man. 
 
 THE CURSE OF GOD 
 
 All at once, incredible as it seemed, we began to hear 
 rumors about a terrible epidemic, a plague, a curse as it 
 were from the Lord, which had struck humanity away over 
 in the steppes of Siberia and Russia. At first it was merely 
 a bit of vague international news for us, something inter- 
 esting of course, something horrible even, something to 
 dream about maybe when one had eaten a good deal of 
 something that did not agree with him. 
 
 Then all of a sudden we heard that it was in France. 
 There it received the name of "la grippe" (the grip), but, 
 in the United States, where most of us are weak on French, 
 it was termed ' 'the la grippe." It was still thought of as an 
 "epidemic." 
 
 All at once it had struck England and crossed the Atlantic 
 Ocean, bringing its French label with it. It was now not 
 an epidemic merely but a pandemic — an outburst of a terrible 
 disease afflicting all the world. 
 
 In the United States it struck 40 per cent of all the people, 
 young, old and middling — not all of course at the same 
 time. But that meant about 30,000,000 sick persons. Inas- 
 much as something like 80 per cent of all physicians were 
 (because of their necessary exposures to the sick) stricken 
 down with the influenza, and, furthermore, as far more 
 
680 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 elderly persons were attacked in proportion to their num- 
 bers than young adults, the necessary consequence was that, 
 with a vast increase in the sickness rate there were only a 
 few young doctors "up and around" to look after the sick. 
 
 My father was one of the first physicians, in fact one of 
 the very first persons, to be stricken. 
 
 All his practice then devolved on me, as well as did much 
 of the practice of the other elderly physicians. 
 
 How to treat this new disease? That was the question, 
 and no one, old or young, knew the answer. The last pre- 
 ceding epidemic of influenza in the United States had been 
 in 1847 — nine years before my father had received his de- 
 gree in medicine. So he had had no experience with that 
 epidemic. Then, too, it had been but a mild epidemic — no 
 such terrible complications as arose in this one. There had, 
 furthermore, been an epidemic of horse influenza — epizootic we 
 called it (simply Greek for "epidemic among animals") 
 which occurred in my childhood and which I remembered 
 very clearly by the long strings of tenacious mucus I had 
 seen hanging from numerous horses' nostrils as the sickly 
 animals had moved feebly about their labors up and down 
 our streets and highways. But all these matters helped 
 nothing. 
 
 The practice of medicine had been revolutionized since 
 1847 and even since that "epizootic." The old treatment of 
 influenza was no longer valid, never had been of much use, 
 and yet no newer methods of value appeared to have arrived. 
 Articles on the disease in American medical journals were 
 mostly abstracts from those in European journals, and, judg- 
 ing by them, the European doctors themselves, quite obvi- 
 ously, were as helpless as were we. 
 
 My father called me into his bedroom one day and said, 
 "Son, any luck with the influenza?" 
 
 "I'm doing my best." 
 
 "I see. I'm too sick to read the journals." 
 
 "You're missing nothing." 
 
 "Sometimes my fever's too high for me to remember any- 
 thing, and, besides — Well, I'll tell you right now what I 
 think." 
 
 "Let's have it." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 681 
 
 "I'm thinking that all these 'antipyretics' they're giving 
 everywhere for this influenza, all these things to 'keep the 
 fever down' — the antipyrine, antifebrine, salicylic acid, and 
 so on — are a very great mistake. The disease is produced by 
 germs, but the fever is not produced by germs. It is produced 
 by the body itself in its endeavor to kill the germs or weak- 
 en them. The only harm that fever ever does is when it gets 
 too hot for the patient's brain. The brain, I'm sure, can be 
 badly damaged by it. 
 
 "So here's the way to treat an influenza. In the cold 
 stage, get the patient warm, and keep him warm till the 
 fever arises. Then let the fever scoot as high as it likes, 
 providing — and don't forget this — providing you keep the 
 head cool. 
 
 "Pound up ice, and, in a rubber apron or a table oil- 
 cloth, make with the pounded ice a big bird's-nest, and then 
 lay the patient's head right down in its center. Keep that 
 head cool. At the same time cover the body heavily, even 
 increasing its heat — unless the arm-pit temperature is up to 
 a hundred and five. Then take off some of the covers. Con- 
 trol the patient's pain with Dover's powder, and, if you 
 have to, phenacetine. Keep the bowels well open by com- 
 pound licorice powder and enemas. Feed warm milk with 
 raw egg beaten up in it. If the patient cannot stand the smell 
 of eggs, add vanilla flavoring or lavender." 
 
 As he directed, so I treated. His wisdom saved many 
 lives. 
 
 DAYS LONG, NIGHTS STILL LONGER 
 
 Despite my appendicitis I kept on working. Work, by 
 the way, is often a good obtundent. 
 
 By day I worked mostly in the office, where I saw all such 
 eye, ear, nose and throat patients as came to the office and 
 could not be put off. I began, as a rule, about 8:00 a.m., 
 had lunch in the office (Mother brought it over to me) about 
 12:00, and, at 4:00 p.m., I was completely exhausted. 
 
 In the house I would sleep from 4:00 till 9:00. Then, 
 eating a good hot meal, I would enter the buggy and start 
 for the real work of the twenty-four hours. 
 
 Work? Nobody knows the meaning of work who has 
 not practiced medicine in the country — of nights too, and 
 
682 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 when very sick himself and after a hard, long day in the 
 office. 
 
 And yet I did not work so hard as did my mother. Not 
 only did she nurse my father by day and by night and nurse 
 him quite efficiently, but she did her entire house-work 
 single-handed (no maids were anywhere available in that 
 epidemic) and then, from time to time, when I was operating 
 in the office, over she would come to assist me, even giving 
 anesthetics and dressing wounds. She seemed sometimes to 
 be everywhere at once — in Father's bedroom, in the kitchen, 
 in the smokehouse, the cellar, my bedroom upstairs, at the 
 old office (to send people over to the new one) and in the 
 new one itself. 
 
 How rapidly she moved ! How soundly she slept — with 
 an alarm-clock beside her! 
 
 She had no case of appendicitis in her own person, but, 
 had she had one, I do not think she would have mentioned it. 
 
 REMBRANDTS 
 
 Out in the dark, mysterious country, hour after hour, 
 little I was strangely pitted against the great angel of dark- 
 ness — and death! 
 
 Only little I! 
 
 If I could have had my father beside me in those nights! 
 
 Once, under the midnight constellations, there came 
 driving up toward me out of the mystery a homely old 
 farmer, who had called for me at our house and been directed 
 by my mother how to find me. He faced me about toward 
 his house instead of letting me go on toward somebody else's, 
 plaintively led the way, called back: "Reckon your pappy's 
 been right smart help to you in this epidemic." "Yes, 
 thank God," responded I and with all my heart. 
 
 But mostly I drove those roads alone. And I never shall 
 forget the nocturnal pictures that steadily came to me as I 
 drove — the "Rembrandts" I called them. 
 
 One of these fragments of the night which now comes 
 back to me vividly is a very simple one. I am driving along 
 the silent south side of the Pittsfield Square, on my way out 
 to the country. Glancing into the long dark aisle of a big 
 
MY SECOND LIFE — 683 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 685 
 
 livery stable I note the motionless double row of sheeted 
 buggies — ghosts, pale ghosts, as if in this epidemic even 
 buggies had become disembodied spirits. 
 
 At the edge of town. 
 
 Into the inky blackness opened suddenly a house-door. 
 A woman with lugubrious countenance stood there for a 
 moment in the gleam of a kerosene lamp she held, then as 
 suddenly disappeared like an apparition of eager expectancy 
 into the darkness again. Probably looking for some doctor 
 other than myself. 
 
 Out into the country. 
 
 Late as it is, and rare as country blacksmith shops are 
 in this year of 1889, here not only stands a blacksmith shop 
 but it is open and shiningly lighted inside in contrast to the 
 deep surrounding darkness — a Rembrandt indeed. A farm- 
 er's wagon has broken down and the kind-hearted smith has 
 been prevailed upon to open his shop for the neighbor's 
 special accommodation. 
 
 Farther into the night-filled country. I see a buggy mov- 
 ing toward me slowly. Both the horse and the buggy are 
 covered with mud — the winter has been somewhat "open." 
 Closer they come, and now the driver — the faint rays of my 
 buggy-lanterns fall full upon his countenance — appears to be 
 fast asleep, though his eyes are very wide open. It is Dr. R. O. 
 Smith of Pittsfield, getting back home. No, he is not at all 
 asleep. He answers my salutation solemnly, wearily. I read 
 the whole story in his white face, his horror-filled eyes. He 
 too is losing his people, young and old — losing many, many! 
 What a fat year for graveyards ! 
 
 The night ! The night of a country doctor ! 
 
 I wonder if my eyes too reveal my recent experiences. 
 
 I slap my horse with the lines. He is blowing badly, my 
 father's good old Frank. He is faithful and strong, but the 
 roads are heavy. 
 
 How dark the nights, how welcome many of the little 
 Rembrandts ! 
 
 I generally had two lanterns on the buggy front with 
 reflectors and lenses, but the wind would often blow the 
 
686 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 flames out. Only a faint streak went down the road from 
 each lantern even under the best of circumstances. 
 
 Often I saw things down-road with my eyes wide open — 
 things that were not there — sleep and dream would I with 
 my orbs wide open. Thus, against the side of a large red 
 barn I saw my father go up and lean his tall, loose- jointed 
 shape. I saw him, or seemed to see him, as plainly and 
 sharply as I saw the barn itself. He had a way, always had 
 had when he was thinking, of going slack like that and 
 half closing his bright blue eyes. 
 
 Again I would see him directly in front of me, pacing to 
 and fro across the roadway. He had a way like that too, 
 pacing and pacing, when trying hard to think. 
 
 Yet all the while he was really back at home raging 
 wild with fever. 
 
 My mother also was back at home. Yet frequently I saw 
 her too, along the road, especially in the daytime, coming 
 out of a flower-garden — where perhaps there was really only 
 an ice-covered orchard — by the side of another woman, then 
 stopping at a dooryard gate to talk. The farm-woman would 
 hand her a nosegay. Sometimes when I saw a black-cap 
 chickadee crying, "Sw-e-e-t Ninny! Sw-e-e-t Ninny!" from 
 the bough of a snow-filled bush, I would think I saw Mother 
 looking down at the bird. 
 
 Perhaps the commonest waking dream I had was that of 
 a farmer forking a horse and spurring furiously down the 
 road toward me. Pulling up he would shout, "Come quick, 
 before he's dead!" Then he would give me directions for 
 finding the house. 
 
 Once I found myself at a place where I had not even been 
 sent for, where in fact nobody was in the least sick. I did 
 not know just how I had got there. The people, who were 
 strangers to me, asked me to lie down and sleep a little. 
 I quietly refused, started for the buggy, knew no more until 
 I had awakened in the buggy, with the horse standing 
 quietly before a house I had visited the night before. I 
 could not remember anything about getting into the buggy 
 at the first house. 
 
 It was well for me, when buggy-lights were out, as not 
 infrequently they were, that there were now and then, more 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 687 
 
 or less dimly in view, fairly unmistakable landmarks. The 
 light from a burning straw-stack was not really a landmark. 
 Neither was a camp-fire, howsoever bright. Movers (people 
 sometimes moved even in winter) might in those days have 
 built a fire on almost any spot by almost any road. But there 
 were large, cathedral-like barns, red or unpainted, whose 
 massivenesses stood out somehow from the all-surrounding 
 night, howsoever inky. And then, best of all, there were 
 white dooryard fences, picket fences mostly, white dooryard 
 sheds and white one- or two-story farmhouses. How I had 
 railed in my boyhood at the then universal practice of paint- 
 ing all buildings white, excepting only the barns. How 
 monotonous the custom! How trying on the eyes too, that 
 ubiquitous color, with its unrelieved glare in the dazzling 
 midsummer days! O, of course, the steeples of the churches! 
 They ought to be white, piercing the infinite blue as symbols 
 of eternal innocence and purity! (But the cross of gold at 
 the top! Why offer a thing like gold to heaven?) 
 
 And, even here on earth, why not earthly beauty in all 
 its infinite variety — the variety which God himself had con- 
 ferred upon earth? Why not green houses and brown houses 
 and red and blue houses and even tan-colored houses? So 
 easy on print-weary eyes! 
 
 But now, at last, I had learned the real value of 
 white — pure, night-piercing white, as a color for human 
 constructions. White was the color ideal, the special blessing 
 of God for the country doctor, as he moiled along and toiled 
 along, hour after hour, with his buggy-lanterns out — as al- 
 most always they were on windy nights — seeking to find 
 his way in a Stygian world. 1 
 
 COVERED BRIDGES 
 There were a few other landmarks too that could be made 
 out occasionally in deep darkness. Thus I could almost 
 always "spot" a covered bridge (there were some still left) 
 on nights as black as the borders of all Hades — but not in- 
 variably could I distinguish one from certain other structures. 
 
 1 It was well-nigh impossible to re-light a buggy-lantern outdoors on a windy night. 
 It took less wind to blow out a match than a lantern. You could, of course, re-light at 
 the next patient's house. 
 
688 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 One night as I went coasting down a long hill, believing 
 that a wide portal-like opening in a mass of deeper darkness 
 was an indication of a covered bridge, lo and behold I all 
 at once dashed through the open doorway of one of Pike 
 County's biggest barns. Pandemonium went loose. Horses 
 neighed. Cows mooed. Roosters in clarion voices told me 
 to be more gentle or get out. 
 
 I got out, only a little later — by faint star-shine and no 
 buggy-lantern light — to run into the side of a great wagon- 
 load of hay. As in the case of the big barn, I had unconsci- 
 ously left the highway, gone through an open farm-gate, 
 and then the loaded wagon, having been near the gate and 
 in a direct line therewith, did the rest. 
 
 Covered bridges, though in the daytime a fine shelter 
 from the sun and a favorite spot wherein to cool an over- 
 heated horse, were, in the darkness of night, things even 
 gloomier still and more depressing than the blackness all 
 around. 
 
 On stormy nights a covered bridge became a much better 
 landmark because of the loud, hollow drumming which the 
 rain made on its roof. But the rain on the roof made me 
 homesick. 1 
 
 Another common landmark, still in those days, was the 
 family burying ground. If even the faintest shaft of light 
 were stirring it would strike on the gravestones and come 
 bouncing somehow to your eyes — grim reminders of the 
 highway both to this world and the next. 
 
 DIANA 
 
 And then there was the moon. When, in the hush and 
 deep solemnity of the night, the country doctor even yet 
 sees the moon, he feels like that Chinese poet of the Tang 
 dynasty who is believed to have drowned while trying to 
 
 1 Some covered bridges in those days (they are all of them things of the past just now) 
 bore a sign— NO DRIVING FASTER THAN A WALK. However, doctors were almost 
 invariably permitted to dash through as they pleased. One bridge indeed expressly stated: 
 "No driving faster than a walk except by doctors." What kind of doctors was not specified, 
 but, in those days, doctors were doctors. I doubt if there was in the county any real doctor 
 of divinity, of philosophy, or science or laws. Nearly all our doctors were doctors of 
 doctoring — either animals or men. There were, to be sure, doctors of dentistry, who, by 
 only a fair presumption, could, at any time and in any case, extract the teeth of the law in 
 respect to covered bridges, with or without pain, should such law militate against their 
 necessity or convenience. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 689 
 
 kiss the moon's reflection in the water. I did not even get 
 out of the buggy to go near any water, but how I felt the 
 beauty and companionship of the moon ! 
 
 All country doctors, I think, must feel the beauty and 
 companionship of the moon, as they toil along and toil along 
 from sick to sick about the lonely highways, or pass through 
 sleeping villages — to stop, it may be, at some hut wherein 
 a window-lamp is burning lest the doctor might not be 
 able to find the place. Out and away again into the silence 
 and the cold and the mystery of the night. Yes, every 
 country doctor, I think, must feel the beauty and com- 
 panionship of the moon. 
 
 He must especially feel the beauty and companionship of 
 the moon as he comes out of a house, leaving therein the dead 
 — the dead who perhaps is dead because of the insufficient 
 knowledge and experience of him who was the dying one's 
 doctor. Yes, then he especially feels the beauty and com- 
 panionship of the moon. 
 
 Nothing, for me, could take the place of the beauty and 
 companionship of the moon. Sometimes, as you drove along 
 an outlying dim track which even your lanterns could not 
 pick out plainly, a mere rutted by-way or an unfenced lane, 
 
 FAftU RESOENCE 
 
 20 CHAMBERSBVRG TR PIKE CO./LUS,jAS f£H FROM TW£ CCMETEP.f 
 
 A TYPICAL OLD-TIME FARMER'S PRIVATE BURYING GROUND 
 (From "Atlas Map of Pike County, Illinois": Andreas, Lyter & Co., Davenport, Iowa: 1872) 
 
690 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 the squeak of your buggy would arouse a far-away cock to 
 fairy-land crowing, or a dog to indignant protest at your 
 violation of the sacred privacy of the night. But these were 
 not the same as the moon's companionship and beauty. Then, 
 too, when the moon uprose, it awakened both cocks and 
 dogs into ecstatic declarations of delight. There was life 
 in the world then. There was light in the world then. The 
 fact that the world is deity and companionship to beast and 
 man came plainly out. How can anyone doubt it when he 
 hears both cock and dog pouring forth peans of rudimentary 
 religious praise in honor of Diana — Diana, who is simply 
 God as expressed in the tellurian moon. 
 
 Dear God of all the moons and all the other things that 
 are, how often have I not expressed to thee my own poor, 
 likewise rudimentary, praise for the beauty and the com- 
 panionship which thou didst show me on those darkling 
 nights in old Pike County! 
 
 To use an expression already employed in this book, what 
 a fee is the moon! But as a golden coin? No. As the Soul 
 of the Universe showing itself in blue-surrounded majesty 
 to bring unto country doctors and unto all others who have 
 taken a veil in one form or another — and that, I surmise, is 
 nearly everybody — His beauty and His companionship. 
 
 Many a night of course that I drove was moonless. Yet 
 if a doctor, like anyone else, be devoid of fear completely, 
 he will know that darkness has its beauty too, as well as 
 has the light. Sometimes there were the stars shining, or 
 there were beautiful clouds, or both of these together. 
 Always there would be at least a little Rembrandt here and 
 there, as I have already stated. And the rays of the buggy 
 lantern, they too were some light. If they went out and the 
 sky too was all black, even so there came the smell of in- 
 visible new-mown hay, or tender peep of little bird in tree- 
 top asking its father or its mother or its God to protect it. 
 And there was the instinct of the horse, that too was a part 
 of divinity. And the horse's sight, so sharp and clear for 
 objects lying low, very low, on the path before him, when 
 so little of light there was that it seemed to a man merely 
 as nothing. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 691 
 
 Yea, even when any person, a doctor or a layman, a child 
 or a dotard, shall be compelled to move through the valley 
 of the shadow of death, he should fear no evil, for behold 
 that shadow itself is a portion of God. And a man, as he 
 merges with the shadow, will perhaps rejoice, not flinch or 
 shudder, at his great re-union with the All Wise and In- 
 finite. 
 
 CHRISTMAS IN A VACUUM 
 
 Many other scenes from nights along the highways and 
 byways I should like to present fully if lack of space did not 
 forbid. For example I should be glad to show in detail just 
 what Christmas Eve on the Highway sometimes means to a 
 country doctor. On the Christmas Eve I have in mind my 
 father's condition had improved not a little, also that of 
 nearly all my own patients. And no messengers from newly 
 stricken patients had arrived for some time. We had all, 
 therefore (all except my half-brother William, who was 
 practicing in Wichita, Kansas) determined — my mother, my 
 two own brothers and myself — to be at home with my father 
 upon this blessed Christmas Eve. Peace on earth, good 
 health to men! 
 
 Especially peace and good health to my father — the Santa 
 Claus we had always known and loved so devotedly. Also 
 peace and good health to good Santa Claus' s good wife. 
 
 We had planned to push Father's bed out into the sitting- 
 room where he could watch us fling our pinned-together 
 stockings over the backs of chairs. 
 
 In the morning we meant to rush from our bedrooms 
 down the stairway into Father's and Mother's bedroom, 
 yelling like savages, * 'Christmas gift, Father and Mother!" 
 All just as in the olden days — so long, so long (we thought) 
 before — though each brother's life at that time had not been 
 long. 
 
 Father had been wheeled out, I for one had thrown my 
 stockings over a chair-back, and Mother was just coming in 
 from the kitchen, when, all at once, at the front door, there 
 came a tremendous pounding. 
 
 Behold — a messenger! 
 
 Then, as if at a pre-concerted signal, there came other 
 messengers. My father, too, all at once had a chill. 
 
692 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 As soon as he was warm again I started for the country. 
 
 That was certainly a Christmas in a vacuum. I could 
 neither see, touch, smell nor hear Christmas, except at an 
 isolated distance and very vaguely. 
 
 I could just as well have merely imagined me a Merry 
 Christmas in the cold cell of a jail or on the top of a high 
 mountain. 
 
 Country churches, here and there, were lighted up. I saw 
 them — remotely. Their bells were ringing. I heard them — 
 faintly. Afar I thought I distinguished the trembling roar 
 of organs. But always my road was away from the merriment, 
 the happiness, the peace. 
 
 In distant windows I thought I could discern the lighted 
 Christmas trees, but I could not be sure of that. 
 
 Along toward morning it began to snow. That would 
 make it seem much more like Christmas, I reflected. 
 
 I stopped, shortly before daylight (it was to be my last 
 call that night) at a house where a very sweet child had 
 been sick but now was improving. I was met at the door 
 by one of the kind neighbor-nurses — a dear, sweet old thing, 
 who, placing a finger of caution on her lips, whispered, "Dr. 
 Tom, the Christ Child wanted a playmate, so he took baby." 
 
 It was very touchingly expressed, but I was shocked to 
 the heart. Dead? That child dead who had been doing so 
 well? I could not believe it. Dead on Christmas Eve? A 
 child? A little child? Dead? And that child? 
 
 "Doctor Tom," said the nurse, "don't look at me that 
 way." 
 
 "After all," I murmured, weakly, "people must die on 
 Christmas Eve, mustn't they? Of course. Of course they 
 must. Even on Christmas Eve they must die. And little 
 children too." 
 
 I turned round, and began crying. I was not much more 
 than just a boy, had not yet acquired the protective mech- 
 anism of the professional doctor. 
 
 Arrived home, I opened the door softly, went in. Santa 
 and Mrs. Santa were still in the sitting room: Santa in his 
 bed Mrs. Santa propped in a chair with the alarm clock 
 beside her. I did not awaken either of the Santas. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 693 
 
 Slipping up boy-like, for the sake of old times, pre- 
 maturely, to my own pair of socks, I fished around inside 
 them, and lo! my mother had knitted me a pair of wristlets 
 — something that boys and men wore regularly in those days 
 but which nobody even sees any more. How on earth had 
 my mother found time to make them? A label on them read, 
 "Merry Christmas from Santa Claus's wife to her first and 
 worst!" There was fun in her still — a little fun. 
 
 I slipped upstairs but it was daylight already. The 
 roosters all round the town were crowing their peace-on- 
 earth with vim and persistence. 
 
 When I heard Mother astir in the kitchen, I went down- 
 stairs crying out, "Christmas gift, Father and Mother! 
 Christmas gift!" 
 
 And, just then (for so it actually happened) there came 
 dashing up on horseback still another messenger. 
 
 Somebody was dying, so it appeared. 
 
 I drove out to see the patient, and the messenger had 
 been quite right. Somebody had been dying. 
 
 Christmas, Merry Christmas! 
 
 Merry Christmas for everybody, even the country doctor! 
 But not on that December twenty-five. 1 Even our good old 
 doctor, David Prince, at Jacksonville, had died on the nine- 
 teenth. 
 
 And it ran on much like that for weeks and weeks. 
 Somebody dying, almost always somebody dying — or 
 dead. 
 
 And so it went on through those interminable nights. 
 Nor was it I alone, of the Pittsfield doctors, inexperienced I, 
 
 1 1 am not absolutely certain that in the foregoing description of my Christmas, 1889, 
 I have not incorporated one or two features of the holiday season of 1890. My father, as 
 I remember, was again sick during the holidays of 1890 and 1891. However, in those 
 terribly busy days, I kept no diary. In fact I kept no case histories then, and, ofttimes, 
 I went for weeks on end without making more than just a few entries in my account books. 
 People later paid me what they would. 
 
 Five or six years afterward when I, in New York, was recuperating from a surgical 
 operation, I set down all the facts of my medical practice in Pittsfield that I could remember, 
 meaning to write them up fully some day perhaps in journal articles. 
 
 These handwritten notes, however, were, together with many still later ones, unin- 
 tentionally burned in the course of our change of residence from Superior, Wisconsin, to 
 Duluth. Nevertheless, the mere setting down of the facts while still -they were fresh in 
 my mind, tended to perpetuate them in my memory and, therefore, to make this "Second 
 Life," as well as the first one, "Tramping to Failure," substantially all correct. 
 
694 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 who "lost" patients. At a place which almost adjoined 
 the one where I lost the little boy on Christmas Eve, Dr. 
 R. O. Smith, with ten or fifteen years more of experience 
 than I had had, lost also a little boy, and also on Christmas 
 Eve. Years later I learned that the stricken young parents 
 of this child (they never had another child) each Christmas, 
 after that terribly fatal one for them, took out and hung up 
 the same stockings of their dead only child, and then, after 
 going to bed, silently arose and filled the stockings to reple- 
 tion. On Christmas day they divided the beautiful toys among 
 the children of the poor. I like to think that they kept on 
 doing that till one or the other of the couple had died. 
 
 Yet another family in the same neighborhood, I heard, 
 although they had five children, had never had one Christ- 
 mas. They did not believe in Christmas. They hated Christ- 
 mas, even as Dickens' old Scrooge had hated Christmas. 
 
 And so, even in a country doctor's clientele and acquaint- 
 anceship, there are as many kinds of people as there are in 
 London and New York. 
 
 It was in one of those depressing nights that I had an 
 experience quite as horrible as it was absurd. The occur- 
 rence, moreover, had grown completely out of a trivial event 
 of my childhood for which I had in no wise been responsible, 
 and of which I had been the innocent victim. 
 
 I was just returning from a consultation near Pleasant 
 Hill with a Dr. Henry of Summer Hill. The patient, as I 
 remember, had been a small boy who had been thrown over 
 the head of a horse he was riding. The horse had then 
 stepped on the boy's head, producing an H-shaped and very 
 much depressed fracture. There had been free hemorrhage 
 from the middle meningeal artery and the boy was wholly 
 unconscious. Together, Dr. Henry and I elevated the de- 
 pressed bone, stopped the hemorrhage and sterilized the in- 
 jured area. The boy then completely recovered conscious- 
 ness. The parents, who, as I remember — I somehow fail to 
 find any record of the operation in my books — bore the 
 name of Elliot, were almost mad with delight. They had 
 many children, it is true, yet not one too many, and great 
 was the happiness which they verbally expressed and which 
 also shone in their, honest and tender countenances. (The 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 695 
 
 boy's recovery, I may incidentally add, was complete and 
 permanent.) 
 
 With great happiness in my own young and unsuspecting 
 heart, I was driving back toward Pittsfield. All at once I 
 discerned ahead of me, in an open space somewhat to the 
 side of the road, a small caravan of moving wagons, ranged 
 in a circle and with a camp-fire in the center. Often I had 
 passed such resting caravans, never with the slightest appre- 
 hension, as I had driven about in the night, and despite the 
 fact that many were the stories of dastardly depredations 
 which, according to unfounded rumor, had been committed 
 by "the mover people." 
 
 As, however, I drew close to the caravan, out came several 
 rough-looking men and halted me. One seized the horse by 
 the bridle and, pulling, cramped the wheels of the buggy. 
 Said one of the men who had come to the buggy-side, "Get 
 out." Angered a little by the stern command, I replied, 
 "What for?" 
 
 ' 'Will you get out by yourself or shall we drag you out?' ' 
 
 I got out by myself, appendicitis or no appendicitis. 
 
 There was singing and mad music inside the circle of 
 wagons. As we drew still closer, the music and the singing 
 grew louder still, as well as profane and obscene. Asked 
 the man who had offered to pull me from the buggy, the 
 biggest, by the way, of the entire group, "You young Doc 
 Shastid?" "Yes, I am." Man's hurt in this wagon — acci- 
 dentally shot himself. You're going to fix him up, fix him 
 up right, understand, and never say nothing about it." 
 "Doctors don't tell secrets," said I, cheerfully, thinking to 
 act as friendly a part as possible. "They don't in this case," 
 said he. 
 
 That voice ! It sounded familiar to me, and yet — I could 
 not be certain I had ever seen the fellow before, because, as 
 already stated herein, I have a poor memory for faces. But 
 that voice! I was certain I had heard it somewhere in the 
 long, long ago. Yet still — 
 
 "Get in," said the ruffian. 
 
 I climbed over the wheel and into the front part of the 
 wagon, then stepped backwards over the driver's seat and 
 into the dim interior of the room formed by the canvas- 
 
696 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 covered wagon-bows — all of which proceeding my appendix 
 vermiformis resented with the hottest indignation. 
 
 Some one brought a lantern. I already had in my pocket 
 the usual pocket-case of instruments, together with ether, 
 my hypodermic set, and so on. Looking at the wounded 
 man, who was lying on his back in a pile of straw with his 
 wounded leg elevated on an inverted chair (not a bad posi- 
 tion, by the way) I saw that the fellow had been bleeding 
 heavily and that his features showed almost complete ex- 
 sanguination. Occasionally he groaned as if in great pain. 
 
 His pulse was intermittent too and feeble. 
 
 All at once it struck me that this face, also, I had seen 
 before. Where? Whose face was it? I certainly needed to 
 know, seeing that none of the men about me seemed willing 
 to impart the slightest information. Then, of a sudden, I 
 remembered. "Bill Bray!" I almost shouted the words. 
 
 The big man of the group gave my arm a sudden squeeze 
 that hurt me almost intolerably, then ordered, ' 'Get to work ! 
 And don't you fail to save this man's life. It's just as im- 
 portant for you as for me." And then I remembered this big 
 fellow too. 
 
 Both these brutes had been the leaders of the vandal boy- 
 gang which, on a night in my childhood, as hitherto related, 
 had broken up the little printing outfit wherewith I had 
 been producing my boyish Monthly Gazette. How that night 
 came back to me! 
 
 Well, I did my best to save Bill Bray. First I gave him 
 a mild shot of morphine for his pain. That would help to 
 stop the bleeding also. Then I tied the severed arteries, dis- 
 infected the wound, dressed it, bandaged it, all quite prop- 
 erly. 
 
 When I had finished, I suddenly discovered that the gi- 
 gantic brother had been repeatedly administering brandy to 
 the patient. A drunkard's remedy for almost everything, 
 of course, is liquor. 
 
 And, all at once, to my great surprise and consternation, 
 the patient arose, and, full of wild drunkenness, shouted: 
 'You, Shastid! You've poisoned me! You're getting even 
 with me for what I did to your G . . d d . . . . d printing outfit 
 in your boyhood." The fool lunged at me, right and left. 
 Several of his companions threw him down, not ungently, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 697 
 
 and sat on his arms. Still, he threshed about with his legs. 
 His big brother spoke soothingly to him. "There, Bill! 
 You're all right. The Doctor done a good job. Jest be quiet." 
 
 But, to my infinite fright, Bill suddenly became entirely 
 too quiet. In fact he was utterly unconscious. 
 
 Then Big Brother, in his foolish turn, went mad. "You 
 killed him, Shastid! You killed him. What he said was 
 right: you poisoned him on purpose. You poisoned him on 
 purpose, jest because he smashed your printing plant. You 
 killed him, and now I'm — " 
 
 I was feeling the pulse of one who had no pulse. 
 
 "Don't be excited," I soothed. "I'll bring him round. 
 Don't be excited." 
 
 "You bring him round and do it damn quick. I give you 
 just two minutes." 
 
 There was no use to argue with this brute. He was half 
 or two-thirds drunk, and, obviously enough, had very little 
 sense when sober. I set to work. 
 
 First, I ordered one of the ruffians to prepare immedi- 
 ately a good strong cup of coffee — "the strongest you have 
 ever seen." Then I asked for a bucket of cold water from 
 the spring. Then I gave that patient several grains of caffein 
 citrate hypodermically and followed that "shot" by another 
 — namely of sulphuric ether, a good big dose. This sub- 
 stance, by the bye, is not merely a powerful heart stimulant, 
 it is also one of the most painful injections that the heart 
 of the Devil has ever devised. 
 
 Bill Bray began to wake up. 
 
 Then the thought occurred to me, and a sickening fear 
 came with it, that, whether Bill Bray got well or died, I 
 was in very grave danger. Suppose that he died. Very well. 
 I would surely die too, for these were ruffians of the very 
 basest sort, who would stick at nothing whatever. And if, 
 on the other hand, Bill did get well, then his brother and 
 the rest of the crew would think that I had, in the beginning, 
 intended to kill him, as, otherwise (they would ask them- 
 selves) why hadn't I given Bill the true restorative treatment 
 to begin with, instead of only after the patient had begun 
 to pass over Jordan from the effects of my first medicine? 
 Was I not indeed plainly and intentionally killing the man 
 (they would ask) until Bill's big brother had shown me 
 
698 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 clearly that, if patient died, then Doc died too? It would 
 have been, of course, of no use to try to tell these people 
 that Bill's brother had, in his great excitement, given Bill 
 entirely too much liquor, and that what I had done in my 
 second treatment was simply to overcome that. 
 
 Then, too, here was what capped the climax, made the 
 situation even deadlier still for "Doc." There was crime 
 in the atmosphere of that camp. One could almost smell it. 
 Who the criminal, or arch criminal, was in the matter, I 
 could of course not know, but I strongly suspected that the 
 Bray Brothers had quarrelled, that the bigger had shot Bill 
 and nearly killed him, and that then Bill had repented, 
 especially in view of the fact that some of his companions 
 might take a notion to "squeal" to the legal authorities. 
 As for me, I really knew nothing at all which would seem 
 to indicate that the wound was not just what it was said 
 to be — accidental. Nevertheless, Bill's big brother might 
 think I could start an investigation. 
 
 It was a tight place to be in. 
 
 Well, the cold water came, and I threw it bravely on the 
 patient. He suddenly stood up, sputtering the water and 
 spouting comical obscenity and profanity. 
 
 All laughed, and, in the midst of the lessened tension, I 
 gathered up my belongings and departed at a rate of speed 
 which betokened no small loss of dignity. 
 
 All of which simply shows that no doctor should ever, 
 if he can avoid it, render medical or surgical services to any 
 person against whom he may even be suspected of having 
 harbored a grudge. 
 
 IN THE HOUSES OF THE AFFLICTED 
 Although my driving was, in those troublous times, 
 largely confined to the hours of the night, nevertheless, as 
 the plague raged on, increasing both in its virulency and in 
 the number of persons stricken, I got to driving more and 
 more by day as well as by night. 
 
 All at once, one morning in the country, I heard a great 
 clatter of wheels on hard gravel. Looking up, I saw ap- 
 proaching down a cross-road no less a personage than Dr. 
 Dublin himself. Buggy-top down, whip held regally on 
 high, as if it had been a sceptre, horse white lathered, and 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 699 
 
 the entire outfit expressive of much to do and little time to 
 do it in. 
 
 All at once the Doctor swung into the road on which I 
 was driving, made it neatly on two wheels, and, dashing 
 up close before me, lay back in his seat and pulled his big 
 white "mud horse" down on his haunches in such a manner 
 that the whole rig squarely barred my way. 
 
 I, you will remember, was the lad who, years before, 
 had thought it smart to be smart — who in fact had said to 
 Dr. Dublin concerning his, the smart lad's, father, "Wrong 
 as he was he was right." Dr. Dublin was just small 
 enough never to have forgiven me for that perfectly justi- 
 fiable bit of triumph. 
 
 As he stopped to bar my passage on the road I did not 
 speak but waited to learn exactly what the important per- 
 sonage would do. He did not offer to speak either, but, 
 instead, continually stared over his panting horse's head 
 with eyes as fixed and cold as two blue marbles with pounded 
 ice behind them. 
 
 Then, not at all removing his gaze from my infinitesimal 
 features, he pulled out and lighted a cigar, puffed several 
 times, began smoking and spitting vigorously. 
 
 All at once he cried angrily, "Pull out of the road there, 
 so I can get on: I have important business to attend to." 
 "So too have I," I replied. 
 
 But I turned out, giving half the road and more — then 
 stopped. 
 
 ' 'Out ! Clear out !' ' he ordered. ' 4 I want the whole road. ' ' 
 
 4 'Doctor Dublin, ' ' I suggested quietly, 4 4 this is a Columbus 
 Buggy Company's buggy and I'm driving a specially good 
 horse. If you are foolish, enough to want to lock wheels 
 with me, come ahead." 
 
 He came ahead but gave his half of the road. * 
 
 1 Dr. Dublin, for all his real ability, was ever a better-than-thou man. Yet he was 
 always that quite frankly. He was no skulker. To a patient of his who once said to him, 
 angrily, "You think yourself better than other people, don't you, Doctor Dublin?" he 
 responded without the slightest hesitation, "Why! of course I do." 
 
 Dr. Dublin was a great stickler for "ethics," by which he chiefly meant keeping one's 
 name and doings out of the public prints. Seeing one day — about as far back as 1882, I 
 think it was — a highly laudatory notice in one of the Pittsfield papers about Dr. Dublin 
 himself, his rapidly growing practice and so on, I clipped it out and pasted it in one of my 
 scrapbooks. After that whenever I saw in the papers any bit of lurid praise about any 
 
700 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 In the houses of the afflicted ! 
 
 What sights and sounds I met there! 
 
 How I used to swagger in, pretending to be brave, to be 
 adequate to the occasion even in that day. (Doctors are not 
 adequate even now, for, to this minute, influenza is not 
 well understood.) 
 
 And still the plague increased both in virulence and in 
 number of those attacked. 
 
 And the attitude of the public toward their doctors after 
 that! An attitude of entreaty, of supplication, almost of 
 humble prayer. 
 
 Pike County physician, I clipped it and popped it into the same scrapbook. In the course 
 of a very few years I had accumulated almost an enormous number of clippings. 
 
 Now it so happened that when I, at the University of Vermont, had received not merely 
 an ordinary diploma conferring the M.D. degree but in addition "a diploma of graduation 
 honors," my father, swelling with pride, gave that information to the Pittsfield news- 
 papers, which, then, printed it. Also, after I had finished my work at Vienna and was on 
 my way home, my father, again pride-filled, had caused the Pittsfield papers to print the 
 fact as a news item together with the further fact that, when I arrived in Pittsfield, I would 
 locate there for practice, both as specialist on the eye, ear, nose and throat, and also as 
 general practitioner. 
 
 Dr. Dublin thereupon said nothing at all to my father but, when I had arrived in Pitts- 
 field, he one day stopped me in front of his office and, mantled with majesty, talked to me 
 as a king might have reprimanded a begger. I was a disgrace to the medical profession, a 
 mere charlatan — coming now into a civilized community "like a bat out of hell." And so on. 
 
 "Fortunately, Dr. Dublin," said I, "I possess a number of excellent credentials from 
 bigger men than you are." 
 
 "I don't question your scholarship, you cur," said he. "I say merely that you are an 
 advertising charlatan — a so-called doctor who seeks to thrive on printer's ink." 
 
 And then I remembered my scrapbook. Fortified with that, I felt courageous. And 
 what I said to the old doctor then was sufficient. As I spoke, he grew vividly purple and 
 speechless. Therefore I could talk to him without interruption. 
 
 I wound up thus: "And now, one more word out of you such as you have used to me 
 to-day, and I'm going to print and send to the entire medical profession of this and adjoining 
 counties the entire collection I have of your bombastic brags about yourself which, in the 
 last few years, you have published in the Pittsfield newspapers. And I will print them with, 
 in each case, the accurate citation to paper, date, page and column. Furthermore I will add 
 an account of this ridiculous conversation as an explanation for my issuance of that choice 
 collection of your self-laudatory notices." 
 
 Never again did I have any trouble with Dr. Dublin about newspaper items. 
 
 The entire incident to-day seems merely funny. The perfectly proper publicity which, 
 years later, was freely employed by men like Professor Howard A. Kelly, of Baltimore, 
 Professor John B. Murphy, of Chicago, and even the heads of the famous Mayo Clinic, 
 has largely done away on the part of the American Medical profession with that old-time 
 fear of the use of printer's ink — a fear of its use, in each and every instance, in favor of any 
 other doctor than the complainer himself. 
 
 To-day, if a doctor is elected president of his state medical society (for example) that 
 fact can be mentioned in the newspapers without his being regarded by other physicians 
 as "a bat out of hell." 
 
 Notwithstanding which immense alteration in the attitude of doctors toward the use 
 of printer's ink, I still continue with my scrapbooks — even at the present day. Not at 
 all for the purpose of confounding other physicians who might want to bring my peace-plan 
 publicity up for condemnation, or, possibly, a book of reminiscences such as this, but be- 
 cause I love to note the increasing participation of the medical profession in affairs of the 
 locality, the state, the nation and the world. 
 
ajUfy 
 
 SIP- 
 
 A Typical Covered Bridge of the Olden Time in Pike County. 
 
 This bridge spanned Bay Creek about two and a quarter miles east of Pittsfield. 
 
 (Old Photograph by the Author) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE —701 
 
mmm. 
 
 Last Covered Bridge in Tike County. This bridge spanned the Middle Fork 
 of McGee Creek two and a half miles west of Perry. 
 
 (Photograph by Preston Miller in 1942, just after the bridge's condemnation) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 702 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 703 
 
 My mother had said to me at home that the messengers 
 had used to shout, for example, "Have the Doctor come," 
 but now, piteously, they would cry, "Can the Doctor come?" 
 (She was keeping up well, fortunately — never did she con- 
 tract the grippe herself. Nor did I at any time, to speak of.) 
 
 There was one place where a man was terribly sick with 
 the dreaded disease. It seemed impossible for him to recover. 
 He was perfectly conscious, however, and suffering terribly. 
 Yet he complained little. In the same room with him, lay 
 his wife. Not very sick she was, apparently, and she had 
 been a hysteric for years — a hysteric of the type that doctors 
 dread to behold, dread as they dread epidemics, hell and 
 the devil. For sixteen years, to my knowledge, she had been 
 a terror to physicians. There was actually little the matter 
 with her now, it seemed, outside a rather weak heart, ex- 
 cept many wrong ideas and emotions. Her husband, an 
 exceptionally fine man and hard worker, she always referred 
 to as "that lout." She hated all her neighbors who did not 
 belong to the same church that she did. She hated especially 
 all her neighbors who were more successful than were she 
 and her husband. Wrong ideas and the hatred that grew 
 out of them, these were the causes of her hysteria. (You 
 see I am no Freudian.) 
 
 Much to my surprise, little flu as she had, one day she 
 died. 
 
 Also much to my surprise, the husband, sick as he'd been 
 with the flu, got well. 
 
 When I reported these facts to my father, he made one 
 of the few unfeeling remarks I ever heard him make : ' 'Wife's 
 death helped him." 
 
 He did not say anything about the man's having had a 
 good doctor. 
 
 There was one man who had divorced his wife and who 
 now for years had lived with a second wife in a house they 
 two had built. The neighbors rather despised them both, 
 somehow, out of sympathy for the first wife. 
 
 Each kept saying, "I have been so happy," and the 
 neighbors kept coming in to hear them say it. I had to 
 limit the neighbor nurses to three at a time. 
 
704 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 This aging couple died with calmness and dignity — de- 
 parting, as one might put it, graciously, from an unfriendly 
 room. 
 
 The heart of the story escapes me — no I will not say that, 
 I remember the heart of that story quite well. But I cannot 
 repeat it, because, even under the mask of names fictitious, 
 the heart of that story would give much pain even now to 
 hearts still living. 
 
 "Nothing ever happens in the country" — nothing except 
 much labor and little repose, sickness and sorrow, hope and 
 fear, fulfillment and disappointment, credulity and bitter- 
 ness of disbelief, hatred more or less enduring and affection 
 more or less eternal, and, finally, after all and for everybody, 
 a departure, more or less gracious, from a more or less un- 
 friendly room. 
 
 In that epidemic a mother one day motioned me out into 
 her kitchen. Children four had she — three girls, one boy. 
 I have already said that that epidemic was especially fatal 
 to the old and the young. So terribly true was this that, as I 
 remember, not nearly enough coffins for the dead children 
 could be procured. In the kitchen the half distracted mother 
 said to me, "I hate all my children excepting only my boy. 
 Him I do love — God only knows how much I love him. 
 Doctor, save me my baby, my boy. You must save him. 
 Then she prayed too — leaning over the kitchen stove as if 
 it were an altar. "Take thou all my girls, O God," she 
 cried, "but leave me Benjamin." 
 
 God took both her Benjamin and her girls. 
 
 Philosophers, I suppose, could find their lesson in this. 
 To me the lesson was, we had not yet found a way to 
 cure the flu. 
 
 Even in the midst of that raging storm of an epidemic I 
 was ofttimes obliged to stop and cut a tongue-tie, also to 
 extract teeth (we still applied a turnkey and had, or at least 
 used, no local anesthetics). Even serious afflictions, how- 
 ever, that had nothing to do with the flu — a broken leg for 
 example — were looked upon by many of the population with 
 aversion and almost horror. Anyone who wanted a doctor 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 705 
 
 for anything else than the flu was a base interloper, they 
 seemed to think, a heartless monster. 
 
 It was, I believe, in the course of that fearful epidemic 
 that I had a curious case in Pittsfield of a small boy with 
 chorea — an outrageously bad case. One of the older Pitts- 
 field physicians had had the case for a long time and had 
 utterly failed on it. Then it came into my hands. And, as 
 it happened, I cured the case completely. 
 
 I was wildly delighted, for not only was the boy a re- 
 markably handsome and intelligent little fellow, but he was 
 in addition the son of a Mr. and Mrs. Earl— people of char- 
 acter and refinement, in a distant way too relatives of my 
 mother. 
 
 Another happy feature of that case was this. After the 
 cure, I half expected the old doctor who had had the case 
 before me to be deeply offended because I had achieved the 
 thing which he had been unable to accomplish. Yet, one 
 day, as I was walking along the street with the boy's father, 
 we met this fine old physician (another than my father, I 
 should hasten to add) and he, coming up to us and extending 
 both his hands, congratulated us both, expressing his ut- 
 most happiness at the outcome of that case. 
 
 It was a magnanimous thing to do. And one, we may be 
 certain, that old Dr. Dublin, for all his really great ability, 
 would never have thought of doing. 1 
 
 But — and this is the fact I was trying to get at — I was 
 more than once during my treatment of that case upbraided 
 
 1 Since writing the foregoing about Dr. C. H. Doss, I have received in a letter from my 
 brother, Jon S. Shastid, of Dodge City, Kansas, the following additional anecdote about 
 this fine old gentleman of the old fine school. My brother, after telling how Doctor Doss, 
 not many years before my father's final sickness, had cured a sore on my father's elbow 
 which other doctors, both in Pittsfield and in St. Louis, had completely failed to cure, my 
 brother runs on: 
 
 "..... When I went to Father Shastid's funeral, I found a large crowd of people there, 
 but was surprised at the fact that the people were mostly young and more or less middle 
 aged. I inquired of someone why his old friends were not there, and was asked: 'Just who?' 
 I began to mention some of the names of his old friends and began to realize, before the 
 answer was given me, what that answer would be, namely, 'They are all dead.' Of course 
 any person who lives to an extreme old age, must have the experience of losing practically 
 all his friends and relatives of his own age, and his acquaintanceship must then be among 
 people younger than himself. 
 
 "But I had no sooner received my reply than I saw one old man, and recognized him 
 as Dr. Doss, unashamedly weeping at Father's coffin. I was much surprised because, as I 
 
 remember, the old time doctors of Pike County had been so torn up about antisepsis 
 
 and similar matters that some of them would not even speak to one another." 
 
706 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 for treating St. Vitus 's dance when so many persons were 
 terribly sick with influenza. Almost a criminal I seemed to 
 them to be, so great was the terror of the time. 
 
 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 
 
 One of the sick men late in that epidemic was an old, 
 old colored man, living I don't say where, whose back, when 
 I started to examine him, disclosed an enormous number of 
 terrible lash-like scars. I fairly cried out in horror. "Bond- 
 age, Doctuh, bondage," explained the old colored man 
 simply. "Some men had good mastuhs, some had bad ones. 
 I worked early and late and tried to please my mastuh [I 
 believed him] but I nevuh could please him, he drunk so 
 hahd. He come back home one night from town, where he'd 
 been spendin' all I'd made him. I'd wukked ve'y ha'd that 
 day knowin' how bad he'd come back. But sez 'e, Til cut 
 you in two, you damn loafuh.' An' he nilly did. Then sez 
 'e, T know a way '11 make you wu'k. I'll put one of your 
 damn eyes out. An' he did. He had two nigguhs bind me 
 tight, an' then he heated a big nail in owah blacksmith fohge 
 an' he buhnt out this right eye — see?" 
 
 "I begged 'im, sayin' 'at as that eye was his eye, he wuz 
 same as buhnin' out his own eye. 
 
 "Den sez 'e, 'Shet up, er I'll buhn out both yo' eyes,' 
 sez 'e. So I shet up." 
 
 "Why didn't you run away?" 
 
 "That's what I did — that night. I run by nights to 
 Canady. An' after the wah I come back here, but I'm goin' 
 away soon — back into Missouri ag'in." 
 
 "Did anybody follow you toward Canada?" 
 
 "My mastuh did. He caught me in Canada one night. 
 He thought he did. But I'd caught him. 
 
 "Sez 'e, T'm a-goin' to kidnap you back to where you 
 belong.' Doctuh, I used to be a mighty good man." He 
 meant a very strong man. 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 "An' so — O God, Doctuh, I ain't paid foh that yit? I 
 ain't nevuh even been arrested. You won't tell on me, 
 Doctuh?" 
 
 "Not in a thousand million years," said I. "Doctors 
 don't tell things." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 707 
 
 He was eighty-odd years old then, and that was consider- 
 ably more than fifty years ago, so he must surely long since 
 have died. 
 
 And "now it can be told." 
 
 "Nothing ever happens in the country." 
 
 FUN IN THE EPIDEMIC 
 
 There is hardly a thing in the world, howsoever serious 
 and sad, but there's always at least a wee bit of fun in it. 
 As for example: 
 
 In the course of that influenza epidemic in Pike County 
 an old man died who was exceedingly fat and equally stingy. 
 Not at once but a few weeks later, there appeared on the 
 side of the barn which had long belonged to him but which 
 he had taken in the first place by trickery — so it was alleged 
 — from a widow, the following long inscription (as nearly 
 as I can get it now) in yellow paint over the barn's deep red: 
 
 "Uncle. died in a comfortable bed on , 1890. 
 
 He was a very big man. He left a large hole in the commu- 
 nity and filled a large one in the ground. But his soul wouldn't 
 have filled anything in particular. It has not gone to the 
 same place where the widow 's went." 
 
 Who wrote those words I never learned, but they re- 
 mained on the barn for several weeks. Perhaps the fact that 
 the fat man had left his relatives nothing had had a bit to 
 do with the long retention of the words. 
 
 Another case there was which was funny or sad, accord- 
 ing to the way you look at it. 
 
 Uncle Lafe Mahlin was dying, clearly dying. Acute 
 tuberculosis, which had resulted from the flu, had him in 
 its grip. Again and again he asked me if he were not sure 
 to die of his present affliction. "Gallopin' consumption, 
 ain't it?" As has probably been the way with doctors since 
 Adam treated Eve, I hedged as well as I could, submitted 
 that there were always chances, and so on. 
 
 One day old Lafe said to me, "Look here, Tommy, I 
 want you to tell me the truth an' no lobsterizin'. Am I 
 goin' to die an' die soon or ain't I? I want the truth. I 
 ain't no coward and I never was one." 
 
708 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 I then said, "Yes," but as gently as I could. And! follow- 
 ed that with sweet comfortings and fine condolences — as 
 sweet and fine and yet as honest too as I could make them. 
 I was terribly sorry, I said, very terribly sorry. 
 
 It grieved me to the center of my heart, I said. 
 
 Looking at me with his overbright eyes he remarked, 
 "O hell, Tommy, you act as if it was you that had to go 
 instead of me." 
 
 THE PRICE OF BEING A BAR-FLY 
 
 Another case that was funny or sad according to the way 
 you look at it was that of Sam Creek. Sam's house — a fine 
 one it had been in the old days — was one of the places where- 
 in my father and I had so often been invited to stop and eat. 
 That house had been one of the best in all the Creek con- 
 nection. But now it had been exchanged for a very much 
 smaller and less convenient house and one also more difficult 
 of access. 
 
 Most of the times when I went to see Sam in that terrible 
 epidemic I had to go at night. Some of the roads were badly 
 out of order and therefore special arrangements had had to 
 be made to render possible my getting to his place. I was 
 supposed to find for myself in the darkness near a certain 
 roadside tree a certain gap (made for my sole benefit) in a 
 certain hedge. You see there was a great deal of "certain"ty 
 about the whole matter — that is, according to the way my 
 would-be helpers described the situation. Truly, however, 
 there was no certainty at all. Instead of that "certain" 
 roadside tree, for example, there were many roadside trees 
 each and every one of which looked just like any other, even 
 in the daytime. 
 
 By night — ah indeed! 
 
 Well, one midnight I drove to the "certain" roadside 
 tree and began slowly looking for the "certain" hedge in 
 which there should have been a "certain" gap. My buggy 
 lights were on, although a stiff wind was blowing, and yet, 
 for all that, one tree looked to me precisely like another. 
 
 All at once my lights went out. There was nothing for 
 it then but to feel my way to that gap. 
 
 I alighted from the buggy, stepped to the hedge and be- 
 gan feeling for that quite #?zcertain gap. Most unfortunately 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 709 
 
 I did not know whether I ought to go feeling in an eastward 
 direction or in a westward direction. Both ways I tried, 
 and still found no gap. 
 
 So, either eastward or westward, I had not felt far 
 enough. Try again! 
 
 Try again I did. 
 
 And again and again and again and — yes, at last I felt 
 that "certain" gap. 
 
 Then I called to my horse. She — it was the little Halpin 
 mare — did not answer. 
 
 I took out my handkerchief and pinned it to the hedge 
 where it could be as a sign and a signal unto me in the 
 darkness, whenas I had found my horse — supposing that I 
 ever found her. 
 
 Needless to say I had a long and weary walk to find her. 
 I should never have found her at all, only I recollected that, 
 for several nights preceding, I had stopped her at a place 
 about one mile farther up the road. She might have gone 
 up there to wait for me. 
 
 She had. 
 
 The case in that house attended to, and my lamps relight- 
 ed, I drove once more westward, again attempting to dis- 
 cover that "certain" place in that "certain" hedge. 
 
 But find it I could not. 
 
 Then, all at once, the little Halpin mare discovered it 
 for me. 
 
 She turned of herself without one word from me, went 
 through the gap in the hedge without accident — and, in- 
 cidentally, without my seeing a sign of my pocket handker- 
 chief again. 
 
 We — the mare and myself — were supposed to drive on 
 through that rugged eighty-acre pasture till we reached a 
 line fence. There I was to hitch her, climb the fence, cross 
 a railroad right of way with its uptripping rails, climb 
 another fence, then walk a long hill from whose high crest 
 I was to see a beautiful guiding light in the window at Sam 
 Creek's house. 
 
 The crest I finally reached, but Mrs. Creek, although she 
 had actually lighted the lamp and set it before the window, 
 had forgotten to shoot up the curtain. 
 
710 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 At length, however, here came Sam Creek's big collie 
 dog, and, by him guided, I reached the humble backwoods 
 residence of a once important man. 
 
 I should not be painting an accurate picture of medical 
 practice at that day and in that region if I did not finish 
 giving the trivia of that call at the house of Sam Creek. 
 
 Sam not only had the flu, but he had already almost had, 
 before the flu attacked him, a case of delirium tremens, and 
 he also did actually have, before he got the flu, a very bad 
 case indeed of typhoid fever. Altogether, a pretty serious 
 case of "mixed pickles." 
 
 To determine the condition of the bowels (this was neces- 
 sary because of the lingering typhoid) I laid across the man's 
 naked abdomen a handtowel, and then, down on the towel, 
 I laid my sleepy head. 
 
 And I remember distinctly what happened then, absolute- 
 ly every minutest detail of it. I walked straight into the 
 Pittsfield Opera House, which was already crowded and took 
 a back seat. A performance was on already, and, up in 
 front — as was their invariable custom — sat Truman Hicks, 
 banker, and Merrick Bush, editor of the Pike County Democrat. 
 Now these two men were widely noted for their inborn ability 
 for and their wide experience in — among more important 
 matters — that of hearty laughter. At every funny show that 
 ever came to Pittsfield these prominent citizens were present. 
 And laugh? Well, it used to be said that if one of them had 
 stood at the Illinois river and the other by the side of the 
 Mississippi, and then both had laughed at the same time 
 and toward each other, nobody standing midway between 
 them could have heard his own voice. It was also stated 
 that, one night, at an open-air political jambo, the two 
 men laughed so heartily they shook the stars plumb out of 
 the sky. Others, however (there always are scoffers at any- 
 thing) alleged that it would have been a good night for 
 falling stars anyway — although, maybe, with the laughter, 
 more stars had fallen than would otherwise have "fell." 
 
 However that may be, wherever these men went they 
 laughed and laughed hard. And it was an unquestionable 
 fact that, whenever they laughed, other people laughed also. 
 Their laughter was, medically speaking, "contagious." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 711 
 
 After a time it appeared that these two prominent citizens 
 were running against competition in the laughter line. An 
 old colored man, that is to say, perceiving that two such 
 prominent white citizens were laughing whenever and wher- 
 ever the spirit of merriment moved them and to whatsoever 
 degree of uproar the spirit moved, decided that if white 
 could do such a thing so too could black. And he pronto 
 unlimbered his laughter canons. Merrick and Truman were 
 not to be outdone. Raising their voices, they drowned out 
 the risus Africanus. Then the black man, raising his'n, 
 drowned out the risus Caucasianus . Truman and Merrick 
 turned on all they had. Black man was equal to the occasion. 
 Whereupon the show had to stop, because it could no 
 longer be heard. 
 
 Thereupon the audience outdid both the whites and the 
 black combined for a very long while. 
 
 Thereupon the actors themselves, getting into the fun, 
 screamed and hallooed hysterically. 1 
 
 In other words the laughter of the three "laughateers" 
 was indeed and in truth "contagious". 
 
 And so it was proving to be, that night in the country 
 and in my own case. Truman Hicks laughed and Merrick 
 Bush laughed, and then all the rest of the great audience 
 laughed and laughed tremendously — till I myself, tired 
 though I was, joined heartily in the cachinnation. 
 
 In fact so heartily did I join that I woke myself up — 
 with my own ha-ha's. 
 
 And after I had awakened myself I kept on laughing and 
 laughing, because I could still, in fond imagination, hear 
 Truman Hicks and Merrick Bush still laughing. 
 
 1 To complete the story of the black man who had "mighty nigh" outlaughed two 
 whites. The black, it appeared, had been receiving from the management standee tickets 
 as pay for his contributions to the mirth of mankind. Now, however, fearing that the 
 laughter episode had gone too far, they cancelled the old black's right to receive the standee 
 tickets unless he paid for them, also promised not to laugh any more. 
 
 At this, however, the white men's wrath arose. They went to that management and 
 they vowed and declared (no fooling about them this time) that they would never, posi- 
 tively never, attend that opera house again were not the old man's tickets restored to him 
 without money and without price and unless in addition the old man's laughter rights 
 were completely restored. The Declaration of Independence, as well as the Constitution 
 of the Sovereign State of Illinois, had guaranteed free speech, free laughter, etc. They had 
 their way. 
 
 This occurrence was for a long time known as "the Pittsfield laughers' strike." 
 
 In fact I heard of the "laughers' strike," years later, clean down in southern Illinois. 
 
712 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 And Sam Creek woke up too, out of his dream of pink 
 elephants or whatever else he was gazing at, and, noting my 
 laughter, shouted, "You seem* things too?" 
 
 And Mrs. Creek and her four or five big girls came rush- 
 ing in from the kitchen. 
 
 Then commanded Sam Creek, "Hand me my glasses.' * 
 One of the girls having placed on his face his pair of big, 
 shell-framed, square-lensed spectacles, he looked into a far 
 corner of the room and demanded of me, "Is that there what 
 you wuz lookin' at an' laughin' at?" 
 
 "I was sound asleep," I explained, "and, in a dream, 
 thought I was back in Pittsfield, listening to Truman Hicks 
 and Merrick Bush laugh in the new Opera House." 
 
 "Opera House? Opera House!" cried he excitedly. "I've 
 had hells of experience in opera houses." 
 
 But just then, as morning was nigh, there entered the 
 front door without knocking, four or five neighbor men "to 
 see how Sam Creek wuz." 
 
 The entry, I saw at a glance, was exciting my patient 
 terribly, so, fearing lest he have another attack of "the 
 delicious tremendous" (I had seen him in several) I popped 
 a hypo into his arm, thinking thereby to calm him and get 
 him to sleep." 
 
 It had — as it sometimes does — just the opposite effect. 
 
 Cried Sam to his visitors, "I'm jist about the finest man 
 as ever spun a glass across a bar, and so I'm goin' to tell you- 
 all a story of the hell I had once in a Opry House." 
 
 TOLD UNDER MORPHINE 
 
 "The curtain went up. Truman Hicks may have been 
 there, and he may not. And Merrick Bush may have been 
 there, and he may not. But if ever THEY wuz there, they 
 never seen no thin' ner nobody to laugh at, I sure-ye. 
 
 "In Hannibal it wuz — I think. The first scene had been 
 guaranteed on the billboards to be acted throughout by 
 twelve pretty girls, wholly unclad, whose clothes was sup- 
 posed in the play to have been stole by some mischievious 
 boys. Them girls was to spend one entire hour paradin' 
 about the stage, huntin' and scoldin' about the loss of them 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 713 
 
 'ere clothes. That'd a been some hunt, an', as the bills stated 
 it would be, so it was actually done. But listen. 
 
 "Say, Doc, them alligators is gettin' fainter. I kin now 
 jest about see the wall-paper pattern right through 'em. 
 
 "The curtain went up. I'd paid but one dollar, an' ex- 
 pected the vally [value] of twelve — there bein' just that 
 many nude girls. 
 
 "An announcer come onto the stage an' stated that, to 
 make the scene on the stage appear all the more luminous, 
 the lights in the auditorium would all be put out. In fact, 
 while he kept that 'ere audience's attention engaged, the 
 lamps in the room wuz actually removed, and then all at 
 once the lights on the stage they went out too. 
 
 "Everywhere nothin' but just plumb darkness. 
 
 "Then the soun's of angry women's voices on the stage 
 began, bewailin' the loss of their entire clothing. Them wux. 
 women's voices too an' no mistake. No mere men speakin' 
 fer women. We wuz gettin' all we'd been promised, but not 
 no more. Still, expectancy was roused to highest pitch. The 
 women began singin'. Then they recited poetry. Then sang 
 ag'in. 
 
 "But not no ray of light. 
 
 "After a time some feller without no patience he grabs 
 me an yells: 'It's a fake! They said naked women would 
 be paradin' the stage, but they didrit say there wouldn't be 
 no lights on.' Another feller grabs me on the other side an' 
 yells, 'Let's give 'em h. ./! Catch 'em.' 
 
 "Some struck matches. There was a grand rush for the 
 stage. But there hain't no girls there. There hain't no 
 nobody there. Even the men was all gone, an' all our dollars 
 with 'em. 
 
 "Then some feller yells, Tve been robbed, I've been 
 robbed!' 
 
 4 T puts up my hand, and, by the Mighty, I've been robbed 
 too. 
 
 "All my corn money, all — all — all — gone. My money — 
 all gone." 
 
 Sam was screaming now, and sitting on the side of the 
 bed with his hands up around his neck. 
 
714 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "It wa'n't them there show fellers that had took the 
 money. It was that there feller that had yelled, Tve been 
 robbed.' I know him. He 'd been robbed? He'd took the 
 money — I see 'im there now." 
 
 He started to rise from the bed. Jim Henderson pushed 
 him back on the pillows with two unbent fingers. 
 
 "Let me up! I'm stronger'n seven elephants! I'll kill 
 him — let me up!" 
 
 All at once he began snoring heavily. 
 
 Several of the men produced a big black bottle and went 
 to drinking. 
 
 I wrapped myself up, went out to the nickering of my 
 Halpin mare, and so on and on and on and on — attempting 
 to help so-called humanity. 
 
 NURSES AND VISITORS 
 
 I have already stated that practically all the nurses we 
 had in those days were ' 'neighbor nurses . " ' 'Trained nurses, 
 in the present meaning of the term, we knew not at all. 
 "Professional nurses" we had, but these, for the greater 
 part, had never seen a hospital — unless as a patient in one 
 of them — or read a book on nursing. Such a nurse was 
 simply a woman who nursed for money, made a business of 
 nursing. She became a professional nurse by the simple pro- 
 cedure of "up and declaring" that she was a professional 
 nurse. Sooner or later she acquired "experience," together 
 with such little "theory" of the subject of nursing as the 
 very busy doctors she worked with had time to impart to 
 her — now a bit and then a bit more. 
 
 And yet it was really wonderful how much knowledge 
 of disease a highly intelligent woman would pick up in 
 that way. 
 
 Remember she saw many sick people, had object lessons 
 in disease or diseases almost every minute of the day. She 
 could not know diseases generally, but the diseases of Pike 
 County she knew to an iota. Aside from the sudden plague 
 of influenza, which even the doctors knew little about, she 
 saw malaria, hysteria (major), typhoid fever, diarrhoea, 
 cholera infantum, cholera morbus, bronchitis and pneumonia. 
 "Rheumatism" she saw a great dear of, and, under that con- 
 venient term, were listed neuritis (inflamed nerves), arthritis 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 715 
 
 (inflamed joints), myositis (inflamed muscles) and numerous 
 other maladies then dimly known. Delirium tremens and 
 its common concomitant, farm-mortgageitis, she saw very 
 frequently in "bar-flies." Such patients were boldly labelled 
 in those plain-speaking days as "drunkards" and "wasters." 
 The academic and highly scientific appellation of "the un- 
 derprivileged" had not then been invented, or, rather, come 
 into general use. 
 
 Injuries of all sorts she saw in great abundance, not 
 merely those produced by "sot-fightin\" Farming is nat- 
 urally a dangerous occupation. Fractures, contusions, lac- 
 erations, incised wounds, dislocations, burns (ofttimes very 
 terrible from kerosene-lamp explosions or barn fires) frost- 
 bites, gun-shot wounds — all these are common indeed on 
 farms. I have seen in the same farmhouse on the same day 
 a finger half-chopped-off by a hay-cutter, a horse-kick in 
 the bowels with resulting peritonitis and a back broken in 
 several places by a falling tree. 
 
 Young women, I believe, were not as a rule good nurses. 
 They ofttimes introduced, that is among male patients, a 
 sexy, at least a romantic, element that was now and then 
 disturbing. Even if the man were as cold as stone toward 
 his not too good-looking nurse, his wife would seldom be- 
 lieve that that was the case. Middle-aged and elderly 
 women were best. Even for sick women they were best, 
 for now and then a healthy husband and an active young 
 nurse — well, nurses and healthy husbands do not invariably 
 remain in plain sight and hearing of an ailing spouse. 
 
 Nurses were ofttimes accused of being the great "tattlers, 
 or news-bearers in the country, generally I believe with but 
 little justification. 
 
 ED FARMER 
 
 Neighbor nurses were not infrequently elderly men, men 
 too old to "work." As a rule they nursed only men and 
 boys — which reminds me of Ed Farmer. 
 
 A short, plump man was Ed, with a quick, bird-like 
 manner and eyes that eternally saw whatever they looked at. 
 He was just a trifle over middle age. 
 
716 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Despite the name I have given him he lived in an out- 
 lying small town, where he did just nothing for a living. 
 
 When a boy he had been a remarkable student, so my 
 Uncle Jon told me, and he had taught Ed Farmer for a 
 number of years. In fact Ed soon had passed beyond the 
 curriculum of the common schools. Then my uncle had 
 taught him privately both Greek and Latin — just to keep 
 his hand in. Ed learned the Greek alphabet in precisely 
 thirty minutes. The entire paradigm of the Greek verb he 
 learned in about five hours. And all that he learned he 
 learned for keeps. 
 
 Said my Uncle Jon to him, "What are you going to do 
 with this immense store of learning you accumulate, Ed?" 
 
 Ed replied, "What are you going to do with all your 
 money?" (My uncle, though a teacher and on a very small 
 salary, was a maker and keeper of money. So capable in that 
 respect he was indeed that, already, he owned four or five 
 good farms.) "Well," Ed answered himself, "You're going 
 to die and leave it. I'm going to die too, but take at least 
 my learning with me — I hope." 
 
 He was always a very cynical fellow, was Ed. He did 
 not believe in patriotism, or religion, or charity or de- 
 mocracy. Yet, when the Civil War had broken out, plump! 
 he had gone into the war — admittedly to "free the niggers." 
 In the war he had become injured, was discharged on pension 
 but never could work again, although he kept on learning 
 like half a dozen Scaligers, also located in the little town 
 I've mentioned — and kept on being cynical. He still did 
 not believe in religion or charity or democracy. "All d. .n 
 foolishness," declared Ed. 
 
 He used to drop into my office occasionally, where I 
 quickly found that he knew as much Latin as I, twice as 
 much Greek and four times as much Spanish and German. 
 I could beat him in Syriac only, and he used to inquire 
 cynically, "Well, what the h. ./'s Syriac good for anyway?" 
 Why! the man was nothing but a tramp — a mental tramp! 
 
 He used to borrow my abstrusest volumes, return them 
 shortly, and in a casual way proceed to show me plainly the 
 cruel, cruel fact that he knew much more about their con- 
 tents than did I. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 717 
 
 Once Ed came dashing into my office horror-stricken and 
 crying, "I've taken a fatal dose of somebody else's oxalic 
 acid instead of my own Epsom salts." (A very common 
 error, that.) He was scientist enough to have brought the 
 unlabelled bottle with him. I gave him the "emetidote," 
 proceeded to test the oxalic acid — which turned out to be 
 in truth Epsom salts. 
 
 Informed of his safety, Ed, when he had quit vomiting, 
 murmured, "And I could hear the singing on the farther shore 
 — angels' singing. Shows what the imagination can do." 
 
 "Ed, were those white angels?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Then it was your imagination." 
 
 "Just for that, Thomas, I will not pay you." (He knew 
 I was not going to charge him anything anyway.) 
 
 I had one night in the country — it was in that terrible 
 epidemic of influenza which Pike County will never forget 
 — the case of a little boy. The rest of the family were like- 
 wise down with influenza but not so very badly. The family 
 was poor, ignorant and more or less despised. Ed Farmer 
 had declared once that "the entire bunch" should have been 
 sterilized. Perhaps they should. But, just now, the child 
 was near to dying, the neighborhood nurses were all busy 
 elsewhere, and so were Lucy Wills and all the other oc- 
 casional volunteers. There were simply no more nurses to 
 be had. All at once Ed Farmer walked in, cynical smile upon 
 his face, and running a high temperature himself, and a 
 pounding pulse. 
 
 Among other subjects he had studied nursing. And that 
 night he nursed. 
 
 He also nursed for a number of days and nights that 
 followed. 
 
 And the child recovered — thanks more to Ed Farmer 
 than to me. 
 
 It takes all kinds of people to make a medical practice, 
 as it does a world. In fact a medical practice is a world — 
 a microcosm, or world in little — a world, however with its 
 own special characteristics, laws and lessons. 
 
718 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Long ago Ed Farmer died. He had grown sicker and 
 more sick — a terrible burden on others, who however stood 
 by him capably and continually. 
 
 The little sick boy above referred to, now a retired public 
 schoolteacher, wrote to me recently not to forget in the 
 "reminiscences" he had understood that I was writing, 
 "the good old soldier nurse" who had cared for him in the 
 long ago. 
 
 Otherwise — I confess the fact with shame — I should have 
 completely forgotten my good old cynical scholar, friend, 
 and medical assistant, Ed Farmer. 
 
 VISITORS 
 
 The work of visiting the sick is a trade in itself, almost 
 a fine art. It requires not merely natural gifts, but also 
 much experience. Some visitors went to a sick-chamber out 
 of mere curiosity — to see how the wife of Sam Saxon was 
 standin' it, or to find out how them 'ere people was man- 
 agin' to exist. 
 
 A cause of frequent trouble about these visits was, strange 
 to say, the gifts that came with them. The most important 
 thing about taking gifts to the sick poor, for example, was 
 tactfulness, in the various manifestations of which excellent 
 quality Lucy Wills and Austin Barber were well-nigh mir- 
 acles. Poor patients in Pike County were not charity patients 
 but as a rule American people of pride and independence. 
 Everything those two visitors did was in strict conformity 
 with that important truth. 
 
 The main thing was friendship, fine and honest friend- 
 ship, the a-ga-pe of the ancient Greeks — which, most un- 
 fortunately, the King James Version translates "charity" 
 and the Revised Version "love." 
 
 LUCY WILLS 
 Lucy Wills, whom I have already described herein, 
 should have been taken as a model by all visitors. I once 
 saw a great giant of a sick youth hold onto her arm con- 
 vulsively, crying: "Don't let me go! Don't let me go!" 
 Nor did she let him go till after he had fallen asleep, as a 
 result both of the doctor's medicines and of her pacifying 
 presence. 
 
THE OLD-TIME PITTSFIELD 
 
 This was, originally, the Pittsfield Congre- 
 gational Church. 
 
 The sale and then the removal of the build- 
 ing from the church site to a site across the 
 street excited horror and indignation among 
 some of the more religious persons in Pittsfield. 
 An opera house was of course all right. Pitts- 
 field needed an opera house. But to use a 
 former church building as an opera house was 
 surrender to the devil, etc. 
 
 It was in this building that the cannon-like 
 laughter of Truman Hicks and of Merrick Bush 
 not infrequently made (and, sometimes, in 
 serious performances, somewhat marred) the 
 success of a play. 
 
 My brother Joseph writes me concerning this 
 building: "I am enclosing a photograph of 
 Fishell's Opera House. It is the only one pro- 
 curable. In this structure many tears were 
 shed over Uncle Tom and Little Eva. Also 
 here, Terresa Carreno, said to have been the 
 greatest woman pianist, once gave a piano 
 recital. Beach and Bowers famous Minstrels, 
 also, many times filled the building with merry 
 laughter. Here, too, court was held, during the 
 building of the present Pike County Court 
 House. Do you remember the band concerts 
 that were given by the traveling troupers for 
 a half-hour just before the show, to drum up 
 trade? 
 
 "When the Congregational church had not 
 yet become the Fishell Opera House, as well as 
 later, when it was another and newer building, 
 many fine artists appeared on well-chosen pro- 
 grams. At present, I can recall Whitney Mock- 
 ridge, the tenor, Genevra Johnstone Bishop, 
 the coloratura soprano, Ovid Musin, the great 
 Belgian violinist, and, last but not least, 
 Leopold Godowsky, the great pianist. I recall 
 
 (Fishell) OPERA HOUSE 
 well the concert given by Musin and Godowsky. 
 I was a little fellow, about four or five. I sat 
 between Pa and Ma. A well-meaning woman, 
 sitting behind us, leaned over and asked 
 Mother if she had had to pay to get the little 
 fellow in. Mother said that she had. Then the 
 woman asked if Mother thought that I would 
 get enough out of the recital to justify the 
 expense, and I can now recall Mother saying, 
 "Well, what he gets here won't hurt him." 
 That little boy recalls part of the program, 
 even now. Musin played Mendelssohn's Violin 
 Concerto with Godowsky at the piano, and 
 Godowsky played La Campanela by Liszt. 
 Well, those were the days when giants were in 
 the land. These concerts were sponsored by 
 the YMCA, which had the backing of Frank 
 Turner, Fred Niebur, Frank Shriver, and 
 others." 
 
 More important, perhaps, it was, at least for 
 my brother Jon, that, in this Opera House it 
 was that he, then a youth of fourteen or fifteen 
 years, first met Godowsky. A result of that 
 meeting had a great deal to do with Jon's final 
 choice of music as a profession — instead of 
 medicine. 
 
 In this building it was also, that once, during 
 a musical performance, two women (each of 
 whom was married, therefore had a perfect 
 right to do so) began to abort at the same time. 
 I was called, perhaps because all the older 
 doctors were either sick or busy, to care for 
 both the patients and in the house of a very 
 kind and helpful lady who, as it turned out 
 later, had been the long-time enemy of both 
 the sick ones. Patients and enemy "did as well 
 as could be expected." 
 
 Anyway, "nothing ever happens in the 
 country." 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 721 
 
 AUSTIN BARBER 
 Another fine helper was Gran'pa (Austin) Barber, of 
 Pittsfield. He came again and again, in country as in town, 
 bearing gifts to the sick whether poor or rich. Frosted per- 
 simmons and paw-paws (Indian bananas) and mallard ducks 
 were his specialties. He was a small, quiet man, fond in- 
 deed of slipping his presents into kitchens as unobtrusively 
 as possible and then with a cheery word taking his prompt 
 departure. He would stay, however, and gladly, in case any 
 supernumerary man were needed — as, for example, to drop 
 cold water on an agonizing limb, day or night or both. 
 
 GIFTS AND GIFTS 
 
 The sick poor wanted, as gifts, chiefly (you could never 
 without experience yourself have guessed it) envelopes, 
 paper, pencils and postage stamps. You see, they wanted 
 more than anything else to tell distant friends and relatives 
 about their nights of terror, their delirium, their horrible 
 aches, their hellish pains. 
 
 Men are much like dogs. Once, near the highway, my 
 father and I observed a dog that had been run over by a 
 wagon. He was terribly torn in the middle, so that his 
 entrails hung out. My father leaped over the wheel and 
 began ministering to the poor fellow, and behold ! that dog 
 began trying to tell us of his suffering, the way it had hap- 
 pened and I don't know what all — looking now at one and 
 now at the other of us, and seeming to say, "It is good of 
 you both to let me tell you about this. The dog died in my 
 father's arms. My father, as I have stated, did not like dogs, 
 but this dog was a patient. 
 . Almost the dog's last look was an endeavor (I thought) 
 to say, ' Tt was so good of you to let me tell you about it all. " 
 A mere dog has an instinct to express himself, especially his 
 grief. Even the writer hereof — it just now occurs to him — 
 being old, very old, perhaps soon to depart, may (subcon- 
 sciously) be writing these very reminiscences quite largely to 
 relieve the suffering he feels from knowing that both the 
 old-time things he writes about and he himself will shortly 
 be no more and therefore inexpressive. 
 
722 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Next to paper, envelopes, pencils and postage stamps, 
 the sick poor wanted dainty things to eat — the kind of 
 things they generally could not have. Mrs. Lucy Wills 
 knew this well and ofttimes came prepared accordingly. 
 She also brought quite frequently her own boiled wheat. 
 (This was all that was known then of cereal breakfast foods.) 
 Tobacco even the men did not long for as often as you might 
 think. Men with high fever, for example, ordinarily forget 
 all about tobacco. It is a good sign as to the fever when 
 thqy begin to ask for tobacco again. 
 
 Any "store eat-in'," such as ginger snaps, cracknels, rusks, 
 and raisins, were always well esteemed. Oranges and figs 
 too were thought of highly, being tropically grown. Dates 
 and bananas were not only from the tropics, but the former 
 were still something of a novelty and the latter just starting 
 to peep in our markets. They had not become common at 
 all in the West, even in 1894, as I specially remember. 1 
 Of course visitors like Lucy Wills were always very cautious 
 about giving patients food. Almost invariably they first 
 conferred with the doctor. 
 
 One of the chief defects in our diet of those days, though 
 then we did not know the fact, was the lack of fresh fruit 
 
 1 A letter from Mrs. Sarah Bates Utt informs me that the first ice-cream ever to be eaten 
 in Pike County was served at the marriage of her aunt, Therena Bates, to John G. Nicolay, 
 on June 15, 1865. The finally relenting anti-emancipation, anti-Union Dorus Bates (Sarah's 
 grandfather) provided his daughter, Therena, and her bashful fiance with, for Pittsfield, a 
 most elegant wedding. Hence the presence, on that occasion, of ice-cream — something 
 which was talked about all over Pike County for many weeks. 
 
 Ice-cream soon became popular, but only in the summer season. It was sold on plates, 
 so that, even in my own early days, one ordered "a plate," not a "dish," of ice-cream. 
 The places wherein it was sold were known as "ice-cream parlors." The same places, from 
 about September 1 till May 1, were called "oyster parlors." Sometimes a place had a single 
 sign out reading "Oyster & Ice Cream Parlor," and all customers were supposed to know 
 what season of the year it was, consequently whether to call for ice-cream or for oysters 
 on any given occasion. 
 
 The medical profession, for a very long time, looked with horror on ice-cream. It 
 "chilled the stomach," "stopped digestion," and did a considerable number of other terrible 
 things to the human economy. My father, at first suspicious of the new form of diet, soon 
 became a convert to its use. In fact he prescribed it freely for the acutely ill, especially 
 those ill from typhoid fever. Great was the consequent rejoicing among patients. Dr. 
 Dublin, however, thought my father's action rather unethical. My father also had ice- 
 cream quite often in his home, and, a little later, a good-sized ice-cream freezer was very 
 active there. 
 
 It was not till I was about twenty-two years old that ice-cream, at least in Pike County, 
 began to be eaten at all times of the year. Ice-cream soda had been introduced a few years 
 earlier, while the Sundae, first called "college ice," did not arrive till, I think, about 1904. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 723 
 
 in winter. Almost every family, even in town, canned fruit, 
 but, by the processing used, destroyed, as now we know, 
 almost every bit of the vitamin C. 
 
 News from the outer world was something that all 
 patients loved dearly, not newspaper news, but news which 
 the news-bringer knew personally about. From the doctor 
 they liked to learn of other sick people he was attending, 
 especially others who were or who had been sick with the 
 very same diseases as were they themselves and who were 
 now on the point of recovery. To bring such a patient to 
 the bedside of another who was not yet even convalescent 
 was for the doctor to make himself seem to the patient like 
 a veritable archangel. I have been sick myself too, and en- 
 joyed the same treat. 
 
 Jokes were excellent — but only after recovery had well 
 begun. The very sick do not like to have joking and laughter 
 about them. It contrasts too harshly with their then present 
 condition. 
 
 So, too, with the reading matter. So many read to the 
 sick without discretion — things entirely too funny, or death- 
 bed scenes and the like, or stories that arouse intense in- 
 dignation or anger. Declamatory pieces were well received, 
 stories showing what courage could do, strong wills, and 
 the like. 
 
 Any "talking down," or reading down, to the patient 
 was bad. So was too much solemnity and unintelligible 
 whispering. News of other peoples' death, of course, was 
 horrible, yet some vile persons would lug it in, continually 
 lug it in. 
 
 NEIGHBORS' TONGUES 
 There was a saying common in some neighborhoods, "It 
 came to me by the tongue-tie route" — meaning that it had 
 passed from mouth to mouth of those who had promised 
 not to repeat it (in other words, those who had tied their 
 tongues) until it had reached the ears of the person who now 
 was telling it again. I have expressed in a farmhouse a 
 certain confidential opinion, left immediately, and, at the 
 
724 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 very next farmhouse, found that, already, every person pres- 
 ent was thoroughly conversant with the fact that I had just 
 expressed such and such an opinion. 
 
 And no telephone in those days either — even of the dog 
 and split-stick variety. 
 
 Worse still, I have then ofttimes proceeded to discover 
 that everybody was discussing that same opinion, favorably 
 or unfavorably, at every single farmhouse I visited for the 
 next twenty-four hours or more. Never, it appeared, could 
 I quite catch up with my own opinion. It was even worse 
 than trying to overtake my own shadow with the sun di- 
 rectly behind me. 
 
 After all, why not a tongue-tie route? Wasn't it as an 
 institution inevitable? 
 
 News was news in those days, an absolute necessity of 
 human life. No newspapers but weeklies, and these all very 
 careful as to what they said. Hardly a thing in them that 
 one needed to know. O yes, Mr. Andrew Hiram had gone to 
 St. Louis last Tuesday to dispose of his herd of cattle directly 
 to a St. Louis buyer. But what about that blonde he was 
 seen riding on the train with and with whom he talked and 
 laughed like mad from a quarter to two till half past three? 
 Paper said nothing about that. O yes, her name was Smith 
 — Mary Smith. And his name, probably, for the time being 
 anyway, was John Smith. And she was a married woman 
 jest the same as he was a married man, and she lived over 
 in Missouri and had a good husband and seven sweet chil- 
 dren, all of different ages, but she looked young, and she had 
 paint on her face and wore a big wig o' truly false hair 
 and she had two great big satchels of clothes with her and 
 likewise a way o' savin,' "O ain't you jest too funny" — but 
 what we really want to git hold of is some o' the details. 
 
 There was no way to get details except through the 
 Tongue-Tie Information Bureau. But the difficulty was, as 
 to the T.T.I.B., that it ofttimes carried details concerning 
 sick people — details even that were wholly of a confidential 
 character. 
 
 Thus, once, when I had delivered a young married woman 
 of a child about six-and-a-half to seven months after her 
 marriage, I was asked at the very next house I stopped at, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 725 
 
 "Dr. Shastid, how soon after its conception kin a child be 
 born and yit keep on livin'?" 
 
 The company was rather a large one, and consisted both 
 of men and of women. Nevertheless, I looked them all in their 
 condemnatory eyes, and replied, without batting my own, 
 4 'About five months . " A moment of judicial silence followed, 
 and then one old hen cackled, "It's strange, ain't it, that 
 no child ever lives when it's only that age, exceptin' its 
 mother was jest newly married?" 
 
 Before I could answer that one, another old she-fowl 
 inquired as to the woman whose house I had that moment 
 come from, "Mrs. Blankenscrub's jest had a childbirth, 
 hain't she?" 
 
 "Mrs. Blankenscrub!" (I "registered" astonishment.) 
 "O my, no. Mrs. Blankenscrub's got typhoid fever." 
 
 After a few more seconds of emphasizing silence, the old 
 fowl challenged, "I bet you a dollar to the center of a 
 doughnut that a few weeks from now she'll shore be adoptin' 
 the child of some distant relative." 
 
 "Mrs. Blankenscrub," I stated slowly and emphatically 
 and yet as kindly as I could, "Mrs. Blankenscrub simply and 
 positively and absolutely truthfully has no child." It was 
 indeed the truth: the baby had been born dead. 
 
 "And all she has is typhoid fever?" 
 
 "All she has is typhoid fever." The little group of five 
 of us had agreed on that story back there at Mrs. Blanken- 
 scrub's house. So it must have been the truth. 
 
 More seconds of considering silence. Then the same old 
 fowl, "Well, outside of the Bible, where I believe easy, I'm 
 mighty hard to believe." 
 
 And old Si Slumpkin, who forever was siding with such 
 women as he happened to be among, capped the situation 
 with: "And me too! Me too, Tm mighty hard to swallow 
 — some kinds of medicine." 
 
 All of which shows that, outside the Bible, we had 
 mighty sceptical as well as news-hungry communities in 
 Pike County. 
 
 Also some that were careless of their English, though, 
 as a rule, their meaning was quite clear. 
 
726 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 TONGUE-TIED NURSES 
 
 The most important link in the tongue-tie route, I was 
 told repeatedly and then repeatedly again, was the nurses. 
 These statements were wholly unfounded, however, at least 
 in the case of such nurses as were more than merely neighbor 
 nurses — professional nurses in fact, though not trained in 
 hospitals. One of the first things a professional nurse, just 
 like a professional doctor — even a young doctor's apprentice 
 — learns, is to tie her tongue up tight — not merely nominally 
 and supposedly, but actually and effectively. 
 
 And yet a professional, when refusing to give out con- 
 fidential information, must never appear to be refusing to 
 give out confidential information. She, or he, must never 
 seem to be taciturn or silent or unwilling. To fail in this 
 respect would be as bad as to reveal the truth expressly. 
 My father, in such matters, was an expert of experts. He 
 could talk more and tell less about confidential matters than 
 any other doctor I have ever known. 
 
 CARLO POST, VOLUNTEER MAN-NURSE 
 One night as I was laboring slowly upgrade into the moon- 
 bright hills of southern Pike, a man in a Columbus Buggy 
 Company's buggy came suddenly up from behind and called 
 to me as he drove up by my side: "Need any man-nursing, 
 Doctor Tom, out at Scofnan's to-night?" 
 
 "Why, yes, I believe they do." 
 
 "Heard they did. I'm not much of a nurse, but I'd like 
 a little experience. Besides, I've always heard that Mr. 
 ScofUan was a fine man." And so forth and so on. The 
 whole matter had a queer sound to me, and yet I liked 
 Charley Post too. 
 
 He was a photographer at Pittsfield, and a real artist. 
 Once he had photographed Abraham Lincoln, though I then 
 did not know that fact. 1 His studio, in Pittsfield, especially 
 the waiting-room thereof was a curious apartment indeed. 
 The counters, of which there were many, were covered with 
 show-cases, only a few of which contained photographs. 
 The rest were filled with curiosities of every conceivable 
 
 1 There are extant to-day two photographs of Abraham Lincoln which were made in 
 Pittsfield. The earlier was made in 1856 by the photographer to whom, above, I have 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 727 
 
 sort. But the lofty walls were the strangest places of all. 
 Every inch of them was hung with some reminder of the 
 distant past. There were arrowheads and potsherds, stone 
 axes, flint flakers — all manner of tools and weapons of the 
 ancient Indians and the still more distant Mound Builders. 
 Some of these I had sold to Charley myself in my boyhood, 
 having found the relics (by permission of the owners of the 
 fields) while waiting for my father near his buggy. In an 
 inner room bones hung from the walls, even dangled from 
 the ceilings. Some of these too I had supplied him — part 
 from the Mounds by the Illinois River, part from the dis- 
 secting rooms of New York City. 
 
 Somehow I could not think of Charley Post as being a 
 nurse. He was so plainly one-third photographer, two-thirds 
 antiquarian, and no-third nurse. 
 
 given the fictitious name, Charley Post. This was made in the Post (fixed) studio at 
 Pittsfield. 
 
 The second was made by Calvin Jackson in a portable studio on the then vacant lot 
 immediately south of and across the street from the Pike County jail. The date of that 
 picture is 1858. 
 
 There is extant a story that the Post picture is only a myth. Nevertheless, this picture 
 is almost universally acknowledged now to be authentic. Its negative is in the possession 
 of Mr. Jesse M. Thompson, Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce at Pittsfield. 
 
 For a long time it was said by many that Abraham Lincoln was never in Pittsfield either 
 to try a lawsuit or for any other purpose and that, consequently, the alleged reminiscences 
 of Lincoln by my father and by many other Pittsfield persons were merely tricks which 
 their memories in combination with the imaginations in their subconscious selves, had 
 played upon them. It was especially emphasized that, in the Pike County Courthouse 
 Records, there were no entries at all relating to suits wherein Abraham Lincoln had been 
 anywise concerned. 
 
 Now as to my father's reminiscences of Lincoln — those for example about Lincoln, 
 when in Pittsfield, visiting at the Shastid home, his there eating one day all the wild pigeons 
 on the table, his being by my father one day introduced to Nicolay, and so on — these I had 
 also, with the exception of the Nicolay introduction, from my father's elder brother, Jon. 
 The two could hardly have been mistaken. 
 
 Then, too, the fact that Lincoln had his picture taken in Pittsfield twice would seem 
 to render it probable he had been in Pittsfield considerably oftener than twice. Lincoln, 
 who lived in Springfield, would surely not in those days of difficult travel have come all 
 the way to Pittsfield and on two different occasions for the sole and single purpose of having 
 his picture taken by photographers there, photographers who, almost certainly, were no 
 better than many others who must have been operating in the decidedly larger town of 
 Springfield. The sittings for pictures were, then, almost certainly incidental, compliances 
 perhaps with the requests of Pittsfield friends. And, if incidental, then, almost certainly, 
 there were considerably more of the Pittsfield visits than just two, as few persons make a 
 practice of having their pictures taken each and every time they go to any town on business. 
 
 If incidental (and fairly numerous) then incidental to what? As Lincoln was a lawyer, 
 the main purpose of his fairly frequent Pittsfield visits, it is more than merely probable, 
 was the transaction of law business. 
 
 Now, even if it were really true, as alleged, that the records in the Pittsfield Court- 
 house contain no evidence whatever that Lincoln had ever been engaged in that building 
 in the conduct of a lawsuit, that would by no means indicate that Lincoln was not ofttimes 
 busy in that building for various other purposes than taking part in lawsuits. Lawyers to 
 
728 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Arrived at Scofflan's, I found poor Mr. Scofflan himself 
 (the patient) quite in his right mind but terribly sick and 
 terribly in need of a nurse. Charley was accepted to do the 
 nursing. 
 
 And my word for it, he worked. There was plenty of 
 work to do too in that case. Once I sent Charley out to the 
 kitchen, with careful instructions on how to prepare a large 
 mustard plaster. As he seemed quite slow in returning, I 
 passed out of the patient's bedroom into the living room, 
 and there saw Charley Post moving rapidly about. He, 
 seemingly, had lost his way, thereby getting into the parlor 
 by mistake instead of into the kitchen. 
 
 All at once I remembered! That parlor was almost full 
 of Indian relics, relics with which the Scofflan farm had 
 once abounded. I, by permission of the owner himself (I 
 hasten to add) had once collected a number of such relics 
 on his farm and placed them in our buggy. 
 
 I returned to the bedroom. Charles soon came back in 
 with the mustard plaster, the patient quickly improved in 
 strength and ease, Charley was talking to him softly and 
 persuasively about Indian relics, and so I departed, promis- 
 ing to return about dawn. 
 
 this day visit courthouses for a great many other purposes than just to participate in trials. 
 Looking up land-titles, criminal records, examining original wills (not merely copies there- 
 of) conferring with judges "in chambers" — all these and many other objects take lawyers 
 to courthouses a score or more of times to where they conduct a trial there just once. That 
 is true, at least, of lawyers in connection with their home-town courthouses. But it is 
 also true in a considerable degree of lawyers in connection with other courthouses. They 
 visit them often for various other than lawsuit purposes — often indeed for the very purpose 
 of keeping their clients out of lawsuits. That was particularly true in Abraham Lincoln's 
 time and in the Illinois of that day. We should remember that, in Illinois in Lincoln's 
 day, lawyers were nearly all circuit riders — i.e. they regularly rode from courthouse to 
 courthouse throughout their "judicial circuit, or district." Lincoln's, the eighth, judicial 
 district, consisted of fourteen counties. On arrival at a given courthouse, he, like every 
 other lawyer, would attend to legal business of a great many sorts. Thus, even unim- 
 portant legal business would frequently be transacted by any given lawyer at a courthouse 
 far away from his own home town. 
 
 Finally, the reader may refer to the third paragraph of the legend under the first picture 
 in this volume of the Pike County Courthouse Q 'Heart of Pike County"). In that para- 
 graph he will learn how, in March, 1941 — after several scholarly investigators had, on 
 several occasions, failed to find in the Pike County Records any proof that Lincoln had ever 
 in the "Heart of Pike County" taken part in a trial — the janitor of the building, Mr. Fred 
 Hoover had accidentally discovered the record of a case, Mahannah vs. Gibbs, wherein 
 A. Lincoln had appeared for the defendant on a number of occasions. As this trial occurred 
 wholly in 1839, it is certain that Abraham Lincoln was in Pittsfield and on legal business 
 a number of times even before he had those pictures taken, far later, in 1856 and 1858. 
 
 And the records lying in the Pittsfield Courthouse have not, even yet, been investi- 
 gated with anything like thoroughness. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 729 
 
 In the false dawn (zodiacal light) I returned — to find that 
 Charley Post, aided and abetted by Mrs. Scofflan herself, 
 who long had wanted riddance of the things, had bought 
 the entire collection of Mr. Scofflan's relics — yes, and paid 
 a huge price for them, as I very well understood as soon as 
 I had learned the amount. 
 
 As Charley drew the bill-roll from his pocket, he said 
 to Mrs. Scofflan, "How much do you owe Dr. Tom?" 
 Scofflan looked inquiringly at me. I mentioned the sum, 
 also stated the amount of an old-time bill that he was owing 
 to my father. Both the Scofflans nodded assent, Charley 
 paid me both the sums I'd mentioned. I receipted for both, 
 Charley paid the remainder of the sum due and was receipted 
 for it by the Scofnans, and presto the nurse for that night, 
 I behind him, was going two-forty toward Pittsfield. 
 
 The collector was actually afraid that some other col- 
 lector of relics might really overtake him and rob him of 
 his treasures. 
 
 Later, Charley, in a financial depression, was obliged to 
 sell his beloved Scoffian collection to some person in St. Louis 
 for about one-fourth of what he had paid for it. 
 
 Anyway he had nursed efficiently — for the one single 
 night. And, besides, the money he had paid the ScofHans 
 for the relics, in turn paid off the little mortgage on their 
 little farm. And that had helped Mr. ScofHan recover. 
 
 So Charley was a pretty good nurse after all. 
 
 Lawyers ofttimes helped a little with the nursing, for 
 farmers seldom made their wills till they believed themselves 
 precisely in articulo mortis. The lawyer, called in suddenly, 
 was promptly commandeered by the physician in the case. 
 At least he was in that epidemic. One of the best of these 
 improvised lawyer-nurses was Wm. A. Grimshaw. Twice 
 I have known him to nurse all night with almost incredible 
 tact and skill although, each time, he had court cases com- 
 ing on the next morning. 1 Local merchants volunteered 
 
 1 Wm. A. Grimshaw had a brother, Bob, who, wherever he lived, and he lived at 
 various times in various places, was ofttimes volunteer nurse among the sick. He never prac- 
 tised his profession, engineering, in Pike County, but studied it at Princeton and Paris, prac- 
 tised it in several places, became a faculty member at the New York University, the College 
 of the City of New York, and at Rutgers University. He was at various times consulting 
 
730 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 manfully. Preachers did no nursing that I now remember, 
 no doubt because they were much too busy making sick-calls 
 and preaching sermons for the dead. 
 
 SLEEPING IN THE FARMHOUSES 
 Many of the farmers slept with all their doors and 
 windows closed — tight. This was not so much to save fuel 
 as it was to keep the "night air" out. As if there were any 
 other air at night than night air. But "night air" was, in 
 those years, supposed to be one of the chief causes of disease, 
 that and devil possession and too much blood in the system. 
 And because "night air" was so dangerous the average 
 farmer kept it out of his house just about as carefully in the 
 summer-time as he did in the winter. 
 
 I have already stated in connection with my apprentice- 
 ship that my father had a happy faculty of sleeping at will 
 and at once even in his buggy and ofttimes even in the cold- 
 est weather. In bed at his home, he would sometimes worry 
 and fret and fret and worry, and, in that way, occasionally 
 keep himself from sleep. But, in his buggy, he slept like an 
 old-time sailor in a rolling ship. The buggy, he seemed to 
 think, was the place where he belonged during the sand- 
 engineer for the U. S. Government and for many European Governments. He was editor of 
 "Power," also one of the Founders of the American Society of Engineers and of other 
 national, or international organizations, and, with his own hand, wrote in three languages 
 a considerable number of textbooks, one of which ran into thirty large editions. 
 
 Yet, at the age of 82, Dr. Grimshaw's interest in human beings and their infirmities 
 was so great, so all-compelling, that he still ofttimes visited the poor in hospitals and gave 
 them ready assistance out of his own purse. In this way it was that, at that advanced age, 
 he came to found the now world-famous organization, "Blindaid." The Pike County, Illinois, 
 Democrat-Times for April 30, 1941, is authority for the statement that the idea of establish- 
 ing this institution came to Dr. Grimshaw (I condense considerably) "when one of his 
 visits took him to the home of a blind negro. 'He was a very intelligent man,' said Dr. 
 Grimshaw, 'in many respects more intelligent than I. We talked of various things, especi- 
 ally South America, where I had lived and worked so long, and, when we spoke of Braille 
 reading, he said that the only trouble with it was that those who sent it out seemed to 
 think that the blind wanted to read only long books or the Psalms of David.' Dr. Grimshaw 
 set about rectifying the weakness. He learned Braille, wrote news flashes for the blind, 
 also books which did not mention colors, for colors mean nothing to those who never have 
 had sight and ofttimes only irritate them. Dr. Grimshaw introduced into Braille writing 
 a pure cotton paper. This easily hardens and so makes it possible to run off large numbers 
 of copies before the raised dots flatten out." 
 
 And in many other ways Dr. Grimshaw assisted the sick and afflicted. His chief per- 
 formances in this direction, as already suggested, occurred after he had reached the age 
 of 82: In April, 1941, he died in his ninety-second year. He used to say that the most 
 stimulating intellectual influence he had ever experienced was that of his brother, William. 
 I do not doubt the truth of the statement. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 731 
 
 man's hours. I, however, slept in a buggy very badly, un- 
 less indeed absolutely exhausted. 
 
 In the farmhouse it was very different for me. Night air 
 or foul air, I slept in the farmhouse all the same — just a few 
 minutes at a time as a rule. 
 
 The spare bed, in many of the houses that had more than 
 one bed, was bad, so bad you can hardly imagine how truly 
 unsatisfactory such a strange fixture can be. 1 Feather beds 
 I abhorred. They would never keep the shape you put them 
 into. Corn shucks were entirely too rustly. Rope "mat- 
 tresses" were too creaky. Bed bugs were both too smelly 
 and too hungry. Yet, despite such auditory and all other 
 sensory disqualifications in the spare beds, I could by jiminy 
 and I did by jiminy sleep in them. Even to this day I'm a 
 fairly good sleeper — in a bed. 
 
 There were houses where, although there were no spare 
 beds at all, numerous relatives from far and near had, all 
 at the same time, come to visit and to stay with the sick one. 
 At some of these places all of us, except the sick one or ones, 
 slept on the floor with a good, thick cotton or wool com- 
 fort betwixt us and the bare boards. These were really the 
 best places to sleep on in the country, though in such cubkula 
 soporifera I have slumbered with at least a dozen other persons, 
 men and women too, all piled down and around promiscu- 
 ously on the same floor in the same room. Some would 
 snore like wheezy pumps. Others (you will easily believe it) 
 remained vigilantly awake apparently the whole night 
 through. At least they were always awake when I was. 
 
 "There hain't never no monkey business at all in such 
 sleepin's," said to me one young farmer with whom I later 
 discussed the subject, "ef only there's people enough a-sleepin' 
 together. Some women '11 always be awake to watch the 
 other women, and some men '11 always be awake to watch 
 the other men." 
 
 I confess that I never did see any "monkey business" in 
 those "sleepin's." My business was to sleep and to give 
 
 1 Often, in the humbler houses, not only the spare bed but the main bed also, would 
 be in fact a "fixture," a post set up solidly near the corner of a room with two boards 
 nailed firmly to it and running one to one wall the other to the other wall. Cross-boards 
 nailed to the boards and to the walls completed the construction of the "fixture." 
 
732 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 others a chance to do likewise. 1 Some of those people, be- 
 fore the winter was over, bless their hearts, slept in worse 
 beds than I did — and have not awakened even yet. 
 
 PROFESSIONS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT 
 
 People of all professions and occupations I passed on my 
 rounds in the night. 
 
 Farmers I seldom passed from sundown to cockcrow, ex- 
 cept of course the "bar flies" whooping and hallooing home- 
 ward after spending their wives' milk and butter money in 
 some saloon. The great majority I passed, of course, were 
 doctors. But there were other sorts of "night hawks" too, 
 nearly all of them professional men. 
 
 I met one night a doctor of dentistry. He had come ' 'from 
 over the river" and was on his way to extract an ulcerated 
 tooth and was madder than a dozen M.D's could have been. 
 "Night work for a tooth! Pshaw!" I suggested that maybe 
 the night work was for the owner of the tooth rather than 
 for the tooth. Whereat he seemed slightly offended. 
 
 Veterinaries I met from time to time, for animals too 
 get sick at night. These were all soft-hearted people, I 
 found, wheresoever they had come from and for howsoever 
 little pay they worked. Always a cheerful greeting got I 
 from the veterinaries — no small matter when lantern lights 
 were out (as half the time they were) and when stars were 
 dim and winds strong and bitter. Our own veterinary, Dr. 
 J. D. Nighbert, who had just settled in Pittsfield, had, a 
 year or two before, received from the Ontario Veterinary 
 College the degree of D.V.S. and he was in other ways well 
 educated. Always we two stopped for a few moments to 
 exchange greetings, and always I learned from Dr. Nighbert, 
 there in the darkness, many things of value, especially about 
 the diseases of animals' eyes. (The Doctor's son, Maynard 
 Nighbert, years later, joined him in veterinary practice at 
 Pittsfield, and now both these fine men have passed into the 
 all-engulfing shadow.) 
 
 1 My father suggested that, in such "sleepin's," I should always make me a bed of 
 straight-backed chairs set together in a row, backs turned alternately right and left, so that 
 I could not fall off. I tried it when I could, that is whenever straight-backed chairs enough 
 were available, and it worked. With a good chair-cushion underneath my head I have 
 slept in my ordinary clothes too, like a veritable stone one, two or three hours, as the case 
 might be, and then, amid the snoring and certain bright, watchful eyes, have arisen and 
 slipped softly away and out into the night. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 733 
 
 Preachers I met occasionally in that dreadful epidemic, 
 also the priest from Pittsfield — Metzgar I think was his name. 
 These were on very sad missions as a rule. 
 
 Neighbor nurses I met not infrequently, going about on 
 their ways to or from sick people. Serious but cheerful they 
 almost always were, working gratuitously but enthusiasti- 
 cally. Some I met were afoot and now I am glad that not in- 
 frequently I gave them a ' 'lift' ' on their way. But — look out ! 
 You never should lift a nurse who was on her way to a 
 competing doctor's patient. Unethical! Well, perhaps right- 
 ly so too. There must be rules. And suppose that I really 
 did give the nurse a lift and that then, later, her patient 
 should want to drop the other doctor and to take on me. 
 A pretty pickle I'd be in. 
 
 Schoolteachers I seldom passed excepting only when they 
 were on their way to nurse the sick. Volunteers, like the 
 "neighbor nurse" women! Nursing all the night, teaching 
 all the day. Those were the strenuous times, not these. 
 
 I used to meet occasionally by night Mr. C. I. Swan, 
 County Superintendent of Schools. With a hundred and 
 forty to a hundred and fifty schools all over Pike County to 
 visit and supervise, no wonder he was sometimes late in 
 getting home. One night, when I met him on the highway, 
 he carefully inquired, as was his wont, about the health of 
 the community. When he learned that, at a near-by house, 
 a poverty-stricken man lay sick with the grippe and had 
 nobody to nurse him, excepting his wife only, who should 
 have been in bed herself, so sick she was, he promptly vol- 
 unteered to nurse through that one night. Well, he did, 
 and the next night and the next. And both the husband 
 and the wife recovered, largely because of his kindly min- 
 istrations. His good cheer, confident manner and gently 
 humorous talk, "worked wonders" indeed. 1 
 
 1 This man was so unusual that I sorely regret I cannot give him space for his general 
 value to the community. Tall he was and spare, very spare indeed but decidedly muscular, 
 and with eyes that almost scintillated so intense and so abounding was his energy. He could 
 make a good speech on almost any subject, at any place or time, and his English was always 
 beautiful, very simple and very clear. In fact, whatever he did he did extremely well, 
 and wheresoever he went he became at once the center of attention without at all intending 
 to do so. In 1890 he went into the newspaper business, so that then I never saw him again 
 on my rounds among the sick. 
 
 It was, as I learn from the Companion's scrapbook which she was making at the time, 
 in the spring of 1890 that "C. I." purchased the Pike County Banner and became its editor. 
 After that the friendship between him and my father was very close and very fine. And 
 
734 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 There was, after all, one old farmer whom, though he 
 was never a "bar fly" I think, I did meet frequently at night. 
 He was a man that did not like me much. A big fellow 
 himself, he had but little confidence in small men. Whenever 
 of a night he met me, he "registered a wail" of some sort 
 or other, and, almost invariably, about me and my work. 
 
 Once when I met him in front of one of those private 
 burying grounds, which in the olden days were so numerous 
 in Pike County, he began his complaints by pointing to 
 several new graves whose tombstones showed plainly in the 
 starlight. He even implied that an old saying had it, 4 'Young 
 doctors make fat graveyards." I answered expressly and 
 specifically that I had in that particular graveyard but one 
 sole, single representative. 
 
 "How's Uncle Tommy?" he asked, changing the subject 
 and referring to a patient whose house was very close to us. 
 "Think he'll get well?" 
 
 "Can't tell yct.^ 
 
 "I don't like yer screech oil [owl] up yonder on the comb 
 of his roof. You know it's a sign of bad luck, don't you?" 
 
 they were very rightly useful to each other too, those men. Father very often, for example, 
 helped "C. I." with matter for his newspaper's obituaries. C. I. in fact was wont to say 
 that Father could always give him more material for them than could the relatives them- 
 selves. Why not? He had brought many of those relatives into the world, and, not infre- 
 quently, he had both brought the dear departed into the world and had likewise been present 
 as he passed out of it. About births and weddings Father was also helpful, but never did 
 he disclose any confidential matter to anybody about anybody. "Why," C. I. might ask, 
 "shouldn't I say that old Mr. and Mrs. Curmudgeon, who have just celebrated their golden 
 wedding, were an ideally happy married couple? O, I see, you don't know the reason, but 
 in fact they were quite notoriously quarrelling all the time, so that 'ideally happy married 
 life' would sound a bit comical to many readers. Ever quarrel in your presence? No? 
 Isn't that the way Mr. Curmudgeon lost his left eye? O, you won't say? And how did 
 he lose his right forefinger? You don't know. And why doesn't that Snapscallion boy 
 go on and get well? Because he hasn't enough to eat, you say? Well, Doctor, that good 
 wife of mine'll join me in an ardent attempt to rectify that situation. I know you can't 
 feed everybody. And don't think I don't appreciate your kindness in saying you don't 
 know this and don't know that and don't know the other, when in fact you do know but 
 do not want to violate a confidence. Do I publish things that could only cause heartaches 
 and that would otherwise remain unknown? When's that dance going to take place at 
 Penhart's?" 
 
 He would also question interminably on scientific matters. What is purpura hem- 
 orrhagica? What is a 'blue baby'? How do you tell chicken pox from smallpox? He could 
 outquestion Socrates before breakfast and keep it up till after dark. 
 
 Merrick Bush, editor and owner of the Pike County Democrat, another Pittsfield news- 
 paper, was much on the same order, but he had other sources of information besides my 
 father— chiefly Dr. Dublin. 
 
 Both Swan and Bush asked innumerable questions not only because they wanted matter 
 for their newspaper but also because they were naturally active minded. In consequence 
 their journals became widely known throughout the state for what country weeklies ought 
 to be. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 735 
 
 "I've heard some people say so." 
 
 "Neither do I like your whip-poor-will down yonder in 
 the holler and the woods." He spoke as if the screech oil 
 and the whip-poor-will were both wholly mine and as if I 
 had placed them where they were screeching and whipping 
 and was therefore responsible for something terrible they 
 were doing to my patient. 
 
 JACKY RIAN, AGAIN 
 
 Passing that same graveyard on another night — my whip- 
 poor-will patient had days before passed away from, rather 
 into, the earth — I, as I reached the crest of a little rise of 
 ground, checked my horse to let him blow. 
 
 After a time the poor fellow was breathing noiselessly 
 again and then I detected in the midst of that midnight 
 silence a very curious sound. It was a sort of clicking, then 
 a clink-clink-clinking — over in the cemetery. I felt the 
 goose pimples jump up all over me. Never superstitious, I 
 had nonetheless always felt a great horror of death — as 
 witness my experiences at the little white house. 
 
 What was that in the graveyard? Clink, clink, clinkety- 
 clink! No such sounds could be earthly. Yet how could 
 they be #7zearthly? Presently I thought I saw something over 
 there, moving among the headstones. Clink, clink, clinkety- 
 clink ! 
 
 Then again the movement, unaccounted for by wind. 
 
 I was actually filled with horror. Had I no reason to be 
 so filled — after all the experiences I had had that long and 
 deadly winter? 
 
 I recalled my father's oft-repeated advice, When anything 
 appears to you especially difficult or terrifying, go to it at 
 once and see how readily the terror and the difficulty vanish. 
 Nine times in ten the hard will have become easy and the 
 horrifying friendly indeed. 
 
 Childish and wholly unnecessary as was the act, I decided 
 to get out and go over and investigate that graveyard. 
 Clink, clink, clinkety-clink, and — all of a sudden — rattlety 
 -bang. 
 
 Having tied my horse, I crossed the graveyard stile and 
 wound my way in and out among the headstones. 
 
736 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Now I could see that what I had noticed as moving was 
 really a long piece of white cloth with a lantern suspended 
 at one side of it. A step farther and I saw that there stood 
 inside the cloth a man — Jacky Rian. 
 
 The stone-cutter at Pittsfield, whom I had met almost 
 daily in the stoneyard at Pittsfield, about one single block 
 from my father's residence! 
 
 On a family stone he was cutting two new names — names 
 of members of the family who had died during the great 
 epidemic of flu, just now beginning to subside. So busy had 
 Jacky been at first-cutting on many stones in his employer's 
 shop at Pittsfield that he had had to come out here at night 
 with his lantern so that he might add new letters and new 
 figures to a certain quite old stone — one that had stood and 
 slanted here for several decades. 
 
 He was the first to speak. Without looking up from his 
 work, "Whoever ye are, I had nothing to do with makin' 
 ye dead." 
 
 "No ghost," answered I. "Just me, Jacky." 
 
 He inquired, "What news?" I told him, glad of a chance to 
 relieve my depression by friendly talk. "Old man Jimpson, 
 I hear, is dead! he was a good man, a very, very good man." 
 
 "All men are good, Doc Tom, all the dead men. But, 
 speakin' of the dead all bein' good, here's a man right in 
 here, under this very stone I'm cuttin', that was so blankety- 
 blank crooked they ought to have dug his grave in the shape 
 of a double letter S. Anyway, they didn't sink 'im deep — 
 left 'im where the devil could git 'im easy." Clink, clink, 
 clink. 
 
 "I tried to tell Mr. Halpinthis mornin'," he went on, "in 
 the stoneyard that he'd better leave this job for me till 
 tomorry — sayin', says I, 'Ef ye leave it fer me till tomorry — 
 him an' yer Uncle Jon was playin' checkers at the time — 
 I'll show ye how to beat Jon Shastid at least once.'^ 
 
 'Shut up,' says Mr. Halpin. 'Ye stupid Irishman,' 
 says he. T ain't no more stupid than you be,' says I, 'an' as 
 for bein' Irish, what in the holy halls of laughter be you 
 yourself but Irish and born Irish?' " 1 Clink, clink, clink. 
 
 1 It was the truth. Patrick had been born in Ireland. Jacky, however, though all of 
 Irish parentage, had been born in New York City — where he had, though, grown up in 
 born-Irish surroundings and therefore throughout his life shown a moderate trace of Irish 
 in his speech. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 737 
 
 " 'An' the kind of Irish that never kin win one game of 
 checkers from Jon Shastid.' 'Crown me man,' says he to yer 
 Uncle Jon; 'crown me man, crown me man/ The man bein' 
 crowned, I asked Mr. Halpin again, 'What do ye be but 
 Irish?' 'Yes,' says he, I'm Irish, but not fool Irish, an' now 
 see what ye've done to me — Shastid's won. An' now,' says 
 he, 'out to that graveyard ye go this night, fer beatin' me 
 out of this game.' 
 
 Jacky stopped and took a great swig out of a long black 
 bottle. "Yes," said he, smacking his lips, "all the dead are 
 good, an' the livin' they are good too. All is optimistic. 
 If times be hard, an' I know that they are, well then ef we 
 can't get cake we eat bread. Ef we can't get bread, we 
 starve and go to heaven. To heaven — look at all these tomb- 
 stones. Or, if we starve but don't quite die [he took another 
 swig] I tell you we have optimism. Look at these people, 
 all lyin' here. Do they complain? They do not. Not one 
 word — what's that sound over yonder?" 
 
 "That's my horse whinnying for his master." 
 
 He sighed with great relief. "Hes got optimism, even 
 that horse. I got optimism. [Another lingering swig]. You 
 got optimism. We all got optimism — hooray! Now see 
 how straight I can cut these letters." 
 
 And he did cut them straight. No one could have cut 
 them straighter. 
 
 "The only remedy for spirits in the ground," he con- 
 tinued, "is spirits in the bottle. But, after all, Doc Tom, 
 it's the pain in me head that makes me keep drinkin'." 
 
 I laughed of course. 
 
 He looked up, hurt. "Do you think I'm a bad man?" 
 Clink, clink, clinkety-clink. "Our best friends sometimes 
 thinks the worst of us. — Annyways, they aint no bad men. 
 Look round ye an' see. All good men. 'Tis the same story 
 in all the other graveyards of the airth. All good, Doctor, 
 me boy. Where air the bad people buried? Do they have a 
 spayshal graveyard for thim? A small one would do. 
 Many's the stone I've cut, me man, but never one yit for 
 anny bad person. 'The good die young,' they say, but, be- 
 jabers, nobody else iver dies at all at all." 
 
738 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Yes," I added, "And haven't you noticed also that no- 
 body ever dies, good or bad — " 
 
 "The bad never die." 
 
 "The bad never die. And nobody ever dies, no matter 
 how extremely good and angelical he was, but he had 
 something the matter with him physically." 
 
 "Yes," responded Jacky with Hibernian promptitude, 
 "and that's because almost always he's had some one-horse 
 doctor a-monkeyin' wit' 'im." He dropped his tools sud- 
 denly and quickly ran up to me. Taking me by both arms, 
 he almost cried as he said, "Forgive me Doc Tommy: I was 
 jest tryin' to be funny and didn't mean to hurt ye." 
 
 He was always like that, Jacky. A good man and a 
 gentleman. He was very much better than almost all of the 
 thousands for whom he had cut the final words of eulogy. 
 I have already told in this volume about the removal by 
 some or another doctor of Jacky' s foci of infection and his 
 consequent immediate restoration to health. This was fol- 
 lowed almost as quickly by his reformation, his payment 
 of all his debts to the last red cent. He became in fact much 
 more than a merely respectable citizen — he was greatly 
 looked up to and universally loved. Jacky died at Pittsfield 
 on June 30, 1919. 
 
 I wonder just what words have been carved upon his 
 stone. They ought by all means to have been very "op- 
 timistic." 
 
 HOW I DID AND DID NOT GET THE GRIPPE 
 
 Some phases of country practice are hard, others are 
 harder. 
 
 Speaking of which the question arises, Did I myself get 
 grippe that winter? 
 
 I did and I didn't. This is how. 
 
 On a certain calm evening late in that winter I started 
 out for the country in my sleigh. The sleigh-bells I had 
 completely forgotten to place upon the horse, therefore all 
 the world was silent. The snow was so soft as to dull the 
 horse's tread and the sound of the otherwise squeaky sleigh- 
 runners. 
 
 I shall never forget a single thought, emotion or sensation 
 which I experienced that night. One thing that impressed 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 739 
 
 me deeply was that I felt extremely well, almost too well 
 perhaps. I felt so well indeed that, just as I entered the south- 
 west road, not far from the Vine Wills house, there came 
 to me all of a sudden the beautiful lines of Whittier — 
 
 "What miracle of wild transforming 
 Is this wild work of frost and light, 
 This glimpse of glory infinite?" 
 
 Those lines I had oft recalled before, but never with such a 
 tremendous uplift of the soul. What, in truth, was the 
 matter with me? I recalled the saying of one of our old 
 professors, "It is always dangerous to feel too well." 
 
 I topped a hill and the sun, for a moment, blinded me. 
 
 The night came down, and that too gave me ecstasy. 
 Bright stars appeared in the indigo sky. From afar on a 
 hill-top, where the snow was thinner and harder than where 
 I drove, came the musical call, or shriek, of yet another 
 sleigh. It seemed as if an unseen hand, an angel hand per- 
 haps, had plucked a thousand harp-strings in the center of 
 my being. 
 
 After a few gay calls in the Hartford neighborhood, where 
 I seemed inclined to talk expansively, I headed my rig into 
 the Martinsburg way. All at once I heard dogs. Now, 
 dogs in those days were fiercer by far than ever they have 
 been since. Presently I came to a giant oak-tree, and that 
 was where the dogs were gathered. Those dogs, in fact, 
 were leaping about the foot of the tree and shouting at the 
 tops of their collective voices. I looked up. Then I saw in 
 a crotch of the topmost branches a little furry bundle, from 
 which shone out two tiny balls of fire. For a moment my 
 heart sickened at the gross unfairness of the unequal contest. 
 Then, of a sudden, I was all sheer ecstasy again. Suppose 
 that the little fur bundle of life should perish. Its pain would 
 be only for a moment. After that who could say that the 
 Creator of the Universe, that great Mind which is the Uni- 
 verse, would not make reparation — beautiful reparation and 
 eternal. I was getting to be more "optimistic" than even 
 Jacky Rian had been with his great bottle of liquid op- 
 timiser. 
 
 Still I had no suspicion as to why I was feeling so very 
 well. Shows how ignorant even a young doctor can be. 
 
740 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Over near the Jim Creek neighborhood I found the night 
 air growing colder. I drew the horse-blanket up around my 
 knees, my waist, my shoulders, my face. I was starting for. 
 the Elliot Baker neighborhood when, all at once, the night 
 grew still more cold. It must have dropped full forty degrees 
 in the next ten minutes. I was so very cold, so very cold! 
 
 The marrow in my bones was plainly freezing. My body 
 was all ice. My heart, my mind, my soul — all, all ice. I 
 tried to move my legs but did not seem to have any. I tried 
 to move my hands and arms but did not seem to have any. 
 I was freezing to death. The philosophy that came to me 
 then was that, on a day, the universe in its entirety would 
 be just like this. Why should a person suppose for a moment 
 that the final condition of all creation would be other than 
 eternally painful — eternally cold, eternally suffering, abso- 
 lute zero for all of God's creatures? And no more death as 
 a possible escape from the situation. Why would God permit 
 his creatures to suffer so much torment, some might say. 
 But how could anyone know that he wouldn't 7 . 
 
 For a mad space of time, I was actually sick at my 
 stomach, at my heart, in every inch and atom of my being. 
 
 Hello! I was now at Jim Creek's house, and the horse 
 had stopped. How had we got -there? I could not remember. 
 The weather had got so cold now, I was sure I was freezing 
 to death. That was the main point of that situation. I must 
 get out of the sleigh and over to that house — into it, to bask 
 by its fire. Either that or I should perish surely. 
 
 Such a night of absolute frigidity I had never known 
 before. But how to get out of the sleigh? That was the 
 first problem. I could really never make it. Cold below the 
 cold of all the Arctic regions ! 
 
 I inched along the seat of the sleigh. Inched again. 
 Inched again. Eternity was passing — an eternity of cold. 
 
 I attempted to cry out, uttered not a sound. 
 
 When at length I had inched to the end of the seat, I 
 somehow managed to lean over — then fell from the sleigh. 
 
 I landed in a snowdrift, but colder than before. 
 
 The horse turned his head, saw I had fallen, gave utter- 
 ance to a low, soft whinny. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 741 
 
 A little later I was picked up out of the snow by Jim 
 Creek himself, taken into the house, set down before the fire. 
 
 Old Mrs Creek, looking at me without asking a ques- 
 tion went and prepared a hot draught for me It smelled 
 like 'whiskey and it tasted like cow dung. But I swallowed 
 it down. It was HOT. That was the main thing, it was 
 
 HOT 
 
 Afew minutes later I let myself drift on a rising tide of 
 bliss. The universe was safe once more. 
 ' I prescribed for those patients. I actually did. And they 
 
 all sot well. So did I. . 
 
 I had had a hard chill. (And I never had any fever after 
 it or any sign at all of grippe.) That was the whole story. 
 I realized the situation before I had even got home. My 
 mother furthermore, when I reached her and told her the 
 happening, said: "Why this isn't a cold night at all, Tom. 
 You've had a chill." I looked at the outside thermometer 
 and it stood just above the freezing point. 
 
 THE END OF THE PLAGUE 
 At last the plague, rather the world epidemic of influenza, 
 did wear itself out. God be praised that, somehow, there is 
 always an end to such things. Farr's law, namely that the 
 curve of an epidemic at first ascends rapidly, then slopes up 
 slowly to a maximum, to fall more rapidly on the whole than 
 it mounted" was strictly observed by this epidemic. The 
 rule however, that "influenza is relatively a mild pestilence 
 which comes and passes on in the course of six weeks was 
 thoroughly broken. That epidemic of 1889-1890 lasted for 
 
 The toll it had taken was frightful. The total of those 
 (in the United States) who had died was given by some 
 authorities as 500,000. The better estimate, I believe, was 
 a million. The mortality among infants and the elderly was 
 simply appalling. So, too, was that among pregnant women. 
 The expectant mother nearly always, in case she got the 
 grippe aborted. Then, almost always, both she and the 
 baby died. These aborted children were never, I believe, 
 included in the totals given for the dead in any state of this 
 nation. My recollection is that Illinois, even in that far day, 
 had a vital statistics law, a part of which was the require- 
 
742 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 ment that for every person who died from any cause what- 
 ever a death certificate must be recorded in the office of the 
 county clerk. But the law made no provision for payment 
 of the physician for this service. He was supposed to do it 
 for nothing, do it promptly and fully and be fined heavily 
 if he did not do it right. And the law, further, required the 
 inclusion in the certificate of data which were not within 
 the doctor s knowledge and which could not be ascertained 
 by him without the expenditure of much energy and time 
 Moreover the very legislature which passed the law was 
 notoriously and almost inexpressibly corrupt— provided, for 
 example, abundant compensation for even the slightest 
 service rendered for the public benefit, or supposed benefit 
 by any attorney. The consequence was that many, probably 
 most of the physicians during that epidemic, would not 
 supply death certificates at all. 
 
 Did they not invariably have a sufficient excuse? "When 
 I have not waking hours enough to devote to the dyine 
 shall I expend any considerable part of my time in getting 
 up information concerning the dead? Concerning even the 
 nationality of the dead person's father and mother and the 
 places of their birth? Go to. Let me be on my way." 
 
 And on his way was he. 
 
 And the result is that epidemiologists of to-day can only 
 guess at the fatality of that world-scourge in 1889 and '90. 
 
 Those of any age, young, old, or middling, who con- 
 tracted the terrible disease and did not die, almost invariably 
 suffered terribly from one or more sequelae. Those who got 
 tuberculosis nearly all died. Many of the grippe patients 
 became permanently insane. Others were permanently para- 
 lyzed—thousands of them. Some had wasting of the optic 
 nerves. Others, accessory nasal sinus disease— but we did 
 not know the nature of such complications at that time 
 We knew all its symptoms, heard from the patients repeat- 
 edly thereof, but always we concealed our ignorance of 
 what produced and continued them under such indefinite 
 terms as neuralgia, facial neuritis, hemicrania and so on 
 Mastoiditis, however, otherwise known as mastoid abscess 
 we knew much about, and mastoid abscess as a sequela of 
 that grippe epidemic was frequent indeed. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 743 
 
 OPERATIONS ON THE MASTOID 
 
 The "mastoid process" is the bald rounded protuberance, 
 situated just behind the ear, which is popularly termed "the 
 butt of the ear." This protuberance consists, just under the 
 skin, of an outer shell of bone, inward to which lie a number 
 of air-cells. The largest of these air cells (the "antrum") 
 communicates with the air-space ("tympanum") which lies 
 on the inner side of the drum-membrane— the membrane 
 which closes the ear-canal at its inner end. This tympanum 
 (air-space) communicates with the top of the throaty by 
 means of an air-passage called the "Eustachian tube,' so 
 that, whenever a person swallows, a pellet of air is shot up 
 the Eustachian tube to the tympanum, and, thence, on to 
 the air-cells in the mastoid process. In the grippe the 
 germs of suppuration which, in that disease, are abundant 
 in the top of the throat would ofttimes, when the patient 
 swallowed be carried into the tympanum, and, from there, 
 into the air-cells of the mastoid process. Result: Pus in- 
 fection of that process— mastoiditis or mastoid abscess. 
 
 If, in such cases, the mastoid process is not promptly 
 opened and the pus removed, the pus very frequently burrows 
 into the brain and the patient dies. 
 
 The mastoid operation is a frequent one to-day, and, if 
 performed with sufficient promptness, is well-nigh always 
 successful. 
 
 The technique of the mastoid operation, however, was 
 at the time of which I speak, very poorly developed. Even 
 in that very year— its early part— I had assisted no less a 
 person than Professor Adam Politzer at the University of 
 Vienna in the performance of a number of mastoid operations 
 wherein he would open the cells by boring into them with 
 a gimlet 1 — though he was indeed just beginning at times to 
 use a trephine (an instrument which terminates at its op- 
 erative extremity in a hollow circular space instead of the 
 gimlet's perfectly solid and pointed end). 
 
 i [For the professional reader.] Notwithstanding that, in his "Lehrbuch fur Ohren- 
 heilkunde" (1887) page 396, he says [I translate]: "The trephines and gimlets formerly 
 employed for opening the mastoid process have been rightly abandoned because of their 
 uncertain and dangerous pressure in the depths of the wound and because of their defilement 
 of the wound with boring chips and dust." Perhaps he used gouges and chisels in his 
 private practice. 
 
744 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Schwarze had, as early as 1873, taught the advantage in 
 the performance of the mastoid operation of chisels and 
 gouges over the gimlet and the trephine. Later still, Stacke 
 (all these men were Germans) taught us the art of holding 
 our chisels (sometimes gouges) almost horizontal, and, so 
 holding them, to peel, or slice, away very thin sections of 
 the bone at a time. This would prevent such accidents as, 
 for example, the very common one of opening unintention- 
 ally an immense vein in the inner wall of the mastoid (the 
 lateral sinus) or, still worse, plunging all of a sudden through 
 the inner wall of the mastoid into the brain cavity. 
 
 Many of our mastoid patients were sent by their general 
 practitioners to St. Louis or Jacksonville for operation. 
 There they nearly all died, even at the Prince Sanitarium in 
 the latter city. A few were operated at home by their family 
 physicians. These, without exception, passed away. All my 
 own and my father's cases, likewise all the cases that were 
 referred to me by Pike or Calhoun County practitioners, I 
 operated on myself, and, as it happened — all lived. 
 
 I remember in particular the case of a W. S. Capps — 
 affectionately known throughout the County as "Our Simp." 
 He had been to several cities outside of Pike and Calhoun 
 Counties, begging for relief, but, in each instance, had been 
 returned as "unoperable." I operated on "Simp" at his 
 home, did him a good, thorough operation, did it as asep- 
 tically as I could for the time (we still were operating in our 
 street clothes then) and, after a few months of further suppura- 
 tion of the bone, he recovered completely. 
 
 This gave a decided uplift to my reputation, "Simp" 
 being a prosperous farmer and a man of great influence. 
 Mastoid abscesses flocked to me, sometimes from great dis- 
 tances and I was looked upon even in my home town as a 
 boy wonder. 
 
 I had been called Doctor Tom occasionally before, but 
 now it was Doctor Tom this and Doctor Tom that. And 
 how I loved that title. There was a Miss Fannie English, 
 a beautiful young lady of Pittsfield with whom I was scarce- 
 ly acquainted but who was among the very first and most 
 persistent to call me "Doctor Tom." This made the title 
 all the more alluring to me. After I had left Pittsfield, never 
 returning to practice there again, the title, "Doctor Tom," 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 745 
 
 as I have heretofore suggested, began gradually to be applied 
 to my father. And then it was applied to him constantly. 
 It suited him to a T, for he deserved that appellation of 
 affection and esteem more than I had ever done by far. My 
 brother Will, of Wichita, Kansas, had taken my place then 
 in my father's office, so that very convenient it was, ever 
 after, for the people of our county to speak of "Doctor Will" 
 and "Doctor Tom" — as if indeed they had been brothers — 
 and not as "the old doctor" and "the young doctor." Even 
 to this day in Pike County the older people speak of Doctor 
 Will and Doctor Tom. Me they have almost forgotten. 
 
 MY FATHER AGAIN PRACTISES 
 My father, too, for a very long time, was feeble in the 
 extreme. I did not know what ailed him nor do I know now. 
 I do however recall that, all at once, as it seemed, he was 
 well and strong again. It appeared like a miracle — the way 
 for example he ran out one morning to his waiting rig and 
 stepped into the buggy as if it were only a few inches from 
 the ground. (I, meantime, had attempted to get in by my- 
 self, had had to call for my brother Jon — he was back for 
 the summer from his musical studies — to help me, and, even 
 so, I had got to the seat with great difficulty and pain.) 
 
 How clearly I remember the first call Father and I then 
 made together in the country, and especially how far better 
 a doctor he was than was I. Particularly as to the psychology 
 of the sick I saw more clearly than ever before how much 
 superior he was to myself or to any other doctor that I had 
 ever known. We had a number of sick children to see and, 
 for the boys, he almost invariably pulled out jumping jacks. 
 "Girls love little houses best," he said, "then dolls. Boys 
 want jumping jacks. Above all other things on earth they 
 want jumping- jacks. [He went on to explain the psychology 
 of that preference.] Then, next, they want kaleidoscopes. 
 There you will have to make the explanation for yourself. 
 Girls seldom care for kaleidoscopes at all, notwithstanding 
 their great love of color. But here is the strangest thing yet. 
 Girls, for all their great love of music, do not care at all for 
 mouth organs or jew's-harps. Boys, on the contrary, play 
 with such things for hours — never tire. Boys too, just as 
 you'd naturally suppose, are fascinated by pocket-knives, 
 
746 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 while girls fear them, even abhor them. Yet, strangely in- 
 deed, girls love little spades, shovels, rakes, hoes, pitch- 
 forks, all manner of miniature farm and garden implements- 
 boys seldom do. Boys, however, I believe, like tiny farm 
 animals— especially horses and cows— much more than do 
 girls." And so he went on and on, almost constructing a 
 whole science of toys, rather a toy-psychology. 
 
 Candy he hardly considered as presents for children at 
 all. It, for one thing, had in those days a very undesirable 
 reputation as a disturber of digestion and a rotter of teeth. 
 "In addition," he used to explain, "a child will eat a sack 
 of candy in five minutes, while a jumping jack he will play 
 with for five or six weeks — or months." 
 
 Father was even more minutely learned in the sickness- 
 psychology of youths and adults. Love stories, howsoever 
 harmless, were looked upon as sinful in those days, but a 
 little framed picture of a beautiful girl (for a boy) or a 
 handsome big fellow (for a girl) would keep nobody out of 
 heaven, it seemed— unless indeed by holding him back upon 
 earth a little while longer. Funny stories from his doctor a 
 youth would seldom tolerate. They seemed disrespectful to 
 his adolescent majesty. To fully grown people and the 
 elderly, however, they were happiness indeed. 
 
 Some adult patients' minds required hardening. They 
 grieved overmuch for those who had died, for example, of 
 the flu. Especially (would you believe it— believe it of these 
 grimy-faced, tough-fisted farmers?) they grieved extremely 
 and terribly for the beloved woman. I (but a youthful little 
 fool then and devoid of all deep experience) laughed a little 
 at these love-sick elderly rough fellows, awkward, inex- 
 pressive, eating their very hearts out because of a lost love 
 as if it were not perfectly possible to find a thousand similar 
 women in Pike County, "all on a single summer's day." 
 
 Many of these afflicted widowers walked stupidly, almost 
 blindly, about with dull eyes fixed on the ground or on some 
 deep inner vision of heart-broken memory. 
 
 Funny the little things one remembers from the practice 
 of medicine, "fifty years after, yes sixty and more"— not al- 
 ways the scientific little things either, for medicine is always 
 practised against a human background. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 747 
 
 We knew of course that a certain old fellow was always 
 thinking of his bereavement — though he had let his children, 
 all of them, go to his sisters' houses to be "raised", even 
 on the very day it had all happened — and had never called 
 for them since. 
 
 He was a big, fat, odd-looking chap — the more peculiarly 
 acting now that he lived alone in his little three-room house. 
 "She" had died even before I had got back from Vienna, 
 just about the time in fact that I had first gone to New York. 
 And still he lived on alone. 
 
 One day my father said to me, "Lem's going to lose his 
 mind if he doesn't get a housekeeper or re-marry soon." 
 
 "O," said I, "it'll be easy enough for him to get a much 
 better looking woman than the one he had caught before." 
 
 One day he said to us that he always saw himself now- 
 adays as having lived two lives — two lives entirely different, 
 the one with his mother the other with his wife (who had 
 been both wife and mother to him). 
 
 On another occasion he informed us, almost as if dream- 
 ing, that he would not have become so terribly depressed 
 had it not been for the fact that, almost exactly two years 
 after the day of her death he had received a long letter from 
 her. 
 
 "You!" exclaimed my father excitedly, thinking he now 
 had evidence of Lemuel's complete mental alienation. ' 'You ! 
 Your wife ! A letter from your wife two years after her death 
 and burial?" 
 
 "No, I hain't crazy." He went and took out a letter from 
 the lower compartment of a clock. "Here 'tis, you orterknow 
 her handwritin'. She wrote it before she died, of course, 
 an' give it to one of her friends (as herein she says) to mail 
 it to me just two years after her death date. The friend was 
 faithful too. It come next mornin' after the two years was 
 over. 
 
 "An', Doc, if she'd abused me in that letter, the pains 
 of my losin' her wouldn't 'a' been so great. But abused me? 
 No. She'd written me once before when I'd gone to St. Louee 
 with cattle and that was a good lovin' letter too. But this 
 one. It sounded as if it'd been writ right straight in heaven. 
 How could an angel like her ever 'a' loved me — a — a — " 
 (he used the only word he could think of) "a damned ugly 
 
748 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 cuss like me? I can't read it to nuther of ye. I can't much 
 of the time read it to myself." He went and replaced his 
 writing in his clock — softly closing the door of time against 
 that message from eternity. 
 
 It may interest a mere psychologist when I add that, 
 many, many long years later, after the death of my own 
 beloved life Companion, it was for a very long time, and, 
 no doubt, as a direct result of the experience which my 
 farmer friend had had and which he had related to me, that, 
 for days and weeks and months after my Companion's 
 passing, a vast fear, a truly inexpressible terror, at times 
 
 f>ossessed me, lest, some day, all at once, I should receive 
 rom her a letter — some such love-letter perhaps as my farmer 
 friend had received from his own beloved and which, despite 
 its kind intentions, by re-opening, yes and even intensifying, 
 all the agony of his loss, had almost proved to be his mind's 
 undoing — by re-opening, yes and intensifying, all the agony 
 of his former loss. 
 
 It may also be worth recording that when, later, I, with 
 my wandering foot, had become a student at Harvard Col- 
 lege, I wrote up freely (without using the actual name of 
 course) my farmer friend's experience, as a literary exercise 
 for one of Professor Barrett Wendell's English courses. 
 Whereupon that unpredictable scholar and teacher raved 
 and well-nigh tore his hair. "Haven't I always directed 
 you students," he demanded, "to draw all your stories, each 
 and every one of them, directly out of life — out of your own 
 experience?" 
 
 Thereupon I stood up firmly and informed the raver that 
 this particular experience I had indeed taken straight out of 
 my life, out of the life, rather, of one of my father's farmer 
 patients back in the old yellow hills of Pike County, Illinois. 
 It had certainly "come out of life" — and death. 
 
 "Paw!" he almost shouted, "things like that don't hap- 
 pen among farmers." 
 
 Things like that do not happen among farmers? All the 
 characters of Balzac "happen" among farmers. All the trag- 
 edies, comedies and romances of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Eu- 
 ripides and William Shakespeare happen in the country — 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 749 
 
 happen and have happened there repeatedly and repeatedly 
 again. All the stories of the Bible have been re-enacted there. 
 Everything in history. Everything in all literature and in all 
 the languages of mankind, I am firmly convinced, have 
 happened in just Pike County alone and will happen there 
 again. Thus I to Barrett Wendell— who knew the way to 
 write, but never had practised medicine or seen into the un- 
 limited hearts of the humble. , ' _ ■ _ j 
 
 He happened to be in jovial mood nevertheless that day. 
 So cooling down as he thought of a joke and evidently 
 esteemed it a good one, he laughed. "O well, your story at 
 all events well illustrates the indubitable fact that a typical 
 woman will have the last word— even if she has to have it 
 from the grave." 
 
 MY BROTHER JON RIDES WITH ME 
 And now I must hasten a little: thus far I have lingered 
 in the recital of my Pittsfield practice story because that 
 practice was the only one which I have ever done upon my 
 own responsibility that was general in its character. 
 
 As my father got busier and busier with his own personal 
 practice, I still had to make, outside of office hours, my own 
 long, long rounds in the country. In my then condition that 
 was very trying. My much younger brother, Joseph, it is 
 true, would, for a small consideration, hitch up Nightshade 
 or Frank to the buggy, then tie him or her to the post before 
 the house or office. But further he would not proceed. There 
 were games and there were girls; there was also Beethoven. 
 Yet it was dangerous, highly so, for me to drive alone in 
 the country. My brother Jon, therefore, much more nearly 
 my own age, being at home on vacation, became my more 
 than merely willing companion on many a long ride 
 helping me now into the buggy, now out again, carrying 
 the weighted pill-bags for me, or even much heavier para- 
 phernalia, into and out of many farmhouses. 
 
 It seems all like a feverish dream now, a dream however 
 whereof I remember almost every detail. So much work in 
 so much pain! I was ofttimes sicker than my patients and 
 kept in my pocket always a clinical thermometer which I 
 used only for myself. __________ 
 
750 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 THE TUMBLE-BUG 
 
 That first day with Jon I remember in particular. My 
 mother came running swiftly out to me with a large cup of 
 coffee even after I had got up to the buggy seat. "This drink 
 is a sin oftentimes," she admonished, "especially for young 
 people — but you, you certainly look as if you needed coffee 
 very badly." I swallowed the terrible stimulant, and, so 
 buoyed up, shook out the lines and away went we. 
 
 It was a beautiful June morning, so clear, so soft, so cool, 
 so bright. There was not even a wisp of vapor in the sky. 
 All seemed like heaven to us. In the rutted, yellow road, 
 however, there were — tumble-bugs, or, as some people called 
 them, tumble-dungs. 
 
 Why have I not already in this story descanted on tumble- 
 bugs? The doctor of to-day in the Mississippi Valley knows 
 nothing at all about tumble-bugs. He, ignorant man, has 
 very probably never even seen one. Yet in the days of which 
 I write the most familiar summer-time object, I will venture 
 to say and will bet a pair of pill-bags on it, was the tumble- 
 bug. 
 
 Therefore,' ladies and gentlemen, I introduce to you his 
 majesty, the tumble-bug. Also her majesy, the queen, who 
 was ever beside her well-occupied lord — like any human 
 queen, for reproductive purposes only. 
 
 I can almost weep when I recall that there are no more 
 tumble-bugs to be seen in a country practice. I greatly ad- 
 mired their pertinacity, their persistence, their almost end- 
 less industry — though not indeed their foolish inattention to 
 danger. Even as a child, leaning out of the buggy as I rode 
 beside my father, I would watch for hours the thousands, 
 perhaps even millions of the big black lord and lady tumble- 
 bugs. Busier than bees were they, gathering up the luscious 
 offal of the horses and rolling it into globular masses. Stand- 
 ing behind those sweetly-smelling spheres they would up- 
 end themselves and then, supported by their hands, place 
 their posterior feet upon the ball and start away whizzing. 
 Mr. T. Bug would then climb atop the ball, gallantly riding 
 for the rest of the journey while Mrs. T. Bug did all the work. 
 Arrived at the proper place, both Mr. and Mrs. would bore 
 well down into the earth and then, the Mrs. having first 
 deposited in the ball her well-loved eggs, the two would 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 751 
 
 kick the spheroid into the hole and quickly cover it with 
 other, but unimpregnated balls, and finally, with earth. 
 
 The earth supplied the needed protection. The buried 
 horse-dung first furnished the heat which hatched out the 
 babies, and then, in turn, became food for them. After that 
 (the following year, about June) the babies emerged as full- 
 fledged "tumblers," and the processes of life were repeated. 
 
 What was the purpose of the balls? To make more 
 tumblers. What was the purpose of the tumblers? To make 
 more balls. Round and round, eh? Only just that? Only 
 just that. Exactly like human beings— only the tumblers 
 were not so percipient of danger as human beings are ; 
 
 Round and round went our buggy-wheels, father's and 
 mine. Crunch and crunch went the tumblers— hundreds and 
 thousands of them, perhaps millions. We were destiny to 
 them. But they seemed to know nothing of destiny, ours or 
 any other kind. I loved them all and I suffered not a little 
 when they perished — they seemed so good-natured and un- 
 complaining. No dirges had they for anybody, or burials. 
 They seemed to know nothing at all about such things. In 
 fact they appeared to know nothing whatever about any- 
 thing whatever, excepting the uses of horse-dung and of 
 holes in the ground. Mr. and Mrs. seemed always quite 
 content. Mr. Bug was instinctively convinced that the place 
 of the man is ever on the top of the world— the globe, at 
 least; while Mrs. Bug seemed quite as thoroughly and in- 
 stinctively persuaded that the place of the woman is always 
 in the— at least on the— ground, with four of her six legs 
 in the air tumbling and trundling the ball— really running 
 the globe. 
 
 I could almost weep when I recall that there are no more 
 tumble-bugs. What destroyed them as a feature of the old- 
 time landscape? They had increased their numbers con- 
 stantly in the old, old order of things, indifferent as they 
 were to the buggy-wheels, the sulky-wheels, the wagon- 
 wheels, the horses' hoofs, which rolled on over them, stamp- 
 ed down hard on them, killed them by the millions. 
 
 What, then, did finally put an end to tumble-bugs? 
 Automobiles. 
 
 Not that the deadly carbon monoxide which autos leave 
 behind to-day has poisoned the tumblers off. But horses 
 
752 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 used to leave behind them the mammoth savory gold-colored 
 balls, which papa and mamma bugs not only ate themselves 
 but which they also used both as raw material for tumbler- 
 incubators and tumbler baby-food. So there were tumbler- 
 bugs in those days, millions of the curious, comical, good- 
 natured, hard-working tumbling-around fellows. 
 
 They must have had some influence on the old-time prac- 
 tice of medicine too. How many a time I have solved my med- 
 ical problems, driving slowly, leaning idly over my near front 
 wheel or the odoriferous dash-board, watching the oncom- 
 ing stream of never-ending, eternally constructing, human- 
 mind-soothing Scarabaei, Aphodii or Copridides. 
 
 They were also a prominent feature — let me say it again 
 — of the old-time medical practice, the landscape which the 
 doctor, in warm weather, continually saw — like the blue 
 mullein stalks, the scarlet sumach bushes, the ever-fragrant 
 locust trees, the white-flittering and the yellow-flittering 
 butterflies, the saucy jaybirds balancing on boughs, the caw- 
 caw-cawing crows. 
 
 Nearly all these landscape features have disappeared now. 
 The modern doctor down in Pike County goes too fast ever 
 to see or hear them even were they still present. 
 
 But most of all I miss when to-day I visit the country 
 roads of Pike County those essentials of old-time country 
 practice — the busy tumble-bugs. They were a part of "the 
 Dack-scene" truly, likewise of the front-scene, the side- 
 scenes and the scene directly under you. 
 
 Why! do you know that in the olden time, some of the 
 good old ladies cured almost all diseases for the doctor (when 
 he wasn't looking) by making a strong concoction of tumble- 
 bug balls, which then they administered to the patient in 
 such and such quantities every so and so often? 
 
 You don't believe that they ever cured anybody? Well, 
 I don't either. But at all events both the bugs and the old 
 ladies did their best. 
 
 The old ladies too had numerous superstitions about 
 tumble-bugs. One of them was that whenever the bugs got 
 to moving tarnation fast — like lightning nearly — to get into 
 their holes, it meant a quick storm coming. 
 
MY NEXT YOUNGER BROTHER, JON SHEPHERD SHASTID 
 Portrait taken a few years after he had greatly assisted me for months in my 
 country practice, not only by driving for me and helping me in and out of the 
 buggy at farmhouses, but also by his ever cheerful and instructive companion- 
 ship. 
 
 Jon was much interested in the psychology of sickness, particularly the 
 value of music as a means of treating certain diseases. On this subject he gave 
 me many valuable thoughts. Later in life he and Ossip Gabrilowitsch, the 
 famous Russian composer and conductor, discussed the subject at some length, 
 and Jon hoped to write a book about it, when, all at once, because of the 
 birth of his only child, he gave up music altogether and went into the more 
 profitable occupation of farm management. 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 753 
 
MY SECOND LIFE — 754 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 755 
 
 THE HEAVENS OPEN 
 
 I told brother Jon that, as he sat there beside me in the 
 buggy. "No truth in the saying," said he. "I've been 
 watching these bugs for the last two hours and they've 
 been on the double-quick run all the while. Yet look at 
 that sky." The sky was simply of brilliant sapphire, as we 
 went into a house. Coming back out, we saw that the 
 world had grown much darker. 
 
 When Jon had helped me back to my seat, the world 
 was engulfed in horrible blackness. High over-head, how- 
 ever, a bit of pale yellow light shone in the threatening sky. 
 Before we had driven a dozen yards, the sky seemed suddenly 
 to crack wide open, to pour down a fiercely beautiful cascade 
 of noise and blinding destruction. 
 
 I SPEAK TO THE COMPANION 
 
 Along in that memorable spring of 1890 there was brought 
 to my office one day by her mother a beautiful young Pitts- 
 field girl whom I have already mentioned, Miss Fannie 
 Fidelia English, whose eyelids were inflamed. On my very 
 birthday, July 19, I discharged her as cured. "Will the eyes 
 now stay well?" she asked. "And beautiful." Then, as the 
 result no doubt of many a lonely day-dream I'd been having 
 about her, I blurted: "If it's pleasant weather tomorrow 
 afternoon may I take you riding?" 
 
 "Yes, indeed." 
 
 Next day I, freshly barbered and wearing a new long- 
 tailed black suit, the regulation toggery for a doctor then, 
 drove Nightshade to our new buggy, stopped for Fannie 
 Fidelia, found her a miracle of all white fluffery and with 
 little dark pansies at her lovely throat. So — over the hills 
 and far away. 
 
 We drove that afternoon mostly through forest roads, 
 said little, came at shut of eve into the James Lowe neigh- 
 borhood, and, as we were starting to cross a creek near the 
 Nass place, Nightshade suddenly stopped. Her check-rein 
 being already loose, she lowered her head, and, after a soft 
 nicker or two began to drink. 
 
 All at once — I know not how I could have done such a 
 thing, I knew so little about Fannie Fidelia — I asked her, 
 
756 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Do you love me?" I was too bashful and timid by far to 
 risk saying outright, "I love you," then, perhaps, being 
 told, "Well, I don't love you" 
 
 She replied quite simply, as if the matter were perfectly 
 obvious and inevitable — inscribed as it were in the leaves of 
 Destiny itself — "Why! of course I do." 
 
 I was astounded. I had thought that a homely fellow 
 like me would have to court her for long ages, argue his 
 case, be terribly persistent. 
 
 The horse, tired, did not start up of herself, so I let her 
 stand. 
 
 For a long time Fannie Fidelia and I sat unspeaking, as 
 though the sweet words we had already uttered were suffi- 
 cient for eternity. 
 
 At last she spoke. Said she, "I hope, Doctor Tom, that 
 our first child will be a boy and that it will grow up to be 
 just like you — another 'Doctor Tom' — and to carry on 
 your life-work and name." 
 
 I was still speechless. Such words from such lips! I 
 kissed the lips. 
 
 Neither of us could know that, long years later, our first 
 child would be a girl and that it would die in the very hour 
 of its birth. Also that no other child would ever be born 
 to us. 1 
 
 If I seem to be saying far too much about a very simple 
 courtship, remember that, hereafter, in this story, Fannie 
 Fidelia — or the Companion, as I soon came to call her — 
 played a highly important part — saving my life, indeed, on 
 a number of occasions. That courtship, too, to a consider- 
 able extent, must have been typical of the wooings and pro- 
 posals of innumerable country doctors of the land and time. 
 Doctors, in those days, were far too busy with their work 
 amid the sick, to go philandering around among a score of 
 
 *It was on that very day, in the evening (if any now should care to know) that I wrote 
 my brief poem, called "My Human Trinity" (meaning my father, my mother and my 
 promised wife) which many persons, I am told, at least many in Pike County, were kind 
 enough to clip and paste in their scrapbooks, and which many newspapers throughout the 
 country were kind enough to reprint. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 757 
 
 girls for a score of years or more, dancing and drinking and 
 frivoling generally, before selecting a life companion — only 
 to land, perhaps, after all, in the divorce court or a continu- 
 ing hell in a hell of a "home." 
 
 At once my appendicitis grew worse, and it had been 
 bad enough before. My brother Jon had had to help me 
 into the buggy on the very day of my betrothal and my 
 betrothed had had to help me out again at the close of the 
 
 ride. 
 
 A few days later I was sick in bed with a raging fever. 
 My mother, learning of my betrothal, became extremely 
 jealous of my betrothed. She admitted herself that Fannie 
 was the prettiest and the best of all the girls she knew, yet 
 she did not want me to marry her. "Even when I am well?" 
 "I cannot bear to think that my boys, as soon as they are 
 grown, will all want to go away with other women and 
 forget me." "We'll not forget you." 
 
 But it was no use. One of the saddest things I know in 
 all this sadness-filled world is the terrible grief of parents 
 over such "loss" of their children. They cannot bear to see 
 their fledglings fly away to build nests of their own. 
 
 Fannie Fidelia sent me daily little nosegays like the one 
 she'd worn at her breast on the day of our ride, also cooling 
 ices she'd made with her own hands. But the more she 
 sent of these the more my mother disliked her. Strange in- 
 deed, when the two women were so much alike! I resembled 
 my mother, yet every one declared that Fannie resembled 
 her a great deal more than did I. Even my mother's brothers 
 all later said that, the color of the eyes being the only differ- 
 ence. 
 
 Even after I had got out of bed and again was practising 
 medicine I was much too sick to marry. ' 'Suppose you marry 
 and have children, then become an invalid. Well, Father 
 and I will do our best to take care of you all. No one shall 
 ever say we shirked our duty." What could I do? 
 
 I could ask Fannie Fidelia to wait, not to give me up 
 but to wait. She said she would wait a thousand years for 
 me, but never give me up. 
 
 She did, in fact, wait seven long years, poor child. I 
 never could understand her waiting. She was far the most 
 
758 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 charming, the most perfect, of all the girls in Pike, and yet 
 she waited. 
 
 Even now, after forty-three years of married life and 
 other years that followed her death, she is waiting still — 
 rather again — over yonder. 
 
 In the fall my brother Jon decided to study, that coming 
 collegiate year (1890-91) at New York City, with one of 
 the greatest piano-teachers of his time, E. M. Bowman. He 
 and I took four or five "last trips" together in the country, 
 saw one of my typhoid patients die, smelled the sweet-sour 
 fragrance of the orchards, listened to the loving croak of 
 frogs along the creek, and watched the ail-too serious moon 
 rise. And then he was gone. 1 
 
 His departure awakened in me many old dreams, stirred 
 something in my vagabond breast. I decided at last to 
 wander again eventually, but not, for the present, to say 
 one word to anybody about it. First, I must get well. Then 
 marry. Then wander. I went to see specialists in appendi- 
 citis, that newly named disease. Cincinnati, New York, 
 and elsewhere! Nobody could help me, at least without the 
 performance of an operation which, in those days, was al- 
 most uniformly fatal. I returned to my home in pain and 
 despair. 
 
 1 1 am no musical critic, not even an amateur musician, but I have never heard another 
 virtuoso whose playing appeared to me to bring out so clearly and entrancingly the archi- 
 tecture of whole compositions as did that of Jon. As he passed through even the longest 
 sonatas you could not even begin to miss the structure of the piece. Nor, again, could you 
 fail to notice how unerringly he rendered the varying shades of contrast which, in the art 
 musical just as in the art literary, unite to form the beauteous unity of the whole composition. 
 Take an example from the art literary— "Romeo and Juliet." There the contrast is that 
 between love and hate, the intense affection of Romeo and Juliet for each other exhibited 
 against the horrible background of hatred between the two families. Every scene of the 
 entire play, almost every sentence in it, brings out some new phase or aspect of that awe- 
 inspiring contrast— until at last the lovers are united, in death, and so the mutual hatred 
 of the families is also buried— i.e., in the tomb with their children. Just as a great actor 
 will present to you all the changing, never-repeated shades of that mighty, all-controlling 
 contrast which constitutes "Romeo and Juliet," which is "Romeo and Juliet," so too my 
 brother Jon, I thought, in every instance of his playing, brought out clearly all the opposed 
 lights and shadows of the composition until, at last, the whole great aggregation of emotions 
 had been presented as a one-thing, a vast unity, of which all the lesser contrasts were simply 
 constituent parts. 
 
 With the playing of my brother Joseph, most unfortunately, I am less familiar. As he 
 was eleven years younger than I— therefore a mere child still, even after I, a practising 
 physician, had left Pittsfield— I seldom heard him play. I have been told, however, by 
 those who should know about such matters that, as an interpreter of Beethoven, in whose 
 works he specialized, he was and still is truly marvelous. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 759 
 
 After a time I managed to work out a technique for get- 
 ting into and out of the buggy alone without exciting over- 
 much pain. From that time on I said but little to my father 
 about my appendicitis. He, progressive though he was in 
 almost everything else, still had his serious doubts as to the 
 existence of any such thing as appendicitis. Now he began 
 saying to me, seeing how much more easily I got into the 
 buggy, "I thought all along that, after a bit of rest or 
 travel,' you'd get all over your sickness, all over it." Only 
 to Fannie Fidelia did I say how sick I really yet was. She 
 still must wait till I got better. Gladly would she wait— 
 if it must be so. . 
 
 All that winter I practiced. That spring. The next 
 summer. The next fall. Along about the end of that fall the 
 wandering foot was getting the terrible better of me. There 
 began to return to me the old, old thought about President 
 Charles William Eliot, and his rendezvous, or "jungle," for 
 born tramps. 
 
 But what would the Grand Procrustes of Inveni do to me 
 this time— in case I attempted to enter that jungle? 
 
 I wrote to my brother, Dr. Will, at Wichita, Kansas- 
 one of the western boom towns which had recently "blown 
 up." Was he looking for a location? I had a good one. 
 We got together on the price, neither of us as yet informing 
 my father. 
 
 About this time, for some strange reason, my father be- 
 came interested anew in the subject of securing a horse for 
 me. He had never really at any time forgotten that highly 
 important matter, but so many other problems had arisen 
 for solution that the one of securing an absolute perfec- 
 tion in the way of horse-flesh for his majesty, "The Young 
 Doctor," was shoved somewhat into the background. Now, 
 however, it rushed, apparently of itself, into the foreground 
 again and with a strange, tempestuous earnestness. All 
 Pike County seemed to be wanting to sell its horses and my 
 father did not seem to care a straw what any one of them 
 would cost. Horses popped suddenly into view anywhere 
 about our house or barn or office and at almost any time of 
 day or evening. There were more varieties of horses than I 
 could have thought existed. There were big bony black 
 
760 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 horses and little bits of starveling brown horses, and fat 
 pintos and palominos and mustangs, and stallions and mares 
 and geldings. There were horses that would eat food out 
 of your hand and horses that would rather eat your hand 
 than your food. In not one single instance, however, did 
 any of the horses this time "belong to the Czar of Rooshia. ' ! 
 They were all for sale. 
 
 pne evening, just as I rejected the offer of a little loving, 
 if high-spirited, mare that nuzzled my arm and shoulder, my 
 father inquired, "Doesn't any one of these horses suit you, 
 Thomas?" "No, Father." "Then take two horses— a team." 
 Head down, I went into the house. 
 
 With my father I still occasionally rode into the country. 
 On one of these trips he said, "Your mother tells me she 
 believes you are getting ready to go to Harvard College. 
 Is that so?" His lips were trembling. I had asked her to 
 tell him. 
 
 But even now I could not face him with the truth. So I 
 said, laughingly, "In the language of diplomats, T will 
 neither confirm nor deny.' " 
 
 Then he was silent so long, looking up at the clouds, 
 that I began pretending that I had only been toying with 
 the idea of becoming an academic student once more- 
 just," said I, "as I go into our lumber-room sometimes, 
 there to fool around with my childhood's jumping-jacks 
 and so on. That doesn't mean I am going to be a child again 
 I merely like to think— " & 
 
 It was excellent make-believe, the only trouble being 
 that it did not make him believe. 
 
 He sighed deeply. "No. You are going away," he said. 
 To Harvard." 
 
 "But I'll not stay there always. I'll come back to Pitts- 
 held again. You'll see." I could not bear to turn the knife 
 in his heart. 
 
 "Not to take the veil, son. Not to stay here. Daddy will 
 see very little of you any more— a day or two at a time 
 perhaps, when you can get away from a big city practice- 
 that is all until I die. Do you remember, Tom, the many 
 letters I wrote you at Vienna, telling you I did not want you 
 to leave me, now that I am getting old?" 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 761 
 
 "Willie is coming," I defended, "to take my place with 
 
 » » 
 
 70 "Then you stay too, Thomas!" he cried. "There is room 
 for all three of us. Plenty of room. And we shall all be 
 joyful.— No. You want to go." 
 
 On another occasion he said, "Have you money enough? 
 
 "Yes, a plenty." 
 
 "Go." 
 
 
 
 A passage from a letter written to me by my father on my twenty-second 
 birthday (1888). Innumerable similar passages he had written me both 
 before and after that date, fearing always that I might some time leave 
 him or even refuse to "take the veil." 
 
 wise 
 
 My mother, another wild intellectual tramp, spoke like- 
 vxse. I went to see her about something and found her at 
 the flour-chest, her bright arms active in the dough. A 
 moment later she was "cutting out" the biscuits. Then, 
 next she was sliding two panfuls of biscuits into the oven. 
 All the while she was talking, talking, rapidly about the 
 hardships and still the unspeakable beauty of being a country 
 doctor's wife. It had meant continual sacrifice to her that 
 life, but she had loved it. "I want to talk to you, Tom, 
 come with me." 
 
762 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Leaving Jon to watch the biscuits, she took me down into 
 the cellar. Nobody else was there. Only the dank, cool 
 cave-odor greeted us : an odor enriched by years of piled up 
 apples and potatoes, pumpkins, persimmons, home made 
 candles (in the long ago). Shelves lined nearly all the walls 
 of both the big cellar-rooms : shelves laden to the full with 
 jars and preserves, all dusty and cob-webbed, and all "put 
 up" carefully by her own tireless hands. 
 
 "You have the Gypsy foot," said she. "Yet you'll al- 
 ways be a doctor — I'll prophecy that." As she began taking 
 down fruit for the dinner: "You never have time to think 
 of any blessings. You have never really sat and looked fully 
 at the inside of your fine new office, no not even yet." 
 
 "Come along with me," I said, "and I'll go gaze on it 
 now." But the front-door bell rang — I went and answered 
 it. Father and Will were both far out in the country, so I 
 made the call for Willie's account. 
 
 After, that night, I had said "Good-bye" to the Com- 
 panion, I walked long, long about the little city — especially 
 around the Courthouse Square — the Heart of Pike. As if 
 they were old human friends, I threw little kisses at the 
 Hirsheimer Cigar Store Indian, then at Fritz Niebur's Sign 
 of the Big Boot (the largest actual leather boot in the entire 
 world, it was joyously acclaimed). All at once Uncle Ned 
 McGuire and his loose-set buckboard came rattling into the 
 Square. He, one day, had saved my Grandfather Shastid 
 from drowning — long, long before my father had been be- 
 gotten. Years later, he had saved John G. Nicolay from a 
 similar fate. I threw the blue-jeaned, big-bellied, bigger- 
 hearted old teamster a secret kiss too, walked down to the 
 Methodist Church (just across from our old house) and sat 
 on the north steps thereof. No use to disguise the fact: I 
 was breaking with Pittsfield, with Pike County, with even 
 my father and my mother — with all that I loved in this 
 region — excepting the Companion, for whom I expected to 
 return, and, then, taking her with me, keep her by my side 
 until my life itself should end. 
 
 In the silence and sacredness of that hour, I thought, 
 "Were I now asked what it is that, in all my experience here 
 at Pittsfield as a country doctor — something I shall never be 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 763 
 
 again — what it is that I shall probably remember with 
 sharpest and most solemn distinctness, I should have to 
 reply that it was what had happened one cloudy night in 
 the country as I stopped to breathe my horse on the crest of 
 a hill." The air, I recalled, had been blackness itself, and 
 the only light that I could see came through the little open 
 window of a roadside farmhouse. All at once a quick, 
 nervous clock inside the house spoke out sharply, "One-two- 
 three" — as if it were very tired indeed of time and remon- 
 strant at all things human. A man then arose, came near 
 the window, poured something quickly with badly shaking 
 hand from a bottle to a spoon, and then my horse (I had 
 no patient at this house) giving a long, pathetic sigh, started 
 on of herself without a word from me. 
 
 (Long years afterward, in Duluth, when, in her dressing- 
 room at night, my Companion had died, all alone, and I then 
 had found her and hurriedly called my old friend, Dr. 
 Merriman, and then had returned to the Companion: all at 
 once in my solemn and seemingly empty house, somewhere, 
 a little old-fashioned striker-clock had rapidly whirred out, 
 as if Time itself were tired and bitterly remonstrant at all 
 things human: "One-two-three!" 
 
 (And then, quickly — such are the associations of the mind 
 — there flashed into my consciousness the night when, more 
 than half a century before, some tiny clock in some tiny 
 farmhouse whose very location I had long ago forgotten 
 had been doing the same thing. 
 
 (So, across the lumbering years, unspeakable tragedies 
 link themselves to other unspeakable tragedies by means the 
 most trivial and unimportant — perhaps in order to teach 
 each one of us that, when he is in his own seemingly solitary 
 anguish, his anguish is only a portion of a great common 
 whole.) 
 
 AN EXPLANATION— AND AWAY 
 I may already have stated, at least have implied, that, 
 in this volume, many of the events may seem to be as nothing 
 while an understanding of those events may ofttimes amount 
 to a great deal. The medical practice of that time, or of any 
 time, cannot be understood without its human background; 
 hence I have presented that background (along with the 
 
764 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 scientific drama so solemnly enacted before it) in consider- 
 able detail. Consider that the children of tomorrow will 
 know nothing at all of this world of yesterday if no records 
 of it be set down. In fact even the children of to-day have no 
 knowledge whatever of its existence. "Mere vignettes!" 
 you cry? Very true: mere verbal vignettes. And yet each of 
 all these thumb-nail sketches is part of one single larger 
 picture which, in this "Doctor Who Fathered a Tramp," I 
 am attempting to set before you as typical of that day and 
 generation — a day and generation which altered the entire 
 world — the whole human race — forevermore. 
 
 My father, next morning, went with me to the quiet 
 village depot, insisting that he carry my satchels. As I took 
 them from his hands at the train, he started to say to me, 
 jokingly, of course, "Tramp!" Then suddenly he turned 
 away. 
 
 Slowly I mounted the steps and passed into the train. 
 
 As I sat down quietly and looked out, the scene became 
 all at once immobile for me and timeless. Everything quite 
 motionless, quite dateless, quite incomprehensible! There 
 seemed to be an inner meaning to the situation — a meaning 
 to which I could not penetrate. 
 
 At length the train got under way, pulled out, and 
 neither of us had again spoken. 
 
 A few moments later I was listening to the rhythmic if 
 ever accelerated clicking of the rails, also watching the out- 
 skirts of Pittsfield slipping into the past. 
 
 I had renounced the veil. 1 
 
 1 Inasmuch as, following the close of my practice at Pittsfield, I beheld that place again 
 infrequently and then but for a few days at a time, I now am pleased to extract from two 
 letters to me by another native Pittsfield son, Attorney Oliver R. Barrett, of Chicago, pas- 
 sages which will serve as a summary of what I hitherto have been saying about Pittsfield 
 and Pike County. 
 
 From his letter of February 28, 1940: 
 
 " I think one of my earliest and most vivid recollections is my first day at school. 
 
 I started in the first grade in the old East School Building. Miss Mattie Merril was in 
 charge. On our way home from school some of the older boys led a procession of the 
 newer students up the steps to the door of your father's office, and with all the secrecy and 
 boyish formality of an initiation or a sacred rite we were told to look within. There as 
 I pressed my face against the glass door I saw a full length skeleton dangling in the air as 
 it hung in the corner of your father's office. I had never seen a skeleton and scarcely knew 
 what it was, but it did seem something terrifying, ready to step out, reaching for me with 
 its long bony fingers. Of course, we turned and ran as fast as our legs could carry us. We 
 did not dare to look back. We heard the trampling feet of the boys behind us and imagined 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 765 
 
 A COUNTRY DOCTOR GOES ACADEMIC- 
 HARVARD 
 
 And now, once again, I shall have to break my rule 
 against repeating in this present "life" anything that has 
 already been set forth in my "Tramping to Failure." Now 
 and then a slight violation of the rule is necessary in order 
 to preserve the thread of the story for those who have not 
 read the earlier book. 
 
 the bony and terrifying figure was not far in the rear. There were times when Jon Shastid 
 would be booming out his piano lessons in a nearby room with particular emphasis on the 
 loud pedal and our imagination was readily convinced that there was a swaying motion 
 of the skeleton as if aroused by the strains of Jon's music. 
 
 "And then, after the coming of cold weather, would come the initiation in front of 
 the John L. Field Jewelry Store. Do you remember that nickel-plated railing which you 
 could hold on while you gazed in admiration at the gold watches and the dazzling diamonds? 
 The newest school boy was told to touch the tip of his tongue to the cold bar. Oftentimes, 
 the older boys would at the same time give the back of his head a push and then the fright- 
 ened kid would jerk back, to find that he had left a part of the coating of his tongue on the 
 nickel-plated bar. About the only consolation the boy would get to salve the hurt of the 
 bleeding tongue would be the knowledge that his experience would enable him to avoid 
 the same unpleasant experience in the future. 
 
 "The coming of spring with its blossoms and the smell of the awakening earth and 
 the bloom and buds was always a pleasant time about Pittsfield. Then there were plenty 
 of wild blackberries to be gathered and money to be earned by trudging out to John Pickup's 
 farm to help in the planting and gathering of his truck crops and on the way a detour for 
 a drink of the evil-tasting waters of the sulphur spring. [Always recommended by probably 
 half the old ladies in the neighborhood to the patients of my father and myself, whatsoever 
 the disease or diseases each one of them might be suffering from, as a perfectly sure cure . 
 — T.H.S.] 
 
 "Then came the experience of the first swim when the younger boys were taken out to 
 Panther or Painter Creek and told to jump into a deep and dark-looking pool to test whether 
 they could swim or sink. And then when the overflow of the spring freshets would turn 
 the small streams into raging torrents, it was great fun to go to the Creek near the Cut past 
 the first bridge to jump in and float down with the rushing and eddying torrent, that is, 
 it was fun until we floated or were washed over submerged trees or branches, and then we 
 were glad to climb out and compare our bruises [some of which my father had to treat. 
 -T.H.S.] 
 
 "Then came the wonderful summer days, when we spent our time exploring the woods, 
 fishing in the pools at Honey Creek, Barber's Woods or Bay Creek. The old covered bridge 
 on Bay Creek Road was a wonderful place where we could put our clothes up under the 
 rafters and then take a swim before we built a fire to have our lunch. Sometimes we 
 stripped ears of corn from the neighboring fields to roast in the fire along with the eggs 
 which we covered with a heavy coat of clay, to be peeled off when the clay was baked and 
 the eggs ready to eat. With a little pepper and salt, the eggs tasted better than any I have 
 ever had since. 
 
 "I remember your uncle, Jon Shastid, the educator of Perry, Illinois, very well. I often 
 saw him at Pat Halpin's tombstone works. Of course, the blacksmith's forge on West 
 Washington with its showers of sparks and water barrels in which the red-hot horseshoes 
 were plunged to sizzle and cool, the leather-aproned smith and the struggling horse had 
 the strongest appeal to the boyish mind and after that we liked to go up the stairway lead- 
 ing us to the tinshop above Lloyd's store and talk with Mason Foster while he went on 
 with his soldering and tinkering. He was always patient and kindly with the boys and 
 the boys, on their part were impressed with something akin to awe in the thought that he 
 had once 'been to sea.' Pat Halpin's shop always deserved attention. Jackie [this was 
 Jackie Rian, T. H. S.] I think, was the name of the stone-cutter, and whenever we would 
 go there, it seemed we never failed to hear the chip-chip of his chisel driven by the heavy 
 
766 ' MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 At Boston arrived and after arrangements made with Dr. 
 Porter of that city (a very special specialist in appendicitis) 
 to keep strict watch over my recalcitrant appendix vermi- 
 formis, I began once more to consider that, at a highly par- 
 ticular and blue-blooded institution like Harvard, there 
 might be requisite a letter of introduction, or say recom- 
 mendation, from the Grand Procrustes of Inveni. 
 
 Could I get such a letter? 
 
 mallet into the stone as he dug out the words 'Here lies', to be followed by some well known 
 name of a local character or a friend gone on. Sometimes we found him working on simple 
 white slabs, but other times on large blocks of granite or marble. I wondered what would 
 happen if Jackie would lose his job, whether anyone else could be found to cut the stone 
 as deftly as he, or whether, if his job was abolished, it might not perhaps stop the endless 
 dying-off of those for whom stones must be provided. 
 
 "Pat always had his checkerboard in the front of the stone yard, although it was not 
 nearly as well patronized as the domino parties in the court yard, where Doc Scott, with 
 his black alpaca coat, stiff hat and red bandana handkerchief, seemed always to be mopping 
 his brow, but very often I would find Pat Halpin and Jon Shastid busily working at their 
 game of checkers. Pat drumming on the board with his finger tips and Jon Shastid good- 
 naturedly asserting that Pat was trying to divert his attention from the game with his 
 thumbing. Pat was big, bluff, red-faced with a bushy beard and a very friendly and jovial 
 manner. Jon Shastid wore a large black hat and a broadcloth frock coat and his beard 
 was spotless white. I loved to watch their game and listen to their talk. Very often 
 Lafe Wheeling came in fresh from his work as a horse-chambermaid in the livery stable to 
 take his turn at the game and not infrequently he came out a victor. At home, I found 
 an old book on checkers. I watched the beginning moves of each of the players that gathered 
 there, and then studied the various combinations in the book that would defeat the game 
 that was most frequently played by Pat Halpin. One day when he had defeated the other 
 players, I asked if he would let me play a game. He started out with his regulation move 
 'the old 14*. Having learned that game in the book, I led him along into a serious trap, 
 more easily because he was paying slight attention to my game, thinking that there was not 
 a chance that my moves could prove interesting. Suddenly Pat seemed to realize that on 
 his next move he would be practically wiped off the board and then — his knee tottered and 
 the board fell to the floor, so my book learning on that occasion went for nothing. 
 
 "On the corner was the jail, where we could almost always see some unfortunate pris- 
 oner with his or her face between the bars cursing us without any reason, as far as we knew, 
 for we were too frightened to do more than run past. On the other side of the street, we 
 would often see old Ned Maguire waddling along, seeming to be almost as broad as he 
 was tall, and to him the boldest of the boys would call: 'Ned, save me a spotted one.' " 
 
 From his letter of April 4, 1940: 
 
 "When I read that you intended to write of early medical practice in Pike County, 
 it brought to mind my reminiscenses of the medical fakers that visited Pittsfield each year. 
 Of course, you will recall the Kickapoo Indians who sold 'the wonderful remedy' Sagwa 
 and their exhibitions on the Public Square. Also Dr. Lighthall, the lightning dentist 
 who came driving into town with his beautiful horses and fancy carry-all. He usually 
 took a station on Shadel's corner across from the jail. There on the platform, lighted by 
 blazing torches, his black-faced singers and dancers would entertain the natives. Then 
 followed a pie-eating contest for the local youngsters who, with their hands tied behind 
 them, would push their faces into the blue-berry and custard pies for a small prize to the 
 one who first cleaned his plate. As I recall, he had two or three of his front teeth set with 
 diamonds. After the free performance he would invite the bystanders to step upon the 
 platform and have their teeth extracted. Sometimes when he found a reluctant molar, 
 there would be writhing and groaning, but after he got it out, the doctor would hold the 
 bloody tooth aloft and call upon the patient (who seldom refused) to say that 'it didn't 
 hurt him a bit.' After his death, his wife took his place under the name of 'Jenny Lighthall, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 767 
 
 No. I felt like a strawless scarecrow whenever I thought 
 about the situation. What, then, to do? 
 
 One thing only. Have a personal and strictly private in- 
 terview with President Eliot himself. 
 
 Could I get that? I should be to that august personage 
 but a humble country doctor, who, at a freshwater college, 
 
 The Diamond Queen,' and stood upon the platform in her wide ruffled silk dress, pulled a 
 few teeth at the beginning before handing the tooth puller over to an assistant. Most 
 interesting of all was the fine-looking dark-haired man (an Irishman, I think) who made 
 annual trips to Pittsfield, driving a sort of buck-board buggy and taking a stand just off 
 the Public Square, with a torch like an inverted banjo, that cast a weird glare over the faces 
 of the townspeople while he stood in the shadow. He sold a dark colored medicine in 
 large bottles. I have seldom heard in all the years that have past since then, a man with a 
 more pleasing voice or persuasive style of oratory. He would usually talk for quite a while 
 before offering any medicine for sale. His talk was calculated, and intended, to persuade 
 his listeners that he had no thought of financial gain, but only a sincere desire to help and 
 better the human race, and particularly the people of Pike County. He would appeal to 
 the farmers with the plea that they were entitled to and should receive more money for 
 their hard labor; that they provided the food for the whole people and yet were paid less 
 than any other class of workers. He was a farmer's friend. He was there to remedy their 
 condition, to help them to secure that share of the good things of life to which they were 
 entitled; that he would later offer them a remedy which would increase their effectiveness 
 so that they might double their crops; that they might all buy it for a dollar a bottle and 
 thus secure a specific that would increase their income. He similarly addressed practically 
 all lines of human endeavor with promises to better their conditions in the name of human- 
 ity if they would buy a bottle of his medicine. His heart and voice reached out to the man 
 who had troubles, an unhappy home life, an ailing wife and children, etc. From whatever 
 they might suffer, his remedy would bring relief. In fact, he pictured a happy and healthy 
 and a prosperous community if only each and all would buy his medicine, which according 
 to his statement would cure any ailment that could be found in the alphabet from abscesses 
 to zymosis. 
 
 "I was always surprised at the number who believed in his promises and bought his 
 medicine. Some would call out and ask whether it would cure this, that or the other 
 ailment and the answer was always calculated to leave the impression that he was a bene- 
 factor of the human race and acting only for the good of all the people; that he might some- 
 times be mistaken, there might be some desperate disease of which he was not aware that 
 his medicine would not permanently cure, but it was worth any man's while to try, as he 
 was doing — to help in the betterment and uplifting of the human race. 
 
 "When the sales began to slacken, he would fold a dollar bill around a bottle, wrap 
 it in paper and offer it for sale at one dollar, but the bystanders were afraid to take it. Later 
 on he would force it as a gift upon someone and have them open it to show the dollar was 
 there. Then he would pretend to put a dollar bill around many other bottles which he 
 stacked in a pile, offering them for one dollar each if the purchaser would promise that he 
 would not unwrap the bottle until he got home and would then give the money to his wife, 
 providing he found it wrapped around the bottle, and at this point he especially recommend- 
 ed his medicine to those who thought they were in perfect health, as a tonic to so build 
 them up that they would become immune from physical ailments. Just as soon as these 
 bottles were disposed of he would turn off his light and drive swiftly away. 
 
 "I afterwards talked to some who purchased from him, but so far as I could learn none 
 found the dollar bill wrapped around the medicine. Some claimed that they had been 
 cured by a single bottle. On the label of the bottle was a partial list of the ailments for 
 which the medicine was supposed to be a cure and after some questioning and investigation, 
 I made up my mind that this man, interesting and pleasing though he was, in spite of his 
 claim that he was only working for the good of all who required treatment or help, was a 
 fraud. But each year I would enjoy listening to his persuasive talk. 
 
 "I often meet individuals who have a very skeptical viewpoint which leads them to 
 distrust both doctors and medicines and then I wonder whether some early experience with 
 medical fakers may not have inspired prejudice which they have never outgrown." 
 
768 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 in his academic days, had been persona non grata — even 
 damnata — bis et ter. 
 
 No use, however, to see a less authority on a subject like 
 mine or to see even him in his ordinary office where we should 
 be subject to continual interruption. So I wrote this maker 
 of many of my boyhood's dreams a brief note wherein I 
 attempted to arouse his curiosity quite as much, and to 
 satisfy it quite as little, as possible. 
 
 For a time I received no answer. Then — an actual reply. 
 President Eliot would see me on February 6th, seven o'clock, 
 at number 11 West Cedar Street, Boston. 
 
 I went. Stood in the presence. 
 
 What a difficult task to tell my story to that man ! I who 
 had been a fool in mathematics; who, though not precisely 
 a fool in languages, had now no backing whatever from the 
 man that had taught me that subject; who, even from the 
 old Procrustes of the Natural Sciences, could probably at 
 that time not have procured so much as one single good 
 word; and who, from the Grand Procrustes of the hated in- 
 stitution — well, had I not cursed both his beard and his 
 heart, seared his breast and his brain, his soul (if any) with 
 frightfully over-emphatic language? 
 
 Alas! even so. Yet there I stood before the greatest (if 
 also the wisest, though that, then, I did not know) of all 
 the noted educators in the world. 
 
 "I am only a kind of mental wanderer," I somehow 
 managed to say, "a tramp — a tramp — in the fields of the 
 intellect. They did not understand me, I think, at Inveni — 
 there where I first went to college. They would not under- 
 stand me-^I could not understand them. We quarreled — 
 quarreled terribly, you know. I left the place. They kept 
 me then out of several academic institutions, so I went at 
 last to a medical college without an A. B. See!" I handed 
 him my various certificates, diplomas, letters of commenda- 
 tion, and so forth from Columbia, Vermont, Vienna. These 
 he took, and, to my great surprise, perused them for a good 
 while with genuine care. 
 
 At last said he: "And now, if I understand you, Doctor 
 Shastid, you have left a medical practice in Illinois, and 
 have come to Harvard University in order to renew there 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 769 
 
 your academic studies and to receive, if you may, our bach- 
 elor's degree." 
 
 "That is the situation." 
 
 "Pardon me. Had you a paying practice?" 
 
 "Yes. Busy, often, night and day. I had the advantage 
 of my father's reputation." 
 
 He looked thoughtful. "When a man is so determined 
 as that, it would seem — " 
 
 "But you don't yet understand, President Eliot. I one 
 day said to the Grand Procrustes of Inveni — " 
 
 "The what?" 
 
 I explained. I had, I said, used that disrespectful title 
 just now before I thought. 
 
 He smiled, faintly. 
 
 I went on then to give him more details of my differences 
 with the old Grand Procrustes than I had space to present 
 in the Inveni portion of this book. 
 
 And the strange thing was that President Eliot listened, 
 listened with a kind of aloof intentness to it all that quite 
 surprised and overwhelmed me. 
 
 I did not, you may be certain, forget to display to him 
 the illuminated and illuminating certificates of that Fourth 
 of July stock, together with a number of letters from those 
 who had carefully investigated the unfortunate mining en- 
 terprise after its collapse. 
 
 Then I exhibited the letter which the Procrustes (he 
 seemed to like the term by now) of Ancient Languages had 
 written to my inquisitive father. ' Tommie is the very best' ' 
 — and so on. 
 
 I spoke of my quarrel with three of the members of my 
 class, of their fiery demands on the President that I be (not 
 expelled but) demoted, and only because of the very plain 
 wrong which I had righted for a weak and unpopular student 
 in the school; of the rumor which had come to me about 
 these men's demands; of my call upon the President; of the 
 two writings which, then, he had given me (I displayed 
 them both); of his wholly unjust reversal of even his second 
 formally written decision just as soon as I had paid my 
 tuition-fee for the succeeding quarter. 
 
 Then I turned away my head as I told him how terribly 
 I had cursed that President, then of my visits to the various 
 
770 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Procrusteans of this and of that, of how each and every one 
 of them had stood up for me justly and manfully, at least 
 until — 
 
 I reached that teacher of the ancient languages. 
 
 Then I told him fully of that strange man's repudiation 
 of my work "after," I said, "he had given me thatX' I 
 pointed to the document which still the President of Harvard 
 held in his hand. 
 
 Suddenly President Eliot stood up, and a fearful light 
 shone in his staring eyes. Not just one side of his Jovian 
 countenance was purple now. 
 
 All those documents he crumpled in his fingers. 
 
 One quick sharp word escaped him. I, again in my em- 
 barrassment, believed he had meant that word for myself. 
 He had, then, and after all my longings and attempts to 
 explain — taken me for a — merely for a — 
 
 And then a commanding voice shot through my reflec- 
 tions. Incredible as it may seem, this was the order: 
 
 "Young man, tell me exactly what you said to that — 
 professor — that man who had written to your father — the 
 one who denied — " 
 
 I thought, of course, he meant without the slightest ex- 
 purgation of my remarks. Possibly he did. At all events I 
 protested : 
 
 "I? Tell you exactly what I said? O no. What I said to 
 him was very terrible indeed. You have no idea how 
 terrible." 
 
 "You will tell me precisely what you said to him or you 
 will not enter Harvard College." 
 
 I gasped, choked. 
 
 My head was hanging too. I was so exceedingly ashamed 
 — incredulous that President Eliot should be demanding such 
 a frightful recital from anybody. 
 
 Then, of a sudden, as always had been my way, I flew 
 into a rage, not only at those recollections of my old wrongs 
 at Inveni, but also at this self-willed President of Harvard, 
 this magnificently over-authoritative, also over-skeptical, 
 personage who so plainly had doubted my flattest word, 
 after all too that I had confessed to him truthfully. 
 
 "Very well," I began shouting. "If you want it, then, 
 by the shades of John W. Webster [a Harvard professor who 
 
FANNIE FIDELIA ENGLISH 
 (After Our Betrothal, July 20, 1890) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 771 
 
AN OLD-TIME PITTSFIELD CITIZEN, "UNCLE" NED McGUIRE 
 
 He, one day, had saved my Grandfather Shastid from drowning, by pulling 
 him out of the ice. That was before my father had been begotten. Years 
 later, Uncle Ned had saved John G. Nicolay from a similar fate. 
 
 Uncle Ned was the town's chief fat man. He always wore a blue-check 
 shirt and bluer-than-blue overalls, size about seven hundred. He drove a 
 buckboard from the Public Square to the New Mill and back again several 
 times daily, for what purpose I know not. Everybody in Pittsfield loved him. 
 
 The original photograph from which this cut was made is very small and 
 much damaged by time, but it is supposed to be the only portrait extant of 
 Uncle Ned. It was kindly lent to the writer by Mrs. Rose Heck Brooks, of 
 Pittsfield. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 774 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 775 
 
 once had done a widely known injustice to a physician] you 
 shall have it, and as nearly as I can remember it too." 
 
 As I went on, I held back nothing — not even one word 
 of all that picturesque language. 
 
 In the midst of my outpouring I heard a peculiar sound. 
 
 Looking up, I saw Charles William Eliot, so noted for 
 his imperial calmness and self-control, shaking from his 
 august head to his almost equally august feet. 
 
 At first I believed that this was from anger at what I 
 had just said about his presidential and professorial col- 
 leagues at Inveni. 
 
 But, as he kept on shaking, I saw that tears were trick- 
 ling down his cheeks. 
 
 Yes, he was laughing. He was in deed and in truth — 
 Charles William Eliot, that type and mould of scholastic 
 dignity — gripping his stately sides, and shaking with the 
 most helpless, if almost absolutely silent, laughter. 
 
 Never should I have deemed that phenomenon among 
 earthly possibilities. And, in truth, in all the years that 
 since that night have fled, and in all the utterances about 
 the man that ever I have heard from those who knew this 
 prince-like teacher best, I have learned of no such thing as 
 laughter, even the very quietest, or most dignified, on the 
 part of Charles William Eliot. 
 
 Nevertheless, there he was then, laughing. "Good!" he 
 cried. "The fellow deserved it." 
 
 I had not half finished, but he waved my flow of language 
 into sudden silence. "Make your formal application, sub- 
 mitting all the proofs of your scholarship and character to 
 Prof. John H. Wright, Chairman of the Committee on Ad- 
 mission from Other Colleges, Harvard University, Cam- 
 bridge, Mass. I will see this matter through for you." 
 
 And through he did see it — not without much difficulty 
 and consumption of time. 
 
 One of those students who had asked for my demotion 
 at Inveni, and secured it too, had (for so it strangely hap- 
 pened) while I was studying at Columbia, Vermont and 
 Vienna, been working for a higher degree at Harvard, had 
 won it, and had then returned to Inveni to be no less than a 
 full professor there. 
 
776 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 He had been an excellent student, too, and an exemplary 
 man while at Harvard, and thus his influence at that insti- 
 tution was great. 
 
 He, written to by the Harvard University Secretary (on the 
 Secretary's own motion and without understanding that by 
 so writing he was awakening one of my old-time enemies 
 against me) fought my admission into Harvard as long and 
 stubbornly as possible. 
 
 More than that. Strange as it seems, one other of the 
 three who had secured my demotion at Inveni was even at 
 this very time a graduate student at Harvard. He, too, was 
 an excellent scholar, and he too, learning of my application 
 for admission into Harvard, opposed it there on the very 
 spot and with a persistence and bitterness that almost 
 passed belief. 
 
 Nevertheless I won. 
 
 Rather, Charles William Eliot, strange, strong lover of 
 justice, even for humble country doctors, won for me. I 
 remember especially his declaring one day in my presence to 
 the Secretary of the University and to the Chairman of the 
 Committee on Admissions, "I say you shall not make Dr. 
 Shastid's enemies the judge and the jury in his case. I will 
 write to the President of Inveni myself. ' ' He was especially 
 indignant because one of those enemies had declared that I, 
 while at Inveni, had not only been unorthodox in my re- 
 ligious belief, but that I had also danced and played cards. 
 
 President Eliot's shade I love to this minute, not only 
 because, for some unaccountable reason, he was my very 
 special and loyal friend, but even more perhaps because (for 
 such is human nature) he, like myself in that particular, was 
 a born defender and advocate of all sorts of under dogs and 
 curious vagrants. 
 
 I also wish to acknowledge here the justice and almost 
 kindness which were shown to me by the then new President 
 of Inveni, and erstwhile professor of modern languages at 
 that institution, the man I have herein already called Carl 
 Swiss. 1 
 
 1 Under all the circumstances I have, quite naturally and as heretofore suggested, taken 
 liberties with the name of the first of my colleges, also with the names of the members of 
 the faculty there and with those of all the students but myself and my brother William. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 777 
 
 THE SITUATION 
 I was allowed to enter, in the middle of its junior year, 
 the class of 1893- I had, however, much delinquent work to 
 make up, chiefly on account of the defective curriculum at 
 Inveni. Then, in addition, there was the constant sickness, 
 the almost intolerable gnawing in my side. 
 
 MY TEACHERS AT HARVARD 
 
 My Harvard professors I have already discussed with 
 considerable thoroughness in my "Tramping to Failure." 
 Here I wish merely to mention and very briefly characterize 
 them, adding only a few details which I forgot to include 
 in "Tramping": 
 
 Francis James Child. Greatest literary critic of the world 
 in his day. Short, round, cherubic. Red cheeks; tousled, 
 very curly sorrel-colored hair; bright, china-blue eyes. I 
 went, once or twice, by invitation, to his house. Well loved 
 by all. 
 
 George Lyman Kittredge. But recently deceased. Tall, 
 slender, full-bearded, very handsome, vital, alert, intelligent. 
 Aristocratic. A caustic tongue and a too ready wit. Never- 
 theless, he, like myself, was a born tramp. Not a peripatetic 
 corpse, but a tramp, the right kind of tramp — one who, full 
 of life and alacrity, had explored each nook and corner in 
 this heavenly world of scholarship. 
 
 Jefferson B. Fletcher. A mere instructor then. Later, 
 full professor of comparative literature at Columbia. A 
 man whom all the students dearly loved. A great Italian 
 scholar, he produced, at Columbia, the greatest of all trans- 
 lations of the "Divine Comedy." Quiet, gentle, dignified, 
 deep — a little too philosophically deep perhaps for the most 
 of us — yet a great leader for those who could follow the 
 stride. 
 
 George P. Baker was a born teacher, a man with a ver- 
 itable genius for exposition, The only fault to find with him 
 was that, in those days, he did not fully realize the mental 
 limitations of the most of his students. His own capacity for 
 work appeared to be quite infinite. Ours, certainly, was 
 nothing of the sort. 
 
 Two or three of his students, for that very reason, nick- 
 named him, out of sheer exhaustion, "Nigger Driver." He 
 
778 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 knew how to build a drama as a long-experienced oculist 
 knows how to extract a cataract. The story of how, in much 
 later years, he was himself extracted, or stolen, literally 
 stolen, from us, his former and rightful owners, by our old- 
 time enemy, Yale, is a familiar tale to everyone. 
 
 He used to be so kind as to invite me occasionally to his 
 house. Never have I heard a more charming talker or known 
 a finer friend. His soul was as clean as a surgeon's knife. 
 His father was an expert physician — one good reason per- 
 haps why his son was always deeply interested in medical 
 and surgical progress. 
 
 * 
 
 4^ A*~. i/£*>*Z*4- :~ 
 
 jluA pu**> Ajf ****** 
 
 I received a number of similar cards from Professor Baker, as well as several let- 
 ters of fine encouragement which he wrote me about my books after I left Harvard. 
 
 Then there was Adams Sherman Hill — dead long ago. 
 Small, peevish, dyspeptic, a marvel of "clearness, force and 
 ease," not much of a friend-maker — at least among the stu- 
 dents — but a great teacher notwithstanding. 
 
 Dean LeBaron Russell Briggs, slender and fair and 
 small-and-blue of eye, was another such man as Francis 
 James Child — only always far too busy to answer the briefest 
 question. As I remember him now, he was ever, at the close 
 of his hour, in a grand rush and furor to leap over to Rad- 
 cliffe College — where also he taught. 
 
 One day, when numerous answers in his brain awaited 
 my demands, I followed "L.B.R.B." nearly to RadclifTe — 
 questioning, questioning. He took it in good part, grinning 
 and answering hurriedly while I did my short-legged utmost 
 to keep up with his palpitating side. As I started to leave 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 779 
 
 him, he asked a question himself. Was I interested in 
 charades? I was not. "O I'm so sorry," said he, almost 
 apologetically — as if he had, without really intending it, 
 accidentally exposed a serious defect in my make-up. He 
 was really interested too in charades — lectured on them, 
 wrote books and articles about them. 
 
 Last of those whom I remember vividly was Barrett 
 Wendell, the unique. Somehow, I know not why, he was 
 the one, sole man among my teachers with whom I could 
 not get along in any friendly fashion. 
 
 He was a man of medium height, inclined to stoutness, 
 who wore a Prince Albert beard, had a nervous, almost ir- 
 ritable, manner, and a voice which, in moments of excitement 
 (these, with him, were common) broke into a very disagree- 
 able and long-sustained falsetto. Even in his calmer moods, 
 falsetto tones would now and then pop up — sometimes only 
 the very briefest of falsetto grace-notes — all of which gave 
 to his utterance a decidedly strange character. 
 
 My various quarrels with this highly exasperating per- 
 sonality I have already set forth at length in my "Tramping 
 to Failure." I wish, however, in this volume, to acknowl- 
 edge my great indebtedness to this man for the instruction 
 which he incidentally gave me in the art of producing litera- 
 ture. His "English Composition" I still regard as a work 
 of veritable genius. I read it before I became his pupil. Then, 
 later, although I never took any of his "practice courses" in 
 English, I did take his course in Shakespeare, and, as a 
 student in that course, received invaluable instruction in the 
 art of literary composition — rather in the art of discovering 
 abundant original literary material in every place I saw. 
 It was a perfect revelation to me — this art of seeing the 
 literatesque in everything that lived and moved (or even 
 didn't move) and had its being. 
 
 One of his remarks upon this head which made a per- 
 manent impression on me I have already quoted in this book 
 from notes which I made at the time. Notwithstanding 
 that I have used the matter herein already, I herewith quote 
 it again. Said Wendell: "Some of you foolish fellows think 
 that the only way to create is to use your imagination. I 
 say to you that if you do not see a good character sketch in 
 every person that you see — mind, I do not say in 'some' 
 
780 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 persons that you see, but in every person that you see — it is 
 because you do not see. 
 
 4 'And, if you do not see a good story in every walk you 
 take about the town, once again the reason is that you do 
 not see: do not see, hear, smell, taste, feel, think, do any- 
 thing — but walk." 
 
 Any one who has ever even tried to see, smell and so 
 forth will know that what Barrett Wendell told us was the 
 truth. 
 
 SOLACE 
 
 Still I suffered from the rat, the ever-gnawing rat, in my 
 side — the appendicitis. 
 
 Still there was solace for me too. I worked like a demon 
 and I enjoyed the work. 
 
 Best solace of all were the letters from Fannie Fidelia. 
 What should I ever have done without them? Every time 
 that, in my rooming-house, I walked down the front stair 
 to the lower hall, there, lying on the carpeted floor beneath 
 the unboxed letter-slot next to the door-frame was a letter 
 from the Companion — sometimes two or three of them and 
 some of them many-paged. And again, as I came back from 
 the college and entered the door of the house, there on the 
 floor, beneath the unboxed letter-slot would be a letter from 
 the Companion — sometimes two or three and many of them 
 many-paged. 
 
 (To this day I possess the most of those letters. Since 
 we began living in Duluth, within the last few years in fact, 
 after the Companion had found that her strength was steadily 
 passing, she insisted that the letters (including mine to her) 
 must be at once destroyed. "Only for ourselves we wrote 
 them," said she. "Who, then, would have a right to read 
 them when we two are gone?' ' ' 'But if only one went first?' ' 
 Then the other could not read them . " "I would read them ! " 
 "Read them now" she challenged. "Out loud." It was not 
 possible. 
 
 (She said, "I will burn them all this moment, to save 
 you pain when I am gone." 
 
 ("I will keep out a dozen," said I, "two dozen, three." 
 
 (She went from the room that I might select the number 
 chosen. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 781 
 
 (After that she took the big remaining chestful of letters 
 away to be burned. 
 
 (A few weeks later still, I found on her desk three dozen 
 of the letters written to her by me, but said nothing. 
 
 (After the Companion's death, there in the same big 
 chest as before, but in a darkened room, were all the hun- 
 dreds of letters we both had written, all still unburned. 
 
 (I have not destroyed them even yet. Nor have I read 
 any of them yet though my eyes are strong and clear as any 
 man's.) 
 
 BACK OVER THE DECADES TO HARVARD 
 On the 28th of June, 1893, I stood up with the other 
 successful classmates and received the bachelor's degree. 
 There on the Commencement Programme, in the list of new 
 alumni, stood my very own name, the tramp's, and crowned 
 — baccalaureatus in art thus mm laude. 
 
 I had triumphed over the forces of Inveni. Moreover, I 
 had got the education I wanted. Likewise a certain skill 
 in the writing of English. Honorable mention too I had 
 twice received for the excellence of my writing. Moreover, 
 I had graduated in a most unusual class of men. Of that 
 there could be no doubt. 1 
 
 1 In that class indeed there were more than fifty who were destined to become famous. 
 Three or four were famous even then. A rather full list of the members of Harvard '93 
 who became renowned can be found in my "Tramping," pages 222 to 224. They had not all 
 tramped to failure. 
 
 With some of these famous fellows I, maugre the tense irascibility that arose from my 
 sickness, formed firm and lasting friendships. I greatly regret, notwithstanding, that at 
 Harvard I never improved the opportunity I found there to knit a deep and enduring tie 
 with George Cram Cook. He, it is hardly necessary to add, went on to undying glory 
 without the slightest assistance from the Tramp. 
 
 As a kind of tribute to Cook, whom I in a way revered despite his raging radicalism, 
 I quote the following from The New York Times Book Review, June 22, 1941, page 19: "Susan 
 Glaspell's The Road to the Temple' has been reissued by the Frederick A. Stokes Company. 
 This biography of George Cram Cook was first published in 1927 and in this new edition 
 the author says, in her foreword, that 'events seem to have caught up with it. The past 
 he loved has come into the living moment.' 
 
 "George Cram Cook, born on the broad yellow Mississippi River, felt that the Greeks 
 of old were not dead, with the birth of the modern ones, so he went to live among them 
 and lies buried beside the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. With Shelley and Byron he joined 
 their Valhalla, and in their magnificent struggle to protect their heritage bequeathed to 
 them by their illustrious forebears, the voices of these dead lovers of Greece have cheered 
 the brave fighters on to deeds of valor and fortitude worthy to rank with the great feats 
 of mankind." 
 
782 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Very sick on the homeward journey I none the less was 
 happy. 
 
 Back in old Pittsfield I was happier still — happy not only 
 because of the cum laude, but also because of the joy of my 
 parents, my brothers, my Companion. 
 
 A specially lucky and interesting event — for me — had 
 occurred at Cambridge on "Class Day." I, an invalid who 
 should have been lying abed in a hospital, had gathered with 
 the rest of our class around the "Class Tree" to witness the 
 "Class Tree Exercises" — a kind of regular dog-fight. The tree 
 itself, as I recall it, was a giant oak, round whose vast cir- 
 cumference, about nine feet from the ground, there had been 
 somehow attached a large band of greenery and all bright 
 flowers . 
 
 Those of the class who were to take no part in the struggle 
 for the flowers, including myself of course, stood in the 
 arena, but back a little distance from the tree. Close round 
 the tree were gathered the prospective contestants for the 
 flowers — all of them "pretty husky guys." 
 
 Outside the arena was an amphitheatre, or rising gallery 
 of a good many seats for friends and visitors. The band 
 having played and a speech been recited, the fight was on, 
 also a heavy rain. I raised and opened my umbrella, as a 
 number of the other external-circle of students had already 
 done. Pronto! some one had torn my umbrella to pieces. 
 
 Angered, I threw the umbrella away, turned toward the 
 tree, saw the bitter fight that then was raging round it. 
 All at once the throng of fighters round the tree divided, 
 half rushing north and half south, to the opposite side of 
 the tree. Into the temporarily unoccupied space at the part 
 of the tree-trunk toward me there hung down a good-sized 
 bunch of flowers and bright greenery. 
 
 Quite accessible! 
 
 I dashed in, grabbed the flowers, thrust them inside my 
 gown, a voice cried, "Run, Shastid, while you can." 
 
 I ran while I could, got to my room safely, had the 
 flowers, in Boston, treated with a good preservative solution. 
 
 The great majority of the actual fighters round that tree 
 got absolutely nothing. Most of the flowers in fact were, 
 during the struggle, torn to tiny bits. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 783 
 
 The battle is not always to the strong, but to him who, 
 having lost his umbrella, hath both his hands free to grasp 
 at whatsoever cometh handy. 
 
 At home I gave the boquet with its walnut base and its 
 one-piece crystal dome to the Companion. 
 
 It went with us all our married years and was ever for 
 some reason a great comfort to Fannie Fidelia — until, at 
 last, she learned that my mother's failure to receive the gift 
 of those Class-Day flowers for herself had hurt her to her 
 very soul. 
 
 Even my appendicitis was much better after I had been 
 home for some time. I began to believe I was going to get 
 well of the trouble altogether. How little we know about 
 the tragedies that await us! 
 
 But happy as I was in Pittsfield I did not take the veil 
 again, nor did my father ever speak to me again about so 
 doing. Never at any. place, in fact, have I engaged again in 
 general practice in the country — although from time to time 
 I have ridden with other veiled physicians for the sake of the 
 pleasant recollections aroused. 
 
 STILL GREATER THAN THOU 
 
 While resting at Pittsfield I had another little brush with 
 old Dr. Dublin. 
 
 Thought I, "Inasmuch as I shall most assuredly be prac- 
 tising here no more, and as that fact is well known (I had, 
 as stated, sold my practice to my brother William) I will 
 try to make friends with this doctor. Agree with thine 
 adversary quickly." 
 
 Up, therefore, went I to see him at his office, and, in- 
 cidentally, to ask his opinion about the trouble in my side, 
 especially about the cons and pros of an operation therefor, 
 in case my appendicitis once more should undergo an ex- 
 acerbation. 
 
 He happened to be standing on the sidewalk, just in front 
 of the stairway leading to his office. 
 
 I approached, spoke, stated my mission — all as politely 
 as I knew how to do. 
 
784 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 With rage the man turned upon me. Through swelling 
 cheeks he cried, "Don't you ever dare speak to me again, 
 sir, unless I speak to you first." 
 
 THE FIRST JUNGLE 
 
 About this time I went over into Indiana, in order to 
 look up a city location. There I received a telegram from 
 friends in St. Louis, suggesting that, if I wanted it, I could 
 secure a professorship on the eye in one of the St. Louis 
 medical schools on the strength of their joint recommenda- 
 tions. If the matter appealed to me, they said, I had better 
 run into the city at once and look the ground over. 
 
 Immediately I left for St. Louis. On my way, however, 
 to that city, my fever suddenly came up, I was well-nigh 
 delirious, and, therefore, at my request, was placed by the 
 train conductor in a cab, on our arrival at St. Louis, and 
 taken immediately to the office of Dr. H. H. Mudd — who, 
 by the bye, was a nephew of the then long-dead John T. 
 Hodgen. 
 
 Dr. Mudd at once placed me in the (old) St. Luke's 
 hospital. (For years there has been a new one.) 
 
 My father, telegraphed to, had my mother wire me — 
 what I had not known before — that he was very sick in bed 
 there at Pittsfield and that neither my mother nor Doctor 
 Will could at that time leave him. 
 
 Thereafter I seemed to pass into another life. 
 
 Somebody was standing in a dark alley, waiting. A 
 curious beggar limped around the corner after him. He was 
 badly crippled, that begger, I saw, as he propped himself 
 unsteadily against the black patch of wall. A pitiful, twist- 
 ed hulk of a man, he whined loudly for alms whenever any- 
 one else passed into the alley. And all of those who passed 
 appeared to be somehow crippled. ,The beggar observed to 
 the man he had joined in the alley, "They are all even as I 
 am, half-sensed, half-witted, crippled — only the remnants 
 of a civilization which never was really half civilized." 
 
 A policeman came up and I was suddenly the beggar. 
 He said to me, "Move on." But I did not move. "You can- 
 not budge me," I said. "I am seldom civilized." "Seldom 
 or partly?" questioned the man with the club. "Seldom. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 785 
 
 And when I am civilized, I am only civilized partly." "Nei- 
 ther or both?" (whatever that meant). He raised his club, I 
 grasped it, struggled with it, shrieked, and found that the 
 nurse and I were grappling for an ice-bag going under my 
 head. 
 
 "This is a hot climate," cried I. "Panama?" 
 
 She, thinking to pacify me, answered, "Yes, Panama." 
 
 I rose from the bed, I thought, without either restraint 
 or remonstrance, walked easily to the window. "Hot clim- 
 ate!" I cried, yet walked easily. 
 
 Looking eastward through the window, I saw, where 
 huge business blocks should have been, a wide grassy pampa, 
 here and there laced with unmoving streams. "A hot 
 country and an idle!" I shouted. Then I saw beyond that 
 too lush pampa, the dark, deep silent thread of a jungle wall. 
 
 Then I thought that a small man with a very large, 
 grotesque head (the "Veiled Prophets," a yearly parade in 
 St. Louis, was just then filling the city streets with multi- 
 colored monsters and direful confusion) came up to my 
 window and solemnly spoke, "With me!" 
 
 And lo! I was with him, not in the noisy backyards of 
 St. Louis, but in the wide, grassy, pampas — pampas laced 
 with the death-like streams and covered with the horror of 
 silence. 
 
 Then I thought I heard the stamp of horses and the sound 
 of switching tails. "Let us take to horses and ride," said 
 I, "whithersoever it is that we must go." 
 
 " Horses \" 
 
 "Yes, I both hear them and smell them. Ah! yonder is 
 the stable!" I thought I really saw a horse-filled stable. 
 
 "Whither we go," cried the heavy-headed man, and his 
 voice was like echoes from a tomb, "there can be no horses." 
 
 "Whither, then?" 
 
 He pointed to the jungle wall, so far away from us — 
 high, dark, motionless, forbidding as infinity. 
 
 "Is this journey needful?" 
 
 "It is inevitable. The Almighty wills it." 
 
 I could not choose but go with him. 
 
 But I asked, "Is there any name for so vast a jungle?' 
 
786 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 It's name is t'o-hoo va vS-hoo, "that to which one returns 
 from civilization." 
 
 In the course of ages, as it seemed, we came to a spot 
 before that jungle wall. 
 
 "At length!" cried the guide. "Enter." 
 
 "I tremble to go in," said I, and I waved that he might 
 depart from me if so minded. "This jungle is too wholly 
 motionless, too deeply black, too threateningly silent. It is 
 like nothing that moves. I have been most painfully sick of 
 late, and now I fear much that I am dead and that this is 
 the place for the dead and that here I shall forevermore 
 remain. Life! I will return to life'." 
 
 "It is not decreed that you shall now die. Enter the 
 jungle." He pointed to a wide path which plainly had been 
 much broadened of late by human feet — though no other 
 human being than I was in sight then. 
 
 He entered, I followed. 
 
 And behold, after a long time of darkness, we came to a 
 little jungle-clearing wherein a light shone from above, and 
 there came to me my mother who had me lie down on a tall 
 rock with a bed of leaves upon it. Her hand she placed on 
 my painful side saying, "So I will ease the pain, my son. 
 But do you remember that, while you were at your home 
 in Pittsneld, you were remiss, in that not once did you go 
 into that office that once had been yours, and there lie down 
 at last and revel leisurely in its decorations — beauty that 
 was so cheap and commonplace to some, yet so dear to your 
 father and to me because it had cost us so much that we 
 could nowise afford yet did spare because you were so be- 
 loved to us?" 
 
 I would have told her that, if ever I could leave that 
 jungle — But soon came a bodiless voice, and with it, even 
 in the heat of the jungle, some unseen person who placed 
 yet more heat on my already searing body and, as it seemed, 
 my already cindered brain. 
 
 Whereat my former conductor shouted, "Arise! Be quick- 
 ly hence. Your mother is gone and all the other personages 
 are hallucinations of your brain — save only me." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 787 
 
 DELIRIUM LAND 
 
 Would I were able to describe that jungle so that doctors 
 who have never themselves explored it might in some meas- 
 ure understand it and realize. 
 
 At times we cleft the foliage of the jungle as one cleaves 
 water in swimming. Again we made vast detours round 
 rocks and mountains. Food and drink were everywhere 
 about. At times we slept, after beating beds of leaves to 
 expel lurking serpents. If the days were pregnant with 
 menace, the nights were more so. 
 
 Voices from unseen things yammered in the woods con- 
 tinually — day or night. 
 
 We came, after long years it appeared, through a wide 
 gap in the green jungle wall onto the soft bank of a great 
 sluggish river which rolled its manifold mysteries toward 
 an unknown ocean. Far out in the stream swam stealthily 
 a crocodile. Soft, slithering murmurs, slow mutterings and 
 hidden crunches floated from the dense undergrowth which 
 hid the farther bank. 
 
 Following my guide — whose face now far from being 
 further human was like the face of a clock — I stepped out 
 upon what appeared to be solidity, but which oozed and 
 sank and dropped under my feet. And, as I stepped further 
 still, the ground arose beneath me and threw me — and behold 
 it was a crocodile that had thrown me, whose gaping jaws 
 reached forward after me. I, lying in the stenchy mud of 
 centuries struck out at the strange, fixed eyes of the beast, 
 thus broke up all at once the brooding of the jungle, turning 
 the place into myriads of outspoken hungry and active shapes 
 — crocodiles, tigers and slithering loops of death-dealing 
 serpents. 
 
 Something — I knew not what — seized me, held me strong- 
 ly, and I slept. 
 
 Awaking, I found my aunt, Margaret McCrudden, my 
 mother's sister, bending over me with a nurse. 
 
 One day my brain was perfectly clear of fever, and, days 
 later still, Doctor Mudd informed me that now I was able to 
 return to Pittsfield for rest. After that I was to return to 
 St. Louis and have the vermiform appendix removed. 
 
788 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 HOSPITAL TO ROOMING HOUSE 
 
 My aunt called a cab and away we sped, she and I, for 
 the St. Louis Union Depot and Pittsfield, Illinois. 
 
 But even the greatest surgeons ofttimes are mistaken. 
 I could not even reach the St. Louis depot. When my aunt 
 and I had gone but a few blocks, the pain in my side broke 
 out with ten-fold fury, my fever and delirium again began. 
 My aunt said, "I know a place near here, a Mrs. Taylor's 
 boarding house. There we must stop at least for the night." 
 
 There indeed we stopped, but not for the night — for many 
 long pain-filled, fever-filled months. 
 
 My father and mother, telegraphed to, arrived that eve- 
 ning. The Companion also would have come with them, 
 but was not permitted by my mother. She loved the Com- 
 panion almost as deeply as did I, but who was this woman 
 to take her son — and so forth. I was still too young to marry 
 anyhow, she said. My father was full of a terrible repentance 
 because he had failed to believe in the existence of appendi- 
 citis, thus perhaps condemning me to die. For months 
 those blessed parents and the aunt remained beside me. 
 
 But into the jungle plunged I again for all that. Some- 
 times it seemed I was partly in the jungle yet also partly in 
 some bed — somewhere — somehow — why could I not remem- 
 ber these kindly people who stood beside me? "Sometimes I 
 could easily recognize Dr. Will Shastid, sometimes Dr. Mudd. 
 Dr. Bernays likewise came— in consultation and when Dr. 
 Mudd was absent. Neither could bear the sight of the other. 
 Then came Tuholsky — with Mudd. 
 
 By now I had lost my fever, but not my pain. My lower 
 extremities were terribly swollen with phlebitis. Night 
 after night, day after day, I went without the slightest sleep. 
 O pain, pain, pain! Then I caught an embolus in my right 
 lung and had in consequence a pulmonary abscess — some- 
 thing almost uniformly fatal. 
 
 I remember distinctly that, on the following night, Mudd 
 and Tuholsky both sat at the side of my bed — Mudd at the 
 foot Tuholsky at the head. 1 
 
 1 My father had asked that Dr. A. C. Bernays, of the College of Physicians and Surgeons 
 and the Marion Simms College of Medicine, St. Louis, be present at the consultation. 
 Bernays was more than willing but both Mudd and Tuholsky had objected most emphati- 
 cally because of certain professional misunderstandings which had occurred long before 
 between each of them and Bernays. On the street, later, Bernays made his own willingness 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 789 
 
 My father begged them to give me a hypnotic. Both 
 said, "No hypnotic!" Mudd, taciturn and secretive as usual, 
 said no word more than that. Tuholsky, however, with 
 characteristic frankness ran on, "Vat's de use of drying to 
 
 in the matter quite clear, also his very good will toward my father, my brother William 
 and myself. 
 
 Bernays, in that decade, the 1890's, was by far the most striking and picturesque char- 
 acter in medical St. Louis. Of him I shall write quite fully in my forthcoming "History of 
 Medicine in the Mississippi Valley." Born at Highland, Illinois, October 13, 1854, he 
 graduated at McKendree College, 1872; received the M.D. at Heidelberg, Germany, 1876, 
 became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, London, 1877; settled in practice at 
 St. Louis in 1878, was an inventor of numerous surgical methods and instruments and famous 
 as a teacher of anatomy, surgery and surgical pathology at two medical schools. 
 
 He and my brother, William, had long been warm friends before I myself first saw 
 Bernays — in 1902. I had then recently received at Ann Arbor an injury to the left side of 
 my throat, which, at times, made, and still occasionally does make, speaking quite difficult. 
 Bernays removed a fractured portion of the hyoid bone, thus giving me much relief. I, 
 thereupon, was permitted to see him perform a number of difficult body-cavity operations, 
 and was truly astounded at his diagnostic and operative skill. The man, I remember, was 
 so small and so quick that he sometimes seemed to me to resemble a grasshopper jumping 
 about. Never a trace of dignity. "Leave dignity and plug hats to the charlatans," he used 
 to say. He was ever at his best when operating on cases that had been pronounced "inop- 
 erable." Throughout the world, in fact, Bernays was known as "the daredevil surgeon." 
 
 Earnest though he really was, at heart, he nevertheless was seemingly quite jocular 
 and facetious when operating. Often he would personify and talk to a pathologic product, 
 say a tumor, about like this: "What! Hide from me? No, you don't, no you don't. Come 
 out of there and quit sticking so tight to that artery. Easy now! Easy now! There you are. 
 Told you you'd have to come out. And Mudd and Murphy both said you would have to 
 stay in." 
 
 One day, as he was washing up for an operation, I quoted him, apropos of nothing in 
 particular, a passage from the Bible. Quick as a flash he pulled out, apparently from one 
 of his sleeves, a playing card, saying: "I will now quote you a. passage from my Bible — the 
 first chapter of the Book of Spades." Holding up the ace of spades, he pretended to read 
 from it, "Verily I say unto you, If ye cannot deal either from the sleeve or from the bottom 
 of the deck, ye shall nowise see prosperity." 
 
 He himself, in fact, had seen a great deal of both prosperity and adversity. Sometimes 
 rich, he was also sometimes poor. And his fees for surgery varied according to his finan- 
 cial status. Once when a wealthy man on whom he had successfully operated asked for 
 his bill, Bernays replied in a casual way, "O-h-h-h, twenty thousand dollars." Said the 
 patient abruptly, "I won't pay it." "Call it then ten thousand," said the famous surgeon. 
 "I won't pay that either." "You'll pay me at least five thousand," was the little fellow's 
 ultimatum. "I owe that much on the races, and, if I can't meet my I. O. U's, there's some- 
 thing serious that's going to happen to me. But it'll happen to you first." The man paid in- 
 stanter. 
 
 Bernays followed the races. He loved them as he loved his life. He always attended 
 them in the season and once he told me that the greatest pleasure he ever had known was 
 when a race horse was "christened," in his honor, "Doctor Bernays." In time he came to 
 own a number of race horses himself, and these he proudly named, "Doctor," "Surgeon," 
 "Lord Lister," and so on. 
 
 When I left St. Louis — I was there detained for a number of weeks by business — the 
 Doctor gave me his signed photograph, which I herewith reproduce, and, for a number of 
 years, we exchanged letters. In that correspondence, as he had done in our personal con- 
 versations, he was very frequently using the madcap adage, "A short life and a merry one." 
 And that was the kind of life that the Doctor led to the end. He was always merry, some- 
 times in a very good way sometimes in a way that was not so good, and departed this world 
 — at St. Louis, May 22, 1907, aged only fifty-three years. 
 
 In all the history of medicine there has been but one Paracelsus, but one Joseph Nash 
 McDowell, and — also alas! But one Bernays. 
 
790 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 fool de young tockter. He knows he's kot to die. He knows 
 he's kot pulmonary apscess. And alzo he knows dot hyp- 
 notics are not for him goot." 
 
 The counsellors gone, my father bestirred himself a little 
 then came to me with something hidden in the hollow of 
 his right hand. "Son," said he, "are you willing to trust 
 Father in spite of the counselings of these two great men?" 
 "Yes, I will trust you in anything." He showed me the 
 hypodermic syringe. 
 
 "Euthanasia?" I asked, jestingly. 
 
 "No, not beautiful death, but beautiful life. At all 
 events you cannot live without sleep. — Where are the pains 
 hardest?" 
 
 "In the outer side of my right thigh." 
 
 There, fantastically reasoning, he gave me my puncture. 
 Then he pulled the covers up about my shoulders, asked me 
 if I remembered our many happy Christmases at home and 
 whether or not I knew it was less than two days just now 
 until another Christmas. 
 
 Well, it was late in the morning. I had awakened after 
 eleven fine hours of undreaming sleep. Father, Mother and 
 Aunt were all bending over me. "I am much better," I 
 declared, superfluously. 
 
 That night was Christmas Eve. I was perfectly free from 
 pain all over, and had not even a tenth of one degree of 
 fever. Why, I do not know. Neither does anybody. Father 
 and Mother went out into the city. I slept without assistance, 
 awoke to find a pair of my pinned-together socks swung 
 over a chair-top. Therein were lovely presents — besides a 
 few such things as jumping- jacks and kaleidoscopes. Lest 
 auld acquaintance be forgot ! I still keep the toys I received 
 that night. 
 
 I have greatly condensed this account of my long sickness, 
 partly because I shall have to speak of my much worse 
 "jungle" herein hereafter, partly because hereafter I shall 
 need more space than I shall be able to find for speaking of 
 the sickness of others. 
 
CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT (1834-1926) 
 President of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909. 
 
 As now I look back on him and up to him, he seems to me the justest man 
 that ever I have known: yes, the justest and the least afraid of the mob's, or 
 of the general, or of the very highest opinion — — and for far more reasons 
 than can appear in this book. 
 
 His picture — that from which this "reduction" was made — hangs in my 
 bedroom along with those of my own people. He is indeed, in a sense, one 
 of every man's very own people, though not every man has been able to learn 
 that little bruited, so highly important, fact. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 

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MY SECOND LIFE 793 
 
 CHARLES McBURNEY 
 
 Even as I speak, as now I do, of that greatest of all 
 operators for appendicitis, Charles McBurney, of New York, 
 I shall have to be brief — extremely. 
 
 After my recovery at St. Louis Mudd, once again proposed 
 that I should go to Pittsfield for a rest, then return to him 
 for operation. But hardly had I reached my native town 
 when my fever began again to arise. I was just starting for 
 the office, there to follow my mother's desire and my own 
 to lie down for a time in the beautiful waiting-room there 
 to let the beauty of the place, especially that of the lovely 
 wall-paper, sink into my soul and give me rapture. 
 
 On my way from house to office, however, I heard my 
 mother behind me. She called, I turned, and, at that very 
 moment, as it happened, felt my "jungle" (delirium) coming. 
 
 I so stated to Mother. We returned to the house. "Let 
 us not go back to Mudd," said she, "great man though he 
 is," but to the greatest man of all in appendicitis — Mc- 
 Burney." "Agreed!" said Will, Father and I. Mother began 
 throwing things into trunks and satchels. 
 
 In New York, it was of course an operation. We had 
 known that to begin with. Into the Presbyterian Hospital 
 went I, and, on the 15th of March, 1894 ("the Ides of March 
 remember") I was relieved of that rat in my side for then 
 and forevermore. 
 
 Six long hours I was under ether. Reason: The sigmoid 
 flexure of the colon had, by the contraction of adhesions, 
 been drawn from its proper position in the left iliac fossa 
 (lower part of my left side) till it had come to overlie com- 
 pletely the cecum and its little, teat-like appendage in the 
 right side, the vermiform appendix. So declared McBurney. 
 
 I seemed to be making an uneventful recovery, until, 
 one day, as my mother walked into my room with Father, 
 she, all at once, cried out, "You getting ready for another 
 jungle, Tom?" She counted my pulse — one hundred and 
 forty-five; took my temperature, one hundred and four and 
 four-fifths. At that moment in walks Dr. McBurney. 
 
 Up rushes he to my bed, looks at the chart, grabs my 
 wrist for a tenth of a second and starts rapidly away. 
 
794 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 But not so rapid he as was my mother. She, reaching 
 the door before him, fairly shouted, "You will not leave 
 this room, Doctor McBurney, until you have actually ex- 
 amined my son." 
 
 "Why! I have examined him." 
 
 "No, you haven't — pardon me. Just come and note his 
 fever." 
 
 McBurney, with a look of some annoyance, came back, 
 actually counted my pulse. Then he thoughtfully took the 
 temperature, looked at my side, called for a nurse, a table, 
 certain instruments. 
 
 The long and short of it was that I presented a tremendous 
 stitch abscess, which the Doctor opened immediately under 
 cocaine anesthesia only. I do not tell this anecdote by way 
 of disparaging Dr. McBurney. There was no greater operator 
 in his day than he. But — 
 
 "Ther nis no werkman, what-so-ever he be, 
 That may bothe werke wel and hastily." 
 
 After the opening of the abscess I recovered promptly. 
 
 Then a brief period of rest at home, a few months in 
 New York City at the Post-Graduate Medical School (life- 
 long friendships formed there with Vulpius, Valk and A. E. 
 Davis) and then back into medical practice, this time in a 
 much larger town than little Pittsfield. 
 
 GALESBURG, ILLINOIS 
 
 Even after the McBurney operation I still was subject 
 to a chronic inflammation of the veins in the lower extremity 
 and to a chronic intestinal inflammation — or, as certain 
 surgeons put it, "to the pull of intestinal adhesions," I, at 
 all events, was very sick — hardly able to stay on my feet. 
 But there was no more fever or delirium. 
 
 It was a terrific struggle, that parting with the Com- 
 panion. She had waited so long, so long, been so extremely 
 patient. And now, once again, I was unable, at least I 
 supposed myself unable, to take her with me — though now 
 I can see that I was really unable not to do so. I needed her 
 constant care and companionship. I could have built up 
 my practice at Galesburg better by far with her than with- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 795 
 
 out her, and, in addition, have been healthier, happier, 
 better indeed and wiser. 
 
 She, however, though still the prettiest girl — old maid, 
 perhaps they now began to call her — in all Pittsfield, would 
 accept no other masculine company or escort, even for a 
 single occasion. 
 
 Tears, bitter tears! I can hear her sobbing even yet, as 
 she fell to the floor and I ran away. 
 
 As soon as the practice was built, I was to come back 
 and get her and marry her and take her with me. 
 
 Galesburg at that time was — perhaps it even now is — 
 a great railroad center. Or perhaps to-day there are no great 
 railroad centers, the railroad, like the stage-coach, being a 
 moribund institution. Well, in that time to a certainty, the 
 place was a great railroad center. About eight times as 
 large it was as my native Pittsfield, and wholly unnecessary 
 it therefore was to combine, in that town, a general practice 
 with the so-called specialties. I therefore was, at that loca- 
 tion, a specialist and a specialist only — a specialist on the 
 branches I had studied in Vienna: the eye, ear, nose and 
 throat. 
 
 THE FREE EXAMINATION 
 
 Thus far in this volume I have said but little about the 
 "free" examination — a kind of quackery which then flour- 
 ished, and which to a large extent still flourishes, through- 
 out the regular medical profession of the United States. 
 Concerning this palpable fraud I have written quite exten- 
 sively in my "Tramping to Failure," therefore in the present 
 volume shall say but little about it. Worse in the smaller 
 towns and villages, it still raged rampant even in the larger 
 places, such for example as prosperous Galesburg, Illinois. 
 
 The free examination is the lowest depth, the very nadir, 
 of corrupt practice. If it be true, as is often alleged, that, 
 out of nothing there cannot possibly come something, then 
 it is ten times true in medicine. If, in the sphere of math- 
 ematics, as the Procrustes of that subject at old Inveni had 
 informed me, there was indeed a "nothing" which was 
 "something," as well as a "something" which was "noth- 
 
796 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 ing," still, in medicine, these things assuredly could not so be.. 
 What doctor on this globe can treat a patient properly if, 
 first, he has not taken time, abundant time, and then time 
 more abundant still, to ferret out accurately the causes of his 
 patient's distress? With examinations free, he can merely 
 make a bluff at a diagnosis, because for nothing he cannot 
 give very much of something. The doctor's overhead, 
 twenty to thirty dollars daily, is running steadily on. So 
 are the expenses of his family. 
 
 I have had, in the free examination country, as many as 
 nine patients come into my consultation room in strict suc- 
 cession, not one of whom had had the slightest intention of 
 taking treatment, no matter how much he might have stood 
 in need of it. Triflers! Patients have even frankly told me, 
 at the examination's close, "O well, I didn't want anything 
 done, even if I needed it. I just wanted to see if you under- 
 stood your business." Many of these triflers, no doubt, had, 
 after that, gone to all the other specialists in the city, on 
 the same ridiculous errand. "It didn't cost anything, and 
 I was waiting for a train," said to me one of this class. 
 
 Some who were really in earnest and wanted to take 
 treatment and get well, would, nevertheless, and even while 
 still under treatment, run to other physicians continually, 
 thus to check up, daily, twice daily, even more times daily, 
 on the doctor that had the case in hand. Adverse opinions 
 by some of the other physicians would invariably be brought 
 to the medical attendant; the attendant, sometimes, would 
 — foolishly, of course — reply bitterly. These replies, in turn, 
 were, by the over-busy sick one, taken to all the commenting 
 specialists. And so on back again. A sorry state of affairs, 
 surely ! All these mostly qualified and well experienced men 
 allowing themselves to be stultified, duped, made mere silly 
 asses of, by the least of lay ignoramuses in the city ! 
 
 And, all the while, of course, the attendant's time and 
 all the time of the criticising physicians in addition was 
 being frittered away to absolutely no purpose whatever — to 
 far less purpose indeed than merely none. 
 
 So little time was left by that method for actual scientific 
 work on the case! 
 
 And, when the most of a doctor's time is thus frivoled 
 away, the doctor must see very numerous patients. Many 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 797 
 
 patients, just a little time available of course for each. 
 Hellish — but inevitable under the free examination system. 
 
 MEDICAL INSTRUCTION OF THE LAITY 
 IN THE LAY PRESS 
 
 Many other abuses there were in the medical profession 
 but one in particular that filled my soul with indignation. 
 That was leaving the laity to stumble round in the densest 
 and darkest ignorance as to practically all matters of medical 
 and surgical science. The natural consequence was that 
 nearly all laymen thought that you were either a "born 
 doctor" or else that you were not. If you were not one, 
 why then did you assume to practice medicine? And, if 
 you were really born a doctor, why did you, then, not cure 
 your patients — all of them? The conception of a doctor as 
 merely a person who is attempting to diagnose and cure 
 diseases by means of the science of medicine as that science 
 has been developed up to and including the given moment — 
 in other words, the really scientific conception of the situa- 
 tion — did not so much as enter their heads. 
 
 With such instruction, furthermore, it would never have 
 been possible for the people to believe that appendicitis 
 could be produced by eating grapes — a foolish doctrine which 
 had wrought much woe to thousands of perfectly innocent 
 raisers of a very wholesome fruit. 
 
 As it was, people received no training whatever on 
 medical and surgical subjects, saving and excepting only the 
 very wrong sort which they got from signs, billboards, the 
 sides of country barns, patent medicine advertisements in 
 newspapers and magazines, and the still worse patent medi- 
 cine almanacs. 
 
 And it might all so easily have been different! 
 
 Over and over I wrote for journals and spoke before 
 medical societies on this and many other abuses. But again 
 I merely tramped to failure. 
 
 "What!" those old-time doctors would ejaculate. "Charge 
 for examinations?" "Precisely." "But why charge for 
 them?" And I never could make them quite see why. Just 
 another case of what now is, is necessarily right. 
 
 And when I spoke of medical instruction of the laity in 
 the lay press, they would cry out in astonishment, "Any 
 
798 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 physician who would attempt to teach the laity in the lay 
 press, would be ADVERTISING!" 
 
 Since those Galesburg days I have attempted again and 
 again to rectify these matters. But still I have tramped to 
 failure — not, perhaps, failure complete and absolute but 
 failure nevertheless. 
 
 Only in the matter of instructing the laity in the lay 
 press, has there been much actual progress. And that pro- 
 gress, I feel certain, has not been owing, to any particular 
 extent, to my own efforts. 
 
 Yet it has, in some degree, come about. 
 
 To-day Drs. Morris Fishbein, Royal S. Copeland, Logan 
 Clendenning, Irving S. Cutter, Wm. Brady and even other 
 very capable physicians, are doing, or have already done, 
 the exact thing I so long advocated, and with great benefit 
 to millions of their readers. 1 Nor do I think that the con- 
 sequent "advertising" has done anybody any harm. The 
 efforts of these men have chiefly advertised (and very prop- 
 erly, of course) the necessary limitations on the healing art; 
 taught people to quit expecting miracles; and, finally (the 
 very best thing of all, of course) shown them how to keep 
 from getting sick. 
 
 JOHN MICHAEL HEWITT 
 I could not properly present my three strange Galesburg 
 years without some small additions to what I have already 
 stated in this volume under "The Doctor Who, Born to Be 
 an Actor, Became Instead a Surgeon of Remarkable Skill." 
 The purpose, of course, of what I there said about him and 
 the purpose of what I say about him here are absolutely 
 different. 
 
 I had been in Galesburg but a very short time when, one 
 day, as if our meeting had been a rendezvous written in the 
 stars, I, plodding along a wind-and-rainy street with my 
 umbrella wide open and held fixedly in front of me, suddenly 
 ran spang into somebody! Apologies followed. The person 
 I had. run against was Hewitt, Dr. Hewitt. I of course was 
 Dr. Shastid, and we went up to my office to get further 
 acquainted. 
 
 1 Dr. W. A. Evans, of Chicago, for very many years was a most excellent leader in this 
 field. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 799 
 
 The immediate consequences of that meeting, that day, 
 I have already related in the Sixth of the "Dozen Doctors 
 You Should Know." 
 
 HEWITT IN TOWN 
 
 Born in this country of natives of Ireland, he was Irish 
 in almost every particular save that he did not use the native 
 Irish brogue. All the other characteristics of "the big dark 
 Irish" were there — the size, the blackness of the mustache, 
 the eyebrows, the hair. The eyes were so dark and at the 
 same time so brilliant that they seemed actually to have 
 been carved out of polished obsidian. The whole face was 
 remarkably expressive, even in repose, of friendliness for 
 every one, of wit and humor, of intense hatred of formality 
 and of anything like commercialism. As I said quite near 
 the beginning of this volume, "he would have been picked 
 out instantly as thoroughly distinguished on any operatic 
 stage of the world or in any brilliant court of Europe." 
 
 The population of Galesburg and the county of which it 
 was the capital, Knox, possessed an underlying layer of old- 
 time American stock, also, added thereto, a little German, 
 French and Irish. But mostly the population was Swedish, 
 and the Swedes are a clannish people, at least they were then. 
 Vivacious as they are and lighter-hearted too than Nor- 
 wegians, they are clannish in the extreme. In Galesburg 
 Swedes employed Swedish doctors. 
 
 Until Hewitt came. Then all at once a considerable 
 percentage of them became his permanent clientele. He was 
 one of the speediest practice-builders, as well as swiftest 
 operators, that ever I have known. One of the oldest physi- 
 cians in the city said to me, "His very appearance on the 
 street is unethical, he is so vivid and attractive." 
 
 I have already spoken of Hewitt's histrionic ability. An- 
 other of his traits was his flair, his almost hound's scent, 
 for human characters, especially odd characters, Dickensian 
 characters. Other kinds could interest him, but the Dicken- 
 sian was his forte. 
 
 After office hours, of a night, he would "just drop into" 
 my consultation room with, perhaps, "Fellow was in my 
 office to-day," and go on to describe him till I would laugh 
 
800 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 myself quite sick or almost melt into tears. Then, all at 
 once he would jump up: "Had an ovariotomy too to-day and 
 three fractures.' * And away he would dash. 
 
 SEVENTY YEARS WITHOUT ATTENTION 
 
 Sometimes, reversing the rule, I would, after hours, go 
 to visit Hewitt. 
 
 One of the first cases he told me about there was that of 
 a man, a cheap sort of half-sensed unmarried old fellow who, 
 as Hewitt described him, was "small, but heavy of bone, 
 with mere piggy eyes and not much head above them, and 
 a round, solid face too with a chronically set-upon expres- 
 sion. He looked as if he had been made to withstand shocks 
 yet he also had the punch-drunk look of one who had had 
 too many of them — yes, even before this accident. 
 
 4 T had gone 'prancing' around town this morning (as 
 you, Shastid, call it) 1 when, down the sidewalk, I beheld 
 this half-sensed fellow as the focus of attention from a 
 quickly gathering crowd." 
 
 Hewitt went on to say that he had picked the old man 
 up, commandeered the horse and buggy of a friend, started 
 to lift and carry to the buggy the bleeding form of little old 
 "Jerry." But all at once he met clamorous objections from 
 Jerry. "I said," continued Hewitt, ' 'O, do I hurt you?' 
 full of sympathy of course. 'Bend down,' whispered Jerry. 
 I bent and the old fellow again whispered, T ain't never had 
 no attention from anybody before.' 
 
 I laughed heartily. 
 
 "Don't laugh," admonished Hewitt, softly. "That was 
 tragedy — stark, staring tragedy. Here was a human being 
 who had lived to be seventy years of age, and who, though 
 he was badly hurt and suffering from pressure against the 
 hard sidewalk, was nevertheless very glad to lie there and 
 suffer, because, throughout his long seventy years of life, 
 nobody 'hadn't never paid no attention to him before.' 
 
 THE BUMSTONE CASE 
 I went into Hewitt's office early one Sunday morning. 
 (We both visited in each other's office quite often on Sunday 
 
 1 He had, in fact, so easy and happy a tread that it seemed almost a "prancing." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 801 
 
 mornings early, because at those times there were seldom 
 any patients waiting and we therefore were able to do a 
 great many things not doable at other times. Hewitt was 
 poking around here and there, not especially in the neigh- 
 borhood of his desk and account books. Answering my 
 inquiring expression, he replied: "O, just looking for my 
 account in the Bumstone case. I wrote it down on a piece 
 of brown wrapping paper (think it was brown) which there 
 was on a bundle — because, at the time I couldn't find any- 
 thing else to write it on. Later, when some patient had 
 gone — can't think of his name — I took the paper off the 
 bundle — I think — and did something else with it, and — O, 
 all to h. .1 with the Bumstone case." 
 
 SCIENTIFIC COLLECTING 
 
 A man would come into Hewitt's office. "How much 
 do I owe?" 
 
 "How much? Owe? O! how much do you owe?" 
 
 "Yes, that's what I said. How much do I owe?" 
 
 "I don't know how much you owe. Maybe you mean 
 how much do you owe me>" 
 
 "All right. All right. How much do I owe youV 
 
 "Haven' t you kept any account?" 
 
 "Why! of course I haven't kept any account. That's 
 your business." 
 
 "Well then, I suppose I can lam h. .1 out of you. I'll see 
 if I've got anything down." Taking up his account books: 
 "I see nothing here. O yes, here's the place." 
 
 I knew he was bluffing, had simply failed to make the 
 charges. 
 
 "O yes, I had to take off Terence's finger. Then there 
 was that felon on your own hand. Then when the baby 
 came. Then — let's see — five, six, seven, eight. O, suppose 
 we call it all fifty dollars." 
 
 "Seems a little high, Doc." 
 
 "Well, say twenty-five." 
 
 1 'Here she air. And mighty good work too you done me. 
 
 The man gone, I would say, "Fifty dollars was dirt 
 cheap for what you had done for that man." 
 
 "O yes, but twenty-five was all he could afford to pay." 
 
802 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "All he could afford? What do you know about what he 
 could afford?" 
 
 "Not a d. .n thing. Let's get down to the X-ray now." 
 
 FIRST X-RAY PICTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 The story of the first X-ray picture made in the Western 
 Hemisphere — that of my left hand by this same Dr. Hewitt 
 — I have already told herein in the sixth of the "Dozen 
 Doctors Many Know." I will therefore not repeat it now. 
 
 I wish to add, however, to what I have already said in 
 that story that, not infrequently there in the privacy of our 
 inner rooms, he would ofttimes say, "I'm going to write up 
 our experiments with the Roentgen ray — some time." 
 
 "Yes," I would answer, "exactly as you've written up 
 all the interesting characters you've run across here in Gales- 
 burg in your practice. What a fictioneer you'd make — and 
 with the literal truth. Barrett Wendell would surely kiss 
 you — if you ever wrote. Look at that big stack of letters 
 on your desk — most of them still unopened. How long since 
 you opened a letter?" 
 
 "Six weeks. Two months maybe." 
 
 "Well, open them all — now. Go to it." Like the 
 Shakespearian boy moving "unwillingly to school," he 
 would open the letters. Many would contain money — cash, 
 checks, drafts, money orders. 
 
 "Now credit those payments on your books." 
 
 "O I'll deposit them all at the bank. If any question 
 arises I'll have the bank look it up." 
 
 I'll now run forward for a moment to say that this ex- 
 cellent surgeon but poor money-maker, three or four years 
 later left Galesburg with his beautiful wife for Alaska — in 
 the mad "gold rush" of that time — seeking in the far north 
 the gold he could have found so much more easily at home. 
 Later still he became a U. S. army surgeon, and, as such, 
 was in his proper sphere. No financial problems to worry 
 him in that capacity. Through the Spanish war he went, 
 next through the War to Make the World Safe for Other 
 Wars. At least he helped the sick and suffering mightily, 
 then, at last, settled down on a comfortable military pension. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 803 
 
 No more money troubles then than if in heaven. No account 
 books to keep or letters to write! 
 
 He certainly deserves it all — but back now to old Gales- 
 burg and the curios of medical practice — more curious by 
 far than those of the army. 
 
 THAT "LITTLE" BILL 
 
 Hewitt operated in the city for ovarian tumor on a very 
 fleshy patient. She and her family were all opposed to 
 hospitals, so the operation was done in the home. I gave 
 the ether. 
 
 The patient made a prompt recovery. 
 
 The Doctor had already done a great deal of practice in 
 the same family (a very wealthy one) before he removed 
 that tumor. 
 
 Well, one day, as I had gone into Hewitt's rooms, the 
 head of that family came in to pay his bill. "What's the 
 hurry?" asked Hewitt. He was himself owing money, so 
 there should have been considerable hurry, but I knew very 
 well that he simply hated to be bothered about business. 
 
 "No hurry, but I want to keep all the little things paid 
 up." So said the paymaster, with just a suggestion of em- 
 phasis on the "little." At once I saw the Hibernian fire in 
 the good doctor's eye. He was ready forever to make a bill 
 quite "little," even for a wealthy man, but he did not want 
 the wealthy one to do any belittling himself. 
 
 Hewitt picked up an account book, went and studied it 
 near a window. I knew perfectly well he was looking at a 
 blank page, for, over and over, at night, when he was 
 making his charges for the day and I reminded him of this 
 item and of that, he would answer, "O I don't bother to 
 set down things about him. These perfectly good people 
 will pay without itemized bills." 
 
 Nevertheless, there stood Hewitt by the window, book 
 in one hand pencil in the other, totalling the "little" amount 
 which the big man owed him. Finally, he said, "O I'll be 
 sort of easy on you — four hundred and fifty dollars." 
 
 The paymaster well-nigh fell off his chair. "You say 
 $450.00? That's four-five-o?" 
 
804 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "Yes, it would have been much more than that of course, 
 but I appreciate you people's practice." 
 
 The paymaster looked barbed arrows, but paid dollars 
 and left without a word. (Later, he employed Dr. Hewitt 
 again.) 
 
 "What's come over you, Hewitt?" I asked. 
 
 "I got mad," he answered. "A minute longer and I'd 
 have weakened." He wiped the cold sweat off his face. 
 
 In fact he had weakened already as he spoke. The only 
 thing on earth that Hewitt ever dreaded was telling some 
 person what he owed — him. 
 
 A WIDOW'S TEARS 
 
 A Mrs. Kate Vasaberg brought her little son to Hewitt 
 for tuberculosis of the hip joint. "I have nothing at all to 
 pay you with, Doctor Hewitt," said she. "All the same to 
 me," said Hewitt. 
 
 I gave the ether and assisted. 
 
 And if ever a patient with tuberculosis of the hip joint 
 made a fine recovery it was little Ole Vasaberg. 
 
 Now in general the Swedes, both in the new country and 
 the old, are, like all other Scandinavians, frank, open, 
 straightforward, absolutely honest. But Mrs. Vasaberg was 
 a decided exception. She was in fact a very wealthy woman 
 who had represented herself to Dr. Hewitt as being ex- 
 tremely poor for the one sole reason that she wished to steal 
 a fee. 
 
 One day in my office a patient of mine complained that 
 he could not pay me what he owed me because of the cruel 
 exactions of a creditor of his — a widow, by the way, named 
 Katherine Vandenburg. Investigation brought out that this 
 very cruel credi tress and the beneficiary of Dr. Hewitt's 
 charitable services to her son were, actually, one and the 
 same person. My patient had simply got the surname a 
 little wrong. I told Hewitt about the matter. 
 
 Hewitt thereupon called on the lady, pointed out clearly 
 the trick she had played on him, and, in a word, demanded 
 a reasonable payment for the services which he had rendered 
 to her son. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 805 
 
 She admitted the deception, but relied on the fact that 
 the good doctor had really offered to treat her son for 
 nothing. 
 
 "But that offer," quite logically replied Dr. Hewitt, 
 "was obtained by fraud." 
 
 Still she stood like adamant for not paying. 
 
 Hewitt sued her. 
 
 At the trial I was a star witness, for I had been present 
 when Mrs. Vasaberg had flatly represented herself as worth 
 not even a dime. Mrs. Vasaberg "could not remember" 
 that she had ever made any such statement as that. She 
 did, however, admit freely the great value of the operation. 
 (She could not have done otherwise, for the fact was no- 
 torious.) Success seemed surely ours. 
 
 But Mrs. Vasaberg had a good (which, in her case, meant 
 a bad) lawyer. Already I knew not a little about this good- 
 bad lawyer, and — though I could not have foreseen it on the 
 day of this trial — I was myself to learn much more about 
 his ways hereafter in a case of my own. 
 
 I can see the cunning fellow now, as he stood before me 
 in the crowded court-room — tall, lean almost to the point 
 of emaciation, bright-eyed, active, keenly intellectual. It 
 was warm in the room, but the fellow wore a heavy overcoat 
 and a woolen scarf around his neck. (After the trial I learn- 
 ed that he had had pernicious anemia for years.) 
 
 O how skilfully he cross-examined me! 
 
 He did not, contrary to what many a cross-examiner 
 might have done, ask me to repeat that vitally important 
 conversation between Dr. Hewitt and Mrs. Vasaberg, rela- 
 tive to her alleged inability to pay a doctor's bill. He did 
 not, of course, wish to deepen the impression which that 
 alleged conversation had already made upon the jury. But 
 he did ask, "On the day when Dr. Hewitt and Mrs. Vasaberg 
 discussed the subject of an operation for her son, did you 
 hear her say that she did not believe in operations? and did 
 you thereupon hear Dr. Hewitt answer, 'Well, I'm rather 
 new in Galesburg, and so, if you'll just give me a chance to 
 operate in this case and in that way to show the public 
 what I can do in these matters, I'll gladly operate for 
 nothing?' 
 
806 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 44 No, sir; I heard nothing of the sort." (Mrs. Vasaberg, 
 when her turn came, actually did testify that such a con- 
 versation had occurred.) 
 
 The lawyer also asked me: "Doctor Shastid, you have 
 not practiced in Galesburg a great many years?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "At first you had no practice here at all?" 
 
 "As a matter of course." 
 
 "And a little later than yourself Dr. Hewitt located in 
 Galesburg?" 
 
 "True." 
 
 "And you then helped him get started into practice?" 
 
 "As well as I could." 
 
 "And his 'take' here was simply phenomenal?" 
 
 "He has been very successful." 
 
 "Then Dr. Hewitt reciprocated your great kindness to 
 him by referring numerous eye, ear, nose and throat cases 
 to you?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "So that now you two are not only prosperous persons 
 but also close friends?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Have you any other professional friend in this city who 
 helps you in your practice — helps you, I mean, both scien- 
 tifically and financially as much as does Dr. Hewitt?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Would it not then seem like treachery if, for such a 
 close friend, a friend like Dr. Hewitt, a friend who has built 
 your very practice for you — sent you scores and scores of 
 cases — not to help him in this one single case?" 
 
 The question had purposely been framed in such a way 
 as to make it difficult to answer. I was taking some little 
 time to think my way to the heart of that question, which 
 was of course its implied falsehood — and to smash that 
 heart. In this thinking I was greatly perturbed by the cross- 
 examiner saying from time to time, "We are waiting, and, 
 remember, you will have to answer." The attorney for Dr. 
 Hewitt, I have always thought, should really have objected 
 strongly to the question. However, he probably thought 
 that I could answer it calmly and to his and Dr. Hewitt's 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 807 
 
 advantage if permitted to do so. If he did so think, he was 
 not entirely wrong. 
 
 I finally answered : ' 'You have asked if it might not seem 
 like treachery if I did not swear a lie to help a friend. Such 
 a course would almost certainly 'seem' different to different 
 persons. To persons whom you no doubt know it might 
 indeed seem like treachery not to swear such a lie. To this 
 jury it would probably seem like treachery if I did swear it. 
 And to Dr. Hewitt himself and to the entire profession to 
 which he and I belong — a profession which does so very 
 much work for the poor without charge — it would also 
 seem, as to this jury, to be a treachery both to friend and to 
 foe throughout the country to swear a lie for any purpose 
 whatsoever." 
 
 Swedes are not ordinarily demonstrative, but that audi- 
 ence, which was mostly Swedish, did applaud that answer. 
 
 I then had to leave the court-room for my office, but I 
 felt that our case was surely won, all the more as Hewitt 
 had two or three other witnesses who, in his office, had 
 heard Mrs. Vasaberg say that she was unable to pay for an 
 operation or for anything whatever. 
 
 But the best laid plans of mice and men go oft astray. 
 Lawyer Lantern discovered that Dr. Hewitt, although he 
 had a perfectly valid license to practice medicine in Illinois, 
 had nevertheless neglected to have it recorded in the office 
 of the County Clerk at Galesburg. And the Illinois law 
 declared plainly that any physician, who, although he had 
 a license, had still not recorded it, should not be able to 
 collect bills for services rendered during such time as the 
 license remained unrecorded. 
 
 So Dr. Hewitt did not collect his bill against the 
 wealthy Mrs. Vasaberg. 
 
 Lawyer Lantern, shortly after that, put up a malpractice 
 claim against me. I, he alleged, had treated a certain Mr. 
 Stanchion's eyes and thereby blinded him. I, after a time 
 of waiting, had a first-rate spy from a near-by city, go out 
 around Galesburg as a book-agent. At my plaintiff's board- 
 ing house he showed a beautiful prospectus of the book he 
 was selling, and, to my plaintiff, displayed the entrancing 
 
808 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 pictures. He even read aloud, but quite incorrectly, some 
 of the legends underneath the illustrations — legends that 
 were printed in very fine type — and my plaintiff, in each 
 case, unthoughtedly set him right and read off the legends 
 correctly. Then my spy, to the various persons who were 
 gathered about him and my plaintiff, shouted out, "and 
 this man's suing Dr. Shastid for having put his eyes out." 
 He also got the names and addresses of a number of those 
 bystanders, then shouted to the faker, "Sue." 
 
 There was of course no suit. But, one day, a little while 
 thereafter, my would-be plaintiff broke his neck and died 
 by falling out of a tree wherein be had been picking cherries. x 
 
 FOOLING A FRIGHTENED MOTHER 
 At one place Hewitt was going to operate at a private 
 house for obstruction of the bowel. First, he caused the 
 patient to swallow a dime. Then by the X-ray, still so new 
 a discovery, he determined the location of the coin and 
 hence of the obstruction — at least he thought that he had 
 done so. Then he proposed to operate. The patient — a fine, 
 sensible young man — agreed immediately. But his mother 
 — aye there was the rub. She, on being told of the proposal, 
 objected with all the objecting power in her obstinate little 
 system. If her son underwent that operaton, she declared, 
 he would surely die. She had personally known of several 
 persons who had died of appendix operations, and this was 
 much like those. 
 
 Then the patient grew more cunning than even his mother 
 was obstinate. He suggested to Dr. Hewitt, that is to say, 
 
 1 Another characteristic anecdote of Lawyer Lantern. Given by a farmer an account 
 for collection, Lantern collected the money — three or four hundred dollars — and being, as 
 usual, short of money, spent his client's cash. Now that sort of thing is known in the 
 law as embezzlement, and a serious crime it is. But what did Lantern? He intentionally 
 drove out past the farmer's residence. The farmer being in the field and seeing him, stopped 
 him and asked him if he had collected that money? "What money? O yes, of course that 
 Mackline money. Yes, I have collected it, but I forgot to bring it with me. Say, my health's 
 not very good and I may happen to die at any time, so, to make assurance doubly sure, I'll 
 give you my note to cover the amount." That he did, writing with an indelible pencil and 
 keeping a carbon copy of the note. The following Saturday, Mr. Farmer came to town, 
 went to Lantern's office and asked for his money. "What money?" "The Mackline money." 
 "O I paid you that money." "What with?" "With my note." Intensely angry, the farmer 
 shouted, "I'll prosecute you for embezzlement." At another lawyer's office, however, he 
 learned that he could not prosecute Lantern for embezzlement, inasmuch as he himself had, 
 by accepting Lantern's promissory note, converted a trust fund (the use of which for a 
 trustee's own purpose is embezzlement) into a debt — a debt which was covered by a note, 
 it is true, but a note which was worth precisely nothing. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 809 
 
 that his mother be deceived as to the exact nature of the 
 operation, be made to believe it was only a "fake" — except 
 indeed that a harmless anesthetic would be administered, 
 and that then an equally harmless incision would be made 
 just through the skin. Then, if anybody should grow sus- 
 picious, he could be shown an operation scar. All of that 
 would be done merely for the purpose of securing newspaper 
 publicity for Dr. Hewitt (he would tell his mother/ and 
 twenty-five dollars in cash for him, the son and patient, 
 from the operator — which sum, by the bye, the said patient 
 intended to turn over to his mother, to be and remain hers 
 only and so on. 
 
 The mother consented. The son gave her the cash. I, 
 wholly ignorant of the harmless deceit which had been 
 practised upon the mother, gave the ether. 
 
 But now behold! We had not avoided "all appearance of 
 evil." So — women being women, some of them more so — 
 the fond mother in the case, rejoicing over what she still 
 considered to be the easy money-making of her son, leaked 
 copiously upon the subject to all her friends and relatives, 
 who, thereupon, to others, leaked more copiously still. 
 
 The patient did his utmost to correct his mother's dam- 
 aging tale. (Poor chap, he knew full well how terribly sick 
 he had been.) But many of the laity, aided and abetted by 
 certain medical enemies of the honest and thrice capable 
 operator in the case, kept the story going for a considerable 
 time. Fortunately, Dr. Hewitt's surgical skill was so 
 phenomenal, so plainly demonstrated on so many occasions 
 and before the very eyes of so many other doctors that the 
 story simply could not live indefinitely. 
 
 That abdominal operation, however, was the last that 
 I know about which probably could have been done in a 
 hospital and yet was actually performed in a private home 
 — a home very carefully cleaned beforehand, it is true, but 
 still only a home. Of course, even at the present day a 
 serious operation is still sometimes performed in a home — 
 if the case be one of great emergency. 
 
810 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 IRONICAL ADMISSIONS 
 
 There was a curious trait of this man Hewitt which I 
 must mention now. Whenever anyone accused him of hav- 
 ing practiced from base motives he would simply admit the 
 charge. "It's always the better way to do," he would say, 
 in response to my protest. "If a man understands you so 
 little that he charges you with doing, say, an unnecessary 
 tracheotomy for his child and thus risking its life for the 
 very few dollars its father can probably pay you in these 
 hard times (not so very hard either in comparison with the 
 Republican times that just preceded them*), why, he just 
 won't believe any facts or arguments that you can give him 
 to the contrary." 
 
 One day when a man accused him of unnecessarily re- 
 secting his almost dead little boy's tuberculous hip-joint, he 
 exclaimed: "Of course I tried to rob you, you fool! Did you 
 have so little sense and knowledge of human nature as not to 
 understand that I was a quack? If I hadn't been a quack, that 
 boy of yours would have got well [he had in truth made a 
 wonderful recovery] instead of being in the terrible condition 
 which now overwhelms him. Rob you? Yes, by the Mighty!' ' 
 Then all at once his manner changed to one of calmness. 
 He seemed to be apologetic, almost. His tones grew round 
 and deep, like those of a mighty organ in mournful sorrow. 
 Suddenly he leaped to his feet. "Rob you? Yes, by the 
 Mighty, I'm going to rob you now and wr-r-r-ring the last 
 penny you owe me out of your throat!" 
 
 The foolish complainer, seeing an apparently irate mad- 
 man advancing with a mind supposedly given up to nothing 
 but thoughts of gore, ran like the deuce from the building 
 — while Hewitt, his lank form folded up across the sofa, 
 yelled and twisted with laughter. 
 
 Next day the histrionic physician received from that 
 same complainer a good-sized check. 
 
 "This is for the acting," Hewitt declared to me with 
 great satisfaction, "not for the operation. Say, Shastid, 
 they ought to have a chair of surgical histrionics in every- 
 thing that calls itself a medical school." 
 
 1 Hewitt was a Democrai 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 811 
 
 THE CHARACTER HUNTER 
 That same evening into my inner office walked Hewitt, 
 
 singing, ' ' Hap-hap-happiness ! ' ' 
 
 "What now? Take in some more money?" 
 
 "No. Found a new character. Such a splendid d. .n fool 
 
 as never was seen before," etc. 
 
 How Barrett Wendell would have loved Hewitt, and 
 
 what a novelist Hewitt would have made! He could see — 
 
 see in the Wendellian sense. 
 
 But, strangely, though he loved to see and to reproduce, 
 
 he did not, as I have stated, love to write. Therein much 
 
 loss to the world! 
 
 NICKNAMES 
 
 I started, once, to make some sort of record of Dr. 
 Hewitt's characters and the nicknames that he had given 
 them — but alas I started only. A very stylish physician who 
 dressed showily and performed many stylish operations he 
 called "Flossy." 
 
 At. a meeting of the Galesburg Doctors Club a rather 
 illiterate but extremely pretentious doctor read a long paper 
 in which he urged "sympathy for the patient and still more 
 sympathy for the patient." This he did, however, as he 
 admitted, almost entirely for pecuniary reasons, winding up, 
 "Remember that, for any physician, a warm heart maketh 
 a full purse." 
 
 Hewitt at once arose to discuss that paper. However, 
 he said merely, "I am proud to learn that Dr. Blankinstone 
 urges the highest possible standards of medical practice for 
 the lowest possible reasons." 
 
 Blankinstone did not seem to be much perturbed by the 
 "discussion." In fact to me he whispered, "Ain't Hewitt 
 the beatin'est feller? Always sayin' somethin' funny." 
 
 And Hewitt, forever after, referred to Blankinstone as 
 "the warm-hearted purse." 
 
 A short, dull-faced fellow, who used to be interminably 
 remarking, "I have a number of cases which puzzle me 
 greatly," he called "Stumped." 
 
 Another physician he used to designate as "Universal 
 Satisfaction." If questioned why, he would answer, "Be- 
 
812 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 cause he has never been complained of by anyone he has 
 killed." It took me some time to get the full point of that. 
 Himself he invariably referred to as ' 4 Johnny-on-the- 
 Spot." Me he called, with or without good reason, "Human 
 Interest." Sometimes I thought he used the expression com- 
 plimentarily; again that he employed it ironically, in the 
 sense, that is, of one who is himself (not) a very interesting 
 human. Anyway, he always laughed when he called me 
 that. 
 
 A CASE, PLEASE 
 
 There was one young doctor whom he sometimes referred 
 to as "Stiffs," sometimes as "Case, please." This young 
 doctor had a way, you see, of referring to all his patients — 
 the few that he had — as "stiffs," i.e. corpses, and, as he had 
 but little practice, he was ofttimes beseeching other doctors 
 to send him their surplus patients whenever they happened 
 to have any. 
 
 Hewitt, for some reason, detested this young doctor. 
 
 One bitter-cold Sunday morning the young doctor, pre- 
 sumably thinking to curry favor by so doing, dropped into 
 my office — where Hewitt chanced to be, as Dr. Case-please 
 would very well have understood. The young fellow com- 
 plained to Hewitt of indigestion. "Anything for it?" 
 
 Hewitt departed to and returned from his own office, 
 handing then to Dr. Case-please an effervescing mixture. 
 
 Dr. Case-please drank, sat again and started into familiar 
 converse with us, when, all at once, Hewitt jumped up and 
 cried, "Twenty degrees below zero and I've a case ten miles 
 in the country — as well as a bad cold here" (tapping his 
 chest). 
 
 "Ho, ho!" cried the young fellow, "this is your chance 
 at last to do me a favor. Let me have the case, please." 
 
 Hewitt consented. Dr. Case-please phoned to a livery- 
 stable for a rig, went downstairs to meet it. 
 
 "Twenty degrees below zero," mused Hewitt with mani- 
 fest self-satisfaction. 
 
 "And just what does that mean?" 
 
 "It means that any man in his senses, on a day like this, 
 who happens to be out of doors in the country, would 
 rather have his trousers up than down." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 813 
 
 "Hewitt, what did you give that young doctor?" 
 "All the Epsom salts I had." 
 
 That young chap never begged any more cases from 
 Hewitt. 
 
 DOCTOR NO-DOCTOR 
 
 Hewitt, like all histrionic persons, was temperamental. 
 
 One day he and I had to go by train to a near-by town, 
 there to consult on a syringo-myelia case, with certain 
 peculiar, though perhaps accidental, complications. Hewitt 
 did not like the attending physician who had called us, so 
 on the train, he was irritable and grumpy in the extreme. 
 
 He sat riding forward. I, however, was perched on the 
 seat before him — a seat which had been reversed so that I 
 was riding backward, facing him. 
 
 At a small country stop an old fellow came into the 
 train, looked observantly round him, finally sat down by 
 the side of Hewitt. 
 
 Presently he asked Hewitt, "Be you a doctor?" 
 
 "No!" shouted Hewitt with Hibernian vigor. 
 
 4 'Well, you look like a doctor. An' you act like a doctor. 
 
 "No doctor." (More vigorously even than before.) 
 
 Happening to catch Hewitt's eye, I foolishly grinned. 
 He, thereupon, grew angrier still. There was no real reason 
 to be angry, though the stranger was unduly prying. 
 
 "An' I heard ye, jest afore I took this here seat, talkin' 
 to that there other feller (pointing at me) jest as ef ye wuz 
 a doctor." 
 
 "No doctor, I tell you." He turned and gave his in- 
 quisitor a deep frown. 
 
 The inquisitor, unabashed, sniffed two or three times. 
 Then he added, "And I'm d. . . .d ef ye don't smell like a 
 doctor — you know, carbolic acid and them kind of per- 
 fumery." 
 
 Hewitt paying no attention, the man turned to me. "Say, 
 what kind o' occupation is this here doctor-like feller?" 
 
 I was tickled to the gizzard, Hewitt's out-of-sortness 
 contrasting so comically with the persistentosity and un- 
 limited inquisitiveness of the farmer. So I answered, though 
 
814 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 of course quite improperly, "He's what is called in learned 
 circles a syringo-myelia." 
 
 "A what?" 
 
 "A chorio-retinitis." 
 The train jerked to a stop. The old inquisitor jumped up 
 and cried, "Here's where I get off. Jest as well be goin' 
 anyway, I reckon." He looked hurt. 
 
 A moment later — a tapping at my window-pane. It was 
 the inquisitor. "You fellows done somepin' to me," he 
 said. "I don't know what it was but you done it. An' know 
 what I think of you? No-o-o-o. You two ain't no doctors 
 at all. You're jest two plumb, dirty, lyin', cheatin', gamblin 
 sharks." 
 
 And Hewitt joined me in laughter. Seldom had I heard 
 him laugh so loudly. 
 
 There were somehow always funny things when Hewitt 
 was around — funny things or sublime things or things full 
 of tenderness and pity and great tears. He seemed somehow, 
 though forever unintentionally, to bring such things about, 
 at least to attract them unto him. Or, say, he emotionalized 
 his environment wherever he went. 
 
 One day when I was sick, and my father had heard of 
 the fact, he wrote to Dr. Hewitt about my condition, 
 and, though Hewitt was so laggard and skimpy a letter- 
 writer, he nevertheless wrote to my father about me in full. 
 "A beautiful letter," my father declared when next he wrote 
 to me. And the correspondence, thus begun, did for a con- 
 siderable time continue. 
 
 TWO HIBERNIAN DOCTORS 
 
 The temptation to contrast those two fine Irish doctors 
 — Hewitt of Galesburg and Dublin of old Pittsfield — cannot 
 be wholly set aside. Both were men of striking personality 
 — large, quick, athletic, and vivacious. Hewitt, however, 
 was dark Irish, Dublin light Irish. Hewitt, was, of course, 
 partly of the "black Spanish" stock that had come into 
 Ireland through the wreck of the Spanish Armada, when so 
 many Spanish sailors had been cast upon the friendly shores 
 of Ireland. Dublin was old-Irish absolutely. Both were boldly 
 intellectual, assertive in the extreme. Both emotionalized 
 their environments. Hewitt, however, had by far the finer 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 815 
 
 judgment, much less egotism and a keener sense of humor. 
 Both were born to be surgeons, as have been so many other 
 fine Irishmen — John B. Murphy, the Mayos and so on. Nine- 
 tenths of all the splendid surgeons I happen to have known 
 have been of Irish stock. 
 
 HEWITT IN THE COUNTRY 
 Thus far I have spoken almost entirely of Hewitt in his 
 office. Now I want to show him in the country. If anyone 
 ask why I devote so much time to so unique a character, 
 I reply that his character was not by any means unique. 
 It was so in certain matters only. Otherwise he was typical 
 of the various surgeons of his day in the United States, 
 especially those of Irish nativity or extraction. 
 
 The population in and around Galesburg was, as I have 
 stated, chiefly Swedish. But there was also an underlying 
 stratum of old American strains. One of these old-time 
 families that had moved up generations earlier from the 
 south of the state and had probably originated somewhere 
 in New England, now had sickness in it, sickness serious 
 and repeated again and again. A call to Hewitt to go and 
 see some member of this family came one Sunday afternoon, 
 a time when I had no office-hours. Hewitt invited me to 
 ride with him. I rode. 
 
 The man of the house himself proved to be sick, also 
 two of his daughters. In the course of his examinations Dr. 
 Hewitt began asking whether or not the farmer, in accord- 
 ance with instructions which the Doctor had given him be- 
 fore, had taken to covering the deposits in his privy — "Mary 
 Ann" he called it — with sand — of which the farmer had a 
 very great abundance near by. 
 
 But the farmer, sick as he was, bristled up. 
 
 Said he, "That ain't no natural way to treat the human 
 dung. Therefore, treatin' it thataway would be an offence 
 against the Almighty. ' ' (I wonder if anything that a human 
 being has ever done has escaped being called by some one 
 at some time a sin against the Almighty.) 
 
 Hewitt insisted. 
 
816 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Mr. Rilestone persisted. Said he, "Show me some place 
 in the Holy Scripters where it says that human dung should 
 be covered up against the action of the natural atmosphere." 
 Now Dr. Hewitt's strongest point, although he was one of 
 the best and most useful of men, was not familiarity with 
 the "Scripters." But all at once there popped into his head 
 a funny story that I had told him about a happening in 
 old-time Inveni. 
 
 Away back in my Inveni days there had been at that in- 
 stitution both of learning and of superstition a so-called stu- 
 dent whom I have named, Eliphalet Hack. Now Eliphalet 
 had no ambition at all to become a scholar; in fact he hated 
 both learning and all its professors. One day a professor at 
 Inveni, praising the Hebrew Scriptures in the hit and miss 
 style to which he was accustomed, declared that there was 
 not a passage in all the Bible which was not perfectly proper 
 to be read in any mixed company (Inveni was co-educational) 
 yes, which could not properly be used as the very text for a 
 sermon before a mixed audience. Eliphalet piped out, "How 
 about Deuteronomy 23: 12 and 13?" 
 
 The professor answered, "Well, what about it? Mr. 
 Hack, it has been recommended at this institution — though 
 the rule is not strictly enforced — that each and every student 
 keep always along with him a copy of Holy Scripture. Have 
 you a copy of it with you?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." Hack pulled out his copy. "Turn to the 
 passage in question and read it, please." The professor had 
 walked into the trap. 
 
 Eliphalet then read (from the Authorized Version): 
 "Thou shalt have a place without the camp, whither thou 
 shalt go forth abroad: And thou shalt have a paddle upon 
 thy weapon; and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself 
 abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and 
 cover that which cometh from thee:" 
 
 Now to a reader of the present generation, the passage 
 does not sound very obnoxious, but to the young ladies and 
 young gentlemen of that day, and particularly of that insti- 
 tution, it sounded improper indeed. 
 
 All were deeply and quite obviously shocked. As for the 
 professor himself, he was absolutely bewildered, scarlet, 
 speechless. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 817 
 
 After a time he recovered his composure and then made 
 one of the most dishonest defenses (to a passage too that 
 needed no defense whatever) that ever I have heard. "That 
 passage," he defended, "though seemingly improper, was 
 undoubtedly placed in the Bible for an excellent purpose: 
 namely, to show the bacterial origin of disease — although, 
 of course, in an obscure manner, so that its real content and 
 significance should remain wholly hidden until this present 
 generation should arrive upon earth and, by scientific in- 
 vestigation, discover that passage's deep, underlying, scien- 
 tific truth." 
 
 Of course all this did not determine at all whether the 
 passage was or was not a proper one to be read in "mixed 
 company." Moreover, I had, with my very ears, heard this 
 same professor again and again condemn the microbic origin 
 of disease as merely "pseudo-science" and "a piece of athe- 
 istic nonsense." Only a day or two before this very day in 
 question I had heard him do so. 
 
 The truth was, of course, that the military order in ques- 
 tion was issued simply for the purpose of preventing the 
 tracking of foul-smelling ordure all about the camp, thus 
 befouling the scene. Even had the instruction been issued 
 with full knowledge of the fact that filth does breed disease, 
 that would not show that the person issuing the order knew 
 anything at all about bacteria or other microscopic pro- 
 ducers of disease. 
 
 For Dr. Hewitt's purpose, of course, the question of 
 the microbic origin of many diseases did not need to be 
 discussed. Mr. Rilestone had probably never heard of such 
 causation. What he had said was, "Show me some place 
 in the Holy Scripters where it says that human dung should 
 be covered up against the action of the natural atmosphere." 
 Dr. Hewitt (very kindly, for he loved the whole farmer pop- 
 ulation) borrowed the objector's own Bible and therein 
 showed him. 
 
 The farmer still pretended to be unconvinced, but Hewitt, 
 on his very next trip, discovered that his sanitary instruc- 
 tions had all been carried out. Not only that but some of the 
 obstinate neighbors of Mr. Rilestone were now following 
 his example. 
 
818 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 So the world was being slowly — very slowly indeed — 
 revolutionized, even through the distant influence of Eli- 
 phalet Hack, clear to the outer-most margins of Knox 
 County. 
 
 MUTUAL HELPFULNESS AND COMRADESHIP 
 
 On Sundays and of nights I often rode with Dr. Hewitt. 
 
 Occasionally I made suggestions to him, and, once in a 
 long while, he would say, perhaps: "Sometimes you give 
 me a good idea: you're not so d. . . .d ignorant as you look." 
 That was his shamefaced way of being affectionate. In his 
 turn he too would be assistive with good suggestions about 
 my eye, ear, nose and throat work. Then, perhaps, I would 
 comment: "I'll do it. Sometimes you're almost as brilliant 
 as you think you are." It is marvelous how much two or 
 three doctors, who greatly wish to do so, can help one 
 another. l 
 
 Out in the country, as I have said already, Hewitt was 
 a kindlier and gentler physician than ever he was in the 
 town. Toward me — I in those days was little better than a 
 constant invalid — he was solicitous in the extreme. As I 
 look back now it seems to me that almost always as we 
 drove together, it was either raining and thundering, or else 
 piling up great drifts of snow across our road or pouring 
 down upon us tropic waves of heat almost intolerable. 
 
 Out in a storm, I see him now and again and hear him 
 clearly, "Pull up that leather apron, Shastid. You mustn't 
 get wet. — Here, let me tuck it round you." 
 
 Again in pleasant weather, he, if not by emergency calls 
 forbidden, would pull up his horse repeatedly to let me out 
 with my camera. The terrain around Galesburg was not 
 like that of Pittsfield and Pike County. In the latter region 
 there were, it is true, fine prairies indeed, but those were 
 mostly rolling, and, particularly in the southern area, they 
 broke into deep gullies — almost chasms — and high hills — 
 almost little mountains. Here in Knox County the country 
 was flat in the extreme and, being black and rich of soil, 
 
 1 There was a third physician up our stairway, George Luster by name. He was a man 
 of skill and excellent judgment, who referred many cases both to Hewitt and to me, as in 
 fact we did to him. But he was of a cold and almost silent nature and I never could have 
 with him the same joyous professional companionship that I had with the life-loving, 
 death-hating, laughter-and-tear-provoking John Michael Hewitt. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 819 
 
 was used almost entirely for corn-growing and cattle-raising. 
 Everywhere the delightful pastures, the fine breeds of cattle, 
 and, as a rule close by the roadside fence, a great drinking 
 tub. 
 
 On these trips Dr. Hewitt was oftenest interested in my 
 accounts of old-time practice and old-time ways in Pike 
 County. Only one year younger than I as a man, he was, in 
 effect, by far the younger doctor, for I, at the age of ten, 
 had become my father's apprentice, while he had not even 
 begun to study medicine till after he had reached his major- 
 ity. He was also greatly interested at my office in my Grand- 
 father Shastid's Bible and the lumps of tallow from his read- 
 ing candle still upon it. My grandfather, after perusing his 
 bed-time chapter in the book, had been accustomed, after 
 reversing his candle, to let it drip melted tallow on the stout 
 leather covering of the volume, and then, as he turned the 
 candle right-end-up once more, to stick the butt thereof into 
 the pool of hot tallow. Presto! the candle and the Bible 
 were one! This was a common practice in those early days. 
 It saved buying handles for candles. 
 
 My mother's sewing-machine — one of the very earliest 
 sewing-machines that ever were manufactured — a genuine 
 first type Elias Howe — also interested him greatly, also my 
 stories of the mobs (composed of sewing women's husbands, 
 fathers and brothers, who thought that sewing-machines 
 would ruin sewing women's jobs). These mobs had gone 
 everywhere about the country, with destruction for all sew- 
 ing-machines wherever they could find them. "Labor-saving 
 machinery," they declared, "will absolutely ruin the nation 
 by the unemployment it will produce." Those ignorant 
 persons were decidedly surprised when they found, as they 
 did a little later, that sewing-machines had actually in- 
 creased the demand for sewing-women's services by ten and 
 twenty times. Well-to-do women now, instead of just one 
 extremely durable dress in five or fifteen years and always 
 of only a single style and pattern, had innumerable styles 
 and patterns and many flimsy garments yearly. 
 
 Of all such things we talked as we drove, and of history, 
 and of general science, and of astronomy, etymology, geology 
 
820 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 and chemistry — but, most of all to be sure, of medicines and 
 of people. 
 
 "WHAT CAN COME OF A KISS?" 
 The very day I took the flat pasture picture herewith re- 
 produced we visited a place whereto not Hewitt alone, but 
 I as well, had been dilatorily summoned. What had happen- 
 ed was this. 
 
 The hired man, a native American, had attempted to kiss 
 a big Swedish hired girl who worked at the same house. 
 Strong as the woman was, she really could not keep the man 
 off. So, at length, she had gripped in her mighty, red hands 
 a big bowl of stewed beef tongue— still boiling hot. This 
 bowl she had inverted over the criminal's head then brought 
 it down over him. The bowl had fitted quite snugly over 
 the bullet-shaped noggin, and staid there, covering his eyes 
 with the boiling hot gravy. The man, when at last he had 
 clawed off the bowl, started out for the girl, but, unable to 
 find her, and hearing in the yard the voice of her big brother, 
 he had called the brother to him, and then, when the brother 
 came, he, though thorougly blinded by the gravy, got a 
 good grip on the brother and administered to him the un- 
 merciful beating which he the gripper, probably would have 
 given to the victim's sister in case he had been able to get 
 her in his hands. Thereupon the owner of the place, a very 
 excitable Swede, happening in on the scene, began without 
 the slightest preliminary questioning to beat up both the 
 native hired man (the would-be kisser) also the man that 
 had been beaten up (the Swede brother of the Swede hired 
 girl). And he was making a good job of it too, when all at 
 once there returned to the scene the Swede hired girl, who 
 sailed into her employer with a stick of fire wood and a 
 perfectly bloody result. 
 
 No word was sent to a doctor until the wife of the owner 
 of the place had returned from her shopping in town, had 
 found everyone about the place hors de combat. She then had 
 stopped a passer-by — a neighbor who had one of those early 
 telephones in his house — and asked him to phone at once 
 for Drs. Shastid and Hewitt. The one applied to, finding at 
 his house his own wife sick, did not telephone at once, and, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 821 
 
 even when he did phone, laid no particular stress on the 
 need of the injured persons for immediate attention. 
 
 Hence, when Hewitt and I arrived, we found a group 
 not only furious with anger but decidedly sick and suffering. 
 
 I went at once to work on the injured eyes of the would- 
 be kisser. "I — I alone am responsible for all this," moaned 
 the Swede hired girl — who, by the bye, had also been acci- 
 dentally injured by the owner of the place when he had 
 taken the fire-wood away from her. "I — yes I — am alone 
 responsible for all this damages." 
 
 "You damned, double-damned so and so," responded 
 the blinded one. 
 
 "Yes, swear on me all you want to," sobbed the girl, 
 "but kiss me too all you like, and I will be your wife here- 
 after because I love you so much and a mighty good one 
 I will be for you too." 
 
 Hewitt at this point exploded. Never, I think, have I 
 seen him so helpless with loud laughter. Then he began that 
 happy, vivacious, absolutely masterful, universally joshing 
 way he so frequently exhibited. Everybody got joshed thor- 
 oughly. In no time at all everyone had lost his anger for 
 everybody else, had been transformed into a laughing, lov- 
 ing perfectly contented human being. A Christian, let us say. 
 
 Those injured eyes got well, somehow. Everybody else 
 at the house recovered too. Whether or not the Swedish 
 hired girl and the native hired man married each other and 
 lived happily ever after, I do not now recall, even if I ever 
 have known. Perhaps both of them are dead, poor souls, 
 for that was nearly half a century ago. Yes, perhaps both 
 of them are dead. All the Galesburg doctors of that time, 
 too, are dead — save only Hewitt and myself. 
 
 Perhaps we are living still only because we have laughed 
 at and loved so many human beings. 
 
 DR. DUBLIN CHARACTERISTICALLY DEPARTS 
 One of the great changes in the world — my world, I mean 
 — which, however, is a microcosmic symbol of the medical 
 macrocosm of my time — occurring in those days was the 
 death of old Dr. Dublin down at Pittsfield, Illinois. It 
 had, no doubt, been foreordained that, when his time came, 
 
822 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 he would simply explode, bomb-like, by the sheer force and 
 excess of his own inner energy. So, at all events, did he die. 
 No death from any external and plebeian disease germ! 
 
 One day in Pittsfield, on the Public Square sidewalk at 
 the foot of his office stairway, he began harrumping and 
 hoo-hooing in his customary manner. All at once he actually 
 fractured a number of his ribs. My brother, Dr. Will Shastid, 
 who had always been a great favorite with Dr. Dublin, was 
 called to the case, and everything was done for the mag- 
 nificent old fellow that could have been done. But the 
 sharply fragmented ribs had penetrated the lung, perhaps 
 also the covering of the heart. Shortly, the fine old Irish 
 doctor was no more. 
 
 "Old"? 
 
 So he seemed to me then. Yet he had, at his death, at- 
 tained only to the age of sixty-three years, a quite early age 
 as it seems to me now — to me who now am more than a 
 decade and a half older. 
 
 The salty old medic who had let himself go without 
 restraint whenever he pleased and who had invariably 
 pleased, who had had an unbreakable habit, perhaps even 
 an inborn instinct, for private and public candor, as if his 
 booming voice were the voice of deity itself — was dead. He 
 had detested me. With all the ardor of his energetic and 
 aristocratic soul he had detested and despised me. 
 
 And yet — I confess it with a stirring at the heart — I 
 missed him. 
 
 I had never seen his like to the very moment of his death, 
 and I have never seen it since. With all his ponderosity, 
 pomposity and intensely bombastic overuse of supercilious 
 energy, he was really, in his soul, a fine old man and a most 
 excellent doctor. I do not forgive him for the attitude he 
 took toward me, because he would not have wanted me to 
 do that. What! Forgive him 7 . Anybody forgive him 7 . He had 
 never in all his life done anything to be forgiven for. But I 
 respect him nevertheless (though he would not want me 
 to do even that, I think). I respect him because, in my 
 memory, he is so striking a personality, was so helpful to 
 his patients, and — most of all — because, despite his offish 
 attitude toward my father at times and his occasional touches 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 823 
 
 of professional jealousy, he was my father's very true and 
 dependable friend. 
 
 After one of the most beautiful of eulogies, 1 delivered by 
 Judge Harry Higbee, of Pittsfield, his remains were, by his 
 own request, cremated. 
 
 Peace be to his imperial ashes, honor and long life to his 
 memory. 
 
 CLARK E. CARR 
 
 It was early in my work at Galesburg when I met Colonel 
 Clark E. Carr. The meeting took place, as so many of my 
 social contacts did, through the courtesy and kindness of 
 Dr. John M. Hewitt. I was a poor "mixer," he a most ex- 
 cellent one. In fact I am tempted to say that he knew about 
 everybody in Galesburg at 6:00 p.m. on the day of his arrival 
 in that city. But that would be a slight exaggeration. 
 
 Carr was short, stout, of a ruddy complexion and more 
 than a merely assertive manner. He was the very personifica- 
 tion of force and energy, withal genial and kindly. 
 
 Carr had been U.S. Minister to Denmark from '89 to '93- 
 He had also been a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, 
 and, indeed, in 1863, commissioner from Illinois for the 
 Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg. In fact it was 
 largely through his efforts that Lincoln had been allowed 
 to speak at the dedication of that cemetery — in other words 
 to deliver his now famous "Gettysburg Address." (The 
 highfalutin' members of Lincoln's own party indeed had not 
 yet ceased to regard him as a kind of country yahoo, who 
 had simply been tolerated as their presidential candidate 
 because he appeared to be the only candidate so influential 
 with the masses that he "could pull the ticket through." 
 When he had pulled the ticket through they were even more 
 ashamed of him than ever and determined to keep him, so 
 far as possible, clean out of public sight and hearing.) When 
 Lincoln had delivered the Gettysburg Address, Carr, as I 
 
 1 See Pike County Democrat, May 27, 1896. In the course of his remarks, Harry Higbee 
 said, "Large of body, commanding but genial in manner, his very presence in the sick 
 chamber was an omen of returning health and was almost as potent for good as were the 
 remedies prescribed by his skill." That was the simple truth. 
 
 All the various eulogies that were published about Dr. Dublin in the Pike County 
 newspapers and in various medical journals, I still possess, carefully preserved in the Com- 
 panion's scrapbook for 1896. Dr. Dublin is a part of that past which is still so very precious 
 to me. 
 
824 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 recall his saying, had sat on the speakers' platform just 
 behind him. Many were the anecdotes which Carr related 
 to me about Lincoln, and, when he learned that my father 
 had known Lincoln well and had told me many things con- 
 cerning him, the Colonel pumped me day and night for the 
 last, least vestige of information about his old-time idol 
 that I could possibly remember, and as I had had it from my 
 father's lips. 1 
 
 I tried to tell Col. Carr various matters also about Hay 
 and Nicolay, with whom my father, in his youth and early 
 manhood, had been intimately associated, but he seemed to 
 care little about those men. He was completely engrossed 
 by Lincoln. 
 
 THE COMPANION 
 
 I had promised to return to Fannie Fidelia and marry her 
 only in case, at Galesburg, I should succeed in avoiding 
 "rank failure." I had not so succeeded. For one thing, the 
 United States, at the time, Was in the midst of the great 
 "Cleveland depression." Scarcely a well-established doctor 
 could collect, at least in Galesburg, even a modest overhead. 
 Inevitable then that I likewise should fail. Nevertheless, 
 exceedingly sick and lonely beyond expression, I went down 
 to Pittsfield, 111., once again "just to talk matters over" 
 with Fannie Fidelia. The result was that she talked me over. 
 Poor child! She had waited so long, almost seven long years. 
 She was nearly dead with waiting. Two could live cheaper 
 than one: she would show me how. And she did. I married 
 her, and she showed me what good management was, also 
 
 1 Some of these memories of Lincoln by my father appear in an article by me in The 
 Nation, February 20, 1929, page 227, entitled "My Father Knew Lincoln." 
 
 My father's mother (born Elizabeth Edwards) was own cousin to Ninian Edwards, 
 who was chief justice of Kentucky in 1808, 1809 — 1818 last territorial governor of Illinois, 
 1818-1824 United States Senator from Illinois, and 1824-1826 U. S. Minister to Mexico. 
 From 1826 to 1832 he again was governor of Illinois. 
 
 Ninian Edwards' son, Ninian Wirt Edwards, was a distinguished lawyer at Springfield, 
 Illinois, and at his house it was (not that of the first Ninian Edwards) that Lincoln married 
 Mary Todd, sister to that Ninian Edwards' wife. This explanation I make because most 
 persons, including a number of careful historians, have taken it for granted that Abraham 
 Lincoln's wife was a sister-in-law to "Governor" Ninian Edwards. Abraham Lincoln's 
 brother-in-law was never governor but was attorney-general of Illinois in 1834 and super- 
 intendent of public instruction from 1854 to 1857. No other public offices, so far as I know, 
 were ever held by him. 
 
 Ninian Edwards, Sr., died in 1833. 
 
iililii 
 
 iiillllllllls 
 mmmmmmmm 
 
 11111 
 
 AUGUSTUS CHARLES BERNAYS 
 Born 1854, died 1907 
 A man of wilful ways and picturesque character 
 yet a true friend and marvellous surgeon. In 
 many ways he assisted in the reception of the 
 Great New Medicine throughout the Mississippi 
 Valley. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 827 
 
 good nursing, good housekeeping, good mothering, affection 
 beyond measure. She was only a little bit bigger than a 
 child's big doll. Yet work and plan and contrive! I never 
 have seen her equal excepting in another little woman — my 
 mother. 
 
 My mother, whom she so very much resembled! 
 
 We would not fail, at least not so fast as I had been fail- 
 ing when she came. And we didn't — although, to succeed, 
 actually to succeed, in times like those, was impossible even 
 for a Rockefeller. 
 
 After seven long years! "Anyway," she used to say to 
 me, "it is better, if we fail, to fail together. Do we not at 
 least have happiness?" 
 
 She was right. We did have happiness. My Pittsfield 
 savings diminished much less rapidly than before, and, in 
 addition, our happiness increased continually and incredibly. 
 
 THE GALESBURG DOCTORS CLUB 
 A contributing factor to that happiness was a medico's 
 club that was founded about this time, or somewhat earlier, 
 by Dr. Hewitt and myself. 
 
 The medical profession of Galesburg, as a whole, had 
 become a perfect orchestra of hate. Hewitt said, "No, but 
 it understood only how to play dissonant chords." I could 
 not see the difference. Every new doctor coming to the town 
 was anathema to those who had been there longer. And the 
 more nearly successful he was when he came, the more dis- 
 sonant were the chords that the orchestra played about him. 
 One bright crash of medical music broke into that pro- 
 fessional inferno like sweet melodies from heaven heard far 
 away in hell — the discovery of the X-ray. I have already 
 told, in this volume, though briefly indeed, that story of the 
 X-rays coming into Galesburg, and, in "Tramping to Failure, 
 at very much greater length. Suffice it here to repeat that, 
 almost certainly the X-ray picture which Dr. Hewitt made 
 of my left hand was the very first roentgenogram to be made 
 in America. Hewitt was also very probably the first to use 
 diphtheria antitoxin west of New York. 
 
828 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 ANTITOXIN ON CHRISTMAS 
 
 Speaking of antitoxin, it was on a Christmas day that 
 Dr. Hewitt was suddenly called out to give antitoxin in the 
 country. "Bring your camera along," said he to me, "and 
 get some fine snow pictures. Besides, there's a very bad eye 
 in this family that you surely ought to see." 
 
 It was to the house of a Swedish settler and his compre- 
 hensive family that we went that day. And there was no 
 true diphtheria in the family, so Dr. Hewitt said, not even 
 a trace of it. Nor any bad eye trouble, so said I, but only a 
 very mild case of simple conjunctivitis. But we staid in that 
 family for hours. "Clannish," that family? Not a bit of it. 
 Nor any other family where Dr. Hewitt was at any time. 
 
 Many in the big family that day had opened their boxes 
 from Sweden, and we two doctors must see all and admire. 
 Smoked reindeer from Lapland, Swedish cheeses of all kinds, 
 fresh from hemlandet, and raspberry jam and strawberry 
 preserves. And of each and everything we had to taste. 
 Also we had to listen to tales from the children (there were 
 something like twelve of them) about the Tomtar, those 
 little old men with long gray beards who live in closets and 
 under the floors and who, in the night, come out to do a 
 large share of the work for the people of the house — if these 
 have been "real good" the month before. Especially in 
 those sacred days preceding Christmas they are helpful and 
 kind. 
 
 Thank God that, on that blessed Christmas, all the other 
 people in all the other houses that we visited were also doing 
 extremely well and were also happy. How different the 
 situation was from that sad Christmas in Pike County when 
 I, all alone, drove "in a kind of vacuum," my father sick at 
 home nigh unto death, and all the rest of the world either 
 dead or gazing, helpless, into the hollow eyes of the com- 
 mon enemy of mankind. 
 
 ON WITH THE GALESBURG DOCTORS CLUB 
 Well, we founded the Galesburg Doctors Club, Hewitt 
 
 and I, and it proved successful from the start. 
 
 The organization meeting took place on December 23, 
 
 1895- Says the Daily Republican-Register of Tuesday evening, 
 
 December 24, 1895: 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 829 
 
 'A DOCTORS CLUB 
 
 "It was Organized Last Night — Who the Officers Are. 
 
 "The Galesburg Doctors Club was organ- 
 ized last night — with a membership limited to 
 fifteen. The meeting was held at the office of 
 Dr. Anderson [A mistake for Dr. Shastid]. Dr. 
 Shastid was elected president; D. C. I. Mc- 
 intosh, vice president; Dr. Anderson, secretary; 
 Dr. Tovey, treasurer. The club meets weekly 
 for the discussion of subjects connected with 
 medicine and surgery. The subject for discus- 
 sion next Monday night is "Asepsis and Anti- 
 sepsis in the Treatment of Wounds." 1 
 
 The underlying idea in the establishment of this club 
 was to get together the better educated physicians and 
 surgeons of Galesburg, also those (they were in fact precisely 
 the same group) who played no instruments whatever in that 
 "orchestra of hate." For these two reasons the membership 
 of the Club was necessarily quite limited. 
 
 The next meeting of the Club was to be held on December 
 30 (still in 1895). I insist a little on the date because it was 
 at that very time when first in public I propounded and ad- 
 vocated the popular referendum on war — specifically, what 
 I called ' The War-Check Vote. ' ' 2 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF MY PEACE WORK 
 I had, as I have said, been elected the first president of 
 the Club, and, for my inauguration, I was to write an in- 
 augural address. On what should I write? 
 
 4 'Once upon a midnight dreary, 
 As I pondered, weak and weary," 
 
 1 Even yet there were doctors in Galesburg who fought bitterly "the germ theory of 
 disease," hence both asepsis and antisepsis. In the Doctors Club there was no opposition 
 at all, I am happy to record, to the germ theory. 
 
 2 A typographical error in one of my earlier articles gave the date as September 30, 1896. 
 After that the date has often been so stated, and I myself, twice or thrice, refreshing my 
 memory as to the date by referring to the clipping in which the error had been committed, 
 simply repeated the error. Some years ago, however, having before me as I wrote (just as 
 I do now while writing this footnote) my old-time Galesburg scrapbook, I corrected the 
 error and, since then, have not repeated it. 
 
830 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 I fell to reflecting, as so often I had done before, on the little 
 white house and its long black shadow extending over all 
 the earth. 
 
 Filled with inexpressible melancholy I pulled down a 
 stack of historical works, which happened to be at my home, 
 and soon was absorbed in long accounts of the various 
 Napoleonic campaigns and especially in the Napoleonic 
 methods for forcing draftees into wars and ruses whereby 
 millions of young men had purposely rendered themselves 
 unavailable for military service — chopping off the trigger 
 finger, for example, blotting out the sight of one eye, etc. 
 
 As I read and read and kept on reading, I began to be 
 surfeited with all those scenes of perfidy, trickery, stench and 
 horror, ineffectual dead bones and blood. 
 
 Of what use, I reflected, are all the efforts of the medical 
 profession to improve the human race — to stamp out and 
 prevent disease, to cure disease — and of ministers and peda- 
 gogues to teach the people right ways of living, if, after all, 
 once in each decade, or decade and a lustrum, the politicians 
 of the various countries are to be allowed to draft their 
 respective nations into war, and so, in a very brief space of 
 time, to undo a hundred-fold all that the doctors, ministers 
 and schoolteachers, with so much stress of mind and so much 
 expenditure of other peoples' money, had been able to ac- 
 complish? 
 
 Let a farmer treat his herds as, from time to time, the 
 profiteers and policiticans treat their respective peoples — 
 and what would surely happen? Suppose that a sheep 
 raiser, now and then, in a senseless rage, would select the 
 eugenically best males from his flocks and lead them out to 
 slaughter. Would that improve the flocks? Hardly. 
 
 Here, then, I began to think, might be a topic suitable 
 for an "inaugural address" to physicians. 
 
 I had always been much interested in history. But now 
 I began to read it more deeply (as in fact I should have done 
 away back in Vienna) and with a far more definite aim. To 
 my astonishment I found that, in practically all wars, the 
 people themselves had, by all the facts and figures available, 
 been bitterly opposed to wholesale murder as a means of 
 settling all or any international disputes. In our own par- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 831 
 
 ticular wars, for example, from the very beginning of our 
 revolution against England till the close of our Civil War, 
 the people — quite contrary, of course, to the patriotic repre- 
 sentations made in our little school histories — had been deep- 
 ly opposed to almost any kind of war. Talk about govern- 
 ments being "controlled by public opinion"! Why! the 
 governments, I found, as I read on, were actually accustomed, 
 in war time, to suppressing, so far as they possibly could, 
 even the very slightest expression of any anti-war public 
 opinion — suppressing it even to the extent of preventing 
 themselves from ascertaining how great or how little that 
 anti-war opinion was. 
 
 And then — the drafts ! How the full extent and necessity 
 for the drafts had, in all our major wars, been carefully, 
 cunningly, dishonestly concealed. Take our Civil War for 
 example. Only at the very beginning of that strife were 
 volunteers forthcoming to any considerable extent. And, 
 even at that stage, the enlistments were secretly forced in 
 ways that school historians seem never to understand. 
 
 Then, of course, dishonest labelling of troops. 
 
 There were hundreds and hundreds of thousands of 
 draftees, yet each and every company and regiment of them 
 was carefully labelled by our government "volunteers." 
 There were in the army "regulars" and there were in it 
 "volunteers." All who were not in the regular army were 
 called "volunteers," true volunteers and draftees alike. No 
 such persons as draftees were known, officially, at Wash- 
 ington. 1 
 
 This was merely a small specimen of what I began to 
 discover, as, filled with amazement and hottest indignation, 
 I dug deeply and still more deeply into the truth. 
 
 Then, too, I began to learn that, in each and every nation, 
 all through each and every war-time, not only the Great 
 Power Seekers but also certain Big Business men had been 
 standing steadily and greedily behind the bloody scenes, and, 
 like maniacs at a fire, taking what they wanted. No ques- 
 
 1 A similar situation prevailed in World War I. For example, draftees were practically 
 compelled to let themselves be listed as "volunteers." 
 
 Then, in World War II (the direct result, by the way, of World War I, which was, 
 according to the world's political crooks, a war to end wars) the fact that nearly all U. S. 
 soldiers had to be drafted was thoroughly disguised by calling them "selectees." 
 
832 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 tion at all about these things. There were the official docu- 
 ments, the absolute, the undeniable, truths. 1 
 
 It was well to know that a good many persons who did 
 not care at all for money, were, nevertheless, strongly mo- 
 tivated by the greed for power. Political power, however, 
 incidentally implies the power to get money, so that, in 
 effect, the two great motives for war-making are, in the 
 Caesars, the Napoleons, the Charlemagnes, and so on, inex- 
 tricably intermingled. 
 
 I dug still further. Then I found that the same war- 
 profiteers (for money or power) had always, before each 
 war had begun, been busy intriguing and contriving to bring 
 that war about. 
 
 And, while the war was on, they had been busy precisely 
 to the very limits of their power, deluging not only their 
 own land but all other nations with lying propaganda con- 
 cerning the conflict and its causes. And ever the biggest lie 
 of all was that the liars themselves had not desired the war, 
 but that the common people, the masses, had "pushed" 
 them into it. 
 
 And the government had always, without one single ex- 
 ception, done the will of those mendacious profiteers, or else 
 the will of political power-seekers. 
 
 Talk about "representative government"! Whom did 
 the government represent — the people or the profiteers and 
 power-seekers? 
 
 Most astonishing of all was the fact that many of the 
 Christian clergy, who, in times of peace, had always and 
 emphatically urged the doctrine of absolute non-resistance, 
 right-about-faced, just so soon as any war threatened, and 
 followed no longer the doctrines of the Prince of Peace, but, 
 instead, the commands, express or implied, of the outrageous 
 profiteers and power-seekers. "War! War! War!" they had 
 
 1 See, among other authorities, Rhodes, "History of the United States," Vol. V, 
 pages 209 ff. 
 
 Rhodes, for example, quotes Olcott, a special commissioner appointed by Secretary of 
 War Stanton to investigate the war-frauds, as follows: "It is my deliberate conviction, 
 based upon the inspection of many bureaus, and the examination of some thousands of 
 witnesses, in every walk of life, that at least twenty, if not twenty-five per cent of the entire 
 expenditures of the government during the rebellion were tainted with fraud. That is to 
 say that over $700,000,000.00 were paid to public robbers," etc. 
 
 Many persons think of the. Northern Government, during the Civil War, as composed 
 exclusively of men like Edwin M. Stanton and Abraham Lincoln. How different the truth! 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 833 
 
 shouted, not once but invariably, whenever a war had 
 threatened, and always they had either believed or else 
 had professed to believe in the silly excuses which had been 
 given out for even the most unrighteous of all our wars. 
 
 I was hurt and indignant almost beyond expression. My- 
 self a churchman, I could hardly believe my eyes, as I ex- 
 plored the Congressional Record, the reports of official com- 
 mittees and other of our public documents, as well as old 
 volumes of sermons and of religious journals. I read again 
 and yet again. But always with the same or more astound- 
 ing results. 
 
 Whenever a war had threatened, a few brave Christian 
 ministers, it is true, had always stood up for their peace- 
 time doctrines without the slightest hesitancy and without 
 hedging. But the great majority of ministers had shifted 
 with the wind, had done as commanded by the chief con- 
 tributors and power-holders in their churches, and, in a 
 word, had been, next to the venal portion of the press itself, 
 the chief and most persistent and universally submissive 
 mouthpieces for the war. 1 
 
 One of the most disgusting points about the matter was 
 that, almost as soon as the war was over, these complete 
 tergiversators invariably began speaking as if no tergiversa- 
 tion on their parts had occurred. "The only way to end 
 war," they would then shout, "is by teaching the world the 
 Christian spirit." As if, when the Christian spirit could not 
 keep the ministers themselves from shouting for war when- 
 ever a war threatened, it was likely to do much better with 
 the profiteers and politicians who, under every constitution 
 beneath the sun, still held the unlimited war power! 
 
 Many more things, as I read, I learned about war, about 
 who make war, and how those who engender it invariably 
 attempt to produce the impression that they could never 
 afford to have a war, and that it was an actual axiom that 
 the common people (whose ears they had filled with lies, 
 and whose mouths, even so, they had had to close by law 
 and by force, and whose blood and whose bones they had 
 seized by organized violence) that had compelled them, those 
 
 1 Anyone who doubts this statement needs only to turn to war-time and just-before- 
 war-time files of American religious journals and magazines and read for himself. 
 
834 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 secret intriguers, together with the government with which 
 they had intrigued, to enter into the conflict. 1 
 
 Even in times of peace, as I found, the lying propaganda 
 went steadily on, especially the doctrine that not the poli- 
 ticians and the profiteers, but the masses (the "mob" as the 
 propagandists disrespectfully referred to them) do in fact 
 want and do in fact produce the wars. 
 
 Filled with indignation, I wrote my address. Nothing 
 did I extenuate or aught set down in malice. I told simply 
 the hideous, but, in those times, deeply hidden, truth. 
 
 And then I proposed to the members of that club the one 
 and obvious remedy for war — not for all wars, but for out- 
 side (extraterritorial) wars. Inside wars (wars to suppress 
 rebellions and to repel invasions) could not by any possibil- 
 ity, I said, be stopped. That impossibility I believed that I 
 thoroughly demonstrated at that time, and I think so still. 
 
 But wars produced by governments' sending armies out- 
 side their own boundaries, these, the great planet-shaking 
 catastrophies, could, as I showed by the facts, readily be 
 stopped and by what seemed to me a very common-sense 
 method indeed. 
 
 Always we had heard that "public opinion" was what 
 really made or prevented wars. But, in war-time, public 
 opinion was precisely the one thing which governments care- 
 fully, vigorously, systematically suppressed. I proposed an 
 amendment 2 to the various constitutions which would give 
 to public opinion an actual opportunity for expression, and 
 an advantageous position where it would have to take 
 effect — i.e., at the polls. 
 
 All this, of course, implied that, in any country adopting 
 the War-Check Vote, there would be no dictatorship, no 
 
 1 There is grave reason to believe that, both before and since the years which I passed at 
 Galesburg, foreign financiers and governments, working in the background at our presidential 
 nominating conventions, have bought the votes of many of our delegates thereto, not merely 
 in the convention of one major political party but in both. Then, howsoever the people of 
 America voted at the election, they were simply putting into office a president who, at no 
 time, would do anything whatever to reveal the true nature of pro- war, pro-foreign propa- 
 ganda broadcast in this country by every available avenue of misinformation. Neither 
 (though perhaps assuming publicly a pacifist attitude) would he do anything whatever to 
 prevent the drawing of this country into war. 
 
 2 Since then I have added a second amendment, one relating to governmental foreign 
 gifts and loans. Of this hereafter. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 835 
 
 concentration of power in the hands of one person or small 
 group of persons. Under a dictatorship, of course, a vote 
 would not be truly a vote — being militarily controlled. And 
 the War-Check Vote would be nothing where there could 
 not be a vote. In fact it was just one kind of vote. If not a 
 vote it was not anything whatever. All this, of course, 
 implied that, to stop extraterritorial war-making, there 
 must exist both the War-Check Vote Amendment to the 
 given country's constitution and also a democratic govern- 
 ment. 
 
 In other words, to get people to understand that the 
 War-Check Vote is the only possible means for stopping 
 (outside) wars is the very best -possible means of getting them to 
 see the inevitable necessity for barring all dictatorships and pre- 
 serving democracy unhampered forevermore. 
 
 That amendment, to sum the matter up, which I pro- 
 posed for adoption to our Constitution — later, to the con- 
 stitutions of as many other countries as possible — provided 
 for a referendum to the people before its government could 
 "make or declare" any war whatsoever, even the very 
 tiniest, beyond its own boundaries. 1 
 
 I proceeded by superabundant evidence to show that, in 
 practically all wars, the masses had been opposed to the wars, 
 and that, further, to compress the matter into a nutshell, it 
 was simply insane to leave the power to make wars any 
 further in the hands of those who prosper, either in wealth 
 or in power, and prosper enormously, by war. 
 
 There was, however, another side to this matter. What 
 about an invasion of, say, this country by some foreign 
 power? No "War-Check Vote" could possibly stop an in- 
 vasion from without. It could, and undoubtedly would, stop 
 our own government from compelling us to invade the lands 
 of other peoples, but how could our voting "no war" keep 
 us from becoming invaded — something that a power-seeking, 
 war-desiring U. S. president could actually himself bring 
 
 1 A careful investigation into the constitutions of nearly all countries which I made a 
 little later, revealed the astonishing fact that, in absolutely not one of them had any pro- 
 vision whatever been made at any time for a check on war in the hands of the people them- 
 selves. Researches which I have made in the last few years have yielded the same results. 
 
836 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 about by Machiavellian maneuvering should world condi- 
 tions become sufficiently unsettled? 
 
 To cover what seemed to be the entire range of war pos- 
 sibilities, therefore, I created the slogan, "Heavy armament 
 at all times to keep others from invading us; the War-Check 
 Vote at all times to keep us from invading others." The 
 great difficulty, of course, involved in putting this slogan 
 completely into the form of constitutional amendments lay 
 in the fact that the word "heavy" as applied to "armament" 
 has a very indefinite meaning. Just how heavy is "heavy"? 
 The heavy armament amendment would not be effective, and 
 therefore invasions of this country could continue to occur, 
 in case either some pacifistic administration or some war- 
 desiring administration should provide this country with 
 very light armament only and then declare that the armament 
 was in fact "heavy." Moreover, the divisional requirements 
 (air, navy, ground forces) as well as the equipment require- 
 ments for each of these three divisions of the military service 
 would necessarily vary from decade to decade, even perhaps 
 from year to year. 
 
 Of course as to the weaker nations — Spain, Portugal, 
 Switzerland, and so on — this armament side of the matter 
 could not be of great importance in any case, because none 
 of such nations could ever sufficiently arm to keep out 
 strong invaders. Such nations would, in any case, have to 
 rely upon the War-Check- Vote Amendment— i.e., its adop- 
 tion by the peoples of the powerful countries, to keep those 
 countries from invading the weaker ones. 
 
 As to the most powerful country of all, and the most 
 important one of all, for us, the U. S. A., the term "heavy" 
 could indeed be defined as, for example, "heavy enough to 
 protect this country against invasion by the two next strong- 
 est powers combined." Even so, of course, there would be 
 some ambiguity. And, in any case, the War-Check Vote 
 Amendment, which is clear and specific in the highest 
 degree, * would of itself prevent practically all international 
 wars because, as I then proved by history and, since then, 
 have proved much more thoroughly, no people on this earth 
 ever demands that its government either declare or make 
 international wars. 
 
 1 Especially as enlarged and improved in later years. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 837 
 
 For all these reasons, I did not, at that time, include in 
 my peace plan any other amendment than just that for the 
 War-Check Vote. I did, however, insist very strongly on 
 the slogan, later just a little enlarged to this: Heavy arma- 
 ment at all times to keep others from invading or attacking 1 
 us; the War-Check Vote at all times to keep us from invading 
 or attacking others." And I made it clear indeed that I, for 
 one, should have no objection whatsoever to the adoption 
 of a "heavy armament" amendment to the U. S. Constitu- 
 tion in addition to the amendment for the War-Check Vote, 
 in fact that I believed it would constitute at least a clear and 
 convincing command from the sovereign people of the United 
 States to their servants, the government, always to keep 
 sufficient military protection on hand to prevent any probable 
 invasion of this country. 2 
 
 THE PLAN— HOW RECEIVED 
 
 A strongly militaristic physician, as I finished, cried out: 
 "O Hades! Why do you make such a fuss about slaughtering 
 human beings? A man is only a bit of mud and water." 
 
 Another, more calmly: "There are plenty of human 
 beings. The most of them need killing anyhow." 
 
 "But those," I answered, "who need the killing do not, 
 in war time, get it. They receive instead power and safety 
 and honor and profits and, after the war, high diplomatic 
 positions and other social and political preferments." 
 
 Still another said: "Doctor Shastid's plan would involve 
 a change in our Constitution. I never could tolerate that, 
 although I believe that his plan would indeed stop all wars 
 between the nations." 3 
 
 1 The words, "or attacking," were thus twice added, because a foreign power could, 
 in fact, start a war with us by attacking our vessels on the high seas, though without an 
 invasion of our territory. 
 
 2 After the close of the First World War, in 1918, I, having learned from that conflict 
 the necessity for so doing, proposed an additional amendment to the Constitution whose 
 general tenor and purport may be sufficiently indicated by its opening words, as follows: 
 "Neither in peace nor in war shall the United States or any of their subdivisions, official 
 organizations or agencies, give or loan to any foreign nation or nations or any subdivision 
 of a foreign nation, or to any person or persons or organization or organizations on behalf 
 thereof, any money, credit, or supplies, or act as guarantor or surety in the case of any 
 foreign loan or loans as above described, without first submitting the question or questions 
 to a vote of the people of the United States at an election at which no other question or 
 questions shall be decided " 
 
 3 How often, in the following decades, I have heard that forceless objection! The plan 
 would stop international wars — thus, probably and eventually, save the human race — but 
 
838 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Yet another said, "I cannot believe other than that it is 
 never the governments that make or want wars. It is the 
 peoples, always, who push their governments into wars." 
 
 My answer was, "Doctor, you are well read in history. 
 You therefore know that, until the American Revolution 
 against Great Britain had given this country political free- 
 dom — a freedom which now has extended to some other 
 (but by no means to all other) nations of the world, the 
 masses in no country, from the very beginning of history 
 until 1776, had had any more voice in government (therefore 
 any more voice on war or no war) than had their masters' 
 horses, cattle, sheep and swine. Yet all the world was full 
 of wars in all those centuries and millenaries before that date. 
 Who, then, during that enormously long period, made all 
 the wars — i.e., when the peoples themselves could not pos- 
 sibly have made them, peoples who were not permitted to 
 learn even how to read and to write and who ofttimes did 
 not know that a war was on till some messenger from a 
 government came into the workshop or the field, and, spear 
 or gun in hand, commanded, 'Follow me and ask no ques- 
 tions'? 
 
 "And do you think that, after thousands of years of war- 
 making, the governments of the world all of a sudden, in 
 1776, turned anti-war?" 
 
 Well read as he was, he could not dispute the facts. 
 
 One man, a very earnest Christian, said: "When we 
 follow the teachings of the ministers of Christ, there will 
 be no more wars." When I showed him a few of the facts 
 about ministers in war-time — how, for example, whenever 
 a war had threatened, the great majority of Christian min- 
 isters immediately forsook their peace-time doctrine, and, 
 in its place, began preaching war — became, indeed, the loud- 
 est and most persistent mouthpieces of the pro-war party — 
 he was speechless. 
 
 The great majority, however, of those present at the 
 meeting, received the paper with considerable approval — 
 greatly, I confess, to my surprise. 
 
 it would necessarily mean an alteration in the Constitution. Therefore it should never be 
 adopted. 
 
 You would think, to listen to such objectors, that constitutions had not been devised 
 for the benefit of people, but that people had been invented and that they even still exist 
 solely for the benefit of important legal documents. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 839 
 
 However, no war at the time was anywhere threatening, 
 and, soon after, my address had been forgotten. Forgotten, 
 that is, except by one physician only, the first militarist 
 above mentioned, who did not like so great a palaver to be 
 made about the killing of human beings, mere little messes 
 of "mud and water." Always thereafter this man hated 
 me, and lost no chance to show me that he did. 
 
 He was the first of a very long line of enemies that, in the 
 course of decades, I have made simply by my teaching that 
 it is lunacy to leave the unlimited power to make war be- 
 tween the nations in the hands of the kind of people who 
 extract vast fortunes or vast powers and sometimes both out 
 of war. 
 
 As to the fellow's talk about men being only mere messes 
 of mud and water, nothing, I think, could have given my 
 soul a deeper offense. The only real value in life, to my 
 thinking, was life. Sans life, what else could matter? 
 
 So deeply imbued in fact had I early become with the 
 infinite meaning and the plainly inexpressible value of life 
 that I could not help respecting it even in the humble worm 
 or ameba. Sometimes, as I think I have already said, I 
 could not resist the most intense conviction that the rocks 
 themselves are not merely vast graveyards — a fact quite 
 plainly apparent on the least investigation — but that, in 
 addition, they, even the rocks of igneous origin, all possess 
 a sort of inherent, howsoever dim and indefinite, life — a 
 dull, but all-pervasive consciousness. 
 
 Impossible to think of the innumerable heavenly bodies 
 as being devoid of life, howsoever low or high their tem- 
 peratures ! 
 
 And, with a feeling like that in the inmost depths of me, 
 I never could honestly fellowship again the crude, inappre- 
 ciative scoffer at the highest forms of life and all life's 
 profound mysteries and lofty connotations — especially after he 
 had shown me plainly that he disliked me because I did not 
 also scoff. 
 
 I spoke frequently on peace, my particular plan for peace, 
 in Galesburg, Abingdon, Peoria, and also was very busy 
 
840 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 with my practice. 1 It was, too, in Galesburg that I publish- 
 ed the first of my long succession of medical articles. Yet, 
 too, I found much time for tramping. I read books by the 
 scores, by the hundreds, chiefly at the midnight lamp. 
 
 THE HOBO'S INSTABILITY 
 
 The sickness continued. Nothing, to be sure, but the 
 results of that old appendicitis, and yet, because of our lack 
 of true knowledge about such matters in that day, very ter- 
 rible indeed. 
 
 Then, too, the tramp had begun to get quite restless at 
 his much too steady job. 
 
 Old dreams began to float about his disrespectable head 
 — old dreams, this time, as it happened, of the law. 
 
 There were several reasons why I wished to study law, 
 not all of which can here be stated. Three were: 1. — At 
 Inveni I had often wished to be a lawyer. 2. — (quite obvious) 
 To indulge my old propensity for tramping. 3. — To enable 
 myself to deal more adequately, because of the Peace Plan, 
 with questions of public international law, of our own Con- 
 stitution and its judicial interpretation, and, in addition, 
 of comparative constitutional law. 
 
 But, first of all, I must get back health — if possible. 
 
 Three black, unspeakable, pain-filled years at Galesburg 
 — lost, all lost, so far as health and true happiness were con- 
 cerned, so far also as concerned material acquisitions. 
 
 Yet they were not quite all lost either. Out of that 
 raging hell of pain and incapacity and the intense longing 
 for continued life and the blessings of abundant health which 
 it engendered, had been born, I rather believe — The Plan. 
 
 1 This account of the beginning of the War-Check Vote movement is somewhat fuller 
 than the highly condensed one given in my "Tramping to Failure." Even this one, how- 
 ever, is not presented as a verbatim account of everything which passed, relative to the 
 W. C. V., at that meeting of the Galesburg, 111., Doctors Club on December 30, 1895. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 841 
 
 THE COMPANION DOES THE PACKING 
 The Companion would not let a professional packer pack 
 — nor any other kind of packer either. As for myself, I was 
 much too sick at the time of our leaving to pack or even to 
 assist at it. I insisted on a professional packer coming. "It 
 would be the cheapest in the long run," I urged, and no 
 doubt it would. But the Companion would not have it so. 
 "I told you I would show you how to save money," was 
 her repeated answer. 
 
 She was radiantly beautiful. The weather was terribly 
 hot, I was always worse in hot weather, and she felt quite 
 certain that, when we had removed to "the cool country," 
 I should be quite well again. If so, the making of money 
 would again be easy, and, as she had stated so often, so now 
 yet again she would state, that she would teach me how to 
 live on thin air and get fat at it. 1 
 
 There was a man who had been "blind" in one eye for 
 many years, a matter which suddenly assumed great im- 
 
 1 1 cannot leave the Galesburg part of my story without supplying this catch-all 
 footnote. 
 
 There was the townsman who ended his life because he was afraid to die, also the 
 countrywoman who said her legs had turned to glass so that, in consequence, she did not 
 dare to walk. Hewitt made her walk — run rapidly in fact, also go to work again and be 
 a good, happy housewife. There was the fellow who imagined he had murdered a man 
 that had died suddenly and mysteriously. He said that, catching the man out on a country 
 road, on the night in question, he had run a sharpened nail through the hairy part of his 
 temple and into the brain. At the earnest solicitation of the dead man's wife the body 
 was exhumed and examined, not far from the family graveyard, by Drs. Hewitt, Tovey 
 and myself. There was no sign of a wound in the temple or elsewhere. Later, the young 
 man was placed in a sanitarium, not for this but for other reasons. There was also the 
 dead body that Hewitt and I "posted" away over in another county. This body when 
 alive had been connected with a head which thought it had invented a breast-armor that 
 was absolutely bullet-proof. The head then had picked a quarrel with its wife's paramour. 
 The paramour had shot the body in the bullet-proof armor before the head had thought to 
 cause its hand to shoot the paramour. Something had happened then behind the armor. 
 Hence — our post-mortem. In yet another case a northwest Illinois blue-blood and only 
 child of a wealthy widow, having gone to a large city, mounted the stair to a bawdy-house 
 door, rang the bell. The person responding to the summons struck for reasons unknown 
 the blue-blood on the noggin with some hard object — from which assailment the blue-blood, 
 after having been brought to his northwest Illinois home, had died. Hewitt had attended. 
 The doctor (not Hewitt) who "posted" the case reported, "Death from injury by hold-up 
 man." (The blue-blood had not been robbed.) There was the maiden lady who, because 
 of old age, had forgotten her own name but who remembered clearly the name of a husband 
 she never had had, together with several never-existent children and a whole host of 
 equally never-existent grandchildren and great-grandchildren. God mercifully took this 
 good woman in the night and without pain. 
 
 There was my patient who imagined himself deaf. "But," said I, "you do hear me 
 and easily." "Yes," said he, "but you are only an imaginary person." There were a dozen 
 more young women who, at different times, had gone suddenly blind and then been brought 
 to see me, but who had no sign of trouble in their eyes. A very few days, or it might have 
 been hours, without the slightest treatment, sufficed to restore the vision. 
 
842 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 portance. In a quite recent brawl he had had the sighted 
 eye completely knocked out with a pair of brass knuckles, 
 so that I had to amputate that eye. Then, all of a sudden, 
 the sight in the formerly "blind" eye became normal again. 
 (This patient, I was clearly informed later, had been hand- 
 somely compensated years before by a well-to-do man for 
 having, through negligence, caused the "total blindness" 
 in the eye which now so suddenly and opportunely recovered 
 its vision.) 
 
 Hosts of less important memories also float back to me — 
 memories, however, with which I would not willingly part 
 — zillions of stories, for example, about his numerous patient- 
 characters wherewith Hewitt regaled me after his office hours 
 or on our rides. "What is 'money'?" Hewitt had asked 
 jestingly, he told me, of a patient who had come to pay 
 him some of that article. The answer: "Money is that 
 which, when you've saved his little boy's life, they have to 
 give you some of theirs." "That," said Hewitt, somewhat 
 hyperbolically, "was the finest use of the English language 
 that ever I have known." Another night: "I saw a Swede 
 at the post-office window to-day. The clerk said to him, 
 'Your letter is overweight.' 'Then I yust trim him off vit' 
 my knife.' 'No. It needs another stamp.' 'Vat you mean 
 den,' said the Swede, 'is dat de letter is understamp, 
 not overveight.' Shastid, we need that new word, under- 
 stamp." 
 
 I remember, too, the visit which my father and mother 
 made to Galesburg in the hope of benefitting my health — 
 in particular the many little scraps of conversation I heard 
 pass between Hewitt and my father. How extremely differ- 
 ent the two men were, yet how strongly they attracted each 
 other. The one young — only thirty, a year younger than I; 
 the other sixty-six (very old to me then). Both quite tall, 
 but the one blue-eyed and blond, the other as dark as an 
 Italian. My father shy, quiet, always anxious about some- 
 thing. Hewitt bold, eternally vivacious and absolutely care- 
 free, come what might. How they compared notes about 
 surgery, about medicine, about obstetrics, about Latin and 
 Greek particularly: Hewitt was an excellent classicist yet 
 my father's Latin and Greek were an eternal surprise and 
 astonishment to him. 
 
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 The X-ray and its meaning to the future were often in 
 their talk. Hewitt knew all about the action of those rays 
 as then understood, but he did not think they had much 
 future. My father saw more clearly what was coming: in 
 fact he scarcely beheld anything except in its relation to 
 the future and to the past. What had brought it about? 
 What would it lead to? I was with the two quite often both 
 in the Cottage Hospital and in the country. Always Hewitt 
 was quick, bold, his very presence and manner a stimulant to 
 recovery, to perfect health. My father was such a stimulant 
 too, but in a different way. And always when the three of 
 us had got back to the buggy, my father would point out 
 numerous dangers, possible disappointments, pitfalls, and 
 the like, which Hewitt had never thought of but for the 
 mention of which he was always decidedly grateful. 
 
 Both these men were inventive. Hewitt, I remember, was 
 working on a new kind of splint, showed the model thereof 
 to my father. Father at once suggested a number of im- 
 provements which Hewitt as quickly accepted and later 
 incorporated in his model and used in his cases. Yet I 
 doubt if ever he gave the world that splint. He was like my 
 father also in the fact that he did not like to write. My 
 father liked only to write affectionate and instructive letters 
 to his boys. Hewitt detested writing in any way, shape, 
 manner or form and for any purpose whatsoever. Besides, 
 he had no children. 
 
 When the two fell to talking about people — patients and 
 doctors alike — I had more chance to edge into the confab. 
 I remember that, one day, as we walked along the street, 
 Hewitt began asking questions of my father about old 
 Dr. Dublin, of Pittsfield. Father replied eulogistically, and, 
 when a pause came in the conversation, I told Hewitt a 
 number of new things that I chanced to remember about 
 Dublin — winding up, as it happened, with this remark, "So 
 you see that he had a terrific and wholly undisguised superi- 
 ority complex." 
 
 Hewitt seemed nettled. "Superiority complex?" 
 
 "Yes/' 
 
 "Hadn't he a right to it?" 
 
 "Why do you ask that?" 
 
 "Didn't you say he was Irish?" 
 
848 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 I did not press the debate, and, anyway, that night — the 
 night before my parents left for Pittsfield — we all ate dinner 
 at Hewitt's house — Mrs. Hewitt and the Doctor, my parents 
 and myself — and we sat up talking (quite sick though I was) 
 until long after midnight. 
 
 A few days later the Companion and I left Galesburg for 
 the cool country. She, poor child, worn out by the packing 
 of household goods and office effects, went into the sleeper 
 and lay down. Hewitt and I, sitting on a railroad truck by 
 the side of the sleeper, talked on and talked on. Presently 
 the whistle blew, the bell rang. 
 
 We both rose. Hewitt turned away his head. "It's going 
 to be mighty lonesome." He did not look at me again, but 
 ran quickly across the tracks and to where his horse and 
 buggy still stood that had brought us to the depot. 
 
 It had been a great friendship. It still is — though Hewitt 
 never writes. 
 
 THE "CRICK" 
 We settled, at first, in Battle Creek, Michigan, not for 
 me to practice medicine there but to recover my health. For 
 a considerable while I was much too sick to walk, therefore 
 spent my time completely at the sanitarium. Later we bought 
 a Lilliputian house at 175 Manchester Avenue, and I, grown 
 stronger, walked daily to and from the "San" for treatment. 
 In the matter of walking indeed I grew at length quite 
 capable again, though the intestinal trouble continued. In 
 our little house I wrote a number of medical and general 
 articles, also a tiny book called "Practising in Pike," which 
 was published also in Bulletin of the American Academy -of 
 Medicine. "A Country Doctor" (a brief eulogy of my father, 
 which is rather widely known) I had already written at 
 Galesburg and published in the Journal of the American Medical 
 Association, February 27, 1897. Afterwards it appeared illus- 
 trated and in the form of a very little book. 
 
 THE PEACE-PLAN TESTED 
 And now, for a very short time and for obvious reasons, 
 I shall have to break the rule I have generally observed in 
 this volume: namely, not to repeat any matter, save only 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 849 
 
 the bare chronology, I had used in the former story of my 
 life, "Tramping to Failure." 
 
 As I sojourned at "The Crick," I had, as it happened, a 
 perfect opportunity to find out for myself and while a war 
 was impending — later, actually in progress — just how the mas- 
 ses of the people did feel concerning war. At first I thought 
 that the masses were, without an exception, in favor of that 
 war. The most of the newspapers said flatly that they were. 
 So did the leading magazines. So, too, did many public 
 speakers. So, even to this day, do most of the histories. 
 
 I was especially shocked and amazed — though I had not 
 any cause at all to be so — to find that the ministers of Jesus, 
 almost without exception, were doing as always they had 
 done theretofore — laying aside their doctrine of non-resist- 
 ance under all circumstances, and out-shouting all the other 
 wild shouters for the conflict. 
 
 By the Congressional Record itself I discovered that Con- 
 gress had sent down into Cuba a committee of investigation 
 to ascertain the so-called truth about affairs in Cuba, and 
 then to report it to Congress. No less a person than Clara 
 Barton herself, organizer and first president of the American 
 Red Cross, had already testified, after the most careful and 
 accurate personal investigation in Cuba (1) That the de- 
 struction of property and the various alleged personal atroc- 
 ities in Cuba had been very grossly exaggerated. (2) That 
 the most of these that had really occurred, had been com- 
 mitted not by the Spaniards but by the insurrectos them- 
 selves. (3) That, in consequence, the Cuban Republic ought 
 not to be recognized by the United States. 
 
 A few fair newspapers told the truth about the situation, 
 about for example the American interests 1 which were doing 
 their utmost to engender a conflict, even to the extent of 
 sending filibusters and ammunition to the insurrectos, and, 
 secretly, intriguing to get the ammunition into the most 
 effective use. 
 
 President McKinley and Vice-President Garrett A. Hobart, 
 who, through the State Department, understood the situa- 
 
 1 On the part which "Sugar" played in begetting the Spanish- American War, see 
 Hamlin, "War Myth in U. S. History," page 64. 
 
850 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 tion, were both bitterly opposed to the war. So were all 
 the members of the cabinet, except two. Better than almost 
 any others in the United States could possibly have done, 
 they knew that war's non-necessity. Mark Hanna, leader 
 in the Senate, was against it tooth and nail. So was the 
 Speaker of the House. According to General Woodford, our 
 then Ambassador to Spain, there was not the slightest 
 necessity for the war. "Congress appropriated $50,000 for 
 the relief of Americans in Cuba, but, up to the fall of 1897, 
 only $6,000 of the $50,000 had been used, so little need was 
 there for it." (Hamlin, 'The War Myth in U. S. History," 
 page 66.^) "United States citizens owned wealth in Cuba to 
 the amount of $50,000,000 and our commerce with Cuba 
 amounted to $1,000,000,000 annually. These interests, of 
 course, demanded intervention. Our Department of State in 
 its correspondence with Spain estimated that $16,000,000 
 worth of American property had been destroyed in Cuba at 
 the close of 1897, for which property Spain was held re- 
 sponsible. This was a greatly exaggerated figure, for at the 
 close of the war a claims commission was created by Con- 
 gress to investigate those claims, and this commission rec- 
 ognized as valid claims amounting to only about $362,252." 
 (Op. cit., page 67.) 
 
 But all general knowledge of the really important facts 
 about the war were, so far as possible, suppressed. Powerful 
 interests, standing in the dense dark behind our central 
 government, nagged, even compelled, Congress on to the 
 war. 
 
 On February 15, 1898, the U. S. warship, Maine, at anchor 
 in the harbor of Havana, was blown up. Not a competent 
 historian in all the world to-day believes that that vessel 
 was blown up at the instigation of the Spanish government 
 or of Spanish business interests. But the very convenient 
 accident was seized upon by the American pro-war party 
 both in Congress and out of Congress, and, willy-nilly, we 
 had the war. 
 
 No conscription, in that small war, had to be resorted 
 to by our government. Only a few more than 200,000 soldiers 
 were asked for, and that number was easily obtained by 
 voluntary enlistment. However, not one man in eighty of 
 military age in the United States offered his services to his 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 851 
 
 country for that war. Of this last, all-important fact you 
 seldom hear the slightest mention. 
 
 At the Battle Creek "San" I met people from various 
 parts of the United States, and, much to my surprise — for 
 these were chiefly members of "the classes" — nearly all 
 were "with the President" — i.e., opposed to war. 
 
 Then I went out and talked with factory hands, section 
 hands, farm hands. At least nine-tenths of these were also 
 "with the President." 
 
 I made a vist to Chicago and vicinity. There too I found 
 that identical situation. Said one man on a hand-car, "We're 
 with the President. He's ag'in the war, an' doesn't he know 
 the facts? An' the Vice-President an' the cabinet, an' Mark 
 Hanna, an' the Spayker av the House. But most of Congress 
 wants the war. Now there's some nayger in the woodpile. 
 Not all of Congress naither, but a majority." 
 
 But most of the newspapers and the magazines declared 
 without cessation that the masses were wanting the war. 
 
 And, to this day, very many historians, although they 
 brand that war as both unjust and absolutely unnecessary, 
 nevertheless emphatically declare that it was forced upon 
 our government by the "great masses" of the United States. 
 
 Poor scapegoat masses! 
 
 Almost immediately after the close of the Spanish- Amer- 
 ican conflict, came our war in the Philippine Islands. This, 
 too, was absolutely unnecessary. Says Prof. C. H. Hamlin, 
 of Atlantic Christian College, in his "War Myth in U. S. 
 History," page 75: "During this period, the American army 
 resorted to every description of barbaric torture. Among 
 other measures, the policy of concentrating the inhabitants 
 in camps was resorted to, which was the same policy we 
 had objected to the use of by Spain in Cuba. Prisoners of 
 war were executed in retaliation for crimes of which they 
 knew nothing. One of our notorious army officers known as 
 'Hell-Roaring' Jake Smith commanded that every building 
 in a certain area be burned and every native over ten years 
 of age be slain. 
 
 "These three years of guerilla warfare cost the United 
 States $170,000,000. All of this expensive cruelty, aside 
 
852 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 from being unjust, was wholly unnecessary, for the natives 
 of the Philippines were willing to co-operate with the 
 United States to develop their civilization by peaceful 
 methods. The resistance was caused by the presence of 
 United States soldiers on the islands." 
 
 THE LAW SCHOOL 
 
 So far — as I have formerly stated — my health would im- 
 prove, and then no farther. Therefore went I one day over 
 to Michigan University, at Ann Arbor, there to consult 
 with Dr. Charles B. de Nancrede, professor of clinical surgery 
 in that institution. "If you'll stay in this city for one or 
 two whole years, I believe that I can cure you." So said he. 
 My old-time dreams of study at a law school began, at this, 
 to become more vivid. 
 
 One day, up we pulled our tiny stakes and moved over 
 to Ann Arbor. 
 
 Getting back health and studying law could now very 
 conveniently be carried on together. 
 
 Tramp-like, though, at the University, I entered — having 
 already received my Bachelor of Arts at Harvard — on what 
 was termed "the three-year combined course" for the Master 
 of Arts (one year of study in the Literary Department) and 
 the Bachelor of Laws (three years of study in the Law 
 School). 
 
 Four years' work altogether, to be accomplished in three 
 years. 
 
 One day, shortly after I had got started in my studies, 
 the dean called me into his office and handed me — actually! 
 — an anonymous letter to read, postmarked "Inveni." Who 
 had written it could have been told in three guesses. The 
 dean, as he gave it to me, said: "You may keep it if you 
 like. I have not read one-third of it. It is too bad that 
 people who write such things cannot be punished without 
 the expenditure of much energy, money and time." 1 
 
 Soon after my matriculation, I began to see the law as 
 something very different from what I had always imagined 
 it to be. Not indeed a vast confusion or hodge-podge of 
 
 1 Even in these old-age days at Duluth I have received an anonymous letter, this one 
 direct from its author, which, though postmarked with the name of a large western city, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 853 
 
 (as a whole) meaningless regulations, but a truly gigantic 
 attempt to impose upon what would otherwise have been 
 such a hodge-podge, some semblance of sanity, system, and 
 order. 
 
 My respect for the law was enormously increased. This 
 was a science, not indeed a natural science such as biology, 
 but a science of human relations — and, therefore, beyond all 
 others interesting. Another phase of life! A bird's eye view 
 of human life ! 
 
 Much illumination, too, it would, no doubt, spread, that 
 incomparable science, over the all-important subject of peace 
 and war. 
 
 Well, it certainly did — in some ways. 
 
 I studied, I believe, as never I had studied before. 
 
 And my health, too, began greatly to improve, thanks 
 to the ministrations of Dr. de Nancrede. 
 
 I had always, on my trampings and at my various hand- 
 outs, been something of a chap — as heretofore stated — to 
 put queries. Now, at Ann Arbor also, I decided to ask 
 questions and to ask them abundantly — questions, for ex- 
 ample, on comparative constitutional law, on private and 
 on public international law, also on the history of such 
 significant matters for the human race as peace and war, the 
 real causes which underlay these supremely important things, 
 the prospects (if any) for an early development of some trust- 
 worthy method for stopping wars — wars, at least, between 
 the nations. 
 
 Sooner or later, of course, as I talked with the more 
 accostable of the professors, I broached (quite as gently as 
 I could) my own particular plan for peace. 
 
 The varied "reactions" which I noted I have already 
 described at considerable length in "Tramping to Failure." 
 
 was filled to the brim with the odd-enough spirit of Inveni and revenge. After these long 
 years too! 
 
 Inasmuch as the President of Inveni and all his curious faculty had passed over the 
 horizon years and years before, this letter had been written by a former student of that 
 institution. 
 
 I filed it away alongside the numerous letters, nearly all commendatory, which had 
 come to my parents from my old-time teachers at Inveni. 
 
 It is a great curiosity, that letter — a strange human document. After all these years! 
 Of no importance, of course, except as a human document! 
 
854 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 SALLY 
 
 I cannot recall "those old Ann Arbor days" without at 
 least one word of heartfelt tribute to my old-time chum at 
 the Law School — Mr. Broussaix Sallee. 
 
 Sallee had taken his freshman year at the school the 
 year before I had taken my own. Then he had dropped out 
 for a year. Then he returned to the school in the fall of 
 1900 — which fact, as it happened, made us co-juniors. 
 
 He, too, was older than the average of our class, though 
 not so much older as I. By natural consequence, we, one 
 day, drifted together, and, having talked simultaneously 
 and continuously for perhaps three hours, discovered, each, 
 a certain fitness in the other, a common tramp-hood perhaps, 
 and so became as thoroughly sealed in that mysterious 
 order called "friendship" as were ever any twain in the 
 European universities of the middle ages. 
 
 He was a short, chunky, chap, with brown, curly hair, 
 lustrous and very active hazel eyes, and, withal, quite ruddy 
 cheeks and the shiningest of coral lips that any mere young 
 maid might have envied. A rather girlish-looking young 
 man. For which reason, the more especially as his surname 
 chanced to be Sallee, it was quite inevitable that, by a gang 
 like '02 Law at Michigan, he should be nicknamed "Sally." 
 
 ' 'Sally' ' he is to me still. So I ever addressed him through 
 after-years in my letters. 
 
 For which plain reason it happened that, once within 
 these later days at the Lakehead, when the Companion lay 
 ill, our temporary maid, who was "righting up" my study, 
 chanced upon a letter which I had started to "My dearest 
 Sally" and then had left unfinished upon my desk, and took 
 it instanter to the Companion with bright, bulging eyes 
 and lips filled with startling information and loud exclama- 
 tions. 
 
 Well, Sally was my chum. As my health improved, Sally 
 and I took walks together — great, long walks and many of 
 them. 
 
 On these we discussed the universe (for he, too, was an 
 incorrigible drifter and zigzagger) zoologically, botanically, 
 astronomically, geologically (not mathematically at all, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 855 
 
 you understand, at any time), medically, legally, and — most 
 of all — politically and historically. 
 
 "When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free 
 In the silken sails of infancy, 
 The tide of time flowed back with me." 
 
 So we used to shout together, as we hoofed it over the 
 roads of "Washtenaw County, ss." 
 
 And, of a truth, the tide of time did flow fondly back 
 with both of us, as we discoursed of kings and queens, dead 
 dynasties, deceased (if still secretly active) political prin- 
 ciples, and all the sense and nonsense of past ages that we 
 knew. 
 
 But when we talked of things historical, I gave to the 
 field of irenics (the science of plans for lasting peace) a 
 good, wide, berth. There was always in Sally at least a 
 touch of the highly aristocratic. He had come from one of 
 the blue-blood families of Kaintuck, and I feared lest — 
 So I gave to the Plan a good wide berth. 
 
 Then, long after our Law School days it was, in a letter 
 of effusion — after Armageddon in fact — I turned loose and 
 laid before him the whole War-Check Vote. 
 
 And behold he was heart and soul for that Plan, and 
 would gladly have been so all the time. 
 
 Which would have been a great advantage for the War- 
 Check, for, of all the quick and accurate minds it had been 
 my pleasure to know, Sally's I believe was the quickest and 
 most accurate. 1 
 
 THE COMPANION AT ANN ARBOR 
 The Companion was one of those women who live not 
 their own lives but those of their husbands, who, in other 
 words, belong to the great Sisterhood of Self-Sacrifice. In 
 this respect, again, she was the counterpart of my mother. 
 Loving her home, she went little into society. She did 
 her housework all by herself and in addition the typewriting 
 for all my work, the law work included. 
 
 1 Concerning the death of Sally on August 20, 1930, see "Tramping to Failure," page 474. 
 
856 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 It was here, while I was still a student at Ann Arbor, 
 that there came to the Companion and me the blackest 
 tragedy of our lives. 
 
 For here it was that our only child was born, a girl whom 
 we had decided to name for my mother, Louisa Minerva. 
 We had employed for the occasion of her birth what we at 
 least had thought to be the highest available skill. And 
 yet, when she entered this world, the back of her head had 
 been carelessly crushed and the respiratory center paralyzed. 
 
 For long hours I performed artificial respiration for her, 
 and, so long as I did that, she lived. But whenever I ceased 
 to do her breathing for her, she at once began to pass away. 
 
 Intolerable as was the thought, there was nothing else 
 to do than merely, at last, to hold her very tight against 
 my breast and let her return into the unknown. 
 
 Adding to the tragedy, the Companion, for well-nigh 
 two years after the coming and the departure of the baby, 
 was completely paralyzed in the lower extremities. 
 
 Since then we have had no children. 
 The years and the years! 
 
 Always and for everything, as Emerson has told us, 
 there are compensations. 
 
 A few years after the baby's death, when I was engaged 
 in medical practice in southern Illinois — the Companion act- 
 ing as my assistant in the office — there arrived, one day, 
 with eyes needing attention, a tiny maiden, who, on being 
 questioned by the Companion, turned out to have been 
 born on the very day whereon little Louisa had come to 
 us — and left. 
 
 This little Maiden, then, Miss Helen Margaret Lehman, 
 daughter of Professor Philip Lehman, Principal of the Carter- 
 ville, 111., Public Schools, we took to ourselves as a blessed 
 compensation for her we had lost; but, later, we knew her 
 clearly for her own sweet self in addition. 
 
 In such ways the world does somehow manage to move 
 bravely on. 1 
 
 1 Helen, in 1923, married Donald R. Husband, widely known attorney, Eugene, Ore. 
 Children: Patricia Jeanne, Donald Shastid and James Harris. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 857 
 
 FINIS AT MICHIGAN 
 
 I had greatly feared lest my too frank talk with some 
 four or five of the faculty members at Ann Arbor about my 
 referendum on war had so prejudiced the entire group against 
 me that, on the final examinations, they might, unconsci- 
 ously perhaps, be somewhat less than fair to me. 
 
 But Ann Arbor was not Inveni. 
 
 I received at that institution, just as I had planned to do, 
 not only the Master of Arts at the close of the second of 
 my years, but, at the close of the third and last of them, 
 the law degree also. I was, too, I add with not a little 
 pride, made one of the associate editors of the newly founded 
 Michigan Law Review, and my graduation thesis (an unusual 
 honor) was requested by the faculty for publication in that 
 scholarly magazine. 
 
 And away went all our class to Lansing, there to be 
 admitted to the Michigan bar. Then, some of us, myself 
 included, to Detroit for admission to the Federal courts also. 
 
 Graduation! Good-byes! A last look at Ann Arbor 
 from car-windows. Loud voices, trembling lips! 
 
 THE DARKNESS OF EGYPT 
 We tried, the Companion and I, she as my assistant in 
 the office, a number of the smaller towns in eastern and 
 southern Illinois, and, at length, the earlier towns having 
 proved too small for an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist, 
 wound up at Marion. We did not dare to locate in a very 
 large city at first, because we had too little cash to support 
 us while establishing a practice. To Chicago we meant to 
 move eventually. 
 
 And now a little word of self-defense. In my "Tramping 
 to Failure," when describing the removal of the Companion 
 and myself by wagon train from Harrisburg to Marion, I 
 wrote of our truly frightful experiences when crossing the 
 Tom Cain bottoms and, in particular, of the harrowing 
 suicide of a horse which occurred in the course of that trip. 
 I said, "Egypt 1 was a land, then as now, of innumerable 
 
 1 A common nickname then, as now, for southern Illinois. Another nickname was 
 "Eden," a term first applied, I believe, to southern Illinois by Charles Dickens in his novel, 
 "Martin Chuzzlewit." 
 
858 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 freshets and floods, and, about half way over to Marion, 
 our little caravan found that it had to 'negotiate' the Tom 
 Cain bottoms, half a mile in width, through 'three feet* of 
 water. The 'three feet,' however, we discovered when 
 about one-third the way across, were almost four. More- 
 over, the causey or road-on-embankment whereupon we had 
 thought to cross the bottom, was narrow indeed and, be- 
 sides, flanked, we were told, by very deep troughs, or 
 running excavations on each side. There was, therefore, 
 much danger that — inasmuch as nearly all the landmarks 
 were now under water — one of the drivers might, by missing 
 the way, tumble his wagon down into the roaring gulf 
 either to the right or the left of the causey. 
 
 "Nothing of the sort happened, but, all at once, some- 
 thing else did take place which, the Companion averred, 
 could never have come to pass in any other country on earth 
 than 'Eden.' The 'near' horse, that is to say, of the front- 
 wagon team, deliberately leaning forward, attempted to 
 drown himself. Believe it or not ! I had never heard or read 
 of such a thing before, but there it was going on before my 
 waking eyes. 
 
 "When this strange thing began, the entire procession, 
 of course, stopped stock still. The drivers of the front team 
 — there happened to be two such — shouted and cursed, and 
 one of them, running forward on the pole, attempted by 
 grasping the horse's collar to pull his head up out of the 
 water. 
 
 "In vain! The horse, it is true, would, from time to time, 
 when well-nigh suffocated, slowly draw up his head him- 
 self, cough thick jets of water to long distances and utter 
 demoniac yells of beastly disappointment. Then down he 
 would thrust that head again beneath the waves — which, of 
 course, rolled close enough around his nostrils anyway. 
 
 "The other driver ran up the pole, joining his eager 
 efforts to his companion's. 
 
 "No use. The alternate immersions and withdrawals of 
 the horse's head and the loud insensate shrieks of the 'crazy' 
 animal continued. 
 
 "The landscape turned blue-black. More rain began 
 falling. Lightnings forked the sky and thunders split the 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 859 
 
 darkness. The bitter Autumn wind raged fiercely and more 
 fiercely still. 
 
 "At a shouted command from one of the front drivers — 
 an owner of the caravan — the hinder wagons bunched to- 
 gether so that all their drivers could run forward over the 
 entire train and so join forces at the front wagon. 
 
 "Various devices were set up, some quite ingenious, for 
 the purpose of holding the horse's head up out of the water. 
 
 "But all to no purpose. 
 
 "That horse finally, definitively and forevermore com- 
 mitted suicide. Even as his body, relaxing, showed that 
 the struggle had attained its end, the men, releasing its 
 harness, somehow caused the 'off' horse to crowd the 
 suicider nearer and nearer to the raised road's edge. All at 
 once the dead body went over the edge and into the deeps." 
 
 Now it would hardly seem that an incident like that, 
 although it occurred in the very obscure district lying be- 
 tween Harrisburg on the east and South America 1 on the 
 west, should have excited in very many readers of my 
 "Tramping to Failure" a bitter and persistent incredulity. 
 
 1 Always, it seems, any person when naming a small town, does his utmost both to 
 emphasize its insignificance and to produce confusion in the minds of those who see or hear 
 the name employed. Thus, minute villages are ridiculously christened Paris, Liverpool, 
 London. Sometimes towns, minute or somewhat bigger, are given the names of states. 
 Kansas, Illinois, is such a town. A resident of Illinois therefore, will ofttimes ask such a 
 question as "Where is Billy Stickwell now?" The answer will then be, let us say, "O 
 Billy's moved to Kansas." The inquirer, supposing that Billy Stickwell has moved to the 
 state known as Kansas (perhaps he has never heard of Kansas, the small town) says to him- 
 self, "Moved into another state, has he? Well, I suppose I may just as well not attempt 
 to collect that bill he owes me, now that he's moved to another jurisdiction." Years later, 
 perhaps, he learns that Billy Stickwell had removed only to the town of Kansas — a town 
 that stands in the state of Illinois and, perhaps, is only thirty or forty miles away from the 
 town where the bill-holder still lives. But, by now, the bill may have become outlawed. 
 
 Is it not confusing that Mark Twain, who was born in Florida, was also born in 
 Missouri? There is a Wyoming in Delaware, an Iowa in Louisiana, an Ohio in Colorado, 
 a Georgia in Vermont. Very few states there are in the Union which do not have one or 
 more other states inside of them. Some states even contain whole nations. Thus England 
 is in Arkansas, Holland is in Michigan, Panama is in Nebraska, Norway is in Kansas, Peru 
 is in Massachusetts, Denmark is in South Carolina. And, as already stated, three or four 
 shacks near the Tom Cain bottoms in southern Illinois are dignified and uplifted by the 
 sonorous appellation of an entire continent — South America. 
 
 Then, too, why have so many towns, even in different states, been given the same name 
 — Marion, for instance? There are actually in the United States 33 Marions. (There are 
 only 31 Washingtons.) People in Marion, during the years that I lived there, were con- 
 stantly being bedevilled, delayed and confused by their mail matter, which had been ad- 
 dressed correctly to Marion, Illinois, going first to Marion, Indiana, then to Marion, Ohio, 
 then to Marion, Iowa, then to Marion, Kentucky, and so on. The man in the mail car 
 out of Chicago, had, of course, simply sighted the "Marion," and then, without looking 
 at the name of the state, had thrown the item into the wrong bag — done it repeatedly. 
 
860 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Yet such was actually the case. Letter after letter I received 
 on the subject. Several of the writers were kind enough to 
 say, for example, "all the rest of the volume bears the ear- 
 marks of frankness and truth," yet at the same time they 
 were unkind enough to doubt that any considerable part of 
 my story about the wagon-train trip from Harrisburg to 
 Marion was fact, especially the part about a horse's having 
 committed suicide. Now these and similar matters I treat 
 at some length in a later section of this volume called 
 "Repercussions of Autobiography." At this present point, 
 however, this Marion portion of this volume, I wish to deal 
 with this particular phase of incredulity, and, for the pur- 
 pose, reproduce herewith photographically and in full from 
 the Companion's Marion Scrapbook her clipping of an 
 article which, on December 4, 1905, appeared in "The Marion 
 Evening Post. ' ' The matter might seem of little importance, 
 but it appears to me essential that the reader understand 
 that both "Tramping to Failure" and "My Second Life" 
 are as true to fact as they can possibly be made without any 
 unnecessary and perhaps quite painful revelations of personal 
 identity. 
 
 Indeed in that former narrative of our journey into Marion 
 there was a subordinate incident which, in "Tramping to 
 Failure," I intentionally omitted but which now, for reasons 
 to appear hereafter, I desire to include. While the Com- 
 panion and I, in our vehicle, were gloomily waiting for the 
 suiciding horse to die, a man in another wagon who evident- 
 ly had either been drinking a little or else was in strangely 
 high natural spirits, played a curiously colored violin long 
 and loudly. For a time he would be telling a story which, 
 obviously, was leading on to something very smutty, and 
 then, just as he came to the offensive word he had all along 
 been rushing toward, he would suddenly stop talking and — 
 play the word, play it on the violin, and mirabile dictul more 
 clearly, sonorously and even more far-reachingly and intel- 
 ligibly than his or any other voice could by any means have 
 sung or spoken it. The impression produced by this really 
 skilful but of course low-bred performance — and in the 
 middle of that raging flood, and with the blood-curdling 
 yells of the suiciding horse resounding across the waters 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 861 
 
 from time to time — the poor animal's death cries, of course 
 — was truly more strikingly brutal and more lastingly horrible 
 (to appear again in my dreams from time to time) than ever 
 I have known from any other source. 
 
 EATING AN APPLE "OUT LOUD" 
 
 Immediately after I settled in Marion, there came before 
 me the following strange, yet, for Egypt, somewhat typical, 
 case. 
 
 In one of the rural schools, a few counties away from 
 ours, a small boy, one day, while school was in session, 
 amused himself with eating an apple out loud — very loud. 
 He had a grown brother who was large and strong, likewise 
 something of a bully, so — well, the small boy probably 
 thought "why not eat apples in just the way you like to 
 eat them?" 
 
 Man-teacher tried to punish noisy lad. Noisy lad resist- 
 ed. Teacher, becoming angry, struck noisy lad, accidentally, 
 I am certain, in one eye with the end of the ruler he had 
 intended to use on some other portion of the boy's anatomy. 
 
 Big, strong brother brought the little lad to me, but I 
 could do nothing for him. The eye had been destroyed. 
 
 The father of the lad then brought a claim for damages 
 against the unfortunate teacher, but got no money because 
 the teacher had none. 
 
 The injured boy's big brother and the injured boy him- 
 self waylaid the teacher, hog-tied him, and the injured boy 
 himself, with a dirty pocket-knife, destroyed one of the 
 teacher's eyes forevermore. 
 
 Then the teacher's sweetheart went back on him because 
 one of his eyes was now of glass. He left Egypt, and I never 
 heard of him again. 
 
 All of which long chain of eventful tragedy was set into 
 action merely by a schoolboy's eating an apple "out loud." 
 
 THE Y. OF P. AT CHIGGER CITY 
 Shortly after we had settled in Marion I received one 
 day a telegram that ran: "Have young man schoolteacher 
 nearly blind. Want your consultation. Meet me tomorrow 
 at my office in Chigger City. I guarantee fee collection. — 
 James Gunsaulus, Y. P." 
 
862 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 This was certainly an unusual message. In the first place 
 I had never in my life before known of any un-M.D'd doctor 
 to advertise, emphasize and deeply stamp-in the fact by 
 appending to his signature the give-away letters "Y. P." 
 This must be a man of the very frankest nature. Still, an 
 extreme of frankness is not always a good quality. Then, 
 as to the likelihood that my fee would be promptly paid, 
 "Doctor" Gunsaulus did, it is true, guarantee the payment. 
 But I had never heard of Dr. Gunsaulus before, and who 
 would guarantee his guaranty? 
 
 I betook me, there in Marion, to the office of a well 
 educated and very shrewd practitioner. To him I exhibited 
 the telegram. 
 
 "Ho, ho!" he cried, "Dr. Gunsaulus! Well, as Dr. 
 Gunsaulus guarantees 'collection,' the fee will almost cer- 
 tainly be collected. Whether, then, he will hand it on to 
 you is problematical, but I'm inclined to think he will. At 
 all events, when meeting Dr. Gunsaulus you will be asso- 
 ciating with one of the most unusual, dumbfounding, and 
 altogether memorable bits of humanity that anyone has ever 
 known. He has been about everything from bill-collector, 
 auctioneer, and deputy sheriff, to quack surgeon. He swears 
 before women and children, and has been known to blow 
 and wipe his nose on the patient's sheet." 
 
 A few minutes later I was on the train. Over the hills 
 and far away to Chigger City! 
 
 After two or three distressing changes of cars and a night 
 in a bad hotel I found myself, late the following forenoon, 
 climbing the most important thoroughfare — in fact there 
 was only one street in the "city" — and looking for the 
 office of James Gunsaulus, Y.P. (I do not use his actual 
 name, of course). All at once I was struck by the sight of a 
 ramshack, unpainted, two-story-and-a-half structure, with 
 a large sign in front jutting out from the stairway entrance 
 clean across the sidewalk. The sign read as follows: 
 
 James Gunsaulus, Y. P. 
 
 Not M.D., But Y.P. 
 
 Not Much Book-Learning But Great Experience 
 
 With sore misgiving I mounted the dirty stairs to arrive 
 
 in a hall running at right angles to their axis. After I had 
 
 passed from the faint light yielded by the stairway head, I 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
TROUBLES DIDN'T GOME 
 SINGLY WITH SHASTID 
 
 Doctor Moving From Harrisburg 
 Has Many Misfortunes. 
 
 If the saying, "Bad "start, good 
 end," has any truth in it, Dr. T. H. 
 Shastid, who is moving from Harris- 
 burg to this city, should have great 
 success in Marion. 
 
 He certainly has had his share of 
 hard luck in getting moved to this 
 city. 
 
 His household goods were being 
 moved from Harrisburg in wagons 
 Saturday morning, having been taken 
 ; out of that city early thaat morning, 
 ibut have not all arrived in Marion 
 j yet. 
 
 I A horse of one of the teams, which' 
 j belonged to John Moody of this city, 
 l fell in some high water a few miles 
 | this side of Harrisburg and was 
 drowned. The wagon to which he 
 was hitched was set out to one side 
 of the road and left. 
 
 Then when the other wagons were 
 about half way from Harrisburg'to 
 Marion, a team driven by a man 
 named Jones, from Harrisburg, 
 balked and could not be induced to 
 move any farther 
 
 Jones put up for the night with 
 a farmer and the next morning he 
 got another to bring part of the 
 wagon load of goods into Marion, 
 the latter arriving- Sunday afternoon- 
 There was yet another wagon load 
 of Dr Shastid's goods in Harrisburg, 
 j so Jones returned to town after that 
 1 and was expected to get into Marion 
 | this afternoon with that and that 
 [part of his first load which was left 
 I at the farmer's house. 
 j Jones was the hindmost man of 
 'the several who were hauling wagon 
 loads of Dr. Shasfid's goods, feo" fhat 
 the others did not know of his mis- 
 fortune and didn't know where he 
 was until the farmer arrived with a 
 part of his load Sunday afternoon. 
 
 The Moody team was being driven ! 
 by one of Mr. Moody's boys, when ' 
 one of the horses was drowned, and j 
 the boy came on to town with the j 
 other horse. He was sent back Sun- 
 day afternoon with another team I 
 and was expected to reach Marion | 
 with, the wagon load of goods this 
 afternoon. 
 
 In regard to why the Moody horse 
 drowned, several theories have been 
 advanced. One is that, the horse was 
 warmed up by his -pull out of Harris- 
 burg and when he struck the high ' 
 water in the Tom Cain bottom, where 1 
 the accident occurred, he was stride- I 
 en with cramps and fell. Another j 
 is that he slipped -off a grade and j 
 fell, after which he became entangled ! 
 in the harness and could not rise, j 
 But probably the true theory is that ' 
 the horse became obstinate and laid | 
 down, as he was known to have a j 
 habit of doing that. 
 
 The same horse had been rescued ! 
 from drowning under similar circum- ! 
 stances on two or three different pre- . 
 vious occasions. Dr. Shastid says 
 he saw the horse lying in the water ' 
 before he died and that it looked like 
 a case of deliberate suicide to him. 
 as the animal didn't appear to make 
 any effort to hold his head out of 
 the water, which the doctor says was 
 shallow 
 
 The loss falls very heavily upon [ 
 Mr. Moody, who is a poor man artd. | 
 had only the two horses, with which 
 he made his living. 
 
 Dr Shastid is an eye, ear and , 
 throat specialist, who has been visit-! 
 ttig 'Marion for the past few months. [ 
 He has now located permanently in 
 Marion and has. moved his family 
 itiio Mrs. Augusta Snider's lesidence , 
 property on South Market street ' 
 
 NEWS ARTICLE FROM THE MARION EVENING POST, DECEMBER 4, 1905 
 
 On our journey to Marion and the suicide of one of our horses. Despite considerable 
 carelessness and inaccuracy on the part of the newspaper's reporter, the fact must plain- 
 ly stand out that that horse did actually commit suicide — the important matter. 
 
 (Photographic reproduction, but reduced in size to l /i) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 866 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 867 
 
 could do nothing but inch my feet along with the utmost 
 care while at the same time searching with a hand for some 
 indication of an office door. At last the hand struck a knob. 
 I paused, turned the knob, threw the door open and stepped 
 into a fairly well-lighted and extremely curious room. To 
 the left hung a huge male skeleton by an immense brass ring 
 in the top of his head. To the right, against the wall, stood 
 a four-shelf book-case. The upper two shelves were filled 
 with medicines, empty bottles, corks, and a pair of rusty 
 scales. In the lower two shelves reposed a number of cob- 
 webbed volumes — Gunn's "Family Doctor," Flint's "Prac- 
 tice of Medicine" (edition somewhere in the 70 's), a number 
 of free reprints, several drug-store almanacs, and a framed 
 license to practice medicine, granted on the ground that the 
 recipient had already practiced medicine for a decade or more 
 before any law had been passed in Illionis to regulate medical 
 practice. 
 
 In the center of the room was a table. Investigating, I 
 found it covered with old-time joke books, a leather-bound 
 volume on horse-doctoring, and, to crown all, a very recent 
 copy of The American Journal of Clinical Medicine, with a 
 large and highly colored blotter sticking out from among 
 its leaves, and, quite evidently, now employed as a ready-to- 
 hand book-mark. Turning to the place denoted by the blot- 
 ter, I beheld, in all its glory, one of a series of excellent 
 articles on "Eye Symptoms in General Diseases," by Thomas 
 Hall Shastid, M.D. I could hardly miss the compliment, 
 and yet it was not too brazenly set forth either. 
 
 But where was Dr. Gunsaulus? Looking at the farther 
 end of the room, I beheld a primitive writing desk, an 
 empty swivel chair behind it. Beyond the chair draped a 
 dusty curtain, and, two or three feet behind the curtain, 
 a dusty and cobwebbed window looked upon the street. 
 
 For a moment or two, although I stood between the 
 curtain and the window, I did not perceive the chief feature 
 of the apartment — a tall step-ladder. The top of the ladder, 
 I now noted, stood level with the sill of a small attic door, 
 a door which plainly opened into a part of the attic which 
 came down lower than most of the ceiling of the room I was 
 in, and whereon appeared these letters, crudely painted — 
 
 CONSULTATION ROOM 
 
868 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 I shouted toward the attic door, "Doctor Gunsaulus! 
 Doctor Gunsaulus!" No response forthcoming, I cupped 
 both hands to my mouth by way of preparation for shouting 
 still louder, when all at once— bang! Some heavy object 
 struck the floor-center of the room wherein I stood, and 
 shocked, as it seemed, the entire building into terrific vibra- 
 tion. 
 
 I whirled, and lo! A rather tall, certainly very paunchy, 
 gentleman who had obviously slid down toward the floor 
 behind me from a large round opening in the ceiling by 
 means of a piece of thick rope — and then let go. 
 
 "Dr. Shastid, I suppose," he shouted, waving his hand. 
 "Dr. James Gunsaulus at your service!" Without giving me 
 time to reply, he went on: "I suppose you wish to proceed 
 now and see those schoolteacher's eyes. Very well. We go. 
 My horse and buggy will be here in a few minutes, but them 
 I am saving for a very long ride." 
 
 When we had reached the sidewalk at the bottom of the 
 stair, he went on, "The young man — name's Wyerbush — 
 lives with his widowed mother, several sisters and brothers, 
 in the family farmhouse just across the edge of town." 
 Then, as we kept walking, he gave me a detailed history 
 of the case. It all amounted to this, he finally said: "The 
 young man has been too ambitious, much too ambitious, 
 worked too hard — by far too hard — and so he has consump- 
 tion. Lately the disease has attacked his eyes. Now he is 
 blind. I have already told his mother that the case is 
 hopeless, perfectly hopeless, but when she insisted on hav- 
 ing counsel, I told her I'd wire you to come if she and the 
 other children would feel better satisfied." 
 
 Now that I had the case-history in hand, I began to ask 
 the doctor about the possibility of my starting back home 
 on the 3:00 o'clock train. Finally, looking at my watch, 
 I observed, "It's almost half an hour since we came out of 
 your office, and I thought that this patient and his people 
 'lived just across the edge of the city.' 
 
 "It's really a pretty good joke," he said. "The smaller 
 a city, now and then, the broader is its edge. And this 
 little place is nearly all edge — like London. However, here 
 we are at last. What think of the place? I like it." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 869 
 
 I paused at his side and looked over the farmstead. In- 
 deed it was no ill-looking affair. Like most of the Egyptian 
 farmhouses, to be sure, it consisted of a pair of small log cabins 
 connected by a central-porch, or porch-roof, wide-open to 
 the weather both in front and behind. One point, however, 
 strongly in favor of the family's being intelligent, therefore 
 excellent to work for, was the fact that the logs, instead of 
 having been left round and unworked after the fashion of 
 most of the Egyptian houses, had been chipped and squared, 
 also deeply notched (scribed) and fitted together at the 
 corners. Then, too, there was glass in all the windows, 
 while the fireplace and chimney, instead of being built with 
 split sticks and yellow clay, had been neatly and solidly 
 constructed of good red bricks and sharp-sand mortar. 
 
 Most impressive feature of the whole place, however, 
 at least by way of index to the character, intelligence and 
 good taste of the owners, was the fact that there was (ac- 
 tually!) a privy. This little structure, although unpainted, 
 displayed in its gable end (the one turned toward the street, 
 or road) and for the purpose of constant ventilation, a 
 large, lovely sawed-out crescent and a little star. The tiny 
 building, moreover, had not been relegated to some obscure 
 spot in the rear of the cabin, but had been erected promi- 
 nently and proudly in the front yard — not really close to the 
 front gate, but not very far from it either — just where its 
 presence could not possibly be ignored. 
 
 And here it is necessary to explain that, as to the homes 
 of all the more shiftless, less up and coming families, the 
 only provisions made for sewage-sanitation and the like, 
 was that the field, wood, or cane-brake, on one side of the 
 house, was set apart for the women and girls of the family, 
 while, on the other side, the corresponding field, wood, or 
 cane-break, was set aside for the men and the boys. 1 And 
 
 I I once knew a Mr. Alfred Tyman, now long ago deceased, who lived in the "crotch 
 of a big creek," in other words, a place where two smallish branches ran together to form 
 a sizable stream. At the very point where the branches came together, and inside, not 
 outside, the land embraced between them, he had constructed his house. This situation 
 was not quite so bad as, at first blush, it sounded, for, at the seemingly unstrategic point, 
 the terrain was good solid rock upstanding several feet above the surrounding mud forma- 
 tion. The boys' side was to the right of the right branch of the Y, the girls' to the left side 
 of the left branch. Several times a year a freshet occurred. The two bridges which crossed 
 the two forks of the stream were carried away, and then both boys and girls resorted to 
 "indoor crockery," or, as the less fastidious people of the North say, to "chambers." In 
 the morning the crockery would all be duly emptied into the corresponding forks of the 
 
870 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 one of the most highly condemned misdeeds in the criminal 
 calendar of southern Illinois was for any man or boy to 
 trespass on the distaff side of the field — unless indeed he 
 was compelled to be there by stern necessity : plowing or 
 cultivating, cutting down trees or the like. 
 
 Inside the house I meet the teacher and his family — he 
 must have twelve or fourteen sisters and brothers all told. 
 I find not tuberculosis of the eyes, but syphilitic iritis. 
 Gunsaulus understands my polysyllabic diagnosis, and so 
 does the teacher — saying nothing. The eyes water too fast 
 for the atropin to take effect. I inject morphine into an 
 arm. The eyes dry. The atropin absorbs, the pupils dilate, 
 the young man begins to see again. His pains are not so bad. 
 I prepare and leave him adequate anti-syphilitic treatment 
 for a month (we had no 606 in those days), instruct the 
 doctor how to watch its effects, and then — all at once the 
 doctor falls into a panicky rush to go and make that ride. 
 
 Breathless we run back to the fleshy doctor's office, and 
 there, puffing like a steam calliope, he hands me a twenty- 
 dollar bill saying, "I told you I guaranteed collection. There 
 you are. That was the best I could do for you — they would 
 not pay more — now I must be going." We rush down street 
 together for about fifty feet, to where the doctor's rig is 
 waiting. Into it he suddenly jumps, and away he drives 
 speedily — giving me no time whatever in which to comment 
 on the adequacy or inadequacy of the fee he has just handed 
 over. 
 
 Going down to the depot I found I had four more hours 
 to wait. All at once it popped into my head that I had not 
 left with the mother the bottle of atropin drops with which 
 I had told her to keep her son's pupils dilated. Back went 
 I to the farmhouse and handed over the drops. Mrs. Wyer- 
 bush reached out both her hands to mine and fairly dragged 
 me into the living room. Her face was radiant, and so too 
 was that of the young teacher. In my absence the drops had 
 kept on releasing the two imprisoned irises of those eyes. 
 
 stream. One day, when I had dropped into this house to treat an eye for Mrs. Alf, one of 
 the boys, perhaps six years of age, came up and demanded brazenly, "Why can't I, Pappy, 
 go over on the girls' side?" "Just because," was the answer, "the little boy-birds and the 
 little girl-birds each has their own side to go to, and we can't none of us run ag'in 'natur'." 
 With this explanation the little boy seemed not wholly satisfied. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 871 
 
 And now the young chap was crying ecstatically, "I see 
 as well as ever! I see as well as ever! And there isn't any 
 pain in my eyes any more!" 
 
 To these very acceptable remarks Mrs. Wyerbush added, 
 "That's once old Gunsaulus didn't lie to us. You shore are 
 one good eye-doctor. An' we don't mind paying a big fee 
 when we get real skill — like yourn. And now set right up 
 to table, dinner's ready and I'm so glad you've come back 
 an' kin eat with us." 
 
 I joined these excellent people in one of the pleasantest 
 social functions I have ever enjoyed. In the course of our 
 conversation it came out that Dr. Gunsaulus, when he had 
 received his license to practice medicine and surgery, had in 
 fact not practiced the full ten years required by the law of a 
 Y. of P. man, but a short three years only. There were, 
 however, people of standing who had certified in writing 
 that he had treated them ten and even fifteen years ago. For 
 this and for that and for the other. And, in that way, he 
 had actually got his license — he, an old-time keeper of a 
 billiard hall and athletic parlor and so on. "The only reason 
 that weuns ever has had him for our doctor," commented 
 Mrs. Wyerbush, "is that he is the only doctor in this place 
 and fer several miles around it." 
 
 Over and over Mrs. Wyerbush expressed her gratitude 
 to the Creator for having guided her, as she in her prayers 
 had requested, to the skill which had restored to her son 
 his sight. "Thank God, thank God, thank God!" So she 
 cried again and again. 
 
 After a time she began quoting passages from the Scrip- 
 tures at such great length and so very, very accurately that 
 I was truly amazed — the more especially as she herself in- 
 formed me that she was totally unable to read either writing 
 or print. "That's why," she explained, "I have to carry 
 most of my Bible in my head." Always interested in the 
 Egyptian character, I asked her numerous questions about 
 both her religious and her social life. She believed that God 
 himself had actually written the Bible with his own hand 
 and in the English language. When, in connection with 
 some or another matter, she recited for me the whole of the 
 Ten Commandments, I learned that she did not know that 
 what were supposed to be the same Ten Commandments 
 
872 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 were stated in the Bible three times and in two almost en- 
 tirely different forms. Neither did she understand that, in 
 their first form (Ex. XX and Deut. V) the Ten Command- 
 ments forbade adultery but not fornication, while in their 
 second (final) form (Ex. XXXIV) they forbade neither 
 adultery nor fornication. Neither did she understand that 
 "the five books of Moses" were not so called anywhere 
 within these books themselves, and that they had been 
 mistakenly so designated only hundreds of years after their 
 composition in their present form. Neither had any of her 
 religious instructors ever told her that the so-called "five 
 books of Moses," in the form in which they now stand, 
 had not been composed earlier than 400 B. C. and that, at 
 that time, they were simply made up, or put together, from 
 clippings, each book not from one former author of it but 
 from several. These and many other elementary facts about 
 the Bible she knew nothing at all about. God himself had 
 written the book all at one time and in the English language 
 and handed it to the preachers. Nevertheless, she had a 
 prodigious memory, and every word she uttered disclosed 
 at least a beautiful personality — a fine, sweet, even sublime 
 and enduring way of life. 
 
 In the midst of my reflections about her and the beauty 
 of her mind, I was interrupted by the son's enthusiastic 
 question, "What do you think of my mother, Doctor?" 
 
 "One of the finest I have ever known," I answered. But 
 "Mother" herself, far from any readiness to discuss her own 
 virtues, questions in her turn, "And what do you think of 
 my son?" 
 
 "A bad, bad son," whispered the young schoolteacher, 
 knowing I understood him and lowering his head. 
 
 "Now I must be gone," I said. "May God bless you 
 both." 
 
 "God bless you too!" cried the mother, her eyes full of 
 grateful tears for the really simple services I had rendered. 
 "And now I got to ask yer forgiveness, Doctor," she ad- 
 mitted. "Yes, I surely done you wrong — I suppose Dr. Gun- 
 saulus told you what I said about you when he insisted you 
 would charge us $50." 
 
 "Fifty dollars!" I cried. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 873 
 
 "Why yes, of course," she said, standing aghast. "He 
 told us, the very first thing, that you had wired him back 
 that you wouldn't stir a step in our direction till first he 
 had collected from us for you the sum of fifty dollars." 
 
 I was too dumbfounded to speak. 
 
 "Is there anything the matter?" asked Mrs. Wyerbush. 
 
 "Matter? Matter? Oh yes. And did you pay Dr. Gun- 
 saulus $50, all of it to be turned over to me as my fee?" 
 
 "Shore did. 1 He said his own trouble in the matter 
 would be just $3-00, all put together. We paid him that too." 
 
 "And do you by any chance happen to have taken from 
 Dr. Gunsaulus a receipt for my part of the bill?" 
 
 "I shore have. Look at this." Going to the cupboard, 
 she returned with a bit of cheap paper. I took it, looked 
 over its illiterate scrawl in amazement. It actually ran — 
 
 "Got fifty for Shastid and all is well. 
 Them as don't like it can go to hell." 2 
 
 There was no signature whatever to the paper, no date, or 
 name of the person from whom the money had been received. 
 
 For a moment I thought I would ask the privilege of 
 taking the "receipt" home with me, afterwards to use it for 
 the purpose of straightening up the crooked Gunsaulus. But 
 when I reflected that I had no means whatever of actually 
 proving that this ethical gentleman had paid me only $20, 
 and had kept the rest for himself, I saw that, almost illit- 
 erate mountebank though he was, he was master of the 
 situation. 
 
 I, however, did plainly inform both Mrs. Wyerbush and 
 her son of the smallness of the sum that had been paid to me. 
 
 Thereupon she, like the fine woman that she was, offered 
 to make good to me the thirty-dollar shortage. Needless to 
 
 1 In the matter of southern Illinois dialect I have from time to time refreshed my 
 memory by reference to the excellent little treatise by Wm. O. Rice, Anna, Illinois, en- 
 titled "The Pioneer Dialect of Southern Illinois," and published by the American Dialect 
 Society in 1902. 
 
 2 Many Egyptians had even more peculiar ways of writing receipts. Into this subject 
 I have no space to enter here in detail, but can only say that many a man in Egypt, if he 
 did not like the size of a bill, would, ofttimes, pay it, and then demand a receipt reading, 
 "In full from the birth of Christ to the death of the Devil." Just what did that mean? 
 It meant that the payer of the bill would never again do business with the payee so long 
 as time lasted — the Devil being doomed never to die, of course. Sometimes, I was credibly 
 informed (by Dr. Edward M. Cates, of Wayne City, and others) an Egyptian who had 
 demanded a death-of-the-Devil receipt, would, after folding it up and tucking it into a 
 pocket, give you even far more emphatic disapproval of what you had called your "bill". 
 
874 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 say, I refused to let her do so, but listened intently to what 
 she was saying about this same Gunsaulus "once when he 
 was collecting money for our church after it'd been hit by 
 a storm. 
 
 "He jest went out hisself into the big light of a gasoline 
 torch on the street in this little city, an' got a crowd around 
 him by playin' his old fiddle an' singin' dirty songs to it, 
 only when he come to the very dirtiest words, he let the 
 fiddle say 'em instead of sayin' 'em hisself." 
 
 Oho! at last I recognized this man, Gunsaulus. For 
 several hours it had been running round inside of me that 
 I had met the curious fellow before. And now — Well, he 
 was the very same person who, as the Companion and I 
 were moving from Harrisburg to Marion, had dead-headed 
 his passage on one of our wagons, and — as when he was 
 begging for the church — had sung lewdly and played the 
 dirtiest of all his words on the fiddle. 
 
 "Mother" was finishing her tirade. "Some says he stole 
 most of what he collected. I could almost wish he did, 
 seein' the how he got it, and in fact I was goin' to object to 
 our church's takin' even a penny of that money — but laws! 
 the most of the members says, 'Well, if that money's tainted, 
 spend it on the church and untaint it.' 'Pears like some folks 
 don't get offended at nobody ner nothin' in these days, 'spe- 
 cially when money— but you ain't eatin' all your chicken." 
 
 SHASTID'S UMBRELLA 
 There was another event in connection with my settle- 
 ment — rather my later professional success — in Marion, 
 which I related in "Tramping to Failure" and which has 
 excited in some of my correspondents considerable incredul- 
 ity. I refer to "Shastid's Umbrella." Just why any human 
 being should think it "ridiculously unbelievable" (as one 
 writer puts it) that any student at the University of Michigan 
 Law School who carried an umbrella more frequently perhaps 
 than the average rainfall of the southern portion of that 
 state would appear to justify completely — even to the tenth 
 of one little precipitation inch — should be jibed and joshed 
 and hilariously roasted, for that least bit of excessive anxiety 
 to keep his hide dry — why, I say, any person on earth should 
 show himself skeptical about any group of students ever 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 875 
 
 doing such an unseemly thing as that, I do not know. Why! 
 all students in all places josh all sorts of persons, even extra- 
 solemn persons like myself, for all sorts of reasons, semi- 
 reasons and no reasons whatever, As, for example, that he 
 has a heavy head of hair, or that he has no hair, or that he 
 has too much or too little information inside the knob on 
 which his hair either should or should not be. 
 
 At all events, it is a fact that the story — I ought perhaps 
 to say the stories, for there were very many of them — about 
 Shastid's umbrella, which had created so much laughter- 
 soreness in the embryonic legal bellies at Ann Arbor, did, 
 in precisely the manner I have hitherto narrated, get trans- 
 ported from Ann Arbor to Marion, in which somewhat clan- 
 nish little city they played a curious and not unimportant 
 role in the medical affairs of Egypt. But further about this 
 matter can be read in the footnote below, in case the reader 
 be skeptical enough or otherwise interested enough to 
 peruse it. 1 
 
 1 Along in the spring of 1937 I was repeatedly urged by members of the Nought-Two 
 (my) Law class of the University of Michigan to appear in Ann Arbor at the thirty-fifth 
 anniversary re-union of that class and to speak before it. The joke was that I am a very 
 poor speaker. 
 
 Unable to attend, I wrote not only my regrets to the inviters but also to my classmate, 
 Att'y Schmiedeskamp, of Quincy, Illinois, a letter which follows and which ought, in all 
 conscience, to be self-explanatory. 
 
 207-208 Sell wood Bldg., 
 Duluth, Minnesota 
 June 28, 1937. 
 My dear Schmiedeskamp: 
 
 Your letter of June 24 is at hand, and I do certainly appreciate it. I have learned from 
 it with an especial pleasure about the reading to the class of the letter I had written for our 
 thirty-fifth re-union. In fact I had thought for a time I would send to Walsh or Mac or 
 you or Veasey a letter written for this recent meeting, but circumstances conspired against 
 my getting round to write it. 
 
 Even more I regretted my inability to attend, but Mrs. Shastid at the time was far too 
 sick. She is much better now and has become quite jocular and like her old self. 
 
 I was certainly sorry to learn that Ohlinger is totally bald. They say it is a great 
 advantage to almost any lawyer to be bare-faced, but there is certainly nothing desirable 
 in his becoming bald-headed. (The true expression of the scalp might then be noticed.) 
 Even the rest of the class, you say, are all at least "gray-heads." Well, of course. I suppose 
 the very youngest among them must be 56 years old by now, and the average 59 or 60. I, 
 of course, am considerably older than the average: in fact I shall be 71 on the 19th of next 
 month. (Yet I'll wager I'm in nearly as good condition as any of the younger chaps: a fact 
 due chiefly to my habit of going about always well-sheltered beneath a good, strong um- 
 brella.) For the reason that I am so much older than most of the other members it was that 
 I recently completed my autobiography (wherein I give myself completely away) ere the 
 days draw nigh wherein my hand shall have lost its cunning to write — or to hold up a 
 rainshed. 
 
 Speaking of bumbershoots, I have handed to my trusted umbrella a laudatory notice in 
 the aforesaid autobiography, where I also tell the tale of how, when I was well-nigh starv- 
 
876 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Anyway, reader interested or reader uninterested; reader 
 skeptical or reader absolutely credulous, the fact remains 
 that silly stories about Shastid's umbrella built Shastid a 
 good practice in southern Illinois when, otherwise, he would 
 
 ing in the deeps of southern Illinois (Egypt) that same umbrella (at least the -story, or one 
 of the stories, about it) was the means of establishing a (somewhat) lucrative practice 
 for me. 
 
 By the bye, in a restaurant the other day I found a piece of newspaper containing an 
 article by the celebrated columnist, O. O. Mclntire. Part of that article said: "To me 
 there is always something substantial and well-nigh respectable about a man who carries 
 a neatly folded umbrella. It's a badge of steady-going dependability. [Think of that — 
 in a member of '02 Law!] Among the umbrella carriers [he runs on] that pop into my 
 mind is Professor Wm. Lyon Phelps. I have seldom seen him without an umbrella." Now 
 Schmiede, if a mere professor of English in a university so unimportant as Yale, can achieve 
 almost respectability by carrying "a neatly folded umbrella," what cannot be said for a 
 member of '02 Law at a university like Michigan, who goes forth, not just on some days 
 but on almost every day, carrying an umbrella — sometimes two umbrellas — and, in addition, 
 wearing rubbers, raincoat and a waterproof muffler? 
 
 I tell you, Schmiede, the more we think about such matters, why — the more we shall 
 go on thinking about them. 
 
 I have another newspaper clipping which concerns this same serious subject. It runs: 
 "Singapore: — Eleven-year-old Prince Amada Mahidor was proclaimed King of Siam today, 
 brother of the moon, supreme arbiter of the ebb and flow of the tides, and possessor of 24 
 umbrellas." 
 
 I do not believe that I can ever supremely arbitrate "the ebb and flow of the tides," 
 but I do have two moon-faced brothers, I can keep out of the wet and I am confident that, 
 in my day, I have been the possessor of more, far more, than just two dozen umbrellas — 
 not all simultaneously, of course, and possibly not all of them exactly my own, but sorta. 
 
 This reminds me of a certain ingratitude even among some non-legal persons. I happen 
 to have (strange as the fact may seem to you) here in Duluth, a ministerial friend — one who 
 has often treated my umbrellas with unseemly jocularity. One day when I was out in the 
 rain — with, of course, one of my ever-trusty umbrellas — I ran across this wolf in wet cloth- 
 ing and he asked me to share with him the shelter of my umbrella. Being a better Christian 
 than he was (I always admit the truth) and forgetting and forgiving everything, I granted 
 his shivering plea. And about the first thing he said then was, "Dr. Shastid, you do carry 
 an umbrella rather too much of the time, don't you?" 
 
 I said, stiffening considerably, "Yes, and I expect to take my umbrella with me up to 
 heaven too." 
 
 Said then the reverend gentleman, after a moment's reflection, "You'd better make it 
 a parachute, Doctor: you won't stay there long." 
 
 Do you remember "Caps and Gowns"? Do you recall how incongruous they were with 
 umbrellas? 
 
 Inasmuch as I cannot indite a separate and individual missive to every member of '02 
 Law (a thing I should very much like to be able to do) I think I will just send to each of 
 them a copy of "these presents" in order that there may hereafter be no more misunder- 
 standing on the subject of Shastid's umbrella. 
 
 Yours very classmatically, 
 
 T. H. SHASTID, 
 
 (The original umbrella man.) 
 
 That this letter may possess for the casual reader of this volume at least some probative 
 value, I herewith submit (for the most part of course condensing) some of the replies I 
 received from various members of the class — giving in almost every instance of course the 
 real name and address of the writer: 
 
 The first reply was from a prominent attorney, Exhibit A I shall call him, who lives 
 in the East and who does not want his name revealed in connection with this or any other 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 877 
 
 surely have tramped to failure there, failure utter and com- 
 plete. A travelling salesman, sojourning in Marion, had 
 heard the umbrella jokes from one of my Law School class- 
 mates, Broussaix Sallee, and, seeing my name on my Marion 
 
 too serious matter. Says he: "That preacher to whom you gave assurance that you would 
 take your trusty umbrella up to heaven with you, and who quite appropriately answered, 
 'You'd better, Doctor, make it a parachute!' Well, he ought to have added, 'And be sure 
 too that the parachute's made of asbestos.' " 
 
 Well, maybe so, A, all lawyers should find such precautions timely. 
 
 Exhibit A. later wrote, "Do you keep a card-index on your umbrellas? You might 
 sometimes get confused." Also, "Do you always curry all of them with you? Why not 
 lay by something for a rainy day?" Also, "Haile Selassie carries bright red ones. Why don't 
 you? It would be far less conspicuous than the ones you do carry with other peoples names 
 all over them." 
 
 Two or three others replied anonymously. Of these one wrote: "In just what part 
 of your home do you keep that stock of umbrellas?" Underneath ran, "You know who," 
 and, under that, stared a bloody finger-print. 
 
 Another wrote on a postal card: "You are indeed a man of courage. I have seen you 
 on two or three occasions, when the weather seemed doubtful, start out without an um- 
 brella. But you always did go back and get a few." 
 
 A maiden lady in Ann Arbor wrote me, "I did not know you were so hopelessly mid- 
 Victorian as to carry two umbrellas in wet weather and only three in the dry." Also, "Jonas 
 Hanway, the first man to carry an umbrella, was not half so courageous as were you on that 
 day when you first went into the Law School Building without any. I can hear those tears 
 of happy laughter falling still." (If they are falling "still," how can she hear them falling?) 
 
 Then came this from W. H. Dyer, Lawyer, Kankakee, 111.: "In response to the copy 
 
 of your letter which was written to Mr. Schmiedeskamp I am going to be very 
 
 frank and say that my recollection of you was that you were considerably older than myself 
 and I am 57, very reserved and dignified and I as a young man and doubtless because I was 
 a young man, formed that unexpressed opinion, probably without even knowing I had 
 formed it, that you had never been guilty of anything intended to be humorous, and that 
 you would never see the joke about yourself, as being constantly equipped with an um- 
 brella, rubbers, raincoat and muffler." 
 
 This from Vern E. Thomson, attorney at Joplin, Missouri: "I acknowledge with pleas- 
 ure a copy of your very humorous letter to Schmiedeskamp. [Note that the learned judge 
 admits that the letter was "humorous."] I am glad to know that during all these years 
 you have been able 'to keep out of the wet.' I sincerely hope, Brother Shastid, that you 
 will not be compelled to use your umbrella as a parachute for the purpose of returning to 
 this mundane sphere." You will note that the gentleman does not appear to be quite 
 certain about the matter. Yet he does have "hope" and has it "sincerely" — rare qualities 
 for a lawyer. He also hopes that if ever I do leave this "mundane sphere" I will not re- 
 turn to it. Kind — to the sphere. 
 
 Dell H. Thompson, attorney at Adrian, Michigan: "I give you full permission as one 
 of your well-wishers, to carry that old umbrella just as long as you are able to navigate, 
 and I further wish you all the happiness in the world." A right fine gentleman is Mr. 
 Dell H. Thompson. 
 
 Gustavus A. Ohlinger, of Toledo, runs on: "We regretted that you were not at the 
 re-union — in fact we thought you rather ignored us. We felt that you could at least have 
 sent by express insured your umbrella to represent you. Looking forward to the next 
 re-union, I hope you will not overlook this — the members of the class will appreciate the 
 token, and I am sure we will arrange to have the article appropriately enshrined in the 
 Clement Memorial Library. [Others have referred to S's U. as the "class mascot" — which 
 probably explains the unusually large percentage of successful lawyers in this class.] 
 
 "I was interested in the article about you in Time 1 some time ago, and about your re- 
 searches in animal ophthalmology. I could have told you that dogs are color blind. I have 
 
 1 A U. S. magazine of considerable intelligence, which nevertheless has occasionally deluded itself 
 into publishing some of my "dope." 
 
878 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 shingle, had called on me. A fast friendship ensued. And 
 to my office, he, on his travels, referred patients almost in- 
 numerable — a good many of them inevitably asking me about 
 my umbrella. 
 
 a very intelligent dog — we call her the League of Nations. She barks for 'yes' — so one 
 day I asked, 'Are you color blind?' and she gave a loud yap. You see there are short cuts 
 to knowledge — and you don't have to carry an umbrella always to gather it in." 
 
 My old-time partner in the Moot Court at the Law School, Herman L. Stevens, of Port 
 Huron, Mich.: "When my wife handed your letter to me and I read your name on the en- 
 velope, I said to her, "Why, that's the fellow who always carried an umbrella' so the fact 
 that you covered the umbrella so thoroughly made your letter most interesting and I am 
 sure that the members of the Class will at least know the true facts about the great emblem 
 of the class." Mr. Stevens, also, is a very fine gentleman. 
 
 Willard A. Knight, a most learned man of thelaw, Battle Creek, Mich., humorizes as fol- 
 lows: "To the Perpetual Umbrella Carrier greeting: Fear not. You will never need to use your 
 umbrella for a parachute. Your eternal reward will be other than perpetual torment by 
 fire: water is your appropriate punishment. Your umbrella has kept you too dry to make 
 GOOD firewood anyhow." 
 
 Homer J. McBride, Atty, Flint, Michigan: "A man is known by the company — no, 
 the umbrella — he keeps, no matter in what way he has acquired it." 
 
 Floyd A. Wilson, Atty, Saginaw, Mich., runs on curiously: "O. O. Mclntire [the 
 columnist] may be an expert in his line. But — To him the umbrella may be a 'badge' (that 
 is, have the appearance) of 'respectability.' But did you ever notice when you went into 
 a store with your umbrella how the clerks and store detective kept their eyes on you, par- 
 ticularly if your umbrella was unfolded? [Now just what did this attorney mean? Some- 
 times I almost think I catch his drift and then again it seems to escape me.] 
 
 "Now again as to an umbrella's being a 'badge* (appearance) of respectability. Several 
 years ago, during the late unlamented 'drought' a minister was announced as a caller in my 
 office. He was dressed as a minister even as to the collar, had the low, round, black hat, 
 and, as I remember, carried an umbrella. Here was all the appearance of respectability. 
 But, as a matter of fact, he was a bootlegger in disguise, trying to take orders. He was 
 a jolly good fellow with a sense of humor even though I did not give him an order. 
 [Believe those last seven words who can.] 
 
 "Possibly 'the umbrella' at one time may have helped you at Egypt, Illinois, but are 
 you sure of the reason? Down there they may have thought that it was a new way of 
 carrying a machine gun, or a shot gun, and that the possessor of 24 umbrellas instead of 
 being 'brother of the moon,' was 'King of the moon." " 
 
 Frederick H. Stone, Manistee, Michigan: "I remember your habit of striding across 
 
 the campus with earmuffs, fur cap, overcoat, rubbers and the ever-faithful umbrella 
 
 My son will follow the medical profession and be an undertaker I dreamed one night 
 
 lately I saw you going into the front entrance to the Law Building without a stitch of 
 clothing on you, but, over each arm, there was casually hooked — 'hooked,' of course in 
 the ordinary meaning — an umbrella." 
 
 Last man that I shall quote from, Barnie Alexander, once indeed a lawyer but now 
 sincerely reformed and keeping a store: "You see I come from a thrifty stock that believes 
 in laying up something for a rainy day. And I ask you brother carrier what could be better 
 than a good old fashioned full ribbed portable rainshed. I have two of them. One I just 
 prosaically took from the stock in our store, surely no thrill in that. But the other is a 
 great joy to every craven ere vise in my heart. Its very acquirement is a secret thrill. I 
 plead guilty to the sin of it and to the fact that I am a Bridge addict. Every week friends 
 come to my house to indulge in our favorite game. They prefer my house because I am still 
 one of those lonesome unmarried things of no use on earth and I hear not wanted in heaven. 
 There are no complications in my house, no wife to fuss about cigar remnants on the rugs 
 or cigaret burns on the furniture, just a paid house-keeper who expects the worst and is 
 never disappointed. One rainy night a bridge player brought this treasure and forgot it. 
 Well I am just as forgetful as he was as I forgot to inquire who left it, and I know you will 
 not blame me when I tell you about it. I feel that you are the one man in whom I can repose 
 all this confidence. I know your love for an umbrella will cause you to forgive the moral 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 879 
 
 Is it not really important that medical, even specialistic, 
 practices can be established on so bizarre, so irrelevant, or 
 call it crazy, a foundation, when skill, education and so 
 forth are regarded as matters of no particular consequence? 
 
 lapse. For this is an umbrella among umbrellas, worthy of the companionship of the famous 
 24 owned by the young prince. Not that you or I would think it a thing of beauty. Far 
 from that as the cover displays all the scars of long and faithful use. Even the handle is 
 plain and ugly. But to the dyed in the damp fan it is precious. You press a little lever 
 and behold it flies open all by itself eager to shelter you. Now what more could your heart 
 or mine desire? It reposes in the rear of my car all the time, it went to the re-union with 
 me and strange to relate, it came back with me, and, pardon the thought, but perhaps that 
 was because you were not there." 
 
 No longer can the doubters doubt the existence of a Shastid's umbrella, for the writers 
 of the above-quoted-from letters — yes, and of far more writers than those, but to similar 
 effect — are, being lawyers, all honorable men. "So are they all, all honorable men." Skeptics 
 have only to write to them, and they, being lawyers, will acknowledge the truth — there 
 being nothing at all to gain in this particular case by doing otherwise. 
 
 And yet, too, I have a dull feeling that I may — quite unintentionally of course — have 
 revealed also herein the suspicion which some of these excellent gentlemen appear to have 
 formed — not indeed toward the existence of my umbrella or umbrellas but toward the 
 absolute perfection of my title thereunto. 
 
 Even more doubtful still were those curious doubters who doubted what I had said 
 about the old farm-lady who, on my pedestrian excursion out of Inveni, I found hanging, 
 dead, in a barn. (See "Tramping to Failure," pages 86-88.) One correspondent declared 
 frankly, "I do not believe a word of it." Another, "Suicide among farm-women must be 
 extremely rare, if not wholly unknown." (The truth is that, in those days, suicide among 
 farm- women was commoner by far than in any other group of the population. The incidence, 
 indeed, among farm- women was so high as to cause much comment in newspapers and 
 magazines concerning it. The cause assigned was the undeniable fact that farm-women's 
 lives were monotonous and drab in the extreme. No rural free delivery in those days. 
 Almost no newspapers or magazines, either, on farms. No phonographs, telephones, radios. 
 Once in two or three weeks the farmer drove to town to do a little trading and to get his 
 mail at the post-office. Sometimes his wife accompanied him, sometimes she did not. 
 If churches were near by, the farmer's whole family, wife of course included, Went to church 
 and listened to damnation sermons, wherein almost every pleasure in this world howsoever 
 simple and harmless in truth, was bitterly condemned. In some neighborhoods there were 
 husking-bees and sewing societies, wherein the farm- wife found variety of experience 
 especially "escape from reality." For the most part, however, everything for the farm- 
 wife was humdrum, prosaic, heavy toil from long before daybreak until long after sunset. 
 No wonder so many farm-wives in those days sought out one little bit of excitement eventu- 
 ally at the end of a rope.) Yet another objector — he was twenty-four years of age — declared, 
 "I was brought up on a farm, and I never heard before of a farm- wife committing suicide." 
 He did not know that farm lives had changed and that farm-wives had changed with them. 
 
 But the most curious objection was made to me by an experienced attorney of about 
 my own age. "It simply could not have been," he declared to me personally. "I believe 
 in everything else in your volume, but that sounds like a story made up for effect. Hardly 
 anybody, in truth, ever does commit suicide." 
 
 Late that evening, this same attorney called me on the phone to inform me that, after 
 all, I might have been telling the truth in my tale of the farm-woman's suicide. "I have 
 changed my mind," he went on to admit, "because I have just happened to remember a 
 certain occurrence in my very own practice. A middle-aged prosperous gentleman years 
 ago came to my office and asked me to procure him a divorce. His wife had been unfaithful. 
 As soon as the divorce had been granted, his wife took train for her parents, and the client 
 came into my office to pay his bill. He expressed much pleasure at the price I had made 
 him, joked about the frailty of all women, then went back home. Next morning, when I 
 entered my office, my stenographer the first thing asked me, "Heard the news?" "No. 
 What?" "Mr. So-and-so committed suicide last night — revolver." He had not been able to 
 
880 . MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 And, further, thousands of practices have been established 
 in this country, truly in all countries, on just as slender, as 
 utterly irrelevant, foundations. 
 
 But, first of all, it must be shown that Shastid's umbrella 
 is not a myth. Hence the long footnote. 
 
 MARION THEN 
 
 Marion in those days was just entering upon the great 
 mining boom for which it was later so justly celebrated, but 
 which, twelve or fourteen years ago, absolutely petered out, 
 along with every bank in the county. (The latter, in fact, 
 did such a thorough job of petering that, from those days 
 until the war broke out, there was not one bank in the 
 county — or, perhaps, using a little exaggeration, so much 
 as one single dollar.) 
 
 What a busy place it was then! Twenty-eight languages, 
 I understood, were at that time spoken on our little city 
 streets. And forty-eight separate smells had been enumer- 
 ated — garlic, sweat, burnt lavender, whiskey breath, fresh 
 tobacco breath, stale tobacco breath, and so on. As back- 
 ground to all this modern Babel and odorosity, there drag- 
 ged and drawled and scuffled the old-time "cracker" pop- 
 ulation — one of the kindest-hearted peoples that ever I have 
 known, but slow, unambitious and discouraged because of 
 a debilitating past — just as, at present, those modern in- 
 vaders having somewhat departed, they are truly once more 
 almost as of old: slow, unambitious, and rather discouraged. 
 
 Marion was the county-seat, the "heart," of Williamson 
 County. The Public Square was the heart of Marion, and, 
 after a brief period of residence and practice down on South 
 
 get along with her, and he had not been able to get along without her. If that had been in 
 your book, Dr. Shastid, instead of in my practice, I would not have believed it." 
 
 None of the journalistic critics of "Tramping," so far as I know, has ever expressed 
 the slightest incredulity concerning that volume. Most of my private correspondents too 
 have been satisfied completely with the book, at least on the score in question. And, indeed, 
 wherever it had been possible, I had submitted documentary evidence for the actuality of 
 all that I had said. It is, however, in all my reminiscences — both those in "Tramping" 
 and those in the present volume — so extremely important to have the reader understand 
 that, in these books, I am indeed and in truth attempting to reproduce a by-gone age with 
 absolute fidelity, that, in this second life of mine, I stress the matter again and yet again 
 and again. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 881 
 
 Market Street, the Companion and I removed both our home 
 and our office to the southwest corner of the Public Square, 
 second floor, an eight-room flat. There the Companion was 
 my office assistant, and, in the front room of the flat, after 
 the long day's work was over, we two used to sit together 
 in the dusk and, looking out into the brilliantly lighted 
 Square before us, watch Egypt (with all the modern im- 
 provements and additions thereto in the way of humanity) 
 pass by. 
 
 In "Tramping to Failure," for reasons now quite obvious, 
 I could not set forth in its entirety the whole of my story 
 about Egypt. Nor can I do so now. At present I shall merely 
 try to add a number of curious or instructive experiences, 
 limiting myself of course to such as do in some way depict 
 the medical practice of the place and time — together with 
 the inevitable and necessary "background" of it all. 
 
 FEATURES OF THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 North of Marion about three miles began the coal-mines 
 — "strip mines" at first: mines where the "big vein" of 
 coal lay so close to the surface that all that the miner (who, 
 as a rule, was the farmer-owner himself) had to do was 
 merely to strip off the soil — and there lay the jet black coal! 
 Farther north stood a perfect forest of tipples — high steel 
 buildings which towered above the mining shafts. All round 
 the landscape, scores of miles in each direction, ran laby- 
 rinths of switch tracks, where clinked and rattled and 
 clanged innumerable switch-engines with their smell of coal 
 smoke and their short, choking coughs. 
 
 South of the strip mines clean down to Marion, simply 
 poor farming. Poor soil, poor horses, poor corn crops, poor 
 all crops, poor farmers. Farm machinery all outdoors all 
 winter, and fairly rusted to the devil. 
 
 South of Marion, still worse farming — flat farms, rolling 
 farms, hilly and even gullied farms, and all farms poor farms 
 and farmers poor farmers — I mean financially. To the east — 
 conditions even worse. To the west and southwest, even 
 
882 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 much worse still, yes till you reach Giant City 1 or, farther 
 onward, Bullfrog Lake. 
 
 Drive east toward Harrisburg and soon you see Eagle 
 Mountain, rising from the flat surrounding country with an 
 effect of sublimity which the actual height of the mountain 
 hardly seems to warrant. 
 
 THE FOLKS 
 
 The people of this Egypt are surely a race apart. 
 
 They are, first of all "leaners." When they come into 
 your office they lean against a door jamb, or the drug-case, 
 or the operating-chair — or if you don't look out, on you, 
 the doctor himself. I have seen them lean on their wives, 
 on their elder daughters, but never on their older sons. The 
 latter were always wanting to do some leaning for themselves. 
 
 Also, when first he arrives, the typical Egyptian is shy, 
 as shy as any little school-girl. For that reason it is that, 
 for a considerable time, he seldom utters a word — or, if he 
 does, it is a very short and non-committal one. 
 
 Thus, to such an entrant I say, "Won't you sit down?" 
 He, after looking all about him for a time unhurriedly, re- 
 plies, "Stand — I reckon." 
 
 I take out a history card and prepare to write. "What is 
 your name?" 
 
 "Name my pappy give me?" 
 
 "Your last name." 
 Henderson — I reckon . ' ' 
 
 "Your first name?" 
 
 "Have to know that?" 
 
 "It is better." 
 
 "J- R-" 
 
 1 A sublime, if somewhat ghostly place, composed of tall bluffs and deep chasms, which, 
 at a distance, have the appearance of a mighty metropolis, but which, on nearer approach, 
 are found to be nothing but uninhabited rocks. 
 
 Uninhabited? Here and elsewhere throughout all Egypt, there inhabits and sings, 
 heartbreakingly, the southern mockingbird, not perhaps the true Mimus folyglottus, but the 
 somewhat larger M. p. leucopterus, or mockingbird of the West. Its song is sweeter than that 
 other's and even than the English nightingale's, and it inhabits ubiquitously the trees and 
 hedges of great cities, the bushes near country homes, yes even the lone rocks of Giant City. 
 It sings almost continuously throughout the day and the night, resting little, nesting little, 
 always filling the air with song — not merely the mimicked pips and peeps and little sum- 
 monings of other bird species, but with its own incomparable arias, so exquisite at times 
 as to be well-nigh intolerable. 
 
 "Listen to the mocking-bird! Listen to the mocking-bird!" 
 
Kitchen and 
 dining room 
 
 \ 
 
 Bedroom 
 
 i r • ■ ' 
 
 Porch, with floor, roof 
 and doored side -walls, 
 but entirely open to the 
 weather front and rear 
 
 \ 
 
 (Unhewn ^ 
 stone step J 
 
 Living room 
 
 and bedroom 
 
 for most of 
 
 the family 
 
 ] 
 
 Ground-Plan of a Typical Southern Illinois Log Farmhouse. 
 
 The central porch, open to the weather in front and behind, was called 
 
 the "dog-trot." 
 
 Elevation of the Same House, Showing Vista Through the Dog-Trot and Beyond. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 883 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 885 
 
 So down goes "J. R." as his "first name." 
 
 Next question: "Did you want to consult me about your 
 eyes, your ears, your nose or your throat?" 
 
 "I don't want to consult nobody about nothin'. I jest 
 come in to have an examination — I mean you don't charge 
 nothin' for examinin' nobody, do you?" 
 No . Examinations are free . ' ' 
 
 "Well, first of all I want to ask you a few questions about 
 eyes jest to see if you understand yer business. I ain't goin' 
 to let nobody examine my eyes fer nothin' 'less I see first 
 of all he understands his business. What's the difference 
 between granulated eyelids and cataract?" 
 
 And so it goes. You have to handle these people care- 
 fully too. If you make a good impression on them, win their 
 confidence, their esteem, their affection, they will talk for 
 you over wide districts of country, help to make your repu- 
 tation, and — what is no small matter — you will often come 
 to like them very much, for beneath his rough exterior, the 
 hillbilly ofttimes has a heart of pure gold. 
 
 He also has a sense of humor, though not humor of all 
 sorts. The kind of humor that plays on words and their 
 meanings he hardly understands at all. Thus, one day a 
 lady patient unburdened her mind to me about the terrific 
 ' 'lickings" her husband had been giving her. ' 'Would you, 
 she asked, "leave a man that'd give you a beatin' up?" "I'd 
 leave what was left," said I. And she sat there and pondered 
 the meaning of what I had said for a very long time — speech- 
 less, her lips moving softly, and her entire face looking 
 puzzled in the extreme, but determined to solve the problem. 
 
 Their pet humor was chiefly that of Americans in general 
 — gross exaggerations. Thus 3 one man told me about "the 
 scientificest doctor" that ever he had "seed." "The time 
 Grandmother had a pain in her belly an' I called him, he 
 first taken out a tape-line an' taken the dimensions of the 
 shanty — set 'em down in a book. Then he taken the dis- 
 tance of the shanty's back-door to the front door of the 
 chicken-house — set it down in the book. Then distance of 
 shanty front-door to front-yard gate, to hitchin' post and 
 center of roadway — set it down in a book. Seemed as if he 
 couldn't ever remember anything. Taken the height of the 
 
886 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 trees by the roadside with a trigonometer and the bushes 
 with a yardstick — set 'em down in that book. 'Peared like 
 he still couldn't remember nothin . Had a portable scales an' 
 taken Granny's weight — standin' up, sittin', an' lyin' down. 
 Then put Granny to bed, slipped off 'er night-gown, weighed 
 it separate, put the gown into a box labelled 'Chemical 
 Analysis' — and set all that in a book. Took an' taken all 
 kinds of her natural offal and put all that in another box 
 labelled 'Chemical Analysis' — and set all that down in a 
 book. Then he taken an' trimmed her hair an' finger-nails 
 an' weighed 'em, put 'em in the box — set all that in a book. 
 
 "And when he'd got all through — pulse-countin' an' 
 tongue-lookin' and ever'thin' — he says, 'What you need, 
 Gran'mother's, a good big dose o' castor oil, an' that's all. 
 Good-day.' 
 
 "An' say, it did cyore 'er — quick. He said he was a sta- 
 tistical doctor, kept statistics on ever'thin', cause he might 
 need 'em some day, say he ever wrote a book that was 
 different from the one he'd already been writin' so many 
 things down in." 
 
 If the people of Southern Illinois were, many of them, 
 "leaners," even more of them were "shouters." They had 
 voices that had been developed not only by hog-callin', but 
 also by callin' the folks themselves across the fields or to 
 supper, likewise "by argyfyin' on politics an' maybe a little 
 later shoutin' 'enough!' 
 
 These megaphonic voices were carried by habit into the 
 county seat and all around the depots, the stores, the Court- 
 house Square, and into the doctors' consultation rooms. 
 
 Even a more outstanding characteristic was that of nick- 
 naming and being nicknamed. Down Egypt way in fact, 
 no man could be happy unless he had either been the re- 
 cipient of a nickname (like an honorary degree) or conferred 
 one on somebody else. Women, I found, very seldom used 
 nicknames, either for men or for one another. Sometimes 
 they would use one in connection with a genuine name, but 
 always even then as a mere necessary instrument of iden- 
 tification. Thus, a woman in my office once said, "There's 
 a man from our neighborhood comin' up to this office to 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 887 
 
 see you soon — I sent him. His name's Walson, Henry Walson 
 — 'Bug-eye' some people call him, 'cause his wife's got 
 bug-eye disease. 1 " 
 
 Not infrequently rough men would refer to women of a 
 certain class by names which indicated their class sufficient- 
 ly; as, Camp-meetin' Sue (an "unfortunate" girl who had 
 "contracted pregnancy" at a notorious camp-meeting), 
 Rocky-Mountain Nellie, the Spanish Jade, Cantharides Kate, 
 and so on. 
 
 I was always greatly interested in the subject of nick- 
 names, and nearly always I, like any other stranger, would, 
 if I asked for it, get a fairly good story about the conferral 
 of the name. I nearly always asked for it, and some of the 
 stories I wrote down. 
 
 One of the men, a prosperous farmer of huge size, was 
 called "Gallows," and the story about him was that, being 
 both wordy and abusive, he not infrequently had a fight on 
 hand. He wore, incidentally, a single gallows to his trousers, 
 as many of the farmers in that district did — a great, thick, 
 strong, inelastic affair his wife had made him, and this 
 gallows he always wore passed from the left hand button 
 behind, to which it was fastened, then over the shoulder 
 and on to one of the right hand buttons in front. He "never 
 felt comfortable in a two-prong gallows." Also, he never 
 would wear an elastic gallows, "for fear it might lose me 
 my pants." 
 
 One day another big man came up to this big man, and 
 said, "I done heard you called me a taker" (thief). 
 
 "Thank God somebody can carry things straight." 
 
 Thereupon the first big man, knowing from long ex- 
 perience the advantage which "lays in strikin' the first blow 
 first," struck the first blow and struck it so hard that he 
 ripped loose his one and only gallows. 
 
 There were women around, and the trousers began slip- 
 pin' [as the gravitational attraction of the earth would 
 naturally incline them to do]. So this big man grabbed his 
 trousers with his left hand, for the purpose of holding them 
 up — there were still women around, and Si he never wore 
 
 1 Exophthalmic goitre, which is simply big-talk for bug-eye big-neck. ("Exophthal- 
 mic" — bug-eye, and goitre — tutnidum guttur, big neck.) "Bug-eye big-neck," or "Trembl- 
 in' ", is very common in southern Illinois — at least it was in my time there. 
 
888 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 no underclothin' in summer time— and then he started fight- 
 in' with jest his right hand only. 
 
 But that big man he took an unfair advantage of this big 
 man, the man that had to use one arm instiddier galluses, 
 and he bunged this big man in his right eye, then this big 
 man in his left eye, then this big man in his mouth — an' the 
 blood come a-runnin'. 
 
 Then the missis of this big man, the wife, she yells, "Si, 
 ye're licked," she says, "better'n I could a' done it myself." 
 O' course they ain't no one-hand fighter that can do nothin' 
 worth no mentionin' so long's he's one-handed. 
 
 But this big man, he yells, "Trousers, damn ye, git off, 
 an' women look the other way — there's real fightin' to be 
 done." 
 
 An' he shore done it too. 
 
 An' sence then we called 'im "Gallows." 
 
 A young married man was "Toehold." Reason: Two 
 small families had a good-sized feud. One family was quite 
 rich the other quite poor. The oldest boy in the poor family 
 married the oldest girl in the rich family. The "pappy" of 
 that girl then tried to whip the boy, but the boy whipped 
 the pappy. It was easier then for the children of the poor 
 family to marry the children of the rich family. And that 
 they did. Six married six (those were "small" families). 
 But the first one was ever afterward called "Toehold," be- 
 cause he had given his family a "toehold" in the other 
 family. 
 
 There were two men who lived in the same neighborhood, 
 both bearing the same name, Tom Rogers. One was a big 
 man, the other not so much so. To distinguish the two 
 apart, everybody who knew them termed them, respectively 
 and respectfully, Tom Bigger Rogers and Tom Smaller 
 Rogers. 
 
 Tom Bigger Rogers came to my office one day, supported 
 by his wife. He had been bleeding at the nose for several 
 days and nights. There was an ulcer on the nasal septum. 
 This I cauterized, thus saving Mr. Rogers' life. 
 
 Not long after that another man came into my office 
 almost wholly drained of blood, who said he had come to 
 see me because he had heard of what I had done for Tom 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 889 
 
 Bigger Rogers. His own name, he declared, was Harmonica 
 Bobbins. He was called "Harmonica," he stated, because 
 he had never been able to learn to play the harmonica. He 
 seemed quite proud of his nickname, in fact referred to it 
 repeatedly. 
 
 And this reminds me that, after I had almost been lynch- 
 ed by the extraordinarily hot-headed people of Marion, as 
 narrated in "Tramping to Failure," pages 327-330, section 
 entitled "The Stone-Cutter's Nose and My Neck," there 
 appeared a remarkable tendency to apply the sobriquet above 
 referred to in another connection, namely, "Gallows," to 
 myself. Not that anyone supposed I wore but a single 
 "gallow," but the whole almost tragical, transaction had 
 ended happily — indeed, in the mouths of many, with a big, 
 Egyptian laugh. Why not, then, celebrate by plastering a 
 nickname on "Doc"? Now I never have had any of the 
 way-up feeling so manifest among some doctors, yet the 
 gallows-idea — because I had in fact approached so close to 
 an actual, if illegal, and wholly improvised, gallows — did 
 not appeal to me as something I should like to have append- 
 ed at all to my name — or, worse, used in place of it. 
 
 I frowned on the idea whenever addressed as "Gallows." 
 The intended compliment, for such it was certainly, at length 
 died out. 
 
 I have sometimes wondered, however, if it wouldn't have 
 been far better to encourage a little the use of that nick- 
 name, instead of frowning it out of existence. Did it not, 
 after all, carry with it the story of how I had cured a patient? 
 I might have been much assisted by the tale, in fact, as 
 were, for other examples — the "Little Corporal" of France, 
 who, for a time, ruled Europe, "Sockless Jerry Simpson" of 
 Kansas, and "One-Shirt Magee." 
 
 Anyhow, I went sobriquetless, and, no doubt, not at all 
 so popular as I might otherwise have been in joke-loving, 
 name-calling Egypt. 
 
 People had other things down there to be proud of than 
 merely their good humor, the strength of their voices, and 
 their usually pertinent — sometimes also impertinent — nick- 
 names. There was a fellow from Polecat Lake who had come 
 to me about other matters but who also had a string of 
 
890 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 supernumerary lobes hanging from each ear. I suggested 
 that he let me amputate the disfiguring things. He wouldn't 
 take a million dollars for them, he said. "Why not?" "My 
 father and my mother both had 'em and so have my brothers 
 and sisters now. They hain't no family in our deestrict that 
 has articles like them" 
 
 This same patient was the chap who taught me the art 
 of extracting foreign bodies from the eye. Said he, "Got 
 somepin' stickin' in right eye? Shake your left foot. Got 
 somepin' stickin' in left eye? Shake your right foot. Always 
 shake the foot that's kattycornered from the eye. Never 
 seen it fail to work. But don't never shake the foot on the 
 same side as the eye ef ye don't want nothin' that's in the 
 eye to go on deeper in it still." 
 
 Why anyone should believe such stuff who could test out 
 the truth or falsity thereof in five minutes, I do not know. 
 But know I do that similar medical nonsenses abounded 
 there then and, according to some of my present Marion cor- 
 respondents, still do. For example, the way to cure "sore 
 eyes" is to pour hot milk over the place where the patient's 
 after-birth was buried. To cure a stye, rub it with a gold 
 ring. A red string wound tightly about the left little finger 
 will stop nose-bleed. A cold key on the back of the neck 
 will do the same thing if cold enough. To drink one's 
 mother's urine will prevent the drinker from ever having the 
 mumps. 
 
 There was no use arguing about these things. People 
 believed always not what they had tested, but what they 
 had heard — an attitude of mind quite deadly of course to 
 all manner of progress in all matters affecting humanity. 
 
 Indeed both the people and a good many doctors in 
 southern Illinois seemed never to have grasped the idea of 
 what had happened in and to the world when the Germ 
 Theory of Disease and Antiseptic Surgery had come into it. 
 They knew something of George Washington and the Amer- 
 ican Constitution and what that man and that document 
 had meant to the world. They also knew about Abraham 
 Lincoln, the Civil War and the Abolition of Slavery, and 
 what these things had meant also. They also understood, in 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 891 
 
 a vague unconsidering way what the telegraph had done 
 for the world, what the railroad, the telephone and so on. 
 But the Germ Explanation of the Nature of Most Diseases 
 and what it really signified for all the other sciences, for all 
 economics, all philosophy, all theology, all the modes and 
 manners of human thought and feeling, they had no more 
 idea about than if that mighty hinge on which the history 
 of this world had just turned so many degrees was nothing 
 more at all than a new instrument, say a forceps, or a new 
 way of rolling a pill would have been. 
 
 And, after all, this is not much to their blame. For even 
 in the largest and most learned volumes of the greatest of 
 our great historians, both of medicine and of mankind, 
 there was not much greater evidence of a full comprehension 
 of what had just been happening. 
 
 The folkways of the Egyptians always interested me, 
 especially the medical superstitions, but these, if I entered 
 into them scientifically, would fill several large volumes by 
 themselves. Therefore I hasten to depict a few individual 
 characters only of the Egypt of that day. Most of the curious 
 Egyptians I cannot consider here because they necessarily 
 appear hereafter in the section of this volume to be called 
 "The Appendix", subdivision "Cruel and Unusual Patients." 1 
 
 MR. MARDI GRAS 
 
 I seldom think of Marion without beholding myself again 
 
 treating the eyes of men who had been injured in some coal 
 
 mine accident — not indeed in one of the "mines" near 
 
 Marion 2 but always some mine farther north: a deep mine 
 
 1 I must in fairness add that by no means all the people in southern Illinois were odd 
 and superstitious. Some of them indeed were highly intelligent, even well educated. 
 The lawyers were almost every one of them men of this class, particularly W. W. Clemens, 
 Wm. H. Warder and Judge Rufus Neely — the three I knew the best of all. As for the 
 ministers, they ranged from highly intelligent to densely ignorant, even superstitious. 
 L. L. Smoot — a first cousin, by the bye, of U. S. Senator Reed Smoot — a Baptist evangelist, 
 was one of the very finest. Outside these professions there were the Stotlars, the Warders, 
 the Campbells, the Goodalls, the Hendricksons, the Swans, Lenzes, Claridas, Scobeys, and 
 many others. To Mr. Edward H. Scobey, a retired school principal, I am specially indebted 
 for valuable data and suggestions about the old times in Marion which, otherwise, I would 
 surely have had to omit from this book. Recently he died, and many of the others mentioned 
 in this footnote have long since passed away. 
 
 2 The "big vein" of coal, as I have stated, came to the surface of the ground two or 
 three miles north of Marion. There was no large vein at all south of that out-crop. If, 
 however, you passed north of the out-crop line and there "probed" for coal, you found the 
 
892 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 with a tall steel tipple over it and long dark shafts running 
 down into it, and galleries — long miles and miles of them — 
 running out in various directions from the shaft. In these 
 galleries the coal was continually being loosened from the 
 main mass (the vein) by the miners' drilling holes sys- 
 tematically into the mass, then inserting the "blast" (charge 
 of explosive) and then "tamping in" the blast by packing 
 dummy (non-explosive) cartridges in the drill-hole all around 
 the "blast." When the explosive was discharged (by means 
 of a fuse, so that the men at the time of the discharge could 
 be standing at a considerable distance from the spot) the 
 blast would, if properly tamped round with cushioning 
 material, throw down a considerable quantity of coal and 
 without danger to the men. 
 
 Strangely enough, spite of all the safety devices the com- 
 panies provided for them, the workmen would be careless 
 (many of them told me so themselves) so that, often, the 
 "shots" were fired "prematurely "—i.e., before the work- 
 men could easily reach a proper distance from the place of 
 explosion. Or the "tamping" with the dummy cartridges 
 would be done badly, resulting in a "blown-out shot" — i.e., 
 a shot with a flame running out of the hole. The flame 
 would sometimes ignite the gas or fine coal-dust that happen- 
 ed to be floating in the air, with horribly mutilating effects 
 on some of the workmen. 
 
 Then there were "foreign bodies," bits of flying coal or 
 steel from the workmen's tools getting into the depths of 
 their eyes continually. 
 
 These three kinds of accidents produced much surgical 
 practice for the only eye-specialist in the county. Amputa- 
 tions of eyes? Yes, scores and scores of them. 
 
 A sad part of the situation was that Illinois law, at that 
 time, had no Workmen's Compensation Act, that the "ac- 
 cident insurance policies" which the workmen generally 
 held, almost invariably contained weasel words and phrases 
 almost any one of which would have rendered a policy 
 
 big vein lying at a greater depth, and the farther north you went the deeper the big vein 
 lay. The consequence was that, near Marion, there was only "strip-mining" done — i.e., 
 the farmers under whose soil the big vein lay had nothing to do when "mining" their coal 
 but to "strip" the thin soil-layer off it. Cheap coal, that! Many local people indeed, 
 both farmers and town folk, drove in their wagons to the farms of the strip-coal farmers 
 and shoveled the coal themselves directly into their wagons, and then, having paid some small 
 price for it, drove back with it to their homes. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 893 
 
 worthless. A suit for damages against the company, more- 
 over, was well-nigh always defeated on the ground either 
 that the injured miner had himself been guilty of con- 
 tributory negligence or that the damage had resulted from 
 the act of a fellow workman. * 
 
 So the plight of the sometimes wholly blinded miner and 
 his dependents was ofttimes truly pitiable. No more jobs — 
 anywhere, no compensation, workman or common law, no 
 — well, as one of them once put it to me, "no nothin'." 
 
 A strange case of human interest I beheld in connection 
 with a burn from a badly tamped shot. The miner, who had 
 come to me from, I think, some deep mine not far from Mt. 
 Vernon, had a face that looked like anything in existence 
 except a face. It had already healed before he came to me, 
 and it resembled in fact a piece of gnurly white-and-pink oak, 
 and, when I tapped on it, it gave forth a sound like that of 
 resonant wood. All deep scar, the entire face. 
 
 And the scar was still, months after the injury, contract- 
 ing strongly. Already it had contracted so very extensively 
 that both the upper eyelids had been drawn tightly upward, 
 while both the lower ones were drawn as tightly downward. 
 Neither when the man was awake nor when he was asleep 
 could the eyelids be closed. The result was, as always in 
 such cases, that the eyeballs began to ulcerate. Blindness, 
 total blindness, if the functions of the lids could not be 
 restored, would result inevitably. 
 
 I was fortunate in being able to restore the function of 
 those lids and so in saving the sight of both eyes. 
 
 But that face ! It was more grotesque than all the masques 
 in Mardi Gras and the Veiled Prophets of St. Louis combined. 
 
 The man was, say, fifty years of age. A girl of good family 
 and about seventeen years of age fell in love with him, or 
 else with his mask, and, in spite of her family's strong an- 
 tipathy to the injured one, she married him. 
 
 They did not "live happily ever after," or at all, not 
 even for a day, but not because the lady did not love her 
 husband. She loved him to distraction and kept on loving 
 
 1 The proper tamping, I was told, was wet clay, which could always be found in the 
 floor of the mine, but nevertheless many of the shot-firers would tamp the holes with dummy 
 cartridges — filled too not infrequently with coal-dust, itself a frightfully destructive ex- 
 plosive. 
 
894 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 him to that extent until, in fact, he compelled her to divorce 
 him — him whom all the schoolchildren had nicknamed "Mr. 
 Mardi Gras." 
 
 Concerning the psychology of the situation I prefer not 
 to speculate. The reader may do that to his own liking. 
 We should, however, remember that a good many explana- 
 tions are conceivable. 
 
 THE BLACK LADY WHO WAS BLED WHITE 
 
 Southern Illinois was a veritable happy hunting-ground 
 for the old-time travelling, open-air performance, doctor, 
 who carried on chiefly at night not far from the Public Square, 
 and who, between his grandiloquent medical lectures and 
 sales of "magic" medicine, "put on" numbers from a brass 
 band, sometimes snake numbers by himself, and war-dances 
 by Commanche Indians. 
 
 Whenever, among the buyers of his medicines, he saw 
 what he took to be an unusually "easy mark," he made a 
 special appointment with the "sucker" to meet him "to- 
 morrow" in his room at the such-and-such hotel. 
 
 His "cures," of course, were rare indeed, and, besides, 
 almost always ostensible rather than actual. The only one 
 I now recall was of a case that resulted in much laughter 
 among the loafers round the Marion Square. 
 
 She was old, fat, and as black as a moonless, starless 
 night in Africa, without any torches. Her name (not the 
 right one) we will say was Rebekah Garner. She lived some- 
 where beyond Dewmaine, and she had had excruciating pains 
 in her arms for many years. 
 
 She had tried every doctor in the city, 1 she told me one 
 day when, in my office, she had asked to have a foreign body 
 removed from her left eye. The last doctor she had had for 
 
 1 She had not needed to consult any doctor at all in Marion. At Dewmaine in fact, 
 a town she had passed on her way to Marion, she could easily have consulted a doctor of 
 her own race, the highly skilful, A. W. Springs, M.D. Rather, he was half negro, half 
 French, and all physician. With him worked his very efficient wife, Birdie McLain Springs, 
 M.D., who was, as I remember, half white, a quarter negro, and a quarter Amerindian. 
 She, poor girl, has been in her grave these many long years. They two were "company 
 doctors" in the all-negro mining town of Dewmaine, and many were the interesting cases 
 they used to send or bring me. The first case, in fact, of pronounced pellagra that ever I had 
 seen was brought to me by them. 
 
 I am glad to pay this little tribute to these fine professional comrades. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 895 
 
 her arms was a Y. of P. man, old Dr. Joly, whose office 
 was on the Square and whom I knew very, very well. Now 
 Joly, despite his lack of the medical degree, was really a man 
 of much learning and skill. 1 He was also, I may add in 
 passing, perhaps the greatest stickler for medical ethics that 
 ever I have known. Indeed he went much farther than even 
 the framers of the medical ' 'Code' ' had ever dreamed of going. 
 Thus, he would not even have his name on his office windows 
 or doors. To do so would have been "advertising." Nor 
 would he even permit a patient to have him called out of 
 any public gathering, howsoever badly that patient might 
 have needed him. He used indeed to warn his patients care- 
 fully against such "highly immoral" conduct. 
 
 Here is what had happened in Dr. Joly's office. The old 
 colored lady had taken therein just one single treatment. 
 Then her pains had become much worse. So she had given 
 Joly a first-rate tongue-lashing, paid him his dollar (she was 
 scrupulously honest) and bade him farewell, as she tragically 
 expressed it, "forevuhmo'." 
 
 That night, going round the Square, she had heard at a 
 little distance the sound of a brass band. Following the 
 sound, she came to an unbuilt place in the city where a 
 travelling doctor and his retinue were triumphantly perform- 
 ing. She had been specially convinced of his powers when 
 she had seen him draw out of a box an immense blacksnake, 
 which then, as he held it firmly just behind its jaws, coiled 
 and uncoiled about his naked, very muscular, right arm. 
 
 When the full-throated invitation to buy medicine arose, 
 she rushed up to the doctor, determined to buy two bottles. 
 But when the doctor discovered that she had painful arms 
 and had had them for years, he tearfully informed her that 
 a case like that demanded especial attention. "You had 
 better, far better," he said, "Madam, come up to my room 
 tomorrow in the Goodall Hotel. You need careful and 
 personal attention." Yet he sold her two big bottles of his 
 
 1 Except in the matter of antisepsis, or asepsis. One day, at his kind invitation, the 
 Companion and I went into his office to be vaccinated. After he had boiled his scarifier 
 carefully he laid it down on a dust-covered table. When I had called his attention to the 
 dust, he nonchalantly remarked, "O well, this antisepsis or any other sepsis does just as 
 much harm as it does good." 
 
896 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 medicine right then and there, cash down, so that she might 
 "get started on the treatment immediately." 
 
 The next morning she went to the hotel, saw, was seen, 
 and was conquered. Conquered to the tune of three treat- 
 ments a day for seven days, price $5-00 per treatment, total 
 bill, $105.00. 
 
 The treatment consisted only in rubbing the painful arms 
 with "magic salve" and in administering strong alkaline 
 draughts to "kill" the uric acid in her system. (Even the 
 regular medical profession, in those days, was almost mani- 
 acal with enthusiasm over the view that practically all 
 human diseases of a chronic character are produced by an 
 excess of uric acid in the system. Professor Haig, of London, 
 England, had said it was so, and thereupon almost the entire 
 medical profession of the world had, of course imitating, 
 shouted, "Yes, it is so!" And so it was so — for fifteen or 
 twenty years. The nonsensical doctrine then raged on to 
 some extent till Doctors Frank Billings and E. C. Rosenow 
 (1909-1916) demonstrated that a very great number of chronic 
 diseases are demonstrably produced and continued by focal 
 pus-infection (infection introduced not by germs from with- 
 out the body but by germs already existing within the body 
 — say in a suppurating tooth, such germs being carried from 
 the tooth to, say, a heart valve. Then the doctrine of uric 
 acid as the cause and continuation of practically all chronic 
 diseases died almost as suddenly as it had been born.) 
 
 Well, the old lady, honest as the blondest of Swedes 
 could ever have been, did pay that bill instanter and with 
 what she had there in her bosom. 
 
 Next day she met on the Public Square old Dr. Joly. 
 Having heard of her recovery and of the price that she had 
 paid for it, he, going up to her in a fatherly way, sweetly 
 murmured, "Well, Rebekah! Arent you Rebekah Garner? 
 Well, I rather thought so. But how comes it you are so 
 white?" He walked all round her in feigned astonishment. 
 "Do tell, Rebekah! You certainly are all white." 
 
 "Yes, I knows," Rebekah replied. "I'se heard dat joke 
 a dozen times befo'. I'se been bled white. Yes, o' course, 
 I'se been bled white. I know it. I'se suttinly done hyeerd 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 897 
 
 about it often enough. But dese hyer arms is well now, and 
 I'm jest a-goin' ter — " 
 
 But the doctor was scooting for safety, while yell after 
 yell went after him from the fun-loving crowd of southern 
 Illinoisans. 
 
 After that the loafers and even some of the business men 
 around the Square used to shout after the old doctor: "Ran 
 from a nigger woman !' ' And, in the meetings of the William- 
 son County Medical Society, the doctors used solemnly to 
 complain that old Dr. Joly, in getting the colored lady to 
 chase him round the Square, had simply been attempting to 
 attract attention to himself — to get publicity, in the very 
 grossest violation of our Code of Ethics. 
 
 FAITH, HOPE AND NO CHARITY 
 
 One day when I was in Dr. Joly's office — which by 
 the bye consisted of just one room (if patients waited, they 
 waited in the hall or on the stair) a white woman entered 
 and began talking to the Doctor about her case. Dr. Joly 
 motioned me not to leave the room. "Being a doctor," said 
 he to the patient, "he is naturally interested in difficult 
 cases presenting new and unusual features." 
 
 The Doctor, quite obviously, was anticipating vigorous 
 complaint from the patient about the failure of his treatment. 
 
 He was not disappointed. She, having first consented 
 that I should remain in the room, added that she had, long 
 before, gone to me about her eyes. And she added, "which 
 never done me one bit of good." 
 
 Then she complained that she had now been taking 
 Dr. Joly's "so-called cure" for a "great misery" in her back 
 for a very long time and still could not see that she was 
 getting any better. 
 
 "It is a Nature cure!" cried the Doctor all at once and 
 with conviction. "The cure comes slowly because Nature 
 does cure slowly. It is a wonderful cure, a magnificent idea, 
 an original idea, my very own idea. In fact it could not be 
 better." 
 
 And so, as the Doctor kept on talking (thus beginning to 
 convince himself of the value of his own cure, in which to 
 begin with he had evidently had not the slightest confidence) 
 he began also to convince his patient. 
 
898 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "The la, la, la!" she marvelled, at length. "If I'd 'a' 
 know'd all that in the first place, I wouldn't of had no 
 suspiciousness. — Here's the money I owe you, and thanks." 
 
 When the last of the lady's footsteps had quit its rejoice- 
 ful echoing down the stairway, the Doctor turned to me and, 
 after a burst of heroic laughter, shouted, "That woman '11 
 get well." 
 
 To tell the truth, she did. Even her eyes got well — eyes 
 I had "failed to cure." 
 
 One day I asked the Doctor, referring to his medical 
 magic, what was that "Nature cure" he had given to the 
 lady in question. "Just water and a little Epsom salts," he 
 replied, "and a great deal of faith and hope. Never leave 
 out the faith and the hope, my boy. These are the 'Christian 
 graces' — faith, hope and charity. But the least remunerative 
 of these is charity." 
 
 On another occasion, too, he talked "hard boiled," al- 
 though in fact about the tenderest-hearted person on the 
 Public Square. That day he was in my office. A man had 
 come in to pay for services I had rendered some time before 
 to three members of his family. (Ordinarily I asked "cash 
 in advance" of my southern Illinois patients, but this man 
 was so honest and had had such very hard luck that I had 
 gladly worked for him "on time. ' ') I said to the man, ' Thirty 
 dollars." "O!" he almost shouted, "that's mighty cheap: 
 I appreciate it," and he peeled off the bills. 
 
 When the man had gone, said Dr. Joly: "You will never 
 have business sense. When a man comes in to pay for work 
 on several persons, and you mention an amount — say thirty 
 dollars — and he admits his great delight, then that's a 
 signal, always, that you can go right on and say, 'for the 
 wife, then there's twenty for the boy and twenty-five for the 
 girl — O call it all seventy.' You see you know, when he s 
 expressed his delight, that you can go on and collect more. 
 Of course if he bellyaches about the thirty, you can stop 
 right there and be glad to get that much." He was really 
 jesting. 
 
 He had brought with him a patient he was anxious to 
 have me see — a man who had been beaten up with unusual 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 899 
 
 severity even for southern Illinois. "Fight?" I asked the 
 man. "Look like it?" "Yes, how'd it start?" "Well, old 
 man Stanhope — I'd never seed 'im afore, but I went down 
 to his place to lick him, an' — well the battle went the other 
 way." "Why did you try to whip a man you'd never seen 
 before? Had he said anything about you?" "Nope, but 'twas 
 like this. Old man Stanhope one day he give 'is wife a 
 lickin'. She was a little bit of a thing, so it wan't no wonder 
 he licked her. Then, woman-like, she got cross, and went 
 an' took her spite out on her oldest gal, who was twicet 
 as big as she was but who didn't dare to fight back 'cause 
 ef she'd 'a' done so, then she'd 'a' had to lick her daddy. 
 He always told his children, so I've been told, that he 
 wouldn't never stand fer none of 'em lickin' their little 
 mammy — he reservin' that pleasure for himself. So the 
 eldest gal, she, woman-like again, got crabby, an' ready to 
 lick the first person she met — which happened to be my 
 eldest daughter, comin' down the road. My eldest daughter 
 come to me a-cryin' an' sayin,' 'Judith Stanhope she gin me a 
 lickin' an' I hadn't even teched her.' So I think says I, 
 'I'll go see this Judith Stanhope.' Judith showed me the 
 fault was her mother's and then the mother, right here on 
 the Public Square, that the fault was her husband's — old man 
 Stanhope's. I went to see that feller then, the starter of all 
 the ruckus — and just behold what a little fire kindleth and 
 endeth up with among good Christians." 
 
 BRASS ANKLES 
 In a certain Egyptian town which here shall be nameless 
 there dwelt a curious man who was neither a white man 
 nor a black one, but a "brass ankles." He had come from 
 South Carolina and was very proud of the condition of his 
 ankles, for "brass ankles," as you may possibly know, are 
 mulattoes who have descended from South Carolina slave 
 parents who were freed before the Civil War, and who, by 
 serving in the War as Confederates, acquired a legal right 
 in South Carolina to be regarded as not-negroes, also the 
 right to vote and to serve in the militia. They are not, 
 however, allowed to attend white schools, yet, being prouder 
 than Lucifer, each and every one of them, they refuse, 
 wherever they live, to attend negro schools or to associate 
 
900 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 with negroes. So they get separate schools for themselves. 
 
 In the big town I now recall, there were three brass 
 ankles — three pairs of them, rather. There was, first, the 
 head of the house — "Dark and Handsome" was his other 
 name. Then there was the headess of the housess — "Small 
 and Rancid" was the additional moniker that other colored 
 ladies bestowed upon her. Then there was the daughter, 
 "Little Straight-Hair" — so called because in fact her hair 
 was very straight. And one surely could never take umbrage 
 or other disagreeable psychological condition just because 
 of the conferral upon one of so plainly Caucasian a cognomen 
 and undeniably eulogistical designation. 
 
 Little Straight-Hair, the daughter of both "Dark and 
 Handsome" and "Small and Rancid," was highly desirous 
 of being given the chance to attend — in Illinois, mind you — 
 a whole tiny school for her little brass-ankled self. And her 
 brass-ankled parents warmly seconded the idea. That was 
 law in South Carolina; why couldn't it be law in Illinois? 
 Why should not Illinois tax-payers be at least as chivalrous 
 and obliging as tax-payers in South Carolina? 
 
 Well, the Illinois tax-payers, in this particular case at 
 least, were not chivalrous and obliging. So Little Straight- 
 Hair had to go to school in the same common building as all 
 the other children — who, although they also had straight 
 hair, were most assuredly defective in the matter of brass 
 ankles. 
 
 The worst thing about the whole matter was that Little 
 Straight-Hair was a born scholar. Under that straight hair 
 of hers lay better brains, believe it or not, than under any 
 other straight hair that attended that school. She beat all 
 the other students in her class, then in her room, then in 
 the room above that room, and so on. She was specially 
 good in music of course, but mathematics did not "phase" 
 her either. She was growing stately too. 
 
 No, the worst thing about her was probably not her 
 scholarship. It was her beauty, plus — spite of her demure- 
 ness — her extreme and spontaneous vivacity. She laughed 
 like the waves in a sunny sea of loveliness. Her one-fourth 
 or one-eighth or whatever the negro constituent in her 
 figured out at, taking back what I just now said, did not 
 mar either her looks or her vivid sort of expressiveness — 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 901 
 
 added to them, rather. The consequence was that even 
 white-ankled boys began to go crazy about her. And then 
 she sometimes smiled at them, sometimes did not even know 
 of their existence. "Little Chills and Fever" they called 
 her then, though at that time she was not so very little, 
 but, as I have said, was growing rather stately. 
 
 Well, the son of the richest man in town fell in love 
 with her. So did nearly everybody else, for that matter, 
 young and old, though many of the afflicted affected to 
 despise her. Then a brass-ankled uncle of hers who had 
 made a fortune in the lumber business down in Arkansas, 
 left his entire fortune to the stately "Chills and Fever." 
 And who is there with soul so dead that never to himself 
 hath said, This is my own, my lumber land? 
 
 The son of the richest man in the city flatly proposed to 
 her. His father, a widower, came near doing it himself. 
 
 The Brass Ankles turned him, the son, down without 
 hesitation. He thereupon became quite persistent. Her 
 father (the handsome one himself) emphatically forbade the 
 suitor his house. Then an overgrown colored boy whom all 
 the brass-ankled ones despised as no white family could ever 
 have despised him, became persistent also, likewise was 
 forbidden the house. 
 
 The white suitor and the black suitor, like two wild 
 bulls in a tropical garden, met accidentally one night in the 
 alley behind the girl's house. The black one beat the white 
 one into a — well you would not have known a name for it. 
 
 The white one, whatever he looked like, went to his 
 father, ashamed — as the father of the not-so-fair-yet-decided- 
 ly-beautiful young lady informed me with his own lips — 
 ashamed, I say, to have been whipped by a negro youth, 
 therefore lied to his father abominably, saying that it was 
 the lady's father [the brass-ankled man now speaking unto 
 me] not her dark, young suitor, who thus had beaten him 
 up — and down. 
 
 The white father, a man of great size and corresponding 
 strength, then took him a good strong black-jack, and, lay- 
 ing for the dark father, beat him with the jack unmercifully, 
 notwithstanding that the beaten one possessed the highly 
 aristocratic "brass ankles." 
 
902 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Well, it may sound quite funny to some persons — at least 
 up to this point. But funny it surely was not in the slightest. 
 
 The beaten dark and handsome father was come into my 
 office with one eye torn into shreds, so that nothing was 
 to do then but amputate it and fit into its former socket an 
 artificial eye. 
 
 The white father, shortly before the operation (the dark 
 father being almost in extremis from the other wounds the 
 white man had inflicted on him) came to me and almost 
 prayed to me to save the very man he had harmed so — also, 
 incidentally, promised to pay my doctor bill himself, what- 
 soever the result in the case might be. 
 
 The dark man recovered fully, except as to the lost eye, 
 and then — did the only sensible thing he could have done 
 in the terrible situation — the conflict of two irreconcilable 
 sorts of aristocracies. He took his belongings, himself, his 
 wife and his still truly lovely daughter away from the 
 northern town and down into Arkansas — there to look after 
 his daughter's lumber interests. 
 
 The white man never paid the dark man's bill, in fact he 
 was quite insolent when refusing to pay it. I had not had 
 him put his promise into writing he said, and so on. 
 
 The dark man, however, had already told me that, if the 
 white one did not pay the bill, then he himself would do so. 
 
 Well, he did pay it. He was proud — had a pair of brass 
 ankles. 
 
 I want to add, moreover, that seldom have I had a negro 
 patient — brass ankles or black ankles — who has tried to 
 "beat" his bill. Some negroes have been able to pay but 
 little, yet that little they have paid with courtesy and with 
 gratitude. The thieving propensity of the old-time negroes 
 — a propensity born of bondage, wherein the slave would 
 "steal" a watermelon or a chicken which his own hands 
 had, by force, been compelled to produce, has about died out. 
 Even those in bondage who had kind, religious (actually, 
 not ostensibly, religious) masters, 1 seldom formed the pilfer- 
 ing habit. 
 
 1 My mother's great-grandfather, Peter Clemmons, of North Carolina, was such a 
 master. To him, therefore, I wish to pay this little footnote tribute. Turned Quaker, he 
 freed all his "children" (blacks). For his views on slavery and on the colored people whom 
 he had taught to read and write long before he had enfranchised them, see his book, "Poor 
 Peter's Call to His Children." [Salisbury, N. C, 1818, pp. 153. Chapter III, pages 43 to 
 67 inclusive.] 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 903 
 
 The negro in the United States has done well. In the 
 few short years wherein his race has had a chance to do for 
 itself, he has done well. He will do much better. I resent 
 particularly, and with all my heart, the motion picture plays 
 in which he is forever represented as a pop-eyed coward. 
 The typical negro is nothing of the sort, but a man of loyalty 
 and courage. He was found to be such indubitably during 
 both the World Wars. What the final solution will be of 
 the tragic difficulties arising from the presence together in 
 the same nation of free negroes and free whites, I do not 
 know. Probably it will be a slow miscegenation at the 
 lower levels of both races — slow at first, but proceeding more 
 rapidly upward as the black element becomes more and more 
 whitened. That is what has almost always occurred where 
 two distinctly different races have long lived side by side. 
 
 At all events, God bless the black people of America. 
 I have seen many of them in financial disaster, in sorrow, in 
 horrible pain, in the great ordeal of having to face death for 
 long periods of time without hope, and in the still greater 
 ordeal of standing by and witnessing the deaths of those 
 they loved; and I have almost always found them steadfast, 
 good-natured, trustworthy, affectionate, courageous, truly 
 religious to a high degree. 
 
 We laugh at "Sambo," but he always laughs with us — 
 yes, even at himself — and in a world like this! 
 
 May he long endure to infect us with his incurable 
 laughter, his merriment, his song. 
 
 SENTENCES OF DEATH AND, WORSE, 
 OF BLINDNESS 
 Actually the patients who paid me the most at Marion 
 were those who gave me jocularity and gratitude. (The 
 negroes were all good about this.) Money I had to have, 
 of course. But at least a little money we all do somehow get. 
 Laughter, however, laughter and good comradeship and 
 some appreciation, God knows how much we need them ! 
 
 And even when money is paid, it can sometimes be so 
 paid as to be a minus quantity. A patient at Marion, who 
 had come to me from a distant county-seat, arose in response 
 to my statement that he had tuberculosis of the larynx and 
 
904 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 that he would very soon die, and asked, ' 'What do you charge 
 for a death sentence?" Told, he threw his money to the 
 floor and huskily whispered, "Get down there and grovel 
 for it." 
 
 After leaving the office he returned. "You're a G . . d d . . d 
 liar, Shastid. I have no tuberculosis and I'm not going to die. 
 Besides, even if I had it instead of this catarrh, you'd no 
 business to have let me know." 
 
 "Didn't you say you were a general merchant at ?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "And that you had a wife and several small children?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "And didn't I ask you if you'd made a will and had all 
 your business in shipshape? — You'll live long enough to 
 thank me for what I've done for you." 
 
 He did. A week or two later, having gone to both St. 
 Louis and Chicago and having received in those places full 
 confirmation of my diagnosis and prediction of an early 
 death from men who knew no more about the subject than 
 did I, he returned to his home completely convinced, and 
 then made his will. Moreover, he had for some time been 
 on the point of buying out a competitor whose store stood 
 next to his own and then merging the two — borrowing 
 heavily of course in order to do so. "Good God!" he cried, 
 "suppose I had done that and then died. My wife knows 
 nothing of business. She would have lost everything — every- 
 thing. And the tiny children! — As it is, I sold instead of 
 buying. And now I've got everything in fine income-condi- 
 tion for my family. That's what you did for me by what I 
 thought brutality. And I cursed you, Doc!" 
 
 A few weeks later he died. 
 
 Which reminds me of another case of the same disease — 
 laryngeal tuberculosis. When I had given the young man — 
 a rather rich one, by the bye — the name of his affliction and 
 told him he soon must perish and that, therefore, he had 
 better not enter into any more long-term undertakings, he 
 gave me a look of fearful hate, and, even as I spoke to him 
 kindly and with much intended helpfulness, he languidly 
 cleared his throat and then, instead of spitting into the 
 cuspidor, he — still seated close before me for the use of the 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 905 
 
 laryngoscope — suddenly ejected the entire gob of sputum 
 into my open mouth. 
 
 I had on my tongue at that time, as it happened, a deep, 
 ragged ulcer, the result of a tooth which my dentist had 
 badly mistreated, and so I was gravely alarmed for some time 
 because of the possibility of much further implication of the 
 tongue. 
 
 Then, on the other hand, there was the fine young chap 
 (he was really fine, even noble) who had accidentally and 
 quite innocently acquired syphilis, and now, in the later 
 stages of the disease, had developed a rapid atrophy (wast- 
 ing) of the optic nerves. Did he want to know the whole 
 truth? He did. I told him. 
 
 "Yes," said he, "I know I've got the social disease. 
 They told me that three years ago in St. Louis — I had no 
 eye trouble then. But, Doctor, as sure as God's in heaven, 
 I don't know how I got it." 
 
 I believed him thoroughly. I knew just how he'd prob- 
 ably got it. From his very much younger sister, a sister 
 he almost idolized and to whom he had been as a father — 
 for their father had died in their early childhood. She, 
 however, was not the saint he thought her. A mistress she 
 to several travelling salesmen. I had treated her two or 
 three years previously for syphilitic sore throat, had warned 
 her not to kiss anyone because the little white sores on her 
 lips (mucous -patches) were exceedingly contagious, and then 
 had been told by my fine young lady that, already, her 
 brother had been kissing her thrice daily, as had always 
 been his custom, and that, surely enough, he had gotten 
 "a great big button of a sore right in the middle of his lower 
 lip." 
 
 No place of mine, of course, to tell fond brother who 
 it was that had "betrayed him with a kiss" and now was 
 consigning him to impenetrable darkness, even this side the 
 grave. 
 
 And then — would you believe it? — up gets my fine young 
 gentleman and says, with a pretended gay laugh: "Time to 
 change my business anyhow. Old one's rotten. How's this?' ' 
 And he takes up his cap and pretends to be a blind beggar of 
 a very comical sort. 
 
906 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 I nearly cried — all the more when, suddenly donning his 
 cap and changing his tune, he asked, "Poor Emily, who'll 
 take care of her now 7 ." 
 
 He did not ask me who'd take care of him. 
 
 HYSTERIA 
 
 Worse even than the dead beat for a patient is the hys- 
 terical woman. Most persons do not understand at all the 
 nature of hysteria, so a word or two upon that subject. 
 First of all, hysteria is really an insanity, though not usually 
 so regarded. 1 Now one of the commonest symptoms of in- 
 sanity is the "delusion." An insane patient, for example, 
 believes that he is a billionaire or Napoleon Bonaparte or 
 Jesus of Nazareth or the man who assassinated President 
 Garfield or the holder of a mortgage on the moon. In the 
 great majority of instances the delusion is so obviously a 
 delusion that no difficulty is experienced in deciding that 
 the patient is crazy. But, strangely enough, in hysteria the 
 fact that the patient is insane is seldom obvious. That is 
 because, in hysteria, the delusion almost invariably relates 
 to the condition, or supposed condition, of the patient's 
 own body. If the patient declares she is Mary the mother 
 of Jesus, you know at a flash that she is crazy. So too, if, 
 being an hysteric, she says her legs have turned to glass, 
 for which reason she can no longer venture to walk or stand 
 upon them. But suppose she asserts that, whenever she 
 reads, she suffers from intense and long-continued headache. 
 Well, she may in fact be either crazy or not crazy. Suppose, 
 further, that, examining her eyes, you find she is far-sighted 
 — a condition in which almost as a rule the patient does 
 indeed and in truth, after reading, suffer from intense and 
 long-continued headache. Very well, you prescribe the 
 correct lenses for her far-sight. 
 
 Now, in the normal situation, your patient is relieved at 
 once of her distressing pains, and becomes your professional 
 friend forever after. Not so, however, in the case of the 
 hysteric. She, God pardon her, returns to your office to 
 complain of your glasses. Returns once more. Keeps on 
 
 1 Thus, too, the delirium of fever is not generally thought of as a form of insanity. 
 Yet a form of (temporary) insanity it most undoubtedly is. (Wharton and Stille, "Medical 
 Jurisprudence," I, 475.) 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 907 
 
 returning. She even says she cannot read with her glasses 
 at all now, is far better off without them than with them, 
 and to cap the climax some day declares that your glasses 
 have actually made her blind in one eye. 
 
 I have had such a patient come to my waiting-room 
 early and remain there, wholly without necessity, all of a 
 crowded afternoon, complaining to all my other patients 
 about the terrible thing she supposed that I had done to her. 
 
 Had she thought herself Joan of Arc the listeners would 
 have had no difficulty at all in setting her down as insane. 
 But the delusion she actually did have was not plainly a 
 delusion. 
 
 Sometimes the hysterical woman's delusion has no foun- 
 dation whatever. She imagines, in other words, that she 
 has intense headache when, in fact, there is nothing at all 
 discoverable whereby headaches could be produced. As a 
 rule, however, and most unfortunately for the doctor, she 
 does have an actual and discoverable basis for her trouble — 
 in the case above supposed, far-sight. So if, after he dis- 
 covers that the woman is also hysterical, he attempts to 
 explain to the husband, father or other relative that the 
 patient is hysterical, and that that is the reason why she is 
 so dissatisfied, he is promptly countered with the question, 
 "Why then didn't you say she was hysterical in the first 
 place?" If you go on and attempt to explain that, in the 
 first place, you found an actual, demonstrable cause for the 
 headache which appeared to be the only origin of the patient's 
 distress, then again you are met with the poser, "Why then 
 have the glasses made her worse? They ought at least to have 
 helped her in part." Well, of course they have, but she, 
 being an hysteric, actually grows worse as she gets better — 
 a state of affairs which sounds quite fishy to Mr., Mrs., or 
 Miss Relative. 
 
 Men, too, are sometimes hysterical, but, thanks to the 
 gods, very seldom. 
 
 A curious fact about hysterical women is that their hys- 
 teria is often commingled with more or less malingering. 
 Sometimes indeed a seeming hysteric is purely only a ma- 
 lingerer. Thus, one woman who had been referred to me by 
 
908 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 her family physician for an eye trouble, made a very good 
 recovery from that affliction, but, a short time later, was 
 found by her husband, as he came back home from work, 
 stretched out on her bed, unconscious. Six whole days and 
 nights she lay on that bed motionless, eating and drinking 
 nothing, and, at least apparently, dead to all surroundings. 
 Not even did she, apparently, visit the toilet or kitchen. 
 The husband, who had more or less given up work to care 
 for her, was growing distracted. 
 
 Being a sensible chap, he listened to reason and so, one 
 day, at our suggestion, pretended to don overcoat and hat 
 and leave the house — although in fact he had merely closed 
 the hall door from the inside and quietly hidden in a spot 
 whence his wife could be observed. 
 
 Shortly she arose, went to the kitchen (the door was 
 wide open) and ate ravenously. Having visited the toilet 
 she went back to bed and became once more "unconscious." 
 
 After awhile the husband pretended to return, slammed- 
 to the hall door, took off his things (ostensibly) and hung 
 them up, then went to the room of the wife — who was still 
 "unconscious." 
 
 A quite salutary scene ensued — after which no more "un- 
 consciousness," occurred, except at the usual times for every- 
 body's sleeping. 
 
 This case, it appeared, was really an attempt on the part 
 of Madam Unconscious to force her husband to employ a 
 maid (which he could ill afford to do) to look after her 
 house work for her. 
 
 A plain case of malingering, not hysteria at all. 
 
 The patient, moreover, in that particular instance, had 
 selected a difficult kind of disease to simulate. Most ma- 
 lingerers are more astute. 
 
 And the true hysterics ! They themselves are thoroughly 
 deceived by their sickness. Doctors dread them as they dread 
 no other undesirables in their practice. "What a magnificent 
 profession," once exclaimed in my presence an old physi- 
 cian, "medicine would be were there no hysterical women!" 
 
 Lay people often suppose that doctors make the most of 
 their reputations and their money (when they have any) 
 on hysterical patients. As a matter of fact they could more 
 than easily pray, "Lead us not into hysteria, but deliver us 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 909 
 
 from that and its seeming double, worse half-sister, ma- 
 lingering. 
 
 Yet, after all, hysterics, both male and female, are not 
 infrequently curable. For this, two things are essential (1) 
 a strong desire on the part of the patient to be well (2) a 
 profound mental impression of very unusual character. The 
 trouble, however, with the scientific physician is that he 
 hates to resort to the humbug and deception which are al- 
 most invariably necessary for the production of "the pro- 
 found mental impression of unusual character. ' ' Better fitted 
 by far for this kind of work are the travelling mountebanks, 
 the red-light burners, the faith-healers and so on. Over 
 and over I have seen religious faith-healers apparently per- 
 form great miracles of cure, especially for the lame. In 
 every large community at any given time there exist scores 
 of sincere persons who go about on crutches but who no 
 more need artificial supports for physical reasons than do I. 
 They merely think that they do. That is their great delusion. 
 Get them to think that they do not, and, presto! they are 
 well. 
 
 To get them to think that they don't, the scientific 
 physician stands at an obvious disadvantage. The rules of 
 his profession forbid and his soul abhors the "burning of 
 red light." Yet red light is what these people truly need. 
 
 PROGRESS IN BACKVIEW 
 Having come so far in this book — so far, that is, in the 
 way of medical progress, whereof there was so little in 
 Marion — it is time to turn and secure a retrospect, or back- 
 look, over the medical distances we have come. This in 
 order to perceive the journey as a whole, instead of by mere 
 scattered fractions as, in this volume, it has until now been 
 necessary to do. Let us also, for the sake of further clearness 
 and deeper interest, go back to the beginnings of scientific 
 medicine and cast a mere glance at the road which medicine 
 had taken ere I, the writer of these memoirs, had come upon 
 the scene. If the reader, smelling technical instruction ahead 
 of him should cry out testily, ' 'Entertainment, not big words, 
 if you please," he may, "if so disposed," just turn to page 
 
910 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 so-and-so, where the instruction very clearly terminates and 
 thereafter read on for entertainment unhurt. 
 
 Besides, there are few big words in the following brief 
 summary. 
 
 THE OLD MEDICINE— 400 B.C. to 1876 A.D. 
 
 The Old Medicine — Old Scientific Medicine — began with 
 Hippocrates. Hippocrates, a Greek, born 460 B.C., became 
 quite active as the founder of the scientific healing art at 
 approximately B.C. 400. Born on the island of Cos, he 
 studied medicine chiefly with his father, flourished at Athens 
 in Greece's golden period, practised a good deal at a little 
 town called Larissa, and, at the age of 90, passed painlessly 
 away at Larissa — where he was long remembered for his 
 high degree of skill and innumerable kindnesses. 
 
 Hippocrates had much to say about disease but only a 
 little about diseases. To him in fact disease in general was an 
 entity, a definite thing-in-itself — something which, assured- 
 ly, "disease" is not to-day. To Hippocrates there was no such 
 fact as a vast number of diseases, each in itself as distinct 
 and clearly apart from other diseases as a camel, for example, 
 is, and even then was, from a dog, a horse or a cow. And 
 the whole development of medicine through the ages does 
 truly exhibit a continually increasing development of the 
 idea that there are a great many distinct diseases — each a 
 a thing in itself. This development, of course, in the con- 
 cept of sickness generally took place slowly at some times, 
 rapidly at others. Especially after the establishment of the 
 microbic origin of most diseases it took place rapidly indeed. 
 
 Now "disease," in the Hippocratic view, this vast, un- 
 integrated concept, was supposed to be caused by one single 
 thing only — an improper commixture of the liquids, or 
 "humors," of the human body. These liquids were the 
 blood, the mucus, the yellow bile and the black bile. Let 
 us see just how this theory was applied. If a patient had 
 fever, no attempt was made to answer the question What 
 fever? There was just fever, and fever was not a disease, nor 
 was it a symptom of any particular disease : it was a symptom 
 of "disease." Fever was not by any means alike in all cases. 
 It appeared, in truth, as the Father of Medicine well under- 
 stood, in a vast variety of forms. In whatsoever form it 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 911 
 
 came, however, it was as it was just in accordance with the 
 particular misproportion that the humors of the patient in 
 question had got into. 
 
 Hippocrates, unfortunately, was not an experimenter. 
 But he was an observer and a very good and close one, con- 
 sidering the fact that, in his day, no medical instruments of 
 precision existed. He was also a great recorder of his ob- 
 servations. He wrote case-histories by the thousand. Then 
 he compared the histories with one another, drew many 
 justifiable conclusions. 
 
 Tradition, to Hippocrates, meant nothing, tradition and 
 her wildeyed daughter, superstition. 
 
 Hippocrates was almost as important for what he was 
 not as for what he was. The world of his time was full of 
 theurgy and magic. He would have none of these. 
 
 ROMAN MEDICINE 
 
 When Rome completed the subjugation of Greece in 146 
 B.C. by the Battle of Corinth, Greek medicine passed from 
 Greece to Rome, becoming in truth a much altered science, 
 what is known to-day as Greco-Roman medicine. Yet the 
 earliest Greco-Roman doctors were in fact Greeks, often even 
 Greeks bearing Greek names, though the most of them 
 resided in Rome. 
 
 Asclepiades (flourished B.C. 100) taught, quite to the 
 contrary of Hippocrates, that "disease" is not due to some 
 disturbance of the humors (liquids) of the body, but of its 
 solids — too great constriction or too great relaxation of the 
 solid particles. This theory was called "solidism." The 
 doctrine, like that of Hippocrates, lived for a long time. 
 Friedrich Hoffman, in fact, of Halle (d. 1742 A.D.) taught 
 it quite persistently. Rasori of Italy, well over into the 
 19th century, was also an earnest advocate of it, and even 
 the great Frenchman, Broussais, until his death in 1838, 
 preached it with all his might. (He also, we may add in 
 passing, taught that to speak of "clinical entities," or 
 "definite diseases" was to be "foolish in the extreme.") 
 The more fanatical of Asclepiades' pupils were called 
 "Methodists." 
 
 Athenaeus of Attalia, who flourished about A.D. 69, 
 likewise differed from Hippocrates, in that he taught the 
 
912 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 causation of disease is some or another disturbance of the 
 "pneuma" (gas or vital spirit of the body, which the lungs 
 extract from the air). He and his followers were known as 
 "pneumatists." 
 
 There were, therefore, in Greco-Roman medicine, three 
 schools of practice, according to the belief which each school 
 held as to the true causation of disease — Humoralists, Sol- 
 idists and Pneumatists. The most quiet and conservative of 
 these practitioners were the Humoralists, less so were the 
 Solidists, and the most radical and noisy of all, the Pneuma- 
 tists. Surely a sufficient variety of opinion: disease (which 
 meant all diseases) is seated in the liquids of the body, or 
 in its solids, or in its gases! 
 
 In addition, however, there was still another class of 
 doctors — the Eclectics. These took something (whatsoever 
 each one chose to take) from each of the three other schools. 
 The greatest of the Eclectics was Clarissimus (ofttimes erro- 
 neously written "Claudius") 1 Galen. He was, in fact, the 
 greatest physician of antiquity except Hippocrates. He be- 
 gan practice in Rome 164 A.D. He was in greater part a 
 humoralist, but to some extent a pneumatist also. He was, 
 for his day, an excellent anatomist : in fact he studied anatomy 
 at first hand and not only in apes and swine as others before 
 him had done, but also, so far as he could, in the human 
 subject. (His was a time wherein the common man's body, 
 while alive, was treated with great indignity, but, when 
 dead, was all at once regarded as so highly sacred as to be 
 absolutely undissectible.) Galen, despite the fact that he 
 was a great egotist, a blow-hard, was a fine first-hand ob- 
 server, just as his master, Hippocrates, had been before him. 
 Best of all, he was an experimenter. Indeed he was the 
 introducer of experimentation into medical science — one of 
 the greatest of all advancements in the field. 
 
 Galen died 201 A.D. His fame, enormous even then, 
 increased with each passing century until at last he became 
 an actual incumbrance, a hindrance instead of a spur, to 
 further medical progress. Physicians would no longer ex- 
 periment, or even observe, for themselves, because they be- 
 
 1 Sec, for example, Garrison, "History of Medicine" (1917) page 97, footnote: "From 
 the fifteenth century on, the erroneous form 'Claudius Galen' has been much employed. 
 Edwin Klebs and others have shown it to be a misreading of Cl[arissimus] Galen. (Sudhoff.)" 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 913 
 
 lieved that everything of any consequence in medicine had 
 already been attended to by Galen. 
 
 Galen, too, was a Greek who simply practiced at Rome. 
 Rome itself, however, by the heads and hands of its own 
 citizens and other inhabitants, did make mighty contribu- 
 tions to the science of human health. These contributions 
 were in the line of public and private sanitation. Rome, that 
 is to say, built easily cleaned houses, well-lighted by day 
 (not by night) and well-ventilated at all times. Also, a 
 vast system of aqueducts, drains and sewers. Also many 
 public baths. Most of these improvements, however, were 
 constructed for purposes of convenience, military advantages, 
 and luxury. They were not at all thought of as conducive to 
 private or public health. The ancient Romans, in other 
 words, like millions of supposedly civilized Americans at the 
 present day, gave little thought to health and disease 
 problems, either public or private. 
 
 The Middle Ages (476 A.D. to 1492 A.D.) produced, rel- 
 atively at least, very little medical advance. Not only was 
 the paralysing hand of Galen everywhere in control, but, 
 even in the great universities — the very spots where progress 
 might most reasonably have been expected, the subjects taught 
 were almost always dialectics, moral science, theology. 
 There was little of natural science, no first-hand observation 
 at all or experimentation. In the eighth century, it is true, 
 there came into the medical field a fertilizing factor — the 
 Arabic invasion, 1 but this was important for medical progress 
 chiefly in a negative way. That is, the Arabs did not so 
 much increase the sum of European medical science as they 
 ■preserved that science through the centuries when the Euro- 
 peans themselves had forgotten it. Then they turned the 
 orecious treasure of learning back to the Europeans. They 
 iiad, however, it is true, added a number of important and 
 valuable discoveries in branches collateral to medicine — 
 mathematics, chemistry and pharmacy. 
 
 In the post- Arabian part of the Middle Ages, too, a 
 number of important additions to medical science were made 
 by non-Arabians — notably spectacles by Roger Bacon, Eng- 
 
 1 The first successful Saracenic invasion of Europe occurred at the great battle of Zeres, 
 in Spain, A.D. 711. 
 
914 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 land (d. 1294) and some other person or persons unknown. 1 
 Clocks also were invented — in the 14th century — instruments 
 of precision which, later, were used in pulse-counting, ex- 
 act-interval treatments and certain other medical matters. 
 
 Then, too, it was during the Middle Ages that hospitals, 
 in the present-day meaning of the term, began to be organ- 
 ized and established in a wide-spread way. However, the 
 mortality in medieval hospitals was frightfully high and 
 these institutions helped little if at all to stay the ravages of 
 the unparalleled epidemics of those days — the Black Death 
 for example, which, about the middle of the 14th century, 
 destroyed a quarter of the population of the earth. 
 
 The Middle Ages ended with the discovery of America 
 (1492). 
 
 THE MODERN PERIOD 
 
 The 16th century too showed little advance in medi- 
 cine. Disease was still disease, not definitely differentiated 
 diseases, except, as with Hippocrates, in a very few affec- 
 tions indeed. 
 
 The most outstanding physician of this century was A. T. 
 Bombastus von Hohenheim, alias Paracelsus. This man was 
 
 1 I have often pointed out the tremendous consequences which soon followed the intro- 
 duction of spectacles — notwithstanding that for a very long time spectacles were employed 
 for old-sight only. Indeed I have shown that the Renaissance itself, with all its vast con- 
 sequences to mankind, must have been largely the result of the introduction of spectacles. 
 Until that introduction all but short-sighted persons — then but a small percentage of the 
 entire population — were obliged at about the age of forty to give up reading and writing — 
 all close work indeed with eyes whatsoever, and that until the end of life. This, to a 
 peasant, perhaps was no great calamity. To a scholar and thinker, however, it generally 
 meant the end of his career. Imagine the stimulus to human thought and inventive genius 
 which must have resulted from the extension of the active-eye age from that of forty to that 
 of sixty, to eighty, yes — as in the case of many famous men — even to over ninety years. 
 
 There were of course other causes for the arousal of the human spirit in the 14th and 
 15th centuries, but all of them together could not begin to equal in value that world-shaking 
 occurrence, the introduction of spectacles (containing convex lenses) for old-sight. 
 
 Spectacles for many other purposes than the extension for years of youthful vision to 
 the aged, came much later. Concave lenses began to be used for the relief of short-sight 
 about the beginning of the 16th century, and, a little later (1623) convex lenses began to 
 be employed after cataract operations to take the place of nature's convex lenses, which, by 
 the operation, were removed from the line of sight (to-day, from the eyes). Then came the 
 highly convenient bifocal lenses, introduced by Benjamin Franklin, 1784. 
 
 Near the middle of the 19th century, owing chiefly to the efforts of an M.D., Dr. Arlt, 
 at Vienna, the fitting of glasses was taken up by ophthalmologists. The movement was, 
 however, even till long after the present writer had entered into medical practice, bitterly 
 opposed by the medical profession generally on the ground that it was "unethical." It was 
 not, of course regarded as "unethical" for general practitioners to keep on administering 
 morphine and coal-tar products for eyestrain. 
 
 It remains to be added that both the grinding and the fitting of spectacle-lenses has 
 now become an art and a science of truly vast proportions. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 915 
 
 as egotistical as Clarissimus Galen himself had been. He was 
 self-assertive, vulgar, profane and obscene. He bullied and 
 browbeat auditors, readers and fellow practitioners alike. 
 The family name of his father, therefore also of himself, was 
 really Hohenheim. The son, however, invented for himself 
 the substitute surname, Paracelsus, the meaning of which is 
 "beyond" or "higher than" "Celsus." Celsus, though 
 never a physician, was an old Roman medical author of 
 the first century A.D. who was still in high repute in the 
 16th century. The "Bombastus" was the father's middle 
 name, which had been passed on to the son despite its vile 
 connotation of bombast, pomposity. "Paracelsus" was born 
 at Einsiedeln, Switzerland, in 1493 (the first year of the 
 Modern Age), received the Doctor in Medicine at Ferrara in 
 1515, and, after travelling over all Europe and much of Asia, 
 taught medicine at Freiburg and Strassburg. He spoke and 
 wrote the language of the common people rather than the 
 ponderous and degenerated Latin, fought both humoralism 
 and solidism, believed in witchcraft and devils but not in the 
 devil-production of disease. He believed in scrupulous clean- 
 liness, though he had no knowledge of micro-organisms at 
 all — the compound microscope was yet to be invented (by 
 Hans and Zacharias Jansen) the simple microscope to be im- 
 proved (by Leeuwenhoek). Therefore he was, unawares, 
 something of an aseptician. He introduced mercury for 
 syphilis (exact date unknown) wrote well on cretinism and 
 goitre. One of his greatest services was the destruction of 
 innumerable petty medical superstitions. Another was his 
 break-away from Galenicals (highly complicated mixtures 
 of numerous vegetable ingredients) and his simultaneous 
 adoption and advocacy of quite simple medicines of mineral 
 origin. 
 
 The greatest work performed by Paracelsus consisted in 
 his sweeping away many worthless, even utterly senseless, 
 things from medical theory and practice. Thus he prepared 
 the way for a more scientific medicine, that which, in the 
 17th, 18th and first three-quarters of the 19th centuries, in 
 turn made possible the Germ Explanation of Many Diseases 
 and, through that marvellous explanation, produced the 
 greatest revolution ever known in human thought. 
 
916 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 THE GREAT PREPARATION 
 FOR THE GREAT REVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 
 We have passed by Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), the 
 father of anatomy; also Michael Servetus (1509-53), the dis- 
 coverer of the pulmonary circulation of the blood, who was 
 burned at the stake by John Calvin, founder of the Presby- 
 terian Church, likewise Ambroise Pare (1510-1590), who 
 abolished the use of boiling oils in wounds and who rein- 
 troduced the ligation of injured arteries — all these great men 
 we have passed over because they do not bear directly on the 
 development of the Great New Knowledge of Disease Causa- 
 tion which was to come into existence with Pasteur, Weigert, 
 Lister and Koch. (This brief review is not by any means 
 intended as an all-aspect history of medicine.) We have also 
 passed by the invention in 1590 of the compound micro- 
 scope, * the actual inventor of which has hardly been deter- 
 mined beyond doubt. Probably the credit does belong to 
 two Dutchmen, Hans and Zacharias Jansen. However, it 
 was not the compound microscope of 1590 that gave to 
 medicine in particular and to all other natural sciences in 
 general their well-nigh incredible microscopic impetus. That 
 never-to-be-forgotten impetus was supplied by the (still a 
 "simple" instrument) microscope of Anthony van Leeuwen- 
 hoek. 
 
 The simple microscope is nothing but a convex lens. It 
 had been in use since Roger Bacon first described it, A.D. 
 1276. 2 Its value arises from the fact that it permits the human 
 
 1 The word, "microscope," was not invented till April 13, 1625 — by a physician, 
 Giovanni Faber. 
 
 2 Roger Bacon, as we have already stated, described his discovery of the simple micro- 
 scope (the use of the simple convex lens for magnification purposes) in his great book, the 
 Opus Majus. Now, there being no such thing as printing in the time of Roger Bacon, this 
 book was only in manuscript form, and only one copy, the original, existed. Bacon, because 
 of his scientific discoveries, was accused by the pope of being a sorcerer (dealer in "black 
 magic") and imprisoned for ten years. To prevent the destruction of his manuscripts, these 
 were hidden away by his friends and did not see the light again until, in 1733, a learned 
 English doctor, Samuel Jebb, introduced them to the world. In that year a London edition 
 of the Opus Majus was printed and published. 
 
 The question then arises, how did Hans and Zacharias Jansen (or whoever the inventors 
 of the compound microscope in 1590 may have been) come to invent the compound instru- 
 ment while still the manuscript recording the discovery of the simple instrument by Roger 
 Bacon lay hidden away until 1733. 
 
 The explanation, which seems to be far from generally known, even yet, is this : Shortly 
 after the discovery of the simple microscope by Bacon, spectacles were invented (whether 
 with or without the knowledge of Bacon's work is unknown) by some still nameless person. 
 Then, about 1285, one Salvino degli Armati was busily engaged in manufacturing them, 
 and, about 1350, the use of spectacles (face-frames containing two convex lenses) had be- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 917 
 
 eye to focus on an object at a very short distance — in other 
 words to see it large (because very close) yet at the same time 
 to see it distinctly. If a dime, for example, without benefit 
 of lens, be brought quite close to the eye, it will be seen so 
 large as completely to fill the field of vision — shut out all 
 else from view. And yet it will be seen so badly that it is in 
 effect not seen at all. With the help of a lens between the 
 eye and the object, the view (if the three factors in the 
 situation be spaced just right) which is had of the object 
 by the eye will be not only large but distinct as well. 
 
 A simple microscope, however, never can give an en- 
 largement of more than 120 diameters (linear magnification). 
 Such enlargement for scientific, particularly medical, pur- 
 poses is far from being sufficient. In the higher powers, also, 
 of the simple microscope there is much apparent distortion 
 of the object looked at so that its true nature is not revealed, 
 and there is in addition much "coloration" of the object 
 (chromatism) due to the fact that the light even from a 
 white object is composed of rays of various colors which 
 look white when seen in combination but which assert 
 themselves as colors after passing through the lens. (This 
 is due to the fact that the rays of the different colors of 
 light when passing through a lens do not get focussed to 
 the same point beyond the lens, therefore to the eye they 
 assert themselves as colors.) 
 
 Now the compound microscope (1590) had the advantage 
 over the single lens that the eye-piece (lens nearer the eye) of 
 the compound microscope magnifies not the object itself but 
 the magnified image of the object which it is the business of 
 the object-glass (lens nearer the object) to produce. This is a 
 magnification of a magnification. Therefore the compound 
 microscope yields to the eye a far greater enlargement of the 
 object than any simple lens could possibly produce. 
 
 come very general. It is, therefore, no mystery at all why Hans and Zacharias Janscn (or 
 whoever the actual inventors of the compound microscope may have been) should, 240 
 years later, have had some knowledge of the simple microscope. They saw that instrument 
 daily, two of them at a clap, before dozens of pairs of eyes. 
 
 To-day, it should be added, a "simple" microscope is not necessarily one single piece 
 of glass, in other words a "simple" lens. No matter how many lenses are combined to 
 constitute a given lens-system, the result is still a "simple" microscope if, through the 
 system, the observer views the object directly. Only when the image, not the object itself, 
 produced by a "single" system is, in turn, looked at by yet another lens or system of lenses 
 does the instrument become, to-day, a "compound" microscope. 
 
918 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 But here is the catch. The compound microscope, though 
 it increases the simple lens's magnification, at the same time 
 enormously increases its distortion and coloration. So great- 
 ly, in fact, did that first (1590) microscope increase the dis- 
 tortion and the coloration that the instrument turned out to 
 be of little use. Afar off in time (in the 19th century) dis- 
 tortion and coloration were to be gotten rid of. But now 
 we are speaking of the 17th century, the century wherein the 
 Grand Preparation for the Great New Medicine began. In 
 that century the compound microscope was still an in- 
 teresting but impractical toy, nothing more. 
 
 What, then, about the simple microscope in that century? 
 There lies the magic of a tale. Another Dutchman, Anthony 
 van Leeuwenhoek, born 1632 at Delft, Holland, a man of 
 leisure and incidentally a lens-grinder, before 1673 had in- 
 vented a vastly improved simple microscope which was to 
 do wonderful things. Each instrument was provided with 
 a very small lens of short focal length "fixed between two 
 plates of metal that had been pierced with a very small 
 opening." Those arrangements reduced coloration and dis- 
 tortion. With these simple instruments Leeuwenhoek insti- 
 tuted the beginning of the Grand Preparation for the Great 
 New Medicine which was to produce the Endless Revolution 
 in All Human Thought. 
 
 Leeuwenhoek was not a physician or even a man of lib- 
 eral education, but, being a person of leisure, he spent the 
 most of his time "fooling round" in the microscopic under- 
 world. He finally produced, all told, with his own hands, 
 247 microscopes with 419 lenses. Many of his instruments 
 he gave away. To the Royal Society at London he shipped 
 as a gift at one single consignment 26 fine microscopes. 
 
 In 1674 Leeuwenhoek was the first to describe sperma- 
 tozoa, the red corpuscles of the blood and the structure of 
 the crystalline lens of the eye. In 1674 * he also discovered 
 protozoa (the simplest forms of animal life) and in 1676 * 
 bacteria (the simplest forms of vegetable life). Either of 
 these last-named two discoveries would, of course, entitle 
 any person to the very highest seat in the human hall of 
 
 1 According to most authorities, protozoa were discovered by Van Leeuwenhoek in 
 1675 and bacteria in 1683. But these dates are undoubtedly incorrect. See on this head 
 the master-work, Dobell's "Anthony van Leeuwenhoek and his 'Little Animals,' " London, 
 1932, large octavo, pp. 435#. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 919 
 
 fame forevermore : in fact they were not merely the corner- 
 stone, they were almost the entire foundation, of the Great 
 New Medicine yet to come. Further developments of Leeu- 
 wenhoek's discoveries, however, were to result, of course 
 from the use of the compound microscope, when that instru- 
 ment, in the 19th century, should also be greatly improved. 
 
 Leeuwenhoek, although the full importance of his dis- 
 coveries were not at all apparent to his generation, or even 
 to himself, received the very highest honors of the day from 
 the world's most learned institutions. 
 
 In 1723, aged 91, Leeuwenhoek died in his "old home- 
 town," the place wherein he was born, Delft, Holland. 
 
 Another great medical discoverer of the 17th century and 
 Preparer of the Way for the Great New Medicine, was 
 William Harvey, an Englishman. Michael Servetus (who, 
 as already mentioned, was burned at the stake by the kindly 
 John Calvin) had already, in 1553, discovered that some (be 
 could not say all) the blood in the right side of the heart was 
 propelled to and through the lungs for aeration, whence it 
 came back to the (left side of) the heart. 1 This is named the 
 pulmonary, or minor, circulation of the blood. The major, 
 systemic, or general, blood circulation, however, remained 
 for Harvey to ferret out. That great discovery he revealed 
 in one of his medical lectures in 1616. 2 
 
 Another great Preparer of the Way for the Great New 
 Medicine was a Jesuit priest, Athanasius Kircher (1602-80). 
 We now know to a certainty that when (in 1658) Kircher 
 declared he had found a microscopic cause of the pest in the 
 blood of pest patients, he could not possibly have done so 
 with the 32-power microscope he used. As Loeffler pointed 
 out, what he probably saw was pus cells and rouleaux of 
 red blood corpuscles. However, as Garrison well remarks, 
 Kircher was "the first to state in explicit terms the doctrine 
 of a 'contagium animatum' as the cause of infectious dis- 
 eases." Thus he was one of the great Preparers of the Way. 
 
 Another Preparer of the Way was Malpighi (1628-94), 
 the "founder of histology," who completed the work of 
 
 1 See his great book, "Restitutio Christianismi." 
 
 2 By those who like mnemonics the date may be remembered thus: Harvey discovered 
 the circulation of the blood in the year when the blood of William Shakespeare ceased to 
 circulate. 
 
920 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Harvey on the circulation of the blood by discovering in 
 1660 the blood capillaries. This was the "missing link," 
 anatomically speaking, in Harvey's blood-motion chain. 
 Even Malpighi's discovery, however, had to be supplement- 
 ed later by the much completer demonstrations of the capil- 
 laries by the already illustrious Leeuwenhoek. 
 
 A minor Preparer of the Way, and yet an important one, 
 was Francesco Redi (1626-94), who opposed the then almost 
 universally accepted idea that the lower forms of life can 
 generate or be generated spontaneously by non-living matter. 
 
 To what extent the world was in need of a new medicine 
 in the 17th century can easily be seen by a very brief 
 statement of the medical doctrines of Thomas Sydenham 
 (1624-89) perhaps the chief internist of his day. Sydenham 
 still taught the humoral theory of disease propounded by 
 Hippocrates. He made few attempts to differentiate "dis- 
 ease" into distinct "diseases," although, necessarily, he 
 wrote of gout, measles, scarlet fever, bronchopneumonia, 
 dysentery, hysteria and chorea. He had a vague idea that all 
 differentiated diseases could be in some way grouped and 
 classified (as, later, living things were classified into genera, 
 species and the like) with, however, the different classes 
 passing into one another by imperceptible gradations. He 
 practised venesection (blood-letting) for almost every affec- 
 tion that he ran across, whether "a disease" or just general 
 "disease." 
 
 For the great majority of doctors in the 17th century 
 alchemy, astrology and witchcraft were still valid. The 
 great van Helmont (next greatest physician of the 17th 
 century to Sydenham) believed with all his soul that every 
 process in the body, normal or abnormal, is presided over 
 by a spirit appointed from on high — a specialist no doubt 
 in its particular line of work. 
 
 Before closing, however, this brief discussion of the 17th 
 century, I wish to point out what appears to me to be, 
 medically, the strangest fact about it — its inability, namely, 
 to follow up the suggestion of Athanasius Kircher that a 
 contagium animatum, some living thing, must be the direct 
 cause of many diseases. Already the ancient Greeks had 
 discovered the tape-worm, the various round worms, yes 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 921 
 
 and so had the Egyptians long centuries before them, as well 
 as other macroscopic parasites in the human intestine. True, 
 these creatures were easily visible to the naked eye, but 
 surely it might have occurred to physicians of the 17th 
 century that parasites too little to be seen might also be 
 acting as causes of disease — each of them indeed as the cause 
 of one distinct, separate, individual disease — when those 
 learned men had only to remember that the Arabian (Jew- 
 ish), 1 Avenzoar, who had flourished at Cordova in the 12th 
 century, had discovered and described the itch-mite QAcarus 
 scabiet) — an animal so tiny that it lay on the very boundary 
 of things microscopic, actually trying to point, as one might 
 almost put it, to that great world of microscopic disease- 
 causation which lay just beyond and whose discovery would 
 mean so much for human health, human life, human thought, 
 human everything. 2 When, in addition to all this, van Leeu- 
 wenhoek, in the same 17th century, actually, with his much 
 improved simple microscope, saw both protozoa and bacteria 
 and wrote up his marvelous findings for the learned societies 
 of the world; and, still further in addition, and still in that 
 same century, when Athanasius Kircher made public his 
 theory of a contagium vivum: it is, I say, the very strangest 
 fact about that century that it did not at least adopt the 
 theory of a contagium vivum as a theory — not as a demonstra- 
 tion, of course, but as a theory — yes, the "germ theory" of 
 disease. 
 
 But it did nothing of the sort. It treated the whole 
 subject with very great indifference. 
 
 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 Just how the following century, the 18th, treated the 
 same subject and why it so treated it, we shall now attempt 
 to make clear. Once again it is to be understood that this 
 historical chapter of this volume, My Second Life, is by no 
 means meant for an all-round history of medicine even in 
 outline. The invention, for example of the obstetrical forceps 
 
 1 So great was the reputation of Arabian physicians, even in Europe, throughout the 
 Arabian part of the Middle Ages that innumerable non-Arabian doctors — Orientals, Persians, 
 Syrians, Christians, Jews — took Arabic names and practised as Arabian physicians. 
 
 2 Avenzoar: "Sometimes there arises on the body, under the external skin, little swellings 
 which the common people call soab. If the skin be removed, there issues from various parts 
 a small beast, so small that he is barely visible." 
 
922 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 by one Peter Chamberlen in the fourth decade of the 17th 
 century was one of enormous importance. Yet it had nothing 
 whatever to do with the chain of events which, acting 
 through the centuries, finally led the medical profession to 
 the Great New Medicine and, through that, produced 
 the mightiest Revolution in human affairs that the world 
 has ever seen. Now it was my great good fortune to behold 
 the ending of the old-time medicine and the beginning, as 
 well as a great deal of the beautiful development, of the new. 
 That mighty alteration became a part of my "life," my life's 
 experience. Therefore, it, as I saw it, belongs in this book, 
 and, moreover, as it does belong in this book and cannot be 
 clear to non-medical readers, unless I place before them this 
 brief account of the events of medical history which led up 
 to it, I herewith give that brief account — but only, once 
 again, the events which led up to and made possible The 
 Great New Medicine and the Great New World which that 
 New Medicine produced. 
 
 THE SYSTEMATISTS 
 
 The systematists, as the copious speculators about disease- 
 causation were and still are termed, were numerous and 
 unhampered throughout the 18th century by any great 
 reference to facts. They believed, that is to say, in arriving 
 at the cause of diseases by ratiocination — thinking things 
 out. They did not ferret things out by the use of Leeuwen- 
 hoek's and other men's then available discoveries and inven- 
 tions. They endeavored instead to think them out. 
 
 The speculators, however, of the 18th century were, as 
 a class, somewhat different from those of the centuries pre- 
 ceding. The earlier speculators had attempted to think out 
 the causes of "disease"; those of the 18th century, in 
 larger part at least, endeavored to think out the causes of 
 "diseases." They, in other words, had arrived at and very 
 largely worked in accordance with the conception of disease 
 as differentiated into a very large number of separate disease 
 entities. 
 
 This, at first, would appear to be quite in line with the 
 practice prevailing at the present day. The 18th century 
 speculators, however, lacking as they were in all knowledge 
 of microorganismal disease-production, had no facts by 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 923 
 
 which to check their ratiocinations. The consequence? They 
 differentiated "disease" into almost innumerable individual 
 diseases. Not only did they make an individual disease of 
 each and every known symptom-complex, or syndrome (oft- 
 occurring group of symptoms) some of them went even 
 farther still and made a separate disease of each and every 
 known symptom. To us of to-day such things appear ridic- 
 ulous. But we of to-day can take, for example, the sputum 
 from some throat, examine it carefully, and, if we find in it 
 the Klebs-LofHer bacillus, declare that we there have a case 
 of diphtheria, or if we do not find the Klebs-Lofiler bacillus 
 in it, we can declare that we have not there a case of diph- 
 theria. We do not say, "diphtheria" merely because we can 
 find in the case some symptom that sometimes occurs in 
 diphtheria sometimes in other diseases. Neither, on the 
 other hand, do we say "no diphtheria" because, in the 
 particular case, we find some symptom that sometimes occurs 
 in diphtheria sometimes in other diseases. In other words 
 we are not misled either on the one hand into an endless 
 multiplication of diseases, or, on the other hand, into the 
 old-time Hippocratean equally erroneous lumping together 
 of almost all the diseases that exist and calling them, as if 
 they were a single entity, simply and solely "disease." 
 
 What I have ventured to term the integration of diseases was 
 in fact not in the 18th century to any great extent possible. 
 Even had the 18th century doctors noted carefully the words 
 of Athanasius Kircher, as well as the plain implications of 
 macroscopic parasitology, of the intermediate (itch-mite) 
 parasitology, and also the discoveries made with the little 
 but quite efficient simple microscope by Anthony van Leeu- 
 wenhoek, they still would have been unable to determine 
 the microbic causation of most of the microbic diseases, 
 except in a very jew instances, for the simple reason that the 
 staining of bacteria was, in their day, unknown. 1 It was in 
 fact not invented until in the 1870's — by Carl Weigert. 
 
 1 In the sentence to which this footnote is appended I have said "except in a very few- 
 instances." And it is perfectly true that there were bacteria which did not need to be stained 
 at all in order to be visible under the microscope. Thus, before Weigert, in 1871, invented 
 the staining of bacteria, Goodsir, in 1842, had discovered Sarcinae in the stomach, and 
 Davaine, in 1865, had discovered the anthrax bacillus. Both of these bacteria should have 
 been visible with Leeuwenhoek's instrument. 
 
 A few more words about that marvelous man and his microscope should be added. 
 Leeuwenhoek, to the moment of his death, made a great mystery both of the way in which 
 
924 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 PATHOLOGICAL ANATOMY 
 
 Eighteenth century doctors, however, did make some 
 progress in what I have called "the integration of disease" 
 — the separation and grouping of symptoms into integers, 
 or "whole things" — things that are not disease proper-frac- 
 tions (things less than unity) nor on the other hand disease 
 improper-fractions (things greater than unity). One of the 
 steps in this progress was pathological anatomy — all de- 
 partures, naked-eye or microscopic, from the normal anatomy 
 of the body. 
 
 The real founder of pathological anatomy was Battista 
 Morgagni (1682-1771) of Forli, Italy, and later professor at 
 Padua. In 1761 he published the results of his investigations 
 in a book, "De Sedibus," of seventy charming letters, almost 
 conversational in character. This book, with its almost en- 
 tirely new science, or department of science, pointed out, 
 mostly for the first time, the post-mortem appearances of the 
 viscera (internal organs) in patients who had had this, that 
 or the other, symptom or combination of symptoms during 
 life. Even this "pathological anatomy," however, although 
 it did to a considerable extent degeneralize the prevalent 
 conceptions of disease giving to each of a considerable num- 
 ber of syndromes (symptom groups) "a local habitation," 
 at least a definite, physical background, nevertheless failed 
 
 he produced his lenses and the manner in which he employed them. He presented a good 
 many of his microscopes to learned societies and to individual friends. Yet even to these 
 elect he never revealed his methods for grinding the lenses which his gifts contained. A 
 great many accurate drawings, too, and descriptions of what he had seen in the microscopic 
 world he made and gave around to his friends. Yet on October 9, 1676 (two years, there- 
 fore, after his discovery of protozoa, and the very year in which he discovered bacteria) he 
 wrote to the Royal Society of London: "My method for seeing the very smallest animalcules 
 and minute eels, I do not impart to others; nor how to see very many animalcules at one 
 time. That I keep for myself alone." Nevertheless it is the truth that other observers than 
 Leeuwenhoek himself, Robert Hooke, for example, a slightly younger contemporary of 
 Leeuwenhoek's (he was born three years later only) had little difficulty in seeing all that 
 Leeuwenhoek had seen in the microscopic world. Why, then, did not the medical pro- 
 fession of the late 17th century discover the microbic causation of at least a few diseases? 
 
 The mystery of course increases when we ask the same question with respect to the 
 century following — the 18th. Consider how vastly the microscope was improved in that 
 century. In 1716 Hertel added the plane mirror, both above and below the stage, for in- 
 direct illumination of the object. Benjamin Martin, in 1742, added the micrometer eye- 
 piece, which assisted in the taking of accurate measurements. 
 
 The greatest obstruction to the full use of the microscope, especially of the compound 
 instrument, had been chromatism (colored rings round the object looked at) and spherical 
 aberration (distortion of the object looked at). 
 
 In the 18th century the first of these obstructions was considerably done away with. 
 Bcelsnyder, in 1791, made the first achromatic objective — i.e., by placing between two 
 bi-convex crown-glass lenses one biconcave flint-glass lens. 
 
 And still the germ-theory of old Athanasius Kircher was absolutely ignored! 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 925 
 
 to produce much progress in the integration of diseases. 
 For one thing because, to a very large extent, and even by 
 some of the foremost physicians of the century, the book 
 was ignored. For another thing, to show that, in a patient 
 who had in life exhibited such and such a symptom or set 
 of symptoms, there was, after death, to be found in his 
 kidneys such and such abnormal appearances, was still not 
 to show that both the symptom-set and the postmortem ap- 
 
 Searances, even when taken together, constituted one certain 
 isease entity — an integrated disease, a neither more nor less 
 than just one disease- whole. For it was plainly true then, 
 and is even more plainly true now, that the abnormal ap- 
 pearances in the kidney, just like the symptoms and symp- 
 tom-complexes which had been known for so many cen- 
 turies, might, because of the overlapping of appearances, be 
 due either to tuberculosis or to syphilis or to pus infection 
 or to yet some other infection or to several concurring infec- 
 tions or to all possible infections combined. So long as the 
 germ of each sort of infection could not be plainly discrim- 
 inated and identified, there was bound to be confusion both 
 in the diagnosis and in the naming of diseases — briefly, in 
 disease integration. 
 
 Pathological anatomy, however, it needs to be strongly 
 emphasized, did give to disease, so far as the subject was 
 attended to by the doctors of that day, an anatomical or 
 localized, a visceral or definite, not a merely humoral or all- 
 through-the body location. Moreover, it made for greater 
 accuracy of knowledge when at last, in the fourth quarter 
 of the 19th century, very many kinds of disease-germs began 
 to be discovered. At that time of numerous discoveries, 
 whenever a new sort of germ was ferreted out, there were 
 already known to physicians many fairly definite patho- 
 logical conditions with relation to the causation of which 
 the new germ could be quite rationally tested. 
 
 MATHEMATICS AND MEDICINE 
 It was in this century — still the 18th — too that math- 
 ematics, which in the 17th century had made great progress 
 — began to show its powerful influence in the department 
 of medicine. Medicine, in other words, began to become 
 quantitative. Some doctors, content no longer with such 
 
926 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 expressions as "he has fever," or "he has a hot fever," or 
 "a little fever," began to want to know exactly how hot a 
 given fever was, exactly how cold a chill. In the middle ages 
 the doctor's naked foot was ofttimes employed as a ther- 
 mometer, because more heat-and-cold sensitive than his 
 hand. 1 About 1579 Galileo invented a rude thermometer. 
 Sanctorius, in 1625, devised a very poor clinical thermometer. 
 In 1714 Fahrenheit constructed his 212 degree thermometer; 
 in 1736 Reaumer his of 80 degrees; and, in 1742, Celsus his 
 "centigrade" (100 degrees) instrument. Clinical thermometry 
 was treated in 1742 by George Martine, a Scotchman, with 
 considerable fulness. Even yet, however, the thermometer was 
 mostly ignored. To complete the subject while upon it, 
 clinical thermometers (also hypodermic syringes) were prac- 
 tically unknown throughout as late an event as our own Civil 
 War. Wunderlich's volume, "Das Verhalten der Eigenwarme 
 in Krankheiten," Leipzig, 1868, laid the first real foundation 
 for clinical thermometry. I shall hardly be believed perhaps 
 by some of the younger physicians among my readers when 
 I say that when I, in 1876, became the "apprentice" of my 
 father, even then there were few clinical thermometers in 
 use in Pike County — perhaps three all told — and absolutely 
 not one single hypodermic syringe. 
 
 Pulse counting fared better. Sir John Floyer, in 1707, 
 published his "The Physicians' Pulse Watch." The watch 
 he had invented, a special kind of stop-watch, ran for one 
 minute only. This watch, moreover, was the first to display 
 a second-hand — an addition which persists in all watches 
 to this day. 2 During my apprenticeship not only did almost 
 all physicians count the pulse, but even the most illiterate 
 nurses generally did so and reported the results to the 
 physician when he came to see the patient. 
 
 Stephen Hales, an English Clergyman, in 1733, published 
 his "Hemadynamics" (part of a larger volume) which de- 
 
 1 It is a curious fact that my great-grandmother, Eunice Richardson Clemmons, 
 of Milton, Pike County, Illinois, who was "neighbor doctor," "neighbor nurse," and 
 midwife in the early days of Pike County when doctors with diplomas were exceedingly 
 scarce, used to test patients' temperature with her right foot. Why the right, I do not know. 
 
 Eunice Richardson Clemmons sleeps — has slept for three-quarters of a century — in the 
 little Milton Smith Cemetery near Milton, Illinois, absolutely forgotten of course by all 
 except the present writer and four or five of her other descendants. 
 
 2 Floyer, it is interesting to note, employs the word "finger" to designate that part 
 of a watch which we, to-day, call a "hand." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 927 
 
 scribes his (the first) instrument ever used for taking the 
 blood pressure. It was not much employed in the 18th 
 century, but still it had a considerable influence in the way 
 of making physicians think and act quantitatively. x 
 
 So, too, did the vital statistics movement which orig- 
 inated in the latter part of the 17th and early part of the 
 18th centuries. 
 
 So too, to an extent, must have done the brand-new 
 science of chemistry with its fairly correct integration of 
 matter — rather of the different constituent forms of matter, 
 what to-day are called "the elements." 
 
 Empedocles (5th century B.C.) had taught that all things 
 are produced from the admixture of four elements — earth, 
 air, fire and water. Aristotle (4th century B.C.) added the 
 view that all these four elements are constructed of one 
 "prime" element (materia -prima). These views, incredible 
 as the fact may seem at present, prevailed throughout the 
 civilized world until the 18th century. In the 17th century, 
 it is true, Robert Boyle, from speculation only, propounded 
 certain approximately correct modifications of the old views 
 of matter. He, for example, defined "element" as a sub- 
 stance which analysis cannot resolve into anything simpler. 
 An element, said he, must be perfectly homogeneous. It can 
 contain no ingredient but may itself be an ingredient of other 
 substances which are not elements. He, however, could not 
 by experiment prove the existence of any given substance as 
 an element, or draw up any list of what substances should 
 be termed "elements." He, therefore, allowed the science 
 of matter (physics and chemistry) to pass over into the 18th 
 century without what I have ventured to term the integra- 
 tion of matter — i.e. the determination of the elemental in- 
 tegers, or units, of matter as matter is known to us. 
 
 That great advance was actually achieved, however, in 
 the 18th century by Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794). Basing 
 his work on the speculations of Boyle, Lavoisier drew up his 
 (the first modern) table of elements — substances each of 
 which is distinct in its properties from all the others, does 
 not contain any other element as an ingredient, and more- 
 
 1 Poiseuille, in 1828, added the mercury manometer; Ludwig, in 1847, added other 
 improvements; and, finally, T. C. Janeway, at John Hopkins University, by his book, "The 
 Clinical Study of Blood-Pressure," 1904, drafted the entire science of haemo-manometry 
 into the service of mankind. 
 
928 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 over cannot be analysed into simpler parts than itself with- 
 out destruction of its essential character. And all these 
 points he largely established experimentally. 
 
 His "table of thirty-three elements" has had to be cor- 
 rected since his time to some extent, especially by the addi- 
 tion of many other elements (the total is now 92, instead 
 of 33). 
 
 But matter had at last received its (at least approximate) 
 integration. No longer were admixtures or chemical combi- 
 nations of two or more elements (such as water, air, fire and 
 earth) regarded as "elements." So, too, in the 19th century, 
 there were to come the Lavoisiers of disease — not only 
 Pasteur, Weigert and Koch, but also Marchiafava and Celli. 1 
 After these no one again could do, as, for example, many of 
 the ancient and medieval physicians had done when they 
 wrote of "malaria" as if it were disease, merely expressing 
 itself in different persons or under different circumstances as 
 quotidian, tertian, semitertian, quartan, etc., 2 or as John 
 Hunter, in this very century — the 18th — did when he thought 
 that gonorrhoea and syphilis are one disease and one only. 
 
 An out-at-elbow, absolutely unknown doctor in the "wild 
 and woolly" wilderness of Kentucky — a doctor with only a 
 little more than a year of medical education all told — in 
 1809, the birthyear of the man Abraham, who was soon to 
 cast out forever the curse of human slavery from his land — 
 that Messiah of a country doctor, I say, long years before 
 the introduction of antiseptic surgery and perhaps, as has 
 been said, "in the physically dirtiest way possible," and for 
 the first time in history, did an actual ovariectomy (ampu- 
 tation of the ovary). This was really the beginning of 
 abdominal surgery. 
 
 The man was so extremely ignorant in a general way that 
 he could not write a proper case-report. He sent his ' 'report, ' ' 
 so-called, to be published eight years after he had done the 
 operation and when he had done two more successful ova- 
 riectomies. 
 
 1 It was in 1889 that Marchiafava and Celli showed that the protozoa of the pernicious, 
 the tertian and the quartan forms of malaria are not the same. 
 
 2 Some physicians too did likewise even in my own time, and, conversely, almost every 
 physician in my boyhood, youth, and early manhood, would at times say to a patient, 
 "Your trouble just now is malarial fever, but, if you're not careful, it may run into, i.e. 
 become, typhoid." Malaria does not become typhoid any more than a giraffe becomes an 
 elephant. 
 
MY SECOND LIF,E 929 
 
 This man, the very Messiah of all modern abdominal 
 surgery, was treated by the wise men of the East — New York, 
 Philadelphia, all Europe in fact — with derision and contempt. 
 
 The greatest surgical operation that had been performed 
 in all this world, down to and including its day — an opera- 
 tion that was amply worthy to open the greatest of all 
 surgical centuries that have been or probably ever shall be 
 until the end of time — that operation was received at first 
 with nothing but derision and contempt. 
 
 And so it went, too, as to the introduction in the 19th 
 century of surgical anethesia. Sir Humphry Davy, in 1800, 
 put himself to sleep with nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and, 
 in his volume, "Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, 
 Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide" (London, 1800) he, after 
 relating the fact that, with nitrous oxide he had put him- 
 self to sleep (thus rendering himself invulnerable to pain) 
 went on to suggest, "it may probably be used with advantage 
 in surgical operations." 1 Yet nobody paid any attention to 
 that unquestionably first discovery of general surgical anes- 
 thesia. 
 
 1 As Davy's book in the original edition (1800) is rare and difficult to buy, beg, borrow 
 or steal, the reader may find it more convenient to consult the passage above referred to in 
 the edition of 1839 — wherein it forms Volume III of "The Collected Works" of Sir Humphry. 
 In that volume the passage is on page 329, and runs in full: "As nitrous oxide in its extensive 
 operation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with ad- 
 vantage during surgical operations in which no great effusion or blood takes place.". 
 
 Apparently, in all the thirty-nine years which had elapsed between the publication of 
 the first edition of this book and the "collected edition" of 1839, not one physician on earth 
 had made the slightest use of the information which had been so plainly given out by Davy, 
 excepting only one young English surgeon, Henry Hill Hickman. Hickman had in 1820 
 reported to a number of British and French medical and surgical societies the performance 
 by him of a number of serious surgical operations experimentally on various animals under 
 general anesthesia produced by nitrous oxide. He also had proposed to these societies that 
 this substance should be employed to render painless the performance of similar operations 
 on human beings. So promptly and so thoroughly, however, were the young man's proposals 
 rejected and he himself derided that he made no further attempts to bring about the ac- 
 ceptance of general surgical anesthesia. "Here," in effect, had said both Davy and Hickman 
 to the entire world, "is surgical anesthesia all ready for your use." And yet no one had 
 used it. In all those years not the very slightest use. For this reason — the gross inertia of 
 the medical profession — Sir Humphry Davy should, according to nearly all medical his- 
 torians, be debarred from the honor to which he is so clearly on all other accounts entitled! 
 
 Other passages in Davy's book disclose that certain scientific persons, notably Dr. 
 Mitchill, of America (p. 299) had come to think that nitrous oxide in a very dilute form 
 is the cause of contagious diseases. Could anything more clearly set forth and demon- 
 strate how the world, before Pasteur and Koch, was floundering around in a sea of etiologic 
 ignorance? 
 
 Devils, bad air (malaria means "bad air") dilute nitrous oxide, and so on. These, for 
 examples, were the causes (supposedly) of contagious diseases before the arrival of the Great 
 New Medicine. 
 
930 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Was it not such a discovery? The man had put himself 
 to sleep, had seen the value of such sleep for surgical pur- 
 poses, and he had made publicly known both the find and 
 its value. It has often been said that "to find and not to make 
 known" does not constitute discovery. Similarly, "priority 
 dates from publication." Again, "discovery" includes three 
 things: (1) finding something important (2) realizing what 
 the importance is (3) publishing the find and the nature of 
 its importance. If Sir Humphry Davy's discovery does not 
 comply completely with all these three tests, then wherein 
 does it fail to do so? 
 
 Yet so stupid, so thoroughly asleep, were scientists at the 
 beginning of the boasted 19th century and for decades there- 
 after that they completely ignored this plain discovery of 
 surgical anesthesia by Sir Humphry Davy. Scientists even of 
 the present day still do so, and all the storm that they have 
 raised about the discovery of anesthesia relates only to the 
 relative claims of Dr. Long, of Georgia, who in 1842, per- 
 formed an operation under ether anesthesia, but who pub- 
 lished no report of the matter; of Horace Wells (Hartford, 
 Conn.) who, in 1844, used nitrous oxide as an anesthetic in 
 dentistry; of William Thomas Green Morton (Charlton, 
 Mass.) who, having learned from a chemist (Jackson) that 
 chloric ether is an anesthetic, used it in 1844 when filling a 
 tooth, and who, having learned from the same chemist that 
 sulphuric ether is also an anesthetic, used that in filling a tooth 
 and liked it better, therefore persuaded Dr. John Collins 
 Warren (Boston) to use it in a surgical operation (October 
 16, 1846) — with, as all know, a successful result. Morton 
 then tried, most unethically, to patent the drug and would 
 not even reveal its identity till 1847. A great hubbub grew up 
 about the whole matter. To this dirty squabble there later 
 was added an even dirtier one as to who was the true 
 discoverer of general anesthesia. Astonishing to relate, the 
 plainly true discoverer, Sir Humphry Davy, was absolutely 
 ignored, as, in fact, he practically always still is. 1 
 
 1 The United States government, in its all-wisdom, has attempted to settle the matter 
 by issuing a commemorative stamp in honor of Dr. Crawford Williamson Long, of Daniels- 
 ville, Georgia. Concerning the claims of Long, Dr. Fielding H. Garrison's "History of 
 Medicine," 1917, p. 531, has the following: "In March, 1842, Dr. Crawford Williamson 
 Long (1815-78), of Danielsville, Georgia, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania 
 (1839), having previously noted some accidental anesthetic effects of ether, removed a small 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 931 
 
 So, in the midst of stupid opposition and mercenary bick- 
 ering the medical progress of the 19th century was born 
 and so in fact it continued until well beyond the beginning 
 of the final fourth of that century. To multiply examples 
 would be easy but pointless. 1 
 
 And then, in 1876, on his birthday the tenth, there came 
 upon the medical scene in the "sticks" of Pike County, 
 Illinois, little Tommy Shastid — one who in no way, shape, 
 manner or form contributed to the Great New Medicine or 
 to any remarkable extent to the Great New World which 
 resulted from it, but who, nonetheless, was selected by his 
 country doctor father to be an apprentice unto him, and who, 
 having two eyes, two ears, a smeller and ten feelers, made 
 fair use of these organs while noting the passage off the 
 stage of the Old Medicine and the entrance onto it of the 
 New: all the while attending of course to the back-scene of 
 the play — the surroundings and their reactions to the ever- 
 changeful drama. 
 
 In 1876, when little Tommy Shastid (or let us say again 
 I) became an apprentice, doctors, as to internal medicine, 
 
 cystic tumor from the back of the neck of a patient under its influence, and subsequently used 
 it in other cases (1842-43), which have been amply certified and vouched for by resident 
 
 Ehysicians of his locality. But Long published no reports of his results, and, as Welch 
 as admirably said, 'We cannot assign to him any influence upon the historical development 
 of our knowledge of surgical anesthesia or any share in its introduction to the world at 
 large.' " Welch might very well have added that, if Long really had understood the value of 
 ether as an anesthetic then his failure to discover his "discovery" to the world (not 
 merely to himself and his tiny circle) was nothing short of a crime whose magnitude exceeds 
 that of almost any other crime in history. 
 
 In any case how can 1842 be regarded as earlier than 1800? 
 
 1 Both the world-astounding operation (ovariectomy) of Ephraim McDowell and the 
 discovery of anesthesia played important parts in the preparation of the way for the Great 
 New Medicine. 
 
 Before McDowell the surgical branch of medicine had been but little developed, and, 
 in addition, it stood in the blackest disrepute as compared with internal medicine. Mc- 
 Dowell's operation gave to surgery not only a higher standing in the estimation of the 
 world but it started that branch of medicine on an unprecedented era of development. This 
 new surgery of course created at once two universally recognized surgical needs (1) surgical 
 anesthesia (2) some means of reducing the then terrible mortality from operation wounds — 
 a need which was later supplied by the Germ Theory and Antisepsis. 
 
 Anesthesia, coming first, became in turn one of the great preparers of the way for the 
 Great New Medicine. Prior to anesthesia, he was the best surgeon who performed an 
 operation in the shortest time. Had antisepsis been proposed before anesthesia had come 
 into use, antisepsis could hardly have been adopted. As Sir Clifford Allbutt remarked 
 (Johns Hopkins Hosp. Bulletin, Baltimore, 1898, IX, p. 281), "What place could there be in 
 record-breaking operations [he means record-breaking in the matter of time] for the fiddle- 
 faddle of antiseptic precautions?" Antiseptic precautions are not "fiddle-faddle," but, very 
 plainly, there was no chance at all for their adoption so long as the old-time surgery required 
 the utmost possible operative speed. 
 
932 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 paid most attention to the pulse and the tongue. 1 They did 
 not at that time make use of the clinical thermometer, but, 
 instead, employed the hand. They had hammers and plessi- 
 meters, also fairly good stethoscopes — though often they 
 tapped on a chest with their fingers and listened with ears 
 applied close (direct auscultation). The ophthalmoscope 
 had been invented (1851), the laryngoscope (1854) and the 
 otoscope (1861), but country doctors in those days used none 
 of these diagnostic instruments. As to the nose and throat 
 my father examined them both by daylight, employing the 
 handle of a spoon to hold the tongue down. On a dark day 
 he usually employed me or some other person of equal prox- 
 imity and skill, to hold a lighted coal-oil lamp and a clean 
 mirror (not all of them were clean) in such a manner as to 
 illuminate the mouth and throat considerably and, just a 
 little, the auditory canals. The look of the skin those old- 
 time doctors noticed with rapt attention. They were truly 
 great students of symptoms, in fact at this present day I know 
 of no such symptomatologists as I met quite frequently then. 
 
 In treatment they used of course quinine — "the sheet 
 anchor of medicine" my father called it. (The world in fact 
 was full of malaria then : doctors did not know the cause of 
 it or how to prevent it, but they could almost always cure 
 it as well as its various complications.) They also used blue 
 mass and other forms of mercury with much skill. A large 
 number of antidotes to pain they possessed, but hardly, as 
 yet, the hypodermic syringe. Tonics too they had in abun- 
 dance. Laxatives and purgatives they had galore, also al- 
 teratives, expectorants, antisyphilitics. And they under- 
 stood the use of heat and cold, likewise of galvanism, 
 faradism and massage, far better then most physicians do 
 to-day. 
 
 In preventive medicine they had no power except vaccina- 
 tion for smallpox, and quinine for malaria — which latter 
 
 1 This brief review of the old-time medicine as it existed just before and for some time 
 after the beginning of the Great New Medicine, I set forth here and now, despite the fact 
 that to some extent but very slightly I have mentioned the same facts before (when writing of 
 my boyhood, youth and early manhood) but that I now do because, when writing before 
 on the subject, I necessarily commingled the facts with a very large amount of other matters 
 which prevented the collective significance of those facts from becoming at all manifest. Just 
 now it is necessary to bring out and to emphasize that collective significance before proceeding 
 to the brilliant advent upon the scene of affairs of the Great New Medicine and all that it 
 has meant to a suffering and blundering world. 
 
EUNICE RICHARDSON CLEMMONS 
 
 "Neighbor doctor," "neighbor nurse," and mid- 
 wife at Milton, Illinois, in the early pioneer 
 days. From one of the earliest tintypes, much 
 damaged by time, especially in the subject's 
 hands. 
 
 I have but one distinct recollection of her. 
 On that occasion she, my mother and I were 
 standing in a yard just two doors south of my 
 father's home. The day was sunny, all around 
 us were flowers. Great-grandmother Clem- 
 mons, in lace cap and shawl, short, chubby, 
 bright-eyed, held in her hand a bunch of 
 marigolds on which she was expatiating to my 
 mother. Just what she was saying I cannot 
 remember. 
 
 That is the only recollection that I have of 
 my great-grandmother Clemmons. And glad 
 am I that it is so beautiful a memory: my 
 mother, then quite young and comely and mani- 
 festly very worshipful of her grandmother. My 
 great-grandmother, so happy and vivacious, as 
 sparkling as the day itself! 
 
 Two days later she was dead. 
 
 She was born in North Carolina, December 
 27, 1781, 18 years therefore before the death of 
 •George Washington. (So brief indeed is the 
 history of our country, when I, who am still 
 among the living, can distinctly remember one 
 who was full 18 years of age at the death of 
 George Washington.) She removed with her 
 husband, Peter Clemmons, to Pike County, 
 
 Illinois, in 1829. Settling in Milton it was there 
 and in that vicinity that she officiated (as, long 
 after her death, my mother informed me) in 
 the capacities of neighbor doctor, neighbor 
 nurse and midwife. It was there, too, that she 
 used to take her patients' temperature by ap- 
 plying to their cheeks the sole of her right foot. 
 
 Just how this neighbor doctor, even in the 
 seventh decade of the 19th century, was still 
 taking sick folks' temperature by a method 
 which has long been supposed by medical his- 
 torians to have died in the later Middle Ages, 
 I do not know. Had this method, so long re- 
 jected and forgotten by doctors, come on down 
 into the 19th century as a bit of medical folk 
 lore? Or had it been re-discovered by Great- 
 grandmother, or by some one else from whom 
 she had learned the trick? I do not know. I 
 do, however, know that it was a very much 
 better method of taking sick folks' temperature, 
 so be the foot was clean, than that which was 
 commonly employed by the M.D. medical pro- 
 fession even so late as the days of my general 
 practice in Pike County — i.e. laying the (per- 
 haps cold) hand on the patient's cheek or fore- 
 head. 
 
 Great-grandmother lived to be more than 
 87 years old. She died July 17, 1869, just two 
 days before I was three. My recollection of her, 
 therefore, is probably the earliest memory-pic- 
 ture I possess. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 933 
 
GRAVE OF MRS. EUNICE RICHARDSON CLEMMONS 
 
 The Tramp's Great-grandmother and old-time "neighbor doctor," "neigh- 
 bor nurse," and midwife at Milton, Illinois. The grave lies in the Milton 
 Smith Cemetery, 1 J4 miles north and west of Milton. She was possibly the 
 last person to take the temperature of the sick by application of a naked 
 foot to the patient's cheek. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 935 
 
 preventive did not so much prevent malaria, as it kept on 
 curing it as fast as it arose. 
 
 Of surgery there was much, indeed by far too much, to do 
 on the farms. Doctors ligated cut arteries; sewed back in 
 place many chopped off fingers; opened boils, abscesses, 
 felons; catheterized bladders often; set fractures and reduced 
 dislocations. They also performed amputations, a great many 
 of them, and had better results by far in this work than did 
 the best of operators in the cities — where the work of course 
 must be carried on in hospitals, and hospitals in those days 
 were merely "entrances into graveyards." Even in private 
 houses the results of the old-time surgery were ofttimes bad 
 in the extreme. 
 
 As the capstone upon this old-time practice, let us merely 
 remark that both the incidence and the mortality of the 
 commonest of all diseases except malaria were almost in- 
 credibly high. Tuberculosis, scarlet fever, diphtheria, dys- 
 entery, cholera infantum, typhoid fever, pneumonia, and 
 many other terrors of the time raged and raged and raged. 
 There was no way at all in which to prevent them: their 
 causes were not understood. And, as to treatment, doctors 
 mostly attempted to make the patient comfortable, to "in- 
 crease his resistance" — and prayed and prayed and prayed. 
 
 Some of the prayers were destined, in time, to be answered. 
 
 THE 19th CENTURY PREPARERS OF THE WAY 
 Already we have spoken of Preparers of the Way for the 
 Great New Medicine — but preparers who lived and worked 
 in centuries preceding the 19th. Now, in the 19th, more 
 preparers still were necessary — and forthcoming. Preparers 
 were necessary particularly in the line of improving the 
 compound microscope. The possibilities of this instrument 
 were plainly enormous if only two of its greatest defects 
 could be got rid of — chromatism and spherical aberration 
 (distortion of the image). Chromatism was due to the fact 
 that, in ordinary (white) light, the constituent rays are of 
 different colors — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and 
 violet. All of these, combined in one beam, are necessary to 
 constitute white light. But, unfortunately, these rays of 
 different color, having passed through a lens, do not come 
 to the same focus — i.e., do not come to a focus at the same 
 
936 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 distance from the lens. The violet rays form a focus at the 
 shortest distance from it, the indigo at a little longer dis- 
 tance, and so on, in the order wherein the various colors are 
 just-above listed, the red rays of course reaching their focus 
 at the farthest distance of all. The result of this state of 
 affairs was that objects viewed through a microscope con- 
 taining un-achromatic lenses showed themselves surrounded 
 by either a red color fringe or a violet color fringe. More- 
 over, even the non-fringe part of the image, consisting as it 
 did of all the different colors of rays commingled, some of 
 which, for whatsoever rays the instrument was focussed, 
 would be decidedly out of focus — the non-fringe part of the 
 image, I say (and that was of course the most of it) would 
 be decidedly blurred. 
 
 Spherical aberration was due not to the fact that the 
 different constituent colors of white light focus at different 
 distances from the lens, but to the fact that any ray of light 
 of any given color which passes through the margin of a 
 convex lens is bent to a focus which is nearer the lens than 
 is the focus of rays which pass through the lens's center or 
 thereabouts. And all the rays which pass through the lens 
 at points between its margin and its center are bent to focuses 
 which stand at varying distances from the lens precisely in 
 accordance with the distance from the lens-center the point 
 is through which the ray passes. The nearer to the center 
 the ray passes through the lens, the farther from the lens 
 that ray will find its focus — and vice versa. 1 
 
 A most important feature of aberration, both spherical 
 and chromatic, was that the stronger the lenses the greater 
 the aberration. The microscopist, of course, would far rather 
 have had it the opposite way. 
 
 For a long time after the invention of the compound 
 microscope (1590) it was thought that neither chromatic 
 nor spherical aberration could ever be got rid of. 
 
 In 1733, however, Hall, an English philosopher, did con- 
 struct achromatic lenses. But he failed to publish his inven- 
 tion and priority dates from publication. The meed of 
 praise therefore goes to a London optician, John Dollond, 
 
 1 Mirrors, it is worth remarking, have no chromatic aberration. Nor do plane mirrors 
 have any spherical aberration. Spherical mirrors have spherical aberration only when the 
 aperture or the mirror exceeds 8 or 10 degrees. (The "aperture" of a mirror is the angle 
 formed by joining opposite edges of the mirror with the principal focus.) 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 937 
 
 who, in 1758, constructed achromatic telescope lenses by 
 combining two lenses (called a doublet) one a double-convex 
 crown glass lens, the other a concavo-convex flint glass lens. 
 The concave surface of the flint glass lens being applied to 
 one of the convex surfaces of the crown glass lens, the 
 chromatism of both lenses was overcome without destroying 
 the magnification. 
 
 For almost seventy years, very strangely, the achromatic 
 principles applied by Dollond to telescope lenses were not 
 applied to microscope lenses. In fact it was thought by 
 scientists generally that the small size and extreme convexity 
 required by the lenses of microscopes debarred them alto- 
 gether from the application of such principles. 
 
 A Mr. Tulley then, in 1825, produced a microscope in 
 which those principles were applied, not indeed to doublet 
 lenses but to an instrument which contained a pair of triplet 
 lenses, and which was fairly achromatic as well as somewhat 
 aplanatic (free from spherical aberration). 
 
 Then came upon the scene Joseph Jackson Lister, a London 
 wine merchant, whose son, Joseph Lister, was destined to 
 become the founder of antiseptic surgery and, thereby, one 
 of the mighty four who gave to the world the Great New 
 Medicine. 
 
 Now thefather, Joseph Jackson Lister, discovered (1826-27) 
 a great law which applies even yet in the manufacture of 
 compound microscopes — the law of relative position, i.e. 
 the law that a certain spacing must be observed between the 
 source of light and each multiplet element in the optical 
 series contained in the microscope. By such correct spacing 
 he in fact, at a coup, got rid of both chromatic and spherical 
 aberration almost absolutely. As he was already the father 
 of Joseph Lister, later to be the father of antiseptic surgery, 
 he was, of course, through him, the grandfather, so to speak, 
 of antiseptic surgery. But, in addition, and as if the former 
 honor were not sufficient for one human being, he was, in a 
 sense, the father of the Great New Medicine as a whole, for 
 the microscope which he devised was one which, very 
 largely, made that Medicine possible. Perhaps we ought to 
 admit this modest gentleman to the great little company 
 which will always lead the van of human immortals — that 
 
938 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 great four: Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister junior, Carl Weigert 
 and Robert Koch. 
 
 At all events Joseph Jackson Lister was one of the great- 
 est Preparers of the Way. 
 
 In 1837 Agostino Bassi found the Botrytis Bassiana, which 
 he showed to be the fungi, probable cause of the silkworm 
 disease, the parasitic fungi, calcino or muscardine. (Note 
 how one thing leads to another.) John Goodsir (in 1842) 
 discovered Sarcinae in the stomach. Davaine, in 1865, the 
 Bacterium anthracis. 
 
 LOUIS PASTEUR 
 Then came the first of the big four, Pasteur. Born in 
 1822, he was professor of physics at Dijon (1848), of chem- 
 istry at the University of Strassburg (1849) and so forth. 
 His discoveries in physics and chemistry were of permanent 
 value, but those in biology are of even greater value still. 
 Contrary to the then prevailing view, he proved that micro- 
 organisms cannot come into being spontaneously but that 
 they are all begotten by previously existing micro-organisms. 
 Without this great incontrovertible underlying truth the 
 Great New Medicine itself could never have come into ex- 
 istence. It would have done no good to kill even an entire 
 generation of a given kind of disease germ, no nor even to 
 kill all the disease germs of all kinds that may exist upon 
 this planet at any given moment, if, then, by spontaneous 
 generation (in other words, without ancestors) disease germs 
 could still continue to come into existence and play havoc 
 with the race. He discovered the microbe (Mycoderma acetz), 
 which, causing the acetic fermentation, produces vinegar. 
 He discovered the preservative effects of heat on various 
 foods, "pasteurization," of practical application even to-day 
 throughout the world. He discovered that the silkworm 
 disease is really two diseases — febrine and flacherie — also how 
 to cure both. As a result of his arduous labors in these 
 matters he suffered in 1868 a severe stroke of paralysis. 
 Nothing daunted, he proceeded thereafter to accomplish even 
 the greatest labors of his career. Gradually this Parisian 
 chemist, physicist and bacteriologist became transformed 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 939 
 
 into a physician — a research physician, with all the ad- 
 vantages that his chemistry, physics and bacteriology could 
 confer upon him. 
 
 The rest of Pasteur's wonderful discoveries, at least the 
 chief thereof, will be mentioned just a few pages hereafter 
 under the section-head, "Growth of The Great New Medi- 
 cine." 
 
 The man was granted the greatest honors that his own 
 country and even some others could bestow, the long list 
 culminating in his glad admission to the Academie Frangaise, 
 the French Immortal Forty. 
 
 One of the French Immortal Forty? He was one of the 
 world's immortal four — the four who founded the Great 
 New Medicine and who, through that, revolutionized the 
 world both of human life and human thought. 
 
 JOSEPH LISTER 
 
 The second of the World's Big Four was Joseph Lister, 
 son of that Joseph Jackson Lister who, though only a wine- 
 merchant, yet had given to the medical world — and to all 
 the other worlds in the world — the aplanatic and achromatic 
 microscope, the means whereby to see disease-germs and 
 to see them accurately (without distortion of shape and 
 without false coloration). 
 
 Lister the younger was born at Upton, England, in 1827, 
 the very year wherein his father had discovered the great 
 new principle of "the proper relative positions of light- 
 source and lens-units" in the manufacture of aplanatic and 
 achromatic microscopes. His medical diploma he received 
 at the University of London in 1852. In 1854 he settled in 
 Edinburgh, where he was house-surgeon under the celebrated 
 Syme. A little later he married Syme's daughter. In 1860 
 he became professor of surgery at the University of Glasgow. 
 
 Lister was often depressed in spirit by the high mortality 
 in even the best of hospitals from septicemia, pyemia, tetanus, 
 erysipelas, and hospital gangrene. His own mortality after 
 amputations was 45 per cent; that of some other distinguished 
 surgeons ran even to 75 per cent. Nearly all wounds sup- 
 purated (formed pus) in those days. So true this was that 
 a certain amount of pus that did not smell too badly was in 
 
940 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 those days called "laudable" pus. Such pus was thought to 
 facilitate healing. It merely facilitated the arrival of the 
 hearse. 
 
 Lister noted too that mortalities did not run by any 
 means so high in homes as in hospitals. * In very clean homes 
 it ran the lowest of all. 
 
 Lister, while musing on these matters, learned of Pas- 
 teur's germ theory of fermentation, of disease, and of wound 
 suppuration. Soon he became convinced that ' 'putrefaction, 
 as he then called suppuration (believing that it was in fact 
 putrefaction) was caused by the micro-organisms of which 
 Pasteur had written so much, or else by others of similar 
 character. Could not, perhaps, he meditated, these micro- 
 organisms be in some way destroyed and thus the putrefac- 
 tion forestalled? Well, in what way? Certainly not by pas- 
 teurization, the application of heat. A degree of heat 
 sufficient to kill the germs would be sufficient to destroy the 
 human tissues also wherein the wound lay. He decided to 
 try out, then, chemical antiseptics. Chloride of zinc, also 
 some of the sulphites. These proving unsatisfactory, he 
 resorted to carbolic acid, having heard of its use for the 
 disinfection of sewage. On August 12, 1865, a most memor- 
 able date, he used it in a case of compound fracture with 
 perfect success. In 1867 he published a number of cases in 
 the London Lancet in two papers, the later called "On the 
 Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of Surgery." Even the 
 term, "antiseptic," had been invented by him. Undaunted 
 by the storm of criticism which his papers aroused, Lister 
 continued with his "antiseptic surgery." He believed, how- 
 ever, that the germs of "putrefaction" got into the wound 
 
 1 The very reverse, of course, of the situation now. In those days many homes were 
 fairly clean, all hospitals were very dirty. To-day no home is really clean in the surgical 
 sense. Whenever a serious surgical operation has to-day to be performed in a home, very 
 strict measures are, except in case of urgent emergencies, taken to render some or another 
 room in the building exceedingly clean for the particular occasion. 
 
 Even as late as 1886 to 1888, when I was a student in medical colleges, "laudable pus" 
 was still laudable, praiseworthy, highly desirable. Pus, be it known, consists chiefly of 
 certain kinds of white blood corpuscles which, commingled with blood-serum, have passed 
 through the walls of the smallest blood-vessels and so into the tissues or into a wound. 
 The function of these white cells is to attack and destroy disease germs — a laudable function 
 indeed, but, inasmuch as the patient sometimes dies as a result of the excreta (poisons) 
 which the germs, even during their battle with the white cells, give off into the tissues, 
 far better it would be to have a clean — i.e., a germ-free — wound and hence no need for the 
 white corpuscles. 
 
 If any pus is "laudable" then all is. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 941 
 
 almost entirely from the air. So, in surgical (operational) 
 wounds, he attempted to prevent putrefaction by means of 
 a "vaporizer" which cast a spray of carbolic-acid-solution 
 not only over the wound and the surrounding parts of the 
 body, but also through the atmosphere in the room — the 
 latter being regarded as far the most important matter. In 
 accidental wounds, of course, the carbolic solution was 
 simply applied to the wound (which already had been made) 
 by means of cloth tampons or by just dropping the solution 
 into the wound from a spoon. 
 
 Later, it became known that little if any infection ever 
 reaches a surgical wound from the atmosphere, but that the 
 sources of infection are nearly always the patient's skin and 
 clothing, the surgeon's instruments, the hands and clothing 
 of the surgeon and his assistants. The changes in surgical 
 technique which resulted from this new information will be 
 mentioned hereafter; suffice it now to say that the antiseptic 
 methods even at first adopted by Lister were highly suc- 
 cessful. Out of forty patients who had submitted to amputa- 
 tions at the hands of Joseph Lister between 1867 and 1869, 
 only six had died. 
 
 Almost miraculous results! Yes, as I have already stated 
 in an early portion of this volume, even in 1876, when I 
 became my father's apprentice, and for years and years there- 
 after, both the germ theory of disease and its necessary out- 
 growth, antiseptic surgery, were regarded as a kind of scien- 
 tific lunacy. Not only that, but as a terrible sin against God. 
 Did not the Bible, even the New Testament itself, in very 
 many places represent disease as resulting from the possession 
 of human bodies by devils — emissaries of Satan, who could 
 talk and even argue? 
 
 Already in this volume I have told of the country preacher 
 in Pike County who, in his own church, oh a Sunday, turned 
 the most of his sermon into a diatribe against my father and 
 his belief that many diseases are caused by micro-organisms. 
 
 In some of the largest cities of the world, particularly in 
 Pasteur's own city (where then he was living) Paris, the 
 fight was even more bitter than it was in the backwoods of 
 Pike County, Illinois. 
 
942 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 CARL WEIGERT 
 
 The third of the founders of the Great New Medicine was 
 Carl W. Weigert. He was born at Miinsterberg, Silesia, in 
 1845- In 1871, being only twenty-six years old, he reported 
 in Centralblatt fur die medicinische Wissenschaft, pages 609-611, 
 the very first staining of bacteria. Until this time all work- 
 ers with the microscope had been obliged to observe only 
 unstained bacteria. That meant that a great many kinds of 
 bacteria had gone completely unobserved by anybody, be- 
 cause many bacteria so closely resemble the media in which 
 they occur — pus, blood, mucus, sputum and so on — that, 
 with even the best of microscopes, they cannot be seen. 
 
 Weigert had used at first a dye taken from cochineal. 
 Later, Paul Ehrlich, of Strehlen, Silesia, had begun to use 
 the aniline dyes for staining human tissues, and this sug- 
 gested to Weigert the use of these dyes, which are almost 
 endless in number and variety of hue, for the staining of 
 bacteria. Weigert's results were published in 1875, and be- 
 hold almost the entire invisible world of bacteria was brought 
 clearly into the view of everybody — save those who would 
 not see. 
 
 It was in fact Carl Weigert's staining methods which 
 rendered possible the achievements of Robert Koch, achieve- 
 ments which constituted the crowning contribution to the 
 Great New Medicine. 
 
 ROBERT KOCH 
 
 Notwithstanding that a number of micro-organisms had 
 been, as already stated, discovered by earlier observers in 
 association with certain diseases, no absolute proof that one 
 definite microbe does actually cause one definite disease, that 
 it never produces any other disease than that one, and that 
 the disease in question is never produced by anything else 
 than that particular microbe — such proof of such fundamental 
 matters had never been forthcoming. 
 
 Such proof of such matters would even as to one single 
 disease and one single microbe, have established what (once 
 again) I have ventured to call the "integration of a disease" 
 — the concept of a given disease as a disease unity, something 
 neither more nor less than one thing apart from all other 
 things. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 943 
 
 Henle, in 1840, had laid down several requirements for 
 the establishment of proof that a definite microbe does cause 
 a definite disease. These requirements were later improved 
 and elaborated by Koch, since which time they have been 
 called "Koch's postulates." In condensed form these run 
 as follows : The micro-organism must be found in association 
 with the disease; a pure culture (unmixed reproduction) of 
 that micro-organism must be successfully produced; inocula- 
 tion of a healthy animal by this pure culture (one containing 
 no other kind of germ) must reproduce the disease; the same 
 kind of micro-organism must now be found in the second 
 animal. 
 
 In 1876 Robert Koch established the absolute truth of the 
 Great New Medicine and for all the ages to come. He, in 
 other words, fulfilled his own exacting requirements, or 
 postulates, with regard to the Bacillus anthracis. After that 
 his great discoveries were legion. Also after it the world 
 could never be the same again. 
 
 FURTHER GROWTH OF THE GREAT 
 NEW MEDICINE 
 
 In that same year of 1876 it was that I became my father's 
 medical apprentice. The bitter public conflict which arose 
 at about that time concerning the Germ Theory of Disease 
 and about Antiseptic Surgery — in a word, about the Great 
 New Medicine — I was myself a witness to in the backwoods 
 of Pike County, but of all that matter I have written herein 
 already. 
 
 But there yet remains to be gathered together the most 
 important further developments of the Great New Medicine 
 and in such a manner as to exhibit that period of history, 
 however briefly, as an interrelated whole. 
 
 Koch, in 1878, established, as in the case of anthrax, the 
 bacterial origin of six traumatic infectious diseases — a whole 
 galaxy of achievements. These achievements explained and 
 justified thoroughly the Antiseptic Surgery of Sir Joseph 
 Lister, which, until then, had been to some extent em- 
 pirical though marvelously successful. 
 
 Pasteur, in 1878 and 1879, discovered the Staphylococcus 
 pyogenes of boils ("pyogenes" means pus-producing), also 
 
944 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 the Streptococcus pyogenes of puerperal septicemia (child- 
 bed fever). 
 
 Pasteur also, in 1880, published his remarkable aggrega- 
 tion of preventive vaccinations (though that of hydrophobia 
 not till 1885). 
 
 Koch, once again, became the star-performer. In 1882 
 he discovered the bacillus of tuberculosis — an achievement 
 of the very utmost importance to the human race. 
 
 In the year following he was the star-performer once 
 again. In 1883, that is to say, the whole of Europe and the 
 Americas was shocked to the heart by the re-appearance of 
 that old-time dreaded scourge of man, Asiatic cholera. Be- 
 ginning in India, it passed into Egypt. There paused, so to 
 speak, for a time, preparatory for a devouring leap into 
 Europe. The German Government established a Cholera 
 Commission for the investigation of the disease and, if pos- 
 sible, the discovery of a cure or preventive thereof. At the 
 head of the Commission it placed Robert Koch. Koch, 
 visiting Egypt and India, discovered the cholera Vibrio 
 (1884) * also its mode of transmission — by clothing, food, 
 and especially drinking water. While engaged in this work 
 he incidentally and as if merely for good measure, discovered 
 the bacillus of Egyptian ophthalmia. 
 
 CARRIERS ON 
 
 Others now, though not indeed the founders of the Great 
 New Medicine, nevertheless carried the great work onward. 
 
 There was, for example, Klebs, of Konigsberg, who, in 
 1878, made experimental inoculations of monkeys, thus 
 proving that man is not absolutely the only animal that can 
 have syphilis, and at the same time providing an animal 
 other than man that could be properly experimented on for 
 the purpose of discovering cures for the terrible disease. 
 In 1881, he discovered the typhoid bacillus, and in 1883, 
 bacillus of diphtheria. 
 
 Loffler, in 1882, discovered the bacteria of glanders; in 
 1882-83 those of erysipelas in swine; in 1898 he discovered 
 that foot and mouth disease is produced by a filterable virus, 
 and the following year produced a preventive inoculation 
 
 1 The Vibrio is a genus of motile bacteria. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 945 
 
 for it. The very term and pathogene, "filterable virus," 
 were respectively invented and discovered by him. 
 
 Hansen, already in 1871, had discovered the bacterium 
 of leprosy. Nicolaier, in 1884, discovered the bacterium of 
 tetanus (lockjaw). This occurred while I was still a student 
 at Inveni, but my father wrote me repeatedly about it, so 
 that it seems, even yet, to have been a part of my life. 
 
 In 1887, while I was still a medical student at Columbia 
 my father was also writing me frequently about Weichsel- 
 baum's discovery in that year of the germ of cerebro-spinal 
 meningitis. These contemporizations, otherwise unimpor- 
 tant, I mention only that the reader may thereby understand 
 how easily and distinctly I can remember and why I 
 should almost necessarily remember even now the great 
 original pageant of the Great New Medicine as it passed 
 before my eyes. My thanks I give to the Great Mind of this 
 universe that my life has largely coincided with that time, 
 that, in fact, I saw in detail and clearly understood both 
 the old medicine and the new, saw the old pass out forever 
 and the new come into being — likewise forever as we have 
 good reason to believe. 
 
 The year in which I received my medical degree (1888) 
 saw the discovery of the bacterium of fibrinous pneumonia. 
 
 In 1889, when I was beginning my practice at Pittsfield, 
 Buchner established the bactericidal effects of blood-serum. 
 In 1890 von Behring was demonstrating "that the serum of 
 animals immunized against attenuated diphtheria toxins can 
 
 be used as a preventive against diphtheria in other 
 
 animals." 
 
 All through my time at Harvard (1892-93) these pro- 
 cedures were being perfected, and during my long conva- 
 lescence at St. Louis my father discoursed upon them to me 
 continually. Later, after my complete recovery, he could 
 not cease writing to me about them. 
 
 While, later, I was practising at Galesburg, 111. (1894-97) 
 there were terrible epidemics there of diphtheria. Von Beh- 
 ring's antitoxin now was being used throughout the world, 
 and was tried in Galesburg — but with almost complete 
 failure. Twenty-eight times I was called in that winter to 
 do tracheotomies for the dreaded disease, the antitoxin hav- 
 ing failed. Many of the tracheotomies failed also. 
 
946 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 But, that winter I did the last of all my tracheotomies 
 (cutting the throat into the windpipe and inserting a breath- 
 ing-tube) for diphtheria, because, beginning with the next 
 winter, diphtheria antitoxin "worked." 
 
 And it works to-day. 
 
 Thank God for the Great New Medicine! 
 
 And there was more of it, far more, to come in the years 
 following. 
 
 Nevertheless, for a very long time the fierce and remorse- 
 less opposition to the Germ Theory of disease and to Anti- 
 sepsis continued. It was only in fact during the dying years 
 of the 19th century that the Great New Medicine may be 
 said to have come to life. Even so late as 1898 the very 
 scientific "International Encyclopedia," a work in fifteen 
 mammoth volumes, could speak as non-commitally as follows 
 (Vol. VIII, page 549): "Koch and his supporters claim that 
 each disease is caused by a specific micro-organism; while 
 other equally able physicians contend that these organisms 
 are merely illustrative phenomena, and wholly without 
 causative functions." 
 
 Such a passage in so famous a work as "The Interna- 
 tional" shows how badly, even so late as the close of the 
 19th century, the doctrine of the true nature and causation 
 of most diseases needed to be inculcated and fought for, not 
 only by professors in the medical colleges of great cities, but 
 also by country practitioners in every portion of the world. 
 
 THE GREAT NEW MEDICINE MOVES ON 
 In 1897, Sir Almoth Wright, of Dublin, Ireland, put the 
 finishing touches on effective anti-typhoid vaccination. 
 (Others before him had done preparatory work.) Before 
 that time the micro-organisms of typhoid had killed more 
 soldiers by far than spears, swords and gunpowder projec- 
 tiles all combined — to say nothing of the hundreds of mil- 
 lions whom the microbes had destroyed of the civilian pop- 
 ulations, not only while each given war was going on but 
 even in the years and years to follow that war. 
 
 In 1899 the U. S. Army appointed a Board consisting of 
 Major Walter Reed, James Carroll, Aristide Agrimonte and 
 Jesse W. Lazear for the purpose of investigating the cause 
 and devising some cure for yellow fever — which, at the time, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 947 
 
 was devastating Cuba, and which at frequent intervals 
 throughout long centuries had been decimating the human 
 race. This Board, as nearly all attenders at the screen shows 
 know, discovered that the unseen cause of the disease 1 is 
 transmitted to human beings by a mosquito (Stegomyia 
 fasciata), and that epidemics of the disease can be prevented 
 easily by the screening-in of yellow fever patients and the 
 destruction of mosquitoes by spraying all stagnant waters 
 with crude petroleum, covering water-tanks and "establish- 
 ing colonies of top-feeding minnows in pools." The experi- 
 ments as to the cause of the disease cost Carroll and Lazear 
 their lives. 
 
 Laveran, of Paris, already in 1880, had shown the para- 
 sites of malarial fever. Golgi then, in 1889, showed that the 
 Plasmodium of quartan differs from that of tertian malaria. 
 In the same year Marchiafava and Celli showed that the 
 germs of the pernicious, the tertian and the quartan forms 
 are all different. In 1899 Grassi and Bignani showed that 
 all three parasites develop only in the anopheles mosquito. 
 Finally Ronald Ross, in 1902, learned how to destroy the 
 anopheles mosquito and thus to stamp malaria out. 
 
 In 1905 Fritz Schaudin discovered the causative germ of 
 syphilis (Spirochaeta pallida). 
 
 August von Wasserman, then, in 1907, devised the hem- 
 olytic diagnosis of syphilis. Many cases of the dreadfully 
 destructive "social disorder" were not clearly diagnosable 
 until that time! 
 
 Then that discovery, in turn (so one thing leads to an- 
 other) caused Paul Ehrlich to point out that, inasmuch as 
 the Spirochaeta pallida is not a bacterium but a protozoon 
 (microscopic animal), it is capable of rendering itself in time 
 immune to all such drugs as do not kill it immediately. 
 
 Thereupon von Ehrlich found out that salvarsan (or 
 "606") destroys the Spirochaeta pallida immediately, or at 
 least very promptly. Injections of the drug were made into 
 the veins of syphilitic patients, or into their spinal canals, 
 
 1 The Board believed that this unseen cause was an ultramicroscopic organism (virus). 
 About two decades later, however, a Japanese, Noguchi, discovered that it was the micro- 
 organism, Leptospira icterohaemorrhagica. As a result of his experiments Noguchi died. 
 
 The name of the carrier mosquito, Stegomyia fasciata, has now been changed to Aedes 
 aegypti. 
 
948 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 with the result that such patients were ofttimes cured 
 permanently. 
 
 And so the Great New Medicine moved on. 
 
 THE NEW MEDICINE CHANGES THE WORLD 
 
 It was not merely in medicine that the Great New 
 Medicine operated for the benefit of mankind and in every 
 direction. 
 
 Take, for example, dentistry. That profession, like medi- 
 cine in general, was highly resistant to the Germ Theory 
 and the Doctrine of Antisepsis. Almost as fast, however, as 
 new developments in the Germ Theory took place in medi- 
 cine, they were to some extent adopted into dentistry also. 
 Dentistry, through the centuries, had been more of a lag- 
 gard even than the parent profession. From Herodotus we 
 learn that in ancient Egypt, there were specialists even for 
 the teeth. In Europe and America, throughout the 18th 
 and early half of the 19th century, dentistry consisted almost 
 entirely in tooth-pulling and the making of dentures. Teeth 
 were now and then filled with gold, silver, or lead, but not 
 till 1854 were plaster and enamel introduced for that purpose. 
 The first dental school in the United States was also the 
 first in the world — the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, 
 founded in 1840, with a course of study covering four long 
 months. 
 
 The earliest article I can find in a dental journal on the 
 Germ Theory and Listerism (antisepsis) is "The Principles 
 of Antiseptic Surgery," by Jarvis S. Wight, M.D., Professor 
 of Surgery and Clinical Surgery at the Long Island College 
 Hospital, in the Dental Register, Vol. 31, pages 31-40, 1877. 
 It is an excellent article. 
 
 One of the first, quite possibly the very first, dental pro- 
 fessor to lecture on and strongly advocate the Germ Theory 
 and Listerism in Dentistry was Dr. Greene Vardiman Black 
 (already remarked upon herein) of Jacksonville, Illinois, and 
 Chicago, known throughout the world as "The Father of 
 Modern Dentistry." To him is due the honor of having 
 secured the reception into dentistry of the Germ Theory 
 and Antisepsis at a far earlier date than could possibly have 
 been the case without him. He was in fact the Lister of 
 Dentistry. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 949 
 
 Pharmacy, the handmaiden of medicine, adopted the 
 Germ Theory and Cleanliness almost as promptly as did 
 medicine — which is to say not promptly at all but in the 
 course of several decades. Drug-stores, however, did in time 
 clean up. No longer were they full of flies, spittoons, sputum 
 on floors, on counter fronts, and on the unspeakably filthy 
 space behind the prescription desk. 
 
 There is a tendency to-day to poke fun at the pharmacal 
 profession, to pretend that it has deteriorated into a mere 
 group of general storekeepers who sell almost everything and 
 even a few drugs. Already, however, in the Pittsfield part 
 of this volume, I have shown that, sixty-five and more years 
 ago, the American drug-store was doing the same thing, 
 and I there have given photographic reproductions both of 
 drug-store advertisements in the newspapers and of drug- 
 store exteriors with signs on windows and doors, to sub- 
 stantiate my statements. The chief difference between the 
 old druggist and the new is that the former was filthy and 
 ignorant, whereas the latter is clean and well-educated, and, 
 as a result, is placed in a separated compartment of the 
 general store — wherein, as a rule, he no longer functions as 
 a seller of paints, chewing gum and soda-water but as a 
 professional man of truly high rank. 
 
 Nurses, in my boyhood, youth, yes and early manhood, 
 even those who worked constantly for hire, did not have to 
 be literate in the least. Soon after the Great New Medicine 
 had won its recognition in the world, nursing necessarily 
 became a learned profession of which not only its members 
 themselves but all the rest of the populations of civilized 
 countries are proud. 
 
 Veterinary medicine was the slowest of the collateral 
 branches of the healing art to respond to the revolutionary 
 influences of the G. N. M. Say Merrillat and Campbell, in 
 "Veterinary Military History," (Chicago, 1935) pages 290 
 and 291: "What were veterinarians doing in the 80's? Ex- 
 amining horses for soundness and attempting by means of 
 a keen eye to diagnose lameness and to cure it by 'balancing 
 the foot.' These were the gigantic problems of the equine 
 clinic, and the subject of extensive discussions and published 
 
950 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 articles. No animal plague ever brought out more con- 
 troversies than did the infirmities charged up to flaws in 
 shoeing, mostly imaginary. In this they were but repeating 
 English thought of a hundred years before. Faulty shoeing 
 was an etiological obsession. It was the poor horseshoer 
 who caused all of the spavins and ringbones, according to 
 the voluminous literature, lectures, discussions, and wise 
 cracks of the professors." Again, loc. cit.: "The main flaw 
 was ignoring the teaching of Lister which in human medicine 
 had become a craze. 1 Veterinarians were slow to practice 
 clean surgery. Not even in the colleges were instruments 
 sterilized or even kept reasonably clean. We have seen, 
 during this decade and later, professors of surgery wipe their 
 scalpel on bloody overalls before making the next cut. Such 
 men were denouncing asepsis as impractical and the germ 
 theory as a passing hobby. Pus was still 'laudable. 2 ' 
 
 But at length even "horse doctoring" passed beneath the 
 uplifting influence of the Great New Medicine and became 
 a new and blessed thing on earth. Smith, Curtice and Kil- 
 borne discovered the cause of Texas fever. Antitetanus serum 
 soon was saving thousands of animals of all sorts yearly. 
 Animal tuberculosis was soon well-nigh stamped out. Mallein, 
 a specific for glanders, proved itself the greatest blessing 
 which the animal kingdom had ever known. 
 
 The benefits of the Great New Medicine, including its 
 basis, bacteriology, spread even throughout agriculture. It 
 was found that many bacteria instead of being inimical to 
 man are among his greatest friends. Such are those which 
 aid in the enrichment of certain soils, in the special produc- 
 tion of certain kinds of crops. 
 
 Farm surgery, too, was changed into a newer and better 
 thing. Among all the farmers I know to-day — and these are 
 many — not one there is but sterilizes carefully all his instru- 
 ments before he "makes a steer or a barrow." Rubber gloves? 
 
 1 With the utmost respect to the learned authors I would suggest that Listerism has at 
 no time, even to the present moment, become a "craze." It is in fact the finest piece of 
 sanity that the world has ever known. And, so far as the 1880's are concerned, Listerism, 
 in that decade, was still fought tooth and nail by a large proportion of the medical pro- 
 fession themselves not only in the "sticks" of Pike County but in the medical centers of 
 this country and Europe. 
 
 2 That is, some of it was supposed to be. 
 
■p»- 
 
 ASEPSIS IN ITS SURGICAL APPLICATION 
 
 A surgeon of the present day in full aseptic equipment — sterilized operating gown, rubber 
 gloves, hair-cap, face-mask, and even the Johnson anti-dimmer — a highly useful device 
 introduced by Donald W. Johnson, Fairmont, Minnesota, in 1940, to prevent the dimming 
 or clouding, of the surgeon's spectacles during the course of an operation. 
 
 All this equipment, excepting only the anti-dimmer, was already in general use by 1912. 
 (Courtesy of Dr. Johnson and Minnesota Medicine) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 951 
 
JULY, 1912 
 MY FATHER 
 
 Dying as a result of his Last Call. 
 
 (The Close of One of Innumerable Humble 
 
 Lives Spent "Behind the Veil.") 
 
 MY MOTHER 
 
 At the Age of Seventy-One and a Half Years. 
 (My Father's Efficient Assistant for Well- 
 Nigh Half a Century. The ruffled waist and 
 the elaborate heavy watch-chain — a gift long 
 years before from her mother, which she had 
 almost never worn — she donned, for the oc- 
 casion only of having this picture taken, at the 
 urgent insistence of all her family.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 953 
 
 No, not generally. Nevertheless, a fairly clean, "aseptic," 
 operation. 
 
 Then in industry many bacteria are found to be highly 
 useful — some to make vinegar in immense quantities, others 
 to produce artificial butter-milks, some to regulate the tex- 
 ture and flavor of butter. In the ripening of cheeses many 
 sorts of bacteria are employed, as also in the production 
 of numerous "plastic" substances. 
 
 When it was discovered that certain disease germs are 
 distributed by kissing — those of syphilis and tuberculosis 
 notably — kissing became taboo in "wise" society. Wire 
 screens for windows and doors were soon introduced into all 
 buildings as preventers of disease. Clean reservoirs of water, 
 proper aqueducts, all plumbing and sewerage in fact became 
 revolutionized for the same reasons. So did the very food 
 we ate. The architecture of the world was altered for the 
 benefit both of the public and of the private health. 
 
 As a result of public health measures, something highly 
 important became possible which had never been possible 
 before, and which was destined to produce the most ex- 
 tensive and profound repercussions in sociology, economics 
 and finance. Until the Great New Medicine and the vast 
 improvements in public hygiene which resulted from it had 
 come into being, it had not been possible for the so-called 
 "large" cities to become exceedingly large. Increase the 
 number of persons living in a very small urban area beyond 
 a certain limit and behold! the death-rate rose enormously. 
 The consequence was that, in spite of the vast improvements 
 in almost all machinery which began to appear in the latter 
 portion of the 18th century, the tiny factories in villages 
 and homes — the multitudes of spinning-wheels, the little 
 hand-looms, the little dye-vats, the little blacksmith shops 
 and so on, continued to live and function — for the simple 
 reason that immense machinery could not be used in home 
 or village or even in small or big town. Large manufacturing 
 establishments could exist only in places whose populations 
 were really immense. 
 
 And in places with immense populations, the populations 
 soon died. 
 
954 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Then along came the Great New Medicine and its natural, 
 its inevitable, result, the Great New Public Hygiene, and 
 so the trick was turned. Big cities, then, in fact, became so 
 healthy that they often were healthier by far than even the 
 villages and farms. 
 
 And so — the "Industrial Revolution" was born. Spite 
 of all the diatribes of theorists, that revolution has been a 
 blessing to the human race, and will be a greater one still 
 when all the necessary re-adjustments growing out of it have 
 been properly effected. 
 
 So very wide-spread indeed were the effects of the Great 
 New Medicine that they showed themselves in absolutely 
 every branch of human industry, even of human thought, 
 yes even in religion. Until that time it was common, per- 
 haps I may say universal, in pulpits, to declare that the 
 Bible is an "infallible book" — not a solitary mistake being 
 discoverable therein from cover to cover. To anyone really 
 conversant with the actual origin and history of the Bible, 
 the statement was, of course, preposterous. Not only did 
 our English translations of the Bible differ considerably from 
 one another, but the ancient Hebrew and Greek manuscripts 
 (the original Bible) differed far more. Some of the later of 
 those manuscripts in fact contained passages (sometimes 
 whole narratives, like that of "Jesus and the woman taken 
 in adultery" — John, VIII, 3-11) which appeared not at all in 
 the earlier manuscripts, whereby they were proved to have 
 been unquestionable interpolations. But a people devoid of 
 education, and especially a ministry that is only half-ed- 
 ucated, did not care what is in and what is not in the original 
 Bible — or Bibles, for each of the old manuscripts is in fact 
 itself "a Bible." 
 
 To each of such persons as those the Bible is the particular 
 English translation (of a composite of the various ancient 
 and some of the later manuscripts) which the individual in 
 question happens to have been brought up on. Manuscripts? 
 You might as well have tried to talk to such persons about 
 the other side of the moon. 
 
 But along comes the Germ Theory of Diseases — no longer 
 a "theory" (Greek word for "explanation") but a demon- 
 strated fact, about whose truth there can be no more ques- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 955 
 
 tion than there can be as to whether ten cows sold at thirty 
 dollars a head should bring the farmer who sells them three 
 hundred dollars or only six dollars and ten cents. 
 
 In other words the Germ Theory (Explanation) of Disease 
 went right into the backwoods farmer's home and made a 
 demonstration he dared not try to back away from. In a 
 certain diphtheria epidemic, for example, farmers whose 
 children were treated with the diphtheria antitoxin lived 
 almost without exception. Farmers whose children were 
 not so treated died almost without exception. And it was 
 so not merely in one neighborhood but in all neighborhoods. 
 And not merely in one county, but in all counties. And not 
 merely in one state but in all states. And so with all the 
 nations too. 
 
 And it was so not only as to diphtheria and as to all the 
 nations. It was so as to numerous other diseases also, and, 
 as to them, with all the nations. 
 
 The doctors had been right and the Scriptures had been 
 wrong — not as to all things, but as to the causes of many 
 diseases. The doctors had not only discovered the truth con- 
 cerning those diseases, but they had proved the truth in- 
 controvertibly. Diseases are certainly not "all" produced by 
 devils sent into peoples' bodies by Satan — devils who could 
 talk back, even argue, about various matters. "What have 
 we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth?" Those were 
 not bacteria speaking. Bacteria have nothing to speak with 
 — nothing even to squeak with, as crickets do have. 
 
 Were the doctors right? So right that the farmers even 
 accepted mallein themselves and used it to eradicate glanders. 
 They even took tetanus antitoxin and with it eradicated 
 lockjaw from the farms. No discussion about ancient manu- 
 scripts there, or about ancient languages. The farmer ab- 
 solutely knew what the cause is of the great majority of 
 diseases. The Bible was not an infallible book. It was the 
 greatest book on earth, because, here and there, it contained 
 the greatest of all truths. But it was not "infallible." 1 
 
 1 Many ministers in those days actually declared, attempting to discredit the Germ 
 Origin of Many Diseases, that bacteria had not existed in Biblical times but had only been 
 created quite recently — possibly for the purpose of testing people's faith in the Scriptures. 
 Inasmuch as some such ministers still exist, I would respectfully call their attention to the 
 science known as paleologic bacteriology. As the subject is somewhat technical I may 
 sum it up by quoting Arthur Selwyn-Brown, M.D., etc.: "The Physician Throughout the 
 
956 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 And in other ways too, the Great New Medicine correct- 
 ed and purified and gave good health to human religion— 
 to everything, indeed, both human and divine. 
 
 MY FATHER 
 
 My father, wherever I chanced to be tramping, wrote me, 
 as ever, a great many letters. In these, even when I had been 
 only away at Inveni, he not infrequently discussed the Great 
 New Medicine, its continual progress, the thorough revolu- 
 tion it was effecting in every large branch and also every 
 tiniest ramification of the healing art. Especially he was in- 
 terested during the 1890 's in the change of Antisepsis into 
 Asepsis. "No more," he wrote me, "could you stand in an 
 operating room and, as once you did, pump carbolic acid 
 solution into the atmosphere." It was the truth. It had 
 been discovered that not the atmosphere of an operating 
 room was full of death-dealing germs, but that the walls, 
 the ceiling, the carpet on the floor — from which great puffs 
 of infectious dust arose at every footstep, to settle, some of 
 it, in the operation wound. And then, still worse, there were 
 the hair and beards of the operator and his assistants. These 
 abounded with infectious micro-organisms, which, in the 
 course of an operation, could fall off into the wounds and 
 cost the patient his life. Even worse still, there were the 
 dirty hands of operator and assistants, the black borders un- 
 derneath the finger-nails particularly. Even the skin of the 
 patient's body needed thorough disinfection, and (worst 
 source of infectious material of all, perhaps) the saliva and 
 mucus from the bystanders' mouths and noses. Anybody, 
 when talking, ofttimes ejects saliva from his mouth, and, 
 when sneezing, expels infectious mucus from his nose. 
 
 The remedies? Carefully cleaned and disinfected operat- 
 ing rooms. Carefully cleaned and disinfected bodies of op- 
 erators, assistants and nurses. Carefully cleaned hands and 
 nails and then, later, carefully boiled rubber gloves upon 
 
 Ages," Vol. I, page 3: "Wounded animals, plants and insects appear in remote antiquity. 
 
 They became infected with bacteria and bacilli precisely as they do today Parasitism 
 
 is often seen in fossils as far back as Devonian times. Pre-Cambrian rocks are rich in the 
 remains of bacteria, microscopical fungi, and other disease-causing organisms." Long before 
 there were human beings on earth! 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 957 
 
 them. 1 Carefully sterilized white clothing for all concerned. 
 Sterilized white caps for the hair and face and so on. 2 
 
 DEATH BEHIND THE VEIL 
 Concerning all these things my father wrote to me as 
 fast as they arrived upon the scene. But he was still more 
 interested in the wider effects of the Great New Medicine- 
 its repercussions even in the barber shops, the butcher shops, 
 the grocery stores. In no light vein he deplored the multi- 
 tudinous urinary deposits of those incurable urinoscopists, 
 the town dogs, upon every large or small exhibit of human 
 foodstuffs before the ubiquitous grocery store. Largely owing 
 to his efforts, the foodstuffs in Pittsfield were kept clean, 
 the drinking waters filtered or boiled, refrigerators intro- 
 duced in place of tin buckets hung down wells. 
 
 Most of all, however, he enjoyed writing me about the 
 effects of the Great New Medicine in the seemingly unre- 
 lated fields of theology and war. 
 
 And always there was fun in his letters: he could not 
 have lived without fun — so he said quite often. But the 
 fun was funny. There was point to it. Of black cats and of 
 yellow cats and stories about their curious fighting he wrote 
 repeatedly. But there was point to it. Under the fun there was 
 always a more or less deep meaning. Yet more and more, 
 too, he became sadly reminiscent — asked if I remembered that 
 and this of the old days. In those letters he could make me 
 see the old-time faces, hear the voices of our old-time friends 
 — the Moomaws, the Petty s (Jim, W. T. F. and Alvin) the 
 Goodins, the Elliott Bakers, the Thomas Jameses, the Robert 
 Fraziers, the Adamses, the Weekses, the Worleys, the 
 Millers, the Jaritzes, the Turnbaughs, the Dolbows, the 
 Billingses, the Wests and the Zumwalts, the Townsends, the 
 Madison Chapmans, the Metzgars, the Ike Winanses, the 
 Ransoms, the Osborn Davises, and so on — people whose 
 very names were dear to us both and still are dear to myself 
 and my brothers. 
 
 1 Rubber gloves, it is interesting to note, were introduced in 1890 by Dr. W. S. Halstead, 
 of Johns Hopkins University, only, at the time, for the purpose of protecting the hands of 
 one of his nurses from the corrosive effects of mercury bichloride solution. Later, the 
 rubber glove was made by the profession a sine qua non for each and every hand that chanced 
 to be in an operating room at the time of an operation. 
 
 2 Those who are specially interested in medical history should consult the fascinating 
 works of Charles Singer, Victor Robinson, and Henry E. Sigerist. 
 
958 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Late in December of 1911, he was suffering from a mild 
 attack of influenza. One night, as my mother wrote me, 
 the north wind was especially terrible and his fever had 
 become hot, when all at once he was called to the telephone 
 
 fc£~~ &~-&*?*p%^ £•& r 1 ^ r "^ '" x ^*- ' ' -* -• - - ^*"^rs- zjC /» >y» . 
 
 
 
 
 My father, whenever in reading he came across some passage of exceptional 
 beauty, would slowly close his eyes and silently kiss the words that had so 
 moved him. Generally, too, he would copy such a passage and send it to his 
 absent children, that they might share in the beauty he had found. In all 
 my life I have never known another man so filled with affection for mankind 
 and with love of the true and the beautiful and at the same time so utterly 
 devoid of every sort and kind of frivolity. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 959 
 
 by a woman in the country. He declined to go out because 
 of his severe sickness. The patient, her husband, however, 
 was an old client of my father's. In fact my father had 
 brought him into the world forty years before, and then had 
 enabled him to live by artificial respiration. 
 
 The patient himself took the phone, implored. 
 
 My mother hitched horse to buggy, dressed my father, 
 wrapped him in the big wolf-robe and packed him round 
 about with hot rocks. Crying the while, of course, but 
 Father would go — the air might cool his fever, he thought. 
 
 Aged eighty and more, in an open buggy and with the 
 temperature at thirty degrees below zero. But he had always 
 worked behind the veil regardless of danger. Besides — only 
 four or five miles out ! 
 
 Doctors in these times, riding over hard roads in over- 
 stuffed coupes, have little understanding of what it meant 
 in older days to go out in an open buggy over an open 
 prairie facing a twenty-mile wind at thirty degrees below 
 zero. 
 
 And then, in addition, to be old and sick and yet feel 
 obliged to attend a contagious patient — one with grippe and 
 pneumonia combined! 
 
 He came back home chilled and with a frightful pain in 
 his back. "It'll soon be gone," he said, but it never left 
 him, even to the end of his life. 
 
 Instead of getting better, it got worse, extended into his 
 right hip, down his right thigh. 
 
 In February, despite his own increasing agony, he re- 
 sponded to a call from Pleasant Hill township. An old-time 
 friend there had been stricken with double pneumonia. Wild 
 horses could not have kept him from that old friend, al- 
 though there was nothing he could do for him when he 
 arrived, other than to console his widow and orphans. 
 
 After the funeral my father seemed to be worse still. In 
 July, as was his wont, he went to Petoskey, Mich., accom- 
 panied by my mother, to escape hay fever. Very soon he 
 became confined to bed. 
 
960 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 A large and painful swelling appeared on the anterior 
 aspect of the right thigh. Local physicians assured him, 
 after the manner of physicians generally, that it was a matter 
 of very little consequence — although, of course, quite plainly, 
 as I knew, he had psoas abscess. 
 
 At length my mother wrote that my father was sinking 
 slowly away. What to do? 
 
 I was myself at the time afflicted with phlebitis, therefore 
 incapable of journeying. My father's old-time friend, Dr. 
 Albert J. Ochsner, of Chicago, however, sent to my father 
 his partner and co-author, Dr. N. W. Percy, who opened the 
 thigh abscess. 
 
 At first there was much relief, then alternating rigors 
 and fever. 1 Dr. Percy, accompanied by my brother, Dr. Will 
 Shastid, removed the patient to Chicago, where he was 
 operated on twice or thrice. Dr. Frank Billings arose from 
 a sick-bed to be present at one of these operations. Ochsner 
 himself performed that final operation, his voice so choked 
 with tears he could scarcely speak. 
 
 The anesthesia was local only, and, near its close, the 
 patient, in a delirium, thought that he still had not yet 
 seen that last patient — the one who, in the fall, had caused 
 his own final illness. Father kept urging my mother to 
 hitch up the horse so that he could go and see the man. 
 "How could I have forgotten all about it? And now I can't 
 walk." Those around him restrained him with difficulty. 
 
 1 One of the last letters I ever received from my father ran in part as follows: "Your 
 mother says today I'm getting funny again. (That's because I'm soon going to die, I suppose: 
 every man should die with good fun in him.) You'll remember riding under the stars with 
 me, Tom — with me or alone. The great, silent stars, the creaking of the buggy leather, 
 the hot smell of the road, the sight of the campfires in the dusk. Those are the things that 
 will remain, those and the look of grateful faces. You'll forget the heat, and the dust and 
 the dirt, the vermin and the flies. The bad water and the worse food. The intolerable 
 smell of mistreated wounds. The foul sermons against our idol, Lister, true man of God. 
 The way a person sounds when he's whimpering with fever and you haven't any ice with 
 which to cool him — just as they haven't any ice that'll cool me now. 
 
 "O a green peach pudding and a blackberry pie! 
 A black cat kicked out a yellow cat's eye. 
 Behind the veil! O a black cat and a yellow cat — " 
 
 The pen had stumbled and sputtered and stopped. My mother had then added: "I 
 didn't want your pa to write this. He gets so delirious when he tries to write in his fevers. 
 And in his chills he cant write. But what can I do? He wants to write. Says he never 
 wanted to write articles or letters or anything to or about anybody else, but only letters 
 to his boys." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 961 
 
 His fever abating, his mind cleared and he began to joke 
 again. 
 
 And then he died. 
 
 Death came to him not stealthily or benignantly but like 
 a torturing despot, with all the sufferings that monstrous 
 ingenuity could devise. He who had stilled so many pains 
 for others, smoothed wrinkles from so many others' brows, 
 went down through the clashing gates of death himself in 
 agony intolerable. 
 
 
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 A BRIEF EXTRACT FROM THE LAST LETTER I EVER RECEIVED 
 
 FROM MY FATHER 
 
 Sick as he was, he still remembered to spell "dad" and "daddy" with small initials. His giving the 
 
 derivation of "Styx" (the dreaded river of ancient Greek mythology) was likewise characteristic. 
 
962 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 But behold, when the gates had closed behind him, they 
 proved, or so we believed, not gates of death at all but of life. 
 
 Both natural and revealed religion still so teach us; and, 
 anyway, I myself cannot think otherwise. 
 
 My father died as he had lived, "behind the veil." He 
 had never deserted it or renounced it. 
 
 I have said in the dedication of this volume that my 
 father, my mother, and my wife, would at any time gladly 
 have died for me. It is the simple truth. My father did in 
 fact die — at a time when he seriously needed attention him- 
 self too — for a patient who was not even related to him. 
 
 At best perhaps it was only two or three or four thousand 
 persons who were dependent on his services — to keep them 
 living; to keep them loving too, if he could; to keep them 
 strong and well in every sense; to keep them happy and con- 
 tented — if he could. And almost all these people were 
 humble and obscure. The great world did not even know of 
 their existence — never would know. But his view of the 
 importance of his work made the whole 'thing seem colossal, 
 magnificent. (Now, after sixty and odd years of thought 
 about the matter, I am disposed to think his view the right 
 one. Is there any more important work than that of a village 
 and country doctor — "the life behind the veil"?) 
 
 Dr. Frank Billings rose from a sick-bed the next day to be present at my father's operation. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 963 
 
 There can be little doubt in the mind of any one who 
 knew my father, that, had he done as his old-time friend 
 and preceptor, John T. Hodgen, had long, long years before, 
 wanted him to do — leave Pittsneld for St. Louis, in that 
 great city to become a partner with Hodgen himself and a 
 professor in some or another medical school, he would have 
 become one of America's great surgeons or physicians. But 
 there was always lacking in my father the necessary ambi- 
 tion — ambition, I mean, in the every-day sense of that term. 
 There was in him a deep-rooted kinship always with village 
 and country people. They were his people, his friends, his 
 brethren, his charges — charges too not merely in the scientific 
 meaning of that term. These people were, in a sense, his 
 spiritual, not solely his physical, charges. He had in him 
 the mind which leads some men to become missionaries, 
 both medical and lay, to far-away places. Not that he 
 ever talked religion very much to anybody, but that a kind 
 of universal fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man 
 seemed to be implicit in all he said and did. 
 
 Like thousands of other humble physicians throughout 
 the country, Father was of great service not in the discovery 
 of course of the Germ Theory and Asepsis, but in securing 
 the acceptance of those world-developing ideas among the 
 people — a far more difficult task than would ordinarily be 
 supposed. 
 
 And this too was a spiritual, as well as a physical, matter. 
 
 The Germ Theory and Asepsis were both undoubtedly 
 from God. 
 
THE DOCTOR WHO FATHERED A TRAMP 
 
 Part III — Without The Father-Preceptor 
 
 The years passed swiftly in such an environment as that 
 of Marion. Characters and incidents world without end! 
 
 During my stay in Marion too I wrote numerous articles, 
 several books and even contributed to two or three encyclo- 
 pedias. As to my books, I made very little money writing 
 them, because so much money was spent on them and so 
 little was received for them. 
 
 Along in 1907 I was appointed professor of the History 
 of Medicine at the American Medical College, St. Louis — 
 an institution which had been formed by the merger of the 
 Barnes Medical College and the College of Physicians and 
 Surgeons. My call was largely due to the kindness of the 
 Dean, Dr. James Moores Ball, between whom and myself a 
 very fine friendship sprang up immediately. 
 
 On every trip that I made from Marion to lecture at the 
 medical college — every trip without exception, so far as I now 
 remember — Dr. Ball and I would meet, and, at night, after 
 the close of my lectures, meet again — missing not one single 
 occasion — and then, seated in his Dean's office at the College 
 or in his private office at 4500 Olive Street, we would talk 
 till long after midnight. 
 
 When I had resigned my professorship, then, after my 
 very last lecture at his college, Dr. Ball and I tramped round 
 the streets of St. Louis for many hours. At length said he, 
 "Shastid, here is something that I know you do not have. 
 Don't open it till you get back to Marion. I don't think I 
 should now go to the depot with you. God bless you." 
 
 He was gone. 
 
 No one who has ever had a friendship as fine as that 
 which I had with James Moores Ball can be said to have 
 tramped to failure absolutely. 
 
 The gift, a book, as I found when back at Marion, was 
 a copy of Greive's English translation (1838) of Celsus' "De 
 Medicina," the rarest and the only one of the three English 
 translations of that work which I did not possess. Inside 
 the cover he had pasted his "compliments" card, and, un- 
 
966 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 attached, had laid in the same place an affectionate note 
 which I have always kept. 
 
 For years afterwards I had a delightful correspondence 
 with Ball — who, by the bye, was a great student of medical 
 history and an unbelievable spender of money on behalf of 
 that part of his library which dealt with that subject. I 
 contributed various chapters to the various editions of his 
 highly successful "Modern Ophthalmology," always re- 
 ceived gift copies of whatever he wrote, to and including his 
 last volume, "The Sack 'Em Up Men." 
 
 Then, all at once, our delightful correspondence ceased 
 — as his great heart ceased to beat (March, 1929). 
 
 MY FATHER'S AFTER-THOUGHTS 
 
 Some time after my father's death my mother wrote to 
 me: "Your father, during his last year or thereabouts, drew 
 up several sheets he called his after-thoughts and which he 
 was just going to send you when he took down with his 
 last sickness. I happened to run across them today and here- 
 with send them to you, to keep, of course." 
 
 These after-thoughts I found to consist of a more mature 
 forecast of the final results for humanity of the Great New 
 Medicine than he had formerly made. They may, being 
 somewhat pessimistic, be regarded as, in a way, a reflection 
 of the profound depression of spirits from which he was 
 suffering as a natural result of the psoas abscess. They never- 
 theless are founded on actual facts and should be regarded 
 as at least a caution and a warning to all who love humanity. 
 
 I will sometimes quote, sometimes condense in my own 
 language. 
 
 "We have often, Tom, painted for ourselves the most 
 beautiful pictures of the New Medicine and of what it will 
 mean for mankind in the great new years to come. Beautiful 
 pictures, all very, very beautiful! The light that never was 
 on sea or land,' but which is to be hereafter — celestial light! 
 Unlimited light and unlimited life and happiness, even here 
 upon this earth! But I see shadows now in those erstwhile 
 beautiful pictures — shadows, very dark shadows. 
 
 "Here is the first shadow. In our beautiful pictures we 
 have always shown man's conquest of disease as rushing 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 967 
 
 steadily onward. No stop, no stay, till the last of our com- 
 mon enemies — diseases — has been destroyed. We have even 
 depicted the victories as coming faster and faster still, each 
 conquest that is won making further conquests easier. But 
 is not the very reverse of that the necessary truth of the 
 future? Have we not, and quite naturally, solved the easiest 
 problems first, won the easiest victories first? I can see signs 
 that that is correct, that the rate of progress in the conquest 
 of disease is already slowing considerably down, and that 
 it will slow down soon perhaps to just nothing whatever. 
 There must be diseases which are not produced by germs at 
 all, others produced by germs that never can be identified. 1 
 
 1 'The second shadow is this. The relative immunity which, 
 before the New Medicine, had been acquired by the human 
 race through countless ages of unassisted struggle against 
 infectious diseases, seems now about to be lost through the 
 very stamping out of those diseases. Are not our natural 
 defensive mechanisms wasting away, becoming practically 
 non-existent from non-use — from reliance on the artificial 
 measures which the authors of the Great New Medicine have 
 brought into use? (In this connection recall the extreme 
 sensitiveness of all the negro African peoples when first the 
 white people introduced syphilis among them. They died 
 of this disease, to which they never had had a chance to 
 develop even a relative immunity, sometimes in a few days 
 — not infrequently within a few weeks. In other words, 
 syphilis, for them, was an acute and an almost uniformly 
 fatal disease. All because their defensive mechanisms had 
 never, among their ancestors, been under the necessity of 
 overcoming the germs of syphilis.) 
 
 "Yet another cloud. In addition to the survival of the 
 unfit as a result of their preservation artificially by the kind 
 New Medicine (kind to the individual, unkind to the race), 
 there is also a survival of the unfit produced by war. On 
 this point I need not write you in detail, as you have taught 
 
 1 There was much truth in these guesses, as witness the number of diseases which, since 
 his demise, have been found to be due not to germs of any sort, but to lack of sufficient 
 vitamin this and vitamin that in many persons; diet-diseases which, however, contrary 
 to his expectations, have been successfully identified and treated. Then there are the nu- 
 merous so-called virus-diseases. As to the latter, his gloomy prognostications have thus far 
 been almost perfectly fulfilled. Almost nothing has been done toward identifying the 
 particular virus causing this or that virus disease, and but little has been accomplished in 
 the way of treating such diseases successfully. 
 
968 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 me all about it in the first place. I will merely remind you 
 that, as you say, among the lower animals, war puts an 
 end to the weaker males (sometimes females also) and pre- 
 serves the stronger; whereas, in human conflicts, the very 
 best sires for a future human stock are selected, then taken 
 out and slaughtered, while the unfit, staying at home, 
 survive. 
 
 "The last cloud of all is not so much a survival, as it is 
 an actual and tremendous -production , of the unfit — i.e., by 
 the interbreeding of the highly creative white race with the 
 very uncreati ve and unfortunately far more numerous colored 
 peoples. Miscegenation of whites and blacks, for example, 
 is said to result in the production of offspring which — though 
 with remarkable exceptions — are inferior to both their par- 
 ents. Is this true? I know not. It is, however, yet one more 
 cloud in the shining pictures that we used to paint." 
 
 THE FAMILY DOCTOR VANISHES 
 
 The country doctor still exists and carries on. The family 
 doctor does not even exist any more. 
 
 Let us see what it is that has vanished — the points of 
 distinction between the present-day general practitioner and 
 the old-time family doctor. Again take my father as an 
 example. 
 
 My father knew the lore of symptoms, "symptomatol- 
 ogy," as no modern, unfamily doctor of my acquaintance 
 can even begin to know it. The latter has a great assistance 
 it is true from his modern medical laboratory, yet that very 
 assistance tends to make him forget about symptoms. And 
 the old-time doctor knew families too, and their hereditary 
 tendencies, "inheritance in disease," as few modern doctors 
 can know it, for all the recent discoveries in genetics. With 
 the country doctor of the old times the family was the unit 
 of which he chiefly thought. He saw each patient as a part 
 of an inheritance complex, something which the patient 
 could not get away from any more than he could lose his 
 mammalian characteristics. My father knew that the Creek 
 women would nearly always have milk-leg after childbirth, 
 that nobody in that family ever took scarlet fever; that no- 
 body in the Corkwell family ever lost his malaria till his 
 quinine had been preceded by calomel; that all the Chuzzler 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 969 
 
 children, every time they contracted a cold, got running 
 ears, and that some of these "ears" turned into "mastoids;" 
 that the Anstruthers, young and old alike, often had high 
 fevers which meant nothing in particular; that the Hardigoes 
 never could stand an amputation, even of a finger; that child- 
 birth in the Rocknell family meant, not infrequently, perma- 
 nent insanity, "if you didn't watch out"; that old man 
 Turgo not infrequently had "spells in the night" which a 
 shot of anything whatever in the arm would immediately 
 cure — "both his father and his mother had been just like 
 that." Patients in certain families always had to be jollied 
 and joked- with, no matter how sick they were, otherwise 
 they thought that you thought that they were going to die, 
 and then they would in fact die. Patients of other families 
 always wanted a doctor to be dignified, attentive, thought- 
 ful, no matter how trifling the disorder from which they 
 were suffering. Otherwise they thought he was not suffici- 
 ently concerned about their welfare. A good many, in those 
 days, liked a doctor, each time he came, to quote some 
 passage from Scripture. That did not always run in families, 
 but sometimes it did. 
 
 In these days of universal hospitalization, even for slight 
 colds and splinters in the fingers, the patient is seen as an 
 isolated entity, something that was born in a vacuum. 
 Family histories? O yes, they take family histories to-day, 
 and always write them down, and then — forget them. What, 
 in any case, can a doctor in a city hospital to-day learn about 
 the average patient's family history? Just whatever that care- 
 less and medically ignorant fatient tells him. What does the 
 patient know about it? The great majority, I have found, 
 cannot give the names of their grandparents. "What was 
 your mother's father's name?" "I don't know: either John- 
 son or Johnston, I forget now which." "And it might have 
 been Jones?" "O yes, it might have been." "And what did 
 he die of?" "The doctor never told us: he wasn't much of 
 a doctor anyway." 
 
 Do you call that learning a patient's family history?" 
 Why, it is simply encumbering the patient's record card. 
 
 My father had almost always personally known the 
 patient's brothers and sisters, their parents, their grand- 
 parents, sometimes their cousins, their uncles, and their 
 
970 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 aunts. He knew them. And not as an ignorant, indifferent 
 layman would know, but scientifically, intimately, con- 
 scientiously. And he carried that knowledge in his head, 
 not on a long-forgotten history sheet. 
 
 It is not simply hospitals (which, in so many ways, have 
 been beneficial to the human race) that have destroyed the 
 family as a unit in the modern physician's mind. There is 
 also the vast movement of country populations to the in- 
 dustrial centers, also the vast immigrations into this country 
 in the 1890' s, and in the first decade of the 20th century. 
 Young people, almost invariably, who, breaking loose from 
 European families, came into this nation to settle, to live, 
 to marry, ofttimes to forget intentionally. Not the fault of 
 the modern U. S. doctor, of course. Nevertheless a vastly 
 different situation from that in which several successive gen- 
 erations in the Mississippi Valley were born on the farm, 
 stayed on the farm, died on the farm, ofttimes even were 
 buried on the farm — yes, on the very same farm burial-lot 
 wherein father, mother, brother, sister, grandparents and 
 great-grandparents had been buried. Some of the children 
 would ofttimes stay on the farm to help their aging parents 
 carry on the farm work. Others would build or purchase 
 their own homes near by or at least in adjoining neighbor- 
 hoods, and the great majority, quite naturally, went back 
 home at last to be buried. 
 
 The family doctor in those days was in truth a family 
 doctor. Nor did he depend for his knowledge of his families 
 on what some related layman might have told him. He 
 observed the whole history for himself, wrote it all down 
 in his brain for himself, kept it eternally alive there for 
 himself — and always as accurately and scientifically as the 
 knowledge of that day permitted. 
 
 But the arrival of hospitals and of the industrial migra- 
 tion were not the only causes for the disappearance of the 
 family-unit, and, by natural consequence, the family doctor. 
 The Great New Medicine itself, though great was its value 
 indeed to both doctor and patient, also contributed very 
 largely to the metamorphosis of family doctors into doctors 
 of individuals. The discovery, that is to say, that a very 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 971 
 
 large number of diseases are produced by germs (microscopic 
 vegetables or animals) seemed to say to everyone, "Diseases 
 do not come from parents any more than they come from 
 devils — emissaries of Satan. They come from microbes that 
 get into the system either via wounds or via the mouth and 
 nose, or, again, via drink and food. They do not come from 
 the heredity but from the environment. The country doctor 
 still understood — he could not help understanding — that the 
 susceptibility to and the immunity from any or all of these 
 disease-producing organisms, and whether the susceptibility 
 or the immunity was relative or absolute, was considerably 
 a matter of inheritance. 
 
 The modern doctor, therefore, whether in the city or in 
 the country, with little or no fault on his part has not been 
 able to remain a family doctor. The germ explanation of 
 many diseases has necessarily lessened to some extent the 
 emphasis that was formerly placed on inheritance, and the 
 presence almost everywhere to-day of hospitals, together 
 with the breaking up of families by the various industrial 
 migrations, have, as a I have already stated, lowered that 
 emphasis almost to absolute zero. 
 
 I should, however, did I not advert to this subject, even 
 though sketchily, be failing in the picture which, in this 
 volume, I am steadily endeavoring to paint of the old 
 medicine as contrasted with the new, of the old doctor also 
 as contrasted with the new. 1 
 
 LOOKING NORTH 
 The Companion and I had stayed in Marion for almost 
 eight years, a very long time at one place for a restless in- 
 
 1 A trait of my father's which was largely peculiar to himself rather than typical of 
 old-time village and country doctors, I here include because I see no other place in this 
 volume wherein it may properly be mentioned. I mean the aptness of his illustrations 
 when discussing scientific matters. Remember that the open buggy moving along the 
 country road, that and the wayside farmhouses, were, taken together, more the source of 
 medical instruction in those days than were the medical colleges. 
 
 Well, there occurs to me at the moment one of my father's illustrations that very much 
 impressed me, so that I never have forgotten it. Said he, "Tom, do you know that there 
 is no limit to the number of forms which crystals of snow — the so-called 'snowflakes' — 
 present? No? Well, that is the case. Yet, strange as it may seem, no crystal has ever been 
 round that is not six-pointed or six-sided. And this is a comparison, now, that I wish 
 you to remember. The six-sidedness is like what the books can tell you about any disease. 
 The no-alikeness is what you have to observe in your cases and to think out for yourself. 
 
 "To study the six-sidedness gives you learning. To deal with the no-alikeness gives 
 you judgment and inventiveness." 
 
972 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 spector of new horizons and for his consort. There, too, 
 the Tramp, thanks to the skilful management of his Com- 
 panion, had not, financially (and for a wonder) practiced 
 wholly in vain. And yet the little money that he had saved 
 there he had invested — well, in things of the utmost promise, 
 although, quite frequently, not so great performance. 
 
 I, in fact, had bought the most wonderful real estate in 
 the most wonderful cities and in the most wonderful loca- 
 tions — "strategic positions" they were called. Yet when- 
 ever I wished to sell that "real" estate its value was quite 
 unreal. 
 
 Among other places in which I had invested both my 
 Marion and some of my other earnings, were Superior, Wis., 
 and Duluth, Minn. There too, as usual, I had tramped to 
 financial failure. Nevertheless, through the making of those 
 investments, the Companion and I had become acquainted 
 with the delightful climate at the Lakehead. My old-time 
 trouble — the results of appendicitis — had meanwhile return- 
 ed upon me. There was also a new trouble, one which at the 
 time I did not understand but whose nature was later to be 
 revealed by further developments of the Germ Theory. Again 
 my life had become a mere raging hell of pain, especially in 
 warm weather. Then it was that I suffered by far the most. 
 There could no longer be the slightest question as to remain- 
 ing in Egypt. 
 
 "It is always cool in Superior-Duluth." 
 
 Dreams again, dreams! 
 
 Dreams of endless miles of blue-green forest, of the vast 
 gray-green or cobalt lake, the sweet low callings of myste- 
 rious ships, coming in or departing and laden to the upper- 
 most red edges with iron ore, or with wheat or with what- 
 soever things any man of us holds dear. "Lo, what I bring 
 you, world! Lo! Lo-o-o!" So the steamers seemed to cry to 
 us clear down the long lengths of Wisconsin and Illinois. 
 
 Dreams of health, too, for myself — health, life and at 
 least a little of success and happiness. 
 
 Great Father, why not leave to each and every man of 
 us, even to each mere tramp, at least his dreams? 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 973 
 
 For behold, as to any man at all, there is nothing better 
 in him than his mere bright dreamings, and, to a tramp, 
 nothing else whatsoever than these. 
 
 HEAD OF THE LAKES. SUPERIOR 
 
 In July, 1913, we removed to Superior, Wis. At first we 
 had money enough with which to buy us a small home. 
 So that we did. Then came a six-months illness for myself; 
 outrageously painful it was and terrifying. Nobody seemed 
 to know precisely what the trouble was, except that double 
 femoral phlebitis was a part of it. But the cause of the 
 phlebitis? Nobody knew that at all — until later. 
 
 Our home became mortgaged to the limit. I had wanted 
 to build a little laboratory too for the study of light and of 
 animal eyes. How could one build and equip a private 
 laboratory when he could hardly hold his home? 
 
 I could write, though, even when confined to bed, so 
 write I ofttimes did. Yet, for writing, how little one re- 
 ceives! For scientific writing not infrequently just nothing 
 whatever, the honor of publication by a noteworthy house 
 being regarded as sufficient pay. 
 
 Ofttimes one does not even receive by way of recompense 
 a kindly word from reviewers, though, as a rule, I have 
 fared not badly at that gentry's hands. 
 
 THE ENCYCLOPEDIA 
 
 On this head it will be necessary to speak at a little 
 length. I therefore quote upon it a few short paragraphs 
 from my "Tramping to Failure": "My piece de resistance 
 through all those years of suffering, was my individual part 
 and portion in The American Encyclopedia of Ophthal- 
 mology.' 
 
 "For that unparalleled affair I wrote, in the course of 
 about seven years, considerably more than 3000 articles, 
 counting biographies and the short with the long. 
 
 "The editor of this enormous book was Dr. Casey A. 
 Wood, of Chicago, another intellectual tramp, full of hobo 
 daring and an intolerable itch for high adventure. The gods 
 of cash had been quite kind to him, and so, all alone — so far, 
 that is, as regarded the financial aspects of the undertaking 
 
974 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 — he projected the mammoth work — eighteen enormous royal 
 octavo volumes of 800 to 1000 pages each — and all on the 
 one sole subject of the eye. 
 
 "These massive volumes were to be profusely illustrated 
 with plates, a good many in several colors, also printed 
 and bound in accord with the importance and purpose of the 
 work. 
 
 "And this magnum opus, you understand, was to be not 
 merely a medical book about eyes. It was to be everything 
 whatsoever about eyes QAugenkunde, not merely Augenheil- 
 kunde). Even the science of color (chromatology) went into 
 it, the symbolism of color, color music, the nature and 
 sources of light, biophotogenesis, animals' eyes, the chemi- 
 cal construction of the numerous kinds of glass out of which 
 ophthalmic and other kinds of lenses and prisms are ground. 
 Many of these topics indeed do not enable an ophthal- 
 mologist to earn more money, but they do immensely broad- 
 en him, make him a man of science, instead of a mere 
 mechanic who chances to be dealing with eyes. 
 
 "It will be a great surprise to many, I am sure, especially 
 physicians, when I say that, up to the fourth volume of this 
 work, the enterprise was, financially, a mere flat, dead 
 failure. 
 
 "So true was this that, one day, Dr. Wood wrote to me 
 as follows: 'No use to go on further with the big book! 
 Sorry, but there's nothing for it now except to return to all 
 subscribers the amounts they've paid for the volumes already 
 issued and then cancel the enterprise in toto. A shame, too, 
 after all we'd meant to do for the ophthalmologic profession 
 of the world!' 
 
 "I replied, pointing out various reasons why the En- 
 cyclopedia should be continued and why, eventually, it 
 was bound to succeed. For example I stated that almost any 
 ophthalmologist who, at the beginning of the book's pub- 
 lication, had been thinking about buying a set of the En- 
 cyclopedia, would have been almost certain to reflect that, 
 if he did subscribe, he would, for some months at least, 
 possess merely Vol. I (devoted exclusively to articles com- 
 mencing with 'A') so that he would seldom be able to find 
 in the work thus far issued such information as, at the 
 given moment, he might chance to need. At the very time 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 975 
 
 in which I was writing, the prospective purchaser, I pointed 
 out, was bound to consider that, even with Volumes I, II, 
 III and IV in his hands, he would not be very much better 
 off. But still, I insisted, as the number of volumes that had 
 been printed and distributed continued to increase, the work 
 would become for all subscribers more and more useful — 
 indispensable indeed — so that, as time passed, the securement 
 of subscriptions for the book would become easier and 
 easier. Several times I wrote to similar effect. And, later, 
 when the book had succeeded beyond even our wildest 
 dreams, this generous editor wrote me that, had it not been 
 for my repeated insistence, the work would surely have been 
 abandoned while still in its unsuccessful stages. 
 
 "All of which goes to show that tramps, sometimes — 
 even if they do, some of them, tramp to failure on their own 
 accounts — may be of at least a little service in helping other 
 tramps to attain to the highest success." 
 
 THE BIOGRAPHIES 
 The hardest work that ever I did for the Encyclopedia 
 or have done for anything else was the biographical part 
 of that book. The data which I had to secure for it could 
 of course not be invented. Neither could it be acquired by 
 any amount of experimentation, or, so far at least as the 
 later worthies were concerned, looked up, to any great 
 extent, in the already existing literature. All the facts, or 
 almost all, must be acquired from living friends and relatives 
 of the deceased. The curious and ofttimes insurmountable 
 difficulties I encountered in the acquirement of such facts I 
 have already written up fully in several long sections of 
 "Tramping to Failure." 
 
 "As to the old-time worthies, whom no one living could 
 possibly remember" (I am quoting now from "Tramping") 
 "the amount of labor which I sometimes expended — yes and 
 hard-earned money also — would be incredible should the 
 whole story be told." 1 
 
 1 1 had already, before leaving Marion, contributed chapters or sections to a number of 
 volumes edited by Dr. Wood — particularly Wood's "System of Ophthalmic Operations." 
 
976 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 THE OTHER WORLD'S WAR 
 
 The Crown Prince of Austria had been assassinated ! So 
 we quickly read. June 28, 1918! 
 
 I thought at once that the murder meant war — judging 
 by all the ticklish situation. If so, I should at least have one 
 consolation — a marvelous chance to test all my views on 
 peace and war — views which underlay my War-Check Vote, 
 gave it its foundation, and to test them on the vastest war 
 in history. The vastest war in history it surely turned out 
 to be. 
 
 You, if old enough, remember the quick succession of 
 events. The demands of Austria. Serbia's reply. Count 
 Berchtold's telegram to the Serbian Foreign Office at Bel- 
 grade. The Russian mobilization, July 29. The alleged 
 violation of Belgian neutrality by French military aviators, 
 the consequent declaration of war on August 3 by Germany 
 against France. The declaration on August 5 by Great 
 Britain of war against Germany. Then a long, unspeakably 
 terrible, succession of similar catastrophes. Almost the 
 whole of the world, it seemed, had been drawn into the war. 
 There was not the slightest evidence that any of the com- 
 mon people had in any sense wanted the war. 
 
 I will now for a time reproduce from my "Tramping to 
 Failure" the facts about the war, as they bear upon the 
 questions which had been raised in opposition to the War- 
 Check Vote. It is absolutely necessary that I do this. 
 
 In this country nobody, at least among the common 
 people, talked of anything else than the war and how we 
 best could keep out of it. 
 
 President Wilson begged and implored every citizen of 
 the United States to remain neutral. 
 
 Neutral a few were. The majority took sides. But, on 
 this side or on that, practically each and every American 
 adult declared that there was one thing perfectly certain, 
 namely that the United States must, by all the gods, stay 
 out of that European war. President Washington's adjuration 
 about entangling foreign alliances was quoted again and 
 again. A considerable portion of the press sided against 
 Great Britain, "our traditional foe." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 977 
 
 Lying propaganda in favor of the Germans and against 
 the Allies flooded this nation in larger and larger quantities. 
 
 "Fair is foul, and foul is fair." 
 
 All at once, as suddenly as you could turn your hand over, 
 the press was almost unanimously in favor of Great Britain. 
 
 Something very plainly had happened behind the scenes. 
 
 Common people said to me, everywhere I went, that it 
 was easy enough to see just what had occurred. 
 
 Came the German-atrocity stories, dozens of them, scores 
 of them, hundreds of them, thousands of them. 
 
 All that the British, French and Belgians did was then 
 reported as white, snow white. All that the Germans did 
 was reported as black, unbelievably and Satanically black. 
 "Unbelievably" black indeed! Few there were, at least 
 among the masses, who did believe. 
 
 German soldiers, it was said, were cutting off Belgian 
 children's hands by the thousands, by the scores of thousands 
 — women's breasts, chaplain's ears. They were crucifying 
 French and Belgian infants against the sides of barns along- 
 side cats and dogs, and, over the horrid pairs of nailed-up 
 corpses, posting even more horrible legends. 
 
 Nearly all our newspapers declared that the German 
 blood was "naturally brutal" blood, that it had, in fact, 
 been responsible for the great majority of wars, so that, in 
 a word, this war against Germany was "a war to end war." 
 
 Laborers came to me and asked, "Doctor, is it possible 
 for a child with its hands hacked off by a mere crude soldier 
 to live? I don't mean if its hand is scientifically amputated 
 by a surgeon, but if it is hacked off by a soldier?" 
 
 "No. It is not possible." 
 
 "That's just what I thought." 
 
 Many said, "What is all this talk about German blood 
 being 'naturally brutal'? Half the American people contain 
 German blood. We have German neighbors, too; German 
 friends; German sons-in-law and so on. Nearly all are good 
 citizens, fine noble-hearted people. The talk is a lie." 
 
 Other laborers asked, "Can this be a war to end war? 
 If so, why has not that noble ideal entered into the minds 
 of the British, French and other Allied governments hereto- 
 fore? Anyway, how can just whipping the Germans and 
 
978 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 their associates end war? Cannot these other nations, even 
 with the Entente whipped, make many wars — just the same 
 as they have always done heretofore? And which nation 
 has had the most wars, Germany, France, Great Britain?" 
 
 Common sense was not quite so besotted and absolutely 
 credulous as the propagandists had supposed. 
 
 The propaganda, nevertheless, continued. It declared 
 that the Germans, whenever they took a prisoner, subjected 
 him to the most frightful and unspeakable tortures that 
 even Teutonic originality and cruelty could devise. 
 
 Again laborers came to me and said, "Doctor, that, too, 
 must be a lie, because, of course, the Germans, like our- 
 selves, must wish to take as many prisoners as possible. 
 That's to their interest. And, in order at any given time 
 to take more of them, they must have treated their former 
 prisoners (many of whom have been exchanged and restored 
 to the Allied ranks) with the utmost kindness. If they 
 tortured their prisoners, they could take no more prisoners." 
 
 Stories began to arrive of how one single man — often a 
 very small one — had captured fifteen, eighteen, twenty-five, 
 yes even fifty or sixty or a hundred of the enemy. 
 
 Then laboring people came to me and said that numerous 
 German soldiers must surely be hating (not wanting) the 
 war, inasmuch as, otherwise one Allied soldier, alone, could 
 never have captured so many of them. 
 
 Still the atrocity stories grew, multiplied, filled the whole 
 country. All white on the Allied side, of course, all black 
 on the side of the Triple Entente. 
 
 That of itself was a highly suspicious circumstance. 
 Matters in a world like this are seldom perfectly all wrong 
 on one side, perfectly all right on the other. The propaganda 
 clearly showed that the Germans had no longer the slightest 
 control of our press, but that the Allies dominated it ab- 
 solutely — as absolutely as they had controlled some of our 
 presidential nominating conventions. 
 
 Common people said as much to me, said it again and 
 again. They were not deceived. 
 
 So much for the statement so often made to this day by 
 militarists that, under my Amendments, the masses would 
 forever be deceived by propaganda, and, so, do nothing but 
 vote for the war. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 979 
 
 Nonsense ! 
 
 War-time propaganda is always so puerile, so idiotic, 
 so utterly and abominably incompetent, inconsistent, even 
 impossible, that no one ever believes it, saving and excepting 
 only those who can make large gains, either in money or 
 in power, by believing it, or who can pick some sort or 
 kind of favor out of the hands of those in power by at least 
 pretending to believe it, or who weakly hope to be able 
 to profit by such pretenses. 
 
 In this connection there is a question which I have very 
 often asked, but which is yet so highly important that I 
 needs must ask it again. During the nearly three years 
 which elapsed between the beginning of the war and the 
 entrance of this country into it — years which were filled to 
 overflowing in this country with all that now admittedly 
 untruthful propaganda — why, I say, during all those years, 
 did not our supposedly peace-loving president come out into 
 the open and inform the nation plainly of the fact that the 
 atrocity tales from the theatre of that war were simply and 
 absolutely false? He, ostensibly at least, desired us, certainly 
 begged and implored us, to be and to remain neutral. All 
 must surely remember that. 
 
 Yet, from the beginning to the end of the war, both 
 after our entrance into it and before that, he never, in all his 
 numerous speeches, notes, messages, and various other docu- 
 ments, even so much as one single time, so far as I have been 
 able to ascertain, plainly informed the country of the truth 
 about those propaganda tales. 
 
 Now, don't anyone say that the man did not possess the 
 truth about the tales. He either possessed it — and he must 
 positively have done so — or else, in not possessing it, he 
 was most criminally negligent. For he was no mere common 
 person like, say, you or me, Reader. He was the President 
 of the United States of America. And, in that capacity, he 
 had, precisely in Belgium itself, and from the beginning of 
 the conflict till our own entry into it (well-nigh three long 
 years) a complete consular equipment residing in all the 
 more important cities and towns of Belgium, and, in addi- 
 tion, at Brussels, our minister to that country — namely, Mr. 
 
980 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Brand Whitlock — together with all the attaches to his 
 legation. 
 
 The Germans had, in those days, to be sure, possession 
 of the most of Belgium, but these, as a matter of course, 
 would have been only too glad to have the U.S. Government 
 deny the atrocity tales to its own citizens and to the world. 
 American consuls, moreover, were continually passing back- 
 wards and forwards between Belgium and the United States, 
 so that these could easily have reported the truth about the 
 stories and have done it in person. 
 
 Mr. Wilson also possessed another powerful machine for 
 the ascertainment of the exact truth about the matter — the 
 United States secret service force. 
 
 Best of all perhaps, he had still another enormously 
 efficient machine — the "Commission for Relief in Belgium." 
 That machine could have supplied him with so many au- 
 thentic reports concerning the Belgian atrocity tales that he 
 never, in all the rest of his life, could even have finished the 
 reading of them. 
 
 In these days, of course, when the heads of the Allied 
 governments have themselves admitted that the atrocity 
 tales were simply fictions manufactured for the purpose of 
 excusing the many-million-fold slaughter, the truth is known 
 and to all. 1 
 
 1 On this head it is well to read the Hon. Arthur Ponsonby's "Falsehood in War- 
 Time." Of old aristocratic English stock, Arthur Ponsonby moves in the circles that know 
 the inside truth about the war. He is a son of the late General Sir Henry Ponsonby, a great 
 grandson of Earl Gray, British Prime Minister. He was a member of the British Parliament 
 all through the World War, Under-secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in 1924, and is 
 now once again a member of the British Parliament. 
 
 He is, moreover, one of the most brilliant and trustworthy of living English statesmen. 
 
 Mr. Ponsonby's book should be used as a text throughout the common schools of the 
 United States — if indeed the pretended wishes of the various governments are to be carried 
 out, "to teach the masses to hate war." How could any person who, in his childhood, 
 had thoroughly learned the truth about, for example, the Briton, Lord NorthclifFe, and 
 his war-time propaganda bureau, ever again believe in atrocity stories or the war-time 
 innocence of governments? 
 
 What do you think would be the lifelong effect on the youthful American mind of the 
 truth about the French Government's "Maison de la Presse"? Here is a brief passage on that 
 subject from Mr. Ponsonby's book, in which, on pages 178-179, he quotes from "Behind 
 the Scenes of French Journalism" by "A French Chief Editor": "As early as three days 
 after the outbreak of the war, Viviani promulgated a law which on the same day was passed 
 by the House and the Senate, and which provided as the first instalment of a powerful prop- 
 aganda the trifling amount of twenty-five million francs in gold for the establishment of 
 
 La MAISON de la PRESSE 
 a gigantic building, Francois Street, 3, five stories high, without the basement, where the 
 
 firinting-presses are located, and the ground-floor with its large meeting hall. A busy, 
 ively going and coming, as in a beehive; trucks arriving, elegant autos with pretentious- 
 looking persons. The two hundred rooms contain the work-shops, offices, parlours, and 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 981 
 
 But the question is, Why did not Mr. Woodrow Wilson, 
 with more than merely adequate power to know the truth 
 about the Belgian situation and to tell it to his people, 
 spread that truth broadcast before — yes, long, long, before 
 — our entry into the butchery? 
 
 That question I have asked times innumerable, but, thus 
 far, have never received an answer. 
 
 There was a great deal of controversy about the sinking 
 of some of the British and even of our own ships. Mr. W. J. 
 Bryan, then our Secretary of State, told us, as now we know, 
 the truth about the situation. Our ships were carrying am- 
 munition, ordnance and other military supplies to Great 
 Britain. The Lusitania, in addition, was a British auxiliary 
 cruiser. We had, therefore, no more right to expect these 
 vessels to possess immunity from military attack, just be- 
 cause they were carrying civilians, than any government 
 would have had to protect its army from assault by sending 
 women and children to march in its front ranks. 
 
 Bryan resigned and everyone knew why. 
 
 Germany had offered again and again to accept Mr. 
 Bryan's proposal that (1) England should obey the law of 
 nations on the seas, and (2) Germany should relinquish her 
 submarine warfare. The latter had, in fact, been adopted 
 
 reception-rooms, where those war-mad heroes are domiciled whose courage grows with 
 the degree of distance from the trenches. From the basement up to the fifth story. covered 
 with a glass roof, all is the embodiment of concentrated propaganda. In the basement 
 stood the machinery necessary for printing and reproduction, under the glass roof operated 
 the photo-chemigraphic department. Its principal work consists of making photographs 
 and cuts of wooden figures with cut-off hands, torn-out tongues, gouged-out eyes, crushed 
 skulls and brains laid bare. The pictures thus made were sent as unassailable evidence of 
 
 German atrocities to all parts of the globe In the same rooms fictitious photographs 
 
 were made of bombarded French and Belgian churches, violated graves and monuments and 
 
 scenes of ruin and desolation The Presse House was the indefatigable geyser which 
 
 belched forth incessantly false war reports and fictitious news from the rear and the front, 
 the meanest and most brutal slanders of the opponents, the astonishing fictions of infamous 
 acts attributed to them," etc. 
 
 Can you suppose that, after such a training of the public mind in the truth about war, 
 the politicians and the profiteers of this nation would ever again have the hardihood to 
 repeat that most damnable and most fundamental lie of all war-lies — namely that govern- 
 ments do not want wars but that they are pushed into them by the masses? 
 
 But Mr. Ponsonby's small book is only a tiny (though an exceedingly authoritative) 
 portion of the literature now in existence about the various governments and their World 
 War lies. In Laswell's large octavo volume, "Propaganda Technique in the World War" 
 you will find a bibliography listing hundreds of volumes devoted solely to the mendacity 
 of governments (and the profiteers behind them) in that one single war. 
 
982 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 only by way of retaliation against Britain's previous and 
 long continued violation of international sea-law. 
 So Bryan resigned and everyone knew why. 
 
 In April, 1916, one whole year before we were put into the 
 war, there occurred a tremendous incident which is still far 
 too little known. It is thus related by Harry Elmer Barnes, 
 ("Who Started the World War?" page 56): 
 
 "Mr. Wilson played his next card at home. One morning early in April, 1916, Mr. 
 Wilson called in conference the Democratic leaders of Congress, Champ Clark, Hal Flood 
 and Claude Kitchin, told them that he felt that it was time the United States entered the 
 War, and asked for their support in leading Congress to accept his plan. These men were 
 opposed to war and, hence, rejected his proposals somewhat heatedly. Wilson knew that 
 it was a poor time to split the party just before an election, so he dropped the matter at 
 once and, with Colonel House, mapped out a pacifist platform for the coming campaign. 
 Governor Martin Glynn of New York and Senator Ollie James of Kentucky were sent to 
 the St. Louis convention to make keynote speeches, which were based on the slogan: 'He 
 kept us out of war!' Senator James' pacifist speech stampeded the convention and he was 
 requested to repeat it." 
 
 So did the great pretended pacifist, who really wanted 
 to enter us into the war, who knew the exact truth about 
 "the German atrocities," and who could have told it to 
 the nation but did not, secure his re-nomination. 
 
 If Mr. Wilson could not get us into the war at once, he 
 would be for peace — till after the election. 
 
 Along in August, 1916, occurred a strangely fateful thing, 
 one whose importance is not yet fully recognized. Congress, 
 on the 29th day of the month, created, at the President's 
 request, what was termed "The Council of National De- 
 fense," together with an auxiliary body known as "The 
 Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense." 
 
 He who does not understand the part which was played 
 by these two bodies in the placement by this government of 
 the American people into the war, has simply not acquired 
 the slightest inkling of our real connection with that out- 
 rageous slaughter. Yet the great majority of Americans do 
 not understand it. 
 
 Remember that these two named bodies were created by 
 one and the same Act of Congress, and that the act was 
 passed on August 29, 1916 — when Mr. Woodrow Wilson was 
 running for re-election, and when the slogans on which he 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 983 
 
 was running were, "Peace with honor, preparedness, pros- 
 perity* ' and "Peace with honor, he kept us out of war." 1 
 
 The Council of National Defense was extended through- 
 out the entire country, until, in fact, it consisted of the 
 immense number of 184,000 units — all under the thumb, un- 
 derstand please, of the central council back there in Wash- 
 ington. 
 
 The country, a little suspicious of the real underlying 
 significance and purpose of this so rigidly organized body 
 of men, among whose numbers were included the holders of 
 most of the strategic positions — financial, political, social, 
 educational, and so on — in the country, were assured again 
 and again that the Council would never be employed for the 
 entering of this country into the European conflict, and that 
 its purpose was simply and solely the establishment of safe 
 and sane preparations for the reception of the Germans, in 
 case those people who were supposed to have started out to 
 enslave the world, etc., should, first, win in Europe and then 
 come over here. 
 
 Thus assured, the nation submitted to the establishment 
 of that tremendous war-machine. It was all, however, you 
 understand, to be merely a "Council of National DEFENSE." 
 No offensive preparations at all were to be indulged in. 
 Of that great fact we were solemnly assured again and again. 
 
 Now what about that little auxiliary body, "The Ad- 
 visory Commission to the Council of National Defense"? 
 It consisted of seven men only. All these seven men, mark 
 you, were, in accordance with a provision of the Act of 
 Congress by which the Commission had been established, 
 
 1 Here are the exact words from the report of "The Select Committee on Expenditures 
 in the War Department" (Congressional Record, House, June 1, 1920, pages 8144-8150): "A 
 political campaign was in full swing. Not a step was taken toward the meeting of the 
 Council of National Defense for three months and until after the election. Meantime the 
 President and his party went about the country telling the people they had been kept out 
 of war and telling them we would continue at peace. The campaign textbook of the 
 Democratic Party in 1916 bore on its cover in bold letters these words: 'Peace with honor, 
 preparedness, prosperity.' They circulated about the country, showing pictures in colors 
 of the President, with this legend upon it: 'Peace with honor, he kept us out of war.' And 
 then at the bottom, to signify verity, his signature, 'Yours, Woodrow Wilson.' With this 
 miserable deceit the American people were deluded." 
 
 It ought, however, to be emphasized that it was indeed "the American people," not 
 just one party only, who were being deluded. The Democratic party was being quite as 
 thoroughly deceived (and with just as much righteousness and good faith on their part) 
 by the President and the war-making group behind him, as were, in fact, the millions of 
 Republicans who, in that campaign, were deluded by precisely the same peace-talk into 
 voting for Mr. Wilson's re-election. 
 
984 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 chosen by the President of the United States and by him 
 alone — Mr. Woodrow Wilson, the very man who just then 
 was running for re-election on a distinctly no- war platform. 
 
 And what, while Mr. Wilson was so running, were his 
 own seven men — that "Advisory Commission," appointed 
 by himself alone — engaged in? 
 
 To show you in an authoritative way just what they were 
 doing, I must run a little forward in time — namely to 1923, 
 when a book appeared, entitled "Industrial America in the 
 World War." This was a highly authoritative and very 
 clearly written volume. Its author was, in fact, no less a 
 person than Mr. Grosvenor B. Clarkson, who had been 
 secretary both to the Advisory Commission and to the 
 Council of National Defense, thus interlocking those two 
 bodies very tightly together. In that book Mr. Clarkson 
 quotes from Mr. William J. Graham, of the U. S. House of 
 Representatives, and chairman of the "Select Committee of 
 the House on Expenditures During the World War" as 
 follows : 
 
 "An examination of these minutes [i.e., the minutes, or records, of the Advisory Com- 
 mission] discloses the fact that a commission of seven men chosen by the President seems 
 to have devised the entire system of purchasing war supplies, planned a press censorship, 
 
 designed a system of food control determined on a daylight saving scheme, and, in 
 
 a word, designed practically every war measure which the Congress subsequently enacted, 
 and did all this behind closed doors, weeks and even months before the Congress of the 
 United States declared war against Germany." 
 
 Having quoted this passage, Mr. Clarkson proceeds to comment on it in the following 
 astounding way (page 26 of his same book): 
 
 4 'The only fault, aside from its bitterly appreciative tone, to be found with Mr. Graham's 
 summary of the achievements of the advisory commission before and in the early days of 
 the war, is that, broad as it is, it does not tell the whole story. And it might be added 
 that the only cause the Nation has for regretting what was then done is that it was not 
 even more inclusive, specific, and compelling." 
 
 Just see. Here were admittedly secret preparations for the 
 war made by a Presidential Commission created August 29, 
 1916, consisting of only seven persons and working for long 
 months in advance of our open entrance into the war, 
 quietly working for war in fact while the President who had 
 appointed it was running before the people on the ground 
 that he had kept us out of war and would continue to give 
 us "peace with honor." 
 
 Does the reader doubt that Mr. Clarkson, who had been, 
 throughout their existence, secretary both to the Advisory 
 Commission and to the Council of National Defense, did in 
 fact utter those quoted words? If he does, let him just turn 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 985 
 
 to Mr. Clarkson's book (it stands in the most of the public 
 libraries of the United States) and there read for himself. 
 
 It should, of course, be borne in mind that at the time 
 (1923) when Mr. Clarkson thus spoke so commendatorily 
 about the part which the Advisory Commission had played 
 with respect to our entrance into the war, the full truth 
 about that war had not yet authoritatively leaked out to the 
 world. At this present time it is hardly probable that Mr. 
 Clarkson would so lustily crow over the war-making per- 
 formances of the Advisory Commission to the Council of 
 National Defense. 
 
 The election occurred, of course, in November, and Mr. 
 Wilson was elected on the one and only platform, or plank, 
 which, at that time, absorbed the entire interest of the great 
 majority of American citizens — that, namely, which prom- 
 ised to keep us from engaging in the European conflict. 
 
 All at once, after the election, a great change in the 
 attitude of all "the higher powers" began to make itself 
 manifest. 
 
 For one thing the Council of National Defense, which, 
 till after the election, had been "soft pedalled," now began 
 to function vigorously, and, in addition, to be ruled with 
 great authority — a forecast, so to speak, of the rule of the 
 rod of iron all over the country which was soon to follow. 
 
 Certain leading newspapers and magazines too, which, 
 thus far, had been wholly for peace, began to change their 
 tone. 
 
 The atrocity stories which, for more than two years, had 
 been appearing in the public prints, coupled, almost invari- 
 ably, with admonitions to our government (you understand) 
 to continue to keep us out of the war, now came boldly 
 forth devoid of the admonitions to peace and with emphatic 
 declarations to the effect that nothing but our entry into 
 the shambles could possibly be the correct course for us to 
 follow — in view of the absolute truth of all those marvelous 
 (and presidentially uncorrected) atrocity tales. 1 
 
 1 Speaking of "the German atrocity tales," I am forcibly reminded of the fact that, 
 in those stirring times, numerous laboring men came to me and said, for example: "Doctor, 
 
986 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 But surely the educated people of the United States, I 
 thought, would not believe those tales. The common people, 
 undoubtedly, were experiencing little difficulty in perceiving 
 the gross inconsistencies, the absolutely palpable impos- 
 sibilities of the war-time propaganda. The "upper classes," 
 therefore, with all their great advantages by way of correct 
 historical knowledge, should easily be able to keep their 
 minds unsullied by the lies. 
 
 As a matter of fact, however, they did not, as a class, 
 do so. 
 
 Especially what about the Christian ministers? They 
 possessed the mightiest influence of all the various bodies of 
 men in the nation. And always heretofore, except whenever 
 a war had threatened, they had inculcated with all their 
 hearts and souls and minds and strengths the doctrine of 
 non-resistance — no war at any time for any purpose. Now, 
 thought I, is the opportunity for these great religious leaders 
 of the United States to redeem the long, blood-stained record 
 of their profession. They, if they stood true to the doctrines 
 of their Master (I mean Jesus Christ) could, plainly, avert 
 our entry into the shambles. Would they stand true? 
 
 Seldom, indeed, had they done so theretofore. 
 
 That fact, however, did not prove to a certainty that, 
 in this one incomparable instance, they would fail humanity. 
 
 Anxiously, watchfully, even prayerfully, I awaited the 
 course which the ministers would pursue. 
 
 By Christmas a good many preachers, especially the 
 leaders of the profession in the cities and larger towns, were 
 preaching and writing emphatically in favor of our entrance 
 into the war. 
 
 Worse, numbers of prominent ministers who had delib- 
 erately joined themselves to the throngs that were going to 
 Europe in order to ascertain at first hand whether or not the 
 alleged atrocity stories were true, were now returning and, 
 
 has not that Russian Government been guilty of many unspeakable atrocities, even in times 
 of peace? What about those Jewish pogroms? Our government should talk about 'German 
 atrocities' "! 
 
 I also recall the fact that, even after the Armistice, the British blockade of Germany for 
 well-nigh one whole year resulted in the unnecessary starvation and death of over 800,000 
 German women and children. 
 
 There is an atrocity tale about British governmental action, not indeed in war-time but 
 in peace-time, and one which has never been contradicted, but reasserted, asseverated and 
 actually gloried in by the British aristocracy itself, even to this present day. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 987 
 
 without qualification, reporting that they were true and 
 that the hundredth part had never been told. Some of these 
 ministers even wrote horrible books on the subject, copies 
 of a number of which are still in my library. Comparing 
 these books now with the known facts about the situation 
 then — as, for example, the facts have been disclosed by 
 Lloyd George (Prime Minister of the British Empire during 
 most of the war) Prime Minister Nitti, of Italy, Raymond 
 Poincare (President of France throughout the entire war 
 period) and numerous other worthies who, during the course 
 of the conflict, had sat in high positions in the Allied 
 governments— one knows not what to think. 
 
 About the worst of these books was "Fighting for 
 Peace," by the Rev. Henry Van Dyke. Van Dyke, as the 
 jacket of his volume was at special pains to inform us, was 
 "Minister of the United States to Holland." Just below 
 these words, the jacket continues, "A vivid view of the 
 origin, conditions and right conclusion of the war, from the 
 standpoint of one who was very close to it and who had 
 intimate personal experiences which illuminate the subject 
 with the light of reality." 
 
 The high official position of Van Dyke as U. S. Minister 
 to Holland and his exalted position as a minister of the 
 Prince of Peace besides, conferred upon this volume most 
 unusual authority and influence. 
 
 A letter by the Rev. Van Dyke, written after our entry 
 into the shambles, appeared in The New Republic for December 
 22, 1917, and ran as follows: "Fines, imprisonment, intern- 
 ment in a comfortable camp in the south are altogether inad- 
 equate. .... A man who by speech or action endeavors to 
 impede American efficiency in this righteous war should be 
 judged by law, and, if convicted, promptly executed." 
 
 No freedom of speech about that ! No abolition of capital 
 punishment either. Not even the briefest time allowed to 
 elapse wherein some miscarriage of justice might be permitted 
 to appear. Blood! and blood immediately! 
 
 In England the situation was much the same, so that, 
 after the war, Mr. Lloyd George, Prime Minister of the 
 British Empire at the time of the war, declared that, here- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 after, when war threatened, the ministers of any country, 
 if they really desired to maintain peace, must, first of all, 
 lock up their churches. 
 
 Let no man think that I write these things out of the 
 slightest prejudice to the ministry. I believe that, all points 
 considered, ministers are far and away the noblest and most 
 useful of men. But I do take it not a little unkindly that the 
 Christian preachers of this and of other lands, after preach- 
 ing for decades the doctrine of absolute non-resistance under 
 all circumstances, should have turned about, when war came 
 — yes, and for a long, long time before it came, in order to 
 compel it to come — and then, in addition, after having 
 berated the farmers and laborers for their hesitancy to enter 
 the war, should now, after the true nature of the conflict 
 has been revealed even by its chief actors, continue to oppose 
 the War-Check Vote and even to accuse (as some of them 
 still do) with outstretched saintly forefingers "the masses" 
 as the real begetters of the war and instigators of our entry 
 into it. 
 
 Father forgive them ! They surely know not what they do. 
 They must have forgotten nearly everything that happened 
 during the world conflict. 
 
 Possibly even a worse book than the Rev. Henry Van 
 Dyke's was that by the Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis, entitled 
 "German Atrocities." At the beginning of the preface to 
 that volume, the Rev. Hillis says, "These inquiries into 
 German atrocities were begun in the latter part of September, 
 1914." In the second paragraph of that preface he explains, 
 
 "I sailed for France at the request of several bankers 
 
 of New York." 
 
 After the Rev. Hillis had returned to America he not 
 only wrote and disseminated the book above-mentioned, but 
 he also went upon an extensive lecture tour about the 
 country, thundering against the so-called 4 'German atrocities" 
 and relating, in all the more important American cities, 
 the results of his personal war-field investigations. 
 
 Once again to run a little forward, he, in the magazine 
 called Current Opinion, December, 1917, at page 376, publish- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 989 
 
 ed an article entitled "What America is Fighting Against." 
 The following passage from that article will indicate with 
 sufficient clearness the character of the Rev. Newell Dwight 
 Hillis' great work for the Prince of Peace. I should add that, 
 at the beginning of the article, just after the author's name, 
 the Rev. Hillis is described as "Member of a Diplomatic 
 Mission to the French Front in Behalf of the U. S. Govern- 
 ment." Mr. Wilson, you see, was still making no notice- 
 able effort to spread the truth (which, as already demon- 
 strated, must have been plainly known to him or knowable) 
 concerning the "German atrocity" tales. 
 
 Here is that typical passage by the Rev. Hillis: "It is 
 not simply that they [the Germans] looted factories, carried 
 away machinery, robbed houses, bombed every farm-house 
 and granary, left no plow or reaper, chopped down every 
 pear tree or plum tree with every grapevine, and poisoned 
 the wells! The Germans slaughtered old men and matrons, 
 mutilated captives in ways that can only be spoken of by 
 men in whispers; violated little girls until they were dead. 
 Finding a calfskin nailed upon a barn door to be dried, they 
 nailed a babe beside it and wrote beneath the word, 'Zwei'; 
 they thrust women and children between themselves and 
 soldiers coming up to defend their native land; bombed and 
 looted hospitals, Red Cross buildings; violated the white 
 flag — and the worst atrocities cannot even be named." 
 
 That is merely a specimen of the alleged horrors detailed 
 by the reverend gentleman. He may have been misled, but 
 he was supposed to have gone to the French front and to be 
 speaking officially for the U.S. Government. Moreover, had 
 he not been able to ascertain the truth at first hand, he 
 ought very frankly to have said so. 
 
 To return to December, 1916 — while still we were out 
 of the war. 
 
 My hopes that the Christian ministry, in the matter of 
 Armageddon, would clear itself of its age-old black and 
 bloody record, were, as you see, very promptly and perma- 
 nently dissipated. 
 
990 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 On December 31, 1916, "at the close of a perfect" year, 
 an appeal was made to "the Christians of America" by fifty 
 prominent persons, almost without exception ministers. 
 Among them were Bishop Lawrence, of Massachusetts; 
 Bishop Gaylor, of Tennessee; Bishop Rhinelander, of Penn- 
 sylvania; Bishop Anderson, of Illinois; Bishop Nelson, of 
 Georgia, and Doctors of Divinity Lyman Abbott, Newell 
 Dwight Hillis, and William T. Manning, of New York. 
 The document was an earnest appeal for immediate war, 
 indeed and in truth a perfectly bloodthirsty harangue. See 
 it entire in The Independent for January 15, 1917, pages 90-91- 
 
 In addition thousands of sermons were preached in 1916 
 and early in 1917 in all parts of the United States, urging war 
 with bitter intensity and flaying the backs of the laborers 
 and farmers of the United States with unmerciful zeal for 
 their persistent opposition to the war. 
 
 The climax, however, of preacher pro- war eloquence was 
 attained on March 11, 1917, still almost a month before our 
 entry into the slaughter-pen. (Mr. Woodrow Wilson, be it 
 remembered, was still presumed throughout the country to 
 be most bitterly opposed to our entry into the war.) 
 
 March 11, 1917. Do you remember the day? That was 
 "War Sunday." Please never forget the name or the date. 
 "War Sunday" is now an important phrase in the history 
 of all war-making. On that blessed white day nearly all the 
 Christian ministers of New York City, by mutual agreement, 
 stood simultaneously up in their influential pulpits, and, 
 repeating the frightful atrocity tales given out by the various 
 Allied governments and personally vouched for by many of 
 Christ's most prominent ministers, shouted again and again 
 for war. 
 
 Some of those sermons appeared in various newspapers 
 throughout the United States, but are not referred to in 
 these days by their respective authors. 
 
 Many, too, were published in the religious journals of 
 the country and in magazines of a general, or literary, 
 character. 
 
 Then, all at once, in every portion of the United States, 
 the ministers of the Prince of Peace began imitating the 
 New York leaders of their profession. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 991 
 
 The sacred lips of the clergy of Christ had become the 
 brazen mouth-pieces of murderous Mars. 
 
 "War! War! War! Let us have war!" 
 
 "Blessed are the [clerical] peacemakers, for they shall be 
 called the children of God!" 
 
 The Lutheran ministers, however, except in a very few 
 instances, refrained from uniting in the awful yell for blood. 
 That was true of the Swedish and Norwegian Lutherans as 
 much as it was of the German. 
 
 One denomination (let us always remember the sect and 
 give due honor to its adherents) refrained, practically as a 
 whole — the Quakers. And this denomination, or communion, 
 has, I am told, no ministers at all — at least in the profes- 
 sional sense. 
 
 I am not a Catholic. I desire, nevertheless, to record here 
 my appreciation of the fact that the Catholic clergy, though 
 it did not wholly abstain from participation in the war- 
 making, was, notwithstanding, far less culpable in that 
 matter than were the Protestants. (My own denomination 
 — the Presbyterian — was one of the worst.) The Pope him- 
 self attempted, again and again, to act the part of peace- 
 maker, but in vain. I think that he really did try. 
 
 What, on the whole, as regards our entry into the war, 
 was the result of the tergiversation of the American clergy? 
 
 Did the ministers, in fact, succeed in deceiving the 
 American masses when they lent their powerful voices to 
 the dissemination of militaristic propaganda? 
 
 Indeed they did not, to any great extent. 
 
 The facts and figures on this head I will state in just a 
 moment. For the present merely let the assertion stand with- 
 out proof that the great masses of the American people were 
 not deceived by the pro-war propaganda, ministerial or lay. 
 
 What, then, did the pro-war propaganda accomplish? 
 It succeeded in saving the face of the government and of the 
 profiteers behind it (of whose existence I will give you 
 abundant proof in just a few moments). 
 
 You know how a culprit in a court-room will almost 
 invariably set up some or another excuse for his ill conduct, 
 even although he knows to a certainty that neither the judge 
 
992 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 nor the jury nor even his own relatives, if present, believe 
 a word of what he says. 
 
 He must save his face, however, have some kind of story 
 in which he himself professes to have faith. 
 
 With its face well saved in advance (December to March, 
 inclusive) our government was in position to proceed (in 
 April) and give us that very entry into the war which we 
 had so recently and so emphatically recorded our opposition 
 to at the polls. 
 
 (It is sometimes said that, since the fall election, the 
 people of the U. S. had undergone a complete change in their 
 attitude toward the question of entry or no-entry into the 
 war. Wait till I give you, just a little later, the figures and 
 other facts upon this head.) 
 
 Woodrow Wilson, even after that first great "War Sun- 
 day" and even after the nation-wide series of war-Sundays 
 which immediately succeeded that one, still appeared, pub- 
 licly at least, to oppose our entrance into the war. 
 
 Then, all at once, on April 2, he personally presented 
 himself before Congress with his astounding war-message 
 and proposed to that body that, in accordance with its con- 
 stitutional powers, it should enter us into the war. 
 
 And that very thing Congress then did — the Senate 
 passing the War Resolution on April 4 and the House on 
 April 6. 
 
 Senator Robert M. LaFollette, of Wisconsin, begged elo- 
 quently for a referendum to the people. He was, however, 
 shown that by the U. S. Constitution the people of this 
 country had no right to a binding say on the matter. 
 
 "Theirs not to reason why! 
 Theirs but to do and to die/' 
 
 The Senator was clearly out of order. Article I, Section 8, 
 of the Constitution had plainly given the war-power ex- 
 clusively to Congress. 
 
 Ours but to do and to die! 
 
 Our vote for Mr. Woodrow Wilson in November, 1916, 
 on the ground that he had kept us out of war and would 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 993 
 
 continue to give us "peace with honor," had been "direc- 
 tory" only, not "binding" at all. There stood the Consti- 
 tution, still, as always, giving the power to make or not 
 to make war exclusively to Congress. 1 
 
 We were in the war. 
 
 Meantime in certain cities there had been a few mobs 
 clamoring for war. It was an old trick, that — a stratagem 
 which had been resorted to since, no doubt, long before the 
 beginning of history. 
 
 You go into the underworld and you pay some of the 
 leaders there so much money to come out on the public 
 streets with a grand hurrah for anything you want. And 
 they do that. 
 
 Thousands of other people, too, who chance to be passing 
 along the sidewalks, follow the crowd as a matter of curi- 
 osity, and so you apparently have "a mob consisting of all 
 classes of people." 
 
 How many persons are in that mob? 
 
 Nobody knows. 
 
 How many that are in it really want entrance into a war? 
 
 Nobody knows. 
 
 What proportion do the mobs, taken altogether, bear to 
 the population of the country as a whole? Fifty per cent? 
 
 1 A great many persons declare that, even if the War-Check Vote should be adopted, 
 and if, under it, the people of this country should vote overwhelmingly against a proposed 
 war, still our government would just deliberately go ahead and give us the war. And the 
 reason which they offer for such belief is that, though, in 1916, we re-elected Mr. Wilson 
 on a no-war platform, he nevertheless, in April, 1917, proceeded to request Congress to vote 
 us into the European conflict. 
 
 Such persons, however, have not grasped the legal situation in this country with 
 respect to peace and war. 
 
 The Constitution of the United States, when adopted, gave the war-power wholly to 
 Congress. That situation remains, even to the present day. It was, of course, the same 
 when Woodrow Wilson was re-elected on a no-war platform. His re-election on that 
 platform meant nothing except that he was to use his influence with Congress to keep that 
 body, so far as he could, from entering us into the European conflict. After he was re- 
 elected on a no-war platform the war-power, by the Constitution of the United States, still 
 remained in the hands of Congress. You cannot change the Constitution of the United 
 States by a presidential election. Article V of the Constitution lays down the only four 
 methods whereby that document can be changed, and political platforms and presidential 
 elections are not among those ways. 
 
 The truth is that the people had no legal method for expressing their wishes in a con- 
 stitutionally binding way. To think a mere political platform the same thing as a binding, 
 constitutionally authorized, referendum, is to make a truly terrible mistake. 
 
994 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Ten per cent? A hundredth part of one single per cent of the 
 whole vast population? 
 
 Nobody knows. 
 
 And yet many of the newspapers proceed to declare with 
 the utmost solemnity that "everybody now is in favor of 
 the war." "There were mobs shouting for war." 1 
 
 What about the Council of National Defense, that body 
 which was to be used as a war machine only in case the 
 Germans managed to get over here, and in case they had 
 really, as the propaganda stated, started out to conquer and 
 enslave the world? 
 
 All at once, just as you might turn your hand over, that 
 Council was converted from a defensive body into an offensive 
 one — worse than that, into a gigantic machine whereby all 
 resistance to the war might be at once steam-rollered. 
 
 Hundreds of thousands of members of that Council of 
 Defense began objecting bitterly to the employment of the 
 organization for any other purpose than that for which 
 alone it had been ostensibly organized. The more obstreper- 
 ous of these were at once hustled into internment camps and 
 the penitentiaries, and silence fell, very naturally, over the 
 rest. 
 
 No member of that organization dared to object to the 
 purpose for which it was now being used, or to try to get 
 out of its iron, machine-like clutches, any more than a nut 
 or a little iron bolt could effect its own release from a machine 
 of metal. 
 
 Whatsoever volition was applied at the engineering end 
 of the machine in Washington was at once transmitted with 
 
 1 There were in fact numerous anti-war mobs in this country — one in Chicago especially 
 — of very large proportions. These, of course, before our entry into the war. But all 
 those mobs were mostly ignored by the press. 
 
 After our government had entered us into the war, all anti-war demonstrations, even 
 the casual and most private utterances of opinion against the war, were rigorously sup- 
 pressed. Then said the pro-war people, "Listen! You do not hear a word against the war. 
 You see everybody wants war." 
 
 In Germany, spite of the rigid discipline imposed by a tyrannical government, there 
 were numerous public demonstrations against the war, even after the war had begun. 
 
 All through the war attempts were made by the German masses to overthrow that 
 Kaiser government and stop the war. In October, 1918, the attempts became successful. 
 The Kaiser was exiled, a new constitution was adopted, a new government established, 
 and that new government it was, and not the Kaiser, which negotiated with the Allies for 
 the Armistice. Even to the day of his death the Ex-Kaiser complained bitterly because 
 "his" people would not let him go on with the war. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 995 
 
 irresistible power to even the tiniest parts of the machine 
 all over the country. 
 
 The Council of National Defense, though the largest of 
 all the war-machines in the United States, was not by any 
 means the only one. Another was the American Protective 
 League, "Organized with the approval and operating under 
 the direction of the United States Department of Justice, 
 Bureau of Investigation." The methods of this body are 
 "proudly" described by Emerson Hough in "The Web" 
 (1919). There were also the American Anti- Anarchy As- 
 sociation, the Anti-Yellow Dog League, the All- Allied Anti- 
 German League, the Liberty League, the Knights of Liberty, 
 the American Rights League, the Terrible Threateners, the 
 Sedition Slammers, and numerous other bodies whose very 
 names, in some cases, were outrageous lies and the sum total 
 of whose vicious deeds, committed in the name of Liberty 
 and so on, will never even be known. 
 
 Back of each and every one of these organizations, whose 
 object without an exception was to intimidate, coerce and 
 silence the populace, was a group of war-time profiteers, 
 filling their pockets with boodle and the columns of mag- 
 azines and newspapers with propaganda to the efTect that 
 the same populace was wanting the war, and that, in fact, 
 it was forcing the profiteers and politicians into it. 
 
 Often, to-day, I am told that the only proper way to kill 
 our next war is to wait till the war starts, and then to refuse 
 to obey commands. There is even an organization called 
 "The War Resisters' Union," which has that modus operandi 
 for its object. Such an organization never can stop war. 
 It is founded on a childish failure to understand the real 
 power of a war-machine — a power which is exercised ir- 
 resistibly not only over each and every part and portion of 
 the machine itself but over even the people who have not 
 entered into the composition of the machine. 
 
 Our government — all the governments involved — know 
 exactly what to do with Conscientious Objectors (as such 
 people are generally called) throughout the World War. 
 Governments have always known what to do with such 
 persons in all wars. And they will always know hereafter. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Better, far better, it were to have the War-Check Vote, 
 and then, when the next war is merely threatening, to kill 
 that war before it starts — collectively and at the polls. Keep 
 at all times a heavy armament to prevent others from in- 
 vading our territory, and the War-Check Vote at all times 
 to keep us from invading theirs. 
 
 No use to object individually and after the war is on. 
 
 As matters now stand, the people have no legal right to 
 object to the government's entering us into any war it likes. 
 The politicians and the profiteers behind them have the 
 entire say about the matter. 
 
 Is that wrong? Of course it is wrong, and everyone knows 
 that it is wrong. 
 
 DE PROFUNDIS— AGAIN 
 
 Not long after our removal to Superior, I, as already 
 stated, was confined to bed by a serious illness for well-nigh 
 half a year. After a few months respite I was once more 
 afflicted in the same way — this time after the war had broken 
 out but before our entry into it. Pain I had without limit. 
 Infection there was, of course, of some sort, but the source 
 could not be found; 1 in fact the true nature of the infection 
 was never so much as suspected, for, in those days, the 
 doctrine of focal infection, so clearly expounded and firmly 
 established by Dr. Frank Billings, of Chicago, was "still in 
 the womb of time." 2 
 
 During this drawn-out illness I was deeply depressed not 
 only by the illness itself but also by the war. It did not 
 seem to me possible that a just God would permit the send- 
 ing of innocent, sincere and specially selected young men 
 and women into the remotest corners of the earth and into 
 a living hell while at the same time protecting the deceivers 
 who — pretended peace-workers, many of them — enjoyed 
 riches and comfort at their own firesides. 
 
 1 Among the professional confreres who looked after me with all the skill available 
 in the then state of science, were Dr. George Saunders, of Superior, and Dr. Charles H. S. 
 Williamson, of Chicago, both now deceased. 
 
 2 Dr. Billings, together with E. C. Rosenow and others, developed the subject from 
 1909 to 1916. The report which did the most, however, to impress on the medical mind 
 the importance of focal infection as a cause of many general diseases was Billings' "Focal 
 Infection": Lane Lectures, New York, which did not appear till 1916, and it was not till 
 two or three years later that Billings' and Rosenow's efforts received from the medical 
 profession the attention they deserved. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 997 
 
 All the while, war or no war, pain or no pain, I was 
 working day and night. When I had apparently finished a 
 task for the Encyclopedia , instead of laying it aside, I would 
 continue going through it again and again. Then the next 
 task would seize me, and it would engage me for hours, days, 
 sometimes even weeks. Thus, while others normally were 
 resting I was laboring — but because I could not lay my work 
 down. 
 
 That to forget. 
 
 The Companion nursed me, did all the typewriting and 
 took care of the house — just as she had done in southern 
 Illinois, only there she functioned as office assistant in addi- 
 tion. But who can sufficiently sing the merits of a hobo 
 writer's little raunie 7 . 
 
 MORE NECESSARY INFORMATION ON THAT WAR 
 
 To give to the war-machine or machines, still more 
 power, there next were passed the "Sedition Act" and the 
 "Espionage Act." 
 
 Then nobody dared even to question the slightest deed 
 or motive of any of the war-makers. 
 
 Then something else happened. 
 
 The war-makers could not send the majority of American 
 citizens to jail, so they just converted the entire country into 
 one large prison and imposed a kind of penitentiary dis- 
 cipline upon it. 
 
 You know that, in a penitentiary, there are immense 
 numbers of convicts and, proportionately, just a few wardens 
 and guards. Yet, because the wardens and the guards are 
 organized and armed and have the law behind them, they 
 are able to impose penitentiary discipline upon all that im- 
 mense number of the stubbornest, most recalcitrant people 
 in existence. 
 
 Just so it is after a government starts a war. The vast 
 majority want no war, may be members, if you please, of a 
 "War Resister's Union," yet the organized minority will 
 have their way with them all the same. 
 
998 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Here are just a few actual World- War war-resister cases 
 out of a great multitude : 
 
 Rev. Clarence H. Waldron, of Windsor, Vt., was sentenced 
 to fifteen years' imprisonment for saying that war is inconsist- 
 ent with Christianity. 
 
 D. H. Wallace, twenty years' imprisonment for declaring 
 that when a soldier goes to war he is a hero, and that, when 
 he returns, he is a bum. 
 
 D. T. Blodgett, twenty years' imprisonment for asking 
 citizens of Iowa not to re-elect congressmen who had voted 
 for conscription. 
 
 One clever little trick which militarists, during the 
 World War, adopted for handling C. O.'s (Conscientious 
 Objectors) with a great appearance of justice, was to dis- 
 tinguish between "sincere" and "insincere" objectors — "ab- 
 solutists." 
 
 Concerning these absolutists, Bates, "This Land of Lib- 
 erty" (Harper and Brothers, 1930) at page 94, says: "De- 
 prived of any recognition of their existence by the civil law, 
 the absolutists were turned over to the military in the guise 
 of 'insincere objectors.' Thus Major-General Leonard Wood, 
 in command at Camp Funston and Fort Riley, where savage 
 treatment of objectors was permitted — terrible beatings, tor- 
 ture by the 'water cure,' immersion in latrines, incipient 
 hangings — was enabled to distinguish between the 'real 
 conscientious objector' doing non-combatant work and the 
 'vicious group' of 'frauds,' 'all of alien type,' who refused 
 
 every kind of war service The 'insincere objectors' 
 
 were tried by court-martial, and the list of sentences was 
 later given out by Assistant-Secretary Keppel, including in 
 a total of 450 cases, 89 sentences of ten years' imprisonment, 
 47 of fifteen years, 73 of twenty years, 57 of twenty-five 
 years, 19 of thirty years, and 142 of imprisonment for life!" 
 
 I am often condemned by Conscientious Objectors for not 
 making a great hullaballoo and outcry against that war 
 immediately after we entered into it. 
 
 What would have been the use of my outcry then 7 . I 
 should merely have landed in the penitentiary or the noose 
 — and accomplished nothing. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 999 
 
 What I have always been trying to secure has been the 
 War-Check Vote, not a mere premature epitaph. 
 
 We were, in fact, in the war. I had been opposed to our 
 entry into it, but, now that we were in it, there was no 
 point whatever in our losing the conflict. What I am wish- 
 ing to do at all times is not to lose wars, but to stay out of 
 them — out, that is, of the preventable (extraterritorial) kind. 
 
 Scores of young men, in those days, came to me, having 
 heard of my proposed War-Check Vote, and begged me to 
 intercede for them in order to keep them away from the 
 fighting. 
 
 I, of course, could do nothing whatever for them. Almost 
 anyone else could have done more. They should long, long 
 before that day, have secured the War-Check Vote and thus 
 have been able to help themselves before the war began. 
 
 But they had all been, just as now they are again, follow- 
 ers of the supine philosophy of the Arkansas traveler. Slight- 
 ly modifying that wise gentleman's immortal utterance, "In 
 time of war we cannot get the War-Check Vote, and, in 
 times of peace, we do not need it." 1 
 
 The government called for volunteers. 
 
 At once and as a matter of course the press reported that 
 the number of men volunteering was vastly in excess of the 
 number required. More propaganda again, issued in the 
 hope that the statement, well promulgated, would make 
 itself correct. 
 
 It did not do so. 
 
 In less than two weeks that same press was loudly crying 
 "shame" at the young men of this nation because they were 
 not volunteering in sufficient numbers. 
 
 Many employers of labor, especially in the East, dis- 
 charged all their male employes who were of military age, 
 and hired women in their places. 
 
 1 That the American people, however, do really want the popular referendum on war 
 is shown by the fact that when (November, 1935) the American Institute of Public Opinion 
 held a plebiscite on that question, the vote was 3 to 1 in favor of the referendum. The 
 ballots, too, had been distributed among all classes of people — not merely among "the 
 masses." 
 
 After the Second World War broke out, similar plebiscites showed all the way from 
 75% to 98% opposing our "fighting entry" into the war. 
 
1000 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 The young men who, even then, faced with the sad 
 dilemma of enlistment or starvation, still, even so, refused 
 to enlist, were branded, often in public too, as pro-Germans, 
 cowards, slackers. 
 
 But still the great majority refused to enlist. 
 
 That was the way in which the young men of the country 
 "forced" (as has so often been alleged) our government into 
 the war. 
 
 The "masses," in truth, "forced" the government into 
 its war-making so hard that, on May 18, an exceedingly 
 stringent conscription law had to be enacted — the so-called 
 "Selective Service Act." 
 
 What! Already? By May 18, less than two months after 
 our entry into the war? 1 
 
 Precisely so. 
 
 Numerous ministers who, for many preceding peace-years, 
 had opposed the War-Check Vote on the ground that it is 
 always the masses who make the wars, "push" the classes 
 into them, now leaped into their pulpits and began crying 
 vigorously for a conscription act to "force" the masses into 
 the conflict. That was the most colossal exhibition of in- 
 consistency that I have ever known. The ministers were 
 actually and publicly doing their best to force the masses, 
 who were supposed to be forcing them! 
 
 There was one very strange provision in that Selective 
 Service Act. Listen. It ran as follows: "Sec. 4. — That the 
 Vice-President of the United States, the officers, legislative, 
 executive, and judicial, of the United States, Territories, and 
 the District of Columbia, regular or duly ordained ministers 
 of religion, students who at the time of the approval of this Act 
 are preparing for the Ministry in recognized theological or divinity 
 
 1 Does the reader remember "Enlistment Week" — the great week during which "mil- 
 lions" throughout the United States of America were "voluntarily" to join the army that 
 was to help the King of Italy et al to make the world safe for the kind of democracy which 
 all kings love? Do you remember how many, how few rather, enlisted during the course 
 of that week, after every conceivable pressure too had been brought to bear upon them? 
 Just 9043. Please do not forget the figures when next you hear the statement: "The young 
 men of this country were all perfectly crazy to get into that war." 
 
DR. CASEY ALBERT WOOD 
 
 Editor of "The American Encyclopedia of 
 Ophthalmology" and the Chief Contributor to 
 that'work. 
 
 Also professor of chemistry and pathology, 
 University Bishop's College, 1878-85; of oph- 
 thalmology, Chicago Post-Graduate Medical 
 School, 1890-97; of clinical ophthalmology, 
 College of Physicians and Surgeons, Chicago, 
 1898-1906; head professor of ophthalmology, 
 Northwestern University, 1906-08, also of the 
 University of Illinois, 1909-13 (now emeritus). 
 Retired from practice, 1917. Editor of several 
 scientific journals, author of books and articles 
 
 almost innumerable, translator of many vol- 
 umes from the German, French, Italian, Span- 
 ish, Latin and Arabic; a traveller in out-of-the- 
 way lands for several years, resident in Rome 
 for twenty years immediately preceding the 
 outbreak of the Second World War; founder of 
 the Wood gold medal and of several scientific 
 libraries at various universities in this country 
 and in Europe. 
 
 Born of American parents at Wellington, 
 Ontario, Canada, November 21, 1856; died at 
 La Jolla, California, January 26, 1942. My great 
 and good friend for more than half a century. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1003 
 
 schools . . . shall be exempt from the selective drafts herein 
 prescribed." The italics are mine. 
 
 Mark you, a minister was exempt if he had been only 
 ' 'ordained, ' ' although he had never preached a sermon. Even 
 a ministerial student was exempt who had been enrolled as a 
 student but a single day before "the approval" of that act. 
 
 Why should ministers, if they really believed the war to 
 be so truly sacred and righteous as they had been declaring 
 it in their pulpits, be rendered exempt from fighting in that 
 war? 1 
 
 Many ministers, spite of their exemption, did in fact go 
 to the battlefields of Europe. The great majority, however, 
 did not, and all were at least permitted to take their choice 
 — as almost all other people were of course not permitted. 
 
 The ministers ! Verily I say unto you, They have received 
 their reward. 
 
 Another noteworthy feature of the situation was that 
 any draftee, after his conscription, was allowed, if he wished, 
 to alter his status from that of "draftee" to that of "volun- 
 teer." A considerable number of conscripts, thereupon, 
 resorted to the change of label. As well enter the slaughter- 
 house for a white sheep as a black one ! So they presumably 
 thought. 
 
 But, even so, what percentage of volunteers were enrolled 
 in that Army, counting from the very beginning until the 
 Armistice? Between 23 and 24 per cent of the entire number. 2 
 
 After counting out all the volunteers (including even 
 the involuntary volunteers) there still remained more than 
 75 per cent of those soldiers who would not even -permit them- 
 selves to be enrolled as "volunteers" ! 
 
 With such a strange pushing did the young men of this 
 country "push" their government into that war. 
 
 1 You will already have observed by your reading of the passage above quoted from 
 the Selective Service Act, that, in the list of those exempt, the President himself did not 
 appear. That was because, by the U. S. Constitution, the President of the United States 
 is, by virtue of his office, the commander-in-chief of the army and navy. In other words, 
 he cannot be exempted. He is, by the Constitution, in the army at all times. 
 
 The President, however, as commander-in-chief, naturally never sends himself into any 
 position which he does not wish to go into. 
 
 2 These figures I got direct from the Bureau of Information, Washington, D. C. 
 
1004 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 But there is yet another and more astounding ratio to be 
 considered in connection with this volunteer-draftee situa- 
 tion. What proportion of all the men of military age in the 
 United States volunteered for service in that war. from our 
 war-declaration until the Armistice? 
 
 Just one in fifty. 
 
 These are a few of the all-important facts and figures 
 which you never will find recorded in our school histories 
 or spouted in our patriotic orations. 1 
 
 I have already spoken of the deception which had been 
 practiced on the people in connection with the purpose and 
 meaning of the Council of National Defense. 
 
 A similar piece of sculduggery had been perpetrated upon 
 Congress itself in connection with that supposedly all-wise 
 
 1 Some of the facts about the war-spirit in other countries than ours prove even more 
 astonishing. 
 
 Take just this about Australia, often, throughout the war, declared to be "the strongest 
 of all the nations for the war." 
 
 At the beginning of the war there had been the usual first uprush of a few adventurous 
 spirits to volunteer. That over, there had come the usual stage of enforced volunteering. 
 Large employers of labor had dismissed their male employes of military age and employed 
 chiefly female labor in their places. Controllers of money had refused to make or to extend 
 loans, especially on homes, unless — and so on. The old story! 
 
 Spite of all this manifest coercion, however, the "volunteering" at length came to a 
 plain halt. Work or no work, starve or no starve, mortgage or no mortgage, "slacker" 
 or no "slacker," the young men simply would no more "volunteer." 
 
 Then the government proposed conscription. 
 
 But the general public, spite of all the attempted suppression of free speech, made such 
 an outcry for a referendum that a referendum was actually held. The government and all 
 its satellites demanded what could be the use of such an election. Was it not a well-known 
 fact that the populace, in all lands and all ages, had had but to hear a drum beaten or a 
 bugle blown to become perfectly insane for entrance into a war? But the "populace" was 
 not quite so easily convinced about the military character of its own emotions. They still 
 demanded that referendum and so persistently and violently that, at last, they got it. 
 
 Never before, perhaps, had any election been so unfairly conducted. Money was spent 
 by the government like water. Propaganda! Censorship! Pro-conscription orators filled 
 the platforms. Anti-conscription speakers filled the jails. And so forth. You know the 
 old story. 
 
 When the votes were counted conscription had lost by a large majority. Even the 
 "volunteers" in the trenches, at this election over which their sometimes prejudiced officers 
 had had supreme control, gave only the slightest majority for conscription. 
 
 That in Australia, "the strongest of all the nations for the war"? Precisely. When 
 the war was on and humming, too. 
 
 Who was blamed? The "masses." Read the comments of British and Australian news- 
 papers and magazines published at the time on the results of that election! 
 
 The government, though dumbfounded, held in 1917 another conscription referendum, 
 employing even baser tactics than before. It, for example, disfranchised not only the 
 German- and Austrian-born citizens, but even the Austrahan-born themselves both or one 
 of whose parents had been born in Austria or Germany. Spite of everything, it lost that 
 referendum by a much greater majority than it had lost the first one. 
 
 Once again the old lie was damned that the peoples are always for war. Do not be- 
 lieve it, no matter from whose lips or pen it comes. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1005 
 
 body's declaration of war. Says no less an authority than 
 Frederick Palmer, writing from the records supplied him by 
 Mr. Newton D. Baker himself (Secretary of War of the U. S. 
 during the World War) and, no doubt, writing in accordance 
 with Mr. Baker's wish, "Congress had no idea when war 
 was declared that we should be sending an army to France." 
 ("When Mr. Baker Made War," The American Legion Month- 
 ly, November, 1930, page 60.) x 
 
 All those who believe that, if the people had the War- 
 Check Vote, they would, whenever voting, vote ignorantly, 
 should put that bit of information about the ignorance of 
 Congress when voting on the war question, alongside thou- 
 sands of other bits of similar import and then consider them 
 all closely. 2 
 
 1 The passage above quoted is followed up thus: " 'Good Lord! You aren't going 
 to send soldiers over there, are you?' said Senator Thomas S. Martin of Virginia, when the 
 War Department's program for a preliminary expenditure of three and a half billion dollars 
 was presented to him. 
 
 "The question of what the Allies would expect us to do, which the Advisory Com- 
 mission, the Shipping Board, and all who had worked in war preparation had been pressing 
 for weeks, became acute. As soon as we broke off relations with Germany our military 
 representatives abroad were confidentially sounding the Allies as to their desires, and inti- 
 mating that we would be grateful for technical information which would aid our own 
 preparations. There was no disposition to give it before we were actually in the War. 
 Our military attache in London, Colonel William Lassiter, received this note from an 
 assistant of the General Staff: 'As soon as the House of Representatives (which was then 
 debating the resolution for war) has finished its work, I will let you have the information 
 on the various subjects which you specified yesterday, and the various training manuals, etc. 
 Until then I feel that my hands are rather tied.' Not until we had been initiated into the 
 secret society might we know the mysteries. 
 
 " Under date of March 30th there is a report in the Baker files of conversations 
 
 with Colonel Johannet, Comptroller of the French War Department, in charge of the pur- 
 chase of supplies in the United States, and with M. Bloch, representing the French Minister 
 of Finance in the United States. This said that France primarily needed credit to purchase 
 supplies, and their prompt transport. An American army in France was deprecated. There 
 were soldiers enough. Transporting an army would clog transportation facilities and 
 take men needed in our fields and shops to produce supplies. Both Canada and Australia 
 had a hundred thousand trained and equipped men who were waiting for transport. Eng- 
 land had a large number of men who had not seen service. 
 
 'As far as this country is concerned,' according to the report of the conversation, 
 'this should be a war of finances, supplies and transportation, and the best protection we 
 have against foreign aggression is the soldiers of France and England and the navies of the 
 Allies, ably assisted by our own Navy.' 
 
 "In short, our mothers need not worry that their sons would be sent to the trenches. 
 Our captains of industry were to be our generals, our workers to be our soldiers. This was 
 the natural propaganda circulated by the Allies to urge us into the war. If we ourselves 
 should have needed aid as seriously as the Allies needed it then we might have been equally 
 plausible." 
 
 2 I am indeed very frequently told that the people of the United States, if they had my 
 check on the international war power, would, when they voted, be acting ignorantly of 
 the true international situation. 
 
 Such people are, themselves, undoubtedly ignorant of governmental procedure. All the 
 correspondence between governments, even when war is impending between them, is con- 
 ducted not by Congress, or in other countries by the bodies equivalent to Congress, but by 
 
1006 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 And now, once again, as an anguished cry uprose from 
 outraged papas and mamas all over the nation, to the effect 
 that Mr. Wilson had recently been voted for by them because 
 of his no-war platform, and yet not only were we in the 
 war, but here, in addition, was — actually! — a conscription 
 act — as, I say, that happened, the loud clamor and outcry 
 were suddenly stilled both by the clapping, as already stated, 
 of some of the outcriers into the internment camp or peniten- 
 tiary, and, in addition, by the soothing propaganda (as on 
 the occasion of the establishment of the Council of National 
 Defense and, later, of the war-declaration) that the duties 
 of American troops would not take very many, perhaps not 
 any at all, of either volunteers or draftees across the water, 
 and that, of those taken, the most would be employed mere- 
 ly in zones far behind the fighting front — thus releasing 
 experienced European soldiers for the actual fray. 
 
 The truth was, of course, that the American soldiers 
 were gotten across the water as rapidly as possible, after a 
 very brief period of training, and that, when across, they 
 were at once "infiltrated" into the ranks of seasoned French 
 
 the respective departments of state. Now it is a fact, however incredible, that, even with 
 war in the offing, neither any individual senator or representative nor the Senate or the 
 House as wholes, has the slightest access to any information in the hands of the state de- 
 partment except such as that department (or the President) sees fit to make known to them. 
 The foreign relations committee of each house has, indeed, a legal right to cite the secretary 
 of state to appear before its sessions, but it has no legal right or power to compel that 
 official, or any of his subordinates for him, to reveal any facts in their possession which 
 relate to the impending conflict. 
 
 Understand, please, that Congress is the body which, by the Constitution, has the 
 "power to declare war." And yet it has practically no power at all to inform itself about 
 the truth respecting the war upon which it votes. 
 
 I could quote you long passages from various authorities on this head, if space permitted. 
 
 Moreover, I have talked with several Congressmen, who had sat in Washington when 
 some war was being declared, and they have each and all told me precisely the same thing. 
 For example, my old-time friend, Congressman Boutelle, of Illinois, just after our war with 
 Spain, informed me that, while the war was threatening, he personally went to the state 
 department day after day for a very long time, and on each occasion begged for a sight of 
 our diplomatic correspondence. But, each time, he was sternly refused. Had that cor- 
 respondence been shown to him, then, as we know to-day, there would have been no war. 
 
 A famous physician in Chicago wrote me: "I am frank to say that I believe the funda- 
 mental principle in your scheme to be wrong. It would be like asking expert doctors to 
 examine a patient and when the body of experts have decided what is best for the patient, 
 to say to them, 'We will now leave it to the members of the family to decide.' 
 
 This was not a logical comparison. It was hardly more than a sorry jest. A body of 
 trained physicians really has been trained. High school, college of arts and sciences, five 
 years in a medical college, much graduate work, etc., have given them actual training. 
 And that training cannot have been omitted. It is required by law. 
 
 What, now, are the requirements for membership in Congress? The Constitution states 
 them. They are nothing whatever but age (twenty-five years for House, thirty years for 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1007 
 
 and British fighters, or, worse still, sent to their inevitable 
 deaths in half- trained masses of their own. 
 
 I must hurry on. 
 
 All who want a fuller treatment of the subject than I 
 here can give, are referred to my various peace-and-war 
 articles, pamphlets and volumes. Most public libraries con- 
 tain them. 
 
 Suffice it in this place to say that, at the midterm election 
 of November, 1918, while the war still was on, and after 
 President Wilson had requested the country to elect to both 
 the Senate and the House no candidates but Democrats, and 
 to do this as a plain mark of approval of his war-making — 
 what, then, did the American people do? 
 
 You, no doubt, remember. And it was done in spite of 
 all the suppression of free speech too. A Republican election! 
 
 Then, in 1920, when the war had closed, and Mr. Cox, 
 the Democratic candidate for the Presidency who had been 
 endorsed for the position by Mr. Woodrow Wilson, and who, 
 
 Senate), citizenship and inhabitancy of the state or congressional district from which they 
 come. No high school diploma is requisite. Not even a common school education. No, 
 nor the ability to read or write. Practically nothing whatever — just age, citizenship and 
 inhabitancy. 
 
 People offer themselves for Congress from each and every walk of life. That is quite 
 as it should be, but we must remember that it is a fact. Not half a dozen of the entire 
 number constituting Congress will probably have the slightest expert knowledge of inter- 
 national affairs. Once in a while there appears in Congress a Daniel Webster, a Frederick 
 W. Dallinger, or a Henry Cabot Lodge. But such men are scarce. The great majority, 
 no matter what their general education, their business acumen, or their skill in their own 
 former lines of work may be, are certainly not the "experts" on international affairs that 
 my correspondent thinks of them as being. 
 
 Suppose that, at the bedside of a sick man, there had gathered a candy manufacturer, 
 a plowmaker, a country lawyer, a former postmaster, a dentist, a labor leader and a specialist 
 in criminal law. And let us suppose that this body of perhaps most excellent men should 
 presume to diagnose the case and to propose some hideous, perhaps fatal, operation. Now 
 you have before you a situation much like that which exists in Congress when a war ques- 
 tion arises. In such a situation I would say that an appeal to "the family" would be the 
 only safe, sane and sensible proceeding. 
 
 The matter would not be quite so bad, if only the country lawyer, the city specialist 
 in criminal law, the carpenter, the plow manufacturer, etc., could, at the time when a given 
 war is proposed, actually have access to the war correspondence and other documents which 
 lie in the possession of the secretary of state. But they cannot even have that one last-hour 
 preparation for their work. Says (for a single authority out of very many) Charles G. 
 Fenwick, professor of political science, Bryn Mawr college, in "Political Systems in Transi- 
 tion," page 281: "At present Congress can do no more than request the secretary of state 
 to appear before its committees on foreign affairs and furnish such information after the 
 event as it may seem expedient to that official to make public." 
 
 What should you think of a body of "expert" physicians who were not physicians at 
 all and who, besides, had not even had a chance to see the patient? 
 
1008 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 in turn, had endorsed all of Mr. Wilson's war-making — 
 once again, what happened? 
 
 The same Mr. Cox, together with his running-mate, 
 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mr. Wilson's Assistant Secretary 
 of the Navy, went down to the most overwhelming defeat 
 that any presidential and vice-presidential candidates, up to 
 that moment, had ever experienced. 
 
 And this electional demonstration occurred in spite of the 
 fact that The Sedition and Espionage acts were still being 
 rigorously enforced by the war-makers, so that "free speech" 
 was virtually non-existent throughout every inch of terri- 
 tory in this "land of the free." 
 
 Yes, the Great War had closed — the war which the Czar 
 of Russia, et al, had waged to "make the world safe for 
 democracy," the glorious war which was "sure to end war." 
 
 And yet, strangely enough, war had not been ended. And, 
 as to democracy, not democracy at all but dictatorship, the 
 world over, had been enthroned. 
 
 I may have committed many failures, but, if you can 
 show me a bigger, a more disastrous or more completely 
 damnable failure on the part of anybody or bodies — high or 
 low, big or little, tramps or respectables— than that which 
 the great ones of the earth — not the general public — created 
 in that "war to end war," then I will never so much as re- 
 mention the War-Check Vote. 
 
 In the first ten years following the war — 1918-1928 — almost 
 forty small wars, as listed by John Carter in his "Man is 
 War," were fought, and by European nations either on one 
 or both sides. 
 
 The idea of "a war to end war" had, therefore, been, by 
 the actually occurring facts (which are what sane men will 
 go by) so thoroughly discredited, that, of course, even a 
 small child could no longer thus refer to the most gigantic 
 conflict and fiasco which had occurred in all history. 
 
 Ten million soldiers dead ! A little over ten million civil- 
 ians dead also, of military traumata. And then, in addition, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1009 
 
 killed by the war-begotten pestilence, which ran rapidly 
 over all the earth, one hundred million more! 
 
 Total — one hundred and twenty million dead. Ten per 
 cent, say, of all the world's population! 
 
 And that war did not end war! 
 
 Pope Julian once said, "Thou dost not know, my son, 
 with how little sense this world is governed." 
 
 How terribly mistaken the big ones of the earth had 
 been — including the Christian ministry, in spite of their 
 "book without errors, an infallible guide for every step in 
 life." 
 
 And yet I am continually told by militarists and by the 
 pacifist advocates of militaristic plans for ending war, that, 
 if the masses were ever given a chance to check wars — they 
 might make some great mistake, might bring upon the world 
 some immense disaster. 1 
 
 Yes, Armageddon was over. 
 
 And then the truth came out concerning it — its actual 
 nature, its deeply hidden, purely governmental causation, 
 and its almost equally distributed guilt among the various 
 governments. 
 
 Take a few typical extracts from some of the personages 
 who, in the course of the murderous strife, had sat in the 
 seats of the mighty — and who, therefore, in their various 
 pronouncements, do not merely guess at truth. 
 
 You remember the frightful propaganda with which the 
 British, French, Italian and Russian governments, through- 
 out the war, deluged the world, to the effect that the Kaiser 
 of Germany together with the German people, had planned 
 for decades to conquer and enslave the earth? Very well. 
 
 1 I am repeatedly told that it is the deep-seated hatred and revengefulness of the world's 
 common people which produces all the world's wars. 
 
 Why! If the common people of the 28 nations whose governments entered them into 
 that "war to end war" with all its myriads of lies, and still more rotten profiteering, were 
 really, at their hearts, revengeful, they would, at the close of the conflict, have torn every 
 one of those mendacious, murderous, profiteering war-makers limb from limb. 
 
 The makers of that "war to end war" have every cause to thank their lucky stars that 
 "the common people of the world" are decidedly not revengeful, but, instead, forgiving 
 and forgetful almost beyond the possibility of belief. 
 
1010 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Listen now to M. Raymond Poincare, President of France 
 throughout the war, as he spoke in 1925 : 
 
 "I do not claim that Austria or Germany, in the first place, had a conscious, thought 
 out, intention of provoking a general war. No existing documents give us the right to 
 suppose that at that time they had planned anything so systematic." 
 
 Listen next to Premier Francesco Nitti, of Italy, as he 
 spoke just a little later: 
 
 "I cannot say that Germany and her Allies were solely responsible for the war which 
 
 devastated Europe That statement, which we all, made during the war, was a weapon 
 
 to be used at the time; now that the war is over, it cannot be used as a serious argument 
 
 When it will be possible to examine carefully the diplomatic documents of the war, 
 
 and time will allow us to judge them calmly, it will be seen that Russia's attitude was the 
 real and underlying cause of the world conflict." 
 
 Now, to cap the climax, listen to Mr. Lloyd George, the 
 mightiest of all the Allied leaders in the World-War period 
 — the great Prime Minister of the whole British Empire — 
 as he spoke at Liverpool on December 23, 1920: 
 
 "The more one reads memoirs and books written in the various countries, of what 
 happened before August 1, 1914, the more one realizes that no one at the head of affairs 
 quite meant war at that stage. It was something into which they glided, or rather stag- 
 gered and stumbled, perhaps through folly, and a discussion, I have no doubt, would have 
 averted it." 
 
 A discussion would have averted it ! They had the Peace 
 Palace at The Hague too, and numerous other places to 
 discuss it in, and yet they did not discuss it! 
 
 Why! they could have discussed it in the open air, had 
 they really wanted to prevent that damnable dissolution of 
 one-tenth of all the earth. 
 
 Very different talk, at all events, this of Mr. Lloyd 
 George from that of "the mad dog of Europe" which had 
 "started out to devour the world," and of which he had 
 spoken so frequently while the war was on. 
 
 Then came more confessions — a torrent, a perfect deluge 
 of them. Historians, invited by the overthrow of govern- 
 ments, especially the old Czarist war-time government in 
 Russia, waded into old secret archives, brought out thitherto 
 hidden documents to public view, translated them into many 
 languages, exposed to the world the real rottenness of the 
 war-time governments and profiteers. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1011 
 
 Mr. Lloyd George (it is perhaps the best of all the in- 
 numerable post-war admissions) in his book, "Where Are 
 We Going?" 1923, at page 34, admitted frankly: 
 
 "Had a plebiscite been taken in every country in Europe a week before war was de- 
 clared as to whether they wished to engage in a European conflict, the proposal would 
 have been turned down by a majority so over-whelming as to show that the proposition 
 was one that no nation had the slightest idea of entertaining." 
 
 PROFITEERING 
 
 Was there really any profiteering during the World War 
 period? — a question often asked. 
 
 Time here for just one colossal collection of instances. 
 Turn to the Congressional Record of the United States, June 1, 
 1920, House, pages 8144-8150, and there read the official 
 report of "The Select Committee on Expenditures in the War 
 Department." If, there, you do not get all the evidence you 
 need about the rottenness and most extensive profiteering 
 that the world has ever known, I will not, in all my coming 
 years, mention the War-Check again. 
 
 This report, remember, is not some merely popular con- 
 jecture. It is an official report, made by sworn officials after 
 the carefulest possible investigations of the subject. And 
 the report in the Congressional Record is merely a condensed 
 report. The report in full on what was found was published 
 separately in several immense volumes, comprising, all told, 
 approximately 20,000 pages. 
 
 But, if you read the condensed report only, you will never 
 again question the fact of war-time profiteering. 
 
 How many of these war-time malefactors were pros- 
 ecuted? 
 
 On this head said Representative W. J. Graham, chair- 
 man of the above-mentioned committee: 
 
 "You talk of prosecution! You might as well submit to the prisoner in the dock the 
 question of his own guilt. There will be no prosecutions, no court-martials. What this 
 committee uncovers will be laughed to scorn by the War Department and Department of 
 Justice." 
 
 So it proved indeed. Read the details. 1 
 
 1 I have done my best to have erected in the various World-War countries, monuments 
 on which should be memorialized (with all the permanent publicity which is customarily 
 devoted to the "glories" of war) the outrageous lies of war-time leaders, the greed and 
 rapacity of war-time profiteers, and all of war's mud and blood and filth and sorrow and 
 physical, intellectual and spiritual degradation. Nothing, you understand, to appear on 
 
1012 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 One of the vilest things about this war-profiteer situation 
 is that some of the most dishonest of all the profiteers and 
 politicians throughout the period of the World War have 
 been exceedingly fertile in the production of fraudulent peace 
 plans ever since the conclusion of their war to end war, 
 also exceedingly energetic in the propagation thereof. 
 
 One plain characteristic of all these plans, one revelatory 
 as well as fatal point in common among them, is that, 
 without exception, they are based on the fiction that those 
 who profit (either as to wealth or as to power) by war will, 
 somehow, when next a war threatens, not want the war. 
 
 Many good, but very careless persons, too, have "fallen" 
 for these plans. And, so. doing, they remind me of the oft- 
 mentioned old lady at the football contest. 
 
 any monument which could not be clearly proved a hundred or a thousand times over. 
 
 Do you suppose that even the conventional pacifists would help me in that certainly 
 laudable undertaking? 
 
 Indeed they would not. 
 
 Men and women who had loudly cried at me, "We want no War-Check Vote, but only 
 the education of the masses to hate war," were strictly opposed to the erection of any such 
 monument. 
 
 Why? 
 
 Do you know of anything else that would quite so quickly, thoroughly, and perma- 
 nently "educate the masses to hate war"? Of course you don't. 
 
 "All right," I said to the people, "if you don't want to educate the masses to hate war 
 by means of monuments, what about telling the truth about war in school and college 
 historical textbooks?" 
 
 This plan, too, however, they bitterly opposed — simply reiterating vapidly the fact 
 that they believed "we ought to teach the masses to hate war." 
 
 What do you think about the sincerity of such people? 
 
 I have also asked that the ministers of the world, at least of this country, should hold, 
 each year, a Retractation, or Recantation, Sunday (March 11, or thereabouts, each year, 
 in remembrance of our magnificent "War Sunday" in 1917). On that day, I suggested, it 
 would be appropriate for all Christian ministers who had preached in favor of our entry 
 into the European shambles, to tell their congregations the absolute truth about the war, 
 the mendacious character of its atrocity tales, the colossal and well-nigh incredible pro- 
 fiteering orgies which had really precipitated and then continued the strife. 
 
 Do you think that there would have been the least thing wrong about such a "Recan- 
 tation Sunday"? Would it have tended to "teach the masses" to love war or to hate it? 
 Would it have been anything more than a matter of mere frankness and fairness on the part 
 of the clergy? Would it have helped them hereafter, whenever a war threatened, to stand 
 by their peace-time doctrines? Would it have given the slightest offense, think you, to 
 the Prince of Peace? 
 
 Thus far, however, not the slightest encouragement from the ministers on the subject 
 of a Recantation Sunday. 
 
 I have been backed, too, with respect to the plan, by persons far less humble than my- 
 self. No difference, however, as to the result. 
 
 Let no one, either, think that I write these words with the slightest animosity toward 
 ministers. The clergy as a whole (of course there are plain exceptions) I believe to be by 
 far the noblest and most useful of men. But I am trying to stop war. As a means to that 
 end it becomes my painful, my excessively painful, duty to write the absolute truth about 
 war — hurt whom it may, laymen or wearers of the cloth. 
 
 Would to God that the absolute truth could be told and no harm to the cloth be done. 
 
 But it cannot. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1013 
 
 She asked, "What is the object of this game?" 
 
 "Why, to put that ball over the line." 
 
 "Well," said she, as she fished for another lozenge, "I 
 should think it would be much simpler if they just kept out 
 of each other's way." 
 
 Like this old lady, the conventional pacifists do not quite 
 understand "the game." Do some of them want to? 
 
 "FAKE" PEACE PLANS 
 
 Here are just a few of these plans, discussed in the brief- 
 est possible manner. 
 
 Arm so Heavily That no Foreign Foe Will Ever Dare to 
 Attack. — In other words, have every nation arm more heavily 
 than every other — an arithmetical impossibility. The United 
 States of course could arm supremely and it should. The 
 small, weak nations could not, by heavy armament, prevent 
 invasions of their territory by powerful nations. They would 
 have to depend on the peoples of the powerful nations to 
 have the War-Check Vote and no dictatorship. (A dicta- 
 torship would mean militarily controlled elections, which 
 would in turn mean no true vote, which, again in turn, 
 would mean no true War-Check Vote.) 
 
 Disarm Completely. — In other words destroy or convert to 
 the use of peace everything that war can be made with. 
 Another piece of nonsense, because (1) Throughout history 
 governments that were as nearly disarmed as governments 
 could possibly be, have re-armed and made bloody wars 
 (2) It is utterly impossible anyway, in these days, to destroy 
 all the equipment that war can be made with. Destroy all 
 navies, and the merchant vessels of the world, steel-clad 
 and steam-driven as they are, would constitute by far a 
 better set of war-vessels than any that ever existed through- 
 out history down to 1862 — when the first iron-clad naval 
 vessels (Merrimac and Monitor) appeared. Any modern 
 steel-plant could equip such merchant vessels with cannon, 
 etc., in a short time (3) Great wars are now fought chiefly 
 from the air. Destroy even your bombing planes, and still 
 your ordinary, commercial air-ships, equipped with merely 
 the explosives and poisons in existence at any given time, 
 could, eventually, destroy practically all the cities, towns 
 and villages of the world. (4) Abolish even your airplanes, 
 
1014 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 your merchant vessels, your cannons, guns, rifles, pistols, 
 swords and daggers, your air-craft bombs, all your air-craft 
 poisons and explosives, and still the chemical laboratories 
 of to-day, the great explosive factories and enormous steel- 
 plants of the earth could produce those articles in very short 
 order (5) Go farther and destroy the steel-plants, etc., that 
 can do the reproducing, and then you have diminished the 
 productive power of the world — its ability to support the 
 present populations — to such an extent that as many of the 
 world's people will perish from starvation as could have 
 been destroyed in almost any large war. And, even then, 
 wars could still be carried on in precisely the same fashion 
 as in pre-historic times. 
 
 Destroy the equipment that is special to war, and you save 
 a great expense, but you do not stop war — or even stop the 
 vicious quarrelling among international financiers and poli- 
 tical power-grabbers, chiefly the latter, which, sooner or 
 later, almost invariably results in war. 
 
 Have the Various Governments Sign Treaties Promising to 
 Make No More Wars. — Tried throughout history and found 
 sadly wanting. The very first treaty on record — that between 
 Rameses Second, of Egypt, and Hattushill, King of the 
 Hittites — made 3300 years ago, was a treaty of "peace 
 eternal." It was kept — for a time only. 
 
 According to Novicow, quoting Valbert, in his "Alleged 
 Benefits of War," page 16: "From the year 1500 B.C. to 
 1860 A.D., more than 8000 treaties of peace intended to 
 remain in force forever were concluded. The average time 
 they remained in force is two years." The Kellogg Treaty 
 did not remain in force that long. In fact it never went 
 into effect at all. It was a fraud on its face — as reverend 
 gentlemen would have noticed for themselves had the Treaty 
 not been issued and propagandized under high political 
 auspices. 
 
 To think of trusting political crooks in high places not 
 to make any more wars ! 
 
 And to think of not trusting the people themselves to 
 have any voice in the matter! 1 
 
 1 As to the truth about World War II, this I shall take up in my forthcoming volume, 
 "World War II, Its Nature and Actual Origin," proving every point. At present, suffice 
 it to say that all the facts show clearly that the War-Check Vote would have prevented 
 Germany's invasion of other countries — I mean if the German labor unions had not 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1015 
 
 The League of Nations. — This curious institution, of 
 course, had as its actual, though not its ostensible, object, the 
 enforcement of the unjust Treaty of Versailles against the 
 Central Powers. As a means of preventing wars the League 
 was merely a swindle, a military imposture, a Satanic 
 joke on simple-minded people who always go by labels and 
 never examine into contents. Call anything whatever a 
 "peace plan," and lo! in the minds of some persons, it is in 
 fact a peace plan. That is particularly true when the plan 
 is foisted upon the world under high political auspices. 
 
 The very Covenant of the League of Nations provides for 
 numerous wars, and, in the first ten years of the League's 
 existence, there actually occurred almost forty small wars 
 (some of them not so very small) wherein one or more of the 
 governments involved were members of the League. Some 
 of these wars, for example that in Syria, had even been 
 expressly authorized by the League. 1 
 
 first committed the mistake of making Adolf Hitler master of all the power in their nation. 
 (I have never contended that the War-Check Vote could prevent extraterritorial war under 
 a dictatorship.) 
 
 In 1933 Adolf Hitler, his supreme power made invulnerable by a military dictatorship, 
 abolished every labor union in Germany and imprisoned more than 5,000 labor leaders in 
 internment camps, saying he would tolerate no competition with his own power. Think you 
 that, after such an act the German laborers (who held more than half the voting power 
 of all Germany) would have voted for Hitler's war against the world? You cannot possibly 
 think it. But the German laborers then could have no War-Check Vote. 
 
 They had locked themselves in their own prison! 
 
 Once again; I contend that only the War-Check Vote can prevent any nation from 
 being forced by its political crooks to attempt the murder of any other nations, also that 
 any dictatorship whatever means no War-Check Vote. 
 
 The people of the civilized nations must see this matter and see it whole. 
 
 1 Consider also the following facts about the League's Covenant: In any quarrel the 
 Covenant requires unanimous agreement, so that any member which desires to go to war 
 can easily have its way merely by securing one single dissenting vote among all those of 
 the entire Council. Even if it could not get that single vote, it could simply defy the 
 League — an offense on which there follows no very effective penalty. 
 
 O yes, I admit there are "economic sanctions," trade embargoes. But these are of 
 doubtful value. If the recalcitrant nation be "self-sufficient" (economically independent) 
 then the economic sanctions can hurt it very little. In fact the countries which apply the 
 economic sanctions may themselves suffer as a result of their application far more than the 
 country against which these measures are applied. If, on the other hand, the recalcitrant 
 nation be economically very dependent on other nations (in the matter of foodstuffs for 
 example) then large numbers of its people will die of starvation, and it is difficult to see 
 wherein such deaths are much to be preferred to those inflicted by total war. 
 
 It has, to be sure, been proposed that military penalties be provided — military sanctions. 
 Actually! WAR to be made against the offending member or group of members by a vast 
 international (League) army! War on the very vastest and most destructive scale! War to 
 get rid of war! 
 
 How could anyone promise that the enormous League army would make a fairer war 
 than would have been made in the old-fashioned, non-League manner? How, in fact, could 
 anyone tell that the enormous League army would maintain its allegiance undivided to the 
 League? Might it not even do what the U. S. Army and Navy did when the Southern states 
 
1016 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Spite of all these undeniable facts, some of the League's 
 adherents, at the close of the first decade of the League's 
 existence, held a glorious celebration all over the world, 
 wherein "the first decade of world-wide peace, due to the 
 League of Nations" was loudly proclaimed and joyed in as 
 if such peace had been an actual fact. 
 
 As a preventive of war, the League is on a level with 
 "the balance of power" (which actually produced many wars 
 from 1648 to 1914) and that most hellish fiasco (but one) of 
 all the world's history, "the war to end war." 
 
 It is, of course, impossible to treat these matters here at 
 all adequately, and the reader is therefore kindly asked to 
 turn to my various peace books, pamphlets and articles for 
 much further accurate information on the conventional plans 
 for peace. 
 
 One point, however, I may say in closing, these various 
 peace plans have in common. They trust in "the honor of 
 governments" to prevent wars. 1 But it is precisely the great 
 shortage of honor among governments that has made most 
 wars. 
 
 The very first objective in our work for permanent inter- 
 national peace, should be to get away from that age-old, 
 fallacious reliance on the honor of governments. 
 
 rebelled against the U. S. Government? Almost all the educated military and naval officers 
 in the United States, when that war broke out, resigned their commissions and went and 
 joined the rebels !* 
 
 In any case, military sanctions mean war and nothing else than war. They ARE war. 
 
 1 Another point they have in common which is seldom thought of. They all, prac- 
 tically without exception, rest (unintentionally) at bottom on the bedrock assumption that 
 the common peoples of the world do not make war. 
 
 Take, for example, the Kellogg Treaty. Did not that flub-dub rest basically on the 
 unqualified hypothesis that, if the governments of the world only give their words and 
 keep them, the common people will rest content with peace — not thrust their governments 
 into war? 
 
 If, indeed, it be true, as the Treaty supporters almost unanimously alleged, that wars 
 are produced by the uncontrollable masses "pushing" their respective governments into war, 
 then how can those governments quit making wars by just promising not to be "pushed" 
 any more? 
 
 If, on the other hand, they are in fact able to restrain the masses, why then have they 
 not through all the centuries been doing so? 
 
 The same thing is true of the "World Court," of all the rest of the trust-to-governments 
 plans. A "World Court" to stop war (you remember that the Austrian Government posi- 
 tively would not listen to Serbia's appeal in 1914 to take matters to the Peace Palace at 
 The Hague) implies that the world's peoples, after the judgment of the Court had been ren- 
 dered, would, positively, be quite content with peace. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1017 
 
 THE HOBO'S RESURRECTION 
 
 Meantime the Hobo, though not in the World War, was, 
 notwithstanding all the work which he did, merely existing 
 in a living death. How came about his resurrection? 
 
 He had consulted many individual specialists of much 
 renown, been passed slowly and painstakingly through 
 several great clinics, been also "snap-diagnosed" in several 
 other great ones — all this in various portions of the United 
 States, and, then, finally, even more tired and much more 
 sick then ever, slipped back into his mortgaged home in 
 Superior, Wisconsin. 
 
 But a happy accident occurred. One day, when I had 
 taken a friend of mine for treatment to the office of Dr. C. D. 
 Conkey, in Duluth, Minnesota (just across the bay from 
 Superior, Wisconsin) I chanced to remark upon my own 
 ever-recurring sicknesses — my innumerable headaches, my 
 fevers, my phlebitis. 
 
 The Doctor was a very laconic man, always. "Nasal 
 sinusitis — possibly," he ventured. (I thanked God he said 
 nothing about the "uric acid diathesis.") 
 
 And he examined me. I can still see him now, as, head 
 bowed over my X-ray pictures,- he scanned my destiny- 
 labelled shadows with patient and trebly accurate eyes. 
 
 At length the weighty monosyllable escaped him, "Pus." 
 
 He operated. I was cured. 
 
 Life again! Life! A resurrection — in effect. 
 
 And then, not long thereafter, Dr. Conkey, my physical 
 savior, passed over to the bright distant star. 
 
 It seemed so utterly impossible. He who had been so 
 vigorous, so full of energy and quite persistent life, now to 
 lie calmly sleeping — so far at least as his mere body was 
 concerned — in a far Western grave, there whirling, as, soon 
 or late, all the rest of us shall likewise whirl, 
 
 "With sticks and stocks and stones." 
 
 And there, too, still upon the surface of the planet, no 
 less undeniably stood I, stalked and strutted I, I the erstwhile 
 hopeless invalid, as strong almost as a horse, knowing a life 
 
1018 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 more vigorous and abundant than any I had experienced 
 since twenty-three years of age. 
 
 It all seemed so ridiculously transposed and knocked 
 about, the order and program of my life. My earlier years 
 so very largely made up by sheer incapacity and pain, and 
 now my later ones so filled to repletion with euphoria and 
 well-nigh unqualified strength. 
 
 I could actually walk fifteen miles in less than three hours, 
 not infrequently did so — at least until, a good many years 
 later, I received a leg-injury on a train. 
 
 I who, for months at a time, had not been able to walk 
 a step! 1 
 
 HEAD OF THE LAKES. DULUTH 
 After my "resurrection" I went about the country a good 
 deal, lecturing on the War-Check Vote. Often too I lectured 
 in Duluth and Superior, and many were the experiences 
 which I had — some of them curious and even dangerous in 
 the extreme. Now and then I got a blacked eye, was kicked 
 off a street-car, and so on. A number of such experiences I 
 have related already with some detail in my "Tramping." 
 One experience, however, which impressed me very deeply, 
 I did not there go into, although in this present volume, 
 at its very beginning, when speaking of Dr. John Cain Adams, 
 of Superior, I thus forecast its mention in this place : I had 
 worn for some time, because of my nasal sinusitis, an "avia- 
 tor's cap," a thick, felt affair about one-half inch thick, 
 which covered not only my head but my entire face, neck, 
 and upper shoulders. One raw day, as I passed down Tower 
 Avenue, complacently wearing this cap, the practical joker, 
 Dr. Adams, beholding the sight, pointed me out to a very 
 earnest couple from the country as a German spy. "The 
 United States Government," he said, "now requires all 
 
 1 For the sake of exactness I must add that Dr. Conkey died before he had quite finished 
 the entire series of operations on my sinuses, and that, in consequence, the work was com- 
 pleted by Drs. Hovde, Smith and Myers, eye, ear, nose and throat specialists at Superior, 
 Wisconsin. These gentlemen, too, together with Dr. Fred Turnbull, then of Duluth, now 
 of Los Angeles, operated on the nasal sinuses of the Companion, but, in her case, the heart 
 and all the arteries of her body had become so badly infected before the nature of her trouble 
 was discovered that, much later, these secondary conditions (those in the heart and arteries) 
 resulted in her death. Her internists had been telling her that her troubles were all due to 
 the uric acid diathesis — a common diagnosis before the existence of "focal infections" was 
 discovered. 
 
TRAMP AND COMPANION 
 
 Working on the American Encyclopedia of Ophthalmology. 
 (Photo by Miss Mira Childs, Duluth, Minn.) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 1019 
 
The Tramp in Days When, Fighting for Peace, he Wore a War-Like "Mug' 
 and, Sometimes, a Moderately Blackened "Optic." 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 1020 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1021 
 
 German spies in this country to wear the sort of head-gear 
 that you now see on that fellow — a 'spy-cap' they call it. 
 Look out for that man, folks, and pass the truth about him 
 on to your friends, thus enabling them, one and all, to avoid 
 him." 
 
 The country couple took the matter seriously. Soon it 
 passed all over Superior. Some saw it, of course, for what 
 it was — as a mere joke; but some took it seriously. In the 
 latter group was a wizened, dried up, diminutive chap of 
 criminal type, who had a number of criminal acquaintances 
 of greater size, strength and courage than himself. These, 
 however, were, as it happened, indifferent to the war and to 
 all war matters. The diminutive chap, therefore, who did 
 want me badly injured because, idiot-like, he took me to be 
 indeed and in truth a German spy, informed one of the big 
 fellows (not that I was a spy, but) that I was in the habit 
 of carrying on my person a considerable sum of cash. In a 
 dark place a blackjack properly applied would make the 
 robbery a perfectly easy matter. The wizened one at no time 
 at all told the big one my name, merely remarked that, as 
 they two walked together that evening in a place wherein 
 I almost always walked of evenings he would point me out, 
 then disappear, leaving to the big one the responsibility, 
 the blow, the cash. 
 
 As the wizened one had promised to do, so he did. The 
 big fellow followed me, a big blackjack in his hand. As I 
 passed, however, a street-light, I saw very clearly the shadow 
 of my follower, together with that of his blackjack, length- 
 ening out before me as we walked, farther and farther into the 
 darkness that lay between that street-light and the next. 
 
 All of a sudden I heard my follower's footsteps quicken 
 toward me. 
 
 I turned, stopped, faced the pursuer. 
 
 At once he dropped his weapon and yelled, "You! 
 Doctor Shastid! Why you are the author of 'Simon of 
 Cyrene' ! Are you not?" 
 
 I admitted the authorship and he took both my hands 
 and pressed them in his own quite fervently, as he told me 
 (truthfully or not) how, one night, when he had finished 
 reading the book — about midnight it was — he arose and 
 went and stood before my house looking up at a lighted 
 
1022 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 window in it. There he had prayed for the author of that 
 book, prayed that the Lord would protect him forever and 
 forevermore. 
 
 Yet here he had been almost on the point of destroying me. 
 
 How much good my book had done him seemed to me 
 problematic. It had, however, proved to be, possibly, the 
 means of my own physical salvation that night. 1 
 
 PRACTISING MEDICINE AGAIN 
 Some more peace work accomplished, 2 1 accepted in 1920 
 the post of oculist at the Lyceum Clinic, just across the bay, 
 in Duluth, Minnesota. Still, for a number of years, I kept 
 my residence in Superior, Wisconsin, though I never to this 
 day have practised in that city. This appointment came to 
 me largely through the kind suggestion of my old-time 
 friend, Dr. R. C. Smith, who, though like myself he resided 
 
 1 Yet another man once told me (this time a man of fine character and at the close of 
 an evening service in the Hammond Avenue Presbyterian church instead of in a dark and 
 lonely spot) that he, likewise, had come before my house very late one evening and there 
 had stood for a long time looking up at my window and thanking me with all his heart 
 for the help that I had given him by that same book. He is now deceased, and I therefore 
 may mention his name. It was Charles H. Bird. 
 
 It makes me humble indeed to recall that I had been of such unforeseen use. I had 
 certainly done nothing to deserve so sublime a compliment, but it is the kind of thing that 
 now and then reaches every one of us — something that we have not at all deserved but which 
 in some degree serves to soften the many harsh condemnations which, also, we may never 
 have merited. 
 
 2 A part of this work was my effort to secure the issuance of peace postage stamps. 
 Even as far back as 1895 I had noted the obvious fact that practically all of our country's 
 
 postage stamps, coins and currency had been plainly designed to commemorate only politi- 
 cians and warriors. 
 
 Now no man in his senses could ever object to the honoring on stamps, and the like, 
 of him who had founded the country or of him who, later, had preserved it. The honoring 
 of Martha Washington, too, could perhaps be accepted as natural and right, despite the 
 obvious fact that she herself had done nothing particularly helpful for the United States 
 of America. She had, however, been George Washington's wife, so we might well enough 
 be gallant about her honoring. 
 
 But why in the name of sense and of peace and of the very simplest justice to everyone 
 concerned should the timbrologic and similar honors be reserved for warriors and politicians 
 only (even warriors and politicians, mark you, of the third and fourth rank) when so very 
 many men and women of the highest genius in the non-political and non-military history 
 of our nation went wholly uncommemorated? 
 
 The question was not a trivial one at all. If we restrict our honors to warriors and 
 politicians, then, in time, through the constant iteration, we deeply impress on the minds 
 both of young and of old the idea that none but politicians and fighters are worthy people. 
 
 What about the long and shining list of marvelous workers in the fields of peace? 
 Were they no less worthy than red-handed destroyers on the fields of battle or than over- 
 cunning "statesmen," nine out of ten of whom had been demonstrably corrupt and whose 
 "brilliant" reputations had been almost wholly factitious? 
 
 I talked for a change in these matters. "Give," I said, "half or even two-thirds of the 
 places on our stamps to the statesmen and fighters. But then," I implored, "assign the 
 rest of the honors to men like Eli Whitney (the cotton gin), Robert Fulton (the steam-boat), 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1023 
 
 in Superior, unlike myself was engaged in practice there on 
 the eye, ear, nose and throat, as part of the firm so engaged 
 there which was known as Hovde, Smith and Myers. Dr. 
 Smith, for a considerable time, had been working also in 
 Duluth, at the Lyceum Clinic, three afternoons per week, 
 as practitioner in the three specialties above mentioned. 
 Finding himself quite naturally overburdened at that clinic, 
 he called me in to take charge of its eye work, and this I did, 
 devoting thereto not only three but five full afternoons each 
 week. 
 
 THE WAR-CHECK VOTE, INC. 
 I had not much more than begun to practice in Duluth 
 than some friends assisted me in establishing an organization 
 whose purpose was to secure the adoption to the Constitu- 
 tion of the United States of my proposed War-Check Vote 
 and Gift-and-Loan Check Vote Amendments. My own wish 
 was to name the organization "The International War- Vote 
 Club." Some of the organizing friends, however, led by 
 Rabbi Louis Kuppin, now of Chicago, desired to call it, 
 after my volume of similar name, "Give the People Their 
 Own War Power, Inc.," and so our little body of workers 
 was in fact christened. Later, however, it came to be quite 
 generally known as "The War-Check Vote, Inc." For a 
 somewhat detailed history of this very active body, see my 
 "Tramping to Failure," pages 472 to 484. x 
 
 Elias Howe (the sewing machine), Cyrus Hall McCormick (the reaping-machine), Samuel 
 F. B. Morse (the electric telegraph), Thomas Edison (so many world-revolutionizing in- 
 ventions that one could not even half-way list them off-hand). 
 
 I did, eventually, and by the help of the Exchange Club of Duluth and of other civic 
 bodies, succeed in securing the issuance of the Edison electric-light stamp. But that was 
 a "special" issue only, not a regular form. 
 
 There have, too, been a number of special issues in honor of other than political and 
 military men, with whose issuance I have had nothing to do, except indirectly. 
 
 For a number of years I worked very hard for the authorization of stamps in honor of 
 Dr. William Thomas Green Morton, also of Sir Humphry Davy (surgical anesthesia), of 
 Major Walter Reed (stamping out yellow fever), and the Drs. Mayo (the clinic idea and 
 enormously important additions to surgery), but absolutely without result. 
 
 Later I endeavored to secure the issuance of stamps in honor of Charles William Eliot, 
 America's greatest educator, ofttimes quite properly designated ' 'American's foremost citizen. 
 
 All again for naught. 
 
 Even some of those who should have been the first to help me in this surely laudable 
 effort, opposed me vigorously, persistently, and, quite often, in what they believed to be 
 secret. 
 
 I I will however mention in this volume the names of some of the most active workers 
 in the organization: Broussaix Sallee, Blandville, Ky.; Rear Admiral Samuel McGowan o, 
 the U. S. Navy; Leslie A. Bechtel, D.D., Minister at the Calvary Presbyterian Church 
 
1024 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 MY MOTHER 
 
 In 1919 the Companion and I visited my mother and found 
 that she had failed a good deal, chiefly because of the death 
 of my father. In 1922 I visited her by myself and saw she 
 had failed very badly. A certain academic honor, however, 
 having recently come to me, her delight in the matter knew 
 no bounds. She grew vivacious, seemed as joyful as she had 
 ever been before. But, in the midst of her vivacity, she 
 happened to glance into a wall mirror. And then she cried 
 aloud as if with a sudden realization of something she had 
 never seen thitherto, at least in all its meaning : ' 'Answer me, 
 Thomas. Can you remember me as I looked when I was a 
 young woman?" 
 
 I quickly assured her — it was the simple truth — that I 
 still could see her countenance precisely as it was in my 
 childhood and that I still could hear her singing too as she 
 had used to sing, either to her pupils or while going about 
 her household duties. 
 
 "Can you really," she cried again, "really, really remem- 
 ber how I sang — how I sang — 
 
 "Bird of beauty whose bright plumage 
 Sparkles with a thousand dyes, 
 Gay thy notes and gay thy carols 
 
 When thy song doth fill the skies." 
 
 She actually went on to sing the whole song through 
 with her poor cracked voice, sounding now so very, very 
 strangely to me, and then she said: "Thank God! I see the 
 tears running down your cheeks, Thomas, just as they used 
 to do when I would sing you that. I thought perhaps my 
 voice had changed. You do not notice any changes in my 
 voice at all, do you, Thomas?" 
 
 Detroit, Michigan; Jacob W. Meyer, Ph.D., Iowa City, Iowa; James Andrew Merrill, LL.D., 
 President Emeritus of the Superior, Wisconsin, State Teachers College; Attorneys Andrew 
 Nelson, Duluth, and J. R. Hile, Superior; District Judge Bert Fesler, Duluth; Miss Bertha 
 Hanford, County Agent for the Blind, Duluth; T. J. Roth, merchant, Superior; Mr. Fred 
 Lounsberry, printer, Duluth; "Great-grandmother" Spiegelberg, New York City; Colonel 
 C. S. Curtis, Oshkosh, Wisconsin; Ray W. Chamberlin, of Davenport, Iowa, and El Monte, 
 California; Dr. Otto H. Vollbehr, Washington, D. C; Dr. Joseph Broadman, New York City; 
 Federal Judge, Claud Z. Luse, of the Western District of Wisconsin; Wm. E. McEwen, long 
 editor of the (Duluth) Labor World; W. J. Michael, long ass't editor of the same publication; 
 Frank Ostman, editor Duluth Free Press; George Jochem, Attorney, Peoria, Illinois; George 
 M. Jensen and family, owners and publishers of the Duluth Free Press; Devere Allen, noted 
 peace lecturer and one of the editors of The World Tomorrow. 
 
 Most of all I am indebted for active assistance in propagandizing for the War-Check 
 Vote, to my nephew, Mr. Jon Barton Shastid, Dodge City, Kansas. He will lead when I 
 am gone. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1025 
 
 "No, Mother. Indeed I do not — not any." 
 "Not any at all, Thomas?" 
 
 "No, Mother, not any at all," I repeated. "Not any at 
 all." Very firmly, "Not any at all." 
 
 Then suddenly the Irish in her arose. She looked upon 
 me with suspicion. "Come to the light here," she cried. 
 "Ah, Thomas, why did you lie to your mother? Have you 
 not known for decades that your mother could always tell 
 when you were lying? But I like you the better for that one 
 lie at least, Thomas. It shows how very much you love your 
 mother — you to lie to her like that. — Wait." 
 
 She returned with a so-called sonnet that I had written 
 her years before from Ann Arbor — a badly constructed thing 
 which she, however, had cherished as any mother might 
 her son's futile efforts. It ran — 
 
 NIGHT IN WINTER 
 
 'Twas winter night. Outside I heard the storm 
 
 Pile up the deep drifts and repile them; now, 
 
 And yet again, I felt the stiff winds plough 
 All through and fling them on the door. The charm 
 Of winter-time was on me. Safe from harm 
 
 I read a book an old-time poet made, 
 
 Or looked how high the pane-piled drift had played, 
 To know how snug my chamber was and warm. 
 
 And then awhile I listened to the hum 
 
 Of draft within the stove, and clean forgot 
 
 The book and storm, and saw again a face — 
 
 The old-time singer's face. Though old, the grace 
 
 Of God was on it. Yes, I clean forgot 
 
 Till dream-time and her heavenly notes had come. 
 
 "You know, Thomas," she said, "I could never sing 
 like that. But I have loved your wanting me to think that I 
 could. And now you must take it back — your sonnet — take 
 it back, for soon I must leave both that and all the rest of 
 earth." 
 
 She was indeed a much altered "bird of beauty," with 
 her badly broken trills, her deeply chiselled countenance, and 
 the shabby clothing which some well-dressed man in a pulpit 
 had unkindly persuaded her to wear as part of her religious 
 duty — to keep from hurting the feelings of all such persons 
 as cannot see comeliness in others without feeling hate in 
 themselves. 
 
1026 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 And so I needs must behold her too, in my memory, more 
 than one year — until March, 1924. Then, as I stood by her 
 open grave, I beheld her again as she had been in my early 
 childhood — the bright and beautiful assistant to a country 
 doctor: rolling pills and bandages away into the night; or 
 nursing some sick neighbor; or, at a pinch, reducing a dis- 
 location; or, perhaps, hitching horse to buggy, so that my 
 father, when he returned from the country, might not lose 
 a moment before starting out in some other direction. 
 
 Hers — like his — was a dog's life, lived however as an 
 angel from heaven might have lived it. 
 
 THE PRACTICE 
 I cannot leave the subject of my mother without referring 
 to the enormous help which her letters (I have always kept 
 
 MqaJ>. ^y^^fJL^^ xb^^ 
 
 im A^^ 
 
 
 FROM THE LAST PAGE OF THE LAST LETTER MY MOTHER WROTE ME 
 
 (March 7, 1924) 
 As will be noted, she was still much interested in the old days and old ways of Pike County. 
 Almost her last words to me, characteristically, were about the old home, the only home in 
 which she had lived after her marriage and in which all her three children had been born. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1027 
 
 them) have been to me in the composition both of "Tramp- 
 ing to Failure" and of the present volume. Generally she 
 wrote to me not only about the then present but also about 
 the prior past. She, like myself, was an incurable nostalgian. 
 She could not help loving the past, because it was once the 
 present and now was no more. She also loved it because she 
 had seen in it the beauty (as well as the ugliness) and wished 
 to keep that beauty ever living in her heart. 
 
 THE LYCEUM CLINIC 
 For five pleasant years I worked as oculist at the Lyceum 
 Clinic, beginning August 18, 1920. The other members of 
 the staff were: R. C. Smith, 1 ear, nose and throat; S. H. 
 Boyer, internal medicine, with F. C. Greaves and C. M. 
 Smith as his assistants; A. J. Braden, 1 general surgery, with 
 G. G. St. Clair 1 as his assistant; A. N. Collins, general 
 surgery, with G. C. MacRae as his assistant; C. E. Scherer, 
 diseases of children; A. L. McDonald, obstetrics and gyn- 
 ecology. 
 
 THE ACADEMY 
 In 1925 I changed to another clinic, the Academy of 
 Clinical Medicine, at 25 North Tenth Avenue East, directly 
 opposite St. Luke's Hospital, where I labored, again as 
 oculist, for five and one-half very delightful years. The other 
 members of the staff were: F. M. Turnbull, 2 ear, nose and 
 throat; (later) J. W. Holderman, 1 ear, nose and throat; 
 L. L. Merriman, internal medicine; A. H. Schwartz, 3 
 skin and urinary diseases, radiology; B. F. Davis, 4 general 
 surgery; C. H. Schroder, diseases of children; A. G. Huderle, 
 dental surgery. 
 
 When I had completed somewhat more than three years' 
 work in the Duluth Academy of Clinical Medicine, I, along 
 with the Companion (autumn of 1928) changed residence 
 from Superior (across the bay) to Duluth. Houses, especially 
 the very big ones, had become cheap by that time, so that 
 we purchased the old Fitger place, erstwhile one of the 
 
 1 Some years ago deceased. 
 
 2 Now of Los Angeles, California. 
 
 3 Now of Beverly Hills, California. 
 
 4 Now of Pasadena, California. 
 
1028 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 "show places" of the city. The house was antiquated but 
 beautiful in the extreme and commodious — in fact it holds 
 quite easily all the several thousand volumes of my library 
 (including my babyhood's toy books, my school and college 
 textbooks, and so on) as well as the most of my experimental 
 "junk." 
 
 The house, which stands on the corner of First Street 
 and Seventh Avenue East we entitled "Tramp's Rest." This 
 "Rest" — which has proved in fact no rest at all, seeing that 
 I have worked in it even harder than ever I had worked 
 before — I have already described with sufficient fullness in 
 "Tramping." 
 
 In October, 1930, I removed my office from the Academy 
 Clinic to the Sellwood Building, where I since have practised 
 individually. Almost on the day when I opened my new 
 office, there applied for the position of assistant therein — a 
 position then vacant — a Miss Esther Erickson, now Mrs. 
 Axel George Carlson, who, accepted, served as my most 
 efficient assistant and secretary for more than twelve years. 
 
 And at this point it occurs to me to suggest to all com- 
 mencing young doctors that, instead of pompously posing 
 as solemn-faced wiseacres, they and their assistants do their 
 utmost to make their clients feel at home and to understand 
 that their doctor is their medical friend. Levity, of course, 
 should play no part in the program. A doctor's work is 
 much too serious and too vital for that. But, without 
 familiarity, the physician, general practitioner or specialist, 
 should have every patient, so far as is for him possible, to 
 understand that, above all things else, he is their friend. 
 This course may pay him not one additional penny — indeed 
 it takes more time per patient than does the ordinary, un- 
 friendly way — but it will make the practice of the healing 
 art a thing of beauty and of joy. No doctor, young or old, 
 can afford to go through life without experiencing the hap- 
 piness of many fine friendships with people of all ages, classes, 
 characteristics. 
 
 In my endeavors to make my patients know me as their 
 friend and my office as a place where every honest human is 
 even more than merely welcome, my receptionists have al- 
 ways been assistive in the very highest degree. As to almost 
 
MY FAVORITE PICTURE OF THE TRAMP 
 Only a profile, it has the advantage that the politer, more diplomatic, or 
 French, side of the countenance is exposed to view — the fightin' — -Irish side 
 being hidden forninst the pay-y-per. I said as much one day to an Irishman 
 and he asked, "Be jabers, why didn't the photographer hide both sides?" 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 1029 
 
>> !3 
 
 3 a 
 
 '■5 >> 
 
 8 £ 
 
 CO T3 
 
 H Si 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
(A) 
 
 
 (B) 
 
 GLIMPSES OF DULUTH 
 
 A. — The large white structure in the background, second counting from 
 the right, and showing a flag, is the Medical Arts Building. 
 
 B. — At the right, behind the tree, is the Federal Building; at the left, 
 the Dear Old Jail. In the middle distance, the Herald-Tribune Building. 
 Against the sky, are, right, the Medical Arts Building, left, the Alworth 
 Building. 
 
 (Snap-Shots by the Tramp, 1942) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 1031 
 
THE TRAMP'S NORTH DUNGEON 
 
 So the Companion promptly and with prophetic insight, termed this study. Later, the den, or 
 dungeon which I had actually made of it, was specially cleaned up, set in order and lighted for the 
 photographic occasion. 
 
 (Picture by N. B. Pendergast) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 1032 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1033 
 
 any one of them, the children have ofttimes run to her and 
 called her Aunty This or Aunty That. 
 
 If any hard-shelled doctor sees in this, my most valuable, 
 advice to any young physician, merely an attempt to advertise 
 my own deeds and ways, there is little I can do about the 
 matter except to point out to him that the counsel in question, 
 if adopted, would be far more likely to build up the practises 
 of my young competitors and to keep on building them up 
 for decades after I have passed from earth. 
 
 THE COMPANION MAKES A LONG JOURNEY 
 
 When the Companion and I were considering the pur- 
 chase of the Fitger place to make it our home, there were 
 several features of the old mansion which appealed to her 
 greatly. Among these were the second-story bedroom, front, 
 and the excellent dressing-room adjacent thereunto. Her 
 joy was unbounded. The view from her window revealed, 
 literally, hundreds of square miles of blue, or gray, Lake 
 Superior. Over to the right, in the night-time, shone the 
 soft, star-like harbor-lights. Straight before us lay nine to 
 ten miles of water, framed by the blue Wisconsin hills, the 
 clouds and the polished sky. To the left, perhaps thirty long 
 miles more of magic waters. Over all this wide expanse of 
 natural beauty, fairy ships were eternally coming and going 
 and coming again. And all their mellow greetings to the 
 world ! 
 
 ' 'We shall be very happy here !' ' Mother (the Companion) 
 cried. "There will be moonrises and sunrises, and, when I 
 waken in the night, up will go the curtain by my bed and 
 I shall behold 'the shores of old romance' once more." 
 
 But what excited her most of all, perhaps, in the entire 
 house, was her individual dressing-room. It too revealed the 
 Lake. Moreover, in old-time books she had learned of 
 beauteous old-time ladies who had had their individual dress- 
 ing-rooms, wherein they had whiled their happy hours away. 
 
 How ecstatically she looked forward to the years and 
 the years wherein she would actually possess, and enjoy her 
 radio in, that room! Almost every hour she talked about it. 
 Little could either she or I foresee what grim fate stood 
 waiting for her and through her for me in that apparently 
 delectable chamber. 
 
1034 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 For a long time the Companion had had symptoms of 
 cardiac angina and her blood pressure was high. She had 
 also aortic regurgitation. So restless, however, was she, 
 so full of energy and ecstatic ambition, that nothing and 
 no one could restrain her various activities. Her heart troubles 
 grew worse. Grave warnings were repeated to her frequently 
 by wise and experienced physicians. She even had hemor- 
 rhages into the vitreous of the left eye. More grave warnings 
 were issued still! Nevertheless, even then she seemed to 
 find it impossible ever to be "therapeutically idle." 
 
 By her own strong wish we long had slept in separate 
 rooms. So often she was up in the night, she said, and it 
 was not at all necessary to awaken me so many times about 
 trifles, thus spoiling my work the next day. 
 
 As the arteries continued to harden she grew irritable, 
 ofttimes, to her friends, more and more set in her ways, and 
 nothing at all could be done about that matter. This is, 
 indeed, I believe, characteristic of the great majority of 
 anginal patients. 
 
 On our last Christmas together, 1939, she gave me too 
 many presents by far. Even her Bible she gave me — a very 
 bad sign indeed. Later she made her reason for that giving 
 quite express. "Soon," said she, "I shall need even my 
 Bible no more." All attempts to convince her that she great- 
 ly exaggerated the immediacy of her danger were without 
 avail, and whenever she saw me grieved, she would quote 
 from the Gospel of S t . John : ' ' Let not your heart be troubled . ' ' 
 "Should anybody ever grieve about anything after reading 
 words like those?" she would ask. "Put that text on my 
 tombstone, Tom, and promise me not to grieve at any time. 
 But I shall grieve for you, my Tramp: over there it is per- 
 missible." 
 
 Only a few days back, as still it seems, she was actually 
 standing here in my study, at my very right hand, precisely 
 by the place where I am writing now, asking me to admire 
 a dress which she was wearing and which she had just com- 
 pleted for herself. Already, that morning, she had broken 
 into my work some six or seven times. I now, looking back- 
 ward, can see that thus she interrupted because she was 
 lonely, perhaps as a result of increased meditation on her near 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1035 
 
 departure. At the time, however, I — suddenly, it is my 
 nature, always, even yet, for I am incurable in this respect — 
 flamed into anger, turned and looked upon her with anger. 
 There came then into my mind one of the saddest memories 
 of my childhood, that wherein I was seated by my Starlight 
 stove in my little study upstairs at the old home in Pittsfield, 
 trying to write a "poem." My mother came in to interrupt, 
 talking about some or another subject which to me appeared 
 quite trivial yet which was near her heart. I spoke harshly, 
 and so she departed with tears. I ran after her but could not 
 comfort her. 
 
 I had thought that poem important! None of my "poems" 
 has ever been important. 
 
 And now, again, after more than six long decades (for so 
 does minor history, like major history, ofttimes repeat it- 
 self) here was the Companion, who so very much resembled 
 my little mother, breaking into my writing — and I all ready 
 to speak to her with old-time sharpness about it! But the 
 recollection of the olden days, thank God, checked me 
 effectually. I arose and, beholding the dress from all points 
 of the compass, admired and admired again. 
 
 That night she died. Which is all that justifies the pres- 
 entation of these rather intimate details — that and the fact 
 that so many unknown persons have written me, asking for 
 each pettiest circumstance concerning her departure, also for 
 even the slightest of her personal characteristics. 
 
 That night she died. 
 
 I had arisen at 2:45 in the morning to set down a few 
 notes. Looking into the hall I saw a streak of light at the 
 bottom of her door. She had many times asked me that, 
 whenever I arose in the night, I would not go to her room 
 to see how she was, in case the crevice beneath her door was 
 dark, but, that, if it was bright, I should come in. So on this 
 occasion I went into her room. As she was not in sight, 
 I called repeatedly, then went to the door of her dressing- 
 room and looked into that and called again. Still no answer, 
 nor could I see her. I then went all round that, the second 
 floor, calling — but still no answer. Downstairs, but no 
 answer. 
 
1036 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
 Returning to the second floor, I went again into her bed- 
 room and then into her dressing-room — the room she had 
 loved so intensely. I saw her electric heater glowing on the 
 stand — the only light in the room. In front of the stove was 
 a vacant rocking-chair turned so as to face the heater. So 
 then I knew that, in accordance with her custom when 
 having her anginal attacks and difficult breathing, she had 
 been sitting in the chair, heating her breast. All at once I 
 saw her on the floor, at the other side of the chair, all 
 huddled up and lying on her right side. Her left arm was 
 still in its sleeve but her right was bare, its sleeve having 
 slipped up above the elbow. Taking hold of the bare fore- 
 arm, I found it cold. Rigor mortis too had set in, so she 
 probably had departed before midnight. 
 
 She looked so little, so minute, there on the floor! So 
 little, and yet she had worked so hard and done so much! 
 
 Now she sleeps in Forest Hill Cemetery. Near a beautiful 
 lake she lies, and her long-time never-resting little heart is 
 no more "troubled." 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE COMPANION 
 
 How quickly I missed her! How many times within the 
 very first hours after I had found her, and although I knew 
 of course that she had been taken to the mortuary, I started 
 to turn to her for information about the house, or for com- 
 fort or advice! All the way through her funeral indeed I 
 caught myself saying, "As soon as this is over, I will tell 
 the Companion how beautiful it all was." In such manner 
 indeed the subconscious part of our selves ofttimes refuses 
 to accept what the conscious portion immediately acknowl- 
 edges to be fact. This strange conflict between our two so 
 contradictory selves is nowise a brief or passing matter. 
 Thus, although the first of my two "mothers" has been dead 
 for twenty years, I never to this minute listen to a black-cap 
 chickadee or behold a divinely beautiful sunrise but I say 
 ecstatically to myself, "I will write to my mother all about 
 that." Thus the subconscious never learns any better, will 
 not know the truth. "Away! I will not have it that the 
 beloved are dead!" 
 
MY SECOND LIFE 1037 
 
 And perhaps they are not dead. Which is right, the con- 
 scious or the subconscious? 
 
 In dreams it is the same way. Therein we never see our 
 loved ones dead. Always they live — they live — they live. 
 
 But about the characteristics of the Companion, concern- 
 ing which I was to tell you more. As to this I must speak 
 briefly, lest, otherwise, I fail to do the thing I would. 
 
 Physically, she was, as I have said, small, although she 
 filled so large a place. Her eyes were an eager, very earnest, 
 hazel, her hair jet black save for a few white threads — a 
 dozen at the most. Her manner was vivacious in the extreme, 
 except in her last, her seventy-first, year. Even then her 
 energy was striking. She was bright, intelligent, cultivated, 
 interested in all good things. She was not inclined toward 
 what is technically called "society," but whenever she did 
 go out among people she brought peace and joy and honor. 
 
 Says the Bible of the ideal woman, "Her children rise up, 
 and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her." 
 Alas ! the only child we ever have had did not live to know 
 her kindly ministrations. But, as to her husband, he has, 
 in many of his numerous rambling writings, gladly "risen 
 up" and given her praise to the limit of his powers. 
 
 AFTER THAT 
 
 After the death of the beauteous little lady who, so long 
 ago, with the pansies at her breast, had so simply responded, 
 "Yes, of course I do," the second life was over. After that 
 a third "life," did, in a sense, begin for me — a life that is 
 partly here in the shadow partly over yonder in the sunlight. 
 Concerning this third life there never will be any separate 
 book. So, excepting for certain rambling references to that, 
 my third, life in the Appendix hereunto, this is indeed 
 
 THE END 
 
APPENDIX: FOR FULL MEASURE 
 
 I— MORE "INCREDIBLES" 
 
 Cruel and Unusual Patients 
 CHRISTIAN A. GENIUS 1 : THE WORLD'S MOST WONDERFUL 
 For a considerable time I pondered the question whether I ought to 
 classify "the man of a hundred professions and greatest in every one of 
 them," as "a Y. of P. practitioner" or as one of my "cruel" (cruel that 
 is to physicians) and "unusual" patients. Giving at last chief weight 
 to the fact that he had sent for me to come and treat him as a patient 
 (cruel and unusual of course implied) I set him at last in the category 
 which is expressed by the heading of this section. 
 
 It was in the dead of night when he sent for me. There had been 
 many hold-ups in Galesburg, too, at about that time, and, besides, I 
 was sick and utterly worn-out. Still, as I was, at the moment of his 
 phoning, seated in my office, "clothed" and — according at least to the 
 best of my own belief — in my "right mind," and as, furthermore, I had 
 heard great things even from educated persons, about this man so mod- 
 estly surnamed "Genius," I decided that I would go instanter to such and 
 such a number, North Seminary Street, and look after his pain-filled eyes. 
 So, instanter I did go — just after midnight. 
 
 The exterior of this man's house and laboratory prophesied accurately 
 the man himself. The building was placed well back on its lot — decidedly 
 retiring and yet not quite to be neglected either. From a post set well 
 inside the yard there extended across the public sidewalk to a tree in 
 the lawn extension an immense wooden sign wherefrom depended still 
 another, one not quite so large as the first, it is true, but still of sizable 
 proportions and covered with words yet more assuming, assertive, as- 
 tounding, even positively commanding than were those staring from 
 above. 
 
 The upper sign read — 
 
 MODEL MAKER AND GENERAL REPAIRER 
 TO ALL THE WORLD. I AM THE GREATEST. 
 The second — 
 
 C. A. GENIUS, THE MOST MARVELLOUS DIVINE 
 HEALER ON EARTH. RUBBER STEEL STAMPS, 
 PRINTER AND STENCIL WORKS. STOP HERE OR 
 GO FARTHER AND BE A FOOL. 
 
 I DO ALL THINGS SUPREMELY. 
 
 1 This man's surname was really Virgilius. That name, however, he himself altered, 
 first to Vergenius, and, later, to Genius. 
 
 This almost incredible person and his multifarious works are treated at adequate length 
 and with many excellent photographic illustrations by the Galesburg (Illinois) Weekly Mail, 
 February 13, 1902, article "The Man with a Hundred Professions." A hundred quotha? 
 Some tramping! 
 
1040 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 Turning, I faced his door. The front of his house, which at first 
 appeared to be the product of some feverish dream, was in fact a mighty 
 wilderness, an oaken, brazen, and iron jungle — gigantic wooden razors, 
 brass keys a yard long, huge iron umbrellas — which lightning might 
 strike but probably never could damage, and certainly nobody could 
 ever carry off — pieces of bicycles, baby cradles, lawn mowers, cross-cut 
 saws, guns, pistols, immense brass knucks, medicine chests, odds and 
 ends of almost everything — with here and there among them bright blue, 
 red and yellow legends proclaiming the value not only of the articles he 
 repaired or sold or bought, but, in addition, of his professional services, 
 which, indeed, it appeared, were not only the greatest on earth but even 
 divine, celestial and (as an unsurpassable climax at the very top of the 
 house-gable) "just as good as anybody's." 
 
 Not till many years later, when I was practising in. southern Illinois, 
 did I run across so fully versatile and so superlatively self-commended a 
 creature — that time in the person of a Dr. Psychopompous. But con- 
 cerning him, to be sure, you will read hereafter. 
 
 Going to the door of the incomparable "Genius," I knocked upon 
 it loudly. 
 
 "Who disturbs my meditations?" came an introspective but majestic 
 voice. 
 
 "I — Doctor Shastid — you sent for me — eyes." 
 
 "Walk in if you are worthy." 
 
 I promptly assumed that I was worthy, only because, otherwise, it 
 appeared I might not be able to enter the building. 
 
 There, inside the queer-house, on a worn-out horse-hair sofa, sat the 
 "Genius." He was a tall man, one in whose personality Dickens would 
 have revelled. He was dressed in paint-smeared overalls and an old, 
 ragged leather coat. His face was long and earnest, his nose aquiline, 
 his hair sorrel. Over his light-blue eyes he wore a pair of thick-lensed 
 spectacles, whose centers continually sparkled, throwing back the light 
 from an old, smoky, foul-chimneyed lamp. The genius was plainly in 
 pain. "I have sent for you," he apprised me frankly, "only after con- 
 siderable hesitation and communion with the universe. You are young. 
 Yet too you may understand your business. I'm a good judge of human 
 nature, however, and now that I have you straight before me, I read you 
 easily — yes, to the center of your soul. I will trust you. Examine my 
 eyes." 
 
 In the midst of that welter and chaos of everything mechanical, worse 
 than a dozen pawn-shops piled together, I examined those eyes by the 
 light of the smoky-chimneyed lamp. All the while he kept up a running 
 comment on the extent of his own grandeur and his own possible folly 
 in sending for some one else to cure his eyes when he himself, no doubt, 
 by means of a brief visit either to heaven or to hell could have ascertained 
 the reasons for his eye troubles, and so the means whereby to cure them. 
 "Why!" he cried, "for me — not for others but for me — it is just as easy 
 as anything at all to go either to heaven or to hell for the purpose of 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1041 
 
 getting information on any subject whatsoever. How do I get there? 
 Easy. To go to heaven I close my eyes, roll them up behind the great 
 lids, wait peacefully for two moments — and there I am, in heaven. To 
 go to hell, I close my eyelids tightly, roll the balls up behind them, 
 wait in anguish for about seven moments, and then 
 
 "Your piece of steel's out," I said. "There had been a good-sized 
 sliver in the center of one eyeball. How do both eyes feel now?" 
 
 He batted his eyes a dozen times or more, thinking to find some or 
 another sensation he could complain of, could not find any, and, at 
 length, much to my surprise, admitted: "Both are now absolutely all 
 right. You're a good doctor." 
 
 He went and opened the door I had come through, and, motioning 
 me toward it, said, as if with some tolerance toward one so plainly his 
 inferior: "I've had a very trying day: I know you'll excuse me if I say 
 I wish to go to bed at once and rest. You understand of course the 
 strict rule of our profession: doctors are not to charge one another a fee." 
 
 So the matter rested. 
 
 DOCTORING DOCTORS GENERALLY 
 
 Speaking of this Doctor Genius, a ' 'doctor' ' who was himself a patient, 
 I am reminded that doctors almost invariably declare that the worst 
 patients they ever have to treat are other doctors. The reason why they 
 say this is, of course, not that a doctor when treating another doctor 
 does not expect a fee, but that he does expect his doctor-patient to ac- 
 cept instructions from him, the attendant, precisely in the way in which 
 a layman is supposed to accept them — i.e., without question; without 
 any mention of his, the patient's, idiosyncrasies; without pointing out 
 objective symptoms that the attendant has not noticed; and without the 
 slightest suggestion of what might prove to be helpful in his case. 
 
 This attitude of attending physicians toward other members of their 
 profession who happen to be sick is, in my opinion, a serious mistake. 
 It is even a mistake not to listen to a lay patient. And then, of course, 
 a doctor-patient is a trained and generally a learned observer who can 
 give the attending physician a whole mine of information on the sub- 
 jective side of his troubles, with, now and then, objective observations 
 too which the attendant may somehow have missed. 
 
 Dr. Bludson, a doctor friend of mine and a man of excellent qualities, 
 went to see a doctor-patient, and would not listen to him at all. Doctor- 
 patient said, "I have appendicitis." Bludson, not listening to his reasons 
 said, "You've nothing of the sort." The patient-doctor died that night 
 — after the correct diagnosis by yet another physician had been arrived 
 at but before the appendix could be removed. Post-mortem showed the 
 truth. 
 
 Mrs. Doctor-patient blabbed the matter all about the not so very 
 large town. 
 
 Thereupon Bludson said to me, as if in truth he'd been the injured 
 doctor, "By the Mighty, I do hate to treat another doctor. I've never 
 treated one yet but I've been damn sorry for it." 
 
1042 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 VACILLATING SIGHT 
 
 But talking of fees and lay patients, not doctor dittoes, I want to 
 report a case of very intimate connection between fees and recovered or 
 supposedly unrecovered vision. 
 
 Away back in the days when I was practising in Pike County, Illinois, 
 I had a patient from Pike County, Missouri. From each of his eyes I 
 extracted a senile cataract, and the result was, in each instance, excellent 
 in the extreme. After the man had recovered, got his glasses, worn them 
 for a month or two and gloried in his new-found vision, he came back 
 to my office in Pittsfield in response to a polite suggestion that, at his 
 earliest convenience, he would call and pay his bill. (I had not yet told 
 him what the charge would be.) 
 
 As he entered my office, he began; "Well, Doc, that's a purty good 
 operation you done for me." I politely offered him a chair, liking the 
 tone of his voice. "Go on," I said. 
 
 "Yes, sir," he continued, "That was a purty dog-goned good opera- 
 tion. Blamed ef it wa'n't." 
 
 "Still seeing well?" I encouraged. 
 
 "Seem* well? Wall, ef I ain't seein' fully a quarter as well as I ever 
 seen before, then I hain't plumb tellin' no truth. Yes, sir, fully quarter 
 as well. An' wherever I go, I'm sendin' you patients too. How you 
 like that, Doc?" 
 
 I was certainly delighted, still revelling in his cheery manner, and I 
 expressed my gratification in no uncertain terms. 
 
 He went on: "Did I say I see a quarter as well as ever? That's under- 
 . statin' it. I see fully half — yes sir, fully half as well as ever I did before." 
 
 "Well, that's very good after an operation for a hypermature cataract. 
 And you are sending me patients! Now do you know I appreciate that 
 extremely. So many patients are glad I have helped their eyes, and yet 
 they forget to tell others I have helped. And whenever they do tell others 
 — just as you have done — that of course increases my practice, shoves up 
 my income and [I in fact actually and most unfortunately said this, being 
 green and all that] it's just as good as money to me." 
 
 Then, as if he had just received a cue from some one, he stood suddenly 
 up and began to praise me even more divinely. "Yes, Doc, I'm a-goin' 
 to make you hunderds of dollars, maybe thousands of dollars. An' I got 
 talkin' points too. Did I say half sight back again? I'm mistaken. It's 
 all the sight. All back again — ever' bit of it. I can make you thousan's 
 of dollars — say, Doc, how much is my bill?" 
 
 For a moment he almost had his way with me. Then I thought, "I 
 must get something out of this [the man had really sent me no cases that 
 I knew of]. I'll make it low enough though." Then to him I answered 
 (it was just two-fifths of my usual charges) "Forty Dollars." 
 
 Even when he had entered the office he had had his right hand in his 
 pocket. And he did not, even now, pull that hand up all at once. On 
 the contrary his face set good and hard, and he looked far away for a 
 time. Then he began — ever so slowly — to talk again. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1043 
 
 "There is one leetle mite wrong, though," he said, "with the result. 
 Seems to me sometimes — well, it's mostly at nights, that I have a feelin' 
 around my temples as if somepin' was crawlin' on 'em. An' I think it 
 starts from the eyes. You must 'ave done somepin' wrong there." 
 
 I could see him feeling round in his pockets with much contemplation. 
 "Yes, 'pears to start from the eyes. Y-e-s. Y-e-s. It seems to start from 
 the eyes. 
 
 "An' then there's somepin' else seems to start from the eyes too. 
 That's a kind of a coppery feelin'. Know what I mean? O ye don't, eh? 
 Well it's a mighty mean feelin', I'm a tellin' ye right now. An' it starts 
 from the center of each eyeball, an' it frescols out an' spreads out, an' 
 keeps a-spreadin' an' a-spreadin' until finally plumb, at last, it reaches 
 into my stomach and there it makes me mighty sick at my stomach." 
 
 I gave no sign of relenting, but looked at him with a hard, cold 
 countenance. 
 
 He continued in a. louder tone. "But the worst of all is — I hate to 
 say this to you but I got to tell the truth. Right in the middle of the night, 
 jest as I'm gettin' my very best sleep, slam! somepin' takes me in both eyes 
 — an' hard. Yes, sir. Very hard. Jest ez ef a bullet'd hit me in 'em, er 
 maybe a cannon ball er a bolt — a big bolt — o' thunder. An' bang! it 
 takes me in both eyes an' wakes me up an' I can't sleep no more that 
 night — er maybe the next night or a whole week o' nights — an' days too. 
 An' truth is I'm fallin' off terrible, loosin' my appuhtite along with my 
 sleep so now I can hardly waddle. 
 
 "I tell you it was a sad day when I let you operate on them there 
 eyes. I ain't one bit satisfied with nary one o' them two operations — 
 an I don't believe I owe you nothiri ." 
 
 I don't know just what the professional psychologists would have 
 tried to make out of this case. No doubt the medical Freudians would 
 have endeavored to show that the man's condition was due to some or 
 another sex complex he had contracted in his mother's womb. But I 
 was and still am of the opinion that the fellow simply wished to beat his 
 bill, to make some dirty money. I had given him more, far more, than 
 forty dollars worth of service, he could pay the money easily. I started 
 suit and he paid. 
 
 "POOR FOLKS HAS POOR WAYS" 
 A similar case occurred down Illinois way — a case wherein, however, 
 a woman was one of the actors, a woman who would gladly have paid 
 the entire debt herself, had she only been able to do so. There is meat 
 in this case. 
 
 The patient, a man who almost invariably presented himself for his 
 treatments outside of office hours, was finally getting well. I could tell 
 a number of curious anecdotes about him but content myself with the 
 statement that he was a typical Egyptian leaner. When his sight had 
 all been returned to him and he had come once more with his entire 
 family to receive his very last treatment, I asked him for a little payment 
 on his bill. 
 
1044 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 "My bill?" he asked indignantly, then went on to declare that he 
 couldn't pay nothin' on no bill. 
 
 When I had made him a pure gift of his account he began complaining 
 bitterly about rich men (like me, for example) eternally downtreading 
 the poor. He loudly wound up, "It's about time somebody like you did 
 some-pin fer 'em." 
 
 "You a-talkin' that way, Myron Slinger," the wife burst out, "when 
 Doc's done what he has an' been so good to you." 
 
 'Sbout time somebody's bein' good to the poor. An' me havin' so 
 many children to look after. Jesus Christ said, 'Sell all that thou hast an 
 give it to the -poor — men like me." 
 
 "Doc ain't never ast you to have no children, has he? No, ner me 
 nuther. Ef men as can't take care o' themselves will insist on havin' 
 whole oodles of children, it's nobody's fault but their own. Why saddle 
 Doc with the blame? Doc — " (She looked at me roguishly) "hain't 
 never even seen me till the very youngest was born an* pukin'. An' you 
 so ungrateful to Doc, talkin' as if he owed you some duty to work fer 
 you fer nothin'! How come he owed you some duty or some anything? 
 The Lord Almighty, as we're goin' home this day, ought to make you 
 happen to an accident." 1 
 
 "Ma, you jest shet right up." He advanced toward her with extended 
 hand. 
 
 "Look here, Mister Man," she jumped up shouting. "You know 
 what I done to a man of exactly your size no furder back than jes' las' 
 week, an' I kin do it again too. Listen, Doc, I'll tell you about that there 
 man and his ways. Poor folks has poor ways — that's why they're 
 poor. 
 
 "You tell Doc anything 'bout me, an' I'll strew your carcass — I'll 
 
 strew " He sat down. "I'll strew your carcass all over I'll strew 
 
 your carcass. I'll strew your carcass." 
 
 "You won't strew nobody's nothin'. You're jest a cracker an' a 
 leaner, an' it's all you ever will be. You couldn't live a minute ef it 
 wan't fer your wife and her butter an' eggs to lean on — you old swill- 
 barrel fer whiskey. 
 
 "This' how he lives, Doc." She went on to detail his whole way of 
 life — his liquor doin's, his tobacco doin's, his spendin' most of his time 
 pitchin' horseshoes, his occasional disappearance for days at a time 
 with a borrowed shotgun, his shooting of his own foot "him bein' so 
 stupid. Another time he got into a fight — and got licked. Yes, sir; 
 he got licked!" 
 
 "Well, holy mackeral! What's a man to do but disappear an' get 
 into fights when the rich is all a-robbin' him?" 
 
 "Nobody ain't ever robbed you, Myron Slinger, except yerself. An' 
 nobody but you has ever robbed these little childern." 
 
 1 A common expression in southern Illinois which Rice in his little work on southern 
 Illinois dialect forgot completely. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1045 
 
 "Underprivileged!" 1 he shouted, ignoring her. " Underprivileged^ 
 what I am. A man from a city preached in our church last Lord's Day 
 an' that's the very word, he said, applied to ever' one of us — under- 
 privileged — that ain't got our own full share of this world's goods. 
 Underprivileged! Underprivileged! An' as soon as I get home, you 
 Susan Marier, you, an' whether I happen to no accident or don't happen 
 to no accident, I'm a-going to take some paint in a paint-bucket — ' ' 
 
 "Ef I buy the paint." 
 
 "An' a paint brush." 
 
 "Ef I buy the paint brush." 
 
 "An' right across the front o' my house — big letters — I'm a-goin' to 
 paint these here flamin' words, HERE LIVES ONE OF THE UNDER- 
 PRIVILEGED!" 
 
 Susan Maria, thereupon, with eyes aflame, began advancing slowly 
 and steadily toward him. "No you don't," she assured him. "No you 
 don't. I'll do that paintin' across that house. An' these here are the 
 words that I'll paint there — right plumb straight across it — POOR 
 FOLKS HAS POOR WAYS. 
 
 "Now you come along." 
 
 And he went. 
 
 ANOTHER OF THE UNDERPRIVILEGED 
 
 One of the first cases I had when I settled at Marion, Illinois, was 
 this: A boy placed a lighted firecracker under a thin glass dish. It did 
 not at once explode, so the impatient lad went up close to the glass in 
 order to find out why. Of course it takes not one boy but several to 
 learn the why of such things, so a number of the boy's companions went 
 up to the glass with him to investigate. 
 
 Bang! went the firecracker. 
 
 One of the cracker-shooter's eyes was filled with bits of glass, and 
 so was either one or both eyes of two or three other boys. 
 
 The father of the main boy in the proceeding brought him to me. 
 The eye had been so terribly torn up that even the lens and vitreous had 
 escaped from it. Nothing there was to do, obviously, but amputate the 
 eye, and that I did. 
 
 When healing was complete and I had supplied the boy with an 
 artificial eye, I asked the father for a payment on account, but he plead- 
 ed inability because of the hardness of the times — and times certainly 
 were hard then, for me as well as for others. 
 
 A little later, going down street to my lunching place, I stepped into 
 a store to get some minor articles, and there — lo and behold! The boy 
 who had lost his eye from a firecracker and his father beside him! And 
 the father was liberally purchasing for the same boy both firecrackers 
 and fireworks — and paying cash for them! 
 
 1 A term that is really quite old, though its very common use — perhaps I should say 
 misuse — by economic theorists to cover not merely the unfortunate poor, but also the loafers 
 and wasters of the world, even the leaners (Egyptian or other) on the savings of women 
 and children and of the provident aged, is much more recent. 
 
1046 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 "Doc," said the father, "I reckon we don't never learn nothin', do 
 we?" But I thought that I had learned rather a good deal. And I in- 
 formed him as to what. 
 
 THE ESCAPE OF THE MORON 
 
 Once I went for a very long time to see a man who was blind in one 
 eye, almost blind in the other. He was confined to bed in his home 
 with heart disease, badly hardened arteries and extreme nephritis. There 
 was also attending him an excellent general practitioner. I was trying 
 to improve the vision in the eye that still was not quite blind, also to 
 lessen its extreme painfullness. (The eye was in a glaucomatous condition 
 and had suffered from many severe hemorrhages into its interior.) 
 
 Well, strange to say, I did get results in that eye. The patient's 
 general condition was too low to permit even the slightest operation 
 on the eye, but, without any surgery, I managed to rid that eye of its 
 cruel and long continued pain. At last the pain was conquered perma- 
 nently. Sight, too, to some extent returned. The patient could, in fact, at 
 three or four feet, see with some clearness the face of his wife and other 
 relatives again — whereat he was duly rejoiced. 
 
 But still he was greatly depressed in spirit, because, as he knew, he 
 never would get well — although perchance he might live on for years. 
 
 About this time the man began complaining of outrageous pains in 
 his legs. His general practitioner, thereupon, once each week or ten 
 days, would administer a hypodermic of morphine. Then the man 
 would deeply sleep, but, for many days thereafter, he would vomit 
 dreadfully. The retching in particular was very violent. So, inasmuch 
 as the arteries inside the eye — those in the brain and spinal cord also — 
 were very hard and brittle, I knew what danger the man's sight and life 
 were placed in whenever he violently retched, even for one single moment. 
 Carefully explaining that I was not at all intent on interference with the 
 treatment of the general condition by the general practitioner, I never- 
 theless protested against the injections of the morphine — solely because 
 of the very great danger in which they put the vision of that eye — which 
 I had had so extremely hard a time to improve. 
 
 Again, however, the morphine would be used, the patient would 
 sleep for ten or twelve hours, and then, as usual, would retch and vomit, 
 vomit and retch, for days more. Again I would expatiate on the danger 
 to which that precious bit of sight had been once more exposed by the 
 vomiting and retching. Again, however, after the stomach had quieted 
 down, the retching had ceased and the eyes had begun improving once 
 more, that fateful jab of morphine would, somehow, be once more 
 administered. 
 
 At length I remonstrated to the wife quite bitterly. "But," she re- 
 plied, "my husband begs and begs for the morphine — he suffers so much." 
 "Does he really suffer?" I asked. 
 She hesitated. "I think he suffers." 
 
 The next time I went to see that patient, his bit of sight had been 
 put out. Forever and eternally it had been put out. Expanding the 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1047 
 
 pupil for a very short time, I looked into the eye with an ophthalmoscope. 
 What I had so greatly feared had happened. The back part of the 
 vitreous humor was entirely dark with blood. The retching had done 
 its evil work. As I say, the eye was irreparably blind. Never again 
 could I, or anyone, give sight to it. 
 
 One day (I like to know the psychology as well as the symptomatology 
 of my patients) I said to the blind man, "Jimmy" (I will call him that) 
 "you know you did not need to lose your eye, don't you?" 
 
 "Yes," reluctantly. "I know it." 
 
 "Jimmy, why did you keep on asking for that morphine when I had 
 told you what the drug would probably do to your sight?" 
 
 "I just couldn't stand the pain in my legs, Doctor. I told you that 
 before." 
 
 "But I have told you before too, that there were many other remedies 
 that would readily stop that leg pain and that never would make you 
 vomit. In fact, I one day tried one of them on you [peralga it was] and 
 you said that it thoroughly stopped the pain for hours. Isn't that true?" 
 
 "Guess so." 
 
 ' 'Then why did you keep on demanding the morphine till your general 
 practitioner gave in? I am not scolding you, Jimmy. Your eye is out, 
 and scolding cannot help it. But I want to understand my patients as 
 well as their diseases. It helps in other cases — when I understand. So I 
 am asking you plainly for the truth about yourself — I know about your 
 eye. Were you a morphine user before you got sick?" 
 
 "Never used morphine before in my life." 
 
 "A whiskey drunkard, then?" 
 
 "Now and then — maybe twice a month — God, Doc, let a man alone, 
 can't you?" 
 
 "I'll let you alone, Jimmy, but I want to understand — understand you. 
 It will help me, don't you see, to understand other patients in the future. 
 Don't you get that? 
 
 "Jimmy, why in truth did you clamor for that morphine when you 
 knew all the harm it could and would do you?" 
 
 "Good God, Doc, I don't know. Yes, I do know too." He spoke 
 with excitement. "Wife wouldn't give me any more whiskey after I 
 got down sick. Even before I was sick— God, Doc — I had to forget 
 what I am — a common — O yes, just a common laborer, a no-good, bottom- 
 of-the-ladder man. God! What was there before me, even if I got well, 
 Doc? When I got sick I was even less than what I've said — and no 
 whiskey. Lie here — only thinkin' — lie here — only thinkin' — pains not 
 so bad, so I lied and said they was, but had a little — bad, bad, lyin' 
 here — heart gone, and kidneys gone, bloodvessels gone too, right eye 
 gone, left eye just a little sight in it — lie here — not even the man, or 
 call me a monkey, the little that even the monkey — I once had been — 
 no whiskey — they would give me morphine if I said 'bad pains/ They 
 wouldn't deny me that morphine then. It wasn't the relief from the 
 pain, Doc. I can stand pain, Doc. I have stood it. It was the relief from 
 me. The dreams, Doc, they was better'n me to think about. Give me a 
 good shot yourself, Doctor Shastid, and give me back — give me my 
 
1048 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 dreams — not me. I'm nothin'. Except in dreams, I tell you. I can't be 
 nothin' except in dreams. I never was nothin', even in school. But in 
 dreams — ' ' 
 
 I gave him no morphine, I assure you. The after-effects were too 
 destructive. But I certainly understood the man then. All that now 
 was left of him was his dreams and what he thought concerning them. 
 Good God, he had never been anybody excepting in his dreams. And, 
 being no born dreamer, no man able to make dreams for himself, dreams 
 out of nothing, he had had to have dreams shot into him. He had actu- 
 ally swapped the little dross (his sight) which had seemed to me to 
 be so precious, in order to get the massive gold of his illusional dreams 
 — those precious, those indispensable dreams, wherein alone he always 
 could sit atop the world, see himself as even more than the equal of all 
 other persons whom he knew. 
 
 I understood him. He had had his ambitions even as the non-moronic 
 have theirs, but without the ability to put even the slightest ambition 
 into effect. He was a paralytic beggar who would be a mighty king, an 
 emperor perhaps, a dictator to the entire trembling world. Or would he 
 in his dreams be a truly great man and a good one? I do not know. But, 
 as I said in "Tramping to Failure," there should be a vast book on this 
 subject, The Psychology of the Sick, Including Their Dreams. Were 
 such a book but written properly — by which I mean devoid of Freudian 
 nonsense — well, there would be one great book in this world beyond the 
 slightest doubt. 
 
 THE WAYS OF THE INDIGENT— AGAIN 
 
 The Egyptian country and its people cannot be adequately depicted 
 in any one book or department thereof, nor can any one writer do justice 
 to the subject in all its fascinating aspects. Mostly and for obvious 
 reasons I have not considered in this volume the more progressive element 
 of southern Illinois, but only the "ridge-runners," the "hill-billies," 
 the "crackers" and "leaners" — the people who have "poor ways" and 
 who as a natural consequence make cruel and unusual patients. Two or 
 three more of these are so typical and instructive that I feel I ought to 
 include them in this book. 
 
 Jim Hook did not have absolutely all the poor ways of the typical 
 hill-billy farmer. He neither smoked nor drank nor ran with outrageous 
 women. Nor did he spend his energies in hating other people — saving 
 and excepting only those who were more successful than himself. He 
 was lazy too, as lazy as they make them, even in southern Illinois. 
 
 He had a number of brothers and sisters who were very much like 
 him, particularly in the fact that each and every one of them had as 
 many children as he or she knew how to have. Neither Hook nor any 
 one of his brothers or sisters possessed sufficient energy to support even 
 one of his or her children in any proper way. The consequence was that 
 all this group of parents believed that they were terribly set upon, down- 
 trodden, stolen from and so forth. Jim himself, one summer, with 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1049 
 
 plenty of water in his "crick," let three of his very best milch cows 
 perish of thirst. Jim himself declared it was not his fault, because he had 
 just forgotten about the matter "as clean as a hound's front teeth." 
 
 Jim had an aunt, however, and so as a matter of course did also his 
 brothers and sisters, who was what in scientific parlance is queerly de- 
 nominated a "sport." Not that she was anywise "sporty." Far from it. 
 But she was decidedly different from (incidentally better than) the most 
 of the rest of her stock. In particular, she would work — work and save, 
 work and save, work and save. The consequence was, she had money — 
 money and good farms. She also kept hired hands whom she'd brought 
 down from the North, and — here is the catch in the entire matter — she 
 loved her entire kindred, yea to the last lazy lout loved she them. 
 
 So when Jim lost his cattle, ' 'Aunt Faber' ' (she had married a German 
 of that name, and lost him, and never had had a single chick or child) 
 made the loss up to Jim. 
 
 And, indeed, whenever any one of all her shiftless relations "got 
 down jest too low," she stepped forth and gave him financial elevation. 
 
 All of which helped out but did not wholly satisfy. The relatives all 
 felt that Aunt Faber never did help quite enough. She was inclined to be 
 "sorter" helpful at times, it was true, and yet she never quite did her 
 whole duty. Always she kept back too much for herself. News of this 
 attitude of mind they not infrequently imparted to Aunt Faber. And she, 
 good soul, took all the impartment gently, because, being childless and 
 also widowed, she loved her kindred without stint or limit. She always 
 did keep back her "nest-egg" as she called it — i.e., the bulk of her be- 
 longings, so that, in the future, she might have aught to give again. 
 
 She had not, till her sixtieth birthday, thought much about religion. 
 As she gazed, however, upon her sixtieth milestone, plainly present and 
 undeniably standing there before her, she began to think about death and 
 eternity. 
 
 Poor creature! she had been as a guardian angel to her riff-raff rela- 
 tives, whom her own hard work and unfailing wisdom had ofttimes kept 
 from starving. Indeed she had been as a light-house of humanity and 
 intelligence to all her part of southern Illinois. But now, on her sixtieth 
 birthday, she became "convicted" of her "sins" and very much dejected 
 over them. 
 
 So she joined a strict church, and, shortly after, determined to follow 
 the Biblical command and give all that she had to the poor — her poor. 
 Her poor ! There were so very many of them that she could not give to 
 others also. So she gave absolutely "all" that she had to those poor, 
 including this time the "nest-egg." "Why not?" she replied to some of 
 her neighbors who expostulated with her for the giving. "Why not? 
 Has not that nest-egg of mine — that part which, so far, I have always 
 held back, been the cause of more or less jealousy and hate against me, 
 even on the part of those I love?" 
 
 And, as she had decided to do, so she in fact did. She sold all that 
 she had and gave the proceeds to her poor — divided it all equally, so 
 that there might be no occasion for heartburnings — nothing but happi- 
 ness and peace. 
 
1050 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 And before that year was over, her relatives, her former poor, were 
 poor again and poorer than ever. For now they had no one to go to 
 for relief — not even Aunt Faber, who, of course, was quite as poor as 
 were they. 
 
 Shortly afterward she died, and, as I fully believe, heart-broken. 
 
 ANDREW BRINSKI 
 
 Andrew Brinski was a Pole, therefore not a leaner. He lived at West 
 Frankfort, a few miles north of Marion, and was energetic in the extreme. 
 
 He came into my office one day — a mild-mannered, chin-bearded little 
 man, who sold milk for a living, but one of whose cows had, turning sud- 
 denly at flies, knocked out one of his eyes with her horn. The eye, being 
 out, had to come out. In other words, being permanently blind, because its 
 aqueous humor, crystalline lens and vitreous had all spurted out of the 
 eye and into the surrounding landscape at the time of the accident, it 
 could not now be treated otherwise than by the amputation of so much 
 of its remaining tissues as could be spared and then by the formation of 
 a socket for an artificial eye. 
 
 There was at the time no hospital in Marion. I therefore performed 
 the operation in a room of our flat, giving the chloroform myself and 
 being assisted otherwise by the Companion. When "Uncle Andy" came 
 to, he asked "How much?" I told him, he paid. Then said he, "I get 
 up and go home now." 
 
 "No," I responded. "You mustn't do that. You'll sleep here in a 
 hotel tonight." 
 
 "I pade [bet] you I don't." 
 
 "You cant walk from here to the C. and E. I. depot." 
 
 "I gant? I valk to de depot an' den up de track to Vest Vrangford." 
 Several miles! 
 
 "You'll die if you try that." 
 
 "I'm doo duff." 
 
 "And I need to see you again tomorrow morning." 
 
 "I valk pack tomorrow morning. Meandime I kot to see my cow 
 und vife." 
 
 Away he went, staggering still from side to side because of the chlo- 
 roform. 
 
 Next morning he walked into my office — sturdy, smiling with his one 
 bright blue eye. A medical student who happened to be present and to 
 whom I had told the story of "Uncle Andy's post-operative pedestrian 
 excursion," remarked to him facetiously, "Uncle, you'd better sue that 
 cow for damages." 
 
 "Yaw, yaw," replied Andrew. "I sue my cow for damages und den 
 vat she dink of me?" 
 
 Uncle Andrew made an absolutely uneventful recovery. I tell his 
 story because his absolute indifference to pain, his lack of self-pity, his 
 boundless energy and recuperative power were so rare in southern Illinois. 
 Even there I had great variety of human experience. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1051 
 
 AUNT GLORY 
 
 Her name was Mrs. Mary Startaway Snooks (at least very much like 
 that) but everybody termed her ' 'Aunt Glory' ' because of her vociferous 
 enthusiasm at all camp meetings — also, now and then, "Doctor Snooks," 
 an appellation which tickled her nearly to death. 
 
 Into my office came she one day and asked, "What are these here, 
 now, infantile paralysis?" 1 
 
 "Why, don't you know?" (As if surprised.) 
 
 "No. I know about most diseases, but I never hearn of that a one 
 before." 
 
 "Well, it's like this." (I explained.) 
 
 "Well, sir, tell you how I'd treat that a yere disease." 
 
 "How?" 
 
 "Why, I'd take and I'd bile me a big yeller yam, then strain off the 
 bilin's an' mix it with corn meal. I'd then sprinkle it with sheep drop- 
 pin's an' let it stand out one night — jest one night, mind ye — in the 
 dark of the moon. Then I'd say certain words over it, which I ain't 
 a-gwine to tell ye. An' then I'd giyc the patient a whole tablespoonful 
 o' that there liquid ever single hour, an' in a day he'd be plumb well." 
 
 "You seem, Granny, to know just how to treat it." 
 
 "I do, Doc, I do." 
 
 "And you never knew what the disease was until just now, when I 
 told you?" 
 
 "No, Doc, I didn't. I'm a cyorer, not a knower. Jest as soon as 
 anybody explains a disease to me an' what 'tis, I know jest how to 
 cyore it — like that." She snapped her fingers and laughed gayly. "But 
 you doctors, you know a whole lot but you can't cyore nothin'. You 
 can't cyore nothin , I tell you. I'd druther not know so much an' know 
 how to cyore it." 
 
 The lady's ideas as well as her language were somewhat confused, 
 and yet, sometimes, confronting a case that just will not get well, I 
 think of old Aunt Glory and her statement — "I'd druther not know so 
 much and yet know how to cyore it." 
 
 RIDER'S BONES 
 Turning now — before passing to the Lakehead — back to old-time 
 Pittsfield, I want to relate a case of a disease whose very name I have 
 not heard mentioned for more than half a century — rider's bones (some- 
 times called "saddle bones"). 
 
 One of my earliest "cruel and unusual" patients, in fact, came to me 
 soon after I'd settled in Pittsfield, suffering from the affection in question. 
 
 1 Poliomyelitis. This disease is often supposed at the present time to be a very new- 
 development in the world. But Simon Flexner described it fully and precisely in 1910-13; 
 also as early as 1838, Rilliet and Barthez in their classical textbook on pediatrics, gave a 
 full account of it, and, to cap the climax, old Hippocrates, the father of scientific medicine, 
 who was born 460 B.C., did the very same thing. 
 
 However, the belief that poliomyelitis is a new thing in the world is an error that simply 
 will not down. 
 
1052 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 He was a physician, not a Y. of P. man either, but a man of considerable 
 ability, who lived over in, I think, Marion County, Missouri. 1 
 
 Now a "rider's bone" is an osseous deposit in the muscles of the 
 upper-inner part of the thigh due to too persistent horseback riding. 
 It is the pressure of the saddle on the thighs — rather of the thighs on the 
 saddle — which causes these bony deposits to occur. 
 
 I did the operation "under strict antiseptic precautions," as we said 
 so frequently in those days, because many operations then were not so 
 performed. 
 
 "To hell with the antisepsis!" cried this rough and ready doctor as 
 I got ready to operate. "Lister is a fool!" 
 
 I did the operation in my own sweet way nevertheless. 
 
 The doctor made a prompt recovery. He never quite forgave me 
 though for "taking antiseptic precautions." 
 
 Upon dismissing this patient I urged him to use a horse and buggy 
 whenever he could, that he might no more contract "rider's bones." 
 But he laughed me to scorn. 
 
 He was not even in the horse-and-buggy stage of medicine. He was 
 just in the horseback stage thereof, and, as I heard years later, he never 
 in all his life descended to the effeminacy of a "rig" or to the "utter 
 nonsense" of clean instruments. 
 
 He admitted my performance of a complete cure yet told many persons 
 I was not much of a doctor, thus costing me a number of clients. 
 
 A "cruel" patient indeed, yet, for those days, not so exceedingly 
 unusual. 
 
 IN WHOSE INTEREST? 
 
 I was once called in by way of consultation with a very old doctor 
 in a neighboring town to see a patient who was dying of cancer of the 
 bladder. Neither the patient nor his relatives expected any cure: what 
 they wanted for that patient was simply relief from the intolerable pain 
 until he died. Again and again he had begged, even screamed, for an 
 "easing shot." But the doctor would not give him the shot. 
 
 Outside the house I asked the doctor why he had not given the shot. 
 "Have you ever given that patient even one single shot?" 
 
 "No. Decidedly not." 
 
 "It would never have harmed the patient, would have given him great 
 relief, perhaps even sleep." 
 
 He: "I had just such a case once before. Gave the shot. Patient had 
 ease immediately. In fact he went at once into a deep sleep — sleep eternal. 
 Not from the shot at all, but from embolism. People don't know the 
 difference between death from embolism and death from a shot. The 
 relatives all declared in this case that it was from the shot, that I'd 
 given too large a dose. I talked embolism, they talked shot. They 
 talked about prosecuting me too, but finally gave that up. However, 
 they damaged my practice all over that countryside. It took me years 
 to recover from the injury they'd done me. 
 
 1 Not to be confounded with the city of Marion, in southern Illinois. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1053 
 
 "Never give easing shots, my boy, to a patient who may die at any 
 moment. They may say you gave too large a dose. 
 
 I reflected a long time on the nature of a world like this. Here now 
 is a doctor who can give to an incurable patient immediate and bene- 
 ficial relief from intolerable pain without harming him a particle. Yet, 
 inasmuch as the patient may die of his disease at any moment, the doctor 
 dare not give the relief — the relatives are so ignorant. 
 
 Some time later I had a similar case myself, with similar relatives. 
 They begged for the shot to be given. I administered a moderate dose of 
 morphine by the mouth, declaring that any easing medicine whatever 
 might prove harmful to the patient, and that what I had just then given 
 him was only an excellent tonic. I then said also that I would try the 
 effect of electricity, which ofttimes eased such patients much — then used 
 electricity from the top of that patient's skull-cap to the soles of his feet. 
 The effect was magical. Each and every night then I administered the 
 tonic and the electricity. Each and every time the patient had ease from 
 his pain and a most excellent night's sleep. 
 
 One night he went to sleep and did not waken again on earth. It was 
 not the "tonic" that had killed him, but the disease. The relatives, more- 
 over, were more than merely satisfied. They swore by me and by elec- 
 tricity forever thereafter. 
 
 Had I done wrong? If so, why? 
 
 POST-MORTEM ON A C. AND U. PATIENT 
 
 The hero of this story, at least its central character — Peter Careless — 
 was a very unusual man, as well as a "cruel and unusual" patient. 
 
 I had met him several years before, that is to say in the way in which 
 he played his flute — by ear. On that occasion my father and I had been 
 summoned to see another patient than old Peter in Peter's home town, 
 and, as we had driven into the place (it was well outside of Pike County) 
 at about ten o'clock at night, we went to the only hotel in the town 
 and took lodgings for the night — but not to sleep. 
 
 For the first few hours the trouble was that it was too quiet — a fault 
 of which hotels are seldom guilty. In fact I never had heard so loud a 
 silence in all my life before. Not the chipper of a single bird or the 
 squeak of a mouse! I began to think the whole edifice was deserted. 
 
 Then, all at once, voices came up from the hotel office. 
 
 "Trouble with the wife again, Peter?" That was the inn-keeper 
 speaking. 
 
 "Yes — again," replied the interlocutor gloomily. 
 
 A moment later I heard the scratching of a match, then Peter — it was 
 he, quite evidently— came slowly and solemnly upstairs. Each step 
 sounded like a cannon and its echo reverberated round the building. 
 
 I, poor fellow, was all worn out and glad indeed at last to fall asleep. 
 But, well-nigh instantly, I was awakened by the playing of a lugubrious 
 flute. There is nothing much more mournful than an ordinary flute even 
 when it attempts to be cheerful. But on this particular night, a par- 
 
1054 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 ticularly mournful flute was being played with particularly mournful 
 intent by a man who, clearly, was himself particularly mournful. 
 The whole situation seemed to presage disaster — for somebody. 
 
 After an almost sleepless night I awoke to hear Peter Careless rise 
 and dress. (Hotels, even in the largest cities and down to the present 
 moment, fail to provide the one commodity their guests are chiefly in 
 search of — quiet and a chance to sleep.) Then came Peter's steps down 
 the stairway — mournful, mournful, again mournful. 
 
 When Father and I had dressed and gone downstairs to breakfast, 
 Peter the Mournful had left. So, as I say, the first time I met old Peter, 
 it was by ear only. 
 
 The next time I met him I did not hear him at all, but, that time, 
 only saw him — saw him lying on a low, exceedingly low, table in the 
 back room of a furniture store. My father and I had come a longdistance 
 to hold a post-mortem over him, which implies that Peter was dead. 
 Which also, in its turn, implies that the presage of that mournful hotel- 
 night — the presage of impending disaster — had turned out to be correct. 
 
 Never again have I seen so curious a post-mortem. Almost every rule 
 in effect for those days was violated — in fact it had to be. 
 
 Take the rule that the table on which the "post" is carried on shall 
 be a high one — so that the examiner shall not have to bend over awk- 
 wardly and almost break his back while doing the this and the that of 
 such examinations. The table used was about two feet high, which 
 necessitated the examiner's, or examiners', sitting on low chairs to 
 operate — and, even so, to bend awkwardly. Then, as if in an idiotic 
 attempt to compensate for its lack of height, that table was about two 
 or three times as broad as such a table ought to be. Hence, if you 
 already had the Petrine remains where you could easily operate on the 
 right-hand side of them — that is, close to the right-hand margin of the 
 table, then, when you wanted to operate on the left-hand side of them, 
 you both — you and your assistant — changing round to the left of the 
 table, had to take firm hold of the remains and — well, any way you 
 could — shift the remains clear over to the left-hand side of the table. 
 And Peter, dispite his mournfulness, had been a big, heavy man. 
 
 Then, because of certain peculiar features in the case, the local physi- 
 cians did not wish to co-operate with us in that post-mortem. "Hain't 
 a-goin' to get mixed up in no blankety-blank lawsuit," said one of 
 them, a Y. of P. 
 
 As if to balance the very distressing situation, Peter's widow insisted 
 that she should be present at the examination — from the very beginning 
 thereof to its perfectly proper termination. She was an aged woman, 
 much older in fact than Peter, and yet she had been the object of Peter's 
 most unjust marital suspicions for very many years — hence his frequent 
 pernoctations at the little hotel. Peter was afraid his wife would some 
 night kill him. In the night! He was never, it seemed, afraid of her in 
 the daytime, and, in fact, he ate all her three meals ravenously. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1055 
 
 And Peter had left a will, wherein he had done much further injustice 
 to his faithful spouse. A will wherein, for example, he had provided 
 that the best friend he had ever had, namely my father, and such assistant 
 as my father might elect, should, in case of his death, do a post-mortem 
 on his body "just as soon as would be proper," and that, for this service, 
 his administrator (to be appointed by the probate court) should pay to 
 my father the sum of one hundred dollars and, to his chosen assistant, 
 fifty dollars. 
 
 Well, we did the best we could, my father and I. The drive had been 
 a long one, we had got to our sleeping-place at four o'clock in the morn- 
 ing, and now — what a mess we were in. 
 
 Well, for one thing, the widow, who had a serious case of heart- 
 disease, but who nevertheless, as already stated, had insisted that she 
 be allowed to remain in the post-mortem chamber from the beginning 
 to the end of the proceedings, promptly — as soon as my father had made 
 the first sweeping cut — fell to the floor unconscious and, apparently, 
 dying. 
 
 My father picked her up, carried her to her home, gave her stimulants 
 and sedatives, then returned to the death-chamber — but not till the end 
 of about four hours. 
 
 And the light in the post-mortem room was wretched. It should 
 have been sunlight, of course, of which there was a great abundance at 
 the time in the vast out-of-doors, but our "illumination" was, in fact, 
 merely a few feeble rays from two coal-oil lamps. I both washed and 
 cleaned the chimneys. 
 
 No chemist being present, some of the viscera — in particular the 
 stomach and intestines, after we had tied them off and then detached 
 them — had to be put into fruit jars, carefully sealed and autographed, 
 and then shipped to the chemist who was to analyse them for poisons. 
 But all the fruit-jars that were brought to us for this purpose were dirty 
 in the extreme. My father and I had to clean them with our own hands 
 and clean them very thoroughly. We also and incidentally had to pay 
 for them out of our own pockets. 
 
 And, as it all turned out, poor Peter had died anyway from natural 
 causes. He had had a cerebral hemorrhage big enough to kill an ox. 
 
 The night, as we drove back homeward, was warm and quiet. The 
 whispery night sounds that stole to the buggy seemed to be a kind of 
 concentrated silence, as it were the silence of death. My father slept 
 again and again, a little at a time, as was his wont — I not at all. 
 
 Gazing at the stars, I measured their slow march across the sky. 
 I thought of God, in whom I had always believed and whom I had 
 always loved, in spite of the nonsense of many foolish ministers about 
 his vengefulness. I do not remember at all our pulling into Pittsfield. 
 
 I do, however, recall that, after a time, my father sat up with a start 
 and cried out as if with fear, "Tommy!" "Yes, Father." "Tommy, do 
 you suppose that the things we've done this day and also this evening 
 have been strictly legal?' ' 
 
 "Legal! Well, I don't know." 
 
1056 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 He grew more seriously alarmed. "Seems to me I have heard there is 
 a law which provides just who may and who may not perform autopsies, 
 and when and where and under what circumstances. Maybe only certain 
 elected or appointed officers can make them." 
 
 "But Peter provided in his will that you and your assistant were to 
 attend to the matter. Also you did your work precisely as taught to do 
 it at college." 
 
 "The point is," went on my father, and I could see he was worried 
 in the extreme, "the point is, can a person when making a will decide 
 who shall and who shall not perform his autopsy. In criminal, or what 
 might possibly be criminal, matters, there is a certain 'criminal pro- 
 cedure' which is laid down by the law and which the maker of a will 
 cannot alter even with respect to a post-mortem on his own body. Crime 
 and its punishment are not private but public matters. After breakfast 
 in the morning I'm going up town the very first thing, there to talk to 
 a number of lawyers." 
 
 4 'Bad plan, * ' ventured I. ' 'What we have done we have certainly done, 
 and what the law is the law certainly is. Those things we cannot alter 
 by talking with any number of lawyers. We, however, can keep our 
 mouths shut. And, nine times in ten, people get arrested just because 
 they've talked." 
 
 "And that will, son. It hasn't yet been probated. Until a will has 
 been probated it is just no authority for anything whatever. It may 
 turn out in the probate court to be a forgery, or the maker to have been 
 insane therefore incapable of making a will, or to have made a later will 
 whereby the one in question has been legally cancelled though not 
 physically destroyed." 
 
 "True. But should any physician withhold his costotome or his 
 scalpel in a plain emergency? This was surely an emergency. The body 
 was fast decaying because the undertaker would not make his preserva- 
 tive injections — such injections being arsenical and so on, do ruin the 
 body completely for any later poison-analysis." 
 
 Anyway we did not talk, and no legal questions were ever raised 
 about our autopsy. We learned, however, that Peter was buried with full 
 religious rites, that the will we had seen was duly probated and that the 
 funeral expenses (which, even in those days, were preferred charges 
 against estates) took all the assets. 
 
 My father, therefore, as well as myself, did not receive one cent of 
 pay for the day or for the two long nights of time and for all the skill 
 and work and worry involved in the matter. For these reasons, as well 
 as for others already apparent, I have listed Peter as a "cruel and un- 
 usual, " howsoever innocent and dead, a patient — one such as the Con- 
 stitution of the United States ought certainly to have forbidden the 
 existence of, strictly even if ineffectually. 
 
 But then, of course, Peter, when we "posted" him, was not legally, 
 or in any other way, "existent." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1057 
 
 BIRDS' EYES AND C. & U. PATIENTS 
 
 Since I began to practice in Duluth, some twenty and odd years ago, 
 I have had some cruel and unusual patients, though not many. One of 
 these was a man I had cured of a distressing eye affection and who was 
 so extremely grateful that I thought he would be my friend for life. 
 
 One day I was out in the Fairmount zoo, examining the eyes of birds 
 with my ophthalmoscope. This, by the bye, is not so dangerous a 
 proceeding to the examiner as many persons might suppose. Before 
 going close to the bird's head — for the purpose of illuminating the in- 
 terior of its eye and then looking into the eye to examine it — one stands 
 first, for safety's sake, at a little distance from the bird, and then, moving 
 the ophthalmoscope so as to throw the light slowly backwards and 
 forwards across the bird's pupils, hypnotizes it. It is really an easy 
 thing to do in the great majority of cases. If, however, you wish to be 
 extremely cautious, as I always did wish, you employ a strong assistant 
 to hold the bird's ankles and wings with one hand and its bill with the 
 other. On the day in question I had with me as assistant in the aviary a 
 very large, powerful, and experienced man. 
 
 It was not, however, the eagle I was working on that we were just 
 about to have trouble with. When my assistant had got a good hold 
 of the eagle and I had hypnotized the bird so thoroughly that he was 
 merely uttering an occasional soft "coo-o-o," in dashed that former 
 patient whose eyes I had cured so thoroughly and who had seemed so 
 extremely friendly. 
 
 "Vivisectionists!" he shouted, then began a profane tirade against 
 doctors generally and against me and my assistant particularly. He tried 
 to take the bird away from us. 
 
 I requested the disturber to leave the room. He refused to do so, 
 became more violent. I then asked my assistant — the interloper being 
 larger and much younger than I — to put the fellow out. But that func- 
 tionary declared with decision that he had come only to help me with 
 the bird, not with a maniac. 
 
 "A maniac, is it?" yelled the disturber. "What could you do, even 
 if you tried, you d. . . .d thus and so, as well as so and so forth." 
 
 That thoroughly angered my big assistant. Dropping the eagle, he 
 took on the importunate fanatic, gave him a first-rate trouncing, then 
 threw him out of the room. 
 
 Even after that I one day met my tormentor in the street, where, in spite 
 of his licking, he told me he wished he knew a thousand languages so 
 that he might curse me in every one of them. He did in fact pile English 
 maledictions on me rapidly and luridly. Not one of these, however, 
 so far as I am able to ascertain, has proved successful. He himself in- 
 deed, some years back, passed into the land where fanatical oculists do 
 not throw harmless light into the eyes of ofttimes harmful birds. 
 
 PAUL BUNYAN'S SPECTACLES 
 In barber shops at Superior it was that I heard by far the greatest 
 number and some of the very best of the stories about Paul Bunyan. 
 In Jo Wells's little tobacco store, also, at the corner of Tower Avenue 
 
1058 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 and 17th Street, crowds would sit around the stove for hours and tell 
 Bunyan tales. 
 
 Some of the most interesting to myself, however, were told in his 
 own barber shop by a barber whose name was Pete Byron, or something 
 like that. I recall especially Pete's story about the time he was called 
 out to help Paul hair-cut and shave Paul's big blue ox, Babe. Pete was 
 clip-clipping the hair that had hung down over Babe's eyes and which 
 was the hair that had bothered the big ox the most. About the time he 
 had been cutting and clipping this hair for two days and three nights 
 and was getting hungry and sleepy, Paul himself entered, cursed, and, 
 running down to Minneapolis, he also ran back with a big wheat com- 
 bine and finished the hair-cutting job for the big blue ox in just thirty 
 seconds. 
 
 "Where did that happen?" asked a bystander. 
 
 "Right over here," replied Pete, unabashed, "just a little north of 
 Gibson's forty, at the place where Paul first used his forest-scythe to 
 mow down ten thousand acres of big timber in a night." 
 
 But about Paul's spectacles. The man that asked Byron where he 
 had hair-cut Babe, told me all about them. 
 
 We happened to be walking home together, this man and I, and, as 
 we passed Juberg's spectacle-fitting establishment, the fellow (I never 
 yet have learned his name) asked me if I had ever heard how Paul Bunyan 
 had come to wear spectacles. 
 
 Being answered "No," he continued: "It was up here where Sycamore 
 Creek runs into the White Pine Branch. Paul had been lookin' so fur 
 off in the forest fur so many years that, all at once, he found the far-seeing 
 part of his eyes had wore off, an' he couldn't see no furder then than the 
 palm of his hand when his elber was bent. This was mighty cripplin' 
 in his business. 
 
 "So up he goes to Juberg's an' asks him for glasses that no rain ner 
 no nothin' won't never affect, an' what'll let him see away fur off jest 
 like he useter. See? 
 
 "Juberg then tried to fit 'im an' couldn't. Sent him to these here 
 local oculists, which is good ones, and they couldn't. Sent him then to 
 the Duluth oculists, an' they couldn't of course." 
 
 I happened at the time to be a Duluth oculist, though residing in 
 Superior, and I had never to that date examined the eyes of Paul Bunyan. 
 So I said as much. 
 
 My interlocutor ignored the untimely interruption. "They went on 
 an' sent him, after the Duluth M.D. oculists had failed on him, to the 
 Twin Ports Optical Co. No glasses. To the Benson Optical Co. No 
 glasses. 
 
 "Finally, he drifted one day into the office of old Doc Adams. Doc 
 says, T can cyore ye.' He set him down in a easy chair and begun tellin' 
 him a story. An' he made that feller's eyes bug, jest bug. An' he kept 
 on tellin', an' the eyes kept buggin'. More an' more they bugged. An' 
 the more they bugged o' course, the longer they got. An' finally they 
 got so long that his long, fur-off sight come back to 'im. An' he looks 
 out o' Adams's winder then, he did, an' seen a forest a hunderd and 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1059 
 
 twenty-seven miles long an' furder'n that away, an' he told Adams jest 
 what kind o' timber they wuz on the land, an' it was some poppel and 
 a little beech and maple and a good deal o' fine pine — which is mighty 
 good lumberin' timber." 
 
 As he closed his narration, I suggested, "You must have got that 
 story from Pete Byron." 
 
 "No, from Doc Adams himself." 
 
 That settled it. No one would ever dispute the incomparable accuracy 
 of a Paul Bunyan story that had been told to anyone whomsoever by 
 Doc Adams. 
 
 MR. McGUIRE AND THE MOON 
 
 While a member of the Lyceum Clinic I one day received through the 
 kindness of Miss Bertha Hanford, County Agent for the blind, a case of 
 blindness acquired by drinking moon — in other words moonshine whis- 
 key. "As blind as the man in the moon" was that patient indeed and in 
 truth. Let us call him Tom McGuire. 
 
 Tom and his pal, a Scotchman, two or three weeks before I examined 
 the former, had spent the night at Superior in the Lake Superior Mission. 
 They had purchased a pint of whiskey on "the fifty-fifty plan" — pay half 
 drink half. Just before getting into bed, each drank exactly half the 
 whiskey. Then said Tom to Jock, "I'm always afraid of sleeping in the 
 dark: don't turn the light out." Jock didn't and Tom slept. 
 
 But Tom, awaking in the night, found the room in absolute darkness. 
 Thereupon he wakened Jock, gave him an Irish cursing, getting, how- 
 ever, the response, "The room's not dark, you fool." 
 
 Tom rose, felt his way to the push-button, pushed it in various 
 ways, peered into the street and into the hall, found himself as blind as 
 the man in our unseeing satellite. 
 
 Days later — these fellows are always indifferent to very serious mat- 
 ters — Tom, accompanied by Jock, arrived in Duluth at the office of Miss 
 Hanford. The consequence was that, in time, the two arrived in my 
 office. 
 
 So much time had elapsed that it seemed impossible anything now 
 could be done. However, after I had conferred with one of the internists 
 in our clinic, Dr. Cyril M. Smith, we two together concocted a plan, or 
 what we thought might be a plan, for the cure or improvement of Tom 
 McGuire's eyes. Certain medicines we shot, in very heavy doses, directly 
 into the blind man's veins. 
 
 And it worked. Seventy-five per cent of the vision returned to each 
 eye — a remarkable result considering all the circumstances. Then, while 
 the man was still under treatment, he suddenly stopped coming to my 
 office — absolutely stopped. 
 
 One day Miss Hanford found him and he promised to return for 
 further treatment, did not do so. 
 
 Then Miss Hanford learned that Tom was over in Superior again, 
 drinking like — whatever it is that is most thirsty. It was plain that 
 something must be done to save the fellow from himself. A magistrate 
 in Superior, the wise and capable Judge Parker, promised to do his best 
 
1060 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 to break up the furious debauch and to get Tom to return to our Clinic 
 for treatment. (My work and Dr. Smith's also, it was plainly understood 
 by Tom himself and by all the others who were connected with the matter, 
 was, even from the very time when we first took charge of the case, 
 to be without money and without price. Even the medicines we used 
 were to be provided at our own expense.) Judge Parker at last had the 
 man arrested on a charge of "drunk and disorderly," and then, confining 
 him to jail, let him sober off until he could return to me for treatment. 
 But it is the law that a man arrested on a "drunk and disorderly" charge, 
 can be kept in prison no longer than just a certain short time. When 
 that time had necessarily expired, Tom was at once to return to me. 
 
 But return he did not. Judge Parker attempted to have him re-arrested 
 on a charge of drunk and disorderly. But Tom was far more interested 
 in getting drunk than in getting back his sight. So away he fled from 
 the city — and from safety. He simply would not remain in a place where 
 people were interested in his eyes. 
 
 Years later I was told that he had gone, I think it was to Lincoln, 
 Nebraska. There he had lost the last little bit of his vision without 
 having made so much as the slightest further effort to retain it. 
 
 This story I tell to illustrate the fact, for fact it really is, that a great 
 many persons are quite indifferent to the welfare of their physical selves. 
 Over and over, at medical meetings, I hear physicians declare that the 
 most important thing in medical practise is not to frighten patients. 
 "All patients suffer more, far more, from fear than they do from disease," 
 is a common, almost a universal, way of putting the matter. Just where 
 these doctors find so many frightened patients I do not understand. I 
 certainly seldom see frightened patients in my own office. In that par- 
 ticular spot the patient who comes in frightened is a rarity. Even after 
 I find that my examinee is suffering from cataract, cancer and glaucoma, 
 all combined, and after I have fully explained to him the true signifi- 
 cance of each of those terrible diseases, he is apt to reply, "Well, I'm 
 going out on a hunting trip for several weeks: after I get back I'll look 
 after these things." Here's a woman's case. A lady whom I found to 
 need a change of glasses, said, in reply to my question about her general 
 health, "O, I'm perfect from top to toe except a little lump I've had a 
 long time in my breast." I examined the lump, and, spite of the fact it 
 had never given pain, recommended that the patient see a surgeon. But 
 she laughed me to scorn. "That lump — that little bit of a lump that 
 never has hurt me at all, that possibly a cancer?" Scared? She refused 
 even to be interested. 
 
 Later she died of cancer from the little lump. General surgeons tell us 
 that similar cases of indifference are quite frequent. 
 
 Another case. A man who had a pigmented mole on his temple also 
 laughed quite heartily when I told him to have it attended to at once. 
 Why, he had had that mole ever since he could remember. Scare him 7 . 
 And he too died of cancer. 
 
 Nearly all my cataract, glaucoma and optic atrophy patients fail to 
 see me or any one till the favorable time for treatment has long since 
 passed. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1061 
 
 Ordinarily, those who propose the socialization of medicine inform 
 me that such neglect arises only among the middle classes. Rich people, 
 they tell me, being financially able to look after their troubles, do so 
 promptly and with good results. Poor persons, not having to pay any- 
 thing at all, do the same thing. But the middle classers — aye, there's 
 the rub. They are the people who make governmental ownership and 
 control of medical practice necessary. Why? Because, say the socializers, 
 the middle classers, though able to pay something, cannot pay the prices 
 that the rich pay, and, therefore, are unable to get treatment. I, having 
 practiced medicine for nearly six long decades, besides my long period 
 of apprenticeship with my father, and having, naturally, seen in 
 the course of that long time, very many thousands of patients, surely 
 ought to know at least a little something about this subject. And 
 what I know is: (1) It is not true at all that the middle classers are 
 charged the same prices as are the rich. In each and every individual 
 instance an attempt is made to adjust charges to the individual's ability 
 to pay. And this is true not merely in my own office but in those of the 
 great majority of doctors. (2) The greatest proportion of unnecessary 
 suffering and the greatest percentage of unnecessary deaths occur, I am 
 certain, not at all in the ranks of the middle classers but, actually, in the 
 ranks of the rich. The middle classers, far more than either the poor or 
 the rich, are interested in their bodies and take care of them. Yet, even 
 among the middle classers, there is much indifference to physical condi- 
 tions, with, naturally, much resulting unnecessary sickness and many 
 unnecessary deaths. I have known a lower middle classer to refuse an 
 excision of an epithelioma (a form of cancer) from the lip for five dollars 
 when, a little later, he spent more than that amount going down to 
 Minneapolis to see a football game. The great majority of even middle 
 classers spend far more money for liquor and tobacco than they do for 
 medical care. 
 
 Where are the patients who have to be coddled and soothed and lied 
 to, so that they may not die of sickness fright? They are almost always 
 in hospitals, already in the final stages of some terribly fatal disease. 
 They are seldom seen in doctors' offices, and, even in hospitals, patients 
 who are actually nearing death not infrequently cannot be kept in bed or, 
 sometimes, even in the hospital, because they believe they are not nearly 
 so sick as the doctor lets on. 
 
 This applies to the poor too, who are being hospitalized gratis, also 
 treated and supplied with medicines. They ofttimes have even less in- 
 terest in their bodies than they have money. 
 
 "Poor folks has poor ways" — once again to quote from the crackers 
 of southern Illinois. And some of them have poor ways in Duluth — 
 where, for example, though perhaps a somewhat extreme example, poor 
 Tom McGuire preferred shameless and costly debauchery to free vision 
 and all that vision can mean to any person. 
 
 OFFICE PATIENTS 
 Contrary to popular opinion, office practice does not infrequently 
 provide cases of extreme human interest — illustrations oihomo psychology. 
 
1062 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 Some of the most peculiar patients are those who come to consult the 
 doctor but wind up by prescribing for him — copiously and authorita- 
 tively. Another will let you examine his eyes if only you permit him 
 to sell you a thousand dollars "worth" of unlisted oil stock, your ex- 
 amination fee to be deducted from the purchase price. Yet another wants 
 merely a diagnosis, no examination. Yet another objectionable species 
 is the hearty (i.e., crunching) handshaker. He is one of those idiotic 
 persons who have heard in sermons of a certain type or read perhaps in 
 the poems of Eddie Guest that it's everyone's duty when shaking a hand 
 to "prove" his sincerity by the strength of his grip. Just how a "hearty" 
 (i.e., crunchy) handshake comes to be any proof whatever of sincerity 
 I do not know. An insincere fellow, very clearly, can, if he only has the 
 strength, smash any hand as thoroughly as can any sincere person. What 
 indeed has hand-squeezing to do with sincerity? 
 
 Indeed firm pressure on a hand by a person who does not know the 
 hand's condition, can easily prove to be the cause not only of much pain 
 but also of serious injury. In a city like Duluth for example, with its 
 more than a hundred thousand population, there are at any given time 
 (I merely guess) as many as three thousand persons with arthritis in one 
 or more joints of the right hand. Of those with neuritis in the hand, 
 let us say a thousand persons more. Then there are hundreds of hands 
 at any given time afflicted with abscesses, boils, felons, and other quite 
 painful afflictions. Nevertheless, up to all the people that he knows 
 runs without the slightest hesitation or discrimination the apostle of 
 the "hearty" handshake, and, grasping the hand whose condition is 
 wholly unknown to him, inflicts upon it in many instances pain and 
 serious injury. 
 
 When I expostulate with such people, they nearly always grin and 
 say, "Well, of course I don't know just who have sick hands and who 
 don't, but I take my chances." 
 
 He takes his chances? He should say that he causes the sufferer to take 
 his chances. 
 
 And do not forget that sick hands can be hurt even by the gentlest 
 of handshakes. 
 
 All these arguments, however, will probably have little effect, if any, 
 on the mind, if any, of the Eddie Guest handshaker. Here is one that 
 may possibly affect him, inasmuch as it is a direct appeal to his own 
 self-interest. The handshaker, hearty or gentle, whenever he shakes 
 any hand at all, takes his chances on getting diseased from the hand that 
 he shakes, or crunches. Custom foolishly decrees that hands when shak- 
 ing each other must be ungloved — that is, wholly unprotected, each 
 from the other, against possible infection. So the handshaker, when 
 shaking a hand, does take his chances on getting a number of serious 
 diseases. The most common of these is scabies (the itch). More serious 
 are pus infection, measles, syphilis, tuberculosis, trench hand (ring-worm), 
 leprosy and others. 
 
 The custom of handshaking originated centuries ago, as a sign on 
 the part of him that offered his hand (open of course for shaking) that 
 the hand so offered contained no deadly weapon. To-day the reason for 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1063 
 
 the custom is dead. May the custom, being no longer significant of non- 
 murderous intent, and being known now to be truly dangerous to both 
 parties to the custom, may it, I say, be abandoned. Why not do as the 
 Chinese do, among whom the shaker shakes hands with himself while 
 the would-be shaken does the same? No suffering, no transferral at all 
 of sometimes deadly disease. Just unmixed good will and common sense. 
 
 The hearty handshaker in the doctor's office, moreover, is apt to be 
 a disappointing person in more respects than just his handshaking — bad 
 as that is. He is apt to be, for one thing, a man who belongs last or next 
 to last, "in line" among the waiting patients. So, when you open the 
 consulting room door and ask for the next in line to come in, up jumps 
 Mr. Royal Handshaker and, with all the comeraderie of an old and long- 
 tried friend, grabs both your hands, gives them the hearty, meeting-house 
 crunch, and then walks you promptly back into your consulting room, 
 where, after anxious (and noxious) inquiries about your own health, he 
 comments on his own and so insinuates himself (or tries to) into an 
 examination far out of his turn. Or he may not be a turn-thief — just, 
 perhaps, a book-agent who wants to make you a "present" of an entire 
 set of the So-and-so Encyclopedia, with the entire United States, almost, 
 wrapped around it. People with sick eyes who really want your skill 
 and attention do not generally give you the out-of-place smile and the 
 Eddie Guest handshake with all its unnecessary pain and some very real 
 danger. * 
 
 1 Among my other "pet peeves" is that against the fellow who claps you on the back 
 or the shoulder. He, too, says he takes his chances. In fact he makes you takeyour chances. 
 You have no "chance" at all to protest against his folly. The trick is done in a moment. 
 The clapper-on-the-back may not know, indeed he never does know or care about ascertain- 
 ing, what a "hearty" back-slap may do to the particular slapee. The slapee may have a 
 boil on that shoulder, and the slapper may break down the protecting wall which nature 
 has carefully built up around the pus in it, and so distribute the pus, via the blood-stream, 
 all about the body. Or, worse still, there may be on the shoulder a carbuncle, with its 
 many pus-foci. Even worse yet, there may be present a cancer or a sarcoma, some of the 
 cells of which are broken from their moorings by the back-slapping and sent helter-skelter 
 throughout the entire body — thus producing terribly destructive "metastases." The slapper 
 may reply that only occasionally are such things present. Correct, but who wishes to 
 produce only an occasional death? 
 
 Another pet grudge is one that I cherish against the person, friend or enemy, who, 
 coming up behind me in a crowd, grasps my upper arm, then steers me through the concourse 
 as if frightfully responsible, somehow, for the safety of my person. 
 
 Another grudge I hold is against the so-called business man who carefully protects his 
 place of business against the entrance thereinto of persons who would gladly spend money 
 with him if only he had not carefully guarded against their doing so by erecting at his 
 various entrances doors that turn so hard customers can scarcely get in. (Even the heaviest 
 doors turn easily if hung properly.) There are (once again) at any given moment, in the 
 city of Duluth for example, several thousand persons who are too old and too frail to turn 
 hard-turning doors. Thousands more have arthritis, neuritis or the like in their hands, and, 
 likewise, have a strong aversion to carrying dynamite on their persons wherewith to blast 
 an entrance into any place of business whose owner happens to be reluctant to transact 
 business with them. Many of these people with frail or sick hands have money to spend, 
 but Mr. Stiff-door does not want their money. He wants stiff hinges instead. 
 
 Even some newsboys — for the great majority of that class I have a strong affection — 
 turn their stock of newspapers so that the front pages thereof with all their wonderful head- 
 
1064 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 Office patients generally, however, even a great majority thereof 
 are courteous, kind, grateful. Contributing to the great increase of 
 these qualities among patients in the office, in the home, in the hospitals, 
 have been such series of popular articles in the newspapers as those by 
 Dr. Logan Clendenning. Clear, simple, accurate, wise, they give to the 
 general public a very much better understanding of the real nature of 
 medical practice, of what it is that the doctor is trying to do, and of 
 the numerous difficulties and complexities which he ofttimes meets in 
 doing it. The result is a far more kindly attitude toward doctors on the 
 part of the public and of a more intelligent, persistent and successful 
 co-operation with them. 
 
 lines — the show-windows of the papers, so to speak — are concealed against their bodies. 
 These curious chaps do not want the public even to behold the main news of the day — the 
 news for which the public would be almost sure to want to buy the papers. Heaven only 
 knows how hard the newspaper managers have thought about those headlines, how care- 
 fully they have considered the wording of every one of them. And yet some newspaper 
 salesboys, yes and newspaper salesmen also, carefully conceal the headlines and do not even 
 mention them when they cry their wares, "Piper! Piper! Here's yer piper, mister." 
 
 Others turn their papers properly, calling distinctly too, for example, "Hitler burns 
 East London." 
 
 Easy it is to see the future of these two classes of boys. The bright and thoughtful 
 will rise into the hated successful class, make jobs for many other persons — and be hated 
 still more. The lazy and the thoughtless will swell the ranks of "the underprivileged." 
 "Underprivileged" there are indeed, and may God bless them and men help them. But it 
 is no use lying about the others — people who are really not underprivileged at all, but quite 
 over-privileged — being in fact privileged to live chiefly on the industry and frugality of 
 others, directly or via the tax-man. 
 
 Another pet peeve — I am often asked about these matters — is the one I have against the 
 merchant who permits his stock to get wholly out of staple articles, and to remain out of 
 them for long periods of time. (He keeps "kidding" you along every day by declaring, 
 "We'll have a lot of them in tomorrow," when he perfectly well knows that he will not.) 
 A merchant should either have an order clerk, whose business it is to notify the manager 
 when the stock of any staple in his store is beginning to run low, or he should have each 
 individual clerk act as order clerk for his or her own department. I am not much at business 
 it is true, but I do understand that merchants who keep telling their best customers, "We'll 
 have some of that in tomorrow," when they probably have not even ordered any of the 
 article, will soon lose numerous customers. 
 
 I also have a grudge against "stamp chiselers." Over and over, people write to me about 
 peace and war, about the War-Check Vote, about the evolution of eyes, about the treatment 
 of cataract and glaucoma, and so forth and so on, and, in very few instances indeed, do they 
 enclose a stamped envelope for reply. I speak now not of prospective patients, but of 
 persons who write merely to secure information to be of use to themselves. Sometimes to 
 consider and to write out the requested information would take hours of my time, as well 
 as some of my stenographer's. All that for nothing. And yet, in addition, such cor- 
 respondents want me to pay the freight on the product of all the work which I have done 
 for them for nothing. 
 
 Least offending in this matter have been, I am happy to say, bankers and lawyers, men 
 who have been made the scapegoats for about all the crimes in the universe. Ministers are 
 not in all cases careful to avoid this petty chiselling. As to teachers, an aged friend of mine 
 who had long been teacher in and president of a State Teachers College, informed me that, 
 even after his retirement, he received from former students at his school, from one to ten 
 letters daily, requesting recommendations for teaching positions, and that in hardly a single 
 instance had a stamp been enclosed for reply. By this pettiness, he said, he was deeply hurt, 
 not so much by the loss of the money it had cost him — thirty to forty dollars in some years 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1065 
 
 "TURNS" IN THE WAITING-ROOM 
 Much misunderstanding still prevails, however, regarding a certain 
 matter which is far more important and complex than it seems. I refer 
 to the matter of "turns" in the doctor's waiting-room. To the layman 
 the subject seems simple indeed. Every one of course who enters a doctor's 
 waiting-room should be seen by the doctor in the exact order of his 
 arrival — take his "turn." Just like that! 
 
 That is in truth the usual way. Yet, for a doctor to conform to the 
 rule is not always wise or even possible. If, however, he attempts to 
 explain to those whom he seems to have cheated of their rights in the 
 matter, he ofttimes does not make much headway— -possibly because it 
 is not reasonable or even proper to state his reasons fully or at all. 
 
 Thus, a lady with sick eyes, who came to my office daily, was like- 
 wise sick in her mind. If, as soon as she arrived, I took her into my 
 consultation room, then examined, treated and dismissed her, all with- 
 out the slightest delay, she behaved very properly. But, if she had to 
 remain in the waiting-room for even a short time, she would grow rest- 
 less, begin talking to imaginary persons, and, after a while, doing things 
 unmentionable. I could not of course say to the other patients, "Excuse 
 
 — but by the incredible littleness on the part of those who had been his former charges. In my 
 own experience, teachers have been more thoughtful than in his, yet in my experience they 
 too have been ofttimes negligent. 
 
 Nowadays I do not answer letters at all which are written solely in the writers' own 
 interest excepting only when those writers themselves exhibit about three cents worth of 
 courtesy. 
 
 I dislike also : Doctors who think that, if you do not treat all cases whatsoever in ac- 
 cordance with somebody or other's textbook, you are a charlatan. — I much dislike also 
 persons who, when they meet me, even in the street, want to waste my time by giving me 
 memory tests; such as, "Doctor, I want to see if you remember me. Remember me? Know 
 who I am?' ' If I do not chance to remember (and in the course of fifty-odd years of practice 
 I have had literally thousands of patients) the tester is disappointed and I myself consider- 
 ably embarrassed. Sometimes the tester is foolish enough to persist in his testing even after 
 I have plainly told him that I know not who he is. "Guess," he will cry, eagerly. "See 
 if you can't guess me right, now, after all." And again he is disappointed and I also am 
 embarrassed. How easy it would be for this ass to understand that such a question is ex- 
 tremely likely to result in distressing disappointment and much embarrassment. Why not, 
 to begin with, remark: "Dr. Shastid, you no doubt remember me. I'm Roland Ryckmeyer, 
 a patient of yours thirty-four years ago." And so on. How much pleasanter that re-meet- 
 ing would be, if only my recollection of that speaker were thus taken for granted. And 
 how much time would be saved for pleasant chatting by us both. — I dislike also people 
 who come to my office for examination but will not give me their names, or who talk to 
 me over the phone but will not tell me who they are. — People also I dislike who try to 
 convince me in my office that breaking up the rich would make poor people prosperous. 
 Also college theorists who speak of any income larger than that of, say, a common laborer 
 as "unearned income." (Uncle Sam himself, nowadays, on his Income Tax "Instructions," 
 labels all incomes of more than $14,000.00 "unearned income." Few persons to-day, what- 
 soever their value to society have incomes half so large as that. Nevertheless, think of 
 making it emphatic, even on a legal document, that nobody can "earn" more than $14,000.00 
 yearly. How, if the Government's definition be correct, does the President of the United 
 States himself come to be receiving for his personal services $75,000.00 yearly — in addition 
 to perquisites which would make the mouth of any multi-millionaire water freely? And 
 if those perquisites plus $75,000.00 yearly, are not "earned" by the President, then why 
 does the very Government which defines "unearned" income as any amount over $14,000.00, 
 pay to him so very large an amount of "unearned" income?) 
 
1066 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 me, please, for seeing this patient ahead of her turn, but she's quite 
 insane." Had I really done that, then I should have had on my hands 
 and on the other patient's hands also, a scene that would have made 
 their hair rise. 
 
 At last I thought of a solution to this and similar problems. I wrote 
 out and had printed a very large cardboard running as follows : 
 
 , EYES 
 PERIODIC EXAMINATIONS 
 
 Many persons wait, before changing glasses, until they have acquired another case of 
 eyestrain. This is the old way, and it is a bad one. The ideal should be not so much to 
 cure, as to prevent, eyestrain. The only known means of preventing it is by periodic ex- 
 aminations. This is also the cheapest method in the long run. And it is the surest way 
 to preserve clear and comfortable vision far into old age. 
 
 Also do not forget that ofttimes the most serious eye diseases are accompanied by little 
 or no pain (progressive shortsight, atrophy of the optic nerve, etc.). This is one of the 
 reasons why hundreds of eyes are blind, partly blind, or permanently uncomfortable, to-day. 
 It is also an additional reason for thorough, systematic, periodic examinations. 
 
 APPOINTMENTS 
 
 For an examination it is always better to telephone for an appointment. Otherwise a 
 chance is taken on being able to secure the proper amount of time. But an appointment 
 should not be made merely for a treatment, to have glasses checked up to see that they have 
 been made right, or for any other purpose which consumes but little time. An appoint- 
 ment means that not less than an hour of time is reserved. 
 
 An appointment may be made for 3:00 or for 4:00 p.m., any day but Sunday or a legal 
 holiday. (No office hours in the forenoon.) 
 
 TREATMENTS AND THE CHECKING OF GLASSES 
 
 For treatments and the checking of glasses it is best to come at from 2:30 to 3:00. Those 
 who cannot come during this half hour should come later, and then the best possible attempt 
 will be made to see such patients promptly. 
 
 Persons coming for treatments or for the checking of glasses will usually be seen in 
 the order of their arrival, but it may now and then be necessary to violate this arrangement. 
 For example, a patient, because of some peculiar infirmity, may not be able to remain long 
 in the waiting-room. Whenever a patient is seen out of his turn, this is not due (contrary 
 to the usual supposition) to any malice toward other patients, or from any desire to coddle 
 the patient who is taken before his time. There is always a reason, though it may be one 
 which the doctor is not in position to discuss with the public. 
 
 T. H. SHASTID, M.D. 
 Rooms 208-209 Sellwood Building 
 
 This card I framed and hung on the wall of my waiting-room in a con- 
 spicuous position. 
 
 Strange to say, scarcely any person ever read it. Even those with 
 excellent eyes for reading and who sat idly in the office facing the card 
 for hours would never see it or ever notice that a card of instructions 
 intended for their perusal was hanging on the wall before them. 
 
 Finally, I made a psychological experiment. On the waiting-room 
 table, all messed up as it was with magazines, books, and so forth, I 
 laid a very much smaller card, running — 
 
 PLEASE READ 
 
 The Wall-Card Hanging in This Room 
 
 and Headed "Eyes" 
 
 That did the trick. Almost everyone thereafter who has waited in 
 that waiting-room has read, first, the small card hidden in the mass 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1067 
 
 of magazines and so forth promptly, then has gone to the wall and read 
 the large-sized and very conspicuous card labelled EYES. 
 
 Explain it or not as psychologists may, the fact remains that the less 
 exposed card is the one first read, almost always. 
 
 THE MAN WITH THREE CHINS AND ONE EYE 
 
 Into my consultation room one day there slipped a great hulk of a 
 man with three chins and one eye. In spite or his bulk he moved as 
 slinkily as a strip-teaser, helped himself to a chair, put his feet on my 
 desk, did not take his hat off. (At all this I did not remonstrate: here 
 was a colorful man.) 
 
 Taking up a blank history card I asked, "What's your name?" 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "What's your name? Who are you?" 
 
 "O, I'm beauty and the beast — without the beauty." 
 
 "Occupation?" 
 
 "What?" 
 
 ' 'Occupation?' ' 
 
 "None." 
 
 "Well, what's your chief interest?" 
 
 "Myself, just myself." He was a smart one, without doubt. 
 
 "Married?" 
 
 "Of course. Women wouldn't let me alone." 
 
 "Your wife's name?" 
 
 He rubbed his second chin contemplatively. "Mrs. Azrael Smith." 
 
 I wrote "Azrael Smith" at the head of his card. "Now will you give 
 me your history?" 
 
 "You sure got a nerve, Doc. You sure got a nerve." 
 
 "Just in a few words." 
 
 He recounted his life from the reception of his first short pants up to 
 the recent time when he had been decorated, as he expressed it, with 
 "the order of the itching palm" in a near-county jail. "And now," 
 he concluded, "I feel a hospital coming on. In other words, I'm pretty 
 sick. This here good eye's a pretty bad eye. When it hurts too much 
 it makes me so sick all over I vomick. I thought maybe the whole thing 
 come from the eye and so here I am. Doc, you don't think I'm going 
 to go blind, do you?" Like most ignorant persons, he asked for a 
 prognosis before he had had an examination. 
 
 I examined that eye with the utmost caution. "Glaucoma," I said. 
 
 "Glaucomy? Why that's 'hardening of the eyeball,' ain't it?" 
 
 "It is." 
 
 "Doc, I play a little game occasionally. To do it I got to see. If I 
 can't play no game, I don't want to live. And when in funds I pay my 
 bills, Doc, with gusto also with cash. All gamblers, Doctor, are good 
 paymasters, ain't they?" 
 
 It was the simple truth. I have always found gamblers — the profes- 
 sional sort — to be good paymasters, if not at the time when the services 
 are rendered, then later. Some call gambler money "tainted," others 
 "erring," but I have always been glad to antisepticize such tainted money 
 
1068 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 by accepting it in payment for my services and then to restore it to the 
 paths of rectitude by paying it to my creditors. 
 
 This man's heart was in such a condition he could not take an opera- 
 tion for glaucoma. I treated him frequently for a time, then, after a respite 
 of several months, gave him another treatment series. After a few 
 months more of rest, another series. And so on. I kept him his sight, 
 and held down his pain. 
 
 One day he spoke of his wife again. She was very beautiful, he de- 
 clared, and front-named Smeraldine — an Italian name. But when he 
 brought her into my office a few days later I found her of old New 
 England stock. She was beautiful indeed, also refined, even spiritual. 
 She had graduated with honors from an excellent college and had been 
 a schoolteacher for years. Strangest thing of all she was deeply in love 
 with this man of three chins and one eye. And they had lived happily 
 together, as Azrael informed me, there in her presence, except that one 
 night when he had taken "just a glass of beer too many" and gone home 
 and beaten her up, she, woman-like, had got mad about that. Could I 
 blame her? I could not, and Azrael, on his part, declared he had forgiven 
 her for her anger years and years ago and fully quit beating her because 
 she didn't like to be beaten. "Anything to please the lady," he con- 
 ceded, with patronage. 
 
 On another occasion she told me that, in childhood, they two had 
 often played together. They had "made mud pies, and filled them with 
 flies, and baked them in the sun." They had also, standing on their 
 heads, exchanged upside-down kisses. 
 
 "About the time we were grown," she told me, "he fell in love with 
 somebody else and so did I. Then we did not see each other for years. 
 But one day — he had never married yet and neither had I — we met 
 again — at the ringside, whither a friend had taken me. I loved him again 
 immediately, knew I had always loved him. He had lost one eye, but 
 I -pitied him for that. And he had filled out in the neck, which made 
 him look manlier. 
 
 "I told him I loved him — there as he stood with his Apollo-like 
 torso — ' ' 
 
 "She means my body, Doc. Ever show you my torso? No? It's some 
 torso. Show it to you some day." 
 
 One day when she was not with him, he showed me his torso. "I'm 
 a pretty fair man below the neck," he said, modestly but truthfully. 
 
 In fact I stood astounded. A breath-taking figure of a man — below 
 the neck. An immense mass of Herculean muscle! Beautiful, too, as 
 Hercules, as even Apollo. I began to wonder if I really had seen now 
 the reason why, at that ringside, the spiritually-minded Smeraldine had 
 fallen in love with this man of three chins and one eye. I pretend to 
 no skill in the unravelling of love-tangles, yet I wondered — and I still 
 wonder. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1069 
 
 Azrael, unfortunately, kept on getting fatter and fatter — three-chin- 
 ned all over. As his body got bigger his soul grew smaller. And, as he 
 kept on getting bigger and smaller, he came to my office more and more 
 frequently — sometimes to complain of the pain in the glaucomatous eye, 
 sometimes to brag about his trickiness in the card games. "I," he gas- 
 conaded, "am a shrewd guy — as slick and slippery as a new-born baby. 
 Now let me tell you about the time when 
 
 Shortly after that, one night, I was called to a saloon where a man 
 had been struck in the eye and then had fainted. Before I started to leave 
 the place, some one at the bar cried in a loud, half-drunken voice, "Where 
 is my wandering boy tonight? Why, there he is — Doc. Shastid." 
 
 It was Azrael. And he was telling all he knew. He was shamelessly 
 disclosing that his wife had syphilis. "Anybody deny it?" he cried. 
 "Who ought to know any better'n me?" And so forth — all he knew, 
 all at least that he should not have been telling. 
 
 "You didn't give her the pock yourself, Az, did you?" quietly ques- 
 tioned a young man from a corner. 
 
 "Who said that? Whoever said that's a — a — Whoever said — " 
 
 I went up to Azrael, reminded him gently of his angina pectoris and 
 the very great danger of death there would be for him should he go on 
 getting angrier. At this he became angrier still. I left the saloon with 
 my patient, both of us accompanied by the young man who had ques- 
 tioned Azrael from a corner. 
 
 Said the young fellow, "What is this here, Doctor, angry pectoralisl 
 Ain't that the heart disease so many people dies so easy from when so 
 little happens to 'em an' they get mad about it?" 
 
 "Yes that's it," I responded. 
 
 "And ef I'd a hit Az he'd maybe a died, an' I'd a been — O God," 
 he drunkenly sobbed, "What I'd a got into if I'd a hit that fool!" 
 
 Azrael and his wife shortly afterward removed from the city in which 
 I then was practising. 
 
 Years later I learned he had outlived his wife and died, actually, 
 with "snakes" in his boots. 
 
 DAUGHTERS WILD 
 
 The doctor is the chief builder of tomorrows. Hence his opportunity 
 and his duty to improve, if he can, not only the nation's health but also 
 its manner of life — a matter so closely related to health that the two 
 can seldom be separated clearly. 
 
 But often he strikes snags — "bad guys" that do not appreciate life's 
 true wisdom. Not all of these are gamblers or even men. Some of them, 
 in this "progressive era," are maidens wild — girls who are about as 
 promiscuous in their sex relations as so many female goats and monkeys 
 and who cannot even understand the beautiful thing that a human life 
 may be transformed into. 
 
 Such a girl I knew upon a time. She brought to my office her mother 
 for the benefit of her eyes, and I never can forget the typical ataxic gait 
 
1070 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 which that mother displayed as she entered the consultation room. It 
 answered the old description fully, "uncertain, irregular, and grotesque." 
 The lower limbs were thrown forward by forcible jerks, without definite 
 direction. The daughter, Regina, was sweetly smiling. "Mother thinks 
 she has to see an eye doctor," she remarked blithely. "She's been treated 
 for locomotor ataxia, which came from her syphilis — so her family doctor 
 said. But she thinks she has to see an eye doctor too. Her family doctor 
 has told her plainly that in locomotor ataxia everybody has bad eyes, 
 so that all she had to do is to keep on taking his medicine — no eye 
 specialist needed." 
 
 "You have told me," I said to the daughter, when I had written her 
 information down — cryptically, of course, "you have told me that your 
 mother has syphilis. Who gave her syphilis?" 
 
 I was looking straight at her. I had known both her and her mother 
 for years. Not much embarrassed, she responded, "I did." 
 
 "When?" 
 
 "When I was twenty. I'm thirty-two now." 
 
 "By kissing her?" 
 
 "Yes. I had the little white sores in my mouth." 
 
 "Had you not been warned by your doctor about the dangers of kissing 
 — kissing by a syphilitic?" 
 
 "No, but I'd read about it." 
 
 "And yet you kissed her?" 
 
 "Well, she always was insisting that I kiss her. I had to give her 
 her way." 
 
 "But you did not tell her of your diseased condition and what the 
 kissing might mean to her?" 
 
 "No, not then — later." 
 
 "You did not get your syphilis just by kissing?" 
 
 "I did not." She looked me brazenly in the eyes. 
 
 There were several things I could do for that mother's sight — thank 
 God. For one thing, I could fit her with glasses so that she could read 
 her newspaper easily, also see well at a distance — something she had 
 not been able to do for years. Her family doctor had foolishly supposed 
 that, inasmuch as locomotor ataxia makes many of its victims blind, 
 therefore it is of no use to try to find out whether a locomotor ataxia 
 patient who does not see well, may not be failing to see because of some 
 other condition that is present in addition to the locomotor ataxia. 
 Such other conditions being present in this mother's eyes, I was happily 
 able to present her with an excellent quality of vision. 
 
 One day, while I was treating her, I happened to notice that the 
 daughter, who, quite unwillingly, was accompanying her mother on her 
 visits to my office, was standing at a window making signs. 
 
 As if in quest of a mislaid instrument, I moved round to another 
 window which also gave upon the street. There, making signals to 
 Regina, were two — not one but two — young men, men whom I knew to 
 be among the vilest criminals in the city. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1071 
 
 EYES AND GRIEF 
 
 Once I had a patient whose eyes continually bothered him, yet who 
 had little detectable trouble in his eyes. Even the ophthalmoscope, which 
 reveals and considerably magnifies the interior or the eyeball, showed 
 slight abnormality. Yet, as I sat and talked with this man, I beheld 
 something deeply wrong with his eyes. For one thing, they were pas- 
 sionately melancholy — melancholy almost beyond belief. 
 
 Now, it is a fact that any depressing emotion, such as grief, produces 
 at first only some functional ailment — one in which there is no alteration 
 in the structure of the organ or organs affected. But it is also true that, 
 after a time, if the depressing emotion be very long continued, the organ 
 or organs affected can be changed in their very structure. These changes 
 are called "structural," or "organic," diseases. The blood-vessels, for 
 instance, in the back of the eye, or those in the muscle of the heart, 
 which, at first, were just functionally contracted by grief and capable at 
 times of re-expansion to normal size, now harden and are narrowed all 
 the time so that the nutrition of the eye, the heart, or whatsoever the 
 organs are which the grief has chiefly affected, becomes greatly interfered 
 with and the structure of those organs can never be sound again. 
 
 Thus, it is highly important to help patients, if you can, to rid them- 
 selves of sorrow. 
 
 I asked this particular patient, "You have had trouble recently?" 
 
 "Yes, much grief." 
 
 "Perhaps if you told me about your sorrow I could in some way help 
 you." 
 
 "I do not think so. My wife died." 
 
 "A long time ago?" 
 
 "Yes, a long time ago." 
 
 He appeared to be gazing down an endless vista of melancholy years. 
 
 "A very, very long time ago," he went on. "A very long time ago. 
 She had been the wife of my youth. It seemed at first incredible. There 
 was just no possibility of realizing what had happened. After a while 
 I did get to realizing — after dreams. You know how it is in dreams when 
 you have lost a loved person." 
 
 "I do. You never see your loved ones dead in your dreams," I put in. 
 ' 'Never — in dreams . ' ' 
 
 "It is true. I have noticed that. They never are dead in our dreams. 
 Every one must have noticed that, I think. Always they are living in the 
 dreams, only to die again as we awaken. That is how we come at last to 
 realize that they are dead. You have seen them die so often as reality 
 returned and the living illusion vanished." 
 
 "It is true," I responded. "Though we not infrequently dream of the 
 living as dead, we almost invariably dream of the dead as still living." 
 
 "One night," he went on, "I had a curious dream. I saw her standing 
 a few feet before me in the sitting-room of our house. I advanced to 
 meet her, but she put me off. Began to complain bitterly, as now and 
 then in life she had done gently — as all people of course sometimes do — of 
 things which I had done and which I should have left undone. She was 
 right about it all. I said, very contritely, 'But I am sorry now. Will 
 
1072 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 you not forgive me? Always in the old days you were so ready to forgive 
 for wrongs I had done that I sometimes thought you always forgave me 
 gladly, that you were more than just merely happy to be forgiving me.' 
 
 "She said then, in a sort of ecstasy, 'Yes, I could forgive you anything, 
 Dan.' 
 
 "So I reached out after her with my arms, and she put up her hands 
 as if to keep me away from her, and cried: 'Do not touch me! I am dead. 
 Do you not know 7 . It is not allowable to kiss the dead. Yes, you did 
 when I had just died, but now I am numbered among those long dead. I 
 belong wholly to those who are dead, not to the living at all but to the 
 kingdom of the dead.' 
 
 "So you see I saw her that time both living and dead — at the same 
 time both living and even speaking to me and yet also dead and speaking 
 to me about that. Nothing ever seems inconsistent in a dream — that is, 
 while still we are dreaming." 
 
 Wishing even yet to help this patient, I asked (he was an educated 
 man): "Have you not tried anything in the way of what is called practical 
 psychology?" 
 
 "Yes. Many years before she died, my wife and I had lived in a 
 different city from the one that she died in. In that city, in our own 
 little home, we had been very happy. One day, after her death, I thought, 
 'I will make an experiment. I will take a trip back to the place in which 
 we used to live, the very house in which we lived when we were first 
 married. I will pretend that again we are back in those old days. I will 
 get off the street-car just where I used to get off it, and then take the 
 old-time long walk to the house. At the door I will ring the bell the 
 way I used to ring it that she might meet me at the door. When some 
 one comes, I will merely, for the look of things, ask to be directed to 
 some fictitious person or other and depart. I thought that this, in some 
 way, would associate, rather re-locate, my grief in the old home rather than 
 in the later one — the one in which I then and still do live, and in which 
 she had died — remove to some extent the sad associations connected with 
 the latter place." 
 
 "Did the plan succeed?" 
 
 "A virago came to the door of our old home with a broom in her 
 hand. 'Now what do you want?' cried she. I said, 'Does a lawyer by the 
 name of Mecklemburg live in this block?' 
 
 "She slammed the door in my face." 
 
 He rose to go. "You think my eye-trouble is due to — to — that other 
 trouble?" 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 "You have no remedy?" 
 
 "None but the one my wife gave to me — some time before her death: 
 'Let not your heart be troubled.' Fourteenth of John, first words." 
 
 He looked me steadily in my own eyes and slowly departed. But 
 returned the next week, helplessly. 
 
 This time his eyes were red. He wanted a lotion to relieve the redness. 
 I gave him a lotion, also another treatment. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1073 
 
 Then he remained and talked more about his sorrow. "It helps me, 
 I think," said he, "just to talk about my trouble — which is harder to 
 bear perhaps than you would think. And so few there are who care in 
 the least about other people's depressions. 'Laugh and the world laughs 
 with you.' 
 
 He was of coarse, almost repulsive, appearance, this man. Yet so 
 warmly appreciative was he of the wife he had lost and the four children 
 she had borne him — likewise lost, all lost — that, despite my first im- 
 pression of the man, I began to feel for him a warm sympathy and 
 friendship. 
 
 There came suddenly into my mind the recollection of a certain after- 
 noon at Pittsfield in the spring of 1891. She who was long afterwards 
 to become "the Companion" came to my office door. There was, at the 
 time, no patient awaiting, so she sat down by me in the waiting-room, 
 and, taking out the first Christmas present I had given her, opened it 
 and said, "This book you gave me, Doctor Tom, Bayard Taylor's 'Home 
 Ballads,' it describes so beautifully this very spring — the first spring 
 after our engagement. It says — 
 
 "The corn was warm in the ground, the fences were mended and made, 
 And the garden-bed, as smooth as a counterpane is laid, 
 Were dotted and striped with green where the peas and radishes grew, 
 With elecampane at the foot, and comfrey, and sage, and rue." 
 
 And she went on with more touching matters, at last crying, "Come! 
 Let us not read any more about spring but go out and live in it." 
 
 I arose, and we walked rejoicefully into the fragrance and the sun- 
 light and the sweet sounds of nesting birds. With our little fingers tightly 
 locked together we went, beaming and not at all ashamed. Out along 
 the old plank sidewalks, block after block, among the bloom-laden fruit- 
 trees — these, too, were madly in love — and so on and on and on. 
 
 But alas, though spring forever returns to this planet, it never at all 
 returns to human lives! She was twenty then, I twenty-three. 
 
 I could not speak to my patient about all that. Such things require 
 the intervention of ink. 
 
 Then there returned to me the day when, years later, as I was in 
 Pittsfield visiting, and was on my way from the Public Square through 
 the beautiful spring weather to my old home, all at once, at the corner 
 of the Presbyterian Church, I beheld the future Companion, waiting. 
 She was much sadder than before, older-looking too than before. I, 
 well-nigh a confirmed invalid, felt older indeed. Around her was gathered 
 a bevy of small girls, plucking her gown and soliciting her attention. 
 She seemed so little and so frail! In fact she was hardly larger than the 
 tallest of the children about her. She had been waiting, waiting for me 
 too all those long-drawn years. 
 
 And the many children about her — her who was never to see even 
 her one and only child alive. 
 
 No, I could not speak of that to my patient either. 
 
1074 MY SECOND LIFE— APPENDIX 
 
 But there was one recollection concerning which I could speak, many 
 such in fact — I of the choloric temper and a perpetual forgetfulness. 
 
 There recurred to me the time, yes, even here at Tramp's Rest, not so 
 very long ago, when, one morning, as the Companion and I together 
 came down stairs, all at once the living room was filled with glorious 
 light. The Companion, rushing to the window, cried, "Quick, Tramp! 
 Quick! and see the loveliest sunrise that ever shone on Lake Superior." 
 I rushed to her side. Hand in hand we stood, both silent in a sort of 
 worship. 
 
 All at once there came to me certain words that I thought I ought to 
 use in a certain place in a book I was writing, or attempting to write. 
 I almost shouted, "I've something to write before I lose it. Back in a 
 minute." And off shot I to my "north dungeon." 
 
 But, in writing, one thing ofttimes begets another. That fact I learn- 
 ed anew that day. For two or three hours I wrote. And, when finally 
 forth I went to rejoin the Companion — she was in tears and refusing to 
 be comforted. I had forgotten to go back and stand with her and share 
 in the sunrise. 
 
 That reminiscence I could easily relate to my patient. So that I did, 
 quite properly condemning myself for my undue forgetfulness — my seem- 
 ing neglect of the Companion who, at my side for so very many years, 
 was soon to be there no longer. 
 
 Even as I related that recent misdoing of mine, I felt a relief. It 
 seemed to me as if I had been really comforted by the mere confession 
 I had made to this man about my heedlessness. And my downcast patient 
 seemed to be comforted by it too, perhaps through the thought that not 
 he alone had been guilty of remissness in the matter of kindly attention 
 to an excellent wife. 
 
 Then I thought of a measure which I had recommended two or three 
 times before to grieving patients. I said, "Have you ever tried writing 
 letters to your wife — not, of course, with any expectation of ever mailing 
 them, but only as if you might be going to mail them? Later, you can 
 destroy them." 
 
 His eyes lighted up. "No, I never have. But why not? Just as if she 
 had only gone somewhere for a short time. My heart has never really 
 believed her dead. (That is why I always dream about her as living.) 
 Perhaps she could look over my shoulder too as I write. Why not? No- 
 body really knows whether she could look or could not. Then why not 
 suppose that she could? And I would always write cheerfully. That 
 might even help both of us." 
 
 Thereafter this patient came to my office several times, took treat- 
 ments, talked again and again with me about the days and ways of long 
 ago, the value to any man of an excellent wife, the failure, in general, 
 of husbands to appreciate wives that are really good, and so on. He 
 himself did the most of the talking. I let him do so. He had written 
 the letters. They had helped him. Mostly, he had cured himself. 
 
 His eyes actually got well -pari passu with his psyche. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1075 
 
 The great pity of the situation is that such treatments of such patients 
 (the psychogenic) consume, in each instance, a large amount of time — 
 more by far than any busy doctor can afford to yield to more than one 
 or two of his patients in a considerable number of days. More unfor- 
 tunately still, the mentally produced diseases and the much greater 
 number of diseases which are produced in other ways are oft times com- 
 bined in one and the same person, also in various persons in various sorts 
 of ways, so that the resulting problems are bewildering, sometimes 
 seemingly endless in their complexity. Then again, some persons whose 
 diseases are purely psychogenic do not willingly, if at all, talk about 
 their troubles to their doctors, and doctors, too, do not like to go prying, 
 prying around in people's souls. 
 
 Sometimes these grieving patients express their griefs peculiarly, 
 even profanely. They do not want to seem "soft." Thus, one man, a 
 lumber merchant: "When my wife died, it seemed as if the very heart — 
 no it wasn't that bad. But we'd lived together a long time, and she'd 
 always looked after me because I somehow always looked after business 
 and never after myself much. As soon as she had died I went and hired 
 a furnished room. Now a funny thing. Before she died, I used at night 
 to throw my clothes around just anywhere, that is when I undressed to 
 go to bed. My socks I specially threw around: one of 'em on the floor, 
 maybe the other on the clock-mantel. But, in the mornin', as soon as 
 I woke up, there were all the clothing articles neatly collected and 
 arranged. After — after she died, I just kept on throwing the things 
 around at night — in my hired room. And, in the mornin', I'll just — I'll 
 just be damned if everything wasn't just where I'd left it the night before. 
 One sock under the bed, t'other on the clock-mantel. Necktie under a 
 chair maybe, and the collar on the chandelier. I tell you it was funny. 
 I'll just be " 
 
 I looked at him closely. His shoulders were shaking and great tears 
 were rolling down his profane cheeks. 
 
 I am specially glad to record such matters of medical psychology, 
 because, in these days of busy divorce courts, criminations and recrimina- 
 tions, bills in equity and cross-bills in ditto, alimony and anti-alimony, 
 it is well to know that some old-fashioned hearts still beat. 
 
 Nevertheless, these patients are not only unusual, they are also cruel, 
 howsoever unintentionally, both to themselves and to their doctors. 
 
 Y. of P'j- and Atypical M.D's 
 
 A Y. OF P. TURNS FOOL REFORMER 
 He lived in southern Illinois, the old Y. of P. man that I have in 
 mind, and, for a time, at his kind invitation, I made weekly visits to- 
 his really commodious office for the purpose of examining and treating 
 there all the patients in his neighborhood who required my services. 
 I had ofttimes heard of this doctor and always as "gruffer'n a bear, but 
 mighty d. . . .n good notwithstandin'." Some Marionites had even told 
 me, "He's so G..d d. . . .n gruff an' not infrequent uses such terrible 
 
1076 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 language, even to his women patients, it's actually a meracle he ain't 
 happened to no accident" — i.e., been whipped for it. "Anyhow, I sup- 
 pose it's because he's so independent that he can afford to be independent. 
 When you got money you can do anythin' an' escape in any direction." 
 
 I found the old fellow, however, notwithstanding all the things I'd 
 heard about him, quite companionable. A Y. of P. man, he nevertheless 
 was a person of considerable education — though he never pretended even 
 to the laity to have more than he possessed of it. In fact he ofttimes, on 
 my visits, looked at my ophthalmoscope with awe. "Can you really 
 see inside the eye with it?" and so on. As a deep penetrant into human 
 nature, he was one of the best that ever I have seen. 
 
 One of the first patients that Dr. Shirley (fictitious name, of course) 
 turned over to me was a woman who seemed to be suffering from all the 
 diseases in the nosology. She had even been to Chicago (having a little 
 fortune of her own) and later to St. Louis, in both of which places she 
 had parted with her ovaries, her tubes, her uterus, her gall-bladder, her 
 teeth, tonsils, and adenoids — as well as, of course, almost all her pocket- 
 book. Now she was getting paralysed, she thought, in both legs, her 
 eyes were bothering her badly, her spleen, kidneys, spinal cord, heart, 
 and so on, seemed — in her opinion — to be terribly and perhaps perma- 
 nently, diseased. She was one patient that was too much interested in her 
 case. 
 
 "Tell you what's a fact, Doc," Shirley told me a bit before she ar- 
 rived. "Tell you what's a fact. That woman's got nothing the matter 
 with her except the doctoring bug. And the cause of her doctoring 
 bug is her family trouble — no children at all plus a no account husband 
 of whom she is constantly and groundlessly jealous. All these things 
 and more I'm a-going to tell her plainly if she don't get well soon. And 
 when I tell 'em I tell 'em/' 
 
 "You wouldn't dare to tell her those things," I ventured. 
 
 "I wouldn't? Say! That woman's simply killing her husband's love 
 for her — the only decent emotion perhaps he ever has had in his life. 
 Tell her! Huh! But see what you can do for her eyes. Then I'll exhaust 
 my scientific resources, and if the lady don't get well and pronto after 
 that, I'll give her the last resort." 
 
 "What's the last resort?" 
 
 "The truth. We sometimes have to use it, you know — strange as it 
 sounds when you hear it." 
 
 That day she came. I found nothing the matter with her eyes and 
 said so both to her and to Dr. Shirley. 
 
 Then I made perhaps a dozen or fifteen visits more, seeing various 
 other patients. Finally came the day of my last visit to the really kind 
 old doctor's office. I was about to pack up and start for the depot when 
 lo and behold there once more entered the lady of many diseases — yet 
 only one. 
 
 When she and the doctor had been in the consultation room about 
 a minute, the door opened and the doctor called me in. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 107.7 
 
 Then and in my presence he told the lady bluntly, flatly and with 
 the utmost possible cruelty that the cause of all her ill health was just 
 one thing — her family trouble — and, in turn, that the cause of all that 
 was — her jealousy, her wholly unfounded, her absolutely ridiculous and 
 damnable jealousy. He told her flatly that no other woman on earth 
 than herself could possibly have a G. . . d. . . . case on him. He was 
 nothing but a G. . . d. . . . idle, lazy, ugly, worthless, incompetent, 
 G. . . d.... good-for-nothing, with a badly bent back, one cross-eye, 
 a bald head and a Jew-peddler nose, who hadn't decency enough or 
 common sense enough to keep any appointment he ever had made and 
 whose mouth was so G. . . d. . . . full of such G. . . d. . . . profanity and 
 such G. . . d. . . . obscenity too, and vile, vicious, ungrammatical English 
 that he was the laughing stock not only of every man of intelligence but 
 also of every woman except the most ignorant and unattractive. 
 
 "Think it a good plan, do I, for you to try to make him jealous of 
 you and see how he likes that? No, by G. .d. You'd be in trouble then, 
 sure enough. Nothing to compare with your present condition, by the 
 Almighty — that. 
 
 "All you got to do, you simple idiot, is to tumble to yourself, to 
 realize that your husband's a man no other woman on earth could pos- 
 sibly fall in love with if she tried, and be d. .d to her. He knows it well 
 
 enough, the big G. .d d fool, but he's got you fooled. You don't 
 
 because you got less sense than he has. An' he keeps making you think 
 that other women are runnin' after him so's to keep you stuck on him 
 forevermore. 
 
 "Stuck on him? Bah! Now get to hell out of here, an' have some 
 sense an' be well of your own self." 
 
 He positively so did "bawl her out" and in my very presence, thus 
 fully justifying all that I had ever heard about him. 
 
 The lady herself, scarlet faced, not with anger at all but with shame, 
 the crudest possible shame, picked up her dainty traps and trappings 
 and dashed into the street. 
 
 Perhaps one year later, I met that doctor at a railroad junction, where 
 we both were waiting for the same train. I had the courage (I know 
 I well may call it that) to ask him how Mrs. So-and-so — the lady patient 
 to whom he had given such a "bawling out" the last time I was in his 
 office — was now getting along. 
 
 "That a bawling out?" he inquired, looking me over from head to 
 foot as if with curiosity. "You ain't heard nothin' yit. O she's getting 
 along fine — sound and well. I heard from a neighbor lady of hers that 
 (it was the very day I gave the patient the 'bawlin' out') that Mrs. 
 Patient, just as soon as she'd got home that day, turned in and, in the 
 very presence of my informing lady, told her husband thus and so about 
 himself. O it was terrible, the language that she used — my informant 
 repeated it to me, slightly modified, of course. It was about the very 
 worst of all the languages that I'd ever heard. In fact it was almost 
 the precise language that Td used to Madam Patient in your presence. 
 Only Madam Patient never, it seems, said a word about it's being my 
 
1078 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 language, or even mentioned me or my name in any way. She just, by 
 G. .d, turned over another leaf in her home book, a-plagiarisin' my whole 
 contents to do it. 
 
 "An' my informant said that it worked, that her so-and-so, the hus- 
 band, hadn't been the same man since. 'Any change would have had to 
 be for the better,' said I, 'you needn't tell me what direction the change 
 was in.' 
 
 The train whistled. A crossing-ball rang. The Doctor and I arose 
 and started for the train. I asked, "Are you still her doctor?" 
 
 "She don't need no doctor now." 
 
 After a little he added, laughter peeping from his profane old eyes, 
 "I'm his doctor now though: he seems to be the nervous wreck." 
 
 A Y. OF P. TURNS CONJURE MAN 
 
 This Y. of P. — or, more simply, Y. P. — was telling me a story of a 
 big buck negro whose wife had left him and gone to live with another 
 big buck negro, of whom the first buck was very greatly afraid. The 
 first buck asked this Y. of P. if he knew of any means or medicine, "con- 
 jure or somepin'," which would have the effect of bringing his wife 
 back home to him. The doctor gave me a cunning look and a laugh, 
 then said, "The nigger had money, so I knew the thing he wanted." 
 
 "Did you actually get her back home?" 
 
 "Sure thing." 
 
 "How?" 
 
 At first he would not tell. But, as I had been of service to his eyes, 
 he at length gave in. "Promise never to tell? Honest to goodness? 
 Cross you heart? Hope to die?" 
 
 "Yes I promise — as to each and every question." (I do not, even now, 
 give his name.) 
 
 "I gave the fool feller a vial, containing exactly seven drops of the 
 spirits of lavender, diluted with seven teaspoonfuls of water. 
 
 "Then I told him that, beginning on the first of next month, he was, 
 at exactly midnight, for the first seven nights, to take a certain teaspoon, 
 which also I supplied him, and with it to deposit on the very center of 
 his back-door sill just one teaspoonful of my conjure medicine. 'But the 
 teaspoonful must be dropped exactly on the middle of the sill,' I said, 
 'and somewhere between the time when the clock in your house begins 
 striking twelve and the time when it finishes doing so.' 
 
 "Another thing that helped to make the 'medicine' effective was that 
 I charged him seventy dollars for it — ten dollars a teaspoonful precisely. 
 And it was worth the money too — assuming that any man in his senses 
 could possibly want a woman like his'n to return." 
 
 "But wasn't the darky pretty mad when he found out she did not 
 return?" 
 
 "Oh ho! But she did return. I saw to that. Had I been unable to 
 see to it I would not have sold the man the medicine. It would not have 
 been ethical." 
 
 "How did you see to it?" 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1079 
 
 In his excitement the Y. P. rose, and, bending down to my ear, 
 whispered very softly: "You see, before this woman had ever married 
 anybody, she came to my office, saying she was just about to die. In 
 fact, getting down on her knees, she prayed to me to save her. — Well, 
 she certainly was a sight when at last I got her on the table. An old 
 woman from back in the country had attempted to relieve her of a three 
 months' child — but did not know the business properly. All I could do, 
 under the circumstances, was to complete the job, dispose of the dead 
 baby, and save the woman from bleeding to death. All these things I 
 did, and she was grateful. But always afterwards she was terribly 
 frightened when she saw me, for fear I was going to have her arrested 
 for getting an abortion started. In fact the woman was now and then so 
 terrified that she was almost insane. 
 
 "Well, time went on and she married this Mr. First Buck. Time again 
 went on, and she, leaving Mr. First Buck, went over into that other 
 county to live adulterously with Mr. Second Buck. 
 
 "To make a long story short. As soon as I had got my seventy dollars, 
 I went over into that other county, and, as soon as her husband had 
 gone into the country to work, I entered the house and, without the 
 slightest preliminary, even the taking off my hat, I said to the nigger 
 lady in a spooky voice, 'You know what you done six or seven years ago. ' 
 She threw up her hands and screamed. 'Quiet!' says I. 'And you ain't 
 paid your penalty to the legal authorities even yet.' 'You hain't come 
 to arrest me?' she inquired protestingly and sinking into a chair. 'No, 
 and I'm never going to bother you at all, if only you go back to your 
 rightful husband on the first of next month at exactly midnight, right 
 while the clock's a-strikin', and call him to you at the back door.' 
 
 "That's exactly what she done too. And, since then, they've lived 
 together happily — leastwise he himself has done so for he comes up 
 here to my office once or twice a year to tell me how very much he thinks 
 of me. — Oh yes, I forgot to say that I told her she was always to say to 
 her husband, whenever he asked her how she had come to return to him, 
 'Oh I don't know, but it 'peared like somepin' was jest always callin' 
 an' callin' me from the middle of the sill in your back door.' And that 
 was what he always said she said to him." 
 
 AS DEEP IN THE MUD 
 
 When I rose to go, I remarked to the Doctor, "Surely you knew at 
 the time you frightened the woman that you would never have dared 
 to tell on her. When you finished that illegal abortion for her, you 
 should at once have gone to the state's attorney's office and reported the 
 case. Your failure to do that, made you, in the eyes of the law, what is 
 called 'an accessory after the fact.' Anyone who knows of a felony yet 
 keeps the matter a secret instead of reporting it promptly, is himself a 
 felon, and liable to be punished as such." 
 
 The old fellow resumed his seat with an easy air and laughed, "Well, 
 Doctor, you yourself are privy to the same matter now. Are you going 
 to report it? If you do, then I'll deny it, and you don't even know who 
 the other people are. We're both safe." 
 
1080 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 THE ONLY DOCTOR WHO EVER SAW A GHOST 
 
 I never have personally heard any physician declare that he believed 
 in ghosts. Here, however, is a story of a doctor who did believe in at 
 least one ghost, a story which was almost on the point of being detailed 
 to me by old Dr. Slanderson, of the region round Galesburg, Illinois, 
 and I have reason to believe that what Dr. Slanderson said to me was 
 precisely what that other doctor had said to him. Is that clear? 
 
 The other doctor was, we will say, A. Greene Yehoodelum, a home- 
 opath. Homeopathy itself, even in that day, was a species of ghost. 
 Always abhorred by the regular medical profession, it had taught that 
 nearly all chronic diseases are produced by the itch-mite — a belief which, 
 of course, even back in the 1890's, had, like the devil-possession theory 
 of disease-production, been largely disposed of by the merciless science 
 of bacteriology. Homeopathy had also taught that the weaker a given 
 medicine is, the more strongly it acts. That second "pillar" of Home- 
 opathy had died of itself, in mere plain words suicided, long ere the 
 1890's, by means of the razor, as John Bunyan might have put it, called 
 "Manifest Untruth." 
 
 Well, Dr. Yehoodelum was a man I had met on a number of occa- 
 sions myself. I had met him once, for example, when Dr. John M. Hewitt 
 and I, having ridden by train for a considerable distance, then drove in 
 a rig to a country big town, to view a sick man jointly. As we drove 
 along in the rig we met Dr. Yehoodelum — a tall, lean, cadaverous look- 
 ing man it is true, but, seeing he was a doctor — Dr. Hewitt intro- 
 duced us — I never foresaw for a moment that, some day, old Dr. 
 Slanderson would be repeating to me young Dr. Yehoodelum's story 
 of his experience with a former lady patient's spectre. Were I a cruel- 
 hearted man I might even add that Dr. Yehoodelum himself did not 
 expect 'er. 
 
 All this to prove that Dr. Yehoodelum himself at all events was a 
 man of flesh and blood — though of not much flesh and of rather white 
 blood. 
 
 Dr. Yehoodelum told Dr. Slanderson that as he, Dr. Yehoodelum, 
 was driving along the road one day, he chanced to fall asleep. (Country 
 doctors often do that, whereby many a one of them acquires the reputa- 
 tion of being a drug-habitue, without, of course, deserving the stigma.) 
 
 All at once he awoke and saw before him in the daylit highway three 
 indistinct and somewhat elevated white human shapes that bobbed slight- 
 ly — as if they were on horseback. Yet he could not catch even the slight- 
 est glimpse of a saddle, a bridle, or a horse. The men were up in the air 
 so to speak and just "bobbing up," also down, serenely. Now these 
 three men, indistinct and pallid and purely aerial though they were, 
 were still not ghosts — according to Dr. Yehoodelum. The coming events 
 proved that completely. Neither were they figments of a sleepy man's 
 imagination. Every little while he could see the features of these aerial 
 beings more distinctly, and he was quite certain that he had never known 
 even one of the men before — also that he would never forget even one 
 of them thereafter. Three plainly visible, perfectly white, men, who 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1081 
 
 bobbed along serenely and on invisible horses, also who, although they 
 were riding toward him, as he toward them, never got the least bit 
 nearer him — the faces of men who conducted themselves like those he 
 was certain he would never forget. 
 
 "All at once," said Dr. Yehoodelum, "there came a loud cry of 
 horror from these three men who were not ghosts. The word that they 
 cried was 'Blood.' My horse squatted down on his haunches trembling 
 in every muscle, suddenly leaped, turned round, upset the buggy and 
 dashed away leaving me in the gutter. 
 
 "When I came to my senses I was quite as horseless as^had been the 
 aerial riders — those three horsemen of the horseless apocalypse. 
 
 "Well, I had a knot on my head as big as a big pumpkin, or an apple. 
 So big it was, in fact, it made me weak. I arose, however, and continued 
 on my now painful journey toward the farmhouse I had been intending 
 to reach. At every step I took I appeared now to be hearing strong men 
 crying, 'Hurry, hurry, hurry! Be in time, be in time, be in time!' 
 
 "Just before I entered the door of the place, these voices cried in 
 agonized tones, 'Too late!' And that was the last that I heard those 
 voices until the funeral. 
 
 ' 'And the house seemed absolutely empty. All the doors and windows 
 were wide open, chairs were overturned, the kitchen table also, nobody 
 present — and, on the cellarway door, BLOOD! That was the blood no 
 doubt that the voice had had in mind. 
 
 "Like most men of scientific training, I am not at all afraid of blood. 
 But when I had reached the bottom of the cellar stairway, there in the 
 light of a candle still burning I saw — I cannot tell you what I saw. 
 But the woman I had come to see, to visit, to treat for a very slight 
 illness, had been transformed by some one into the lifeless — the — well, 
 the thing that I saw." 
 
 "Did she seem to be dead?" asked Dr. Slanderson of the other doctor. 
 "Seem to be? She was. And there was blood over everything. Over 
 everything. Over everything, I tell you, over absolutely everything. 
 I would not have supposed that the blood of so little a woman could 
 have blood-stained so large an area. It looked like about an acre and a 
 half in extent. 
 
 "I got up, dug out of there with much precipitation, meaning of 
 course to inform the coroner. But I had not walked a good, full mile 
 before I beheld those three same horsemen, this time on visible horses 
 and they and their horses all in the natural colors of the world. You 
 see they were not dead, so that, as I told you, their wraiths had not been 
 ghosts, when I'd seen them before, aerially projected. 
 
 "They were actually the same men that I had seen aerially projected, 
 however. I could not be mistaken about that. I could have identified 
 them anywhere on earth. 
 
 "Well, this time, once again, they were bobbing toward me — bobbing, 
 bobbing, bobbing toward me. And they were actually getting, this time, 
 nearer and nearer to me. At last they reached me. Then they all cried 
 together, 'Did we not ask you to hurry, to be in time, hinting that other- 
 wise there would surely be blood when you arrived?' Without waiting 
 
1082 MY 'SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 for answer, they galloped on toward the house I just had quitted, and 
 wherein lay the body, as the papers that night put it, of their sister. 
 These three men, who had lived in the next-south county, had all had 
 premonitions of their only sister's death, and so had started out on 
 horseback (because of the bad timetables of the railroads) to see her as 
 early as possible." 
 
 "Were you present at the funeral?" asked of him Dr. Slanderson. 
 
 "I certainly was present, and so were those three horsemen too." 
 
 "Shastid," Dr. Slanderson went on, "I asked that man, that Dr. 
 Yehoodelum, 'Are you sure that woman ever died? Was she really dead?' 
 'Dead!' cried he, 'What do you think they buried her for?' — Shastid, 
 do you challenge mine accuracy?" 
 
 "Challenge your accuracy? No. Certainly I do not challenge your 
 accuracy." 
 
 "Well, you look as if you did. I'll merely say that, that night, as 
 Dr. Yehoodelum informed me, he saw that woman's ghost. And 
 that was the terriblest ghost tale that ever I have heard or read about. 
 It was a tale — But I will not tell it to you, Shastid, for I see that you 
 challenge mine accuracy." 
 
 So I missed hearing the only ghost story that ever was told by a 
 doctor who had actually seen a ghost. 
 
 DUBLIN IN ANOTHER ROLE 
 
 I have already said so many things concerning Dr. Dublin that were 
 either not wholly to his credit — for example, his habit of drinking hard 
 — or else were merely to display his eccentricities, that I must, as a sort 
 of good-bye to him in this volume, tell of a case wherein he played a, 
 for him, unusual part. 
 
 Father and I, one day, when I had just begun to practice general 
 medicine in Pike County, were called to by Dr. Dublin from the 
 doorway of a log hut — a hut surrounded by every evidence of the most 
 extreme poverty. The Doctor, as usual, when we had arrived, ignored me 
 absolutely. I, however, did go into the hut with my father. 
 
 There Dublin and my father held a consultation. Father, that is to 
 say, examined the patient, turned and slowly looked at Dr. Dublin so 
 that the patient could not see the expression on my father's face. 
 
 That was all there was of the "consultation." 
 
 I, as I looked at the patient's countenance, also not merely beheld the 
 Hippocratic (dying) face, but, in addition, remembered that, once, at a 
 country church festival, I had heard this patient — then in the vigor of 
 abounding health — declare of this same Dr. Dublin (who was not present 
 on the occasion): "He is a man that can make surgical instruments say 
 'Uncle.' Seen him operate a boil once." How I had laughed at the time 
 over the plain man's effort to express his sincere admiration for this really 
 excellent doctor-surgeon. And how little the words possessed of humor- 
 ous quality for me now, as the man lay a-dying! What a queer com- 
 mixture of the humorous and the tragic — like all life for that matter! 
 
 The man turned his head toward Dublin, "Tell me," he demanded, 
 "some of your funniest stories." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1083 
 
 Dublin then started to tell him — I remember it very clearly — the story 
 about a man who wore sandpaper breeches, so's he wouldn't have to 
 spend all his time a scratchin'. All at once he stopped short. 
 
 Then he rose from his chair. Two big tears — the only ones I had ever 
 seen him shed — were starting down his cheeks. 
 
 My father rose, said to me, "Come" in a tone that told the whole 
 story. 
 
 The wife — a widow now — had not noticed that her husband had 
 passed away. So she followed us out of doors with her several small 
 children. "Doctor," she said, "I wish you'd tell me your bill: got an 
 extry cow that we can sell." 
 
 Dublin took from his bill-fold a twenty-dollar note. "This is the 
 only bill you'll need just now," he told her softly. She stared at him 
 strangely for a moment, then turned and re-entered the house. Dublin 
 followed her and I could see him lay the bill on the table, then place a 
 dish over it, and start back toward my father and me. 
 
 So I can see him still. Therefore I can hardly answer just why I have 
 placed this brief anecdote about him in my section devoted to "atypical 
 M.D's." The act was thoroughly typical of country doctors generally in 
 that day. Still, after all, Dublin was very atypical — a bundle of con- 
 tradictions in fact. He left instructions that he wanted "no religious 
 nonsense" at his funeral, only a few simple words from his friends, Harry 
 Higbee and Gus Dow. Yet what truly is religious? and what is not? 
 
 "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these, even these least, ye did it 
 unto me." 
 
 THE DOCTOR WHO'D PLENTY OF TIME 
 
 In southern Illinois I knew and could not help liking a physician 
 who was the champion "leaner" of the medical profession. No, he was 
 not a Y. P. but a "diploma man," a veritable M.D. — two fine letters 
 which, in the minds of many in southern Illinois meant not "Doctor in 
 Medicine" but "Medical Diploma." Well, this man had undoubtedly a 
 medical diploma, but he was not so certainly one learned (i.e., doctor) 
 in medicine. Yet, too, he stood, or leaned, far above the level of a mere 
 Y. P. — undoubtedly. 
 
 He was a colorful character, a man of whims and crotchets and, above 
 all else, a leisure. He was kind-hearted, also skilful, yet he never per- 
 mitted his kind-heartedness or his professional skill to lure him from his 
 leisure. That was of the essence of his ego. 
 
 The Companion and I were once called in to be his guests at dinner. 
 He lived in a lovely house, had a lovely family, and life in that family 
 was both lovely and leisurely. Two or three messengers arrived while 
 we ate, demanding his presence immediately. To each and every one of 
 them he responded, soothingly, "after awhile, after a while" (southern 
 Illinois equivalent now and then for "manana"). 
 
 His name, let us say, was Masterson, and he lived miles and miles 
 away from Marion. 
 
 One day he called me on the phone to meet him at a farmhouse about 
 equidistant from his office (which stood a few feet from his house) and 
 Marion. At that farmhouse, he said, there lived with her parents a very 
 
1084 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 estimable young lady who, though unmarried, was just on the verge of 
 blindness due to the nephritis (kidney inflammation) of pregnancy. He 
 wanted me to examine her eyes and advise him what to do. He likewise 
 urged me to be at that farmhouse exactly at 9:00 a.m. and "no fooling. 
 I insist that you be perfectly punctual," said he, "because at times I 
 have noticed a slight tendency on your part to miss an appointment." 
 Of all the effrontery — for a leaner to be admonishing me, old man Punctual 
 himself from Punctual City, to be punctual! 
 
 I assured Doctor Masterson I'd try to beat my -record, and he replied 
 that he was "already hitched up" and starting for the place of consulta- 
 tion. 
 
 The Companion almost broke her pretty neck getting me ready in 
 time. Then I dashed down the stairway and into the livery-stable rig, 
 for which the Companion had promptly phoned. Away went I into the 
 blue distance with lather all round the harness and the rabbits scattering 
 as I drove. I had not time even to listen, listen, listen to the mocking birds. 
 
 I stopped before the farmhouse, the poor horse's head hanging and 
 his nostrils blowing and sucking, blowing and sucking. The house was 
 nearly as good as Doctor Masterson's itself. All the family, except 
 mother and patient, were lined upon the porch. 
 
 As I passed up the walk, I inquired, "Doctor Masterson arrived?" 
 
 "O no. You're Doctor Shastid? Doctor Masterson is always late." 
 
 "Doctor Masterson late?" So I, in astonishment. 
 
 "Yes, we've had Doctor Masterson for years, and he's always been late. 
 But when you do get Doctor Masterson, you've got jw^?body." 
 
 "Phone to him at once," I commanded as I entered the house. 
 
 The father phoned, said to the rest of us, "He says he's just starting." 
 
 The father and mother cleared the room of the other children, then, 
 in the very presence of the patient herself, told me the whole tragical 
 tale. 
 
 "She'd always been a good child," concluded the father. "And 
 never a time had she told us a lie until this once." 
 
 "It's not a lie," cried the victim in great mental agony. "It's not a lie. 
 I am not in the way you say I am. I am not, I am not, I am not — O I 
 wish I were dead. I'll kill myself. I will, I'll kill myself!" 
 
 I tried to pacify her as the father went on: "We couldn't believe it at 
 first, but the fresh young feller she insisted on goin' with — he, well 
 he's skipped the country, and Masterson he's examined Rosy Ann a 
 dozen times and each and ev'ry time he's said she's pregnant." 
 
 My interests were deeply aroused, not only because the child was 
 very beautiful, but also because, to my ears, her voice was filled with 
 nothing but absolute truth. 
 
 "Phone Masterson again," I almost shouted. 
 
 ' 'Already — again?' ' 
 
 "Yes, again." 
 
 The father complied, reported that Masterson had said he'd be ready 
 to start in about half an hour. I meantime had found in the eyes not the 
 slightest sign of nephritis. Yet the girl had complained to me that she 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1085 
 
 was totally blind! I knew that she simply had hysterical blindness. 
 Why should she not, with all her world arrayed against her? 
 To the mother: "Does the patient eat well?" 
 
 "Eats only when we make her eat." 
 
 "Bowels regular, and bladder?" 
 
 "Bowels move well, but the bladder hain't moved for more'n a whole 
 day or two. Masterson said about a hour ago that that don't make no 
 difference." 
 
 I turned down the cover and looked at the abdomen: a tumor as large 
 as a big egg-plant stood up from its lower region. 
 
 "A chamber!" I cried. When it arrived I passed a catheter. The 
 chamber was filled to the top, and then another vessel was almost filled in 
 addition. How that bladder had escaped rupturing I do not know to 
 this day. 
 
 All over the abdomen I passed my stethoscope, but never a single 
 sound from a fetal heart heard I. Nor was there any other sign of preg- 
 nancy. The girl was supposed to have been pregnant six months. 
 
 "Shall I always be blind?" whispered little Rosy Ann. 
 
 "No, no, my child." The attending physician was not present, but I 
 took the responsibility of telling that child the truth myself. In fact I had 
 already broken a rule about consultations — that, namely, which forbids 
 a consultant to examine any patient saving and excepting only in the 
 presence of the attending physician, and which also forbids a consultant 
 to enter a sick-room before the attending physician himself steps into it. 
 But, to all rules there must be exceptions. That case itself was a great 
 exception. 
 
 And still Doctor Masterson did not arrive. 
 
 I went out to the gate. No sign of him. 
 
 I re-entered the house, rang Masterson myself, asked him when he 
 was coming. "Don't be in a hurry," he drawled. "What's the hurry?" 
 "Doctor Masterson," I shouted, "If* you're not here inside of two hours, 
 I'll tell this family exactly my findings in the case." 
 
 "You know you'll be breaking the rules." 
 
 "If you're not present in an hour and a half, I'll tell these people the 
 actual situation, if it breaks all the rules in the Bible." 
 
 "Why, what actual situation?" 
 
 "That broke down all of my final discretion. "The truth," I said — 
 and all the family heard me — "is that the patient's bladder was just 
 about to burst. I drew off the urine, and she's safe now. She has only 
 hysterical blindness, it will disappear of itself inside of a day and ab- 
 solutely without any special treatment other than the fact that she knows 
 her parents no longer believe her a bad girl — which they won't," I 
 concluded as loudly as I could shout — "when they hear me say there isn't 
 the slightest sign of pregnancy in this case." 
 
 Now what about the rules? Well, Masterson was silent for some time, 
 then drawled, "Well, Shastid, I certainly do owe you a vote of thanks. 
 And I'm just as glad as you are that you found me mistaken. Give my 
 congratulations to the whole family and tell them how much I think 
 of them." 
 
1086 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 And I'd almost expected to be told he would shoot me on sight. 
 
 Well, that was southern Illinois for you! 
 
 Many a time and oft I met the good doctor thereafter, and each and 
 every time he told me how glad indeed he was that I'd "saved" him 
 from a terrible mistake. "Why, do you know that I was just about to 
 perform an abortion on that good girl? Well, I was. You sometimes 
 accuse me of being too leisurely by far. But it ain't always well to be 
 in a great hurry. What if I'd jumped in an' performed that abortion? 
 Never be in a hurry, I say and say again. Never be in a hurry." 
 
 THOSE WHO CHALLENGE MINE ACCURACY 
 
 Whenever old Doctor Slanderson completed one of his tall tales, he 
 would lift his quiet eyebrows threateningly and demand, "Do you 
 challenge mine accuracy?" 
 
 "No, no. Not at all." 
 
 On a certain day he added: "If you do, I will go no further. If you 
 don't or at least are kind enough to asseverate that you do not, I will 
 proceed to relate to you the story of my greatest experience of all. It is 
 a strange story. It is yours though: you have deserved it." 
 
 The old doctor was not a resident of Galesburg, the town in which 
 I then was practising. He came at intervals from a certain distance off 
 to have me swab his throat — something he could have done for himself 
 — then spent a good, long hour in pleasant, and for me ofttimes profitable, 
 conversation. Finally he went to a local hotel, where (I shame to relate 
 it) he went all alone on a periodic drunk before returning to the place in 
 which he had for a long time practiced. 
 
 Or said that he practiced. In fact I had heard that he did but little 
 practice, if any, though everybody in the tiny town wherein he resided 
 and attempted to seem a doctor, looked up to him in awe and astonish- 
 ment because of his knowledge of Latin and Greek and at least of theo- 
 retical surgery. 
 
 His person was unprepossessing. Huge, fat, shapeless — a kind of 
 Falstaff he — with certain curious twists about one corner of his mouth 
 and one single, apparently paralytic, eyelid. He had a superiority com- 
 plex with regard to his practice of surgery and an inferiority complex 
 regarding his relations with women of every size, shape and hue. 
 
 From one of his distant kinsmen he had inherited a small annuity. 
 
 He was very, very wise — he really was — as to many matters. I learned 
 a great deal from him. In fact I loved him too and I know that, for that 
 very reason, he would forgive me fully, were he only alive now, for 
 portraying his actual character in this book and also for using as the 
 caption to this whole section of it an expression which was ever on his 
 kind old lips but which he used in very much fuller form. (I here have 
 shortened it by lopping off its latter and decidedly hotter end: "Those 
 who have challenged mine accuracy may — " And so forth and so on, 
 to the very temperature of the sun. 
 
 On the time he was with me that I started to tell about above, the 
 old doctor had just been bragging again concerning the amount of surgery 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1087 
 
 he was doing — although he knew quite well that I knew he wasn't 
 doing any. 
 
 When he happened to catch me smiling a little, he demanded, as so 
 often he had done before, "Do you challenge mine accuracy?" 
 
 "I certainly do not," I answered. 
 
 "Because," he continued, as for a moment he ceased pacing the floor, 
 "those who challenge mine accuracy may just be everlastingly — " And 
 so on. But he wound up: "To you, however, my good young friend, 
 these words do not apply. You never have challenged mine accuracy." 
 Stopping again with some suspicion, "If you do I will go no further. 
 But, if you don't, or at least are kind enough to asseverate that you do not, 
 I will proceed to relate to you the story of my greatest achievements of 
 all. It is a strange story. It is yours though. You have deserved it." 
 
 He went to pacing the floor again, "It was some years back — you 
 were not then born." He looked up at the ceiling as if to discover the 
 details of his reminiscences there. Then — 
 
 "I had had a terrible headache for three days and nights, in conse- 
 quence of youthful tarryings at the wine cup — a practice I deprecate but 
 have not always had the courage to resist. 
 
 "At length the pains became too great for me. I stepped across the 
 hall to the office of another doctor — in which office, I may say, incident- 
 ally, there worked for much too pitiable a pittance a very fine looking 
 young lady for whom, through a very long time, I had felt a great admira- 
 tion, although of course she never could have felt even the slightest one 
 for me. (Look at me!) 
 
 "I asked her where her employer (he was not then in his office) was 
 accustomed to keep the Elixir of Triple Bromides — a headache medicine 
 which he several times before had prepared for me and administered to 
 me with his own very hands. 
 
 "Said she, with something of a foreign accent, It is where it has 
 always been, the next to the last bottle at the right hand end of shelf 
 No. 3- Help yourself to two teaspoonfuls. The spoon is close by, and my 
 hands are dirty from cleaning the office.' 
 
 "I went and took the medicine, gave her a grateful as well as an 
 admiring look, and returned to mine own office. 
 
 "Now listen to the sequel. For a very long time I had been praying 
 for a surgical practice — a very good big one amongst the biggest people 
 in our little county seat." 
 
 The doctor stopped in his pacing and scrutinized my lineaments with 
 suspicion. "Do you question my ver — I mean mine accuracy? Perhaps 
 you have heard that the very first patient on whom I ever operated, 
 passed to his Creator — in other words died. Is that any reason for sus- 
 pecting the nature of all my subsequent work? No. Who is there that 
 cures every one of his patients, surgically or non-surgically? Does he 
 dwell in Chicago, New York, London, Paris? No, he does not. He is 
 not even in this room at this very minute, though you and I are here. 
 They who challenge mine accuracy may [And so forth.] But you do not 
 challenge it. 
 
1088 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 "Hardly had I got back to my office when the horrible headache 
 passed completely away from me. Then — it seemed almost like an answer 
 to those very many prayers — there entered my humble waiting-room no 
 less a person than Judge Smith. A moment later there came Mayor Jones. 
 And just a moment later still, our chief money-lender, Mr. Jamieson. 
 
 "I took all three into my consultation room at the same time. And 
 there I examined, diagnosed, prognosed and told them what was neces- 
 sary — all in a very few seconds. Said they, as if with a single voice, 
 'Do what you like, we implicitly trust you.' 
 
 "Well, I did what I liked. The Judge I laid on the table. I took out 
 his prostate. Then I opened his liver, made a deep hole in it, pushed 
 into the hole his prostate and sewed up the hole. The prostate could 
 be no further obstruction there, yet still he retained his -prostate. 
 
 "Then the Mayor I laid upon the table. I cut off his feet and his 
 hands and then transposed them. The reasons? I forget those now, but 
 I knew them at the time. 
 
 "Then our man of many loans, Mr. Jamieson — a Scotchman he — I 
 laid upon the table. He, I thought, had had his skull crushed by some 
 disgruntled client who had been disinclined to return to him certain 
 moneys he had borrowed of him, either with or without interest. I tell 
 you I took his own thigh bone and made him a new skull out of it. 
 Next, from the skin of his buttock, I made him a new scalp, though of 
 course a bald one. 
 
 "I gave no anesthetic to any. They were men of grit and courage. 
 Nor did I bother about the monkey-doodle of asepsis. The germ theory 
 has never even yet been proved, and, anyway, each and every one of those 
 prominent men began getting well, right there before my eyes. — Hold 
 on, now, hold on! Remember the imprecation which I called down on 
 any one who would venture to question my ver — my accuracy? — Listen 
 first to the sequel: then judge. 
 
 "All at once there came into the room our village undertaker, Mr. 
 Blackmere. And all my patients apparently were dead. He was not a 
 strong-looking man, this Mr. Blackmere, but he shouldered those three 
 corpses easily — all on one shoulder — and, as he left, he said, 'Will be 
 back for you, you monster who does so much surgery. Into the Big House 
 you shall go, there to labor and to rot, instead of in the soil as these 
 shall do.' 
 
 "I leapt up in anger and attempted to seize the undertaker, but, 
 instead, I was myself laid hold upon — by some one who kept shouting, 
 'Wake up, wake up.' 
 
 "It was my neighbor's beautiful office-nurse (as I said, a young and 
 very beautiful foreign-born lady, for whom, alas! I was no fit com- 
 panion). 
 
 T am awake,' declared I. 
 
 " 'Not at all,' said she, 'although you do make a big fine job of sleep- 
 ing with one eye open. Say, what kind of a sleep- job this is, eh?' 
 
 "I tell her about the three big pieces of surgery I have just performed 
 on our three most prominent citizens — the Judge, the Mayor and the 
 Money-Lender, Jamieson. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1089 
 
 'You? You operated on those men? You think you have cured them? 
 You shall be famous.' 
 
 'But,' I told her, 'a little later, a few minutes — they died. And 
 then the undertaker came and took them away, meaning to return for 
 me shortly. Since then,' I said, 'I have been sitting here all alone for 
 nights and nights and days and days, and nobody at all came near me. 
 Even thou,' saidest I, 'did not come anigh unto me.' 
 
 "All at once she burst into terrible laughing. 'Do you, then,' I ques- 
 tioned her, 'in any respect whatever make question of mine accuracy?' 
 
 "She did not answer, but laid me on the lounge, fetched cold water 
 and applied it to my temples. After a time she asked, 'Now; do you think 
 you have done operations?' 
 
 "I looked her squarely in her beautiful orbs and responded, 'I begin 
 to doubt it.' 
 
 'Of course you do, you old dear,' she corroborated. 'The Judge and 
 the Mayor and the Money-Lender, they were only dreams. So was the 
 undertaker. But the Cannibis Indica that you got hold of by mistake, 
 that was real, very real. It is also very intoxicating. So is my love for 
 you, you blessed old sweetheart.' 
 
 "I leaned over and kissed her — " 
 
 "But you have never been married!" I cried out, and with no little 
 astonishment. 
 
 "No," he responded slowly, "I haven't. I haven't. — I was afraid 
 she too had got hold of the Cannabis Indica bottle. Why else should she 
 think that a man like me was a 'dear' and a 'sweetheart'? — Say, look at 
 me: look straight at me. See this corner of my mouth from facial par- 
 alysis? See that helpless eyelid, the result of the same affliction? See my 
 rum-blossom nose, my acne rosacea, my big fat stomach — my — my — 
 And I swear unto you by Apollo himself, that, in my youth and earlier 
 manhood, I was five times uglier than even I am now. — What! you don't 
 believe that? Neither did you believe the wonderful operations that I 
 just now told you about, even as I was telling you about them — during 
 which brief period of time at least they were perfectly true. Well, so, 
 all things considered, I did not believe a bit in that beautiful young lady's 
 statement that she loved me. I could not believe it." 
 
 ' 'Then why did she make the statement? She was, no doubt, in perfect 
 earnest — you have been so lonely too as a bachelor all these many years 
 that have passed since then. She would no doubt have married you." 
 
 "O yes — for revenue only. She must have heard of my inheritance. 
 You are right, though, when you say that I am lonely — lonely enough. 
 Yet, after all, I sometimes think that, when I thought she said she loved 
 me, I had just relapsed for a moment into those — into the Cannabis — 
 Cannabis — Cannabis — What you may call it? I am growing old. I can- 
 not always remember words." 
 
 FOOL'S GOLD 
 
 He was very impressive the moment he came into my Galesburg 
 office — Dr. Butanesco. Erect, tall, dark, vivid, quick-spoken, decidedly 
 commanding, he would have caught the attention of anybody anywhere. 
 
1090 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 He handed me, frankly, his professional, rather his unprofessional, 
 card, remarking, "Not only an advertising doctor — there's nothing im- 
 moral about that — but admittedly out for the money. I have hypertrophic 
 rhinitis, am unable to breathe through my nose, either side. I have 
 already sent you two or three patients [that was the truth — patients whom 
 he did not want] but, if you do not wish to treat me, I will keep you 
 from your work no longer. 
 
 Those were the days before the miracle clinic of the Mayos had taught 
 the world, especially the medical profession, that first-class medical and 
 surgical services are not in the least inconsistent with modest, likewise 
 perfectly honest, publicity. Dr. John T. Murphy, of Chicago, it is true, 
 had, for years, appeared at intervals in the front pages of several Chicago 
 newspapers, always to tell the people the truth about himself and 
 nothing but the truth; yet, each time, only stirring the rest of the medical 
 profession in Chicago to the loudest and bitterest charges of quackery. 
 The doctor now before me, however, was, on his card, plainly telling — 
 well, making exaggerated statements. He was indubitably unethical. 
 
 Nevertheless, I had a burning curiosity to know him. First, he was 
 a strange variety of homo (more or less) sapiens. Second, he had been 
 drinking enough to make him talkative. Third, he was inclined to do 
 the talking all about his own sublime and perfectionated self. 
 
 So, as I proceeded to examine, to anesthetize, to cauterize, he dis- 
 coursed and discoursed and discoursed about Dr. Butanesco. 
 
 "Just had an interesting case," said he. "Old man Rente — know 
 him?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Cicatricial aphonia. Got fifty dollars out of him to begin with, 
 and a note for fifty more if I cure him — that is, I'm not to sell it at the 
 bank until he admits he is well." 
 
 "But he will never admit that. He never can get well." 
 
 "True. And when he goes to complaining, I'll give him back his 
 note. But the fifty dollars cash will have been big pay for the very few 
 minutes of time I shall have given him." 
 
 "Why, then, the note, if you intend never to cash it?" 
 
 "That's to keep him from being too angry when, at last, I tell him 
 I cannot make him well, or when perhaps, on his own motion, he walks 
 in, charging me with being a bad man — frightened at the thought that 
 I may have sold his note already. I'll just put my hand into my wallet, 
 pull out the note and present it to him. 
 
 "Then he'll believe I at least expected to cure him, and that my 
 statement that his is the first case of its kind I ever have failed to cure 
 is true. But, by the bargain, I am to keep the fifty dollars — just to cover 
 'expenses' — and that I of course do keep. And say, I can make ten or 
 twenty dollars where you, with all your monkey-doodling education, 
 can make one." 
 
 "But the people you hoo-doo," I put in. "What about them — yes, 
 and their money, which, in these very hard times, the great majority 
 most sorely need?" 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1091 
 
 "Fool's gold!" he shouted with gay laughter. "Fool's gold! A fool 
 and his money should be promptly separated — made miles apart. They 
 will be separated too, at some time, by one person or another. Why, then, 
 not now and by me — me who probably appreciate the money more than 
 could any other of the vast multitude of separation artists?" He began 
 singing— 
 
 "Fool's gold! Fool's gold! 
 All else on earth doth leave me cold." 
 
 When he had finished he began showing me some of the "literature" 
 he had just been sending out. I did not interrupt him. Anyone who 
 could make a sick man grateful to him because he, the obvious stealer 
 of fifty of the sick man's dollars, had returned to him a note which he, 
 the supposed physician, had never in the first place intended to bank, 
 must be indeed a "separation artist." I let him talk on — noting again, 
 however, more closely than before, the excellent way in which he was 
 "groomed." His hat — he wore it continually in my office — must have 
 been worth ten dollars. His suit of clothes — Prince Albert, trousers 
 and everything — were all of the best material and most stylish design. 
 He wore a Van Dyke beard, like almost every doctor of the time, was 
 otherwise shaven to a nicety; and his hawk-like nose, piercing black 
 eyes, and heavy dark hair — all gave to him an air of distinction and 
 unquestionable authority. 
 
 He laid on my desk, after I had got through treating him, his very 
 latest masterpiece in the way of "literature." This sheet displayed a 
 handsome portrait of his no less handsome self. Underneath ran a legend, 
 giving his name and reciting that he, the mighty So-and-so, had taken 
 the degree of Doctor in Medicine at such and such a college [naming in 
 fact a medical institution which, though actually accredited by the State 
 Board of Illinois Medical Examiners, was nevertheless known all over 
 the country as a mere shameless diploma mill] and that he had taken that 
 degree with the highest honors possible. 
 
 Then followed a long series of paragraphs, each headed by the name 
 of some serious disease, which the paragraph then went on to declare 
 that Dr. Butanesco had been the discoverer of a cure for. At the head 
 of the final paragraph stood this word, 
 
 DIPHTHERIA 
 
 When I saw this terrible vocable I gave an astonished gasp. The 
 antitoxin for diphtheria, not so long before discovered by von Behring, 
 of Berlin, had now quite plainly proved and established itself as the 
 first and, at least to that date, the absolutely only, cure for the horrible 
 and almost always fatal disease whose name stared out in such hellish 
 letters. Of the efficacy of antitoxin, let me repeat, there no longer was 
 even the slightest doubt in the minds of all the doctors who had used it. 
 But here was Dr. Butanesco saying in the most absolute manner that the 
 only real, actual and unquestionable cure for diphtheria was his own 
 most precious discovery — Dr. Butanesco's Syrup No. 14. 
 
 And Dr. Butanesco, still under the influence of his two or three high- 
 balls, kept running on about his achievements, especially his ability to 
 
1092 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 make money — not in the usual way but as a separation artist. "Just 
 sent a set of this new literature to my wife/' said he, pointing to the 
 stuff I had been reading. "Will not she be proud?" 
 
 He himself was looking proud enough, as he stood up from the desk, 
 still casting worshipful eyes over his newly originated and about-to-be- 
 mailed-out "literature." 
 
 "Does your wife understand?" I asked, waving a hand across the 
 literature in a kind of comprehensive way. 
 
 "Understand that this is all bunk?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "She? No indeed. No, she believes, just like our little daughter 
 Mamie, that I'm exactly what I say I am. Wouldn't undeceive her for 
 the world. 
 
 "By the bye, she's sold a lot of my medicines to her neighbors, and 
 they all just swear by 'em. She's one of the squarest little critters that 
 ever — Sent her a draft for five hundred dollars just the other day to 
 finish paying off on our fine new home, back there in Kain-tuck. Some 
 day — some day — I'm going to quit being this separation artist and go 
 into something else. Meantime — it's me for the fools' gold." 
 
 And so he left my office. 
 
 To return in a very few days drunker than ever, and demanding if I 
 thought for a moment he was any worse than two-thirds of the so-called 
 "ethical" medical profession — the kind that belongs to all the medical 
 clubs and societies. "Now you're a graduate of the very best of schools," 
 he was kind enough to tell me, "and so you know the truth. Is it or is 
 it not a fact that at least two-thirds of the medical colleges in the United 
 States are merely diploma mills — just as bad as the little one in Iowa I 
 graduated from or worse? Say, don't you know that easily half the 
 medical profession of this country can't tell the difference between small- 
 pox and measles?" 
 
 "I wouldn't say that," I replied. "And the great majority of doctors 
 in this city are certainly competent. But, the country over, I — well, I 
 understand there's room for some improvement." 
 
 " Some improvement!" He walked out, saying, "Sooner or later Til 
 find and then I'll send you documentary evidence that not only the rank 
 and file of the medical profession in this country, but even the professors 
 in the most of our medical colleges to-day are so inferior in scholarship — 
 so — so — Well, just as low down as / am. I'll get it if I can some day, and 
 then — hie! — I'll send it to you." 1 
 
 *True to his word was he. Years later, when I had almost forgotten the man com- 
 pletely — 1910 to be exact — he sent me a marked copy of the report on "Medical Education 
 in the United States and Canada," which had been prepared by no less an authority than 
 Abraham Flexner, and with the assistance of Dr. William H. Welch of Johns Hopkins 
 University, Dr. Simon Flexner of the Rockefeller Institute, and Dr. Arthur D. Bevan, Chair- 
 man of the Council on Education of the American Medical Association. The entire investi- 
 gation and report were made under the auspices of "The Carnegie Foundation for the Ad- 
 vancement of Teaching." This report, therefore, was not in any sense the work of radicals, 
 or of muck-rakers, but of calm, sober, clear-headed and true-hearted men of the very high- 
 est standing in the medical profession of this country and of the world. 
 
 It is a quarto volume of 326 pages, exclusive of the Index, and, from end to end, consists 
 of carefully presented, but absolutely damning, statements of fact about a very large propor- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1093 
 
 About a week later he came for still another treatment. While seated 
 in the chair he began again telling me about the old man with the in- 
 curable aphonia. "So certain is he," said the doctor, "that I will even- 
 tually cure him, so absolutely made up is his mind (or imagination) that 
 he is really better already, that he told me to-day I need not wait any 
 longer about depositing that note but could bank it at once. So I bank- 
 ed it." 
 
 While still I was treating the man, in walked my office assistant, 
 saying, "Dr. Butanesco, here's a telegram a friend of yours said for me 
 to give you. He said it had come to his care in another city, one you 
 had intended to remove to and where you had rented a room in his 
 house. He was going through Galesburg anyway, he said, so had brought 
 the message with him, but had had to catch another train out and so 
 could not wait." 
 
 "Just another sucker!" said the callous Dr. Butanesco. 
 
 As I put the last of the plugs in his nose and asked him to wait a 
 few minutes until the medicine had taken effect, he began opening his 
 telegram. 
 
 At first his eyes widened — just a little. 
 
 Then he arose and they went much wider. 
 
 tion of the medical colleges of the United States as they were at the date of the report. 
 Perhaps the climax of condemnation is attained on page 216 of the Report, wherein it is 
 said that "The city of Chicago is in respect of medical education the plague spot of the 
 country." 
 
 It should, however, in fairness be stated that, in the part of the Report devoted to the 
 individual schools of Chicago, some — for example Rush Medical College and Northwestern 
 University Medical Department — appeared to have been most excellent institutions. 
 
 Nevertheless, Dr. Butanesco — this, of course, was not his actual name — had had his 
 sort of revenge upon me: revenge not so much for anything I had said or done to him as 
 for what he must have known that I was thinking about him. He had at last, after about 
 thirteen years, sent me "the documents." 
 
 As a kind of postscript to the foregoing I must state, for the benefit of the wholly lay 
 reader, that Chicago, to-day, instead of being the medical "plague spot of the country," 
 is a medical center of enlightenment, standing in that respect among the foremost of the 
 world. 
 
 As a further postscript too, I wish to declare that it seems to me a crying shame that, 
 in none of either of the medical histories of the world or the medical histories of the United 
 States is any worth-while account presented of the seamy side of American medical history 
 — for example, of the great era of the Y. of P. men (men who had had no medical education 
 and yet had been licensed to practice), or of the great acid poisoning era (when almost every 
 human being was treated for "the uric acid diathesis"), of the great HS era (when innum- 
 erable consumptives were "cured or benefitted greatly" by injections of sulphuretted hydro- 
 gen into the rectum), of the ovariectomy era (when hundreds of thousands of women had 
 one or both their ovaries unnecessarily taken out, ofttimes for backache, languid feelings, 
 eyestrain, or whatsoever did afflict them much or little). One of the most interesting, 
 likewise useful, monographs on American Medical History, however, would be a truthful 
 — not the usual complimentary and one-sided, sort, but a truthful — account of the origin 
 and development of medical education in the United States. 
 
 If I live a sufficient length of time, I shall at least endeavor to write a comprehensive 
 treatise on the Y. of P. man — one of the most curious of all the curious "mutations" which 
 the medical profession has thus far produced. He came as an absolute necessity, so the 
 profession need not be ashamed of him. 
 
1094 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 He staggered to the window, read again and sat down. 
 
 I advanced to help him, but he handed me the open telegram, saying, 
 "You read." 
 
 I read, "Mamie died this morning at two o'clock of diphtheria. 
 Come to funeral. Tried number fourteen but it did not work. Heart- 
 broken and half crazy. — Margaret." 
 
 When the man arose I helped him to the door. 
 
 There he paused for a long moment, as if cogitating. Then he com- 
 mented — taking the words not out of my mouth, because I would not 
 have spoken them for the world at that time, but out of my thoughts — 
 he commented, I say — 
 
 "FOOL'S GOLD!" 
 
 DOCTOR PSYCHOPOMPOUS 
 
 Elsewhere in this volume I have written about "leaners" — a class of 
 southern Illinois people specifically so-called. Some dub them "crackers," 
 and say there is no difference at all between crackers and leaners, that 
 the words are precisely synonymous. Which reminds me of a story that, 
 long years ago, made the rounds of the northern newspapers. 
 
 A northern gentleman visited a colonel friend in Georgia. The colonel's 
 home was located on the border of a village, so that, on one side of his 
 home stood the little collection of houses, while, on the other, lay a 
 newly plowed field. 
 
 Seated in the library one day, overlooking the newly plowed field 
 and discussing cigars and juleps, the northern gentleman suddenly broke 
 out: "I hear so much down here in Georgia about certain people called 
 'crackers.' Crackers this, crackers that, crackers the other. What on 
 earth do you mean by 'crackers'?" 
 
 Responded the colonel: "What, suh! Don't you know the meanin' 
 of that word, cracker? Well, then, suh, I'll go on an' explain it to you. 
 A cracker, suh, or a leaner, suh (we use the two words synonymously) 
 is a very unindustrious person. Rather, that does not fully express the 
 idea. Gaze out over that newly plowed field. About its middle, suh, 
 there is a small, black object, which, bein' apparently motionless, may 
 possibly be a stump and may possibly be a cracker. Keep lookin' straight 
 at it, suh, for fifteen minutes, suh — at the end of which time, suh, if it 
 moves — it's a stump." 
 
 Since first I heard that little story, I have learned that a distinction 
 does actually exist between a "cracker" and a "leaner." "A leaner," 
 said my informant, a well-known southern Illinois lawyer, "is the 
 laziest possible kind of cracker. A cracker may possess an infinitesimal 
 amount of energy. A leaner however possesses none at all. A cracker, 
 in fact, may be a person capable of standing to some extent alone — 
 nothing at all to lean against. He is just like the stump in the story. 
 A stump, you see, though it never moves, is nonetheless capable of 
 standing and does in fact in the great majority of instances stand, upright, 
 all by itself, unsupported. A leaner, however, is like a board that is 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1095 
 
 'leaned' against a house. Remove the house and the leaner [he smacked 
 his hands together loudly] falls." 
 
 He walked rapidly away. Had he waited for only two or three hours 
 longer, I should have had time to think and so to point out to him that 
 there is no distinction whatsoever between the self-supporting qualities 
 of a stump-out-in-the-field on the one hand, and those of a plank-against- 
 a-house, on the other, inasmuch as, though it is perfectly true that the 
 plank against the house is supported and kept at least approximately 
 upright by the house, it is also a fact that the stump is supported and 
 kept in its relative place with respect to the horizon by the dirt which 
 is packed tightly around its roots. However, I thought and still think 
 I had caught the law-man's main idea, which was that there is hardly 
 anything on earth much lazier than a "leaner." 
 
 Now, one morning there in Marion, as I sat at early breakfast with 
 the Companion, wondering what the chances were for assisting the 
 human family in a medical manner on this dark and gloomy day (as well 
 as the T. H. Shastid family incidentally) all of a sudden — the phone rang 
 and I quickly acquired an opportunity to look after a typical leaner's 
 little son. 
 
 The person who was speaking was — well — let us call him Doctor 
 Piaster, because he was in fact very much interested in piasters, or dollars, 
 especially when these units of value were or might have been his own. 
 Now I had lately worked for a number of leaners, from whom not a 
 farthing would ever be forthcoming. Therefore the Companion had made 
 me promise that, for a time at least, I would very plainly ask my leaner 
 applicants to lean in another direction. So I said to Dr. Piaster: "Doctor, 
 I don't wish to be illiberal, but I have of late attended so many bad 
 paymasters that — well, in fact — you see — I want to know if this is just 
 another leaner." 
 
 "Leaner! I should say not." He seemed utterly astounded that I 
 should think him capable of committing so heinous an offense as asking 
 me to devote any time to a leaner. Again, "Leaner! I should say not. 
 Why his wife is one of the finest — And money? Say, Shastid, you'll 
 be glad you met both Rick and his wife. And then — a bug in your ear — 
 you'll meet in addition one of the queerest, one of the most astounding 
 doctors to be found in several states — no less a personage, in fact, than 
 Dr. Psychopompous." That was not his name, but I giye it him here 
 because it fits him so precisely. "This Psychopompous, of course, as 
 probably you know, burns more red light and has less sense and skill 
 than any other doctor I have ever met. In fact he's a Y. of P. man, yet 
 he declares that, on occasions, he has virtually 'raised the dead' — those 
 are his exact words. He has enormous influence, has sent me many cases 
 he could not attend himself, and, in a word, has made me good money. 
 He won't do the same for you? Anyway, he's a curiosity worth looking 
 at and you'll be glad you met him. I'll be right over." 1 
 
 1 Psychopompous, literally, "leader of souls," i.e., raiser of the dead. It is a fact 
 that, in many primitive languages (e.g., Osage Indian, wa-kon dagt) the same word means 
 both "physician" and "necromancer," or "raiser of the dead." 
 
1096 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 We had not driven more than twenty miles before Dr. Piaster changed 
 the course of his conversation — away from the state of the weather, 
 the pressing need for a new and much larger courthouse in Marion and 
 the absolute desirability of far more ethics in the medical profession — to 
 the subjects of more immediate interest — the sick boy we were on our 
 way to visit, the sort of place in which the boy and his parents lived, 
 the financial and social status of the family. At first he surprised me 
 not a little by speaking as if the Ricks were folk of a financial standing 
 that might not be quite perfect. Over the phone he had spoken as if that 
 standing were perfection itself. However, I had always had a way of 
 treating the eyes of those who needed my services but were not well able 
 to pay for them without any very great consideration of his or his parents' 
 financial condition, whether at the time or a little or very much later. 
 
 After some further talk about the courthouse, Dr. Piaster astonished 
 me still more by these words: "You're probably going to be surprised 
 somewhat by the place that the Rick family lives in — well, it's not very 
 beautifully kept up. Pretty bad, pretty bad!" 
 
 Still I said nothing on the subject, and, after a time, the Doctor 
 crashed my hopes still further by confessing that the Ricks were dead 
 broke, "broke completely, absolutely, utterly and damnably. They own 
 nothing whatever but their home place and that's covered — eh — covered 
 fully — by a mortgage. Even their corn crop's covered by a mortgage, 
 and all their personal property in addition — every bit of it — all mort- 
 gage" 
 
 "Every bit of it!" I cried with considerable excitement, the man's 
 present description of the situation being so absolutely different from 
 the one he had given me at least by implication that very morning on 
 the phone. 
 
 At my shrillish tone, he drew in his horns somewhat, no doubt be- 
 lieving, although erroneously, that the alteration in my voice had been 
 produced by at least a little actual knowledge about the subject in ques- 
 tion by myself. 
 
 So he weakly and shamefully hedged. Said he, "Well, maybe not 
 just every bit of the personal property's mortgaged. But you might as 
 well say that it is. Though they do have a first-rate year-old colt that 
 ain't as yet been mortgaged. But this very day, before I leave their 
 place too, Til see that it's mortgaged and to me. I've come [he patted 
 his coat pocket] all prepared for that very purpose. The horse was made 
 a present of to Rick himself about two weeks ago by his older brother 
 who lives down near Paducky somewhere an's dyin' of consumption. 
 First come first served, Doctor. Sorry. But I can't make this long, long 
 trip down here to see this boy an' then go all the way back to Marion 
 without either the cash or a mortgage. A little hard on you maybe, but 
 I can't help that. You can possibly get somethin' out of 'em some day 
 or other by some other trick or contraption." 
 
 We were now crossing a deep, wide creek. The muddy water came 
 freely up into the buggy-bed. A few minutes later, we watched our 
 horse clambering slowly up the bank opposite, then trotting with con- 
 siderable difficulty along a roughly-rutted clay road for a half or a quarter 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1097 
 
 of a mile and then come to a full stop before a farmstead for which I could 
 find no other name, either then or now, than "The Abomination of 
 Desolation." 
 
 Without getting out of the buggy — 
 
 "The Rick's place," said Dr. Piaster simply, surveying the spot with 
 apologetic eyes. 
 
 The fence in front was surely a sight to behold — just a few rotten 
 old posts still strong enough to stand upright, the rest in various posi- 
 tions — either mostly or quite upon the ground. A few short lengths of 
 broken wire were still attached to some of them. Beyond the fence was 
 a bare — an utterly and absolutely bare — clay dooryard, pockmarked in 
 innumerable places by hens, many of whom were sluggishly flopping 
 around in the holes which they themselves had scratched out, attempt- 
 ing, it appeared, to make them even deeper. A hay-rick, a corn bin, 
 an old ruinous barn, a rusty and partly broken plough, a distant, half- 
 tilled cornfield. 
 
 But the house itself, what a sight was that! It was so overshadowed 
 by great leafy elms and oaks that, at first, small as it was and set back 
 in the deep darkness, it was hardly visible at all. When at length you 
 had "spotted" the building you found it was just like hundreds of other 
 homes in southern Illinois — one-storied, but consisting of two wings 
 and an open porch between them which joined them and caused them 
 to be one house. This open porch conjoining what appeared to be two 
 houses was called in southern Illinois parlance, "the dog trot." Each 
 of the wings, or conjoined houses, was built of huge logs whose seams 
 had been sealed up, mostly, with the kind of clay that lay in the door- 
 yard. The porch, or dog trot, which, as already stated, stood midway 
 between the two wings and connected them, consisted only of a floor 
 and a roof — no wall whatsoever either in front or behind. At its right 
 hand it presented a door leading into the right wing. At its left end 
 another door which, quite evidently, led into the left wing. 
 
 Standing in this left doorway, and (actually!) leaning with his great 
 right hand and arm against the jamb thereof, stood a typical southern 
 Illinoisan. "Rick," said Dr. Piaster out of the corner of his mouth. 
 "He almost always is standing in that doorway and in just that leisurely 
 pose — leaning against the jamb — whenever you find him at home. Most 
 of the southern Illinoisans for some reason do that — lean, lean, lean — 
 against one or another of their doorjambs, excepting only at meal-times 
 or at the hour to go to bed. Often, if a friend happens to be around, 
 they lean on his shoulder — or pocket-book. 
 
 "Now this case we've come to see and discuss — I want to tell you 
 more about it. The patient, as I've already told you, is just a little boy 
 — not strong, not strong. And now, it seems, he's taken down in bed. 
 It may be just a case of nervousness, in fact I think it is, but, anyhow, 
 the boy declares that he cannot see. That's where you come in, you 
 know, and why I brought you along with me to-day. I want to under- 
 stand whether he really can't see or whether he's like his mother and 
 her people — always imagining he's diseased when there's nothing par- 
 ticular the matter. If his eyes really are sick, tell me in what way and 
 
1098 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 just what there is to do for him. I can treat the eyes all right, same as 
 any of the rest of him if you'll only just give me a few pointers. — Howdy, 
 Rick." The last words were shouted. 
 
 Rick spat tobacco juice leisurely and copiously, and, after a full 
 period of reflection, softly responded, "Howdy." 
 
 Dr. Piaster continued his little speech to me, "Dr. Psychopompous 
 hasn't arrived yet, but I think we'd better not wait for him — just go in. 
 Dr. Psychopompous, by the way, I'll venture to predict, will be consider- 
 able of a depressing surprise to you. The Doctor has a great following 
 though through all this timber country. Be careful what you say, be 
 careful what you say: Mrs. Rick believes in him. And yet the man 
 amounts to very little — just a Years-of-Practice Doctor, and, even as to 
 mere practical, financial affairs, about as little successful as any other 
 physician that ever I have known. All you have to do is humor him — 
 and get rid of him. Now don't forget to give this boy that thorough 
 examination." 
 
 When we got out of the buggy, the Doctor tied his foaming horse, 
 and then, slowly and with much difficulty, we wound our way through 
 the pock-marked dooryard with its numerous hens. 
 
 Mounting the floor of the connecting porch, we turned and stepped 
 softly toward the doorway wherein Mr. Rick was still standing and 
 likewise still leaning. "Howdy," said Dr. Piaster and I both, gently, 
 as we entered the sick-chamber. But Mr. Rick uttered no word. He 
 spat again, it is true, leisurely and copiously, even seemed to be starting 
 to say at least something to us, but, all at once, as if he had happened 
 to remember that he had already spoken to us once — at the moment 
 we had driven up to the front of his place — and also happening to re- 
 member no doubt the old question, "What is the use of doing anything 
 superfluous?" he conserved his strength and held his peace. 
 
 Inside the room, Mrs. Rick was busily adjusting the bed-clothes and 
 making the boy-patient more comfortable. 
 
 The mother greeted us cordially, and Dr. Piaster began at once his 
 examination. 
 
 Much to my surprise he merely glanced at the patient's eyes, then 
 casually inspected the tongue and counted the pulse. 
 
 Finally, with the manner of a lawyer who has finished with a witness 
 at a trial, he said, "The patient is yours, Doctor." 
 
 Turning down the covers, I found the patient hideously dropsical. 
 I said as much and the doctor agreed. Then, while I secured a specimen 
 of the urine and tested it, also dilated the pupils, the manner and tone 
 of the doctor toward our little patient changed completely. Instead of 
 his treating the boy as a merely nervous (imaginary) patient, he talked 
 to him about fishing and hunting, about jumping and baseball — in fact 
 he paid the lad very special consideration and courtesy. 
 
 Next, with the ophthalmoscope, I inspected the interior of the eyes. 
 Having so done, I explained to the doctor, in words that neither the 
 patient nor his mother could possibly understand, that the boy had a 
 chronic inflammation of the kidneys, that this had resulted in complete, 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1099 
 
 double-sided, blindness, that neither his blindness nor his general affec- 
 tion could ever be recovered from, that, in a word, in a few weeks longer 
 at the most, this fine little fellow would be sleeping with his ancestors. 
 
 Then Dr. Piaster, with at least attempted cheerfulness (and what 
 more could he do?) pulled out a pad of prescription blanks and began 
 writing off prescriptions, when — suddenly, like a great eruption of 
 Vesuvian good-will — into the room dashed and smiled and towered and 
 rumbled the gigantic Dr. Psychopompous. 
 
 He was one of the most eye-filling and impressive men that ever I 
 had seen. No United States Senator had in fact, I thought, ever looked 
 half so famous, half so pondering, wise, altogether world-shaking as did 
 this two-yards-four of black-clad doctor. Except for a white shirt he 
 was all in black from the plug hat on his head down past his Prince Albert 
 coat-tails to the patent leather boots on his long feet. 
 
 While he talked, he gave an occasional twirl with one hand or the 
 other to a large share of his great black beard. 
 
 "How are you, everybody?" he chuckled, even shouted, with vivid, 
 patronizing smiles and quick, semi-hearty handshakes. "How are you, 
 everybody? — You, Dr. Piaster? You — Dr. Shastid? It must be Dr. Shastid, 
 he was to be here. And this handsome little fellow in the bed I take to 
 be the patient. What a pity, what a pity!" 
 
 He spoke without allowing the slightest interval for anyone else to 
 wedge a word through. "Doctors two, you don't mind, I am certain, 
 if I proceed to make my own examination first. — Say ah! — A little louder, 
 please: good! — Now the stethoscope: I wouldn't know at all what to do 
 without a stethoscope. Simple little instrument though it may be and 
 though it was discovered long ago, I still value it highly. But now — " 
 
 He turned to his attendant, a young colored man who had followed 
 him in and who was carrying an enormous and, apparently, enormously 
 heavy, black box. On the sides of the box appeared these words in large 
 characters of flaming crimson : 
 
 DR. PSYCHOPOMPOUS'S 
 UNIVERSAL DISEASE DETECTOR 
 
 "Set it there!" ordered Dr. Psychopompous, as he pointed the colored 
 lad to the exact spot on the floor where he wished the box to be desposited. 
 
 Then the doctor, unlocking the lid of the great chest, threw it back 
 with a lordly air and a great clatter. 
 
 All at once I appeared to be gazing into the heart of the Arabian 
 Nights. The inside of the lid was a deep, dead black, whereon had been 
 pasted, or painted, great, glorious golden and silvern stars. But the 
 lower or main part of the box was more magnificent still. It consisted 
 of what to-day might well be termed a control-and-indicator board. This 
 lay flush with the margins of the box. It glowed with all the hues of 
 the Oriental rainbow, and shone with every conceivable form and variety 
 of scientific contraption. There were strangely colored globes of light 
 which came suddenly on, winked at you oddly for a few moments, then 
 
1100 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 passed quickly off into unutterable mystery. There were sizable fountains 
 encased in glass, which all at once began pulsating like jets of human 
 blood, then promptly turned into sprays of quicksilver, changed to tulips 
 of gold or roses of vermilion, and, finally, spread over the interior of 
 the encasing glass an inky and impenetrable darkness. All at once, 
 deep in the interior of the box, there rang a soft-toned bell. 
 
 "We will now," said Dr. Psychopompous, solemnly, "proceed to 
 detect the source and origin of this patient's disease." 
 
 He had already placed beneath the boy's back a moistened pad, whence 
 a gold-colored chain proceeded to and through a slot in the side of the 
 box. He now took up a large rubber tube consisting of three branches. 
 A plug which formed the terminus of one of the branches he inserted into 
 a hole which there was in the center of the control-and-indicator board. 
 A small tube which formed the terminus of the second branch he inserted 
 into one of his ears. Finally, the large, cup-shaped extremity of the 
 third branch he began applying first here then there at various spots on 
 the anterior surface of the patient's anatomy — saying, for example, as 
 he did so: "Heart, sound. Both lungs, good. Spleen, excellent. Liver, 
 more excellent still. Right kidney, perfect; left kidney, more so. Bladder, 
 correct. Stomach — wait a minute, wait a minute. Here's your trouble, 
 here's your trouble. Well, we'll fix all that up. — Johnson [to the colored 
 man] put all these things together now and take them back into my 
 carriage. — You, Mrs. Rick, come outdoors with me a moment while I 
 talk to you about the case: you, I know, Dr. Piaster and — and — both of 
 you — will want to finish your prescriptions." 
 
 And out he went, Mrs. Rick proudly at his heels. 
 
 After I had waited awhile for Dr. Piaster to finish his prescriptions, 
 a vague uneasiness seized me. I went out onto the porch to investigate. 
 Even Rick, the leaner, had gone. Stepping off the porch and going round 
 the other house-wing, I came upon Rick, Mrs. Rick and Dr. Psychopom- 
 pous, all apparently winding up a most excellent understanding of some 
 sort. 
 
 "Just put your names right here," purred the cordial doctor. "It's 
 merely a bill of sale for the colt also receipting me for the same." 
 
 "Whatever you say, Ma," conceded Rick. 
 
 "I say, Sign." 
 
 While Rick himself was signing Mrs. Rick handed me a great yellow- 
 papered bottle, saying, "This is what we get for the colt." 
 
 The words on the yellow paper ran about as follows— 
 
 The Great 
 
 Dr. Psychopompous 's Universal 
 
 FIX-ALL, 
 
 Constitution-Changer and Unparalleled 
 
 Tonic 
 
 Together with Unlimited Renewer of Exhausted Energies and Caster-Off of Each and 
 Every Form of Disability and Morbidity, Likewise All Species, Kinds and Varieties of 
 Disease Results, Acute and Chronic, and Each and Every Unwanted and Undesirable Con- 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1101 
 
 ditfon of the Human System, Male and Female, Physical, Mental and Spiritual, Conceivable 
 and Inconceivable, Discovered to this Date or Undiscoverable at any Date Whatsoever. 
 
 To be Administered Only after Accurate Diagnosis and Conclusions Reached 
 by Dr. Psychopompous and his 
 
 INCOMPARABLE 
 DISEASE-STATE DETECTOR 
 
 Renewer of the Vital Spark Itself 
 
 None genuine without this signature — G. A. Psychopompous 
 Honored, decorated and bowed down to by all the learned societies and crowned-heads 
 
 in Europe. 
 
 All these words I read, wondering, wondering, wondering. 
 
 Of a sudden Dr. Piaster joined us. Dr. Psychopompous had already 
 got hurriedly into his buggy and gone driving off, the beautiful colt 
 trotting easily and complacently behind. 
 
 "Now," said Dr. Piaster, "here are eight prescriptions." 
 
 "Prescriptions!" shouted Mrs. Rick. "What dowe want with yore 
 prescriptions, or any of yore medicines either? We've got this. 11 She 
 showed him the "Fix- All." 
 
 Piaster stared at the bottle a moment, then shouted, "Where's the 
 colt?" 
 
 ' 'Look for yoreself . ' ' She pointed after the retreating Psychopompous 
 
 outfit. 
 
 Piaster gasped. "Why — why — I was going to have that — that — that 
 colt for myself. 
 
 "You two kin both of you jest clear out, or you're likely to happen 
 to an accident." 
 
 "But — but," stammered Piaster. "You called us, you sent for us. 
 You'll have to pay us in some way." 
 
 "When I called you two, I didn't know for shore I could get Dr. 
 Psychopompous to come here, busy as that man always is. So I don't 
 owe nothin' to nobody else ner nothin'." 
 
 "But — but — but — " 
 
 "But nothin'. Want that accident? Clear." 
 
 We cleared. 
 
 As we drew near Marion, Dr. Piaster whistled to himself sharply and 
 vigorously, as if in deep thought. 
 
 All at once he said, "Doctor, my bill for this day's work is going 
 to be exactly twenty dollars, yours I make at five. I believe that the 
 money can be collected — not from Rick himself but from Mrs. Rick: 
 she gets considerable chicken money. Now don't forget — twenty for me, 
 five for you. But, to get that five, mind that you'll have to do all the 
 collecting yourself and that you'll have to pay to me, too, my twenty 
 dollars, first. Now, don't forget: you do the collecting and you pay 
 me my twenty dollars first. It was me that brought you into the case." 
 
1102 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 We drove up on to the Public Square and around in front of the stair- 
 way leading to my office. I got out in complete fatigue and in perfect 
 silence; the doctor handed me my satchel of instruments, and, as still 
 I uttered no sound, he stared at me as though he thought me crazy. 
 "Well," he cried, "What say?" 
 
 There popped into my mind all at once for no imaginable reason that 
 I can now recall, except that I did not wish to relapse into my old-time 
 habit of ineffectual anger, a passage from Gray's "Anatomy," the first 
 of all the medical books my father had ever had me read. I said to the 
 doctor, looking him firmly in the eyes: "The temporal bones are situated 
 at the side and base of the skull, and present for examination a squamous, 
 mastoid, and petrous portion." Having so asseverated, I turned, walked 
 slowly across the sidewalk and then began the long, steep, dark, ascent 
 of the stairway toward my office and home. 
 
 LUMPED TOGETHER 
 
 I could not give an adequate idea of the state of medicine and 
 medical practice in the old, old days without, very briefly, delineating 
 three or four more "atypical M.D's", who, although atypical, were 
 nevertheless so frequently duplicated and thickly sprinkled throughout 
 the nation, that they formed a considerable part of the medical profession. 
 
 In this catch-all section I introduce, first of all, the doctor who in- 
 herited -pill-bags. An uncle of his who had been a doctor with both a 
 classical and a medical education, as well as a first-class brain to begin 
 with, had died, leaving to this particular nephew and scape-grace fifty 
 dollars and a pair of pill-bags — why I do not know. 
 
 The nephew tried to sell the pill-bags, failed. The bags were some- 
 what out of date for one thing, pretty well battered and used up for 
 another thing. 
 
 The nephew — he was an unusually unsuccessful gambler— tried, here and 
 there, at the poker table, to bet his pill-bags against small amounts of 
 the other players' legal tender. No use. If there was anything on earth 
 the other gamblers did not want, it was a pair of dilapidated pill-bags. 
 
 All at once a flash of genius in Dr. Pill-bag's mind! He would keep 
 the pill-bags himself, if nobody else would have them because they 
 possessed, apparently at least, no tiniest bit of financial value. Yes, 
 he would do that, and, by Jupiter, he would also show everybody, his 
 old-time gambling friends included, that there was money, as well as 
 pills, in them thar pill-bags. 
 
 He experienced, then, also another stroke of genius. He would be- 
 come an M.D. Why not? Why not become respected as well as merely 
 rich? There was Dr. So-and-so, with whom he had gone to public school. 
 Dr. So-and-so could never even learn to spell correctly. Yet he had 
 gone to Chicago, got him a medical degree in two years time of four 
 months each, gone to a place where nobody knew him and become rich. 
 And Dr. So-and-so had never, to Dr. Pill-bag's knowledge, served 
 any apprenticeship to any practising physician. 
 
 That very day Dr. Pill-bags started on his pilgrimage to success. He 
 walked all the way to where Dr. So-and-so was practising, unfolded his 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 1103 
 
 plans, wound up by saying, "And now I want you to give me a certificate 
 saying I've been your apprentice for the last three years. Everybody 
 knows I ain't been doin' nothin else— asept maybe a little poker game 
 at nights and I've been over here in your office too, quite some time, of 
 nights and people all know that." 
 
 "How much'll you give?" 
 
 Pill-bags paid and got his certificate of apprenticeship, borrowed 
 money from a maiden aunt who was taken with the idea of his becoming 
 a doctor, and so— to Chicago. 
 
 There he matriculated. Soon found that, after the first week of school, 
 no record was kept of attendance. So he went to serving in a restaurant 
 and saving his money for a time of need. Near the close of the four- 
 months year he attended for a week at the medical college— when records 
 of attendance were once again kept. 
 
 Next year he repeated the procedure, only, at the close of the year, 
 he took his examinations, the first he had ever taken in medicine, and, 
 much to his astonishment, passed. He went bragging around to the 
 other "students" about his great success until, all at once, a number of 
 them told him, "Why! everybody passed!" 
 
 Dr Pill-bags then went and settled in a southern Illinois village 
 where he did quite well— for himself. Subsequent to his retirement, I 
 met him now and then at county medical meetings, and, at one of these, 
 he told me the story of his medical career as I have stated it herein. 
 He added, however, "I think I may say that, practically, I m a sell-made 
 man and doctor. 
 
 I agreed with him that he was, undoubtedly, a self-made man and 
 
 doctor. x 
 
 l Lest anyone suppose that I have not adhered to the truth in telling the story of this 
 not so exceedingly atypical doctor, that is for those days, and of his very very typed educa- 
 t^Ton thatTs for S those?ays, I will quote once more from the large and highly authoritative 
 voTume which was published in 1910 and entitled "Medical Education in ^*dS**« 
 and Canada." This volume was not the product of muckrakers but had been Prepared, 
 after the most careful and thorough investigation by the ™ ld .(f™ us Jl^ 
 servative Abraham Flexner with the assistance of Dr. William H Welch of Johns ■Hopkms 
 University, Dr. Simon Flexner of the Rockefeller Institute and Dr. Arthur D. Bevan, then 
 Chairman of the Council on Education of the American Medical Association The entire 
 investigation and report were made under the auspices of "The Carnegie Foundation for 
 the Advancement of teaching." This book of 326 quarto pages consists ofcarcfoUy f pre- 
 sented but absolutely damning statements of fact about a very large Proportion ot the 
 medical colleges of the United States as they were at the date of the Report. Perhaps .the 
 climax of condemnation is attained on page 216 of the Report, wherein it is said that The 
 city of Chicago is in respect of medical education the plague spot of the country 
 
 7 And note 8 carefully, please, that this Report was made in the com parative lyj at e year 
 of 1910. Dr. Pill-bag's "education" was received long decades before that time, when 
 medical education, if possible, was worse. 
 
 It is only fair to add, as to the Chicago schools, that the Report ^I^^f^t 
 quite favorable to two or three of them^for examples Rush Medical College jmd the 
 Medical Department of Northwestern University. It should also be added that at the 
 present day, Chicago, far from being the medical "plague spot of the country, is a ^medical 
 center of great renown, while the medical profession of the United States, as a whole, has, 
 
 center ot great .- 
 
 in the last few decades, advanced to the leadership of the world 
 
1104 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 Another not so very atypical M.D. was Dr. Mallinger. He had a 
 lawsuit of his very own against a company for total deafness, the result, 
 as he alleged, of extreme carelessness on the part of one of the company's 
 employes. 
 
 I placed the doctor with his face against the wall at one end of my 
 consulting room. Walking to the other end, I turned, held my flat hand 
 about four inches in front of my face and very gently whispered, ' 'Let me 
 know when you're ready to be tested." "O," he replied, "I'm ready at 
 any time." 
 
 This doctor was not only an M.D., but an "eye, ear, nose and throat 
 specialist" also. 
 
 Dr. J inker (none of these names was actual, of course) was head of 
 the medical department of a western life insurance company. He had 
 taken a medical degree from a small-town college in the west, and, later, 
 an ad eundem (additional medical) degree from a "sun-down" 1 college in 
 a very large eastern city, because, as he repeatedly stated himself, he 
 was ashamed of his small town institution. At about fifty years of age 
 he came to me to be examined for his "very first reading glasses." Both 
 his eyes, externally, appeared normal, but, when I looked inside them 
 with an ophthalmoscope, lo and behold, I found in one of them certain 
 congenital abnormalities which showed beyond a doubt that that eye 
 never in all its owner's years could have had any sight. I so informed 
 Dr. Jinker, who merely laughed and said, "Quit kidding." "I'm not 
 kidding," I replied. "Just put a hand over your left eye and then tell 
 me if you see with your right." 
 
 He did as instructed. Then rose, walked to a window, looked out 
 into the street. Like a man in an incredible dream, he gazed. Covered 
 first one eye then the other. Again and again. At last he was convinced. 
 
 Said he, finally, ' 'And I had always took myself to be a good observer. 
 
 Dr. Dictionary (another atypical, who was not so very atypical) 
 had also a medical degree, as well as a low high school diploma. He 
 was a tall, impressive, magnificent, curseworthy, general practitioner, 
 who pretended to be a specialist in whatsoever ailed you. 
 
 The doctor had received the nickname, "Dr. Dictionary," because he 
 had so often boasted that he knew the "Devil's Dictionary" by heart, 
 also that he could swear rapidly for thirty-five minutes and never repeat 
 once. I have already termed him curseworthy, and curseworthy he surely 
 was, as well as curse-learned. Yet no one ever dared to curse him to his 
 face, he was so big and strong and overbearing. So he did all the cursing 
 himself, at least when he himself was present. He was also a braggart 
 and a drunkard. Because of his incessant bragging he was ofttimes 
 referred to as "Bugle." One day, as he entered the room wherein the 
 "County Medical" was meeting, one of the younger doctors, who was 
 
 1 A sun-down college was a medical school wherein lectures were given of nights only. 
 Their ostensible purpose was to enable those to study medicine who were busy at making 
 a living in the daytime. The most of them, however, were little, if any, better than 
 "diploma mills." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1105 
 
 looking through a window as if at something in the street, blared out — 
 
 "Blow, bugle, blow: 
 Set the wild echoes flying; 
 Blow bugle; answer echoes, 
 Dying, dying, dying." 
 
 Dr. Dictionary, or "Dr. Bugle," as he was almost exclusively called by 
 the other doctors after his death, walked up behind the young doctor, 
 pulled him out of the chair by his ears, dragged him to the top of the 
 stairway and kicked him to the bottom. 
 
 A few days later Dr. Dictionary was called to see a woman who had 
 severed her right radial artery on a piece of glass. Now, it would seem 
 that Dr. Dictionary had never been taught in his sun-down or other 
 college that a radial artery, cut, should always be tied. Anyway, Dr. 
 Dictionary, in the presence of the patient's own son, merely sprinkled 
 tannic acid (a styptic) on the wound and told the patient to lie very 
 quiet and that soon all would be well. 
 
 The patient, after the doctor's departure, did lie very quiet. She lay 
 very quiet for a very long time — until, in fact, her son, becoming sus- 
 picious, investigated her quietness and found she was going to be quiet 
 from that time on. 
 
 The son, too, was quiet, very quiet — till after his mother's funeral. 
 Then he went to town, learned from the young doctor (the one that 
 Dr. Dictionary had once beaten up and kicked down stairs) that a 
 severed radial artery should always be tied — both ends of it at that, and 
 then he went and personally interviewed Dr. Dictionary. 
 
 Dr. Dictionary began with his usual browbeating and cursing, then 
 attacked the dead woman's son. The latter, however, was much too 
 much for the assailant. — He whipped the brute to a finish, then threw 
 him down his very long stairway — poetic justice, so to speak, for the 
 young doctor. 
 
 Dr. Dictionary, a few weeks after his recovery (he did, for a wonder, 
 recover) while sitting at a game of poker, all of a sudden fell forward. 
 And, since then, he has neither left any more radial arteries untied or 
 spouted the devil's dictionary to an audience, or bragged (as he had 
 been so fond of doing) on the sun-down college from which he had un- 
 timely sprung. 
 
 Dr. Drumo is the last of the old-time, atypical, yet not so very atypical, 
 doctors of the "good old days," that I want to discuss in this "Lumped 
 Together" section. Not that there was any scarcity of such doctors. 
 There were, in fact, a great many hundreds, possibly even thousands, of 
 such practitioners, rampaging it or quacking it around in the U. S. A. 
 under the aegis of an M.D., a sheepskin, a license and no knowledge. 
 But these five shining examples must serve to illuminate and expound the 
 whole brotherhood of atypicalities. 
 
 Well, Dr. Drumo particularly exemplifies the fact that the right kind 
 of doctor must have the right kind of brain. For many long years before 
 Drumo had really received a medical degree he had called himself "doctor. 
 In some states that might have got him into trouble — caused him perhaps 
 to pay a fine of thirty or forty dollars. In other states, his glaring fraud 
 
1106 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 appeared to be a matter of no special interest either to the general public 
 or to the courts or to the highly honorable legislature. In fact the 
 doctors in those states who really had been born to be doctors, and who 
 had served out the requisite three years of medical apprenticeship under 
 other doctors who had also been born to be doctors, and who then had 
 actually studied medicine in the medical colleges which they had (ac- 
 tually) attended, had sent committees, or else had personally gone, to 
 the state legislatures and there had pleaded earnestly, almost unremitting- 
 ly, with the members thereof to enact laws which would properly reg- 
 ulate the practice of medicine — bar from medical practice all the ignor- 
 amuses, the illiterates, the defrauders of both well people and sick. 
 And what kind of receptions did those doctors receive from those poli- 
 ticians? Very cold ones indeed in almost every instance. 
 
 Sometimes a committee of earnest, capable and well-taught physicians 
 would be kept outside a committee-room's doors day after day and week 
 after week, the politicians trusting that, thus, they might eventually 
 overcome the persistence and the patience of the qualified practitioners. 
 Worse still, while such practitioners sat or stood outside the politicians' 
 doors, they beheld, if not with chagrin and profound amazement at least 
 with bitter sorrow and disappointment, medical crook after medical 
 crook promptly admitted to those legislative committee rooms. Most 
 of the crooks had never even beheld the inside of a sun-down medical 
 college. Many of them were ignorant boors — but sharp, very sharp 
 indeed. And they had come not merely with the purpose of preventing 
 the enactment of any stricter medical practice legislation, but also of 
 securing the passage of medical practice acts of their own devising — acts 
 the direct purpose of which was not at all to protect the public but to 
 license this, that and the other clearly fraudulent so-called "school" of 
 medicine. 
 
 Some of the legislators were indeed intelligent and honest. Nearly 
 always, however, the majority were hand in glove with the illiterate, 
 but would-be medical, crooks. 
 
 Year after year the fight went on. Eventually the doctors, in most 
 states, won their battle, but in no state quite completely. That fight, 
 even in the very year this book is published, is being continued. 
 
 But, as to Dr. Drumo. For a long, long time he had travelled thousands 
 of miles yearly in his covered and gaily painted van. For a long time 
 he had pretended to diagnose and treat ailments concerning which he 
 knew little and ofttimes nothing. 
 
 At last, when he had saved a good deal of money, he decided to 
 become a doctor, a doctor indeed and in truth. He therefore discharged 
 his singers and his horn-blowers, put in storage his big nimbly wagon 
 with its gaily painted sides, and its beds, its chemicals, its long-haired 
 wig and bass arum and so on in the interior, and then hied himself to 
 an eastern medical college — by the way, a very good one. And, on his 
 graduation at that college, he stood, I have heard and actually believe, 
 at the head of his class. 
 
 Drumo settled in a good-sized midwest town, built there a fine practice 
 and did so on the basis of work well done. Then he took in a secretary 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1107 
 
 and two assistant doctors. All appeared to be going well with Dr. Drumo. 
 
 Sometimes, however, Dr. Drumo seemed to be dissatisfied, had a far 
 away look in his big blue eyes. 
 
 One day, to the astonishment of everybody, he sold, almost gave, 
 his practice to the two young doctors — and disappeared well over the 
 horizon. 
 
 One of the young doctors, years later, while traveling in a western 
 state, passed through the doors of his hotel on a mild autumn evening, 
 and, thinking he heard the sounds of a very familiar voice, followed them 
 up and — well, soon saw Dr. Drumo himself, on the rear platform of 
 his gaily painted wagon, selling "The Elixir of Life" — a great prepara- 
 tion for whatever ailed you or anybody else. 
 
 After the close of the show with its drum-beating, its singing, and 
 all the rest of its hocus-pocus and noise-making, the young doctor ac- 
 costed his former employer and preceptor and asked for an explanation 
 of his sudden disappearance from the place of his great reputation and 
 later return to this strange nomadic life — this life of bamboozlement and 
 fraud. 
 
 And then the truth came out. Dr. Drumo had enjoyed, to some 
 extent at least, the practice of scientific medicine. But better by far he 
 had adored this wandering life: the moving from place to place, the 
 different towns and people that he saw, their easy gullibility, the bright 
 lights and the music. "That sort of thing," said he, "is innate, a part 
 of my being. It awakens something deep within me which nothing else 
 awakens or ever could. So — I cannot be other than I am." 
 
 But earnest medical men, still arguing and contesting with adverse 
 and ofttimes boodle-minded legislators, after a very long time succeeded 
 in very much helping Dr. Drumo to be "other than" he was — Dr. Drumo 
 and many others like him. In fact they largely cleaned up medical 
 practice in the United States. 
 
 And that is not all that the better class of physicians in this country 
 have done by way of improving their nation's healing art and all the 
 things even collaterally appertaining thereunto. In fact the cleaning up, 
 as well as the scientific progress, of medicine in this country during the 
 last three score and more years has been the continual astonishment and 
 even amazement of all doctors who are working in the socialized medicine 
 of Europe. This progress be it emphasized and re-iterated, has been 
 brought about by the medical profession itself of this country — working, 
 almost invariably, at cross-purposes with the politicians — yes, and even 
 the genuine, well-meaning statesmen, in this country. Yet now the 
 politicians — yes and even the well-meaning statesmen — propose to take 
 over the control of medical practice in this country, to take it out of the 
 hands of the American doctors who, under freedom, have made American 
 medicine the wonder of the world, and into the future control, guidance 
 and shaping of themselves, who, always heretofore, have so bitterly 
 opposed its progress. 
 
1108 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 BIOGRAPHIC REPERCUSSION 
 
 The response to autobiography consists not merely of the public's 
 reaction to any given book of memoirs; it includes even more, far more, 
 the inevitable effect which the writing of an autobiography has upon the 
 work's own author. He is the man who wrote that book, not merely 
 read it. Read it? Why, he must necessarily have read it half a score of 
 times — wrote it in the first place, then rewrote it and wrote it again and 
 again. After that, he must have "seen it through the press." Can a man 
 do that, all that, and yet not feel repercussions therefrom in his very soul? 
 
 As to the public's response to "Tramping to Failure" (published 
 August 7, 1937) it was favorable indeed. Never before, I think, have I 
 received so many or so beautiful letters about any single book. And 
 each and all reviews were highly favorable, all at least that I saw of 
 them. One never knows of course, exactly how many critiques of any 
 given volume have appeared. As to criticisms by correspondents, that 
 I have already attended to sufficiently in earlier portions of this book. 1 
 
 Somewhat more interesting, probably, would be a presentment of the 
 effects on my own psychology of writing my "Tramping to Failure" — 
 its effects, for example, on the long-time melancholy from which I have 
 so terribly suffered for so many years as a result of my experience in child- 
 hood with "the shadow of the little white house." And hardly an atom 
 of my psyche but has undergone similar changes. No one, indeed, can 
 write a considerable number of pages on the life of himself and not, to a 
 great degree, remold and re-orientate himself. All these matters, I say, 
 I had thought to present at least to some extent in this volume. To that 
 end I filled a number of boxes with pertinent manuscript notes. But now 
 it is apparent that space will not permit their showing. 
 
 I have, however, room to indicate just a few more psychologic matters 
 — how, for example, psychologically even as physically, nobody can 
 ever travel backward in time. 
 
 YOU NEVER CAN GO HOME 
 
 The years of my life which were covered, to an extent, by "Tramping 
 to Failure" seem still to me quite recent; those that have passed since 
 I finished that volume, like a long-forgotten antiquity. This temporal 
 illusion, no doubt, is due to the fact that, by writing T. to F., I re- 
 vivified in my mind those older days, those old-time characters and scenes. 
 The last several years, on the other hand, have been so filled with intense 
 suffering and with the very blackest tragedy that they seem, spite of the 
 fact that I write herein about them, quite unreal, quite impossible, or — 
 if actual — then merely a part of a time that fled long eons ago. 
 
 1 Did time permit, I would present some of the most interesting reactions of some of 
 my patients to my "Tramping to Failure." Though the great majority who had read the 
 volume understood its several purposes thoroughly, some on the other hand misunderstood 
 its very title. One, indeed, expressed astonishment that a person who had been a hobo 
 (he took this word in its literal sense) should, late in life, have decided to turn doctor. 
 I had become my father's apprentice in 1876, received my medical degree in 1888. "Late 
 in life" quotha! 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1109 
 
 "Tramping to Failure" came out in August, 1937. For a very long 
 time before it appeared I had wished to go home — that is to Pittsfield, 
 Illinois; there is for me no other home — but I was wholly unable to do 
 so. The last occasion whereon I had visited Pittsfield was the funeral 
 of my mother. From that time onward it appeared to me that I could 
 not possibly endure to see the town or the home itself any more. The 
 home, in the sense of house in which we'd lived, was still standing, to 
 be sure, but it was merely a dead house, a corpse of a home. The twin 
 spirits that once had given it life, set it apart for me from all the rest of 
 earth, had departed no more to return. 
 
 So many kind letters, however, from Pittsfield, had reached me in 
 response to my "Tramping," had so stirred and intensified the old nostal- 
 gia in me, that, of nights, I dreamed of little else than home. And yet 
 I could not even then go home. There had troubled me for many years, 
 in addition to the blackness about home, a severe neuritis of the back 
 and shoulders, very painful indeed, but which I somehow managed to 
 endure if only I could get, each night, to bed betimes — say by eight or 
 nine o'clock. If I staid up later, I was in much more pain next morning. 
 
 Then one day my long-time friend, Dr. W. A. Coventry, of Duluth, 
 came to my house with a copy of "Tramping to Failure" which he'd 
 bought for his (and my) long-time friend, Dr. Carl Ellsworth Black, of 
 Jacksonville, Illinois, and which he wished me to autograph. Later an 
 invitation came to me from Dr. Black via Dr. Coventry to re-visit my 
 boyhood's haunts at Jacksonville and Pittsfield, in the latter city to be 
 guest of honor at a dinner by the Pike County Medical Society. 
 
 Why not attend, and, with good fellowship — et cetera? 
 
 Why not note to what extent the backscene of the old-time medical 
 practice had changed, the backscene too of my boyhood, my youth, my 
 early manhood, before I wrote again about those early days and about — 
 in a word, about "My Second," my much more detailed and (I'm trust- 
 ing) rather more interesting, "Life"? 
 
 INVENI REVISITED 
 
 I went first, for first it lay upon my journey geographically, to Inveni, 
 seat of Inveni College. (Little could I then foresee, as I approached 
 Inveni, the terrors that hung over me, the earthly hell so soon to be my 
 lot.) It was of course fitting that, first of all, I should revisit the first 
 of my youthful "hand-outs" — the first, that is to say, excepting Hayloft 
 University. (That magnificent institution of learning was now no more.) 
 
 The Companion had not come with me on this pilgrimage into the 
 past. At the very last moment she had said that her heart was bothering 
 more than usual, that her breath was shorter, that she did not like in any 
 Case to travel. No, she would not go, yet I must not stay at home on 
 that account. She was persistently insistent. So here I was, after an 
 absence of fifty-three years, re-entering Inveni. People have thought that 
 Rip van Winkle, on entering Tarrytown, N. Y., after an absence of 
 twenty years, must have been stricken dumb by all the great changes 
 that had occurred in his absence. Merely twenty years! 
 
1110 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 Not on the train, this time, did I go roaring into the first of my 
 hand-outs as on that night I arrived with my father at my side, and a 
 train was the most wonderful thing that ever had been or could be. 
 
 "Depot! All out." For a moment I could not resist a feeling that 
 numbers of old students — as they used to do at the close of vacations — 
 would be rushing up to meet me. Wild shouts, welcoming acclaims, 
 hearty handshakes, mad embraces! Not even Mushmouth Jones! He, 
 poor chap, I had understood (he had believed very deeply in the devil- 
 possession theory of disease) had been placed in a mad-house and was 
 now quite busy at fighting devils. 
 
 Round the town I flew, but only about five buildings of the old-time 
 village now stood any longer. A new town, new people and new and 
 better views on almost every subject. I talked with graybeards: not 
 one of them remembered the old-time president of the college with whom 
 I had quarrelled so bitterly. Not one had even heard his name. Nor, 
 as I learned by side-wise questioning, did any one I talked to believe any 
 more in the devil-production of disease, or in the necessity of immersion 
 for the soul's happiness and salvation hereafter, or any of the other 
 articles of faith once deemed so essential by the fundamentalist college 
 of Inveni. Gone, all gone, like the people who had believed such things. 
 Gone and incredible! 
 
 I tried, of course, to find the old-time offices, or homes, of the doctors 
 I had known so well in Inveni — N. B. Crawford and L. A. Ferry. Gone 
 too! All gone! Not a trace. No one remembered he ever had heard the 
 names. How they both had opposed, at the beginning, the germ "theory" 
 of disease! How they had espoused it later! But now, despite their 
 manifold labors, they were completely forgotten. The fate of almost all 
 doctors in almost all places, it seems — is to be forgotten. 
 
 I ran down to the railway depot, a weather-beaten, ramshack affair, 
 a disgrace to any backwoods village. Railways, apparently, both here 
 and everywhere, were following the devil-possession theory of disease 
 and baptism by immersion. 
 
 All at once it came upon me that there, right there, my father, having 
 brought me to Inveni for admission to the college and the making of a 
 record there, had parted from me to return home. How badly he had 
 been shaken by emotion! And indeed how emotional all people had been 
 in those days! Thus I reflected, as, on my bus, I was speeding across 
 the central plains of Illinois for Jacksonville — "Athens of the West." 
 
 JACKSONVILLE REVISITED 
 Jacksonville was part and parcel of the old stamping-ground of my 
 boyhood. It was not far from Pittsfield and, as heretofore related, it 
 was in that place that I had spent a small but important part of my 
 medical and surgical apprenticeship. Because of an accident I did not 
 arrive in Jacksonville till the second day about noon. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1111 
 
 First of all I looked for the Prince Sanitarium, or what had been that 
 important institution. It existed no more. Almost everything in the 
 way of a building, in fact, that once I had familiarly known had either 
 passed wholly away or become a mere ramshack only. And now as I 
 had arrived so close to Pittsfield, there began resounding in my ears the 
 former melancholy cry, "You never can go home ! You never can go home !' ' 
 Over and over, "You never can go home!" Louder and louder, "You 
 never can go home!" To quiet myself, I walked about the city, seeking. 
 
 I came in time to the big Wabash depot. What a place that had 
 been even in my very early years ! Whenever, as a boy, I had run over to 
 Jacksonville to see a circus and, later, whenever on my way to Inveni 
 College I had changed cars at this depot, it was one of the greatest and 
 most impressive of all my few experiences — the dash, the turmoil, the 
 uproar of this place, the gigantic depot! Even before we could see the 
 outskirts of the city, I would respond with a deep agitation of the heart as 
 the giant conductor threw open the door of the coach I was in and yelled, 
 like the clashing spirit of All-business itself, ''Jacksonville I Jacksonville ! 
 Jacksonvillel" the emphasis on that last syllable saying to one and all, 
 "We now come to the greatest of depots, wherein the greatest of all 
 business is forever being greatly transacted!" 
 
 And what a chaos really! What a commercial bedlam! 
 
 Trains by the dozen, coal trains, box-car trains, trains of day coaches 
 and trains composed wholly of sleepers. All ka-chang, ka-chang, ka- 
 changing, ringing their insane multitudes of bells, blowing their even 
 more insane multitudes of whistles! Under it all a stormy tumult of human 
 voices attempting to make themselves audible. 
 
 All round the depot, two and three deep, were forever vehicles of 
 every conceivable sort. Buggies, surries, baggage-wagons, buck-boards, 
 farm-wagons, milk wagons, racers and sulkies, express wagons, street 
 cars, delivery wagons, vegetable wagons, band wagons, coal trucks, 
 hotel busses, Shetland ponies, fire-wagons and boys' carts. Everything 
 and everybody pushing, pulling, tugging, elbowing, shoving and shout- 
 ing. Get through the depot before all those hundreds of others, will you? 
 
 And to-day — that day of my return? I was almost on the platform of 
 the silent station before I half-way realized I had reached the vicinity. 
 
 People? None at all — unless I was "people." 
 
 The great hotel which had formerly stood at the west end of the 
 structure, and which, in old days, you got into quickly and registered in 
 more quickly still, or be promptly blanked to you, had disappeared. 
 No train was coming or going, or visible. And where were the crowds 
 of sick people who used to be coming here to get cured? 
 
 I mounted the platform and, like a dismal ghost from a long-dead 
 past, stalked along it, listening to the multiplied echoes of my feet. 
 
 The whole length of the depot I paced. Nobody at all did I behold 
 either outside the building or inside it, until, all at once — a figure in 
 white. 
 
 To the door I went. It was locked. I tapped. The figure in white 
 turned, saw me, turned back, turned again and saw me, looked hard at 
 
1112 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 me for awhile, dropped a hammer and came moping toward the entrance. 
 "What want?" It sounded like a big voice in a small cistern. 
 
 "Let me in." 
 
 He let me in. 
 
 I proceeded to tell him then the purpose which had brought me down 
 there from the Public Square — the purpose namely to witness once again 
 the scenes of great activity I had relished so much in my boyhood. 
 
 As he spread his arms horizontally, he cried, "Dead! Dead! Railroad 
 business all dead. All business is dead. The whole world is dead, or 
 about that — what 's your business? Any?" 
 
 "Doctor." 
 
 "Why don't you kill ever'body?" 
 
 "Some people say I do. Why don t you kill 'em?" 
 
 He had a little wit left in him. "Carpenter. Not my place. Jest 
 hired to fix up this depot a little, not too much. Said to not fix it up 
 too much. 'Tain't worth it. — How old?" pointing about to my stomach. 
 
 "Seventy-one." 
 
 "Same's me. Same about's the railroad. It's dead, though. Say, 
 let's get — ho hum — a shovelful of earth and bury the Wabash system. — 
 Dead!" 
 
 He paused and looked far away, as if into the past and wholly for- 
 getful of my presence. After a time there came from far away a faint 
 trickling, a mere thread of sound, a scarcely caught echo of an echo of 
 an echo of a far-away whistle of an elfin locomotive. 
 
 My interlocutor expectorated, partly on his very self, his once white 
 carpenter's suit. He looked down at the rich, dark ambier stream on 
 his coat-front and muttered a curse, apologizing, "Excuse my French." 
 Then, more energetically, "I'm a son of a sucker if — " 
 
 "If what?" 
 
 "If that ain't the Wabash — Naw! Naw, it ain't the Wabash, that 
 sound. Jest a switch-engine away down on the Chicago and Alton. I — " 
 
 He seemed averse to finishing the sentence, and soon I heard again 
 in the barn-like depot the echoes of my footsteps as I retraced my solemn 
 path in the gray dust of the platform. 
 
 SHADOWS OF HOUSES 
 Now as I wended my way back toward the business district of the 
 city, the old-time blackest melancholy I had felt for fourteen years and 
 more whenever I had thought of the changes in the old home, came over 
 me again with overwhelming force — deepened not only by the funereal 
 changes I had seen at the Jacksonville depot, those I had witnessed at 
 the depot in Inveni, and those I had ofttimes heard had taken place at 
 the depot in Pittsfield (no more passenger trains at all were run there now) 
 but also because of the fear that I forefelt whenever I should go back 
 once again to the old home. If I had shrunk from the thought of death 
 at the little white house I had seen in my childhood, the house wherein 
 a total stranger to myself had died, and if, nevertheless, the funereal 
 gloom, the shadow, of that place had followed me all my life, depressing 
 and saddening almost everything I did and thought, how much more 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1113 
 
 would not the hand of death, when laid on the home of my parents — 
 which also and of necessity was forever the home of my brethren and 
 myself — how much more would not that cover my inmost being with a 
 gloom that could scarcely be lifted in all my years to be? 
 
 At Duluth I had thought, at the very last, that I would merely see 
 Inveni once more, then Jacksonville and Doctor Black, and, after that, 
 if too greatly depressed by the horror of my near approach to Pittsfield, 
 I would, without seeing the old home again, return to Duluth and 
 Tramp's Rest. 
 
 Now I went up to the office of Doctor Black. This brilliant student, 
 as I have heretofore related, I had ofttimes met at the old Prince San- 
 itarium decidedly more than half a century before. Later, both he and I, 
 in precisely the same year, had studied at Vienna, though without the 
 knowledge of each other's presence there until long afterward. As now 
 I stepped into his office, the graciousness and the hearty welcome of the 
 man came toward me like a blessing. For a time I completely forgot 
 the shadows of the old home and of the little white house. Equally 
 gracious were his son, Dr. Ellsworth Black, his son-in-law, Dr. George 
 L. Drennan, several of the professors at Illinois College, and, later at 
 his home, his charming wife and daughter. 
 
 Late at night, as we finished the inspection and discussion of Dr. 
 Carl's biography of his father, Dr. Greene Vardiman Black, "Father of 
 Modern Dentistry," my proposal to take bus for Pittsfield was over- 
 ruled and both Dr. Carl and Dr. Drennan motored me swiftly over the 
 thirty-seven miles to Pittsfield — without the slightest knowledge on 
 their part of the emotional upset from which they had providentially 
 delivered me. 
 
 THE SECOND JUNGLE 
 
 On my joyous return to Duluth I displayed to the Companion two 
 especial treasures I had acquired on my visit to Pittsfield — my father's 
 diploma and his large, framed portrait of John T. Hodgen. 1 
 
 She seemed more languid than usual and I tried to cheer her up with 
 a ludicrous anecdote of a fine old colored man I'd met one day at Pitts- 
 field. As I had been plodding along the street to meet my brother Joseph 
 and take him with me to the dinner which the Pike County Medical 
 Society was so kindly giving me that day, I was stopped on a street- 
 crossing by an old but well-dressed colored man (not a citizen of Pitts- 
 field or I'd have met him sooner). And he, tipping his hat, came up to 
 me and inquired, "Have I the honor of addressing the Honorable John 
 G. Nicolay?" 
 
 "No. My name is Shastid." 
 
 1 These had been presented to me by my brother William's widow, Clara Willson 
 Shastid, and his son, Willson Shastid. These two sacred documents, these silent, if also 
 ever-eloquent, homilists, had hung in my father's, later in my father's and brother William's, 
 office for fifty-six years, then, after my father's death, in my brother William's for a quarter 
 century more. 
 
 It was before these documents that my father had stood me and blessed me and talked 
 to me so long and affectionately on that day, so many years before, when I had become 
 his apprentice. 
 
1114 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 "It is" (in great astonishment)! "I understood your name was Nicolay 
 and that you were trying to get the lady that runs that there hotel right 
 there — the Parkway — to name the place after you." 
 
 I explained that John G. Nicolay had been dead for years. 
 "He has? I'm sorry. — Maybe it was his son I know'd. I'm eighty-four 
 years of age and sometimes I get confusion." 
 
 The old man's mistake was not founded on nothing. What had 
 happened just a few days back and what he had probably heard some- 
 thing about and got twisted, was as follows: 
 
 I have already stated herein that my father, in his youth at Pittsfield, 
 had been a close companion of John G. Nicolay, the man who was later 
 so helpful in securing for Lincoln his first nomination to the presidency. 
 I have also related that John G. Nicolay and Abraham Lincoln had first 
 been made acquainted with each other by my father. Even before Lincoln 
 had been elected, Nicolay had, because of his helpfulness to Lincoln, 
 been appointed at Springfield Lincoln's campaign secretary, and, after 
 the election, his presidential private secretary. As Lincoln's assistant 
 private secretary there was appointed, on the recommendation of this 
 same John G. Nicolay, the same small, black-haired, rosy-cheeked John 
 Hay who, though considerably younger than Nicolay and my father, had, 
 nevertheless, been pals of them both during his one year's stay in Pitts- 
 field — as student at the John D. Thomson Academy, still more at the 
 Nicolay printing and publishing office. Inasmuch as Hay, largely in 
 consequence of his association with Lincoln, became in much later years 
 United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James, and, still later, 
 Secretary of State of the United States, it is easy to see how very much 
 indeed of historical importance — the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, with its 
 meaning to the still future Nicaragua Canal, also the Open Door Policy 
 in China, etc. — resulted from Hay's association with Nicolay, Nicolay's 
 association with my father and, in a word, the throwing together of all 
 these three men in Pittsfield at the psychologic, or Lincolnian, moment. 
 
 As I, the Commonplace Philosopher and Psychologue, alias Hobo 
 Medicus, had, before meeting the old colored man, been considering all 
 these old-time Pittsfieldian matters, I chanced to be crossing the south 
 side of the Courthouse Park. On one side of me, as I had reached the 
 south side exit from the Park, I glanced to the left and there beheld the 
 commemoration stone to Hodgen (my father's old-time preceptor and 
 idol) also to Henry Hodgen Mudd (Hodgen 's nephew and my attending 
 physician at St. Luke's — the man who had tried to lead me through 
 those jungle wastes of delirium in St. Louis). To the right, then, I chanced 
 to catch sight of the Lincoln-Douglas-Hay-Nicolay stone and, all at 
 once, a glittering project which I thought might be of some value to 
 the town popped into my mind. 
 
 Glittering! But not all is gold that glitters in my mind. 
 
 First, thought I, seeing that we have here two monuments already 
 erected, why not proceed further and make of Pittsfield the historical 
 center which it deserves to be? Why not have a similar stone with a 
 copper plate let into it erected on the site of the old Thomson Academy? 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1115 
 
 Why not, next, in the yard-corner of my Grandfather Shastid's old home, 
 have yet another such stone and plate to tell of the times when Lincoln 
 had eaten there and been part and parcel of so much good sense, good 
 humor, wit, and excellent comradeship — even in the days when no one 
 could ever have really dreamed he would some day be President? Then, 
 too, why not have a similar stone and tablet in the Pittsfield post office 
 yard, the site of the old Dorus Bates residence, where Nicolay for so 
 many years courted Therena? Lastly, why not have a simple copper 
 tablet let into the south-corner brick-pier of the Zimmerman garage, 
 apprising the world of the former existence on that spot of the old Free- 
 Press office, there where Nicolay and Hay had foregathered, and not far 
 from the spot where my father had introduced Nicolay to Lincoln — 
 with so great consequences to the nation and to the world? 
 
 Four such tablets should, incidentally, be of much value in the way 
 of publicity for Pittsfield. 
 
 But indeed not all is gold that gleams in hobo heads. Where, then, 
 to find the correct assayer to analyze these bright, these gold-seeming 
 ideas with a view to ascertaining just how much, if any, value lay with- 
 in them? 
 
 The right name occurred to me— Jesse M. Thompson, Secretary of the 
 Pittsfield Chamber of Commerce. That man was also Pike County 
 Historian — and how there could have been a better historian of county, 
 state or nation, I do not know. Master of a beautiful literary style, a 
 tireless research worker, a person both widely educated and deeply 
 learned, one moreover who worked for the major part not for mere gain 
 but for the sake of preserving the well-loved past of Illinois, he was 
 indeed the right man. 
 
 All at once, however, I happened to descry the electric sign of a 
 newly rebuilt hotel. This structure had formerly, even from the days 
 of my boyhood, been known as The Mansion House. Now, under the 
 highly capable management of a Mrs. Armentrout, it was about to be 
 re-christened The Parkway Hotel. But here was a further idea. Why 
 not call it the Hay-Nicolay House? That would give it both local appro- 
 priateness and historical significance. A Parkway Hotel might have 
 existence anywhere. Nor would such a hotel have any historical value. 
 Then, too, "The Hay-Nicolay House," being absolutely unique and com- 
 pounded of names already known and loved throughout the nation, 
 would at once excite attention, wherever heard or read. "The Hay- 
 Nicolay House! Where is that?" "At Pittsfield, 111." "Why that name 
 there?" The answer would fix the hostel and the town in the hearer's 
 mind forever. 
 
 What an advertisement for Pittsfield and the old times, I thought, 
 also for the hotel — Hay-Nicolay House. Quincy (first county-seat north 
 of us) had a Lincoln-Douglas House, and Hannibal (first county-seat 
 west of us, and Mark Twain's boyhood's town) had The Mark Twain 
 Hotel — the latter in fact well known to travelers not only over all the 
 United States but also over all the rest of the world. Why so? Because 
 of its name merely. 
 
1116 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 Full of these ideas, I broached the subject to the excellent Mrs. 
 Armen trout, there in her hotel office. But she did not like the ideas at all. 
 
 I next broached them to Mr. Thompson, who at once declared them 
 of the highest value not only to Mrs. Armen trout but likewise to all 
 Pittsfield and Pike County. "The Hay-Nicolay House forever!" he 
 shouted. "That name will stick in the memory of every one who hears 
 it. I'll see our leading citizens and take them to Mrs. Armentrout with 
 me. She must see things our way." 
 
 Taking Fred Niebur and Harry English, Jo Shastid, the Hesleys and 
 I don't know whom all, along with him, away then went he to Mrs. 
 Armentrout! 
 
 And he argued, I am told, like a Daniel Webster. Then many of the 
 others spoke. And all the while Mrs. Armentrout looked the more 
 interested the more they kept on talking. 
 
 But when all, at last, had finished speaking, she said, quietly, and 
 smiling sweetly still, "No. This is 'The Parkway.' 
 
 And the answer remained, "This is 'The Parkway.' 
 
 At this point I said to the Companion, "Don't you think it comical, 
 this further failure of the Hobo?" 
 
 "I will tell you," she answered, "in just a few moments precisely 
 what I think. I'm so glad you all were happy that I want you to keep 
 on talking." I noted the languor in her speech, but at the time saw not 
 its full significance. 
 
 I went on, "Once again I had 'tramped to failure,' but a lot of good 
 fellows with me. 
 
 "Anyway, you see now the reason for the aged colored man's mistake 
 — the curious error he made as I, on my way to meet Joseph and take 
 him to the Cardinal Inn, was regarded by the old gentleman as Mr. John 
 G. Nicolay — right hand supporter of Abraham Lincoln before I had even 
 been born. 
 
 "Or was the old darky merely attempting to 'rub it in,' to 'horse' me?" 
 
 And still she did not laugh. I continued, however, though far more 
 circumstantially than here recorded, as follows: 
 
 THE CARDINAL INN 
 At the Cardinal Inn there were, first of all, from Jacksonville, Dr. 
 Carl Black and his delightful son-in-law, Dr. Drennan, again. Following 
 came most of the local doctors, Dr. F. N. Wells, the President, presiding. 
 The only non-medical person there was my brother Joseph, who, most 
 of the time, was comically insisting that vitamins are merely a sub-order 
 of bacteria, and the rest of the time trying to tell doctors what it was 
 that Dr. John T. Hodgen had done to the supposedly drowned colored 
 man in a street of St. Louis that had brought the darky back to life, and 
 so had accomplished more to put Hodgen in the public eye and make 
 him thoroughly famous than had all the quiet and far more valuable 
 and original work that this truly remarkable man had achieved before 
 that merely incidental day. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1117 
 
 What a group of doctors were gathered together in that inn! To me, 
 ideal doctors. Oldest of all was Lacey, born in September, 1860, even 
 while Lincoln had been running for president the first time. Older than 
 I by six years! Still active, still scholarly, still thoroughly, carefully 
 practical. The youngest was Dilts. I, though younger than two or three 
 others in that group, could distinctly remember his great-grandmother, 
 the wise and universally beloved Lucy Wills — he was that young. Born 
 in 1901, graduated at Northwestern University Medical School in 1933, 
 benefited by much graduate study, he represented all that is recent and 
 best and most skilfully serviceable in the medical instruction of to-day. 
 And how different from that of the olden times! Yet here he was in tiny 
 Pittsfield, doing daily, nightly, duty among the sick, even the most 
 hopelessly humble, sick. And so, as to Peacock, McRaven and the rest. 
 
 Perhaps these men, as my father before them had done, loved village 
 and country people. I wonder. 
 
 Eleanor Roosevelt once said, " in the real things of life, every 
 
 one stands on the same level." If only they did! In the estimation of 
 village-and-country doctors they always do. Otherwise there could be 
 no village-and-country doctors. Life, death, birth, suffering, sorrow, 
 happiness! The village-and-country doctor, it seems, like Pallida Mors 
 herself, knocks with strict impartiality at the cottages of the poor and 
 (if calls from such luxurious habitations ever come to him) the "palaces 
 of kings." Only, of course, the doctor taps at all the various kinds of 
 habitations with precisely opposite purpose from that of Pallida Mors. 
 And with less arrogance too and more kindness of manner, for he sum- 
 mons with courteous knuckle, instead of the insolent pede. 
 
 I talked to them, first, of Hay, Nicolay, Lincoln— appropriate subject, 
 surely, in this town. Next, of my (then) sixty-two years of medical 
 observation, first as boy "apprentice" to my father (ten years and over), 
 next as medical adult (more than half a century). I had seen the Sunrise 
 — the aboriginal darkness of medicine, glowing first a little, then turning 
 brighter, and, finally, waxing into the radiance and effulgence of the 
 new scientific day — a day on which the sun of truth will never set, any 
 more than it will ever set in heaven. 
 
 Here the Companion, putting hands to breast, interrupted me per- 
 force, "I have a dim foreboding, Tramp, that, somehow, your 'little 
 white house' will soon be casting its 'long black shadow' over some 
 one in this neighborhood." 
 
 "Over just whom?" I responded, not wishing to understand. 
 
 "You know well enough," she countered, and arose to reach the 
 stairway. 
 
 I caught her before she fell. 
 
 AT KINDLY ST. LUKE'S 
 
 It soon became clear that the shadow of the little white house was 
 
 advancing even more rapidly toward the Tramp himself than toward his 
 
 Companion. For many years the neuritis which had sometimes burned 
 
 and sometimes frozen his shoulders, back and arms, had been slowly 
 
1118 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 spreading over his entire body. In September, 1938, because he was 
 unable to meet his patients any longer, he took to his bed — a place then 
 of unmitigated pain and horror. 
 
 It was of course obvious that the Companion could not nurse me. 
 I suggested outside nurses, was overruled, and, by unanimous vote of all 
 my kind physicians — Nelson, Graves, Gowan and others — was sentenced 
 (I can scarcely call it else than that) to St. Luke's Hospital, here in 
 Duluth. And kind indeed were all the attendants there, likewise the 
 physicians. Especially I have to thank Dr. Thomas Gage Clement and 
 his most excellent assistant, Miss Leve Bergholz, for their gentle and 
 skilful ministrations to me. There were many things to do, or to try, 
 it seemed, in my case. Numerous suggestions were therefore made by 
 even other physicians still: Drs. John Power, Arthur Collins, T. L. 
 Chapman, John M. Robinson, David Tilderquist, Frank Knapp, Archie 
 Olson, L. L. Merriman. I mention all these matters so that the sequel 
 may be clearly understood. There was no lack of good counsel in my 
 case. Yet I steadily grew worse. 
 
 My one escape from pain, and that a very incomplete one, was read- 
 ing — newspapers, books, whatsoever came handy. Write I could not. 
 Even the newspapers brought news of dire disaster. My old-time 
 friend, Dr. A. G. Hovde, of Los Angeles, had passed away. Then Dr. 
 R. C. Smith, of Superior, had followed him — Smith, the incomparable. 
 It did not seem that a world could get on at all without these so ex- 
 cellent men, such skilful physicians, such warm-hearted comrades. And 
 month after month the death-roll grew apace. All the while, in the 
 European distance, the throb and roll of innumerable war-drums, presag- 
 ing death, blindness, insanity, for millions and deterioration of the human 
 race forevermore. They who would have been the finest sires for the 
 future human stock! Slaughtered! So many of the most life-worthy 
 to die, leaving humanity degenerate! And all from leaving the war-power, 
 even from concentrating the all-power, in the hands of political crooks ! 
 What a mistake it had been on the part of so many sincere peace-workers 
 to back all the plans for peace that had been devised by the governments 
 themselves and not one of which had given the people any say at all in 
 the matter of war or no war! 
 
 . At home the Companion, who had always been subject to a curious 
 trepidation whenever there was ice on the sidewalks or in the roadways, 
 now, when her breathing was daily becoming more difficult, would not, 
 really could not, leave the house. This added to my hospital depression. 
 Yet she daily, or twice or thrice daily, wrote me loving letters wherein, 
 unable as she was to realize the full extent of my danger, discoursed 
 chiefly of her approaching dissolution. 1 
 
 1 As she grew older, she became more helpless, yet continually attempted to do more 
 work. It seemed as if forever she was trying to prove to herself that, instead of getting 
 weaker with age and angina pectoris she was actually growing stronger. She was ofttimes 
 greatly amazed at being waited on, yet, afterwards, she would remember the friendly offer 
 of assistance with pleasure. Me she looked after with an undeviating devotion which she 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1119 
 
 These dark subjects I. write about here because they shed much 
 light on the psychology of my case of neuritis. Farther on I shall be 
 able to cite matters that shed much light more, and I carefully emphasize 
 this topic of pain-psychology because, although in my general practice, 
 years before, also in that of my father, I had seen several cases of uni- 
 versal neuritis, I had had no more conception of what that meant to the 
 patient's psyche than if he were in fact a sufferer on a far-away planet. 
 "But how canst thou properly heal a sick person," asked some quaint 
 doctor in antiquity, "if thou understandest not the mind in him which 
 his sickness produces?" 
 
 DREAMS 
 My greatest suffering I had not to endure in my waking hours but in 
 my dreams. When waking there were means wherewith to control my 
 thoughts. When waking, moreover, I could almost invariably, just by 
 a little selection of the subjects for my thought, dispose myself to sleep. 
 Almost always, for example, some ludicrous incident of my childhood 
 would put me soundly asleep instanter. In fact I have almost always got 
 to sleep while laughing or reminiscing about old-time animals. This was 
 better, far better, than to take any sort of sleeping medicine. Anything is 
 good that works and does no harm. Over and over some kind-hearted 
 nurse would enter holding a syringe — morphine, codeine, pantopon or the 
 like — and offer it for my solace. Not once, however, did I take the proffer- 
 ed nepenthe. The old-time jokes and other reminiscences were more effec- 
 tive by far and caused no after-exacerbations of the disease. 
 
 Yet, though my methods were highly effective in giving me much 
 tranquility when awake and even in sending me off to sleep, they gave 
 me no control at all over what occurred, at least appeared to me to occur, 
 when once I had gone into dreamland. 
 
 At first the dreams were not horrible and depressing, so much as 
 intolerably beautiful, or at least unearthly and sublime. Such was the 
 oneiritic effect of mere pain, but pain intense and long continued, over 
 my psyche during sleep. 
 
 Sometimes, when first I had entered the hospital, there seemed to be 
 bending over me the Companion. And she would be always saying, 
 
 would not have exchanged for any other lot — this, too, although I had rather by far she 
 would have let me help myself. 
 
 As time passed she stubbornly refused to follow the instructions of her doctors, would 
 not even consult doctors any more — a mental condition not uncommon among those with 
 hypertension and angina. 
 
 She was greatly worried about what might happen to me, to the house, after her de- 
 parture. She made long memoranda about how the home which had long been so dear to 
 her should be managed, should be kept in its present condition. "Never allow the view of 
 the Lake," she wrote again and again, "the view from my bedroom and dressing-room 
 windows to be blocked up. It is like looking out to heaven through those windows. 
 Let the view remain unchanged in every way, so long as you shall live." 
 
 After her death I attempted to fulfil all the wishes she had at any time expressed to me, 
 excepting three: Not to grieve for her. To burn all her letters to me and mine to her. To 
 remarry soon after her death. "You have always been so helpless, Tramp." 
 
1120 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 "I have no longer a dim, but now a very clear, foreboding that the 
 shadow of your 'little white house' will soon pass over me. I am greatly 
 disturbed as to what may happen to you in that case (husbands are so 
 helpless) but, as for me, remember 'Let not your heart be troubled.' " 
 
 But, later, this dream came no more. Others instead, almost more 
 terrible. 
 
 The subject of dreams in general has always much interested me, and, 
 since I wrote my "Tramping," whether because of my performing that 
 task or not, I dream more often than ever. And there is one curious 
 thing about these later dreams which I never had noted before (perhaps 
 the same thing is true of the dreams of all elderly persons) the source of 
 the dream lies more and more and still more and more in some earlier, 
 ofttimes very much earlier, dream. 
 
 And why not? If we elder folk, in our waking hours, spend more 
 and more time in musings on our far-away past, why, then, should we 
 not, in our dreaming hours, spend more and more time in dreaming 
 about former dreams? A curious instance occurs to me in which a dream 
 of mine at St. Luke's harked back to and took its origin from a dream 
 I had had that was not a normal dream but a dream that occurred as I 
 awakened out of ether narcosis after my vermiform appendix had been 
 removed. That operation had been performed more than forty-four years 
 before, and, strange as it seems, I had been under ether anesthesia at the 
 time for about six hours — for reasons made clear at the time by the 
 operator, Dr. Charles McBurney. 
 
 As I began to recover consciousness, I had curious delusions about 
 space, light, time and eternity. In fact, as to time, I appeared to have 
 had my former existence, or consciousness, millions and trillions, yes 
 unspeakable vigintillions, of ages before. And in absolute darkness I was. 
 At last a tiny light began to appear straight before me. I moved, rather 
 was moved, steadily toward it — steadily, steadily— with enormous swift- 
 ness yet over countless aeons of time. I saw many things besides the 
 central light too — a great angel with a platter of stars in his hand, and, 
 on the platter, standing, a much smaller angel, holding aloft that central 
 light toward which I moved. 
 
 All at once — a crash as of the explosion of many worlds. 
 
 The point of light had suddenly expanded into the light of my hospital 
 room. I was again awake. 
 
 After I had recovered from that New York operation fully and was 
 back in Pittsfield, 111., I had, at long intervals, a curious sense of detach- 
 ment from all the world, as if I had not yet got hooked up with it right. 
 But less and less I thought about the operation and its curious ether 
 effects, until, by slow degrees, I ceased to think of them at all. 
 
 And never did I have any dream that could surely be traced to the 
 one I had had under the influence of ether — until, in St. Luke's at Duluth, 
 as I lay sick of neuritis, I one night slept and dreamed. I walked, it 
 appeared, in a place of desolate great rocks, a place I could not recognize 
 though I somehow felt that I must have seen it long before. 
 
 And the Unidentifiable One — whoever he was I somehow knew his 
 name — handed me an instrument, his fingers all blazing with jewels. 
 
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 MY FATHER'S DIPLOMA 
 
 (Greatly Reduced in Size) 
 The date is February 28, 1856. 
 
 Most of the signatures, as well as the name of 
 my father, are still fairly legible in the actual 
 diploma, yet by no means distinct enough to 
 be legible in an ordinary half-tone engraving. 
 To remedy this situation, the engraver em- 
 ployed an artist to cover those parts of the 
 diploma in which all the handwriting appears 
 with tracing-paper, and then, on that paper, 
 to trace the signatures, etc., in good black ink. 
 That task having been performed by the artist, 
 the engraver made a negative of the diploma 
 itself, including the barely showing signatures. 
 Next, he made a negative of the tracing paper, 
 which, of course, showed the document's hand- 
 writing only, though plainly. Superimposing 
 the second negative on the first one, he printed 
 
 the two simultaneously, and, from the double 
 print, made his engraving. 
 
 So the reader now is able to see the docu- 
 ment precisely as it appeared on February 28, 
 1856, with its shining galaxy of the newly 
 written signatures of some of the most illus- 
 trious physicians and surgeons in the Missis- 
 sippi Valley at the time — Spence, Moore, Mc- 
 Dowell, Hodgen, and so on. (It also appears 
 as it did on the day when little Tommy Shastid, 
 with so much rejoicing, became his father's 
 apprentice.) And yet this document, in front 
 of which I still am very fond of standing and 
 standing, remains absolutely unaltered except 
 of course by the untender touch of time. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 1 121 
 
w. 
 
 THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS-HAY-NICOLAY MEMORIAL STONE 
 
 Courthouse Park, Pittsfield, Illinois. 
 
 (Photograph by Reurser Studio, Pittsfield) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1123 
 
 And he instructed me, saying: "Here is the chronoscope, that instrument 
 thou thyself didst devise for the purpose of noting how time itself, like 
 all else, originates in light. Look thou through it." 
 
 Then I looked. And I saw. And I beheld a great angel standing at 
 an infinite distance from me and out of both time and eternity — a place 
 where I knew there was no duration, limited or unlimited. 
 
 And he held in his hand what I somehow knew to be a "gyrane." 
 It was shaped like a platter of the universe, and all the island universes 
 were there in its shining. 
 
 And as the platter shook, a change occurred — although there had 
 been no change at all in the angel, who was utterly changeless inasmuch 
 as he had not duration and changes require duration for their occurrence. 
 
 Dark pools of violet pain — I can describe them no otherwise — poured 
 over me again and again. 
 
 A voice then which I knew not commanded, "Awaken! Awaken and 
 see that thou, whilst thou didst sleep, didst sleep all time away, so that 
 now the second of thermodynamic laws, that of entropy, hath had its 
 effect upon the entire universe, which is all outside (and not within) 
 thee, so that that universe hath turned, like thee thyself, both old and 
 cold and gray — a mere realm of motionless, changeless desolation, hold- 
 ing not so much as one tiny, aching bit of life to tell where life once was. 
 
 "Nothing but death! 
 
 "Nothing but death — for thou hast slept so long! 
 
 "Awaken and see! 
 
 "Awaken, I tell thee, and but behold!" 
 
 And behold indeed ! A nurse was shaking me unduly and bidding me 
 — for so it had been ordered — to awaken and sit up for two hours in a 
 straight-backed chair. A wise precaution! 
 
 Freud's theories could certainly supply no adequate interpretation of 
 such a dream. It was in fact a dream that had been engendered after so 
 many years by that old-time dream I had had at the Presbyterian Hospital 
 in New York City when awakening out of my anesthetic more than 
 forty-four years earlier. A few later matters had of course mixed into it. 
 
 IMAGES IN PLANE MIRRORS 
 
 Stand before a full-length looking-glass and observe the curious man 
 therein. He is both you and yet not you. He is precisely the same size 
 that you are, both as a whole and in every smallest detail. His head is 
 at the top of him, precisely as is yours at the top of you, and his feet, 
 like yours, are down against the floor. Yet the left side of him is not 
 your left side but your right. So, too, the right side of him is not your 
 right side but your left. Wiggle your left hand and see if his right one 
 does not wiggle with it, and not his left. The man in the mirror is not 
 a mere repetition of yourself, though he would have you believe that 
 he is. 
 
 So too with dreams and reality, or with dreams for which the reality 
 (the source) is merely an earlier dream. The later dream is ofttimes a 
 
1124 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 kind of mirror-image of the earlier — or of some reality. You dream of 
 a dead person, say a person whom you loved, and she is almost always 
 living. Even my patients have ofttimes noticed that. A "wish fulfil- 
 ment" merely? Well, dream of a dead person whom you hated and even 
 still hate; he too is almost always living in your dreams. You may be 
 glad indeed that he is dead, and yet ofttimes in your dreams, he still is 
 living. If he is still living in reality, he not infrequently appears to you 
 as dead. It seems to be a law of dreams that, therein, no former dream 
 or former reality shall ever be repeated exactly. It is a mirror image, 
 not a perfect repetition, of its source. Dreams mock reality — or former 
 dreams. If they mock some former dream, they are only mocking what 
 was already a mockery — making reality twice mocked, or perhaps thrice. 
 The variation, therefore, from the source, in all such cases, is apt to be 
 greater than when reality itself is mocked. Sometimes the reality is a 
 present, not a past one, as when my brother Jon, one morning, actually 
 standing by the head of my bed, was singing "Awake, arise! and go 
 with me!" I dreamed that he indeed was standing beside me but in a 
 cannibal country from which he was wishing to help me escape. (My 
 brother Jon was still my brother Jon — the vertical dimension in the plane- 
 mirror image; but my room had changed into a great cannibal area, 
 and so forth — the horizontal dimension in the plane-mirror image, the 
 dimension of transposition or falsification.) 
 
 The fact that dreams are always mockeries does not mean that they 
 are always painful or sarcastic. I have laughed at a dream while still 
 in the dream, and still more heartily afterward. But the dreams of the 
 sick and suffering are almost always painful and horrifying, fever or no 
 fever. 
 
 This whole field of psychology has been neglected — not merely the 
 structure of normal dreams but the dreams of the sick, especially those 
 of the sick who are suffering. Such dreams are more likely to be dis- 
 tressingly vivid, or depressingly sublime, or symbolical in some painful 
 manner. Their mirror-image qualities — their distressing mockeries of 
 truth — are apt to be pronounced in a high degree. I knew a man who was 
 sick and in pain who continually dreamed that his dead father, whom 
 he adored, was still living and walking about very vigorously, but that 
 his head, although it could talk, was upside down and undergoing putrefac- 
 tion. "But how canst thou properly heal a sick person if thou under- 
 standest not the mind in him which his sickness produces?" 1 
 
 1 This comparison of dream-structure with the structure of a plane-mirror image, 
 should, like any other figure of similarity, not be followed out in every detail. Take the 
 old metaphor, "He was a lion in the fight." A caviller could easily object that the man 
 who had been fighting had not the color of a lion, nor his long mane, nor his reverberant 
 roar. Neither did the man, of course, run about like a lion — on all fours. No two things 
 that are ever the subject of any comparison are supposed to correspond in all details. Were 
 they actually alike in each and every point, they would not be alike but identical — i.e. one 
 and the same thing. In any comparison whatsoever the asserted likeness is valid if it 
 extends to the essential points — those intended to be clarified and enforced. The comparison 
 of a man with a lion is sufficiently complete if it extends to such qualities in the battle as 
 strength, agility, judgment, courage. 
 
 The essential points about the dream-and-plane-mirror-image-comparison are not merely 
 that, in almost every dream, there are points of resemblance to and points of difference from 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1125 
 
 A SECOND JUNGLE IN A SECOND ST. LUKE'S 
 After a time the dreams which had tortured me merely because they 
 seemed to be too extensive in space or too enduring in time — depressingly 
 sublime, in a word — ceased to injure or annoy me. In their place, as the 
 neuritis became worse and the pains thereof more nearly intolerable, the 
 dreams which I had whenever I slept became concerned with a horrible 
 affair of which I had dreamed long years before. 
 
 The reader may remember that, at St. Louis, I, when suffering in the 
 old St. Luke's Hospital there, later at a boarding-house in the same city, 
 had had fever and a raging delirium — a fever and a delirium which had 
 well-nigh caused my dissolution. It began, as I remember, with my seem- 
 ing to walk in some dark alley, wherein I shortly met a beggar and a police- 
 man. After a struggle with my nurse on that account, I appeared to 
 arise and, as a result perhaps of the "Veiled Prophets" whose wild 
 hilarity and jocund din were even then uprising from the avenue below 
 and invading my sick room, I seemed to walk out of my window, and, 
 after a short, but long-continuing, journey across a pampa, to reach the 
 wall of a jungle — a jungle silent and waiting. But that "first jungle" 
 at St. Luke's, in St. Louis, was little to compare with the "second jungle" 
 which I so unwillingly explored and suffered in while a patient at St. 
 Luke's, in Duluth. 
 
 Again "in the course of ages," as it seemed, we came to a pampa 
 spot before the wall of a jungle — a jungle silent, waiting. And again, 
 ' 'Enter, ' ' cried my guide, whose identity was unknown to me. Sometimes 
 he appeared to be both human and humane and then he was Dr. R. C. 
 Smith of Superior — who was more than half of one year dead. Again he 
 appeared to be a bright and beautiful angel, again Charon, of old mythol- 
 ogy, son of Erebus and Nox, and yet again "the Spirit of Involution," 
 whatsoever that is. Now and then he was only a voice — the voice of 
 nobody; but still he was "the Spirit of Involution." 
 
 It seems that, as nearly as I can remember, I had entered the jungle 
 as one of the few remaining thousands of human beings then left existent 
 upon earth, the rest having perished because of the failure of civilization. 
 Others than myself who still lived had entered the jungle, it seemed, but 
 at other points. As my guide at first explained to me, the failure of 
 civilization had produced a reversal of evolution — an involution, the 
 sheer opposite of evolution, or racial development. And what had caused 
 the failure of civilization, I asked, that of the sort which we had had. 
 
 "Some attribute it," said the seeming Charon, who at that time was 
 my guide, "to the miscegenation of all the races on the planet. This 
 resulted, they say, first of all, in biologic involution, and, out of that 
 
 the dream's source, but that there is apt to be one set, or group, of points wherein the re- 
 semblance to the source is practically complete, and yet another group wherein the resem- 
 blance is much transposed. Thus, in the dream of the man (already referred to) about his 
 dead father, all the words, phrases, modes of expression, and even ways of thought, of the 
 father were reproduced exactly (the vertical dimension in the plane-mirror image), while 
 the physical resemblance, though to some extent quite faithful to the facts, was nevertheless 
 considerably transposed or knocked about — i.e., the man was living, not dead, and his 
 head, though set at the top of his body and able to talk, was upside down and undergoing 
 putrefaction. 
 
1126 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 involution, as it said, came the failure of civilization — not the other 
 way about — though the failure of civilization went on and produced 
 still further deterioration in the unified race." 
 
 I demurred to the possibility of this, and he went on: "Some say it 
 is owing to the failure of 'mutual aid,' others to the stopping of disease 
 by public health measures, such measures having been adopted as the 
 result of the germ theory. Before that theory and its children, the great 
 public health measures, disease, though seemingly cruel, swept out of 
 existence yearly millions on millions of the weaker members of our race 
 before they could reproduce their kind. That left the naturally stronger, 
 the more disease-resisting by their natural physical inheritances, to 
 produce a continually sturdier and more self-preserving stock. The public 
 health measures, on the other hand, saved the weak, the naturally weak, 
 to reproduce. But what sayest thou?" 
 
 "War!" I replied. "War! It must be the cause, but I had not until 
 now, even after we have entered the jungle, realized that civilization is 
 dying, or else is fully dead." 
 
 "Who had? Thou art right at least in this, that war, by its selection 
 for the incomputable slaughter of the fittest to survive, must surely have 
 deteriorated the race hugely. At all events there are now no humans 
 left save those that dwell in this jungle. What fools you were, you 
 humans, to think that what had been going on for about six thousand 
 years and on rather small areas of the planet only, would necessarily 
 go on forever. Civilization! It never was firmly established, civilization, 
 upon this earth — never. It never had had aught but a beginning and that 
 not firmly established — what thinkest thou of this river?" 
 
 The body of Charon had vanished and only his voice continued in 
 the air about me. At last the voice vanished also, crying, "Follow the 
 river: do not cross it." 
 
 And I followed — but who can portray a jungle that is merely a 
 mirror-image of a tormented mind, a mind that is followed even into 
 dreamland by its pain? 
 
 I "followed," and the jungle stretched before me ever wilder and 
 more deep. At first it had seemed uninhabited, a soundless tropical 
 green unconsciousness, shaded by the umbrage of a thousand interlacing 
 branches, a thousand years. The floor, a mere rot of bygone jungleness! 
 Now and then there slid up thick, slow ooze through the quagmire 
 stench, and about my shivering thighs. All, all about — silence. Then — 
 down long vistas in the unending dimness dense pale columns of living 
 men, toiling along with downcast faces, turning aside to pass round vast 
 rocks, flowing over the tree-trunks and sinking in the endless ooze. 
 I shouted but they could not hear me. Fear flooded my heart. 
 
 On each side of me, hidden by the ebony curtain of the deeper jungle, 
 was the thing. For hours it had dogged me, spied on my every motion, 
 stopping when I paused, forever keeping just outside my range of vision. 
 If I tried to pluck a fruit or drink from the safe calyx of a flower, it was 
 very close around my head. As I rose, it leaped backward into pockets 
 of blackness, remained unseen. 
 
 Once it whispered, again coughed — hackingly. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1127 
 
 For a moment horror robbed me of the power to move. Then I gave 
 voice to my terror, turned, started to flee, calling for help. 
 
 The summons was answered by a black — a powerful, broad-shouldered 
 creature with a tiny head and a face almost as evil as that of the accursed 
 enemy himself of God. 
 
 I tried to speak to him; tongue clove to roof of mouth. 
 
 Then I saw that the forest was full of faces, demoniac faces like that 
 first one; and the same column of humans (I took it for the same) that 
 I had already beheld, had, in their wanderings, fetched a wild compass 
 round behind me, and the true army of the jungle and that that had 
 come from the non- jungle locked in one mortal embrace. 
 
 Well, it was nothing like so horrible as the old-time wars in the 
 non- jungle had been — the former non-jungle world from which this 
 sorry flight had issued. 
 
 And I slipped away with weird, inarticulate cries of my own, as 
 though I were myself turning beast. 
 
 Exhausted, I fell. Rose. Fell again. 
 
 So hours passed. 
 
 I woke — in my dream — to find I had been sleeping. Through a glade 
 the glad sun poured his welcome beams, and millions of beautiful birds 
 sang paeans to a rising day. Incense hung in the air — incense which, 
 as I breathed painfully, pervaded my being, my moveless limbs, stirred 
 me into incredible ecstasy. 
 
 I rose and moved on, and the river of which my Charon-like guide 
 had spoken had curved round about and lay before me. Though black, 
 it seemed like a river of peace. Yet so thick was the water of that river 
 and so damp and so dark and so soft the soil whereon I stood that I 
 scarcely discerned where river was and where bank. 
 
 And as I, remembering the words of my guide, was even beginning 
 to move along the river's side, there uprose from the stream a dripping, 
 monstrous head, that of an alligator, with eyes as relentlessly cruel as 
 ever had shone in head of human. Its lunge overturned me. I, helpless, 
 could not choose but fight. And as I beat the abysmal head with bare 
 hands — ineffectually of course — I awoke in actuality. And behold I was 
 drubbing my swollen sick palms against the steel sides of the heating- 
 cradle in my bed. 
 
 Night after night I rolled again that unequal combat with that 
 alligator. 
 
 Sometimes, however, instead of the alligator, I met my parents — 
 who, of course, seemed now living. And I saw them much as in that 
 earlier jungle at St. Louis — mirror-wise, of course, both as to that earlier 
 jungle and also as concerned the reality about them in the days when 
 they still lived. 
 
 TRAMP'S REST AGAIN 
 It soon became apparent that I could not recover in the hospital. 
 Better for others, a hospital, it was worse, far worse, for me, than was 
 home. 
 
1128 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 With every admission of the unquestionable skill of the many doctors 
 who had kindly made suggestions for my betterment, I owed, as much 
 as to anything else my recovery to my departure from the hospital and 
 joyous return to Tramp's Rest, the place where I could be surrounded 
 by old-time books, scrapbooks, pictures, boyhood's handwritten news- 
 papers, boyhood's diaries, trunks full of letters from hands that could 
 write no more but that still, even in these days, gave comfort and peace 
 and hastened my recovery. 
 
 Almost from the day when I returned to Tramp's Rest I began to 
 improve. 
 
 I had, to be sure, many dreams, even there at Tramp's Rest, but these 
 were more pleasant and, therefore, of a sanatory rather than a destructive 
 character. Thus, I dreamed that, back at home again in Pittsfield, I sat 
 beside my mother — she, of course, in accordance with the law of dreams, 
 was living — on the old front porch, waiting for the troops of children 
 to pass by — homeward on their way from school. And shouting and 
 chasing each other madly they were, all happy little rascals. 
 
 Then, all at once, I was, it appeared, on my way to Oakwood Ceme- 
 tery, where I knew my father and mother lay buried. And, curiously 
 enough, I said to myself, "You cannot go out to the very cemetery where 
 your father and mother lie buried and there not think of them as dead, 
 even though you are still in a dream, and therefore should, by the law 
 of all dreams, be thinking of them and of all the other departed as living." 
 
 Yet, as I entered the graveyard, my father and my mother came to- 
 ward me, although white-raimented, quite as a matter of course, and 
 even more happy it seemed than ever before I had known them, discours- 
 ing too about their happiness. 
 
 And my mother — she seemed to be the Companion now — said, "Do 
 not worry about me: let not your heart be troubled." 
 
 And my father: "Just a little farther on, son, as you know, down 
 the Honey Creek road and across that Creek and so on up to the high top 
 of Petty Hill, there is silence and light — the kind in which you used to 
 worship." 
 
 I said, "But I did not know that you used to know I worshipped in 
 silence and in light." 
 
 "We know all things about the earth now," he answered, "and — 
 strangely, very strangely — are happy, very happy in that knowledge." 
 
 I left them then and started down the road toward Honey Creek, but 
 awoke before reaching it. Still I was very happy. And all my dreams 
 were happy. 
 
 Hence it is not at all strange that, almost from the hour I returned 
 to Tramp's Rest I began to improve. Even my dreams were sanatory. 
 
 Yet not merely my dreams and my pleasant surroundings could, alone, 
 have sufficed to effectuate a cure. 
 
 RECENT MEDICAL ADVANCES 
 Already, in the main portion of this volume, I have told how the 
 old-time, largely ineffective, medicine had made slow way for the Great 
 New Medicine. The marvellous change was almost altogether owing to 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1129 
 
 the introduction and the slow but finally unquestionable establishment 
 of the truth of the Germ Production of a very large number of diseases. 
 As a result of that introduction and that firm establishment of the Germ 
 Theory, not only medicine, but all else human, was altered, improved 
 and advanced in a way that had formerly seemed impossible. And yet 
 the healing art had further heights to climb. Not all diseases are caused 
 by micro-organisms. 
 
 From the earliest days, for example, it had been known that certain 
 diseases are engendered by mechanical violence. Thus, a kick on the shin 
 sometimes produces a bony outgrowth of the bone (exostosis) even 
 though no germs at all are anywise concerned in the matter. That fact 
 has never been questioned, even to the moment in which I write. So too 
 with overeating, which may cause nausea or diarrhoea; undereating, which 
 may cause starvation. Such facts were known in early days and remain 
 till now unquestioned. The power of certain drugs, too, to produce 
 disease — opium, drastic cathartics, etc. — was known in antiquity. Too 
 great exposure of the body to cold (freezing) or to heat (sunstroke, 
 thermic fever, etc.) were also known in early millenaries as producers of 
 sickness, just as still they are. 
 
 Yet all these perfectly obvious causes of disease (mechanical, dietary, 
 thermal, and the like) furnished explanations of a very small portion 
 only of the total number of diseases in existence. Even after the advent 
 and establishment of the Germ Theory, which clearly and permanently 
 explained the production of a very large number of diseases (those, 
 namely, which are known as "infections") there still remained unaccount- 
 ed for a rather long list of pathological conditions. 
 
 EYESTRAIN 
 Even in the 13th century, as already herein stated, spectacles with 
 convex lenses had begun to be employed — i.e. as aids to the failing near- 
 vision of old persons. Concave lenses were, in the 16th century, intro- 
 duced for the improvement of vision in the short-sighted. Cylindrical 
 lenses began to be employed about the beginning of the 19th century, 
 chiefly for the improvement of sight in those with astigmatism. It was 
 not, however, until my very own time that the prescription of spectacles 
 of all sorts for eyestrain and for the very numerous disorders which are 
 frequently produced by eyestrain, began. Prisms, ground into lenses 
 with other refractional elements (curves) were first adopted for the relief 
 of eyestrain in the last two decades of the 19th century. 1 
 
 1 Those chiefly concerned in this great service to mankind were E. E. Maddox, of 
 Bournemouth, England; G. C. Savage, of Nashville, Tennessee; Claud Worth, of London; 
 George T. Stevens, of New York City; and Chas. F. Prentice, of New York City. To the 
 latter we owe not only the invention of the "prism dioptry," the "typoscope," the "pris- 
 mometric scale," the "diagonal prism" with correct mathematical formulae for its use, and 
 "Dioptric Formulae for Combined Cylindrical Lenses," but also a very large portion of the 
 accepted nomenclature in oculo-myology. I trust that the reader will pardon me if I mention 
 with pride the long-standing friendship which I had with Prentice also the voluminous 
 correspondence which passed between us for very many years on scientific subjects and 
 which closed only with his death. 
 
1130 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 But much there still remained to be discovered about the causes of 
 diseases, besides the always obvious causes, also micro-organisms and 
 eyestrain. 
 
 FOCAL INFECTION 
 
 From 1909 to 1916 Dr. Frank Billings, of Chicago, together with 
 E. C. Rosenow, developed and propagated what was called the focal 
 infection theory of the causation of many diseases. This ' 'focal infection' ' 
 is often supposed by laymen to be an additional, or wholly new, kind of 
 disease causation. It is, however, simply an enlargement, or extension, 
 of the Germ Theory. The word "infection" indeed, which forms an 
 essential portion of the term, so implies — an infection being precisely an 
 attack upon some portion of the body by disease germs. The word 
 "focal," however, appears to me to have been unhappily chosen. Redis- 
 tributed infection, or relayed infection, would, I think, have been far clearer 
 and more accurate. "Focal," to a layman, always seems to mean either 
 a limitation of an infection to some one focus or spot of the body, with- 
 out implying any extension elsewhere, or else to signify some new kind of 
 disease -production — "infection," to the general public, meaning ordinarily, 
 simply disease production of any sort or kind. 
 
 When any or all of a person is infected by germs from the world out- 
 side him, that should be entitled, in scientific parlance, extrinseco-genic, 1 
 produced from without. When, however, one or more parts of a person 
 are infected from some part of the body that is already infected, that 
 should be called intrinseco-genic, 2 or, in lay talk, simply redistributed, 
 or relayed infection. Possibly, for the non-medical public, the correlative 
 terms might very well be simply original infection and relayed infection. 
 ("Internal infection" would be highly ambiguous.) 
 
 The great point, however, of this section is that "focal infection" 
 is not at all an entirely new kind of disease production, but simply one 
 of the ways (a rather recently discovered way) whereby germs can and 
 do act. Germs from without, for example, ofttimes infect the teeth, the 
 tonsils, the nasal sinuses, the vermiform appendix. That I would call 
 original infection. Then the germs which are colonizing (breeding) in 
 these infected areas may get inside of the bloodvessels of those areas, 
 in which case of course they, if not killed by the white cells of the blood, 
 are carried by the blood-stream to other parts of the body, wherein, if the 
 resistance there is low, they set up what I have called redistributed, or 
 relayed, infection. Especially susceptible to relayed infection are the eyes, 
 the heart, the bloodvessels, the muscles, joints, veins of the lower ex- 
 tremities. 
 
 TOO MUCH, TOO LITTLE, OR DEFECTIVE HORMONES 
 
 The word, hormone, is derived from a Greek word meaning to excite. 
 A hormone is a substance which, having been produced in one part of 
 the body and having then been carried by the bloodstream to another 
 part of the body, excites in that second part some physiological, or 
 
 1 Latin, extrinsecus (adv.) from without. 2 Latin, intrinsecus (adv.) from within. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1131 
 
 pathological, effect. Hormones are sometimes called internal secretions, 
 because they are poured, by the (ductless) glands which secrete them, 
 directly into the blood as it circulates through those glands. 
 
 This linking of part with part about the body by these hormones, 
 excitants, or messengers, was in truth discovered by Claude Bernard from 
 1848-57, but endocrinology, as the science of hormones and their func- 
 tions is now scientifically termed, did not begin in earnest until the 1890's, 
 and it did not reach its crest till the earlier decades of the 20th cen- 
 tury. Now it is understood that Addison's disease is due to deficiency 
 of the hormone known variously as adrenin, suprarenin, adrenaline and 
 epinephrine, a secretion of the little bodies which cap (surmount) the 
 kidneys. Also that diabetes mellitus is produced by lack, or deficiency, 
 of a secretion which is known as insulin and which is manufactured by 
 the ' 'islands of Langerhans" — certain portions of the pancreas. A deficient 
 secretion of thyroxin by the thyroid gland (at the base of the neck) 
 produces myxedema and idiocy. Too much of the same secretion may 
 cause Basedow's disease (exophthalmic goitre, in English bug-eye big-neck). 1 
 Too little secretion of the pituitary gland, anterior lobe, stunts normal 
 growth and sexual development; of the posterior lobe, diminishes the 
 digestion of carbohydrates and fats. A too great secretion of the an- 
 terior portion produces, before puberty, giantism, and, after puberty, 
 acromegaly. Diminished secretion of "Castle's intrinsic factor," a sub- 
 stance formed in the stomach and stored in the liver, results in the pro- 
 duction of pernicious anemia. Whether or not this substance is a hormone 
 has not been finally determined. The cures or ameliorations of these 
 various quite serious diseases by the administration of hormones from 
 various animals have been remarkable in the extreme. The administration 
 of suprarenal extract for Addison's disease, of insulin for diabetes mellitus, 
 of thyroxin for thyroid inactivity, of Castle's intrinsic factor (in the 
 form of dried hog's stomach or of various kinds of liver) and of many 
 other hormones — either taken from animals or produced synthetically in 
 the laboratory — for many other diseases of the endocrine organs, have 
 been productive of most marvellous results. 2 
 
 1 Even in the embryo (unborn young) deficiency of thyroxin produces serious conse- 
 quences. The baby arrives misshapen, belly greatly swelled, tongue protruding and saliva 
 running all over its chin, neck and breast. 
 
 Everyone knows what a "freemartin" is, but only a few understand how such a being 
 comes to be. When a cow is "carrying" twin embryos of opposite sex, it quite generally 
 happens that the arteries from the two placentas anastomose (inosculate) with one another, 
 so that the bloods of the two embryos commingle. The male calf develops normally be- 
 cause the masculine hormone (produced by his testicles) is normal for his development, 
 while the feminine hormone from the other calf's ovaries somehow does him no harm. 
 The female calf, however, suffers sexual damage from the testicular hormone to such an 
 extent that she is absolutely sterile throughout her entire existence. 
 
 2 As to the use of liver for pernicious anemia, the reader will please to recall what is 
 said in an early part of this volume about my father's schoolteacher, Mrs. Mary M. Heath, 
 and her wise, but unheeded, recommendation to my father of any form of liver for anemias 
 that do not respond to iron. 
 
 The scientific history of this extremely important subject is this: Drs. Minot and 
 Murphy, of Boston, in 1926, found that the feeding of one-half pound of mammalian liver 
 daily cured uncomplicated pernicious anemia. (Journal A.M. A., August 14, 1926.) In 1928, 
 Castle, of Boston, discovered that a deeper-lying cause of pernicious anemia lies in some 
 
1132 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 Yet, after all, have these great discoveries contributed to our knowl- 
 edge of the causes of disease 7 . The diseases in question, we say, are pro- 
 duced by the too much, too little, or somehow defective hormones. 
 Yet what was it that caused the too much, the too little, the somehow 
 defectiveness? In the case of myxedema (from a deficient secretion of 
 thyroxin by the thyroid gland) the trouble we know to be due, at least 
 in most cases, to an insufficient intake of iodine in the food. But as 
 to most of the other diseases of the endocrine (hormone producing) 
 organs, the ultimate cause is still in doubt. Some may be engendered 
 by improper diet, by germs or by some of the other causes of disease 
 already herein mentioned. No one knows with certainty just what causes 
 them. 
 
 THE ALLERGIES 
 There is another class of ailments, quite lately gone into with thor- 
 oughness, namely the allergies. For countless ages it had been well 
 known that certain persons react unfavorably (are sensitive to) certain 
 substances. But not till the last few years was the fact established that 
 the number of allergens (allergy producing substances) is really quite 
 large and that some of the reactions have very serious consequences. 
 Here we have at last a true addition to our list of things that we cer- 
 tainly do know can cause diseases. 
 
 In no case whatsoever of any disease whatsoever has the cause thereof 
 been found to consists of any devil, especially a devil capable of uttering 
 human speech and engaging in theological argument. 
 
 VITAMINS 
 The Pre-History 
 
 Night-blindness. This rather common affection was recognized 
 even by Hippocrates, the Father of Scientific Medicine, who flourished 
 in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ. 
 
 Scurvy. This dangerous affection was probably first distinctly de- 
 scribed in 1260, by Jean de Joinville, a French military leader who ac- 
 companied Louis IX (St. Louis) on his Egyptian Crusade. The book 
 containing the description, however, was not published till 1546. In 
 1636 the disease was described by John Woodhall, master in surgery, 
 in his interesting volume, "The Surgeon's Mate," and the remedy for 
 the disease was in that volume (following a practice already in use) 
 quite properly declared to be simply lemon juice. Later, lemon juice was 
 generally substituted by lime juice or potatoes. Yet just why these 
 substances cured and prevented scurvy was not understood. 
 
 form of defective digestion in the stomach. The following year Sturgis and Isaacs, at Ann 
 Arbor, Mich., "demonstrated that dessicated hog's stomach, concentrated by the removal 
 of fats, is equally as effective, or even more so, than liver extract." Then, in that same 
 year, although the active principle itself could not be absolutely isolated, a very potent 
 material was nevertheless (by Cohn, Murphy and Minot) extracted from liver, one which 
 could be given by injection into the veins in very small quantities and with highly beneficial 
 effects. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1133 
 
 Beri-beri. This disease of the heart and peripheral nerves, vaguely 
 known to the ancient Chinese, was first described in modern times by the 
 Dutchman, Bontius, in 1642, by another Dutchman, Tulp, in 1652, and 
 very thoroughly indeed and accurately by John Grant Malcolmson in 
 1835. The cause of the disease, however, like that of scurvy, remained 
 a deep secret. 
 
 Rickets. This disease was first specifically described by the English- 
 man, Francis Glisson, in 1650. Once again, however, the cause of the 
 affection was by no means understood. 
 
 Pellagra. This condition was first described in 1735 by Casal, a 
 Spanish physician, who had observed the disease in his native country. 
 Very much later it was found to exist in every country in the world, 
 and in 1907 to be endemic in the United States. 1 
 
 These five diseases are now all curable, even preventable, by the 
 administration of vitamins. 
 
 THE HISTORY 
 
 The really scientific history of vitaminology began in 1906. In that 
 year Sir Frederick G. Hopkins, of Cambridge University, showed that, 
 contrary to former belief, no animal can live on a diet of proteins, fats, 
 carbohydrates, inorganic salts and water. These dietary elements — bulk- 
 elements one might very well call them — must, it was pointed out by 
 Hopkins, be reinforced by a considerable number of accessory factors 
 which, though present in minute quantities only, are absolutely neces- 
 sary for the animal's existence. 
 
 Then began a series of astounding discoveries about vitamins. 
 
 1 Night-blindness. Ofttimes regarded as a disease, this affection is more properly a 
 symptom only — a diminished adaptation of the eye to darkness, so that, by twilight, it 
 sees little or nothing. Night-blindness is not invariably a proof that vitamin A is wanting 
 either in the diet or in the eye. Scurvy, in its milder forms, is indicated by weakness, pallor, 
 loss of appetite and weight, dizziness, headache, stupidity, pains in the legs and muscles. 
 Later, there is inflammation of the gums, which retract from the necks of the teeth and 
 bleed at a touch. Blood is sometimes poured out just under the skin, making purple patches. 
 Anemia may be extreme. The disease is ofttimes fatal, but numerous cases are subclinical 
 — i.e., not alarming enough to cause the patient to seek assistance from a doctor. Beri-beri 
 in its earliest stages is marked by muscular weakness, especially in the calves. Later there 
 is swelling of the legs and palpitation of the heart. The peripheral nerves inflame and the 
 pain may become atrocious. General paralysis may supervene. A similar affection, also 
 produced by much the same cause, is polyneuritis. In either beri-beri or its variant, poly- 
 neuritis, the muscles of respiration not infrequently become paralysed, with of course a 
 fatal result. In former times either of these affections was generally fatal. Rickets is a 
 disease of children, characterized by abnormal changes in the bones. There is delay in 
 teething and walking, skull-enlargement and squaring, enlargement and softening of the 
 ribs, pigeon-breast, spinal curvature, clubbing of bones at the wrist, knock-knees and bow- 
 legs. Rickets is seldom fatal. In -pellagra the mouth and tongue become inflamed. Later 
 there is a characteristic skin eruption, especially on the backs of hands and wrists. These 
 areas look at first as if sunburned. Later, they become scruffy and peel off. There is gen- 
 erally much pain throughout the body. Stomach and intestines become involved. The 
 appetite is poor, the digestion weak, and the patient consequently emaciates. In some 
 cases there is insanity, ranging from slight depression and morbid fears to a truly terrible 
 melancholia. 
 
1134 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 Dr. Casimir Funk, of the State School of Hygiene, at Warsaw, Poland, 
 in 1910 introduced the term, "vitamine" (life-amine). The dropping of 
 the final e was proposed by J. C. Drummond, because it had been dis- 
 covered that not all vitamins are amines. 
 
 Vitamin A 
 
 1913. — In this year vitamin A was discovered, though not isolated, 
 independently by McCollum and Davis and by Osborne and Mendel. 
 Six years later, Steenbock, of the University of Wisconsin, pointed out 
 that the vitamin A effects were produced by the yellow pigment, carotene, 
 present in certain vegetables. Nine years later still, Euler proved that 
 carotene "could replace vitamin A in the diet." In 1930 Moore showed 
 that carotene is actually changed to vitamin A in the liver, also, that the 
 vitamin is stored in that organ. 
 
 Vitamin A was found to exist in milk fat, egg yolk, liver, fruits, and, 
 in the form of carotene, in the green and yellow vegetables. Experi- 
 mental animals, deprived of these articles in their diet, developed con- 
 ditions which, in a general way, are called A-avitaminosis (lack-of- 
 vitamin-A-condition). One of the most striking symptoms produced by 
 lack or insufficiency of vitamin A is, as already stated, night-blindness. 
 Other symptoms are slowing or cessation of growth; various skin erup- 
 tions (cornification, papules and pustules); increased susceptibility to 
 infections generally, fogging, even ulceration, of the cornea of the eye; 
 (in combination with other vitamin deficiencies) tendency toward cat- 
 aract formation. When the patient is fed on a vitamin-A-rich diet, such 
 of these symptoms as he exhibits disappear, if present merely because of 
 the A-insufficiency in the diet. If present because of failure on the part 
 of the system to absorb or to utilize the vitamin A which is present in 
 proper amount in the diet, then the amount of vitamin-A intake must 
 be increased sometimes enormously. That is accomplished by the giving 
 of vitamin-A "concentrates," or carotene (which is ^-vitamin A, i.e., 
 a substance from which the animal economy can manufacture its vi- 
 tamin A). 
 
 Vitamin B 
 
 1915. In this year the existence of vitamin B was demonstrated by 
 McCollum and Davis, and the name of this vitamin was also then 
 proposed by them. 
 
 1926. Smith and Hendrick showed that vitamin B is not one single 
 vitamin, but at least two and perhaps more. The multiple nature of 
 vitamin B was then absolutely proved by Smith and Hendrick. To-day, 
 at least seven constituents, "factors," of the so-called vitamin B are 
 known to exist and these are named, respectively, vitamin Bi, vitamin 
 Bi, etc. The entire combination of B's is called to-day "the vitamin B 
 complex," and most of its constituents have other names than merely B 
 this and B that. Thus Bi is also called "thiamin chloride." The chief 
 pellagra-preventing factor was called "nicotinic acid," later "niacin." 
 
 It is now known that the following diseases or symptoms may be 
 produced by an insufficient intake of (or the inability to absorb) either 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1135 
 
 the B complex or some one or more of its constituents: beri-beri (2 vari- 
 eties: peripheral neuritis with muscular paralysis and atrophy; various 
 diseases of the heart). Polyneuritis of various types which are not 
 downright beri-beri ; various disturbances of stomach and bowels; various 
 eye affections, notably retinal hemorrhages with inflammation, followed 
 by atrophy of the optic nerve; pellagra; acrodynia. 
 
 Vitamin C 
 
 1918. In this year the anti-scurvy substance was christened vitamin C. 
 It was then, in 1928, "isolated" — i.e. separated in unmixed form by 
 Szent-Gyorgy. In 1932 it was synthetized — i.e. produced artificially in 
 the laboratory — by Reichstein. 
 
 It is now known that the following diseases or symptoms may be 
 produced by an insufficient intake (or the inability to absorb) vitamin C: 
 Scurvy (with all the numerous symptoms described in the footnote above); 
 dental caries; pyorrhea; various sorts of hemorrhages; abnormal cutane- 
 ous pigmentations. 
 
 Vitamin D 
 
 1922. In this year McCollum integrated the antirachitic factor in 
 codliver oil and other substances. In 1924 Hess and Steenbock made 
 certain foods antirachitic by irradiation with ultraviolet rays. 
 
 Ten different forms of vitamin D have been synthetically — i.e. arti- 
 ficially — produced. 
 
 It is now known that the following diseases or symptoms may be 
 produced by an insufficient intake (or the inability to absorb) vitamin 
 D: rickets, softening of the skull, pigeon breast, spasmophilia, spasms 
 in the ankles, feet and larynx, softening of the bones generally, delay 
 or cessation of growth, malformation and decay of the teeth. 
 
 And now there have been discovered a number of other vitamins 
 which need not here be mentioned. Suffice it that vitaminology has, 
 alone, become a science of exceedingly large proportions. 
 
 The main points to remember are that while the germ theory of 
 disease proved to be undoubtedly the greatest discovery ever made in this 
 world, it nevertheless did not explain the causation of absolutely all 
 diseases. Mechanical violence, worry, undereating or overeating, too 
 much or too little exercise, excessive cold and heat, the action of various 
 poisons; all these had been known as causers of disease from time im- 
 memorial. Then came the Great Germ Theory — within, as I say, the 
 time of my still living self — to explain the causation of all the infectious 
 and contagious diseases, including the terrible epidemics. And this, as 
 I also have heretofore stated, has had well-nigh incredible effects on 
 almost everything that man either is or does. And then in addition — 
 to sum up tersely — there came eyestrain as a cause of certain diseases. 
 Then too much, too little, or defective hormones. Finally came the 
 vitamins. Or is it finally? What causes the common cold, influenza, 
 smallpox, the shingles, infantile paralysis, and so on? These diseases, 
 
1136 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 it is usual now to say, are produced by some sort or another of virus — 
 a micro-organism that the microscope has not as yet disclosed. But is 
 it? We know not for certain. 
 
 There is still a terra incognita. It is not an extensive territory, yet it 
 exists. 
 
 However, it is well worth repeating, even in these modern days, that, 
 among the vast multitude of diseases whose causes have been actually 
 ferreted out and are demonstrably known, not one single disease, or even 
 one single case of one disease, 1 has ever been found to have been produced 
 by a devil. Certainly not the kind of devil that can use human language 
 and even conduct an argument. 2 
 
 Yet there are thousands of supposedly educated people, even in these 
 United States of America, who still believe in the devil-possession theory 
 of disease-causation. The reason for the persistence of this old-time mis- 
 conception — not only in primitive countries, wherein it is a hang-over 
 from the ages when everyone on earth believed in the devil-possession 
 idea of disease-production, but even to some extent in civilized lands — 
 is sufficiently obvious and need not here be gone into. 
 
 THE RECOVERY 
 I have already stated that, almost from the very moment when I 
 returned to my home, Tramp's Rest, I began to get better. Despite that 
 fact, however, it is true that, had it not been for one of the vitamin 
 discoveries above-mentioned — that of vitamin B, meaning in my indi- 
 vidual case the entire B complex — I should surely have died. So long as 
 I dwelt in the hospital the remedy could not properly act, so great was 
 my depression. When I had been removed to my home, the remedy had 
 some opportunity to act and to cure. Once again, the importance of 
 psychology, at least of "human nature," in the healing art was em- 
 phasized thoroughly. 3 
 
 1 Contrast with this the statement in Luke IV, 40-41: "And when the sun was setting, 
 all they that had ANY sick with divers diseases brought them unto him; and he laid his 
 hands ON EVERY ONE OF THEM, and healed them. And devils also came out from 
 MANY, crying out, and saying, Thou art the Son of God." Also with the statement in 
 Matthew VIII, 16: "And he cast out the spirits with a word, and healed ALL that were 
 sick." 
 
 2 E.g. Mark I, 24: " and he cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, 
 
 thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us?" etc. 
 
 3 It sometimes almost seems to me, as backward I look over the course of my life, as 
 if there had been a very "special providence" enacted at times in my favor. Thus, when 
 I had gone to New York for the study of medicine and was at my very wits' end because of 
 constant eyestrain, I found that medicine had recently advanced to the point where my 
 "strain" could be removed. This made it possible for me to go on with my medical studies 
 when, otherwise, they would have had to be abandoned. 
 
 Then, in 1893, when I had been suffering for years from chronic appendicitis and was 
 now about to perish from that disease, it again appeared that medicine had recently advanced 
 to the point where my appendix could be safely removed. Thanks not only to the Germ 
 Theory and Asepsis, but also to Reginald Fitz (in 1886) and Charles McBurney (from 1889 
 to 1893), not merely my efficiency but my very life was saved. Then, when again the gates 
 of death had opened before me because of my continually recurring abdominal and femoral 
 phlebitis, lo and behold once again as it were a very special providence! Drs. Frank Billings 
 and E. C. Rosenow had, from 1909 to 1916, established the focal infection exegesis of just 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1137 
 
 The Companion, needless to say, was rejoiced to see the prompt im- 
 provement. Little did we realize that, after my recovery, and not so 
 very long thereafter, she, not I, despite the pleasure she felt in my con- 
 valescence, would pass into the land where "hearts" are no more "troub- 
 led" — by any sickness whatsoever, either of others or ourselves. 
 
 Exactly six months before the Companion's death, I returned to my 
 medical practice, to my writings, to my peace work. 
 
 THE PEACE WORK 
 Long years before I wrote "Tramping to Failure" I had published 
 numerous books and articles on the various proposed methods for securing 
 international peace, and, in the "Tramping" (pages 380 to 444), I pre- 
 sented in narrative form a very brief summary of all those books and 
 articles. Even in the "Tramping," however, brief as the peace matter 
 therein is, I in that volume nevertheless rendered a fairly full account 
 of the origin of a good many wars, whereby it was clearly shown — as 
 I thought and still believe — that in no civilized country would the 
 general public, if given the referendum on outside (extraterritorial) wars, 
 ever vote for their nation's entry into such a conflict. For these reasons, 
 therefore, I do not here intend to do more than merely outline the history 
 of the movement for a popular referendum on wars outside our own 
 territory and territorial waters as that movement has progressed, re- 
 mained stationary, or regressed, since the date when "Tramping" ap- 
 peared—August 7, 1937. x 
 
 Supposing, then, that the reader already believes that the people 
 really care to stay out of extraterritorial conflicts, and that, if they had 
 the referendum on such conflicts, they would well-nigh always vote 
 against entrance into them, the question at once arises, What form 
 should the law take whereby the popular referendum on outside conflicts 
 should be conferred? 
 
 such maladies as mine. The primary offenders — teeth, tonsils, nasal sinuses — having been 
 properly attended to, I once again was well — all excepting a localized neuritis in my upper- 
 arms and shoulders. This having spread, as hereinbefore related, to almost the whole of 
 my body, behold eventually once again, just in time — the recently provided vitamin 
 B complex and the knowledge of what it was good for. 
 
 I am not so egocentric, quite, as to think myself of such importance to the world that 
 the Spirit of the Universe would trouble itself to bring to the attention of science the proper 
 cure for this disease, that disease and the other disease, just at the moment in each case 
 when such a proceeding had become necessary to continue my stay on earth. Yet the mere 
 fact that my life has actually been so many times preserved, as it were "in the nick of time," 
 by several distinct, world-shaking, discoveries, may serve duly to emphasize the fact that 
 each and every one of those discoveries has been made and developed and rendered practical 
 and effective in the very short space of one individual's life. 
 
 1 Those who are not even yet convinced that the American people, if granted the referen- 
 dum, would invariably vote strongly against their country's intervention in outside (extra- 
 territorial) conflicts, may, if they wish, consult not merely the pages above cited from 
 "Tramping," but also, on the particular point in question, my other volumes as follows: 
 "The Only Way" (1926), "Give the People Their Own War Power" (1927), "Just One 
 Check on War" (1928), "How to Stop Internation War" (1928), "How to Stop War-Time 
 Profiteering" (1931), 2d ed. (1937). These works are all still in print, therefore easily 
 available. 
 
1138 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 First of all, contrary even to the opinion of some believers in the 
 War-Check Vote, such a law should not take the form of a statute. 
 A statute, when war threatens, can be easily, in fact almost instan- 
 taneously and by a mere majority vote, repealed by Congress — the very 
 body which, under our Constitution as it now stands, holds the war- 
 declaring power, and which is, therefore, the very body we are seeking 
 to restrain — that is, as to the making of extraterritorial wars. What 
 we therefore need is an amendment to the U. S. Constitution. Then, 
 whenever Congress wished to enter us into an outside extraterritorial 
 conflict, the people would have something on which they could depend. 
 Congress could repeal such an amendment only by another amendment, 
 something they could almost certainly not get adopted — with a war 
 threatening. To repeal a statute requires merely a majority vote (a 
 majority of one vote would actually be sufficient) in each house of 
 Congress. To repeal an amendment, however, requires, first of all — I 
 will quote the very words of the Constitution, Article V: "The Congress, 
 whenever two-thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose 
 Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legisla- 
 tures of two-thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for 
 proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all 
 Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the 
 Legislatures of three-fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in 
 three-fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may 
 be proposed by the Congress." 
 
 The next question is, What provisions should the referendum amend- 
 ment contain? 
 
 First of all it should provide that — 
 
 No war or wars, partly or wholly outside the territory or territorial waters of the 
 United States, shall be made or declared by the United States or any of its subdivisions, 
 officials or agencies, without the question or questions being first submitted to a vote of 
 the people of the United States at an election at which no other question or questions shall 
 be decided. 
 
 Why, in that sentence, should there stand the expression, "no war 
 or wars"? Because, if it read only "war," then Congress might say, 
 when it wished us to engage in an outside war with two countries, "This 
 is not 'a' war that we're proposing to make, but two wars." "Nonsense," 
 do you say? Not at all. Almost any political body, whenever it wishes 
 to do some war-making, will take full advantage of even smaller loop- 
 holes than that one. If, on the other hand, the amendments said only 
 "wars," then, as a matter of course, the political body in question 
 (in the U. S., Congress) would say, "But we are not proposing to make 
 'wars,' only a war." — Why "partly or wholly outside"? Because, other- 
 wise, the Congress might on some occasions say, "This war is not 'out- 
 side,' it is partly outside and partly inside therefore by the very terms of 
 the amendment does not call for a referendum." — Why "made or de- 
 clared"? Because governments not infrequently do make wars without 
 declaring them. Many wars have been so made, even in the time of the 
 present generation. — Why "or any of its subdivisions, officials or agen- 
 cies"? Because, otherwise, the United States Government might actually 
 make war by such indirect methods. Have you never heard of licensed 
 
AT TRAMP'S REST 
 THE COMPANION: NOW THE LITTLE LADY WITH THE DYING HEART 
 
 (Photograph by N. B. Pendergast) 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE — 1139 
 
MY SECOND LIFE — 1140 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1141 
 
 privateering, etc.? — Why "at an election at which no other question or 
 questions shall be decided"? To prevent the Government from confusing 
 the issue for common mortals by submitting at the same time as the 
 outside-war question a large number of other propositions, some quite 
 similar to it and some quite dissimilar from it. 
 
 Then a number of provisions should follow the above, whereby just 
 methods for holding the election should be clearly laid down. Thus: 
 
 All persons qualified to vote for presidential electors shall be qualified to vote at such 
 election, and no other persons. Not less than thirty days' notice of such election shall be 
 given, and at least ten days before the day of such election the Department of State of the 
 United States shall have finished making, in a conspicuous place on the inside walls of all 
 the post offices in the United States, a complete disclosure in the English language of all 
 facts substantially affecting the question or questions at issue and known to the Depart- 
 ment. The ballot employed shall be a secret ballot. On the face of the ballot a statement 
 shall be made in the English language, clearly specifying the purpose or purposes of the 
 war or wars and the enemy or enemies against whom the war is or the wars are to be con- 
 ducted. The question or questions of whether or not the war is or the wars are to be made 
 shall likewise be plainly stated on the face of the ballot in the English language and in 
 such a manner that the voters shall be able to vote either plainly for the war or wars or 
 plainly against the war or wars and in no other way. The time, places and manner of 
 holding the election, so far as these are not herein prescribed, shall be determined by Con- 
 gress, but such time, places and manner shall have been plainly and completely promulgated 
 by Congress on the inside walls of all the post offices in the United States not less than ten 
 days prior to the date of the election. The day on which the referendum shall be held shall 
 be the same throughout the United States. The polls shall be open for voting not less than 
 fourteen hours. The voting precincts shall be the same and the polling places as numerous 
 as at the last election of presidential electors. If a majority of all the votes cast shall be 
 against the war or wars, the war or wars shall not be made. If a majority shall be in 
 favor of the war or wars, the war or wars may be made, but the President shall have power 
 either before or after the opening of hostilities, to make a treaty of peace, by and with the 
 advice and consent of the Senate, provided two- thirds of the senators present concur. 1 
 
 That completes Section 1 of The Amendment for the War-Check Vote. 
 Now follows the remainder of the Amendment : 
 
 (2) Any person or persons intentionally secreting or misrepresenting any one or more 
 of the facts required by this amendment to be disclosed on the inside walls of all the post 
 offices of the United States, or on the ballots, or defacing, hiding or removing any docu- 
 ment or documents disclosing any one or more of such facts, or misrepresenting the time, place 
 and manner of such election, or defacing, hiding, or removing any document or documents 
 which promulgate the time, places and manner of the election, shall be adjudged guilty of 
 felony, and shall be punished therefor by imprisonment at hard labor for not less than ten 
 years and not more than ninety-nine years. 
 
 (3) Territory, within the meaning of this amendment, shall be all the area within 
 the Nation's boundaries as set forth and described in the latest treaties dealing with that 
 subject. 
 
 (4) Territorial waters, within the meaning of this amendment, shall be waters which 
 extend from the lowest-tide shore-line and from the outer line of the exclusive waters of 
 any nation as far seaward as any projectile, at the time when the question arises, is capable 
 of carrying. 
 
 (5) Armed violence committed under governmental authority shall be war within 
 the meaning of this amendment. So shall any other measure or measures having for its 
 or their intended result the destruction of human life, the injury of a human body or bodies, 
 or the destruction of property. So shall military occupation of any country, or of its air, 
 or naval occupation of its territorial waters, or both such military and naval occupation, 
 if, at the time of such occupation, military or naval or both, there shall be in such country 
 any actual or impending insurrection or rebellion, or any dispute as to the right to govern 
 
 1 The present method of making all treaties. 
 
1142 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 such country, or if such occupation shall be for the purpose of influencing any legislative, 
 executive, or judicial act or acts of such country, or for the purpose of influencing such 
 country's trade. 
 
 (6) Whenever any person or persons, with intent to make war (as defined in this 
 amendment) shall invade the territory or territorial waters of the United States, the govern- 
 ment of the United States shall, without any referendum, have the same power as always 
 heretofore to expel such invaders, but shall not have power to follow such invaders out- 
 side our territory or territorial waters. And each state under the same circumstances shall 
 have the same power, without any referendum, to expel such invaders, and, likewise, shall 
 have no power to follow such invaders outside its territory or United States territorial 
 waters — saving under the express circumstances mentioned hereinbelow. 
 
 (7) The infliction of injury upon persons or property situated outside our territory 
 or territorial waters by any person or persons who, at the time, are situated within our 
 territory or territorial waters and who are acting under governmental orders, shall be extra- 
 territorial war within the meaning of this amendment, and is not to be made without the 
 affirmative vote of the people as above described. 
 
 (8) In case any person or persons, situated outside the territory or territorial waters 
 of the United States, shall make war (as defined in this amendment) across our boundaries 
 and in our territory or territorial waters, then the United States government shall have 
 power, without any referendum, to transgress such boundaries and to silence, capture or 
 destroy the immediate source of such trans-boundary war, but, after such immediate source 
 has been silenced, captured or destroyed, our forces must at once withdraw into our own 
 territory, national waters, or the high seas. 
 
 (9) Nothing in this amendment shall debar the government from making war within 
 the territory or territorial waters of the United States whenever it shall deem that measure 
 necessary to suppress insurrection. 
 
 (10) Nothing in this Amendment shall debar the government from making any and 
 all such preparations for war as it may see fit to make prior to the receipt of the final returns 
 from the referendum. 
 
 (11) No vessel of the United States shall be prevented by this amendment from de- 
 fending itself, either in peace-time or in war-time, against unprovoked attack on the high 
 seas, nor shall any aircraft of the United States when on or above the high seas. When any 
 vessel of the United States shall so act in self-defense, the State Department of the United 
 States shall, within thirty days, make, in a conspicuous place on the inside walls of all the 
 post offices in the United States, a complete disclosure in the English language of all the 
 facts substantially affecting the situation and known to the department. 
 
 (12) This amendment shall in nowise interfere with arrests, trials or punishment for 
 piracy, and any vessel on the high seas which is engaged in the slave-trade may be treated 
 as a pirate. 
 
 If the reader will give but a little close thought to the matter, he 
 will see, in the case of each and every provision of these sections 2 to 12 
 inclusive, one or more plain reasons for its adoption. 1 
 
 But there should be also a second amendment, one auxiliary to "The 
 Amendment for the War-Check Vote," above quoted and very slightly 
 commented on. So frequently do governments back up, even engender, 
 wars without any actual fighting on the part of their own people, merely 
 by lending or giving (the "lending" is almost always, in the end, a 
 giving) money, credit, or supplies, that the additional amendment is 
 actually requisite for the prevention of such skulduggery. I realize fully 
 
 1 In case he does not, he can readily find in almost any large library one or more of my 
 peace-and-war volumes, which may be of assistance to him. Soon there will appear my 
 very large volume on these proposed amendments, its title "The War-Check Vote." Part 
 of that volume will consider the text of both of my proposed amendments and in very great 
 detail. 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1143 
 
 that evasions of such an amendment could sometimes be thought out — 
 such, for example, as the buying of another nation's gold at twice the 
 price that that other nation would be very glad to sell it for, thereby to 
 assist in preparing the favored nation for the war, even inclining it to 
 make a war which, otherwise, it might never have engendered. Yet, all 
 things considered, I do indeed believe that the Amendment in question 
 would mightily assist to prevent, say, our own government, from supply- 
 ing the "sinews of war" to other governments, at least in a large number 
 of instances. 
 
 Such an auxiliary amendment to the War-Check Vote amendment I 
 long ago drew up in the following form : 
 
 THE AMENDMENT 
 FOR THE LOAN-AND-GIFT-CHECK VOTE 
 
 (13) Neither in peace nor in war shall the United States or any of their subdivisions, 
 official organizations or agencies give or loan to any foreign nation or nations or any sub- 
 division of a foreign nation, or to any person or persons or organization or organizations 
 on behalf thereof, any money, credit or supplies, or act as guarantor or surety in the case 
 of any foreign loan or loans as above described, without first submitting the question or 
 questions to a vote of the people of the United States at an election at which no other 
 question or questions shall be decided. All persons qualified to vote for presidential elec- 
 tors shall be qualified to vote at such election, and no other persons. Not less than thirty 
 days' notice of such election shall be given, and at least ten days before the day of such 
 election the Department of State of the United States shall have finished making, in a con- 
 spicuous place on the inside walls of all the post offices in the United States, a complete 
 disclosure in the English language of all facts substantially affecting the question or ques- 
 tions at issue and known to the Department. The ballot employed shall be a secret ballot. 
 On the face of the ballot a statement shall be made in the English language, clearly specify- 
 ing the nature and extent of the gift or gifts, loan or loans, the name of the donee or donees, 
 borrower or borrowers, the percentage or percentages of interest to be paid in the case of 
 a loan or loans, the date or dates, place or places, the manner or manners of repayment if 
 a loan or loans, and if a loan or loans the nature and amount or amounts of the security or 
 securities to be required by this country and the name or names of the guarantor or guar- 
 antors, surety or sureties. If the United States is to act as guarantor or surety directly or 
 indirectly for any foreign loan or loans as above described, a statement shall be made in 
 the English language on the face of the ballots employed clearly specifying the nature and 
 extent of the guarantorship or guarantorships, suretyship or suretyships, the nature and 
 extent of the loan or loans, the name of the debtor or debtors, and of the creditor or creditors, 
 the percentage or percentages of interest or interests contracted to be paid by the debtor 
 or debtors, the date or dates, place or places, and manner or manners of payment of both 
 the principal or principals and the interest or interests. The question or questions them- 
 selves shall likewise be plainly stated in the English language and in such manner that the 
 voter shall be able to vote either plainly for or plainly against the submitted proposal or 
 proposals, and in no other way. The time, places and manner of holding the election, 
 so far as these are not herein prescribed, shall be determined by Congress, but such time, 
 places and manner shall have been plainly and completely promulgated by Congress in the 
 English language on the inside walls of all the post offices in the United States not less than 
 ten days prior to the date of the election. The day on which the referendum shall be held 
 shall be the same throughout the United States. The polls shall be open for voting not 
 less than fourteen hours. The voting precincts shall be the same and the polling places 
 as numerous as at the last election of presidential electors. The result of the election shall 
 be decided in accordance with a majority of all the votes cast, and it shall not be advisory 
 only but shall be binding on the United States and upon all their subdivisions, organiza- 
 tions, officials and agencies. 
 
 (14) And neither the United States nor any of their subdivisions, official organiza- 
 tions or agencies, shall have any power, direct or indirect, to remit, wholly or in part, 
 any foreign loan or loans as above described, or the interest or interests to be paid thereon, 
 or to modify in any way or ways a term or terms of such loan or loans, or to modify in any 
 
1144 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 way the responsibility or responsibilities of this country as guarantor or surety for any 
 foreign loan or loans as above described, unless to end such responsibility or responsibilities 
 absolutely, without first submitting the question or questions to a vote of the people of 
 the United States at an election at which no other question or questions shall be decided. 
 All persons qualified to vote for presidential electors shall be qualified to vote at such 
 election, and no other persons. Not less than thirty days' notice of such election shall be 
 given, and at least ten days before the day of such election the Department of State of the 
 United States shall have finished making in a conspicuous place on the inside walls of all 
 the post offices in the United States, a complete disclosure in the English language of all 
 facts substantially affecting the question or questions at issue and known to the Department. 
 The ballot employed shall be a secret ballot. On the face of the ballot a statement shall 
 be made in the English language, clearly specifying the loan or loans in question, together 
 with the exact amount of the remission or remissions, or modification or modifications 
 of a term or of terms, or the exact modification or modifications of this country's respon- 
 sibility or responsibilities as guarantor or surety, and the time and manner in which such 
 remission, remissions, modification or modifications are to be made. The question or 
 questions themselves shall likewise be plainly stated in the English language and in such 
 a manner that the voter shall be able to vote either plainly for or plainly against the sub- 
 mitted proposal or proposals, and in no other way. The time, places and manner of hold- 
 ing the election, so far as these are not herein prescribed, shall be determined by Congress, 
 but such time, places and manner shall have been plainly and completely promulgated by 
 Congress in the English language on the inside walls of all the post offices in the United 
 States not less than ten days prior to the date of the election. The day on which the 
 referendum shall be held shall be the same throughout the United States. The polls shall 
 be open for voting not less than fourteen hours. The voting precincts shall be the same 
 and the polling places as numerous as at the last election of presidential electors. The result 
 of the election shall be decided in accordance with a majority of all the votes cast, and it 
 shall not be advisory only but shall be binding on the United States and on all their sub- 
 divisions, official organizations and agencies. 
 
 (15) This amendment shall not, either in peace or in war, prevent or limit the making 
 of foreign gifts or loans or the undertaking of foreign suretyships or guarantyships, by 
 citizens, subjects, firms or corporations of the United States, so long as these shall act 
 strictly within their private capacities. 
 
 (16) This amendment shall not, either in peace or in war, prevent the making of 
 foreign gifts or loans by the United States government as a matter of aid and assistance 
 after hurricanes, earthquakes, epidemics, and similar natural calamities, provided that such 
 gifts or loans made to any one nation in any one year without an authorizing referendum 
 as above described, shall not exceed the sum of ten million dollars. 
 
 (17) Any person or persons intentionally secreting or misrepresenting, or assisting 
 to secrete or misrepresent, any one or more of the facts required by this amendment to be 
 disclosed on the inside walls of all the post offices of the United States, or on the face of 
 the ballots, or defacing, hiding, or removing, or assisting to deface, hide or remove, any 
 document or documents disclosing any one or more of such facts, or secreting or misrepre- 
 senting, or assisting to secrete or misrepresent, the time, places and manner of such election, 
 or defacing, hiding or removing, or assisting to deface, hide or remove, any document or 
 documents which promulgate the time, places and manner of the election, shall be ad- 
 judged guilty of felony, and shall be punished therefor by imprisonment at hard labor for 
 not less than ten years and not more than ninety-nine years. 
 
 What, now, since the appearance of my "Tramping to Failure," 
 August 7, 1937, has been the history of my peace work — the work for 
 those two amendments to the U. S. Constitution: "The Amendment for 
 the War-Check Vote" and the auxiliary amendment thereto, "The 
 Amendment for the Loan-and-Gift-Check Vote"? 
 
 First of all, the support of the American people for these two amend- 
 ments has, since the date above mentioned, grown enormously. Librarians 
 of public libraries have not infrequently told me that my various books 
 on the Amendments are "out all the time." Even when several copies 
 of each of the volumes have been provided in a given library, the report 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1145 
 
 has come to me that "All the copies are out all the time." So many- 
 letters from various advocates of the movement now arrive at Tramp's 
 Rest, that it is not even within the bounds of possibility to answer them 
 — so I no longer try to do so. Then, too, these amendments, indirectly 
 at least, have "fathered" an immense family of similar proposed amend- 
 ments, some of which made their way to the halls of Congress. There 
 they became the subject of much involved discussion, of repeated reference 
 to Senate or House committees, of many debates in committee, of votings- 
 out or petitionings-out of the resolutions, and, finally, of House or Senate 
 actions. Throughout the whole of this feverish activity the present 
 Administration has opposed the Amendments, and, mark you, for funda- 
 mental reasons. Thus, President Roosevelt himself has opposed such 
 amendments generally — opposed them basically — on the ground that amend- 
 ments to grarft the popular referendum on extraterritorial wars would 
 "not be compatible with representative government." 
 
 It has always been my practice, ever since, in December, 1895, I 
 began advocating the War-Check Vote, never in the course of any pres- 
 idential campaign to press the issue concerning them. My reason for 
 this has been that I did not wish to make the adoption or rejection of the 
 Amendments a partisan issue. To have done so would have killed all 
 prospect of success. First of all, remember, the amendments in question 
 would have to pass in both the upper and the lower house of Congress 
 by a two-thirds vote. Get either party set against you by bringing the 
 amendments up in a political campaign, and never again would you have 
 the slightest chance of securing for them that two-thirds vote in each 
 house of Congress. 
 
 Now, however, that a presidential campaign is no longer before the 
 people, let us consider for a moment just what Mr. Roosevelt's objection 
 to the popular referendum on extraterritorial war amounts to. His objec- 
 tion was, once again, that such an amendment would "not be compatible 
 with representative government." In a "representative government" 
 just whose wishes should be "represented"? Should they not be the 
 people's? Mr. Roosevelt himself has said so time and time again in 
 connection with other matters. Now, then, if Congress wishes to make 
 some outside war, and the proposal to do so, having been left to the 
 people, should by them be ratified — it would not by them be ratified, but 
 suppose for the sake of argument that it would be — then the result would 
 be precisely the same as if there had been no referendum. In that case, 
 how could the people be said not to have been "represented"? If, on 
 the other hand, the will of the people in the matter was not the same as 
 that of Congress, in other words that the people voted "No" to Con- 
 gress's proposal to enter us into some foreign war, then, once again, 
 how could it be asserted that the people had not been "represented"? 
 Was not Mr. Roosevelt's real fear that, in case the Government wanted 
 the war and the people voted against it, then their will, in accordance 
 with the express provision of the amendment, would be represented? How 
 could the people's not wishing the war, voting against the war and so 
 not having the war, be ^representing themselves? He did not tell us 
 how, and I know of no person who can. 
 
1146 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 A sadder, a much sadder, fact about the progress of the war-check 
 movement is this. No matter with what care and skill any given proposed 
 amendment which had been introduced into Congress had apparently 
 been drawn, it invariably omitted certain provisions that are absolutely 
 essential to the proper working of any amendment for the popular ref- 
 erendum on outside wars. 1 In addition it invariably contained loop- 
 hole expressions, so-called "weasel words," with which all persons 
 familiar with public documents are so thoroughly and so sadly ac- 
 quainted. 
 
 1 The reader is to bear in mind continually that my proposed amendments do not pro- 
 vide for any referendum on wars to repel invasions or to suppress insurrections or rebellions. 
 Those are inside, intraterritorial, wars. My amendments have always provided for the 
 referendum on outside wars only. Recall again the opening of my proposed "Amendment 
 for the War-Check Vote": "No war or wars, partly or wholly outside the territory or ter- 
 ritorial waters of the United States," — etc. Sections 3 and 4 of the same amendment then 
 provide: "(3) Territory, within the meaning of this amendment, shall be all the area 
 within the Nation's boundaries as set forth and described in the latest treaties dealing with 
 that subject. (4) Territorial waters, within the meaning of this amendment, shall be waters 
 which extend from the lowest-tide shore-line and from the outer line of the exclusive waters 
 of any nation as far seaward as any projectile, at the time when the question arises, is capable 
 of carrying." 
 
 The rules for the determination of "territorial waters" being decidedly unsettled and 
 confused in international law, it seemed to me better to set forth explicitly in the amend- 
 ment what should be "territorial waters" within the meaning of my proposed amendment. 
 The fact that of all the other proposed amendments not one defines either "territory" or 
 "territorial waters," but merely employs such indefinite, legally uncertain, terms as "for- 
 eign wars", "domestic wars", and so on, does of itself absolutely and completely condemn 
 those amendments. Is war fought on the high seas a "domestic" war? No? Then where 
 does a given nation's territorial waters end and the "high seas" begin? At the three-mile 
 limit? At the farthest projectile limit? If at the three-mile limit, then where does the 
 three-mile-wide strip of territorial water begin? At the high-water mark or at the low- 
 water mark? U. S. courts have held even that the high seas themselves begin "at low water 
 mark except in the case of harbors or roadsteads enclosed within headlands or promontories." 
 These matters, I repeat, have never been definitely settled. It is therefore quite necessary 
 in the proposed amendments to specify exactly the meaning of "territory" and "territorial 
 waters" for the purpose of these amendments. 
 
 In 1939, at the Panama Conference, held at Panama, Republic of Panama, a so-called 
 "Neutrality Zone" was established by the republics of the Western Hemisphere — a zone 
 wherein certain naval and military operations by Eastern Hemisphere powers were strictly 
 forbidden. By far the greater portion of this zone lies in what, under international law, 
 is clearly enough high seas — that part of the high seas in fact concerning whose "high- 
 seasness" there cannot be and never has been any question. Moreover, the zone, though 
 represented by the public press as extending outward from the shore-lines of the various 
 Western Hemisphere nations for a distance of 300 miles, is, in fact, by the treaty itself, of 
 no such uniform breadth. Says the treaty: "Such waters shall be defined as follows. All 
 waters comprised within the limits set forth hereafter except the territorial waters of 
 Canada and of the undisputed colonies and possessions of European countries within these 
 limits: Beginning at the terminus of the United States-Canada boundary in Passamaquoddy 
 Bay, in 44° 46' 36" north latitude and 66° 54' 11" west longitude; thence due east," etc., 
 along a line with numerous angles and varying lengths in it, following sometimes a parallel 
 of latitude, sometimes a meridian of longitude, and again making for itself a rhumb line — 
 a line which is neither a parallel nor a meridian. 
 
 It has been suggested that, for greater freedom of defence, the term, "territorial waters," 
 shall be defined for the purposes of my amendment as "all waters comprised within the 
 'neutrality zone' as defined in September and October, 1939, at the Panama Conference." 
 To this I have no objection at all, other than that the "neutrality zone" of the Panama 
 Conference is a very complicated affair, and I would therefore counter-suggest that "terri- 
 torial waters" be, for the purposes of the amendment and in the amendment, defined as 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1147 
 
 Let us consider a few of these more recent amendments — not as 
 "suckers" but as sane human beings who would really like to see adopted 
 to the Constitution of the United States amendments that would really 
 grant to the American people a right, if they chose to exercise it, to 
 prevent the thrusting of their country into conflicts here, there and 
 yonder, about this ever-warring globe. 
 
 FOUR PROPOSED AMENDMENTS 
 Let us consider just four of the more recent and more widely known 
 of these amendments — all of which were under debate in Congress at 
 the same time, and three of which (those in the Senate) had been intro- 
 duced in the course of one and the same week. 
 
 THE REFERENDUM OF MR. LUDLOW 
 No one, I believe, would dream of questioning the good faith gen- 
 erally of Representative Ludlow, of Indiana, or his sincere intention 
 particularly to secure the adoption of a war-check vote amendment that 
 would really stop war. Here, nevertheless, is his proposed amendment 
 as it actually appeared, probably after forces opposed to it had finished 
 their devilish work upon it. At all events, read it carefully: 
 
 "Except in the event of an invasion of the United States or its territorial possessions and 
 attack upon its citizens residing therein, the authority of Congress to declare war shall not 
 become effective until confirmed by a majority of all votes cast thereon in a nationwide 
 referendum. Congress, when it deems a national crisis to exist, may by concurrent resolution 
 refer the question of war or peace to the citizens of the States, the question to be voted on 
 
 being, 'Shall the United States declare war on ? ' Congress may otherwise by law 
 
 provide for the enforcement of this section." 
 
 So many "holes" can be perceived immediately in this amendment 
 that it would hardly be necessary to point them out to anyone, excepting 
 only for the fact that large numbers of famous persons throughout the 
 United States — ministers of the gospel, editors of newspapers and mag- 
 azines, college professors and presidents, and so forth and so on — wrote, 
 spoke and otherwise pressed for the adoption of the amendment without 
 apparently so much as the slightest suspicion that a single weasel-word 
 or loop-hole had existence in it. First of all, "territorial possessions" 
 is absolutely not denned for the purposes of the amendment. "Territorial 
 waters" is not even mentioned. What are "territorial waters" in this 
 connection? Is an invasion of them "an invasion of the United States 
 or its territorial possessions?" (See my footnote just above, wherein the 
 difficulties of "territorial waters" is barely gone into.) Then, after 
 saying that "the authority of Congress to declare war shall not [italics 
 mine] become effective until confirmed by a majority of all votes cast 
 thereon in a nationwide referendum," Mr. Ludlow — though he may not 
 
 "waters extending from the lowest-tide shore-line and from the outer line of the exclusive 
 waters of the United States and of its possessions and protectorates as far seaward as three 
 hundred miles." Or, for that matter, call it four hundred miles — a strip sufficiently wide 
 for the defense of our shores beyond any doubt — especially when read in connection with 
 sections 8 and 11 of my War-Check amendment. 
 
1148 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 have been blameworthy in the matter — returns to the same subject, and, 
 having already made his referendum mandatory ("shall not") he now 
 proceeds to make it permissive only ("may") thus: "Congress, when 
 it deems a national crisis to exist, may [italics mine] by concurrent resolu- 
 tion refer the question of war or peace to the citizens of the States " 
 
 In fact, as will have been noticed already by the attentive reader, he 
 not only does this, but he also provides that Congress is only to act at 
 all in the matter when it — Congress, the very body the amendment is 
 intended to restrain — "deems a national crisis to exist." And Congress 
 may "deem" or not "deem," just as it likes. 
 
 Finally, as if on purpose to make this pyramid of amendmental ab- 
 surdities still more colossal, the entire amendment is so constructed as 
 to concern itself with war declarations only. Since the very beginning of 
 history all governments have made war sometimes with and sometimes 
 without declaring war. Our own government has on a number of occa- 
 sions made war without declaring war (Nicaragua, Porto Rico, Haiti, 
 Japan, China, etc.). What, then, would the amendment have amounted 
 to, even had it been adopted to the Constitution? Compare this with 
 the opening words of my "Amendment for the War-Check Vote": "No 
 war or wars, partly or wholly outside the territory or territorial waters 
 of the United States, shall be made or declared" etc. Later, "territory" 
 and "territorial waters" are both carefully defined for the purposes of 
 the amendment. So is "war." 
 
 Anyone who desires to note more loopholes in the Ludlow amend- 
 ment need only to read my "Amendment for the War-Check Vote" and 
 note how very many vitally essential points for an effective war-refer- 
 endum amendment have been excluded from the Ludlow document. I 
 want to repeat that it is my firm belief that Mr. Ludlow himself sin- 
 cerely and persistently desired to pass an effective amendment, one that 
 would really keep the American people out of extraterritorial conflicts; 
 yet it is nevertheless the simple truth that no believer in the War-Check 
 Vote can ever possibly be sorry that the Ludlow amendment for the 
 popular referendum on outside wars, drawn as it was, with all its loop- 
 holes, weasel-words, vital omissions, and staring inconsistencies, was 
 defeated and has never again been proposed. Had it been adopted, it 
 would have been worthless, and could therefore only, like the Kellogg 
 Treaty and other bogus measures, have brought disappointment and 
 shame, to all who had joined, no matter how sincerely, in working for 
 its adoption. 
 
 THE REFERENDUM OF SENATOR LA FOLLETTE 
 
 Besides the Ludlow referendum resolution, which has just now been 
 considered, a resolution which was introduced into the House of Repre- 
 sentatives, there were also, a little later, introduced into the Senate 
 three separate resolutions for so-called war-referendum amendments — 
 all in one and the same week. The first of these was that by Senator 
 La Follette. Its operative part reads as follows: 
 
 "The president shall not wage warfare abroad without a declaration of war by congress. 
 Except in the event of an invasion of, or military expedition against, the United States or 
 its territorial possessions, or attack by a foreign military force upon its citizens residing 
 
THE TRAMP IN 1940 
 
 CONTINENTAL BY R.H.G., INC. 
 
 NOT TO BE SYNDICATED, RENTED OR LOANED. 
 
 THIS PHOTO MUST NOT BE USED FOR ADVERTISING PURPOSES 
 
 WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE— 1149 
 
JON BARTON SHASTID 
 Born November 21, 1914, son of Jon S. and Mary Barton Shastid, this fine young man will, 
 after his uncle, the Tramp, has crossed the horizon, continue to carry on the work for the War- 
 Check Vote. His Kift of leadership preindicates final success. 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE— 1150 
 
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 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
MY SECOND LIFE — APPENDIX 1153 
 
 therein, or invasion of, or a military expedition from abroad against, any other North 
 American or Caribbean nation, the authority of the congress to declare war or conscript 
 men for military service overseas shall not become effective until confirmed by a majority 
 of all votes cast in a nation-wide referendum thereon. The congress, whenever it deems 
 necessary, shall by concurrent resolution refer the questions of war or peace and of military 
 conscription for service overseas to the citizens of the states the questions to be voted on 
 
 being: 'Shall the United States declare war on ?' and 'Shall the congress be authorized 
 
 to conscript men for military service overseas?' 
 
 "The congress shall by law provide for the enforcement of this article." 
 
 The attempt in the second sentence of that resolution both to limit 
 and to enlarge the application of the Monroe Doctrine is unfortunate to 
 say the least. The Monroe Doctrine applies to all the nations of the 
 Western Hemisphere, other than the United States. This proposed amend- 
 ment would limit its application to the North American and Caribbean 
 nations. At the same time, as to those nations, it extends the application 
 of the Monroe Doctrine from merely attempts by Eastern Hemisphere 
 nations to acquire territory in the Western Hemisphere to "attacks" 
 for any purpose whatsoever. 1 
 
 In next to the last sentence of this same proposed amendment (I need 
 merely observe) the four plain words, "whenever it deems necessary" 
 absolutely nullify all else that might otherwise possess value in this 
 document. 
 
 There are also numerous vital omissions from this document, as in 
 the case of the Ludlow proposed amendment. These need not here be 
 repeated. 
 
 THE REFERENDUM OF SENATOR CLARK 
 
 Senator Clark's proposed amendment is as follows: 
 
 "Except in the event of attack, invasion, or military expedition from abroad against 
 the United States or its territorial possessions or against any other North American Nation, 
 the authority of congress to declare war or to conscript citizens for military duty abroad 
 shall not become effective until confirmed by a majority of votes cast thereon in national 
 referendums. Congress, when it deems a national crisis to exist [all italics in this quoted matter 
 mine], shall by concurrent resolution refer the question of war or peace and the question of 
 conscription for military duty abroad to the citizens of the states, the questions to be voted 
 
 on being 'Shall the United States declare war on ?' and 'Shall congress be authorized 
 
 to conscript citizens for military duty abroad?' Congress shall otherwise by law provide for 
 the enforcement of this section." 
 
 i Says Kohler, "The Monroe Doctrine: A Complete History," 1922, page 33: "The 
 United States is careful to impress upon South and Central America that the Monroe Doc- 
 trine is not intended as a shield for violations of international laws. Cleveland did not 
 deny the right of the British to land marines at Corinto, Central America; nor did Roosevelt 
 prevent England, Germany and Italy from bombarding Venezuelan ports to exact a money 
 indemnity, where no territorial seizure was attempted." 
 
 Said President Theodore Roosevelt in his message to Congress, December 3, 1906: "If 
 a republic to the south of us commits a tort against a foreign nation, then the Monroe 
 Doctrine does not force us to interfere to prevent punishment of the tort, save to see that 
 the punishment does not assume the form of territorial occupation in any shape." 
 
 Again said President Roosevelt in his Message to Congress, December 3, 1901: "[The 
 Monroe Doctrine] is a declaration that there must be no territorial aggrandizement by any 
 
 non- American power at the expense of any American power on American soil We 
 
 do not ask under this doctrine for any exclusive commercial dealings with any other American 
 state. We do not guarantee any state against punishment if it misconducts itself, provided 
 that punishment does not take the form of the acquirement of territory by any non- American 
 power." 
 
1154 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 This proposed amendment, precisely in the manner of the Ludlow 
 amendment, proposes the popular referendum on outside wars not once 
 but twice — once in the first sentence and again in the second sentence — 
 with resulting great confusion. The proposal in the first sentence, for 
 example, as the reader has no doubt already noticed, limits the refer- 
 endum to war declarations only, leaving the government free, without 
 holding a referendum, to make outside wars if it simply does not declare 
 them — something which our government has not infrequently done. 
 Then the proposal in the second sentence makes the holding of the 
 referendum necessary when Congress (the very body which the amend- 
 ment is intended to restrain) "deems a national crisis to exist." Aside 
 from the great confusion which arises from proposing what is obviously 
 meant to be one and the same referendum twice (each time differently 
 and inconsistently) in the same document, the fact is likewise obvious 
 that each of the two proposals is rendered inert by its own particular 
 weasel. The two proposals cannot operate together, because they are 
 inconsistent with each other, and neither can operate separately — both 
 because each is inconsistent with the other and because each is nullified 
 by its own particular "weasel." 
 
 There are also numerous vital omissions from this document, as in 
 the case of both the Ludlow and the La Follette proposed amendments. 
 Again, these need not here be repeated. True, this (jhe Clark) amend- 
 ment does conclude, "Congress shall otherwise by law provide for the 
 enforcement of this section." But Congress is the very body intended 
 to be restrained! Why leave to that body the enforcement of the amend- 
 ment against itself? This, of course, aside from the fact that it hardly 
 could, even should it wish to do so, provide for the enforcement of an 
 amendment which proposes the referendum in two different ways, each 
 way inconsistent with the other and each way completely nullified by 
 its own individual weasels. 
 
 THE REFERENDUM OF SENATOR CAPPER 
 
 Senator Capper I regard as one of the ablest men that have ever sat 
 in Congress. Nevertheless, here is his "resolution" for a referendum, 
 precisely as it went on the floor of the Senate: 
 
 ' 'The congress shall have power to declare [italics mine] war after a proclamation [italics 
 mine] by the president that the United States or some place subject to the jurisdiction thereof 
 has been invaded, or is in immediate danger of invasion [italics mine], and shall have power to 
 declare [italics mine] war in other cases only if a declaration of war is favored by a majority 
 of those persons voting in a national referendum held in such a manner as the congress shall 
 by law provide; but nothing in this article shall be deemed to limit the power of congress 
 to suppress insurrections." 
 
 First of all, we notice that Senator Capper is not interested in wars 
 but in war declarations — notwithstanding the obvious fact that our own 
 government has several times made war without declaring war. That 
 alone "queers" the entire amendment. 
 
 We notice also, however, that Senator Capper has actually provided 
 for the suppression of insurrections by the Government without stopping 
 to take a vote, and for this clear-headed foresight we are deeply grateful 
 to him. To that extent, at least, his referendum resolution is much 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1155 
 
 better than some of the others. We also have to commend Senator Capper 
 for not excepting from the operation of his referendum the occasions 
 when our government wants to make war for the protection (either real 
 or pretended) of other North American nations. Such protection, how- 
 ever, if granted at all, should be in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, 
 therefore granted to all American nations. Nevertheless, we have to 
 condemn his amendment utterly because of its provision that "The 
 congress shall have power after a proclamation [italics mine] by the 
 president that the United States or some place subject to the jurisdiction 
 thereof has been invaded, or is in immediate danger of invasion [italics mine] . ' ' 
 The president, of course, merely by a "proclamation" that the country 
 "is in immediate danger of invasion" — a matter, of course, of his opinion 
 only — could, by the very terms of the amendment itself, extract from the 
 document all the value which it might otherwise contain, even had it 
 been directed against both wars and war declarations instead of against 
 the war declarations onlv. 
 
 SUMMARY OF THOSE REFERENDUM RESOLUTIONS 
 
 And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the situation as respects the "help" 
 we were nearly on the point of receiving from Congress in 1937 and 1938 
 with respect to some amendment for the popular referendum on foreign 
 wars. I, for one, am glad that the amendments, as they actually came 
 upon the floors of Congress, were defeated. In the name of peace and of 
 war-worn humanity! After all the "holes" and "weasels" that have 
 been perpetrated on the peace workers of the world by the "Balance of 
 Power," "The Covenant of the League of Nations," "The Kellogg 
 Treaty," "The Locarno Treaty," even hundreds of other treaties and 
 hundreds of other so-called peace plans — after, I say, all the "loop-holes" 
 and "weasels" and "sleepers" that were placed within those plans (by 
 no means always with malicious intent) to find now presented in our 
 behalf such so-called referendums on war as those above produced and 
 analysed, is indeed a tragic joke. 
 
 The fate of the world is at stake. And yet — peace plans like these! 
 
 Recall the slogan of my own peace-movement, a slogan which sums 
 up my entire peace-plan. It runs: "Heavy armament at all times to keep 
 others from invading or attacking us; the War-Check Vote at all times 
 to keep us from invading or attacking others." Apply that to World 
 War II. Had our government had the U. S. A. sufficiently armed in 1941, 
 instead of re-arming Japan (which was what it actually did, even to the 
 last ounce of our scrap-iron) Japan would never have struck and we should 
 not have got into the war. Nay, further, if Great Britain had adequately 
 re-armed, instead of heavily re-arming Germany (which was what 
 Great Britain actually did) World War II would never have started 
 anywhere at all. Deny these things who can. 
 
 The reasons why the above-mentioned 1937-1938 resolutions in 
 Congress — resolutions now quite dead — are yet undeniably forecasts of 
 what we may expect hereafter — the reasons, I say, why those resolutions 
 in Congress were so deceitfully drawn was not, in my opinion, that the 
 
1156 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 original drafters of the resolutions actually and deliberately attempted 
 to entrap and cheat the American people. I cannot possibly believe that. 
 Each and every one of those proponents is, I believe, a man of honor. 
 The trouble, as I take it, is simply that, first, in the stress and hurry of 
 governmental business at Washington, those resolutions were first con- 
 ceived and then thrown into a form of words without sufficient thought; 
 and that, second (this is by far the most important reason) the enemies 
 of the foreign-wars referendum simply had their wilful way with the 
 documents in question. 1 
 
 PARTING 
 
 Such is the status at the present time of the peace work — the work 
 that I started long decades ago and which I had hoped in the beginning 
 would move on to success very rapidly. It had seemed to me at the time 
 so large and fine, too, that peace movement, so large and so important. 
 
 Big things, however, do not make so much difference to me now — 
 though I never have abandoned the War-Check Vote. The cries of 
 children at play in the street, and so forth, become daily more important 
 to me, especially since the death of the Companion. 
 
 1 A considerable number of war-referendums other than my own and those above con- 
 sidered, I have treated rather fully in various newspaper and magazine articles. A number 
 of these will be discussed again at length in my forthcoming volume, "The War-Check Vote." 
 
 The fact that all these amendments show vital omissions as well as many weasel 
 words and loopholes, is discouraging in the extreme — not so much because the. amendments 
 are badly drawn as that so many persons of considerable education and ofttimes high posi- 
 tion have actually accepted and worked for the most, even for all, of them, without so 
 much as a squawk of protest or any sign whatever that the workers in question had any 
 idea that it mattered at all whether the proposed amendment had been drawn well or drawn 
 badly. One of the editors of a peace journal, in fact, a journal I had always read with in- 
 terest and respect, after he had abandoned his erstwhile perfectly indiscriminate support 
 of the Kellogg Treaty, the League of Nations, the World Court and so forth, went to sup- 
 porting with might and main not indeed my own proposed amendments (these he thor- 
 oughly ignored) but all such other amendments — well, as those above mentioned and many 
 similar to them. And not one single time did the man point out in any of his numerous 
 articles the vital omissions, the ridiculous self-contradictions, the multitudes of weasel 
 words and loopholes in each and every one of the documents that he so ardently supported. 
 
 It all makes me think of an old farmer, a man I knew when I was practising at Gales- 
 burg, Illinois. He had lent a tricky business man one thousand dollars and taken what he 
 believed to be a "promissory note" for the amount. I later saw that promissory note. 
 "The man called it a promissory note," the old fellow said to me when he had laid the 
 document down before my startled eyes. "So, why ain't it a promissory note?" It ran 
 about like this. (The old man could read and so could I, yet the note meant not the same thing, 
 quite, to each of us): 
 
 "So many days after date, or else so many, I promise to pay to Silas Strongheart [ficti- 
 tious name] or else into my own bank account and wholly at my own convenience at no 
 place whatever and with no interest or less, the sum of One Thoundred Dollars. Yours truly, 
 Jonah and the Whale." 
 
 The old man, I verily believe, had not even read the note — not, at least, until its sup- 
 posed maker had flatly refused to recognize the document. The old man had trusted to 
 the fact that his "friend" had called the document a "promissory note." 
 
 So, too, with many of our good peace workers. They believe in the popular referendum 
 on extraterritorial wars, but they do not even read the document which professes to grant 
 it to them. 
 
 The title is enough. 
 
 Why! he called it "a popular referendum on war." So why ain't it a popular referendum 
 on war? 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1157 
 
 Though I have been alone for years now, almost absolutely alone, 
 my days have not been cheerless. I do not seek society, yet good friends, 
 knowing about my neuritis, do pardon me and come to see me — my 
 Harvard classmate, Thomas E. Oliver, especially; and my long-time 
 Pittsfield friend, Tom Smith. And people from various places who have 
 come to summer in Duluth and who have read one or another of my books, 
 especially "The Duke of Duluth," drop in occasionally for a brief chat. 
 Then there are the letters! Besides those from relatives, there are many 
 from my childhood's friend and protector, Fritz Niebuhr, who still 
 writes with all his old-time charm. And the letters from my class- 
 secretaries, William De Lancey Howe in particular, and that other prince 
 of letter-writers, Charles F. Welsh, Detroit, also those from my former 
 minister, Leslie A. Bechtel, now of Detroit. Finally, my good house- 
 keeper, Mrs. Stycket, keeps Tramp's Rest as restful and as civilized as 
 the lair of any such disorderly tramp as I could be. 
 
 But, above all, there are the children shouting in the street! 
 
 Strange how the whole world had altered all in a fraction of a second, 
 at the death of the Companion. Strange, in particular, how what she had 
 stood for in my mind — she, her life — had changed. Hitherto, my thoughts 
 about her had, year after year, and moment after moment, related chiefly 
 to the future, to that sojourn,- for example, which I had always meant 
 to give her some time in beautiful Venice. Now all at once that mar- 
 velous future which I had ever been imagining for her and had so surely 
 meant to give her, she had turned her back upon — stepping into the 
 past, already become part and portion of the past, and, so far as this 
 world is concerned, of the past only. Nothing at all about her had any 
 more any relation to the present or to the future at all. She had gone 
 suddenly and irrevocably into the Land of No Present, No Future What- 
 ever — a horrible domain, an abode beyond the chance of even the most 
 and very longest years to change or alter. Then, suddenly, in the midst 
 of my grief, I became intensely, even if uselessly, angry. Why had the 
 Companion not had the beauty that I had always meant to give her? 
 Why? The beauty we both had saved for during long decades, in order 
 that, in our failing years, we might have some belated taste of beauty — 
 beauty, serenity, peace. 
 
 The answer, of course, was sufficiently obvious. The "tax man" had 
 taken from us the most of our savings and given them to other persons : 
 to some of these of course quite properly, to a very large number, how- 
 ever, who had neither toiled nor saved, but who had voluntarily been 
 heavy burdens all their lives on other people, and who still were. 
 
 And so too — away went that part at least of our savings with which 
 I had meant to buy the beauty, the serenity, the peace for my lifelong 
 Companion. Away it went, and, if statistics have even the slightest 
 value, it had largely gone to pay for the liquor, the tobacco, the slot- 
 machine gambling and the bawdy-house revelry of people far younger 
 and stronger than were the Companion and I. 
 
 And now she was only a part of the unalterable past — a part of what 
 had been and no more was, that land of illusion wherein you had ever 
 
1158 MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 
 
 toiled and saved, toiled and saved, so that, eventually, others who had 
 neither saved nor toiled might spend your savings for you — yes, and hate 
 you into the bargain. 
 
 And all that notwithstanding the patent fact that, as a physician, 
 you had, through the whole of your professional career, been kind to the 
 poor — good poor and bad poor just alike — without money and without 
 price. 
 
 Yet there was one excellent point about that unchangeable past. It 
 contained, counting the years of betrothal as well as those of marriage, 
 through almost five of its decades the story of a happy union. That, too, 
 was unchangeable. 
 
 Now all those persons and things of the long-ago, concerning which 
 I have written, are gone. All, rather almost all, are departed. There 
 remains, of course, the little brown-haired (for many years past, quite 
 white-haired) boy who once was medical apprentice to his father. The 
 Companion! Far away, from time to time, I hear her call — or is it my 
 mother? So like in speech and look they were! Far away as fairyland 
 itself they call as if with one single voice. Gone too is my patient, Rick, 
 he and his entire family, even all his grandchildren. And almost all the 
 other old-time patients, as also the well members of their families whom, 
 ofttimes, we had to work hard to keep well. Yes, Rick and his people 
 are gone, although I see again quite vividly the unfilled hen-holes in his 
 door-yard and hear once more the whistling of innumerable blithe quails 
 in the sweet-scented jungle not far behind the dog-trot of his sour- 
 scented house. 
 
 And again I see and hear the tall, quick-tongued Y. of P., Doctor 
 Psychopompous (Raiser of the Dead), genial yet quite forehanded and 
 firmly believing in the religion of self-preservation. 
 
 Most vividly of all, however, and most frequently, there returns to 
 me my human trinity: my mother, crying as if her heart would break 
 because my brother Jon and I, in our childhood, had condemned the 
 big, fine tent her weary hands had made for us with so much anticipatory 
 pleasure; my sweetheart, later the Companion, smiling through her tears 
 and saying (so much as if it had long before been settled from above, 
 that she pierced my heart) "Why, of course I do"; and, finally, my father 
 (the day I became his apprentice) as he stood beside me in his office, 
 we two facing his diploma and the picture of Hodgen, and telling me 
 I must always be this and always do that. 
 
 Why have I invariably failed to attain his ideals? 
 
 Well, anyway, I have written this volume. That is the best that I 
 can do to make amends. It is at all events a true book, as I have been 
 at infinite pains in its pages to document and show clearly, also a book 
 that is chiefly about the marvelous time when not only healing but 
 everything else of interest in this world, both human and divine, was, 
 as I have said in my preface hereto, undergoing a transformation "into 
 something new and true and strangely, almost impossibly, beautiful." 
 
MY SECOND LIFE APPENDIX 1159 
 
 Not many will read this book. It is neither a murder story, nor a 
 "bugger" story, nor yet a fraudulent peace proposal, nor a lying pro-war 
 volume. But it is a record of highly important matters and it is true. 
 For those reasons there may, in each generation still to come, be some 
 persons that will care to read it. 
 
 THE END 
 
INDEX 
 
 TO 
 
 MY SECOND LIFE 
 
INDEX 
 
 (For Captions of Illustrations not in the Text, See Pages 12-13-14) 
 (Section-heads are wholly in capital letters) 
 
 Academy of Clinical Medicine, The, 1027. 
 
 ACADEMY, THE, 1027. 
 
 Academy, The John D. Thomson, 8, 59, 65, 
 
 66, 71, 447, 1114. 
 Academy, The Pittsfield, 447. 
 Adams, Dr. John Cain, 21, 1018, 1058. 
 Adams, Minna Worthington (Mrs. A. L.), 188. 
 AFTER THAT, 1037. 
 AGAIN THE LITTLE SIDE-SKIRMISH IN 
 
 A GREAT WAR, 241-250, 253-254. 
 Agnew, Dr. Cornelius Rea, 599. 
 Agrimonte, Dr. Aristide, 946. 
 AH! 380-385. 
 Allbutt, Sir Clifford, 931. 
 Allen, John, 673. 
 ALLERGIES, THE, 1132. 
 Although I had been writing or wiring to them 
 
 daily (illustration in the text), 605- 
 Amateur newspapers of our boyhood, 109, 110, 
 
 111, 239. 
 AMENDMENT FOR THE LOAN-AND- 
 
 GIFT-CHECK VOTE, THE, 1143-1147. 
 American Academy of Medicine, Bulletin of the, 
 
 476, 482, 624, 848. 
 "American Encyclopedia of Ophthalmology, 
 
 The", 973-5- 
 American Journal of Clinical Medicine, The, 867. 
 American Medical Association, Journal of the, 
 
 26, 27, 848, 1131. 
 American Medical College, St. Louis, The, 
 
 965. 
 Amish (Pennsylvania Dutch) language, 477. 
 "Anatomy," Gray's, 317, 338, 340, 387, 452, 
 
 454, 1102. 
 ANDREW BRINSKI, 1050. 
 Annotations, a few of my father's, 325. 
 ANOTHER OF THE UNDERPRIVILEGED, 
 
 1045-1046. 
 "Anthony van Leeuwenhoek and His 'Little 
 
 Animals,' " Dobell's, 918. 
 ANTITOXIN ON CHRISTMAS, 828. 
 Anvil, anatomy of the, 210. 
 Apprentice, 427, 1115. 
 APPRENTICE, IGNORED, LOOKS ON THE 
 
 INSIDE, THE, 343-345. 
 Apprenticeship, my, 292, 297, 306-313, 375, 376. 
 
 Arabs in medicine, the, 913. 
 
 Aristotle, 927. 
 
 Arlt, Dr. Carl Ferdinand von, 914. 
 
 Armati, Salvino degli, 916. 
 
 Armstrong, Jack (Clary Grove bully), 316. 
 
 Army drafting, dishonest, 831. 
 
 AS DEEP IN THE MUD, 1079. 
 
 Asepsis, partly displacing antisepsis, 956. 
 
 ASKING OUR WAY IN THE COUNTRY, 
 
 465-468. 
 AT KINDLY ST. LUKE'S, 1117-1119. 
 Atkinson, Miss Hattie, 515. 
 AT LAST THE WOODLOT HOME, 363-364. 
 AUNT GLORY, 1051. 
 AUSTIN BARBER, 721. 
 Australian people and World War I, 1004. 
 Avenzoar, Arabian physician, 921. 
 BACK OVER THE DECADES TO 
 
 HARVARD, 781-783. 
 BACK TO MOTHER, 571. 
 BACK TO THE MILOS', 487-488. 
 Bacon, Roger, 913, 916. 
 Bailey, Henry, 452, 453, 454. 
 Baker, Elliott, 317. 
 Baker, George P., 777. 
 "Balance of Power, The," produced many 
 
 wars, 1016. 
 Ball, Dr. James Moores, Dean of American 
 
 Medical College, 965, 966. 
 Ball Wirey, 361, 368-370, 373. 
 Barber, Dr. (cartoon), 192. 
 Barber, Tip, sells a black hen, 541-542. 
 Barnes, Bart, hanging of, 509. 
 Barrett, Attorney Oliver R., 8, 65, 764. 
 Bassi, Dr. Agostino (his contribution to the 
 
 germ theory), 170, 171, 174, 938. 
 Bateman, Newton, founder of first high school 
 
 in Illinois, 462. 
 Bates, Dorus Evelyn, 722, 1115. 
 Bates, Therena (Nicolay's sweetheart), 64, 
 
 722. 
 Battle Creek, Michigan, 848-849. 
 BEAUTIFUL SKULL, THE, 519-520. 
 Bechtel, Dr. Leslie A., 1023, 1157. 
 Beecher, Dr. Edward (first president of Illinois 
 
 College), 563, 569. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Bcecher, Henry Ward, 569. 
 
 BEGINNING OF MY PEACE WORK, THE, 
 
 829-840. 
 Behring, Emil von, 42. 
 Bergholtz, Miss Leve, 1118. 
 Bergmeister, Otto, 615, 619-622. 
 Bernard, Claud, 1131. 
 Bernays, Dr. Augustus Charles, 788, 789. 
 Bevan, Dr. Arthur D., 1092, 1103. 
 Big Boot, Fritz Niebuhr's sign, 762. 
 BIG WORDS AND THE LAITY, 338-339. 
 Billings, Dr. Frank, 183, 896, 960, 962, 996, 
 
 1130, 1136. 
 Billroth, Professor (his slowness to accept the 
 
 germ theory of disease and Listerism), 
 
 179. 
 BIOGRAPHIC REPERCUSSION, 1108. 
 BIOGRAPHIES, THE, 975- 
 BIOGRAPHY OF GENERAL U. S. GRANT, 
 
 214-220. 
 Bird, Charles H., 1022. 
 
 "Bird of beauty whose bright plumage," 348. 
 BIRDS' EYES AND C. AND U. PATIENTS, 
 
 1057. 
 Bishop, Genevra Johnstone, coloratura so- 
 prano, 719. 
 Black, Bessie McLaughlin, 562. 
 Black Death, the, 264, 914. 
 Black, Dr. and Mrs. Carl E., 563, 591. 
 Black, Dr. Arthur Davenport, 562. 
 Black, Dr. Carl E., 8, 199, 562, 563, 568, 571, 
 
 1109, 1113, 1116. 
 Black, Dr. Ellsworth, 1113- 
 Black, Dr. Greene Vardiman, 443, 561-562, 
 
 571, 579, 591, 948, 1113. 
 BLACK HAWK'S SON, 674-676. 
 Black Jim, the wild horse, 114, 237, 349-350, 
 
 352, 355-356, 425, 450, 673. 
 BLACK LADY WHO WAS BLED WHITE, 
 
 THE, 894-897. 
 BLACKSMITHING, 466. 
 Blacksmithing, the old-time, 208-215, 685. 
 Blackwell, Elizabeth, first woman doctor in 
 
 the United States, 421-424. 
 Bleeders, neighborhood, 438. 
 BLUE GLASS, 345-346. 
 Body-snatching, 255-258. 
 Bonesetters, 438. 
 
 BOTTOM MAN, THE, 230-232. 
 Bowman, E. M. (pianist), 758. 
 Boyer, Dr. S. H., 1027. 
 BOY WHO OUTRAN HIS OWN SHADOW, 
 
 THE, 507-511. 
 Bradburn, Mrs. June, 461. 
 Braden, Dr. A. J., 1027- 
 Brady, Dr. William, 798. 
 BRASS ANKLES, 899-903. 
 Briggs, Dean LeBaron Russell, 778. 
 Brooks, Mrs. Rose Heck, 8. 
 Bryan, William Jennings, 53, 561. 
 Bubonic Plague, 264. 
 
 Buckham, President of the University of Ver- 
 mont, 611. 
 
 Buggy, The American, 664. 
 
 Buggy, The English, 664. 
 
 Bulletin of the American Academy of Medicine, 
 476, 482, 624, 848. 
 
 "Bum's Rush" at Illinois College, The (illus- 
 tration in the text), 595- 
 
 BUMSTONE CASE, THE, 800-801. 
 
 Burbank, Alfred Post, 318-319. 
 
 Burke, William, 255-258. 
 
 Burking, 255. 
 
 Bush, Colonel D. B., 64. 
 
 Bush, Merrick, 711, 712, 719, 734. 
 
 Bush, Mrs. Will, letter from (illustration in 
 the text), 533. 
 
 Bush's Hall, 96, 274, 318, 378. 
 
 Bush, W. C, 8. 
 
 Butz, Uncle Abe, 443, 472-476, 537, 541-546. 
 
 Calvin, John, 916. 
 
 Campbell, Dr. O. S., 76, 157, 159, 187-190. 
 
 Cannon, Mrs. Ellen Turner, 459. 
 
 Capps, W. S., ("Our Simp"), 744. 
 
 Capsules, gelatin, invention of, 357- 
 
 CARDINAL INN, THE, 1116. 
 
 CARLO POST, VOLUNTEER MAN-NURSE, 
 726-730. 
 
 CARL WEIGERT, 942. 
 
 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of 
 Teaching, The, 1092, 1103. 
 
 Carr, Clark E., 56, 823-824. 
 
 CARRIERS ON, 944-946. 
 
 Carroll, Dr. James, 946. 
 
 Casal, Dr. Francis M., 290, 327. 
 
 CASE, PLEASE, A, 812-813. 
 
 Castle, Dr. William B., 1131. 
 
 Cates, Dr. Edward M., 873. 
 
 Caughlan, John H., 8. 
 
 Celsus, Aurelius Cornelius, 915, 926. 
 
 Cemetery, Oakwood, 450-451, 465, 627. 
 
 Centralblatt fur die medicinische Wissenschaft, 942. 
 
 Certificate of my age and apprenticeship, my 
 father's (illustration in the text), 610. 
 
 Chamberlen, Peter, 922. 
 
 CHANGES, CHANGES! 648-657. 
 
 Chapman, Dr. T. L., 1118. 
 
 Chapman, Madison, 290. 
 
 CHARACTER HUNTER, THE, 811. 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE COMPAN- 
 ION, 1036-1037. 
 
 CHARLES McBURNEY, 793-794. 
 
 Charlie Brazier and My Father (illustration 
 in the text), 508. 
 
 Cherry, Mrs. Mina Swan, 8. 
 
 Child-bed fever, due to contagion, 378. 
 
 Child, Francis James, 108, 777. 
 
 CHOLERA INFANTUM, 659-660. 
 
 Cholera infantum, present-day preventives of, 
 295. 
 
 Cholera infantum, the terrible epidemic of, 
 294-295, 494. 
 
INDEX 
 
 CHRISTIAN A. GENIUS: THE WORLD'S 
 
 MOST WONDERFUL, 1039-1041. 
 Christian clergy in war-time, 832-833, 838, 
 849, 986-991, 1000, 1003, 1012. 
 
 CHRISTMAS IN A VACUUM, 691-694. 
 
 Cigar Store Indian, Hirsheimer, 762. 
 
 CLARK E. CARR, 823-824. 
 
 CLEANLINESS BEFORE PASTEUR, 485- 
 486. 
 
 Clement, Dr. Thomas Gage, 1118. 
 
 Clemmons, Eunice Richardson, 9, 926. 
 
 Clemmons, Peter, 902. 
 
 Clendenning, Dr. Logan, 798, 1064. 
 
 Club, Galesburg Doctors, 35, 36. 
 
 CODE FOR DOCTOR AND APPRENTICE, 
 500-507. 
 
 College, Harvard, 760, 765-776, 781-783- 
 
 College, Illinois, 1113- 
 
 Collins, Dr. Arthur, 1027, 1118. 
 
 COLT'S FOOT OR MONEY, A, 322-323. 
 
 Columbia University, Medical Department of, 
 604. 
 
 COMPANION AT ANN ARBOR, THE, 855- 
 856. 
 
 COMPANION DOES THE PACKING, THE, 
 841, 848. 
 
 COMPANION MAKES A LONG JOURNEY, 
 THE, 1033-1036. 
 
 COMPANION, THE, 824, 827. 
 
 Companion, the, 46, 89, 107, 273, 453, 616, 
 733, 748, 755, 758, 762, 763, 780, 782, 
 783, 824, 827, 841, 848, 855-856, 857, 858, 
 860, 881, 972, 997, 1018, 1032, 1073, 1074, 
 1109, 1113, 1118, 1119, 1120, 1121, 1122, 
 1137, 1157, 1158. 
 
 Companion, the diaries of, 8, 616. 
 
 Companion, the (Fannie Fidelia English), 273. 
 
 CONFUSION OF VOICES, 305-306. 
 
 Congressional Record, 833, 849, 983, 1011. 
 
 Conkey, Dr. C. D., 1017, 1018. 
 
 Connett, Mr. and Mrs. John, 284. 
 
 CONSULTATIONS, 527-535. 
 
 Cook, George Cram, 781. 
 
 Copeland, Dr. Royal S., 798. 
 
 "Coral Grove, The," Percival's, 384-385. 
 
 "Country Doctor, A," my, 126, 158, 848. 
 
 COUNTRY DOCTOR GOES ACADEMIC- 
 HARVARD, A, 765-776. 
 
 COUNTRY DOCTOR'S LIBRARY, A, 324- 
 327. 
 
 Country doctors not yet extinct, 205. 
 
 Country Sounds, 202-205. 
 
 Coventry, Dr. W. A., 1109. 
 
 COVERED BRIDGES, 687-688. 
 
 Cowboy doctors, 381-383. 
 
 "CRICK," THE, 848, 849. 
 
 Crisswell, Grant, 8, 311-312, 433. 
 
 Cruel and Unusual Patients, 1039-1075. 
 
 CURSE OF GOD, THE, 679-682, 698, 700, 
 704-706. 
 
 Curtis, Dr. John G., 601, 606-607. 
 
 Cutter, Dr. Irving S., 798. 
 
 "Cyclopedia of American Medical Biography," 
 
 Kelly's, 609. 
 Czar of Rooshia, the horses of, 675. 
 Dallinger, Frederick W., 1007. 
 DARKNESS OF EGYPT, THE, 857-861. 
 DAUGHTERS WILD, 1069-1070. 
 Davaine, Casimir (his contribution to the germ 
 
 theory of disease production), 170, 938. 
 Davis, Dr. A. E., 604, 794. 
 Davis, Dr. B. F., 1027. 
 Davis, Jefferson, 108, 112. 
 Davy, Sir Humphry, 929, 930, 1023. 
 DAYS LONG, NIGHTS STILL LONGER, 
 
 681-682. 
 DEATH BEHIND THE VEIL, 957-963. 
 DEATH, REALIZATION OF, 221-226. 
 DELIRIUM LAND, 787. 
 DELLA WREN, 630-631. 
 Dental Register, 948. 
 Dentistry, progress of, 948. 
 DE PROFUNDIS— AGAIN, 996-997. 
 Devil-possession theory of disease, 266, 268, 
 271, 324-326, 401-402, 573, 589-590, 941, 
 1110, 1136. 
 Devil's Dooryard, the, 543. 
 DIANA, 688-691. 
 Diltz, Dr. P. V., 437, 1117. 
 Dinsmore, Dr. Virginia, 635. 
 DIRECTIONS, 466-468. 
 Disarmament no guarantee of peace, 1013. 
 Disarmament sometimes causes wars, 1013. 
 Disease germs in Devonian times, 956. 
 Dobell, Clifford, Sc.D., "Anthony van Leeu- 
 wenhoek and His 'Little Animals,' " 
 918. 
 DOCTOR DRUGGISTS, 427-433. 
 DOCTORING DOCTORS GENERALLY, 
 
 1041. 
 DOCTOR NO-DOCTOR, 813-814. 
 DOCTOR PSYCHOPOMPOUS, 1094-1102, 
 
 1158. 
 DOCTORS AND FLOODS, 356-368. 
 DOCTOR'S APPRENTICE AND A COMING 
 
 MAN, A, 288-296. 
 Doctor's Apprentice, The, Learns about Rhon- 
 chi and Rales (illustration in the text), 
 297. 
 DOCTOR'S APPRENTICE, BUT FATHER'S 
 
 LITTLE CHILD, A, 330-337. 
 "Doctor's apprentice," history of term, 318. 
 Doctor's Buggy of the Olden Time, A (illus- 
 tration in the text), 668. 
 Doctors, cowboy, 381-383. 
 DOCTORS DON'T TELL, 321-322. 
 "Doctor Tom" and "The Old Doctor," 661. 
 Doctors, women, 420-421. 
 
INDEX 
 
 DOCTOR URSUS, 50-52. 
 
 DOCTOR WHO, BORN TO BE AN ACTOR, 
 BECAME INSTEAD A GENERAL SUR- 
 GEON OF REMARKABLE SKILL, THE, 
 28, 33-38. 
 
 DOCTOR WHO BROKE DOWN THE 
 COLOR LINE, THE, 22-26. 
 
 DOCTOR WHO'D PLENTY OF TIME, THE, 
 1083-1086. 
 
 DOCTOR WHO KEPT A HOTEL, THE, 
 42-45. 
 
 DOCTOR WHO MERELY STOPPED IN, 
 THE, 46-48. 
 
 DOCTOR WHO NEVER WOULD OPERATE, 
 THE, 26-27. 
 
 DOCTOR WHO WOULD HAVE SAVED 
 MANKIND, THE, 45-46. 
 
 Dollond, John, optician, 936. 
 
 "Donkey Engine," Lister's, 566. 
 
 Donovan, Mike, 114, 119, 120, 191, 193-194, 
 241, 281, 298-299, 308, 323. 
 
 Doss, Dr. C. H., 290, 311, 327, 379, 705. 
 
 Douglas, Stephen A., 82. 
 
 DR. DUBLIN CHARACTERISTICALLY DE- 
 PARTS, 821-823. 
 
 DREAMING, 623-624. 
 
 DREAMS, 1119-1120, 1123. 
 
 Drennan, Dr. George L., 1113, 1116. 
 
 Drowning, my almost, 367-368. 
 
 Dublin, Dr., becomes converted to the germ 
 theory, 307, 310. 
 
 Dublin, Dr., I incur his lifelong enmity, 208. 
 
 Dublin, Dr. James, 83, 112, 113, 114, 132-133, 
 134-135, 162, 167, 171, 173, 181-182, 186, 
 191, 195, 201, 207, 208, 241-242, 247-250, 
 253-254, 263, 277-278, 283, 286-288, 306- 
 311, 327, 332, 382-383, 405-406, 419-420, 
 465, 476, 490, 514-520, 524-525, 528-532, 
 698-700, 705, 722, 734, 783, 814, 821-823, 
 847, 1082-1083. 
 
 DUBLIN IN ANOTHER ROLE, 1082-1083. 
 
 "Duke of Duluth, The," my, 1157. 
 
 EATING AN APPLE "OUT LOUD," 861. 
 
 EATING IN THE COUNTRY, 471-472. 
 
 ECLECTICS, 912. 
 
 Edison, electric-light postage stamp honoring, 
 1023. 
 
 Edison, Thomas, 443-444, 1023. 
 
 ED FARMER, 715-718. 
 
 Edwards, Capt. George T. (as fighter), 206, 
 316. 
 
 Edwards, Capt. George Travis, 206, 316, 369. 
 
 Edwards, Dr. James Lafayette, 67, 321, 463. 
 
 Edwards, Dr. James Lafayette, my father's 
 most brilliant apprentice, 321. 
 
 Edwards, Elizabeth, 824. 
 
 Edwards, Ninian, 824. 
 
 Ehrlich, Paul, 942, 947. 
 
 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, THE, 921-922. 
 
 Eliot, President Charles William, 390, 573, 
 593, 597, 767-776, 1023. 
 
 Ellis, Arthur, 461. 
 
 Ellis, Mrs. Lottie Davis, 461. 
 
 Ellis, Peter, 461. 
 
 Empedocles, 927. 
 
 ENCHANTED PRINCESS, THE, 303-305. 
 
 ENCYCLOPEDIA, THE, 973-975. 
 
 Endless Revolution, The, in All Human 
 
 Thought, 918. 
 END OF AN OLD AGONY, 598-599. 
 END OF THE PLAGUE, THE, 741-742. 
 English, Miss Fannie Fidelia, 273, 744, 755- 
 
 758, 759, 780. 
 Epizootic, or horse influenza, 680. 
 Epling, Louisa Greene (Mrs. B. D.), 8, 55, 56. 
 Erickson, Miss Esther (Mrs. Axel George 
 
 Carlson), 9, 1028. 
 Erxleben, Dorothea, first woman doctor in 
 
 Germany, 421-422. 
 ESCAPE OF THE MORON, THE, 1046-1048. 
 Ethics, medical, of the old-times, 525-526. 
 Evans, Dr. W. A., 798. 
 Evolution, old-time opposition to, 266. 
 Examination honors, my special diploma of, 
 
 611. 
 EXAMINING SURGEON, THE, 458, 463-464. 
 Exchange Club of Duluth assists in securing 
 
 issuance of Edison electric-light stamp, 
 
 1023. 
 EXPLANATION— AND AWAY, AN, 763- 
 
 764. 
 EYES AND GRIEF, 1071-1075- 
 Eyes, Lincoln's, 60-61. 
 EYESTRAIN, 1129-1130. 
 Eyestrain, 404-406, 1129-1130. 
 "Eye Symptoms in General Diseases," my, 867. 
 Fahrenheit, 926. 
 
 FAITH, HOPE AND NO CHARITY, 897-899. 
 "FAKE" PEACE PLANS, 1013-1016. 
 "Falsehood in War-Time," Ponsonby's, 980. 
 FAMILY DOCTOR VANISHES, THE, 968- 
 
 971. 
 "Fannie," the Halpin mare, 351-352. 
 Farmer, Ed, 715-718. 
 Farm of John T. Hodgen's boyhood, 156. 
 Farm surgery, 950. 
 FATHER'S HORSES, 349-356. 
 FEATURES OF THE ENVIRONMENT, 881- 
 
 882. 
 Ferguson, Dr. William, 258, 261. 
 Field, John L., 765. 
 
 "Fighting for Peace," Van Dyke's, 987. 
 FIGHTING HEART, THE, 205-207. 
 FIGHTING PENITENT, A, 315-321. 
 Fights, frequency of, in Pike County, 315-317. 
 Fights, Saturday, in Pike County, 288. 
 FIGHT THAT WAS A FIGHT, A, 207-213. 
 FINIS AT MICHIGAN, 857. 
 Finlay, Dr. Charles, 464. 
 FIRST JUNGLE, THE, 784-787. 
 FIRST TELEPHONE IN PIKE COUNTY, 
 
 THE, 365-367. 
 
INDEX 
 
 FIRST X-RAY PICTURE IN AMERICA, 802- 
 
 803. 
 Fishbein, Dr. Morris, 798. 
 Fitz, Dr. Reginald, 1136. 
 Fletcher, Jefferson B., 777. 
 Flexner, Abraham, 1092, 1103. 
 Flexner, Dr. Simon, 1051, 1092, 1103. 
 FLOOD-GATE AND THE HARP, THE, 228- 
 
 229. 
 Floyer, Sir John, 926. 
 FOCAL INFECTION, 1130. 
 FOLKS, THE, 882, 885-891. 
 FOOLING A FRIGHTENED MOTHER, 808- 
 
 809. 
 FOOL'S GOLD, 1089-1094. 
 FORGIVENESS, 639-641. 
 "Four Pillars of Bacteriology, The," Dr. 
 
 Robinson's, 393. 
 FOUR PROPOSED AMENDMENTS, 1147- 
 
 1156. 
 Fourth of July Mining Stock, 388, 389, 574, 
 
 596, 769. 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 914. 
 FREE EXAMINATION, THE, 795-797. 
 Friendships, some of my father's finest, 628. 
 "F.S.S."Courboyhood's),109,220,238,239,380. 
 Frisbie, photographer, 35, 36. 
 "From Pioneer to Scientist," Dr. & Mrs. Carl 
 
 E. Black's, 559, 560, 562. 
 FUN IN THE EPIDEMIC, 707-708. 
 Funk, Dr. Casimir, 1134. 
 FURTHER GROWTH OF THE GREAT 
 
 NEW MEDICINE, 943-944. 
 Galen, 912, 913, 915. 
 Gaksburg Daily Re-publican Register, 828. 
 Galesburg Doctors Club, The, 35, 36, 811, 
 
 827, 828-829, 843-846. 
 GALESBURG DOCTORS CLUB, THE, 827, 
 
 828-829. 
 GALESBURG, ILLINOIS, 794-795. 
 Galileo, 926. 
 
 Garbutt, Rev. Zachariah N., 63, 233, 236. 
 Garrison, Fielding H., 421, 912, 919, 930. 
 General Letter of Introduction from my "Born 
 
 Enemy," A (illustration in the text), 612. 
 George, Mr. Lloyd, 987, 1010, 1011. 
 "German Atrocities," Hillis', 988. 
 Germ theory and asepsis both undoubtedly 
 
 from God, 963- 
 Germ theory at Inveni, the, 390-414, 415- 
 Germ theory, fight in graveyard over, 286-288. 
 Germ theory of disease, the, 126, 132, 162- 
 
 181, 191, 244-247, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 
 
 271, 277, 278, 283, 284, 285, 286-288, 382, 
 
 390-414, 415, 427, 465, 472, 485-486, 493, 
 
 494, 573, 587-590, 593, 915, 921, 925, 931, 
 
 940, 941, 943, 946, 948, 949, 950, 954, 
 
 955, 963, 971, 1110, 1126, 1129, 1130, 
 
 1135, 1136. 
 Gettysburg Address, Lincoln's, 56, 205, 823. 
 Gibson, Dr. William B., 609. 
 
 Gift-and-Loan-Check Vote, The, 1023. 
 
 GIFTS AND GIFTS, 721-723. 
 
 Gilmer, Dr. Thomas L., 199. 
 
 "Give the People Their Own War Power," my, 
 
 1023. 
 Godowsky, Leopold, great pianist, 719. 
 Goll, "Old George," 165. 
 Goodsir, John, 938. 
 GOTHAM AT LAST, 598. 
 Gowan, Dr. Lawrence R., 1118. 
 GRANDMA HEATH, 444-445, 447. 
 Grandma Heath's discovery of liver for anemia, 
 
 444-445. 
 Grant, General U. S., 214-220. 
 Grasshoppers, I get a job feeding, 310. 
 Graves, Dr. Waldo N., 1118. 
 GREAT NEW MEDICINE MOVES ON, 
 
 THE, 946-948. 
 Great New Medicine, The, 825, 918, 931, 932, 
 
 935, 937, 938, 939, 942, 950, 956, 957, 
 
 966, 970, 1128-1129, 1146. 
 Great New Medicine, The, and life on the 
 
 farms, 955. 
 Great New Medicine, The, industrial revolu- 
 tion possible from, 954. 
 Great New Medicine, The, large cities possible 
 
 from, 953. 
 Great New Medicine, The, public health 
 
 possible from, 953. 
 Great New Office, The, my father plans it, 
 
 629. 
 Great New Office, The, staking it out, 630. 
 GREAT PREPARATION, THE, FOR THE 
 
 GREAT REVOLUTION OF THE 
 
 WORLD, 916-921. 
 Greaves, Dr. F. C, 1027. 
 Green, Bowling (first cousin once removed of 
 
 my Grandfather Shastid), 54, 56. 
 GREENE VARDIMAN BLACK, 561-562. ( 
 Greene, William Graham ("Uncle Billy"), 
 
 9, 54, 55, 56, 59, 316, 561. 
 Greene, William Griggs and Elizabeth Graham 
 
 (parents of William Graham Greene), 56. 
 Grimshaw, John, 65- 
 Grimshaw, Robert, 729-730. 
 Grimshaw, William A., 95, 519, 729. 
 Grinnell, Dr. Ashbel Parmalee (Dean), 609. 
 HAIL AGAIN, BRIGHT DAY OF RAIN! 
 
 464-465. 
 Hales, Stephen, 926. 
 Hall, Angelina Clemmons (my grandmother), 
 
 73, 102, 107, 108. 
 Hall, Beecher, 8. 
 Hall, Calvin (my uncle), 652. 
 Hall, Dr. Frank L. (my cousin), 647. 
 Hall, Joseph (my uncle), plans and builds the 
 
 great new office, 629. 
 Hall, Louisa Minerva (later my mother), 461. 
 Hall, Thomas Linster (my grandfather), 73, 
 
 98, 99, 101, 102, 107, 347, 452, 476, 565, 
 
 664. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Hall, Thomas (my cousin), 452. 
 Hall, William (my mother's brother), 87, 89. 
 Halpin Mare, the, 351-352, 485, 709. 
 Halpin, Patrick, 736, 737, 765- 
 Hand, Augustus Frederick (first to receive a 
 medical degree from an Illinois institu- 
 tion), 563. 
 Hanford, Miss Bertha, 1059. 
 Hanna, Mark, U. S. Senator, 850. 
 "HARD-BOILED" DOCTOR, THE, 38-42. 
 Harder, Charley (old-time druggist), 62. 
 Hare, body-snatcher, 257, 258. 
 Harfields, The (my father's fight with) 210- 
 
 213, 265, 639-647, 657. 
 Harvard College, 22, 768, 777-780, 781-783. 
 Harvey, Dr. William, 919. 
 Haskin, Frederick J., 145. 
 Hay, John, 8, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 71, 
 72, 73, 163, 293, 296, 463, 469, 824, 1114, 
 1115, 1117. 
 Hayloft University, 90, 97, 107, 163, 221, 348, 
 
 349, 376, 488, 1109. 
 Hay, Milton, uncle of John Hay, 80. 
 HEAD OF THE LAKES. DULUTH, 1018, 
 
 1021-1022. 
 HEAD OF THE LAKES. SUPERIOR, 973. 
 Heath, Mrs. Mary M. ("Grandma"), 59, 
 
 444-445, 447, 545, 1131. 
 HEAVENS OPEN, THE, 755- 
 Heck, George, 381. 
 Heck, Gus, 109, 154, 218, 239, 240, 273, 
 
 380-381, 452. 
 Heck, Mrs. Hannah, 8. 
 HECTIC CAREER, 389-402. 
 HELL IN THE SIDE, 662-667. 
 Hell's Half- Acre, 543. 
 Henle, 170, 943. 
 
 Henry, Dr., of Summer Hill, 694. 
 HENRY SUTLER, DISOBEDIENT, 226-228. 
 Hesley, Car, 381. 
 
 Hewitt, Dr. John Michael, 35, 36, 37, 798- 
 821, 823, 825, 827, 828, 841, 842, 844, 
 847, 848, 863. 
 HEWITT IN THE COUNTRY, 815-818. 
 HEWITT IN TOWN, 799-800. 
 Hicks, Truman, 711, 712, 719. 
 Hide-and-go-seek in Latin and Greek, 507. 
 Higbee, Judge Harry, 823. 
 Hill, Adams Sherman, 778. 
 Hill, Dr. Roland, 199. 
 Hiller, Dr. (teacher of languages), 86, 380, 
 
 506. 
 Hippocrates, 168, 181, 182, 910, 911, 912, 914, 
 
 1051, 1132. 
 Hippocrates' (opposition to the devil-posses- 
 sion theory of disease production), 168, 
 181, 182. 
 "History of Medicine," Garrison's, 421, 912, 
 
 930. 
 Hitler, Adolph, abolished labor unions, 1015. 
 Hobart, Garrett A., Vice-President, 849. 
 
 HOBO'S INSTABILITY, THE, 840. 
 
 HOBO'S RESURRECTION, THE, 1017-1018. 
 
 Hodgen, Attorney John, 199- 
 
 Hodgen Hill, 232, 235. 
 
 Hodgen, John T., 67, 70, 76, 104, 112, 134, 
 
 135, 143-150, 155-161, 167, 173, 188-190, 
 
 246, 247, 293, 296, 319, 320, 329, 359, 
 
 414, 563, 564, 579, 784, 963, 1113. 
 Hodgen, John T. and the drowned negro, 159. 
 Hodgen, John T., as jumper, 156. 
 Holderman, Dr. J. W., 1027. 
 Holmes, Dr. Oliver Wendell, 377-378, 485. 
 Honey Creek, 627, 1128. 
 Hoover, Fred, finder of Lincoln Records, 82, 
 
 728. 
 Hornback, Dr. Edward T., 143, 144. 
 Horses, my father's, 349-356. 
 Horse, suicide of, 858. 
 HOSPITAL TO ROOMING HOUSE, 788- 
 
 790. 
 Hovde, Dr. A. G., 1118. 
 Hovde, Smith and Myers, Drs., 1018, 1923. 
 How a Doctor's Buggy of the Olden Time 
 
 Looked After Black Jim Had Got Through 
 
 with It (illustration in the text), 669. 
 Howe, Elias, 819. 
 Howe, William De Lancey, 1157. 
 HOW I DID AND DID NOT GET THE 
 
 GRIPPE, 738-741. 
 HOW THE LIBRARY BEGAN, 323-324. 
 Huderle, Dr. A. G., 1027. 
 Humoralists, 912. 
 Hunter, John, 928. 
 Husband, Attorney Donald R., 856. 
 Hyde, D. W., druggist, personality of, 438- 
 
 440. 
 Hyde, Luther, 239. 
 Hyde's drugstore, 75, 78. 
 HYSTERIA, 906-909. 
 I BECAME WHAT I ALREADY WAS, A 
 
 DONKEY— SO TO SPEAK, 566-568, 571. 
 I GET "THE BUM'S RUSH" AT ILLINOIS 
 
 ' ALSO, 586-590, 593-598. 
 ILLEGITIMATE FATHER— IN HIS HEART, 
 
 AN, 637-638. 
 Illinois College, Medical Department of, 363. 
 "Illinois College Medical School," Dr. and 
 
 Mrs. Carl E. Black's, 563. 
 IMAGES IN PLANE MIRRORS, 1123-1124. 
 I'M FOLLERIN' MEDICINE, 659. 
 I MOURN FOR THE LAUGHTER, 232, 235- 
 
 236. 
 Influenza, the terrible epidemic of, 679-698, 
 
 700, 704-708. 
 "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath," 
 
 Coleridge's, 100. 
 IN THE HOUSES OF THE AFFLICTED, 
 
 698-700, 703-706. 
 Inveni College, my first experiences at, 387- 
 
 418. 
 Inveni College, 387-418, 571-574, 1109-1110. 
 
INDEX 
 
 INVENI REVISITED, 1109-1110. 
 
 IN WHOSE INTEREST? 1052-1053. 
 
 Irish, the alphabet of ancient, 210. 
 
 IRONICAL ADMISSIONS, 810. 
 
 I SEEN IT MYSELF, 540-543. 
 
 I SPEAK TO THE COMPANION, 755-758. 
 
 I "take the veil," 293, 627-630. 
 
 JACKIE RIAN, 490-493. 
 
 JACKIE RIAN, AGAIN, 735-738, 765-766. 
 
 JACKSONVILLE EPISODE, 556, 560-571. 
 
 Jacksonville, Illinois, 556, 560-571, 1110-1112. 
 
 JACKSONVILLE REVISITED, 1110-1112. 
 
 Janeway, Dr. T. C, 927. 
 
 Jansen, Hans and Zacharias, 169, 174, 394, 
 
 915, 916, 917. 
 John D. Thomson Academy, 8, 59, 65, 66, 71, 
 
 447, 1114. 
 JOHN MICHAEL HEWITT, 798-821, 823. 
 Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, 931. 
 JOHN THOMSON HODGEN, 143-150, 155- 
 
 161. 
 Jones, Dr. Thomas Wharton, 258, 261: 
 JOSEPH LISTER, 939-941. 
 Journal of the American Medical Association, 
 
 26, 27, 848, 1131. 
 JUMPING-OFF PLACE, THE, 255-268. 
 JUST LITTLE PICTURES, 236-240. 
 
 Kearney, Mrs. Ruth Ducey, 8. 
 
 Kelly, Mrs. Helen, 8, 63, 233. 
 
 Kerosene lamps, coming into use, 381. 
 
 Killing Monk, 291-292. 
 
 Kill-master, the great, 198-199, 201-202. 
 
 King, Dr. A. F. A., 465, 609, 612. 
 
 King, Dr. A. F. A., finds malaria is conveyed 
 by a species of mosquito, 465. 
 
 Kircher, Athanasius (his contribution to the 
 germ theory of disease production), 169, 
 174, 919, 920, 923, 924. 
 
 Kitchen-table surgery, 246. 
 
 Kittredge, George Lyman, 777. 
 
 Klebs, Edwin, 464. 
 
 Klemme Furniture Establishment, 96. 
 
 Knapp, Dr. Frank, 1118. 
 
 Knox, Dr. Robert, 258. 
 
 Koch, Dr. Robert, 174, 271, 393-394, 444, 465, 
 589, 916, 928, 929, 938, 942-943, 944, 946. 
 
 Kuppin, Rabbi Louis, 1023. 
 
 Lacey, Dr. Lincoln S., 1117. 
 
 Lantern, Lawyer, 808. 
 
 LAST DAYS AT INVENI, 571-574. 
 
 Laudable pus, 940. 
 
 LAUGHING DOCTOR, THE, 19-22. 
 
 Lavoisier, Antoine, 927. 
 
 LAW SCHOOL, THE, 852-853. 
 
 Lazear, Dr. Jesse W., 946. 
 
 League of Nations a mere imposture, 1013, 
 1015. 
 
 Leeuwenhoek, Anthony van, 170, 174, 394, 
 915, 916-919, 920, 923-924. 
 
 Lehman, Helen Margaret, 856. 
 
 Letter from my father on my 22d birthday, a 
 
 (illustration in the text), 761. 
 Letters still kept as evidence, my, 390. 
 Library, a country doctor's, 324-327. * . 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 9, 53-56, 59-66, 68-73, % ) 
 
 95, 96, 108, 155, 156, 207, 213, 236, 237, 
 
 273, 316, 458, 463, 472, 726-728, 823, 824, 
 
 1114, 1115, 1117. 
 Lincoln-Douglas-Hay-Nicolay stone, 1114. 
 Lincoln-Douglas House, Quincy, 1115- 
 Lincoln's eyes, 60-61. 
 Lister, Sir Joseph Jackson (his introduction of 
 
 antiseptic surgery), 160-161, 171, 172, 
 
 174, 179, 180, 182, 244, 246, 271, 307, 
 
 444, 566, 589, 916, 937, 938, 939, 943. 
 Lister's So-Called "Donkey Engine" (illustra- 
 tion in the text), 566. 
 LITTLE ANGEL OF THE DARK, THE, 346- 
 
 348. 
 Little white house, 272, 279, 382, 465, 552, 
 
 622, 1117. 
 Loan-and-Gift-Check Vote, The, 1143-1144. 
 Loffler, 464. 
 London Lancet, 940. 
 LOOKING NORTH, 971-973. 
 LOUIS PASTEUR, 938-939, 941, 943. 
 Lowe, James, 317. 
 LUCY WILLS, 718, 722. 
 LUMPED TOGETHER, 1102-1107. 
 Luster, Dr. George, 818, 863- 
 Lyceum Clinic, 1023, 1027. 
 LYCEUM CLINIC, THE, 1027. 
 MacRae, Dr. G. C, 1027. 
 Maine, blowing up of, 850. 
 Malpighi, Marcello, 919. 
 MALPRACTICE IN THE COUNTRY, 
 
 513-514, 517-519. 
 "Man Is War," Carter's, 1008. 
 MAN WITH THREE CHINS AND ONE 
 
 EYE, THE, 1067-1069. 
 Mare, the Halpin, 351-352, 485, 709. 
 MARION THEN, 880-881. 
 Mark Twain Hotel, Hannibal, 1115. 
 Martin, Charles R., 143. 
 Mar tine, George, 926. 
 MATHEMATICS AND MEDICINE, 925-932, 
 
 935. 
 May, Dr. Charles H., 604. 
 Mayos, The Doctors, 815, 1023, 1090. 
 McBurney, Dr. Charles, 308, 793-794, 1120, 
 
 1136. 
 McCarthy, Michael, 208-213, 215, 322-323, 
 
 466. 
 McCrudden, Mrs. Margaret (my mother's 
 
 sister), 787. 
 McDonald, Dr. A. L., 1027. 
 McDowell, Dr. Joseph Nash, 9, 76, 112, 134- 
 138, 143-150, 155-161, 258-261, 329, 568, 
 579, 1115. 
 McDowell, Ephraim, 931. 
 
 PAGE 1168 
 
INDEX 
 
 McDowell Medical College, The, 70, 73, 137, 
 157, 160. 
 
 McDowell, Plat of his burial lot, 147. 
 
 McDowell, resolutions on his death, 155. 
 
 McDowell's burial in Mammoth Cave, 145. 
 
 McDowell's burial of his daughters, 138, 143. 
 
 McDowell's death certificate, 146. 
 
 McDowell's last will and testament, 149. 
 
 McGowan, Rear Admiral Samuel, 1023. 
 
 McGuire, Uncle Ned, 762. 
 
 McKinley, President, 849. 
 
 McRaven, Dr. C. P., 1117. 
 
 MEDICAL COURSES, 604-605. 
 
 Medical Department of Columbia University, 
 604. 
 
 Medical Department of Northwestern Uni- 
 versity, 1093, 1103. 
 
 Medical Department of University of Vermont : 
 Old Pearl Street Building (illustration in 
 the text), 607. 
 
 "Medical Education in the United States and 
 Canada," 1092, 1103. 
 
 MEDICAL INSTRUCTION OF THE LAITY 
 IN THE LAY PRESS, 797-798. 
 
 Medical society, first in Pike County (1891), 
 449. 
 
 MEDICINE UNTIL THEN: AN AUTOPSY 
 (a review of the nature of disease produc- 
 tion from ancient times until the dis- 
 coveries of Pasteur), 181-185. 
 
 MEET ABRAHAM BUTZ, 472-476. 
 
 MEETING ON THE ROAD, 512-513. 
 
 Members, prominent, of the War-Check Vote, 
 Inc., 1023. 
 
 Merril, Miss Mattie, 764. 
 
 Merriman, Dr. L. L., 1027, 1118. 
 
 Microscope, invention of the, 169. 
 
 Microscope, the compound, 169, 916-919, 
 923-924. 
 
 Microscope, the simple, 170, 916-919, 923-924, 
 935-937. 
 
 Middle Ages, the, in medicine, 913. 
 
 Military sanctions are themselves war, 1016. 
 
 Miller, Mrs. Dora Bobbitt, 8. 
 
 Minnesota Medicine, 527. 
 
 Minot, Murphy & Cohn, Drs., discoverers of 
 the cure for pernicious anemia, 445, 1131, 
 1132. 
 
 Mockridge, Whitney, great tenor, 719. 
 
 "Modern Ophthalmology," Ball's, 965. 
 
 MODERN PERIOD, THE, 914-915. 
 
 "Monroe Doctrine: A Complete History, The," 
 Kohler's, 1153. 
 
 Montgomery, Dr. E. B., 8, 160, 516. 
 
 Montgomery, Dr. E. B., his opinion of John 
 T. Hodgen, 160. 
 
 Monthly Gazette (my amateur publication), 
 107, 123, 124, 125, 202, 238, 240, 241, 
 263, 696. 
 
 Moon as an incomparable fee, the, 451-452. 
 
 Moon, the beauty and companionship of, 688- 
 
 691. 
 Moore, Ernest (on old-time blacksmiths and 
 
 blacksmithing), 213-215. 
 MORE ABOUT BLACKSMITHS, 468-469. 
 MORE EATING IN THE COUNTRY, 476- 
 
 477. 
 MORE NECESSARY INFORMATION ON 
 
 THAT WAR, 997-1000, 1003-1011. 
 MORE OFFICE WORK, 454-458. 
 MORE PEOPLE OF THEN, 339-342. 
 MORE TROUBLE FROM THE G. P., 602- 
 
 604. 
 Morgagni, Batista, 924. 
 Morton, Dr. William Thomas Green, 930, 
 
 1023. 
 MOSTLY ABOUT FIGHTING, 202-205. 
 MOTHER, THE TACTICIAN, 345. 
 MOUNT OLYMPUS, 543-551. 
 MR. MARDI GRAS, 891-894. 
 MR. McGUIRE AND THE MOON, 1059- 
 
 1061. 
 MR. STETTENHAUSEN'S TRAGEDY— 
 
 AND OURS, 273-282. 
 Mudd, Dr. Harvey, 199. 
 Mudd, Dr. Henry Hodgen, 784, 787, 788, 789, 
 
 1114. 
 Mudd, H. T., 156. 
 Murphy, Dr. John B., 815, 1090. 
 Musin, Ovid, great Belgian violinist, 719. 
 MUTUAL HELPFULNESS AND COMRADE- 
 SHIP, 818-820. 
 MY BROTHER JON RIDES WITH ME, 749, 
 
 755. 
 MY FATHER, 956-963. 
 MY FATHER AGAIN PRACTICES, 745- 
 
 749. 
 My father and I and his diploma, 296. 
 My father and Rannigan's dog, 220. 
 My father as a sleeper, 425. 
 MY FATHER BUYS ME A HORSE, 661-664, 
 
 667. 
 "My Father Knew Lincoln," by T.H.S., The 
 
 Nation, Feb. 20, 1929, 60, 824. 
 My father, letter from, on beauty of literature 
 
 (illustration in the text), 958. 
 My father preaches funeral sermon, 536-538. 
 MY FATHER PREDICTS, 173-174, 179-181. 
 MY FATHER'S AFTER-THOUGHTS, 966- 
 
 968. 
 MY FATHER'S ASSISTANT, 78, 83-90. 
 MY FATHER'S CONTRAPTION AND 
 
 DOCTOR DUBLIN'S GREEN TIE, 
 
 520-526. 
 My father's last illness, 959. 
 My father's last letter to me (illustration in 
 
 the text), 961. 
 MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE! 670-672. 
 MY MOTHER, 552-556, 1024-1026. 
 My mother, a characteristic letter from (illus- 
 tration in the text), 616-618. 
 
INDEX 
 
 My mother as letter writer, 417. 
 
 My mother at the flour-chest, 236. 
 
 My mother collecting an overdue account 
 (illustration in the text), 649. 
 
 My mother's last letter about Father's ap- 
 proaching decease (illustration in the 
 text), 962. 
 
 My mother, the last page of her last letter 
 (illustration in the text) 1026. 
 
 MY TEACHERS AT HARVARD, 777-780. 
 
 MY UNCLE JON'S BARGAIN, 676-679. 
 
 Nancrede, Dr. Charles B. de, 852, 853. 
 
 Nation, The, 824. 
 
 NEAR TO TAKING THE VEIL, 282-288. 
 
 Neighbor Nurses, 424, 426. . 
 
 NEIGHBORS' TONGUES, 723-725. 
 
 Nelson, Dr. Robert L., 1118. 
 
 NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH, A 
 (the advent of the germ theory of disease 
 production), 162, 167-173. 
 
 NEW MEDICINE CHANGES THE WORLD, 
 THE, 948-950, 953-956. 
 
 New Salem Park, 53. 
 
 New Salem, various towns of that name in 
 Illinois, 53, 59, 60, 316. 
 
 New York Times Book Review, The, 781. 
 
 New York, University of the City of, 609. 
 
 NICKNAMES, 811-813- 
 
 Nicolay, John G., 8, 61-68, 71-73, 96, 163, 
 236, 237, 296, 321, 427, 437, 463, 603, 
 632, 722, 727, 762, 824, 1113, 1114, 1115, 
 1117. 
 
 Nicolay, John G., a letter from my father to 
 (illustration in the text), 603. 
 
 Nicolay, Miss Helen, 63, 72. 
 
 Niebur, Fred W., 8, 62, 109, 154, 194, 239, 
 240, 273, 376, 380-381, 452, 719, 762, 1116, 
 1157. 
 
 Niebur, Mrs. Fred W., 8. 
 
 Nighbert, Dr. J. D., veterinary, 732. 
 
 Nighbert, Dr. Maynard, veterinary, 732. 
 
 Night blindness, 1132, 1133. 
 
 Nightingale, Florence, 485. 
 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY PREPARERS OF 
 THE WAY, THE, 935-938. 
 
 NO, DOCTORS DO NOT TELL, 329-330. 
 
 NOSTALGIA MALIGNANS, 415-418. 
 
 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD, 706-707. 
 
 NUBBIN, 299-300, 303. 
 
 NURSES AND VISITORS, 714-715- 
 
 Nurses, neighbor, 424. 
 
 NURSES, SCHOOLTEACHERS AND PHIL- 
 ANTHROPISTS, 422-427. 
 
 Oak wood Cemetery, 450-451, 492, 1128. 
 
 Ochsner, Dr. Albert J., 960. 
 
 ODDS AND ENDS THAT SEVENTEENTH 
 SUMMER, 496, 499-500. 
 
 OFFICE PATIENTS, 1061-1065. 
 
 OrTut store, 54. 
 
 OFTTIMES THE APPAREL DOTH PRO- 
 CLAIM THE HORSE, 672-674. 
 
 Old Dick, the sorrel, 350. 
 
 Old-fashioned medicine shows, 381-383. 
 
 Old Flag, The, Pittsficld, Illinois, 428, 433, 434. 
 
 Old Lion, the dog, 290-291. 
 
 OLD MEDICINE— 400 B. C. to 1876 A. D., 
 
 THE, 910-943. 
 Old-Time Log House and Virginia Rail Fence 
 
 (illustration in the text), 658. 
 Old-Time Pill-Bags When in Use (illustration 
 
 in the text), 671. 
 Old-Time Pill-Bags When Not in Use (illus- 
 tration in the text), 670. 
 Oliver, Professor Thomas E., 1157. 
 Olson, Dr. Archibald, 1118. 
 ONCE MORE THE APPRENTICESHIP, 
 
 306-313. 
 ONE LIVED, 74-78. 
 ONLY DOCTOR WHO EVER SAW A 
 
 GHOST, THE, 1080-1082. 
 ON TO STETTENHAUSEN'S, 186, 191, 
 
 193-195. 
 ON WITH THE GALESBURG DOCTORS 
 
 CLUB, 828-829. 
 Opera House, The Pittsficld, 710, 712, 719. 
 OPERATIONS ON THE MASTOID, 743-745. 
 "Ophthalmology, the American Encyclopedia 
 
 of," 973-975. 
 Orr, Clifford E., "Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell 
 
 (M.D. Hobart, 1849)", 422. 
 Osgoode, President, 594. 
 OTHER PAINS THAN THOSE FROM 
 
 GERMS, 404-407. 
 OTHER WORLD'S WAR, THE, 976-996. 
 OTTO BERGMEISTER, 615-622. 
 "Outline History of Ophthalmology, An", 
 
 my, 35. 
 Outten, Dr. W. B., 144. 
 Paleobacteriology, 590. 
 Paleopathology, 590. 
 Palomino, The, 352, 355, 523. 
 Paracelsus, 914-915. 
 Pare, Ambroise, 916. 
 PARTING, 1156-1159. 
 Pasteur, Louis (services to medicine and the 
 
 world), 170, 171, 174, 271, 395, 444, 465, 
 
 589, 916, 928, 929, 938-939. 
 PATHOLOGICAL ANATOMY, 924-925. 
 Patton, Dr. Robert J. (author of "A Pioneer 
 
 Surgeon: David Prince"), 567. 
 PAUL BUNYAN, M.D., HOMO UNIUS 
 
 LIBRI, 328-329. 
 PAUL BUNYAN 'S SPECTACLES, 1057-1059. 
 Peace and War, my various books on, 1137. 
 Peace Palace at The Hague, 1016. 
 PEACE PLAN TESTED, THE, 848-852. 
 Peace postage stamps, 1022. 
 Peace work, my, 829-840, 848-852, 853, 855, 
 
 1137-1138, 1141. 
 PEACE WORK, THE, 1137-1138, 1141. 
 Peacock, Dr. S. B., 1117- 
 Pennsylvania Dutch (Amish) language, 477- 
 
 PAGE 1170 
 
INDEX 
 
 Percy, Dr. N. W., 960. 
 
 Peter Cooper, the tall white horse, 350-351. 
 
 Petty Hill, 1128. 
 
 Pharmacy, progress of, 949. 
 
 PHILANTHROPISTS, 427. 
 
 PHYSICIAN IN EMBRYO, A, 296-299. 
 
 PHYSICIAN OF SIXTY-ODD YEARS BACK 
 
 — Y. P., 48-49. 
 PICKING UP SLEEP, 425. 
 "Pike County Ballads," John Hay's, 469. 
 Pike County Banner, 733. 
 Pike County Democrat, 710, 734, 823. 
 Pike County Democrat-Times, 8. 
 Pike County Free Press, The, 64, 72. 
 Pike County Journal, The, 64. 
 Pike County Republican, 8, 63, 64, 192, 205, 215, 
 
 226, 632. 
 PILL-BAGS, 667-669. 
 "Pioneer Dialect of Southern Illinois, The," 
 
 Wm. O. Rice's, 873. 
 "Pioneer Surgeon: David Prince, A", Patton's, 
 
 567. 
 Pittsfield Hotel, 96. 
 Pittsfield laughers' strike, the, 711. 
 PITTSFIELD : ' 'ROUGH-AND-TUMBLE" 
 
 PRACTICE, 624, 627-648. 
 PLAN— HOW RECEIVED, THE, 837-840. 
 Plank in political platform is not amendment 
 
 to Constitution, 1003. 
 Pneumatists, 912. 
 Poliomyelitis, 1051. 
 POLISHED PHYSICIAN, THE, 28. 
 Politzer, Prof. Adam, 743. 
 POLYFORM, 443-444. 
 "POOR FOLKS HAS POOR WAYS," 1043- 
 
 1045. 
 "Poor Peter's Call to His Children," 902. 
 POST-MORTEM ON A C. AND U. PA- 
 TIENT, 1053-1056. 
 Power, Dr. John, 1118. 
 PRACTICE, THE, 1026-1027. 
 "Practising in Pike," my, 126, 848. 
 PRACTISING MEDICINE AGAIN, 1022- 
 
 1023. 
 Pratt, Harry E. (Exec. Sec, Abraham Lincoln 
 
 Association), 9. 
 Preachers as nurses, 733. 
 Prentice, Dr. Charles, F., 1129. 
 President Osgoode's first statement (illustra- 
 tion in the text), 577. 
 President Osgoode's supposedly final statement 
 
 (illustration in the text), 578. 
 PRICE OF BEING A BAR-FLY, THE, 708- 
 
 712. 
 Prince, Dr. Arthur Edward, 406, 565, 568, 570, 
 
 571. 
 Prince, Dr. David, 48, 562-571, 693. 
 Prince, Dr. David (descendants of), 568. 
 Prince, Dr. John A., 565, 568, 570. 
 Prince, Edward, 563. 
 Prince, Mrs. Arthur E., 560. 
 
 Prince, Mrs. David Chandler, 568. 
 
 Prince Sanitarium, 8, 48, 556, 560-571, 1111, 
 
 1113. 
 PRINCE SANITARIUM, THE, 562-565. 
 Prince, The Doctors, 556. 
 PROCRUSTEANS, THE, 402-404. 
 PROFESSIONAL NURSES, 426. 
 PROFESSIONS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT, 
 
 732-735. 
 Professors at Vienna, my, 614. 
 PROFITEERING, 1011-1013. 
 Profiteering in war-time, 832. 
 PROGRESS IN BACKVIEW, 909-910. 
 Propaganda, lying, in war-time, 832. 
 "Propaganda Technique, in the World War," 
 
 Las well's, 981. 
 Psychopompous, Doctor, 1040, 1094-1102. 
 Purkitt, George L., 233. 
 Purkitt, Mrs. George L., 63, 163, 233, 236, 
 
 237, 296-297, 427, 437. 
 Pusey, Dr. William Allen, 161, 199. 
 QUACK DOCTORS AND QUACK DEN- 
 TISTS. POLYFORM, 437. 
 Quinby, Harvey, my father's apprentice, 318. 
 Quinine, the sprinkled bay, 351- 
 READIN", WRITIN" AND STEALIN', 657- 
 
 659. 
 REALIZATION OF DEATH, 221-226. 
 Reaumer, 926. 
 
 RECENT MEDICAL ADVANCES, 1128-1129. 
 RECOVERY, THE, 1136-1137. 
 Redi, Francesco, 920. 
 Reed, Major Walter, 946, 1023. 
 REFERENDUM OF MR. LUDLOW, THE, 
 
 1147-1148. 
 REFERENDUM OF SENATOR CAPPER, 
 
 THE, 1154-1155- 
 REFERENDUM OF SENATOR CLARK, 
 
 THE, 1153-1154. 
 REFERENDUM OF SENATOR 
 
 LaFOLLETTE, THE, 1148, 1153. 
 RELEVANT IRRELEVANCY, A, 185-186. 
 RELIGION OF A COUNTRY DOCTOR, 
 
 THE, 268-273. 
 RELIGIO PLANI, 407-415. 
 REMBRANDTS, 682, 685-687. 
 Resurrecting, 255, 256. 
 Rian, Jackie, 490-493, 618, 765-766. 
 RIDER'S BONES, 1051-1052. 
 ROBERT KOCH, 942-943, 944, 946. 
 Robinson, Dr. John M., 1118. 
 Robinson, Dr. Victor, medical historian, 245, 
 
 393, 957. 
 Robinson, George and Herman, 381. 
 Rockefeller Institute, 1092, 1103. 
 Roentgen, William Conrad (discoverer of the 
 
 X-rays), 35. 
 ROMAN MEDICINE, 911-914. 
 Roosevelt, President Theodore, 1153. 
 Rosenow, Dr. E. C, 896, 996, 1130, 1136. 
 Rubber gloves in surgery, history of, 957. 
 
 PAGE 1171 
 
INDEX 
 
 Rush Medical College, 1093, 1103. 
 
 Rutledge, Ann, 54, 60. 
 
 "Sack "Em Up Men, The," Ball's, 966. 
 
 Sacking-'em-up, 255-257, 966. 
 
 Saddle-bags, 667. 
 
 Salem, 53- 
 
 Sallee, Broussaix, 854-855, 877, 1023. 
 
 SALLY, 854-855. 
 
 Sanctorius, 926. 
 
 Sandburg, Carl (Lincoln biographer), 55, 56, 
 
 61. 
 Sanitarium, The Prince, 8, 48, 556, 560-571, 
 
 1111, 1113. 
 Santa and Mrs. Santa, 692-693- 
 Sarazin, Dr. F. C, 21, 22. 
 SCENE OBSCURE, THE, 90, 95-102, 107. 
 Schaudin, Dr. Fritz, 947. 
 Scherer, Dr. C. E., 1027. 
 Schluetter, Dr. Robert E., 9. 
 Schmedtgen, William H., 85, 297, 508, 649, 
 
 658, 668, 669, 670, 671. 
 School-buildings, old-time, 446-447. _ 
 School-children, old-time, their hardships, 
 
 446. 
 School discipline, old-time, 448-449. 
 Schoolhouse, Toll Gate, 99- 
 SCHOOLTEACHERS, 426-427. 
 Schoolteachers as nurses, 733. 
 Schroeder, Dr. C. H., 1027. 
 Schwartz, Dr. A. H., 1027. 
 SCIENTIFIC COLLECTING, 801-802. 
 Scobey, Edward H., 9, 891. 
 SCUTTLED, 229-230. 
 Sears, Dr. Frederic W., 610. 
 SECOND JUNGLE IN A SECOND ST. 
 
 LUKE'S, A, 1125-1127. 
 SECOND JUNGLE, THE, 1113-1114, 1117- 
 
 1121. 
 Secret names for medicines, 501-506. 
 SEEING PATIENTS HOME, 535-538. 
 SENTENCES OF DEATH AND, WORSE, 
 
 OF BLINDNESS, 903-906. 
 SERENADE IN PRAISE OF DEATH, 313- 
 
 315. 
 Servetus, Michael, 916, 919. 
 SEVENTY YEARS WITHOUT ATTENTION, 
 
 800. 
 SHADOWS OF HOUSES, 1112-1113. 
 Shastid, Dr. Thomas Wesley (my father), 53, 
 
 60, 213. 
 Shastid, Dr. T. W. (as philologist), 205- 
 Shastid, Dr. T. W. (cartoon), 192. 
 Shastid, Dr. T. W. (fight with Mocksinger), 
 
 206. 
 Shastid, Dr. William (my half-brother), 9, 54, 
 
 73, 74, 113, 199, 217, 273, 275, 309, 318, 
 
 324, 379, 383, 387, 418, 449, 452, 473, 
 
 507, 516, 571, 632, 691, 745, 759, 761, 
 
 762, 783, 788, 789, 822, 960. 
 Shastid, John Greene (my grandfather), 9, 54, 
 
 55, 60, 62, 63, 90, 101, 107, 316, 762. 
 
 Shastid, Jon B. (my nephew), 9, 1024. 
 Shastid, Jon (my uncle), 68, 462, 463, 642, 
 
 646, 676-679, 736-737, 765, 766. 
 Shastid, Jon (my uncle) does the impossible, 
 
 642, 646. 
 Shastid, Jon S. (my brother), 9, 73, 74, 86, 
 
 201, 218, 236, 238, 239, 273, 288-289, 297, 
 
 313, 314, 340, 341, 369, 407, 418, 452, 
 
 629, 705, 719, 745, 749, 755, 757, 758, 
 
 762, 765, 1124, 1158. 
 Shastid, Joseph C. (my brother), 9, 73, 156, 
 
 416-417, 418, 629, 664, 749, 758, 1113, 
 
 1116. 
 Shastid, Louisa Minerva Hall (second wife of 
 
 Thomas Wesley Shastid), 73, 89. 
 Shastid, Mary F. Edwards (first wife of 
 
 Thomas Wesley Shastid), 73. 
 Shastid, Mrs. Clara (widow of my half- 
 brother), 9, 54, 1113. 
 Shastid, Mrs. Fannie English, 8. 
 SHASTID'S UMBRELLA, 874-880. 
 Shastid, William (my father's brother), 463. 
 Shastid, Willson, 1113. 
 Sheep-droppin' tea, 499. 
 SHOW-DOWN, THE, 574-578, 583-586. 
 Shriver, Frank, 719. 
 Shubert, Mrs. H. C, 8, 65- 
 Shubert, Rev. Thomson K., 8. 
 Sickness in the old-days, great amount of, 
 
 493-495. 
 Sigerist, Dr. Henry E., medical historian, 957- 
 Silence and Light, 195-196. 
 "Simon of Cyrene," my, 1021. 
 Simpkins, Eli, 317. 
 Singer, Dr. Charles, medical historian, 566, 
 
 957. 
 SITUATION, THE, 777. 
 SKELETONS AT THE FEAST, 478, 481-485. 
 SLEEPING IN THE FARMHOUSES, 730-732. 
 Smith, Dr. C. M., 1027, 1059. 
 Smith, Dr. R. C, 1022-1023, 1027, 1118, 1125. 
 Smith, Tom, 1157. 
 Smoot, Rev. L. L., 891. 
 SOLACE, 780-781. 
 Solidists, 912. 
 
 Spanish-American War, The, 849. 
 Springs, Dr. A. W., 894. 
 Springs, Dr. Birdie McLain, 894. 
 Stacy, Mrs., buys a horse, 677. 
 Star Hotel, 96. 
 Starvation Hollow, 543. 
 St. Clair, Dr. G. G., 1027. 
 Stettenhausen, John, 101, 114, 119, 120, 132, 
 
 276, 278-283, 284, 323. 
 Stettenhausen, John, death of, 282. 
 STETTENHAUSENS AND THE FIGHTING 
 
 HEART, THE, 107-114, 119-122, 132. 
 Stettenhausens, the, 107-114, 119-122, 132, 
 
 186, 241, 243, 244, 246, 247-250, 253-254, 
 
 273-282, 298, 306, 317, 318, 481. 
 Stevens, Dr. George T., 845, 1129. 
 
 PAGE 1172 
 
INDEX 
 
 STILL ANOTHER HAND-OUT— VIENNA, 
 
 613-624. 
 STILL GREATER THAN THOU, 783-784. 
 STILL IN THE OFFICE, 342-343. 
 STILL TOWARD THE MILOS, 469-471. 
 St. Louis Globe Democrat, 72. 
 Stocker, Miss Clara, Duluth, Minn., 563, 568, 
 
 580. 
 Stowe, Mrs. Harriet Beecher, 569. 
 STRANGEST SURGEON THAT EVER 
 
 LIVED, 134-138. 
 Strauss, William, 8. 
 Strong medicines, people wanted in those 
 
 days, 496-499. 
 Stryker, Mrs. Frederick E., letter from, 374. 
 Sturgis and Isaacs, Drs., 1132. 
 Stycket, Mrs. A., 1157. 
 SUMMARY OF THOSE REFERENDUM 
 
 RESOLUTIONS, 1155-1156. 
 Sundance Valley, 232, 235, 359, 360. 
 Sundown colleges, 1104. 
 Swan, C. I., 733, 734. 
 Swan, Harry Burr, 632. 
 Swan, Mrs. C. I., and her little brood, 632. 
 Swan, Mrs. Dot Dorsey, 8. 
 Sweet-Ninny (the song-bird), 555- 
 Sydenham, Thomas, 920. 
 SYSTEMATISTS, THE, 922-923. 
 "System of Ophthalmic Operations," Wood's, 
 
 975. 
 Taking the veil, near to, 282. 
 TALES OUT OF TIME, 299. 
 Tallow candles, passing out of use, 381. 
 Tanner, President E. A., Illinois College, 594. 
 Teacher and pupils playing hide-and-go-seek, 
 
 449. 
 THAT "LITTLE" BILL, 803-804. 
 THINGS ARE EVER DYING, 551-552. 
 "This Land of Liberty," Bates's, 998. 
 Thomas, Dr. John A., my father's partner 
 
 while at Pleasant Hill, 547. 
 Thompson, Jesse M., 8, 64, 72, 727, 1115- 
 Thomson, Ann Ledlie, 8, 65, 66. 
 Thomson, John D., 8, 65, 66, 71. 
 THOSE WHO CHALLENGE MINE 
 
 ACCURACY, 1086-1089. 
 THROUGH THE OFFICE WINDOW, 348. 
 Tilderquist, Dr. David, 1118. 
 Time, 487. 
 Tinware peddlers, as doctors and dentists, 
 
 440-443. 
 TOLD UNDER MORPHINE, 712-714. 
 Toll Gate, 347. 
 
 TONGUE-TIED NURSES, 726. 
 TOO MUCH, TOO LITTLE, OR DEFEC- 
 TIVE HORMONES, 1130-1132. 
 Towles, Dr. William B., 609. 
 TRAMPING, 600-601. 
 TRAMPING LITERAL AND MORE 
 
 OFFICE WORK, 452-454. 
 
 "Tramping to Failure," my, 10, 11, 22, 35, 37, 
 47, 89, 109, 388, 389, 415, 572, 574, 578, 
 
 693, 765, 777, 779, 781, 840, 849, 853, 
 857, 859, 860, 874, 879, 880, 881, 975, 
 1108, 1109, 1137, 1144. 
 Tramping to failure, my father's warning 
 
 against, 388-389. 
 TRAMPS AND MEDICINE, 349. 
 TRAMP'S REST AGAIN, 1127-1128. 
 TRAMP TURNS INTO HISTORIO- 
 
 PHILOSOPHER, THE, 493-496. 
 Treaties, governments do not keep when want- 
 ing war, 1013. 
 Trinity, My Human, 756. 
 TUMBLE-BUG, THE, 750-752. 
 Turnbull, Dr. Fred, 1018, 1027. 
 Turner, Frank, 719. 
 "TURNS" IN THE WAITING-ROOM, 
 
 1065-1067. 
 TWO HIBERNIAN DOCTORS, 814-815. 
 Typical drug-store advertisement in the 1870's 
 
 (illustration in the text), 434. 
 Typical Old-Time Farmer's Private Burying 
 
 Ground, A (illustration in the text), 689. 
 UMBILICUS AGAIN, THE, 418-422. 
 Umbrellas, family, 378-380. 
 UNCONVENTIONAL MEDICINE, 631-632. 
 "UNDERPRIVILEGED," THE, 433, 435-437. 
 UNGRATEFUL MOTHER, THE, 538-540. 
 University, Columbia, 604. 
 University, Johns Hopkins, 1092, 1103. 
 University, Northwestern, 1093, 1103. 
 University of Michigan, 852-857. 
 University of the City of New York, 609, 612. 
 University of Vermont, 605-613. 
 University of Vienna, 613-624, 743. 
 University of Wisconsin, 357. 
 Urdang, Professor, University of Wisconsin, 
 
 357. 
 Utt, Mrs. Sarah Bates, 8, 722. 
 VACATION AND RETURN, 601. 
 VACILLATING SIGHT, 1042-1043. 
 Varro (his contribution to the germ theory of 
 
 disease production), 169- 
 Vermont, University of, Medical Department, 
 
 605-613. 
 Vesalius, Andreas, 916. 
 Veterinary Medicine, 949. 
 "Veterinary Military History," Merrillat & 
 
 Campbell's, 949. 
 Vienna, University of, 613-624, 743. 
 Virus-diseases, 967. 
 VISITORS, 718. 
 VITAMINS, 1132-1136. 
 WAITING IN BARNS, 488-490. 
 WAR-CHECK VOTE, INC., THE, 1023-1024. 
 War-Check Vote, The, 36, 829, 834-840, 846, 
 
 863, 976, 988, 993, 996, 999, 1000, 1005, 
 
 1008, 1012, 1013, 1014, 1015, 1018, 1023, 
 
 1024, 1064, 1138, 1141-1143, 1144, 1145, 
 
 1146, 1147, 1148, 1155-1156. 
 
 PAGE 1173 
 
INDEX 
 
 WAR IN THE STICKS, THE, 641-647. 
 "War Myth in U. S. History," Hamlin's, 849, 
 
 850, 851. 
 Warren, Dr. John Collins, 930. 
 Wasserman, Dr. August von, 947. 
 WAYS OF THE INDIGENT— AGAIN, THE, 
 
 1048-1050. 
 Weigert, Carl, 271, 444, 589, 916, 923, 928, 
 
 929, 938, 942. 
 Weir's Antiseptic Spray, 567. 
 Welch, Dr. William H., 1092, 1103. 
 Wells, Dr. F. N., 1116. 
 Wells, Dr. Horace, 930. 
 Welsh, Attorney Charles F., 1157. 
 Wendell, Prof. Barrett, 22, 748-749, 779-780, 
 
 811. 
 "WHAT CAN COME OF A KISS?" 820-821. 
 WHAT LITTLE THINGS CAN 
 
 DEDOCTORIZE, 378-380. 
 WHAT TO BE SQUEAMISH ABOUT- 
 THEN, 633-636. 
 Wheeler, Benjamin (my second cousin), 9. 
 Wheeler, Dr. John B., 614. 
 Whig Free Press, The, 63, 64, 236. 
 White, Rev. W. F., 410-414. 
 "Who Started the World War?" Barnes's, 982. 
 WIDOW'S TEARS, A, 804-808. 
 Wight, Dr. JarvisS., 948. 
 Wike, Attorney Scott, Assistant Secretary of 
 
 the Treasury, 516. 
 WILHELM II, 620-622. 
 Williams, Harvey (my father's cousin), 463. 
 Wills, Mrs. Lucy, 427, 433, 435-437, 1117. 
 
 Wills, Vine, 739. 
 
 Willson, Dr. J. F., 54, 55, 59. 
 
 Witthaus, Dr. Rudolph A., 609, 611, 612. 
 
 WOMAN DOCTOR WITH A TRAGI-COMIC 
 
 COMPLEX, THE, 27, 28. 
 Women doctors, 420-424. 
 Wood, Dr. Casey A., 9, 973, 974, 975. 
 Woodford, General, Ambassador to Spain, 850. 
 Woodlot, Old Mr., 357-358, 361-362, 373-374. 
 WORD FROM VERMONT, A, 605-606. 
 World Court, The, a failure, 1016. 
 World War I, 831. 
 
 World War I, numerous lies in, 976-996. 
 World War II, 831, 1155. 
 Worth, Dr. Claud, 1129. 
 Worthington, Dr. Thomas, 76, 157, 327,441, 
 
 442. 
 Worthington, Monroe, 63- 
 Wright, Dr. J. Williston, 609. 
 Wright, Sir Almoth, 946. 
 X-Ray, 35, 36, 802, 827, 847. 
 Yellow Fever germ walks along the ground, 
 
 Thomas Edison's, 444. 
 YET ANOTHER HAND-OUT— VERMONT, 
 
 606-613. 
 Y. OF P. AT CHIGGER CITY, THE, 861-874. 
 Y. of P's and Atypical M.D's, 1075-1107. 
 Y. OF P. TURNS CONJURE MAN, A, 
 
 1078-1079. 
 Y. OF P. TURNS FOOL REFORMER, A, 
 
 1075-1078. 
 YOU NEVER CAN GO HOME, 1108-1109. 
 
 PAGE 1174