"No, Dr. Bliss didn't come; he saved my life!"
The mystery about medicines and the obscurity of professional terms throw a romance about the doctor.
One day I fell out of a third story window onto a picket fence. When I asked Dr. Hammond if I would die, or recover, he looked at my tongue and said he "thought I would."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because," said he, "on general principles, Mr. Perkins, whenever a patient's esophagus becomes hyperemic through the inordinate use of spiritus vini rectificati, causing hepatic cirrhosis, the reverse holds true; in other cases it does not."
Then he put some water in two tumblers, and said:
"Idiosyncrasy, Mr. Perkins, is not superinduced by the patient's membranous outer cuti-cle becoming homogeneous with his transmag-nifibandanduality."
Sez I, "Doctor, I think so, too."
My doctor, Dr. Hammond, is a great doctor. He can cure anything. He can cure cholera or smallpox, or hams or bacon.
One day I cut my toe off with an ax. When I called in Dr. Hammond to prescribe for me, he said he thought I had tic doloro, and then he prescribed bleeding, and bled me out of seventeen dollars. That was the dolor; and when he wanted his pay, I told him to charge it, and that was the tic; and I still owe it to him, and that is the "o."
