Page:Masterpieces of American Humor (Little Blue Book 959).djvu/9

Rh "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."