CHAPTER XXVI.
THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF DR. PERKINS.
It might be hardly fair to say that Doctor Perkins, a former resident of the village, was a quack; he may be described in milder phrase as an irregular practitioner. He belonged to none of the accepted schools, but treated his patients in accordance with certain theories of his own. The doctor had a habit of relating remarkable stories of his own achievements, and the most wonderful of these was his account of an attempt that he once made to cure a man named Simpson of consumption by the process of transfusion of blood. The doctor, according to his own story, determined to inject healthy blood into Simpson's veins.
As no human being was willing to shed his blood for Simpson, the doctor bled Simpson's goat; and opening a vein in Simpson's arm, he injected about two quarts of the blood into the patient's system. Simpson immediately began to revive, but, singular to relate, no sooner had his strength returned than he jumped out of bed; and twitching his head about after the fashion of a goat, he made a savage attempt to butt the doctor. That medical gentleman, after having Simpson's head plunged against his stomach three or four times, took refuge in the closet; whereupon Simpson banged his head against the panel of the door a couple of times, and would probably have broken it to splinters had not his mother-in-law entered at that moment and diverted his attention. One well-directed blow from Simpson floored her, and then, while she screamed for help, Simpson frolicked around over the floor, making assiduous efforts to nibble the green flowers in the ingrain carpet. When they called the hired man in and tied him down on the bed, an effort was made to interview him, but the only answer he could give to such questions as how he felt and when he wanted his medicine was a "ba-a" precisely like that of a goat, and then he would strain himself in an effort to butt a hole in the headboard. The condition of the patient was so alarming, and Mrs. Simpson was so indignant, that Dr. Perkins determined to undo the evil if possible. So he first bled Simpson freely, and then, by heavily bribing Simpson's Irishman, he procured fresh blood from him, and injected Simpson the second time. Simpson recovered, but he shocked his old Republican friends by displaying an irresistible tendency to vote the Democratic ticket, and made his mother-in-law mad by speaking with a strong brogue. He gradually gave up butting, and never indulged in it in a serious manner but once, and that was on a certain Sunday, when, one of the remaining corpuscles of goat's blood getting into his brain just as he was going into church, he butted the sexton halfway up the aisle, and only recovered himself sufficiently to apologize just as the enraged official was about to floor him with a hymn-book.
[Illustration: SIMPSON'S CASE]
But the doctor did not succeed with private practice in Millburg, and so one day he made up his mind to try to get out of poverty by inventing a patent medicine. After some reflection he concluded that the two most frequent and most unpopular forms of infirmity were baldness of head and torpidity of the liver, and he selected compounds recommended by the pharmacopoeia as the remedies which he would sell to the public. One he called "Perkins' Hair Vigor," and the other "Perkins' Liver Regulator." Procuring a large number of fancy bottles and gaudy labels, he bottled the medicines and advertised them extensively, with certificates of imaginary cures, which were written out for him by a friend whose liver was active and whose hair was abundant.
It is not at all unlikely that Perkins would have achieved success with his enterprise but for one unfortunate circumstance: he was totally unfamiliar with the preparations, excepting in so far as the pharmacopoeia instructed him; and as ill-luck would have it, in putting them up he got the labels of the liver regulator on the hair vigor bottles, and the labels of the latter on the bottles containing the former. Of course the results were appalling; and as Doctor Perkins had requested the afflicted to inform him of the benefits derived from applying the remedies, he had not sold more than a few hundred bottles before he began to hear from the purchasers.
One day, as he was coming out of his office, he observed a man sitting on the fire-plug with a shotgun in his hand and thunder upon his brow. The man was bare-headed, and his scalp was covered with a shiny substance of some kind. When he saw Perkins, he emptied one load of bird-shot into the inventor's legs, and he was about to give him the contents of the other barrel, when Perkins hobbled into the office and shut the door. The man pursued him and tried to break in the door with the butt of the gun. He failed, and Perkins asked him what he meant by such murderous conduct.
"You come out here, and I'll show you what I mean, you scoundrel!" said the man. "You step out here for a minute, and I'll blow the head off of you for selling me hair vigor that has gummed my head up so that I can't wear a hat and can't sleep without sticking to the pillow-case. Turned my scalp all green and pink, too. You put your head out of that door, and I'll give you more vigor than you want, you idiot! I expect that stuff'll soak in and kill me."
Then the man took his seat again on the fire-plug, and after reloading the barrel of his gun put on a fresh cap and waited. Perkins remained inside and sent a boy out the back way for the mail. The first letter he opened was from a woman, who wrote:
"My husband took one dose of your liver regulator and immediately went into spasms. He has had fits every hour for four days. As soon as he dies I am coming on to kill the fiend who poisoned him."
A clergyman in Delaware wrote to ask what were the ingredients of the liver regulator. He feared something was wrong, because his aunt had taken the medicine only twice, when she began to roll over on the floor and howl in the most alarming manner, and she had been in a comatose condition for fifteen hours.
A man named Johnson dropped a line to say that after applying the hair vigor to his scalp he had leaned his head against the back of a chair, and it had now been in that position two days. He feared he would never be released unless he cut up the chair and wore the piece permanently on his head. He was coming to see Perkins in reference to the matter when he got loose, and he was going to bring his dog with him.
A Mr. Wilson said that his boy had put some of the vigor on his face in order to induce the growth of a moustache, and that at the present moment the boy's upper lip was glued fast to the tip of his nose and his countenance looked as if it had been coated with green varnish.
There were about forty other letters, giving the details of sundry other cases of awful suffering and breathing threatenings and slaughter against Mr. Perkins. Just as Mr. Perkins was finishing these epistles a friend of his came rushing in through the back door breathless, and exclaimed,
"By George, Aleck, you better get over the fence and leave town as quick as you can. There's thunder to pay about those patent medicines of yours. Old Mrs. Gridley's just gone up on that liver regulator, after being in convulsions for a week. Thompson's hired girl is lying at the last gasp, four of the Browns have got the awfulest-looking heads you ever saw from the hair vigor, and about a dozen other people are up at the sheriff's office taking out warrants for your arrest. The people are talking of mobbing you, and the crowd out here on the pavement are cheering a green-headed man with a gun who says he's going to bang the head off of you. Now, you take my advice and skip. It'll be sudden death to stay here. Leave! that's your only chance."
Then Doctor Perkins got over the fence and ran for the early train, and an hour later the mob gutted his office and smashed the entire stock of remedies. Perkins is in Canada now, working in a saw-mill. He is convinced that there is no money for him in the business of relieving human suffering.