“You don’t need to do that,” replied the doctor, laughing pleasantly. “When I have an appointment with a young man who wants an examination for football, and I find a stalwart youth in my inner room so absorbed in studying old football pictures that he doesn’t hear me come in, it isn’t difficult to guess who he is. But now for business. What is it that you wish me to do?”
Wolcott explained his situation. He wanted Dr. Brayton to look him over and see what condition he was in, and then he hoped—he really had no hope—that the report to his father might in some way permit him to slip back into the game.
“If you have any idea that I’m going to say that football is not a dangerous game, you are mistaken,” said the doctor, gravely, poising his stethoscope in his hand. “It is a dangerous game; but while for some the danger is considerable, for others it is insignificant—not greater than in any sport where physical strength and endurance are severely tested. In my judgment football doesn’t compare in risk with bicycle riding or automobiling, or sailing or swimming. Given the right man in the right conditions, and the danger is trifling. The only question is whether you are the right man, and whether you play under the right conditions.”
For some minutes the thumping and sounding went on. When at last the stethoscope went back into the drawer, Wolcott asked eagerly, “Am I the right man?”
But Dr. Brayton, instead of answering, started a series of questions as to how long he had played, what injuries he had received, whether he had gained or lost in weight during the season, how he felt at the present time, whether listless and tired, or elastic and eager for the game; whether the coach and trainer were capable and trustworthy men, what kind of a game was played at Seaton, and between Seaton and Hillbury; and a dozen similar questions. The last question touched on the accidents of the season.
“There have been hardly any at Seaton this year,” said Wolcott. “A few have been out for a while with bad ankles or Charley Horse, and one fellow had a football ear. Why, the manager told me this morning that the doctor’s bill for the care of the first and second elevens—thirty-five men—for seven weeks was only nineteen dollars.”[[3]]
[3]. The bill for medical and surgical attendance on the school football squad (thirty-five men) at Exeter in the season of 1904, reckoned at full rates, was twenty-two dollars. The injuries were mainly muscle bruises and strained ankles. The most troublesome case was a neglected scratch on the foot. The trainer reports for the same season, among the one hundred and twenty-five fellows playing football on the various school and class teams, “practically no injuries at all.” The record for the year 1903 was much the same. In a private school in Boston, where seventy-five to one hundred boys, from ten to eighteen years old, were engaged during the fall of 1904 in playing football, the only accident of the season was a broken nose, suffered by a boy who did not wear a nose guard. At Harvard, after a peculiarly unfortunate season, in which, it is feared, men were sometimes played when not in the pink of condition, those best acquainted with the facts could still report in January, 1905, “We had no injuries that could be called serious.” From New Haven a most trustworthy authority writes: “We have been fortunate here for many years in having no serious accidents. The most incapacitating accidents this season have been muscle bruises, generally called ‘Charley Horse,’ which, while in no sense permanent and, as the surgeons would put it, with a distinctly favorable prognosis, cripple a man’s speed so much as to make it almost impossible to use him if he is a player in the backfield. For this reason Yale’s backs in the Harvard game were different from those who faced Princeton a week before. Yet though these two hard contests came close together, no Yale man left the field in the Harvard game, and no time was taken out on Yale’s account.”
It is safe to say that no harder football is played in the country than at Exeter and Yale; yet the reports from these centres of the game bear little resemblance to the lurid tales of murder and mutilation which newspaper correspondents delight in. The worst injuries from football known to the writer have occurred in games played by workingmen out for a holiday, or by untaught, unfit lads trying what they imagined to be football.