"Now look here," said she, in an irritated way, "I have about lost all patience with you, and unless you do as I tell you hereafter I shall have the orderly punish you again."
"But," said I, in amazement, "you have not mentioned yet what you would have me do."
"I have told you fully a hundred times to put this thermometer under your tongue and keep it there," replied she, exhibiting considerable temper, as she viciously jammed it once more into my mouth and twisted it under my tongue. "You are about the biggest chump that ever came into this hospital," continued she, grasping my wrist as though she intended breaking it and simultaneously taking my pulse and temperature.
A few moments later she jerked the thermometer from my mouth, glanced at it hurriedly and then entered a record upon a chart suspended from the head of my bed. Then calling one of the male attendants, she instructed him to fill the tub preparatory to giving me an ice bath. This attendant went to the corner of the room from whence he secured a bath tub on wheels, which he pushed over to the side of my bed. The tub was already partly filled with water, and I afterward learned that owing to the laziness and filthiness of the attendants, the same water was often used over and over again for the different typhoid patients. I observed that this attendant, who was otherwise called an orderly, was about as ignorant and degraded a specimen of humanity as a much boasted civilization could possibly breed.
He was about six feet tall, round-shouldered, knock-kneed, and weighed about two hundred pounds of flabby flesh, mostly covered by filthy garments. His head was pyramidal in shape, and covered by a mass of unkempt red hair. He had practically no forehead. His eyes were dull and bloodshot. His nose was flat and bent to one side, and his whole face was covered with pimples. His mouth was wide and beastly, and filled with tobacco. His mustache was irregular, and dyed almost to the roots by tobacco juice. His breath was odoriferous with fumes of whiskey, cigarettes, and foul stomach disorders, causing a poisonous stench to pollute the surrounding atmosphere. One could not look upon him without a feeling of sickening disgust. He was a twentieth century American civilized Christian. He was not, of course, the highest type of a civilized Christian, but nevertheless he was of a high enough order for a Christian community to breed, rear, and put in charge of its sick and unfortunate members. As he pushed the tub along he carelessly allowed it to strike the end of my bed, which gave me a shock as though I had been pierced by a thousand daggers, causing an involuntary groan to escape from my lips.
"Shut up there, you old duffer," said he, looking at me in a stupid, expressionless sort of a way, "you are not hurt yet. I'll give you something to cry about if you don't quit making such a fuss over nothing. You're the biggest baby I ever saw."
Having fixed the tub in position, put some pieces of ice into the water, and adjusted a small portable partition around my bed, which obstructed the view of the other patients, he called for the assistance of another attendant, and began preparations to put me into the tub. As they uncovered me, I glanced down at my emaciated form and was astounded at my own appearance. Nothing now remained of the once muscular and powerful frame I had always felt so proud of, but sickly looking skin and bones. Raising my arm to the level of my eyes I discovered that it was shriveled, and ghastly to behold, and it fell back to my side with a sickening thud for the want of strength to remain erect. It seemed as if a great fiery furnace was located within me and that I was fairly burning alive. Ten thousand different pains were shooting back and forth in every part of my body, but the most excruciating of all was a terrible pain in the center of my back, which caused me to think that my spinal column had been dislocated. And then as if all of the tortures of a refined civilization had suddenly been thrust upon me, as though some supernatural hellish agency was instrumental in causing me to go the full limit of human suffering, those two devilish orderlies took hold of me, one by the head and the other by the feet, and without any leverage whatever to break the strain upon my backbone, they raised and then dumped me into the tub of ice-water below. I had always considered myself invulnerable to bodily pain, and from early youth had schooled myself against outward manifestation of suffering, no matter what the circumstances might be, but on this occasion the power of resistance deserted me entirely and I gave vent to a howl, of rage like the bellowing of a maddened bull, and partly arising, endeavored to clutch the throat of the unfeeling beast at my head, but too weak to accomplish my purpose I fell back into the tub exhausted. At the same time the orderly took hold of my own throat and almost strangling me, beat my head against the tub several times cursing me under his breath in the vilest of language at the same time.
"Look out you don't kill him," cautioned the other orderly at the foot of the tub, "or we might have to go through another of those damned investigations."
Just then the doctor and nurse came within the inclosure, and inquired as to the cause of the commotion.
"This damned idiot has broken loose again, and I am teaching him how to behave himself," replied the orderly.