3. An eight months old infant was brought in, blind in the right eye. This condition might have been obviated had boric acid been applied at the time of the baby’s birth. The mother said that only a little warm water had been used.
So many, though they may not say so, appear to believe with Mary when she said to Jesus, “Lord, if thou hadst been here my brother had not died.” They think the Doctor has something like supernatural powers.
With the utmost care he prepared to administer novocaine and treat the wound of a man who had run a splinter into his left hand between the first and second fingers, leaving an unhealed sinus. “Wonderful stuff, this novocaine!” he remarked, as he put on a pair of rubber gloves, washed them in alcohol, and then gave his knives a bath in a soup-plate of alcohol.
“In the inflamed parts none of these local anaesthetics work very well,” was his next comment.
But the patient scarcely felt it when he ran a probe through the hand till it all but protruded through the skin on the inner side.
The bad blood was spooned out, and then the deep cavity swallowed about six inches of iodoform gauze. When the wound had been carefully packed the hand was bandaged. For nearly an hour’s work requiring the exercise of rare skill and the utmost caution the charge was—a dollar. And that included a pair of canvas gloves and another pair of rubber mitts, of the Doctor’s own devising, drawn over the bandages and tied so that the man might continue at his work without getting salt-water or any contaminating substance in the wound and so infecting it badly.
These two importunate telegrams arrived while he was paying a flying visit to headquarters at St. Anthony:
“Do your best to come and operate me I have an abscess under right tonsil will give you coal for your steamer am getting pretty weak.
Capt. J. N. Coté, Long Point.”
A second telegram arriving almost simultaneously from the same man read: “Please come as fast as you can to operate me in the throat and save my life.”