It was long after midnight when I retired, congratulating myself, meanwhile, that I had completed and forwarded to the publisher the last batch of MS. for my new book, and was therefore privileged to rest my weary bones and exhausted brain.
A telephone at one’s bedside is sometimes a great convenience for the physician, but there are occasions when to me it seems an invention of the devil—a something devised especially to defeat the ends of tired nature—a sort of Nemesis, which pursues one into the very midst of dreamland. When I am as tired as I was on this particular night, the ringing of my telephone bell awakens me with a sudden physical and mental shock that sets my every nerve a quiver, and makes my heart beat like a trip hammer for many minutes.
With the bell still ringing with impudent insistency, I found myself sitting bolt upright in bed and, I freely confess, swearing to the limit of my vocabulary of the profane. Having sufficiently identified myself to the party at the other end of the line he said excitedly, “Doctor, you are wanted at once at No. — B— Street. A man is dying. For God’s sake, hurry!”
And I stood not on the order of my going.
A handsome young man, apparently about twenty-five years of age, lay writhing in the most horrible agony, and crying, “Water, for God’s sake give me some water! I am burning up inside! My stomach and bowels are on fire!”
From time to time frightful paroxysms of vomiting came on, with the ejection of a greenish fluid mixed with blood. His sufferings were frightful to witness. He complained of cold shivers, and his teeth chattered like those of a man with an ague chill. His skin was yellow and parchment like, and his face drawn and cadaverous. His eyes were sunken and surrounded by great dark rings. Their dullness was only redeemed by the gleam of fear and horror of death that shone in their depths.
“Has this man ever before been ill, so far as you know?” I asked.
“Yes, doctor,” replied an elderly woman—evidently the landlady, for the ear marks of the cheap boarding house were plain—“this is the third attack of the kind, only this is the worst one he’s had. Until a month ago he was well and hearty. His sickness always comes on in this way, with that funny lookin’ vomit, and that burning in his stomach. This is the first time there’s been any blood, though. He was all right this morning at breakfast. He didn’t come home to dinner, and I think he must have eaten somethin’ that didn’t agree with him, at one o’ them restaurants downtown.”
I immediately gave the poor fellow a hypodermic of morphine and requested everybody to leave the room. He grew easier in a few minutes, I meanwhile administering antidotes for what seemed clearly a case of arsenical poisoning.
“My friend,” I said, “you have taken arsenic. Why did you do it?”