CLASS IV

CLASS V

CLASS VI

I made two more classes, VII and VIII, but they entered into anatomical details impossible of discussion in a book designed to be read aloud at the domestic hearth. Perhaps I shall print them in the Medical Times at some future time. As my classes stand, they present mysteries enough. Why should the bronchial tubes (Class II) be so much lordlier than the lungs (Class III) to which they lead? And why should the œsophagus (Class VI) be so much less lordly than the stomach (Class II in the United States, Class IV in England) to which it leads? And yet the fact in each case is known to us all. To have a touch of bronchitis is almost fashionable; to have pneumonia is merely bad luck. The stomach, at least in America, is so respectable that it dignifies even seasickness, but I have never heard of any decent man who ever had any trouble with his œsophagus.

If you wish a short cut to a strange organ’s standing, study its diseases. Generally speaking, they are sure indices. Let us imagine a problem: What is the relative respectability of the hair and the scalp, close neighbors, offspring of the same osseous tissue? Turn to baldness and dandruff, and you have your answer. To be bald is no more than a genial jocosity, a harmless foible—but to have dandruff is almost as bad as to have beri-beri. Hence the fact that the hair is in Class I, while the scalp is at the bottom of Class V. So again and again. To break one’s collar-bone (Class II) is to be in harmony with the nobility and gentry; to crack one’s shin (Class IV) is merely vulgar. And what a difference between having one’s tonsils cut out (Class II) and getting a new set of false teeth (Class V)!

Wherefore? Why? To what end? Why is the stomach so much more respectable (even in England) than the spleen; the liver (even in America) than the pancreas; the windpipe than the œsophagus; the pleura than the diaphragm? Why is the collar-bone the undisputed king of the osseous frame? One can understand the supremacy of the heart: it plainly bosses the whole vascular system. But why do the bronchial tubes wag the lungs? Why is the chin superior to the nose? The ankles to the shins? The solar plexus to the gall-bladder?

I am unequal to the penetration of this great ethical, æsthetical and sociological mystery. But in leaving it, let me point to another and antagonistic one: to wit, that which concerns those viscera of the lower animals that we use for food. The kidneys in man are far down the scale—far down in Class V, along with false teeth, the scalp and the female leg. But the kidneys of the beef steer, the calf, the sheep, or whatever animal it is whose kidneys we eat—the kidneys of this creature are close to the borders of Class I. What is it that young Capt. Lionel Basingstoke, M.P., always orders when he drops in at Gatti’s on his way from his chambers in the Albany to that flat in Tyburnia where Mrs. Vaughn-Grimsby is waiting for him to rescue her from her cochon of a husband? What else but deviled kidneys? Who ever heard of a gallant young English seducer who did’t eat deviled kidneys—not now and then, not only on Sundays and legal holidays, but every day, every evening?