He reported to his company that I was in a more advanced stage of the disorder than he had at first feared. I had arrived at the unnecessarily irritable condition. Of course my case was settled with that company. Professional etiquette again stepped in, and the doctor for the M. B. of C. took another whack at my liver. He said that the organ was badly enlarged and he'd hold me off for one year to see if it would return to its normal proportions. According to his diagnosis fully nine-tenths of the population of New York were carrying around livers that were enough to tire out an ox. He could tell a big livered man as far as he could see him, and he pointed out five who passed while he was talking.
He said that enlargment of the liver was getting to be a very real danger to the population of all of the chief cities, and if the cause was not soon discovered by the medical profession and a reducing process, so to speak, clapped on to the metropolitan liver, life insurance companies would have to keep a mighty sharp eye on all applicants, or the death rates would wreck the most prosperous of them in pretty short order.
I was led to infer from the way he poked and prodded around me and measured and sounded that my liver was rather badly sagged at one side and that the other lobe was swelled up like a bladder. It seems as if a person would notice a thing like that himself, but the doctor said that as like as not I'd never have discovered it at all if he had not—fortunately for me—been called in to examine me.
He said that he never prescribed for men, he is required to examine for insurance, but he told me to take a certain remedy for the next three months and then report to him. Meantime his company would "hold me off."
"We won't reject you outright," he explained "because this thing may be only temporary—may not be organic—and it wouldn't be a fair thing to your heirs to decline you outright, because that would most likely prevent you from ever getting life insurance anywhere in the future."
That was a new idea to me and gave me a good deal of a scare.
It occurred to me that the future of a man's family—where it depended on the insurance money of its head—was subject to considerable uncertainty from the various fads of the doctors.
Here I was in danger of being rejected—pronounced an unsound risk—by four separate and distinct companies for four separate and distinct ailments of which my own doctor could find not the least trace and I could feel not the faintest twinge.
If any one of them decided positively against me the future of my family was nil—so far as insurance went, for the examining physician of no other company would be bold enough or sufficiently lacking in "professional courtesy" to pronounce in my favor, whether he could find anything wrong with me himself or not. I began to realize that what I had so far looked upon as rather a good joke might be serious after all.
It occurred to me, too, that it would be a good deal more far reaching than I had supposed.