His face was a study* He was angry clear through. He would have (in a medical journal or debate) taken issue with, and proved the utter incapacity of nine-tenths of the profession, but to have a layman criticise their action when it might mean even life or death to him and his was more than the doctor's adherence to professional etiquette could bear.
* My friend, the agent, saw his face.
"I'll bet you four dollars, John, that you not only won't get a policy here now but that no other company will pass you," said he under his breath. "The old man is on the war path."
That was eight months ago and I'm "held off" in eleven companies now. I was never sick in my life. I'm as sound in person and in heredity as any man who ever lived, but I am at the mercy of that absurdest of all covers for personal incapacity—professional etiquette—combined with the unreasonable fact that insurance companies require an applicant to tell their examiners just what piece of idiotic prejudice has been launched at him by the doctor of every other company, so that they can all hold together and fit his case to the reports, and not the reports to the facts in his case as they find them.
Meantime, Jack Howard, who died last week, poor fellow, was accepted by five of them because the first examiner who got hold of him, not being a kidney fiend but having his whole mind on lung trouble—and Jack had splendid lungs—didn't discover that he was in the last stages of Bright's disease. His family made $27,000 out of professional etiquette, and mine—when I die—will most likely lose that much, together with a reputation for a sound heredity which may affect the insurers to the third and fourth generation of them that love truth and tell that their father was rejected by all the leading life insurance companies for pulmonary trouble, heart disease, kidney affection, paresis, and enlargement of the liver. Meantime the first good company that shows enough sense and sufficient confidence in its own medical men to omit that sort of questions from its form of examination is going to get me—and a good many others like me.
COMMON SENSE IN SURGERY
There are certain forms of expression which once heard fit themselves into the mind so firmly, and re-appear in one connection or another so frequently, that one scarcely recognizes the fact even when one changes a word or two in order to make the original idea fit the case in point. So when I stood watching the ingenious method by which the trainers of the English fox-hounds induced each dog to perform his own surgical operations after a hunt, I remarked, with no recognition of the plagiarism from Dr. Holmes, "Every dog his own doctor."
"No," replied the trainer, with a fine sense of distinction which I had not before observed—"no; I am the doctor; the dogs are the surgeons. I prescribe; they perform the operation. They do that part far better than I could; but they wouldn't do it in time to save the pain and trouble of a much more serious operation that they could not perform, if I did not set them at it in time, and keep them at work until all danger of inflammation is past."
It was after a hunt. The dogs—splendid blooded fellows, a great pack of over sixty of them—had gotten many thorns and briers in their feet. They came back limping, foot-sore, and with troubled eyes that looked up piteously for relief from their pain. They were very hungry too, after the long chase; but "No doctor will allow a patient to eat just before a surgical operation," remarked the trainer, dryly. "Now watch."