Extract from Letter Home.
Wednesday, Dec. 13, 1904.
My dear ——:
The scientific exercises have just concluded and before dressing for the banquet I will make use of the few moments between the diurnal reading and the nocturnal eating of articles, to inform you that you have lost five thousand dollars. Whenever I have insured my life before trusting my fate to the reckless railway management which this country cultivates, and which costs from one to two lives a day in demonstrating how two trains can occupy the same space at the same time, I have found that my life has been spared and my estate has lost the six thousand dollars of insurance money for which I had contracted and paid. I have survived so often that I am beginning to have faith in the insuring method as a life preserver. I know of nothing else that has protected me from the ax of those public executioners facetiously called railways. If the government would only give attention to the regulation of railway accidents as it does to the regulation of railway rates, some good might be done. Railway rates are simply ruinous; railway recklessness is simply regretable.
I am well, excepting a stiffness and soreness in my left ankle, which reminds me that I got away just in time from the frozen North, where people eat and freeze too much and get rheumatism and appendicitis, to visit the Sunny South, where people eat and drink too much and get rheumatism and appendicitis. In the North we think that the cold makes us healthy and hardy, while in the south people think that appetizers and night-caps keep them healthy and happy. And I am temporarily inclined to think that the Southerners must be half right, for my ankle is getting better already.
After a most interesting session devoted to the discussion of obscure and difficult scientific facts and fancies, the society adjourned to the public park to unveil the statue of the late Wm. Elias Davis, the eminent Birmingham surgeon who founded the Southern Surgical and Gynecological Association. It is the second statue that has been erected to a private individual in Alabama, and is also about the second attempt of the kind by our profession in the United States, the statue of the signer of the Declaration of Independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush, at Washington being the first. There is also at Washington a statue of Hahnemann, the originator of the once popular fad, homeopathy, placed there by a few fad fellows before they faded out.
But it is growing dark and the band is playing and the festivities are about to begin. We must eat and drink and get merry, which is the lot of the living.
For Children Only.
Extract from Letter Home.
New Orleans, Saturday, Dec. 17, 1904.