"What's a sanitarium?" asked Gub-Gub.
"A sanitarium," said the Doctor, "is a sort of mixture between a hospital and a hotel—where people stay who are invalids.... Well, I agreed to this idea. Then I and my young friend—his name was Phipps, Dr. Cornelius Q. Phipps—took a beautiful place way off in the country, and we furnished it with wheel chairs and hot-water bottles and ear trumpets and the things that invalids like. And very soon patients came to us in hundreds and our sanitarium was quite full up and my new thermometer was kept very busy. Of course, we made a lot of money, because all these people paid us well. And Phipps was very happy.
"But I was not so happy. I had noticed a peculiar thing: none of the invalids ever seemed to get well and go away. And finally I spoke of this to Phipps.
"'My dear Dolittle,' he answered, 'go away?—of course not! We don't want them to go away. We want them to stay here, so they'll keep on paying us.'
"'Phipps,' I said, 'I don't think that's honest. I became a doctor to cure people—not to pamper them.'
"Well, on this point we fell out and quarreled. I got very angry and told him I would not be his partner any longer—that I would pack up and go the following day. As I left his room, still very angry, I passed one of the invalids in his wheel chair. It was Sir Timothy Quisby, our most important and expensive patient. He asked me, as I passed, to take his temperature, as he thought he had a new fever. Now, I had never been able to find anything wrong with Sir Timothy and had decided that being an invalid was a sort of hobby with him. So, still, very angry, instead of taking his temperature, I said quite rudely: 'Oh, go to the Dickens!'
"It was Sir Timothy Quisby, our most expensive patient"