The Genial Idiot: His Views and Reviews

by John Kendrick Bangs

“Oh well,” said the Doctor, “what of it? The pace that kills is bound to have some symptoms preliminary to dissolution. If you, like other young men of the age, burn the candle at both ends and in the middle, what can you expect? You push nature into a corner and then growl like all possessed because she rebels.”

“Not I,” retorted the Idiot. “Mr. Pedagog and the Poet and Mr. Bib may lead the strenuous life, but as for mine the simple life is the thing. I’m not striving after the unattainable. I’m not wasting my physical substance in riotous living. The cold and clammy touch of dissipation is not writing letters of burning condemnation proceedings on my brow. Excesses in any form are utterly unknown to me, and from one end of the Subway to the other you won’t find another man of my age who in general takes better care of himself. I am as watchful of my own needs as though I were a baby and my own nurse at one and the same time. No mother could watch over her offspring more tenderly than I watch over me, and—”

“Well, then, what in thunder is the matter with you?” cried the Lawyer, irritated. “If this is all true, why on earth are you proclaiming yourself as a physical wreck? There must be some cause for your condition.”

“There is,” said the Idiot, meekly. “I went Christmas shopping yesterday without having previously trained for it, and this is the result. I sometimes wonder, Doctor, that you gentlemen, who have the public health more or less in your hands, don’t take the initiative and stave off nervous prostration and other ills attendant upon a run-down physical condition instead of waiting for a fully developed case and trying to cure it after the fact. The ounce-of-prevention idea ought to be incorporated, it seems to me, into the materia medica.”

“What would you have us do, move mountains?” demanded the Doctor. “I’m not afraid to tackle almost any kind of fever known to medical science, but the shopping-fever—well, it is incurable. Once it gets hold of a man or a woman, and more especially a woman, there isn’t anything that I know of can get it out of the system. I grant you that it is as much of a disease as scarlet, typhoid, or any other, but the mind has not yet been discovered that can find a remedy for it short of abject poverty, and even that has been known to fail.”

“That’s true enough,” said the Idiot, “but what you can do is to make it harmless. There are lots of diseases that our forefathers used to regard as necessarily fatal that nowadays we look upon as mere trifles, because people can be put physically into such a condition that they are practically immune to their ravages.”

“Maybe so—but if people will shop they are going to be knocked out by it. I don’t see that we doctors can do anything to mitigate the evil effects of the consequences ab initio. After the event we can pump you full of quinine and cod-liver oil and build you up again, but the ounce of prevention for shopping troubles is as easily attainable as a ton of radium to a man with eight cents and a cancelled postage-stamp in his pocket,” said the Doctor.

“Nonsense, Doctor. You’re only fooling,” said the Idiot. “A college president might as well say that boys will play football, and that there’s nothing they can do to stave off the inevitable consequences of playing the game to one who isn’t prepared for it. You know as well as anybody else that from November 15th to December 24th every year an epidemic of shopping is going to break out in our midst. You know that it will rage violently in the last stage beginning December 15th, thanks to our habit of leaving everything to the last minute. You know that the men and women in your care, unless they have properly trained for the exigencies of the epidemic period, will be prostrated physically and nervously, racked in bone and body, aching from tip to toe, their energy exhausted and their spines as limp as a rag, and yet you claim you can do nothing. What would we think of a football trainer who would try thus to account for the condition of his eleven at the end of a season? We’d bounce him, that’s what.”

“Perhaps that gigantic intellect of yours has something to suggest,” sneered the Doctor.

“Certainly,” quoth the Idiot. “I dreamed it all out in my sleep last night. I dreamed that you and I together had started a series of establishments all over the country—”