A CUNNING DODGE.
There was a certain citizen of this place, a butcher by occupation, who, deeming the remuneration he received small in comparison to the amount of service done, resolved to discontinue butchering cattle and become a butcher of men, or in other words to assume the responsibilities of a practicing physician and surgeon. It seems in his travels he had collected quite a number of receipts and prescriptions from old almanacs and doctors’ books.
With this limited stock of medical knowledge, and an unusually large amount of “cheek,” he thought to work himself into a lucrative business. As an invoice of smallpox was expected by every steamer, he imagined he might pass among other professionals as though his scientific acquirements were excelled by none, and his vocabulary of Latin names surpassed “Doctor Hornbook’s.”
Hiring an office in a central locality, he hoisted a board reaching nearly across the building, on which his name and calling were made known in large characters. Then sitting down amidst a “beggarly account of empty bottles,” he patiently awaited the result. Whether the city had suddenly become remarkably healthy through the sanitary exertions of the health commissioners, or he had not his proportionate share of the medical practice in requisition, he knew not, but certain it was, that from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve he sat in his room—
“As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.”
One day, however, while straying along North Beach, musing on the strange vicissitudes in human affairs, and thinking how “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable” were all the uses of this world, a happy idea presented itself. In the vicinity of the County Hospital he had noticed the invalids coming out to sun themselves, like seals, along the Beach. What a glorious attraction to custom they would be, congregated around his door! Entering into conversation with some of them, he soon struck a bargain with thirty or more. They were to visit his office once a day, those who could walk there without much trouble or pain receiving fifty cents per day, while those who traveled under greater difficulties were to be paid accordingly. So, every morning, after breakfast, they took up their line of march in twos and threes along the street toward the charlatan’s place of business. They were indeed a motley crowd—that cripple brigade—as they hobbled through the thoroughfare.
ADVANCE OF THE CRIPPLE BRIGADE.