Another writer wanted to say that cancer is an unnatural growth of epithelium. He took a big breath and spouted the following: “Carcinoma arises from any subepithelial proliferation by which epithelial cells are isolated and made to grow abnormally.” Now, then, you know all about cancer.
A writer on insanity illuminates the subject as follows: “The prodromic delirium is a quasi-paranoiac psychosis in a degenerate subject. A psychosis of exhaustion being practically a condition of syncope.”
The following is an effort to say that certain microbes produce the poison of erysipelas: “The streptococcus erysipelatosus proliferating in the interspaces of the connective tissue is the etiologic factor in the secretion of the erysipelatous toxins.”
A large cancer of the liver was found at a postmortem examination and reported about as follows: “A colossal carcinomatous degeneration of the hepatic mechanism.”
Still, the man of big swelling words is not always up in the clouds. If called to a case of accident, he examines the injury, and may inform the family in quite a simple and dignified manner that their father was thrown sidewise from his carriage breaking his leg and putting his ankle out of joint, but if he writes out the case for his medical journal, he gets up straightway on his stilts and says, “The patient was projected transversely from his vehicle, fracturing the tibia and fibula and luxating the tibio-tarsal articulation.”
Your man of solemn speech is peculiar. He does not keep a set of instruments—not he—he has an armamentarium. His catheters never have a hole or an eye in them, but always a fenestrum. In gunshot injuries a bullet never makes a hole in his patient, but only a perforation. He does not disinfect his armamentarium by boiling, but by submerging it in water elevated to the temperature of ebullition. He never distinguishes one disease from another, but always differentiates or diagnosticates it. His patient’s mouth is an oral cavity. His jaw is a maxilla. His brain is a cerebrum, his hip-joint is a coxo-femoral articulation. If his eyelids are adherent, it is a case of ankylosymblepharon. If he discovers wrinkles on the skin, they are corrugations or else rugosities. He never sees any bleeding, but only hemorrhage or sanguineous effusion. He does not examine a limb by touch or by handling—he palpates or manipulates it. If he finds it hopelessly diseased he does not cut it off—that is undignified. He gets out his armamentarium and amputates it.
Metaphorical Conceits
A Chicago critic addicted to figurative fancies was very much affected by the play of Arrah na Pogue. “There are passages in it,” he writes, “which thunder at the heart like the booming of the Atlantic tide, and drown it in floods of bitter tears.” This idea of being drowned in floods of tears, by the way, has been always very popular with struggling muses who long to launch into bolder strains. Lee describes a young lady with an exuberance of tears:
“I found her on the floor
In all the storm of grief, yet beautiful;