The man ought to be arrested who comes downtown in the morning with an insulting scowl that curdles the milk of human kindness. One smile is worth a dozen snarls.
Horace, the Latin poet, taught truth by laughter; in politics a smile has controlled kings; and Swift and Heine did more by their smiles for freedom than swords. We can’t all be poets, painters and presidents, but we can all be end-men to Life’s minstrel show. Mark Tapley was always cheerful, and Sydney Smith said, “I have gout, asthma and seven other maladies, but otherwise, thank the Lord, I am very well.”
“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”
* * *
Pacific Coast physicians are conducting a campaign which has for its aims “the conservation of public health”—specifically, the elimination of the advertising doctors, whom they designate quacks, and the squelching of “cranks” who oppose vivisection.
The editor of the Whiz Bang may be put down by the doctors as among the “cranks” because he doesn’t like the idea of vivisection. I suppose I’m one of those sentimental birds, but any goop who tries to carve up my dog, my pony, or even Pedro, my pedigreed bull, will have a fight on his hands.
If surgeons must have live bodies upon which to experiment, it is suggested they utilize some of the less useful members of the medical profession. Most doctors are good citizens, and we include some advertising doctors, too. They have, it is true, a somewhat exaggerated idea of importance in the general scheme of things, but their delusion is honest. They regard the profession highly, and rightly so.
This being the case, nobody would object if a doctor showed the courage of his convictions by allowing his fellow “cut-ups” to strap him on an operating table and dissect his carburetor and other inside machinery.
But until doctors assume this attitude, most regular people will regard vivisectionists as a low species of bloodthirsty coward, pandering to a perverted taste for twisting entrails.