“I should say he’s sort of a fool for rentin’ that old Thornsdale rat-trap, for God-knows-what, that’s stood vacant these ten years.”
I nodded and left in the direction taken by the doctor.
Here was an element of mystery; for I alone, of all the villagers, knew that this eminent surgeon’s presence in Belleville boded ill.
I soon caught sight of the doctor. For a man of his age and physique, his gait was exceedingly fast—as though propelled by a nervous dynamo.
Stretching my legs, I kept a safe distance between him and myself, until he swung open the tall wooden gate and quickly vanished through the wilderness of tall bushes and low trees into the Thornsdale house. I halted safe from observation and lighted my pipe.
Leaning against a tree there, I ran over in my mind the odd significance of that remarkable article I had recently read in the staid and ever-authentic Surgical Monthly.
This Dr. Calgroni, it appeared, had stated to the interviewer that he was here from Austria on a vacation—and to feel out the opinions of American surgeons anent his new theory. One Herr von Meine, a noted surgeon of Vienna, he added with some asperity, had scoffed at the absurdity and unorthodox idea of the unprecedented theory advanced by him, and had declared that his, Calgroni’s, operation was extremely impossible, not to say foolish—that it would never be a success.
Dr. Calgroni claimed that he could prolong a human life indefinitely by the insertion of a live thigh gland from a young quadrumanous mammal, such as the Pithecoid.
Much discussion and argument had been provoked throughout the entire medical world by the famous doctor’s theory, and consensus was that he was an impracticable theorist gone mad.