Disciples of Hippocrates
Aren’t you pretty young to be a practicing physician? asked the severe-looking female person sternly.
Well, you see, I only doctor children, said the young medico, nervously.
Doctor, are you sure my husband has pneumonia? I have heard of doctors treating patients for pneumonia who finally died of typhoid fever.
Well, madam, I don’t make such blunders. If I treat a patient for pneumonia, he dies of pneumonia.
Patient—Doctor, it hurts me to breathe. In fact, the only trouble now seems to be with my breath.
Physician—All right. I’ll give you something that will soon stop that.
A young doctor in a country district was called one night by an old farmer to his first case. The patient was the farmer’s son, who was lying on the bed in much pain. The young medico threw out his chest and said: This should cause you no alarm. It is nothing but a corrustified exegesis antispasmodically emanating from the physical refrigerator, producing a prolific source of irritability in the pericranial epidermis.
The farmer looked at him and replied, just what I said, but his mother thought it was the stomachache.
Wife—Now dear, here’s the doctor to see you.
Merchant Prince—Send him away and fetch the undertaker! You know I never deal with middlemen.
A doctor came up to a patient in an insane asylum, slapped him on the back and said: Well, old man, you’re all right. You can run along and write your folks that you’ll be back home in two weeks as good as new.
The patient went off gayly to write his letter. He had it finished and sealed, but when he was licking the stamp it slipped through his fingers to the floor lighted on the back of a cockroach that was passing and stuck. The patient hadn’t seen the cockroach. What he did see was his escaped postage stamp zigzagging aimlessly across the floor to the baseboard, wavering up over the baseboard and following a crooked track up the wall and across the ceiling. In depressed silence he tore up the letter that he had just written and dropped the pieces on the floor.
Two weeks! Hell! he said. I won’t be out of here in three years.
He had just hung out his shingle. That morning a stranger entered. The doctor asked to be excused as he hurried to the phone.
Taking down the receiver, he said: Yes, this is Dr. Whoosit. Yes, will be ready for you at two-ten this afternoon. But please be prompt, for I am very busy. Two hundred dollars? Yes, that was the estimate I gave you.
Hanging up the receiver, he turned to the stranger and rubbing his hands asked: Now, sir, what can I do for you?
Nothing, replied the stranger quietly. I only came in to connect up the telephone.
The following item is taken from a county officer’s health report: The patient died of blood poison from a broken ankle contracted in an automobile accident, which was a very strange occurrence, since he was struck between the lamp post and the radiator.
Herr Doctor, my wife and I are possessed! Can’t you cure us? What sort of a demon is it possesses you? Peasant: The fighting demon; it forces us to come to blows, and we are both sorry for it afterward. Doctor (making three times the sign of the cross): Begone, foul demon of discord, begone! So that was only the preliminary cure, now I will write a prescription for you. When the fit comes on again, the one who is not yet begun to scold and fight is to take the medicine bottle and a spoon and go out of the room, while the other remains inside. After ten minutes the first one is to come in again, count twenty-seven drops into the spoon, and give them to the other; then the latter is to take the spoon and count twenty-seven drops and give them to the first one, after which you shake hands together. Not a word to be spoken the whole time. Three months later the peasant came again with his wife: Herr Doctor, we have come to make you a present of this ham for having cured us so thoroughly! This is a true story, and occurred in Holstein.