Exploring the Interior.

Dear reader, in what manner do you act, react, and counteract when you fancy that you detect a fault in your physiological architecture, such as a warping of the props, a sagging of the arches, atrophy in the attic, or overstrain of the personal magnetism which stringhalts your ability to deliver the spoken word with the horsepower necessary to induce chubb-hearted capitalists to peel their wads to the core?

When you feel that your interior decoration calls for renovation, and your personality is suffering from the inroads of pessimism, do you charge round the spinach bed every morning in a semi-raw condition; do you take deep breaths in short pants, adopt the feeding habits of the Angora goat, and go to bed with the hens and get up with the milkman, or do you disclaim any responsibility for your physiology by gathering up your personal debris and carrying it to a man of medicine for examination and rectification? An egg to an elephant that you do!

When finally you stand before him, divulging all your physical faults which have lain hidden from the world for so long, you feel yourself to be an awful example of what Nature never intended. The man of mystery glances you over with ill-concealed contempt. He pokes you scornfully where your chest ought to be. He strikes you nonchalantly over the liver, slams you in the wind, and sighs. You are too weak to hit back. In fact, you feel that, after all, perhaps he is right; you are a mistake; you are an infringement of the rules; you should never have been allowed; your latitudes and longitudes are all mixed up. By some inexplicable oversight you were allowed to slip past the censor—perhaps as an example to others; who knows? The doctor turns his back and bows his head as though the burden were too great; then suddenly he throws a quick glance over his shoulder as if to satisfy himself that you really are true, and not merely the result of overwork. Finally he sits at his desk with his head in his hands, probably brooding on the inscrutability of Nature. No doubt he is also considering the advisability of writing to the “Poultice” about you, under the heading “Misprints in the Book of Nature,” or “Should A Doctor Dwell.” Eventually he pulls himself together as one would say: “Enough of this weakness.” These things must be faced, and after all, even Nature has her “off days.”

Then he listens-in to one or two respiratory items with a rubber set, plays “eena-deena-dinah-dough” up and down your spine with his knuckles, counts your ribs to discover what it really is that holds you together, and then goes off into a trance.