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Round The Red Lamp | Arthur Conan Doyle | |
A Medical Document. |
Page 4 of 8 |
"That's the worst of these medical stories," sighs the outsider. "They never seem to have an end." "When a man is up to his neck in practice, my boy, he has no time to gratify his private curiosity. Things shoot across him and he gets a glimpse of them, only to recall them, perhaps, at some quiet moment like this. But I've always felt, Manson, that your line had as much of the terrible in it as any other." "More," groans the alienist. "A disease of the body is bad enough, but this seems to be a disease of the soul. Is it not a shocking thing--a thing to drive a reasoning man into absolute Materialism--to think that you may have a fine, noble fellow with every divine instinct and that some little vascular change, the dropping, we will say, of a minute spicule of bone from the inner table of his skull on to the surface of his brain may have the effect of changing him to a filthy and pitiable creature with every low and debasing tendency? What a satire an asylum is upon the majesty of man, and no less upon the ethereal nature of the soul." "Faith and hope," murmurs the general practitioner. "I have no faith, not much hope, and all the charity I can afford," says the surgeon. "When theology squares itself with the facts of life I'll read it up." "You were talking about cases," says the outsider, jerking the ink down into his stylographic pen. "Well, take a common complaint which kills many thousands every year, like G. P. for instance." "What's G. P.?" "General practitioner," suggests the surgeon with a grin. |
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Round The Red Lamp Arthur Conan Doyle |
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