I did not want to eat at first, and when I did begin to want to
they would not let me. If I felt sort of peckish they let me suck
a little glass thermometer, but there is not much nourishment
really in thermometers. And for entertainment, to wile the dragging
hours away, I could count the cracks in the ceiling and read my
temperature chart, which was a good deal like Red Ames' batting
average for the past season--ranging from ninety-nine to one hundred
and four.

Also, through daily conversations with my nurse and with the
surgeons who dropped in from time to time to have a look at me,
I learned, as I lay there, a great deal about the medical profession--
that is, a great deal for a layman--and what I learned filled me
with an abiding admiration for it, both as a science and as a
business. This surely is one profession which ever keeps its face
to the front. Burying its past mistakes and forgetting them as
speedily as possible, it pushes straight forward into fresh fields
and fresh patients, always hopeful of what the future may bring
in the way of newly discovered and highly expensive ailments. As
we look backward upon the centuries we are astonished by its
advancement. I did a good deal of looking backwards upon the
centuries during my sojourn at St. Germicide's.

Take the Middle Ages now--the period when a barber and a surgeon
were one and the same. If a man made a failure as a barber he
turned his talents to surgery. Surgeons in those times were a
husky breed. I judge they worked by the day instead of by piecework;
anyhow the records show they were very fond of experiments where
somebody else furnished the raw material.