Laryngoscopes and Stethoscopes; and Thermometers and Spirometers and
Dynamometers and Sphygmometers and Pleximeters; and Probes and Probangs
and all sorts of frightful inquisitive exploring contrivances; and scales
to weigh you in, and tests and balances and pumps and electro-magnets and
magneto-electric machines; in short, apparatus for doing everything but
turn you inside out.

Dr. Benjamin set me down before his one window and began looking at me
with such a superhuman air of sagacity, that I felt like one of those
open-breasted clocks which make no secret of their inside arrangements,
and almost thought he could see through me as one sees through a shrimp
or a jelly-fish. First he looked at the place inculpated, which had a
sort of greenish-brown color, with his naked eyes, with much corrugation
of forehead and fearful concentration of attention; then through a
pocket-glass which he carried. Then he drew back a space, for a
perspective view. Then he made me put out my tongue and laid a slip of
blue paper on it, which turned red and scared me a little. Next he took
my wrist; but instead of counting my pulse in the old-fashioned way, he
fastened a machine to it that marked all the beats on a sheet of
paper,--for all the world like a scale of the heights of mountains, say
from Mount Tom up to Chimborazo and then down again, and up again, and so
on. In the mean time he asked me all sorts of questions about myself and
all my relatives, whether we had been subject to this and that malady,
until I felt as if we must some of us have had more or less of them, and
could not feel quite sure whether Elephantiasis and Beriberi and
Progressive Locomotor Ataxy did not run in the family.

After all this overhauling of myself and my history, he paused and looked
puzzled. Something was suggested about what he called an "exploratory
puncture." This I at once declined, with thanks. Suddenly a thought