"Speaking of operations--" / by Irvin S. Cobb ... illustrations by Tony Sarg.
- Irvin S. Cobb
- Date:
- [1915], ©1915
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: "Speaking of operations--" / by Irvin S. Cobb ... illustrations by Tony Sarg. Source: Wellcome Collection.
63/78 page 53
![distantly recall, among childhood’s happy memories, carried this liberal-mindedness to a point where she not only dipped snuff and smoked a cob pipe, but sometimes chewed a little natural leaf. This lady, on being called in, would brew up a large caldron of medicinal roots and barks and sprouts and things; and then she would deluge the interior of the sufferer with a large gourdful of this pleasing mixture at regular intervals. It was efficacious, too. The inundated person either got well or else he drowned from the inside. Rocking the patient was almost as dangerous a pas¬ time as rocking the boat. This also helps to explain, I think, why so many of our forebears had floating kidneys. There was nothing else for a kidney to do. By the time I attained to long trousers, people in our town mainly had outgrown the unlicensed expert and were depending more and more upon the old-fashioned family doctor—the one with the whisker- jungle—who drove about in a gig, accom¬ panied by a haunting aroma of iodoform and carrying his calomel with him in bulk, [53]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b29817675_0063.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
