Well, sir, he was a talker, that there doctor was, and he knowed more
religious sayings and poetry along with it, than any feller I ever
hearn. He goes on and he tells how awful sick people can manage to get
and never know it, and no one else never suspicion it, and live along
fur years and years that-a-way, and all the time in danger of death. He
says it makes him weep when he sees them poor diluted fools going around
and thinking they is well men, talking and laughing and marrying and
giving in to marriage right on the edge of the grave. He sees dozens of
'em in every town he comes to. But they can't fool him, he says. He can
tell at a glance who's got Bright's Disease in their kidneys and who
ain't. His own father, he says, was deathly sick fur years and years and
never knowed it, and the knowledge come on him sudden like, and he died.
That was before Siwash Injun Sagraw was ever found out about. Doctor
Kirby broke down and cried right there in the wagon when he thought of
how his father might of been saved if he was only alive now that that
medicine was put up into bottle form, six fur a five-dollar bill so long
as he was in town, and after that two dollars fur each bottle at the
drug store.
He unrolled a big chart and the Injun helt it by that there gasoline
lamp, so all could see, turning the pages now and then. It was a map of
a man's inside organs and digestive ornaments and things. They was red
and blue, like each organ's own disease had turned it, and some of 'em
was yaller. And they was a long string of diseases printed in black
hanging down from each organ's picture. I never knowed before they was
so many diseases nor yet so many things to have 'em in.
Well, I was feeling purty good when that show started. But the doc,
he kep' looking right at me every now and then when he talked, and I
couldn't keep my eyes off'n him.
"Does your heart beat fast when you exercise?" he asts the crowd. "Is
your tongue coated after meals? Do your eyes leak when your nose is
stopped up? Do you perspire under your arm pits? Do you ever have a
ringing in your ears? Does your stomach hurt you after meals? Does your
back ever ache? Do you ever have pains in your legs? Do your eyes blur
when you look at the sun? Are your teeth coated? Does your hair come out
when you comb it? Is your breath short when you walk up stairs? Do your
feet swell in warm weather? Are there white spots on your finger nails?
Do you draw your breath part of the time through one nostril and part
of the time through the other? Do you ever have nightmare? Did your
nose bleed easily when you were growing up? Does your skin fester when
scratched? Are your eyes gummy in the mornings? Then," he says, "if you
have any or all of these symptoms, your blood is bad, and your liver is
wasting away."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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