The doctor tapped his desk thoughtfully for a moment, then suddenly his face lit up with some brilliant thought and he wrote out orders for five more examinations. Though I had won my point I didn’t like the contented smile with which he handed them to me. I went out felicitating myself on having cleverly side-stepped the stomach test, but a few hours later I discovered the cause of his merriment, for I walked right into another, much worse--a cystoscopic examination--where they insert something that feels like a piece of rusty barbed wire into the bladder and up through the ureter into the kidney. Affixed to the inner end of this ingenious apparatus--which has an opening through the center--there is a tiny electric light bulb, by means of which they get a view of the interior furnishings. To facilitate this they dilate the parts by pumping in air, soda, transparent acids and suchlike pain-producing inventions. The process of exploring by alternately probing, twisting, pumping and expanding the inside membraneous walls of the kidney is unpityingly pursued as long as the victim remains conscious; and up to this point is as far as I am able to give an account of the performance. In fact there is no use attempting further to describe it, because no printable language can do it justice. They don’t like to give an anesthetic in this case, for the reason that you can suffer more and they claim they can get better results without it. It’s like the old-fashioned idea that in confinement cases anything given to mitigate the pain is apt to injure the child. The only near-humorous feature that I discovered in the whole procedure was the remark of one of the examining physicians, that he didn’t think it would hurt--much. There was a pet expression that he used repeatedly: whenever he gave the vitals a vigorous probe that involuntarily tightened every muscle and nearly lifted me off the operating table he would say, “Now _relax_, please.” I asked why they called it an examination instead of an operation. He said it sounded less painful; and if the patients knew it were an operation they would either refuse to take it, or else insist on being etherized. When it was over, the only report I could get was, that it was “satisfactory” (to them at least), and that the kidney was “still functioning.” They gave me another bottle of castor oil and put me to bed for twenty-four hours to recuperate and muster strength for the next examination. The doctor assured me that castor oil was very “cleansing,” and he warned me that any substitute might prove injurious. I didn’t think to inquire if he had an interest in the drugstore where they sold it.