Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical LifeDoyle, Arthur Conan
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Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life
Doyle, Arthur Conan
Medical fiction; Physicians -- Fiction
"I was in practice at the time. One morning a Mrs. Cooper called upon
me and informed me that her husband had shown signs of delusions
lately. They took the form of imagining that he had been in the army
and had distinguished himself very much. As a matter of fact he was a
lawyer and had never been out of England. Mrs. Cooper was of opinion
that if I were to call it might alarm him, so it was agreed between us
that she should send him up in the evening on some pretext to my
consulting-room, which would give me the opportunity of having a chat
with him and, if I were convinced of his insanity, of signing his
certificate. Another doctor had already signed, so that it only needed
my concurrence to have him placed under treatment. Well, Mr. Cooper
arrived in the evening about half an hour before I had expected him,
and consulted me as to some malarious symptoms from which he said that
he suffered. According to his account he had just returned from the
Abyssinian Campaign, and had been one of the first of the British
forces to enter Magdala. No delusion could possibly be more marked,
for he would talk of little else, so I filled in the papers without the
slightest hesitation. When his wife arrived, after he had left, I put
some questions to her to complete the form. 'What is his age?' I
asked. 'Fifty,' said she. 'Fifty!' I cried. 'Why, the man I examined
could not have been more than thirty! And so it came out that the real
Mr. Cooper had never called upon me at all, but that by one of those
coincidences which take a man's breath away another Cooper, who really
was a very distinguished young officer of artillery, had come in to
consult me. My pen was wet to sign the paper when I discovered it,"
says Dr. Manson, mopping his forehead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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