“I have had hard luck all my life,” he wrote. “I have no friends or relatives. My health is broken and I am without money. I once was somebody, but that doesn’t matter now. I am dying. Lying up here in my room and hearing the noises in the street all day and all night I got to thinking about things. I don’t mind dying, but to die all alone in a cheap bedroom with nobody around is too much. So I got dressed. It took me almost all day to dress on account of the pain. I had twenty cents left. I finally managed to walk out of the house and get on a street car. It was a torture. But I figured if I could reach the County Hospital they would put me in a bed and give me treatment, and, anyway, it would not be so bad to die in a hospital.” Then he went on to relate his experience. He had arrived at the hospital and been ushered into a receiving room. Here a group of internes stood around cracking jokes. One of them finally advised him to take his clothes off. He retired into one of the booths and stripped. When he came out the room was empty. So Winkelburg crawled up on a dirty table and lay there waiting. He waited for an hour. After an hour an interne popped into the room and looked at him with some surprise and inquired what the devil he was doing lying naked on the table. Winkelburg, more dead than alive, moaned something in reply. Whereupon the interne examined him. Winkelburg wrote: “He moved my legs up and down and felt over me for a minute and then said, ‘You’re all right. I’ll give you a prescription to fix you up.’ And he wrote out a prescription. I put my clothes on slowly and asked him what I should do. ‘Go home,’ he said. I told him I couldn’t. Then he asked, ‘Well, how did you come here?’ I told him it was a torture. So he grinned and said, ‘Torture back, then.’ I am back in my room now, in bed. I feel worse. I’ve been thinking about all this. It doesn’t make me angry. The world is like that. It has no time for its unfortunates. There are too many healthy ones to take care of. This interne was possibly not a bad fellow. When he talked to me I realized how it was. I was just one of a thousand poor fools, and he was busy with his career and his plans. He didn’t mean to be cruel, but that’s just human nature, don’t you think?” I wrote the story, adding a few lugubrious details for good measure. I drew a picture of Winkelburg lying on his back, staring at the ceiling and thinking of the busy city whose noises floated in through his window. The next day brought a flood of letters. Philanthropists offered to care for Winkelburg. The hospital authorities denied the incident described by Winkelburg, but offered to make amends and to give him treatment and a bed.