The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10Brann, William Cowper
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The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
Now for Christ's sake don't judge Iowa people by this peripatetic
Ananias. Where he was born I don't know; neither do I care a
d--n; but I suspect that he was begotten in some back yard during
the dark of the moon, spawned in a dry goods box and raised on
bones." So Bailey is "Tank-Kee." If I mistake not there was a
Tank-kee trotting around Texas some years ago beating
school-children of the small towns out of their pennies by
dressing like a Chinese joss with a double-barrelled jag and
exhibiting a lot of old junk. It is my impression that he's a
half-breed of some kind, but whether half Chinese or coon I
cannot with certainty say. If he is hacking around from town to
town in Mississippi he is doubtless working a fake of some
kind-swindling the people while defaming them. If the
Mississippians can locate G. W. Bailey they had best hold him and
wire me for copies of his articles in my possession. One thing is
cock-sure--"Tank-kee" had best keep out of Texas.
. . .
The suspicion is growing that Dr. Gutieras, the government
expert, has a pint of yellow fever baccilli in his cerebrum. He
carries the plague with him, just as a man suffering with mania a
potu carries his cargo of monkeys. Had he been called to see
Simon's wife's mother, he would have declared that she had a case
of Yellow Jack and spread a panic through all Judea. Should he
find a man suffering with katzenjammer he would pronounce him a
"suspect." As Barney Gibbs says, all the yellow fever patients
Gutieras discovered during his tour of South Texas were up
"hunting either a drink or a job" ere this peripatetic expert was
well out of town. I'll gamble four dollars that there is not in
the United States to-day a genuine case of Yellow Jack. There's
every indication that the cases at Mobile, New Orleans and Biloxi
are identical with the disease discovered by Gutieras at
Galveston--nothing under heaven but the dengue. Who the devil
ever heard of the mortality in a yellow fever epidemic averaging
only about 6 per cent.? Why la grippe will beat that as an
angel-maker and beat it blind. When good old- fashioned yellow
fever reaches for people they begin to sing "Heaven is my home,"
I'd rather have the "plague" now rioting in New Orleans than to
contract the buck ague or the itch. These "experts" make my soul
aweary. An insanity expert thinks everybody crazy but himself,
while a yellow fever expert would isolate a case o' cucumber
colic. What the South needs to do is to quarantine against these
special doctors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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