The Poet at the Breakfast-TableHolmes, Oliver Wendell
General
The Poet at the Breakfast-Table
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
American fiction -- 19th century; Conversation -- Fiction; Poetry
--I should be sorry to lose my confidence in Dr. B. Franklin, who seems
very much devoted to his business, and whom I mean to consult about
some small symptoms I have had lately. Perhaps it is coming to a new
boarding-house. The young people who come into Paris from the provinces
are very apt--so I have been told by one that knows--to have an attack
of typhoid fever a few weeks or months after their arrival. I have not
been long enough at this table to get well acclimated; perhaps that is
it. Boarding-House Fever. Something like horse-ail, very likely,--horses
get it, you know, when they are brought to city stables. A little “off
my feed,” as Hiram Woodruff would say. A queer discoloration about my
forehead. Query, a bump? Cannot remember any. Might have got it against
bedpost or something while asleep. Very unpleasant to look so. I wonder
how my portrait would look, if anybody should take it now! I hope not
quite so badly as one I saw the other day, which I took for the end man
of the Ethiopian Serenaders, or some traveller who had been exploring
the sources of the Niger, until I read the name at the bottom and found
it was a face I knew as well as my own.
I must consult somebody, and it is nothing more than fair to give our
young Doctor a chance. Here goes for Dr. Benjamin Franklin.
The young Doctor has a very small office and a very large sign, with a
transparency at night big enough for an oyster-shop. These young
doctors are particularly strong, as I understand, on what they call
diagnosis,--an excellent branch of the healing art, full of satisfaction
to the curious practitioner, who likes to give the right Latin name to
one's complaint; not quite so satisfactory to the patient, as it is not
so very much pleasanter to be bitten by a dog with a collar round his
neck telling you that he is called Snap or Teaser, than by a dog without
a collar. Sometimes, in fact, one would a little rather not know the
exact name of his complaint, as if he does he is pretty sure to look it
out in a medical dictionary, and then if he reads, This terrible disease
is attended with vast suffering and is inevitably mortal, or any such
statement, it is apt to affect him unpleasantly.
I confess to a little shakiness when I knocked at Dr. Benjamin's office
door. “Come in!” exclaimed Dr. B. F. in tones that sounded ominous and
sepulchral. And I went in.
I don't believe the chambers of the Inquisition ever presented a more
alarming array of implements for extracting a confession, than our young
Doctor's office did of instruments to make nature tell what was the
matter with a poor body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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