The Stark Munro Letters: Being series of twelve letters written by J. Stark Munro, M.B., to his friend and former fellow-student, Herbert Swanborough, of Lowell, Massachusetts, during the years 1881-1884Doyle, Arthur Conan
General
The Stark Munro Letters: Being series of twelve letters written by J. Stark Munro, M.B., to his friend and former fellow-student, Herbert Swanborough, of Lowell, Massachusetts, during the years 1881-1884
Doyle, Arthur Conan
Epistolary fiction
As to old Cullingworth, he is booming along as merrily as ever. You say
in your last, that what you cannot understand is how he got his hold of
the public in so short a time. That is just the point which I have found
it hard to get light upon. He told me that after his first coming he had
not a patient for a month, and that he was so disheartened that he very
nearly made a moonlight exodus. At last, however, a few cases came his
way--and he made such extraordinary cures of them, or else impressed
them so by his eccentricity, that they would do nothing but talk of him.
Some of his wonderful results got into the local press, though, after
my Avonmouth experience, I should not like to guarantee that he did not
himself convey them there. He showed me an almanac, which had a great
circulation in the district.
It had an entry sandwiched in this way:
Aug. 15. Reform Bill passed 1867.
Aug. 16. Birth of Julius Caesar.
Aug. 17. Extraordinary cure by Dr. Cullingworth of a case of dropsy in
Bradfield, 1881.
Aug. 18. Battle of Gravelotte, 1870.
It reads as if it were one of the landmarks of the latter half of the
century. I asked him how on earth it got there; but I could only learn
that the woman was fifty-six inches round the waist, and that he had
treated her with elaterium.
That leads me to another point. You ask me whether his cures are really
remarkable, and, if so, what his system is. I answer unhesitatingly,
that his cures are very remarkable, indeed, and that I look upon him as
a sort of Napoleon of medicine. His view is that the pharmacopaeal doses
are in nearly every instance much too low. Excessive timidity has cut
down the dose until it has ceased to produce a real effect upon the
disease.
Medical men, according to his view, have been afraid of producing a
poisonous effect with their drugs. With him, on the contrary, the
whole art of medicine lies in judicious poisoning, and when the case
is serious, his remedies are heroic. Where, in epilepsy, I should have
given thirty-grain doses of bromide or chloral every four hours, he
would give two drachms every three. No doubt it will seem to you very
kill-or-cure, and I am myself afraid that a succession of coroners’
inquests may check Cullingworth’s career; but hitherto he has had no
public scandal, while the cases which he has brought back to life have
been numerous. He is the most fearless fellow. I have seen him pour
opium into a dysenteric patient until my hair bristled. But either his
knowledge or his luck always brings him out right.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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