Twelve Stories and a DreamWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Science
Twelve Stories and a Dream
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Science fiction, English; Short stories
Professor Gibberne, as many people know, is my neighbour in Folkestone.
Unless my memory plays me a trick, his portrait at various ages has
already appeared in The Strand Magazine--I think late in 1899; but I am
unable to look it up because I have lent that volume to some one who has
never sent it back. The reader may, perhaps, recall the high forehead
and the singularly long black eyebrows that give such a Mephistophelian
touch to his face. He occupies one of those pleasant little detached
houses in the mixed style that make the western end of the Upper
Sandgate Road so interesting. His is the one with the Flemish gables and
the Moorish portico, and it is in the little room with the mullioned bay
window that he works when he is down here, and in which of an evening
we have so often smoked and talked together. He is a mighty jester, but,
besides, he likes to talk to me about his work; he is one of those men
who find a help and stimulus in talking, and so I have been able to
follow the conception of the New Accelerator right up from a very early
stage. Of course, the greater portion of his experimental work is not
done in Folkestone, but in Gower Street, in the fine new laboratory next
to the hospital that he has been the first to use.
As every one knows, or at least as all intelligent people know, the
special department in which Gibberne has gained so great and deserved a
reputation among physiologists is the action of drugs upon the nervous
system. Upon soporifics, sedatives, and anaesthetics he is, I am told,
unequalled. He is also a chemist of considerable eminence, and I suppose
in the subtle and complex jungle of riddles that centres about the
ganglion cell and the axis fibre there are little cleared places of
his making, little glades of illumination, that, until he sees fit to
publish his results, are still inaccessible to every other living man.
And in the last few years he has been particularly assiduous upon this
question of nervous stimulants, and already, before the discovery of the
New Accelerator, very successful with them. Medical science has to thank
him for at least three distinct and absolutely safe invigorators
of unrivalled value to practising men. In cases of exhaustion the
preparation known as Gibberne's B Syrup has, I suppose, saved more lives
already than any lifeboat round the coast.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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