Let Me Feel Your Pulse

O.Henry

So I went to a doctor.

"How long has it been since you took any alcohol into your system?" heasked.

Turning my head sidewise, I answered, "Oh, quite awhile."

He was a young doctor, somewhere between twenty and forty. He woreheliotrope socks, but he looked like Napoleon. I liked him immensely.

"Now," said he, "I am going to show you the effect of alcohol upon yourcirculation." I think it was "circulation" he said; though it may have

been "advertising."

He bared my left arm to the elbow, brought out a bottle of whiskey, andgave me a drink. He began to look more like Napoleon. I began to like

him better.

Then he put a tight compress on my upper arm, stopped my pulse with hisfingers, and squeezed a rubber bulb connected with an apparatus on a stand

that looked like a thermometer. The mercury jumped up and down withoutseeming to stop anywhere; but the doctor said it registered two hundred and thirty-seven or one hundred and sixty-five or some such number.

"Now," said he, "you see what alcohol does to the blood-pressure."

"It’s marvellous," said I, "but do you think it a sufficient test? Haveone on me, and let’s try the other arm." But, no!

Then he grasped my hand. I thought I was doomed and he was sayinggood-bye. But all he wanted to do was to jab a needle into the end of a finger and compare the red drop with a lot of fifty-cent poker chips thathe had fastened to a card.

"It’s the haemoglobin test," he explained. "The colour of your blood iswrong."

"Well," said I, "I know it should be blue; but this is a country ofmix-ups. Some of my ancestors were cavaliers; but they got thick withsome people on Nantucket Island, so --"

"I mean," said the doctor, "that the shade of red is too light."

"Oh," said I, "it’s a case of matching instead of matches."

The doctor then pounded me severely in the region of the chest. When hedid that I don’t know whether he reminded me most of Napoleon or Battling or Lord Nelson. Then he looked grave and mentioned a string of grievancesthat the flesh is heir to -- mostly ending in "itis." I immediately paid him fifteen dollars on account.

"Is or are it or some or any of them necessarily fatal?" I asked. Ithought my connection with the matter justified my manifesting a certain amount of interest.

"All of them," he answered cheerfully. "But their progress may bearrested. With care and proper continuous treatment you may live to be eighty-five or ninety."

I began to think of the doctor’s bill. "Eighty-five would be sufficient,

I am sure," was my comment. I paid him ten dollars more on account.

"The first thing to do," he said, with renewed animation, "is to find a sanitarium where you will get a complete rest for a while, and allow your

nerves to get into a better condition. I myself will go with you and select a suitable one.

So he took me to a mad-house in the Catskills. It was on a bare mountainfrequented only by infrequent frequenters. You could see nothing but stones and boulders, some patches of snow, and scattered pine trees. The young physician in charge was most agreeable. He gave me a stimulant without applying a compress to the arm. It was luncheon time, and we wereinvited to partake. There were about twenty inmates at little tables in the dining room. The young physician in charge came to our table and said: "It is a custom with our guests not to regard themselves as patients, hut merely as tired ladies and gentlemen taking a rest.Whatever slight maladies they may have are never alluded to in conversation."

My doctor called loudly to a waitress to bring some phosphoglycerate of lime hash, dog-bread, bromo-seltzer pancakes, and nux vomica tea for my

repast. Then a sound arose like a sudden wind storm among pine trees. It was produced by every guest in the room whispering loudly, "Neurasthenia!"

-- except one man with a nose, whom I distinctly heard say, "Chronic alcoholism." I hope to meet him again. The physician in charge turned and

walked away.

An hour or so after luncheon he conducted us to the workshop -- say fifty yards from the house. Thither the guests had been conducted by the

physician in charge’s understudy and sponge-holder -- a man with feet and a blue sweater. He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face; hut the

Armour Packing Company would have been delighted with his hands.

"Here," said the physician in charge, "our guests find relaxation from past mental worries by devoting themselves to physical labour --recreation, in reality."

There were turning-lathes, carpenters’ outfits, clay-modelling tools,spinning-wheels, weaving-frames, treadmills, bass drums,enlarged-crayon-portrait apparatuses, blacksmith forges, and everything,seemingly, that could interest the paying lunatic guests of a first-rate sanitarium.

"The lady making mud pies in the corner," whispered the physician in charge, "is no other than -- Lula Lulington, the authoress of the novel entitled ’Why Love Loves.’ What she is doing now is simply to rest her mind after performing that piece of work."

I had seen the book. "Why doesn’t she do it by writing another one instead?" I asked.

As you see, I wasn’t as far gone as they thought I was.

"The gentleman pouring water through the funnel," continued the physician in charge, "is a Wall Street broker broken down from overwork."

I buttoned my coat.

Others he pointed out were architects playing with Noah’s arks, ministers reading Darwin’s "Theory of Evolution," lawyers sawing wood, tired-out

society ladies talking Ibsen to the blue-sweatered sponge-holder, a neurotic millionaire lying asleep on the floor, and a prominent artist

drawing a little red wagon around the room.

"You look pretty strong," said the physician in charge to me. "I think the best mental relaxation for you would be throwing small boulders over

the mountainside and then bringing them up again."

I was a hundred yards away before my doctor overtook me.

"What’s the matter?" he asked.

"The matter is," said I, "that there are no aeroplanes handy. So I am going to merrily and hastily jog the foot-pathway to yon station and catch

the first unlimited-soft-coal express back to town."

"Well," said the doctor, "perhaps you are right. This seems hardly the suitable place for you. But what you need is rest -- absolute rest and

exercise."