ch was a good deal like Red Ames' batting average for the past
season--ranging from ninety-nine to one hundred and four.

Also, through daily conversations with my nurse and with the surgeons
who dropped in from time to time to have a look at me, I learned, as I
lay there, a great deal about the medical profession--that is, a
great deal for a layman--and what I learned filled me with an abiding
admiration for it, both as a science and as a business. This surely is
one profession which ever keeps its face to the front. Burying its past
mistakes and forgetting them as speedily as possible, it pushes straight
forward into fresh fields and fresh patients, always hopeful of what
the future may bring in the way of newly discovered and highly expensive
ailments. As we look backward upon the centuries we are astonished
by its advancement. I did a good deal of looking backwards upon the
centuries during my sojourn at St. Germicide's.

Take the Middle Ages now--the period when a barber and a surgeon were
one and the same. If a man made a failure as a barber he turned his
talents to surgery. Surgeons in those times were a husky breed. I judge
they worked by the day instead of by piecework; anyhow the records show
they were very fond of experiments where somebody else furnished the raw
material.

When there came a resounding knock at the tradesman's entrance of the
moated grange, the lord of the manor, looking over the portcullis and
seeing a lusty wight standing down below, in a leather apron, with his
sleeves rolled up and a kit of soldering tools under his arm, didn't
know until he made inquiry whether the gentle stranger had come to mend
the drain or remove the cook's leg.

A little later along, when gunpowder had come into general use as a
humanizing factor of civilization, surgeons treated a gunshot wound by
pouring boiling lard into it, which I would say was calculated to take
the victim's mind off his wound and give him something else to think
about--for the time being, anyhow. I assume the notion of applying a
mustard plaster outside one's stomach when one has a pain inside one's
stomach is based on the same principle.

However, one doesn't have to go clear back to medieval times to note the
radical differences in the plan of treating human ailments. A great
many persons who are still living can remember when the doctors were
not nearly so numerous as they are now. I, for one, would be the last to
reverse the sentence