RIDGEON. You keep up your interest in science, do you?

SIR PATRICK. Lord! yes. Modern science is a wonderful thing. Look at
your great discovery! Look at all the great discoveries! Where are
they leading to? Why, right back to my poor dear old father's ideas
and discoveries. He's been dead now over forty years. Oh, it's very
interesting.

RIDGEON. Well, theres nothing like progress, is there?

SIR PATRICK. Dont misunderstand me, my boy. I'm not belittling your
discovery. Most discoveries are made regularly every fifteen years;
and it's fully a hundred and fifty since yours was made last. Thats
something to be proud of. But your discovery's not new. It's only
inoculation. My father practised inoculation until it was made criminal
in eighteen-forty. That broke the poor old man's heart, Colly: he died
of it. And now it turns out that my father was right after all. Youve
brought us back to inoculation.

RIDGEON. I know nothing about smallpox. My line is tuberculosis and
typhoid and plague. But of course the principle of all vaccines is the
same.

SIR PATRICK. Tuberculosis? M-m-m-m! Youve found out how to cure
consumption, eh?

RIDGEON. I believe so.

SIR PATRICK. Ah yes. It's very interesting. What is it the old cardinal
says in Browning's play? "I have known four and twenty leaders of
revolt." Well, Ive known over thirty men that found out how to cure
consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment, I
suppose. There was my father's old friend George Boddington of Sutton
Coldfield. He discovered the open-air cure in eighteen-forty. He was
ruined and driven out of his practice for only opening the windows; and
now we wont let a consumptive patient have as much as a roof over his
head. Oh, it's very VERY interesting to an old man.

RIDGEON. You old cynic, you dont believe a bit in my discovery.

SIR PATRICK. No, no: I dont go quite so far as that, Colly. But still,
you remember Jane Marsh?

RIDGEON. Jane Marsh? No.

SIR PATRICK. You dont!

RIDGEON. No.

SIR PATRICK. You mean to tell me you dont remember the woman with the
tuberculosis ulcer on her arm?

RIDGEON [enlightened] Oh, your washerwoman's daughter. Was her name Jane
Marsh? I forgot.

SIR PATRICK. Perhaps youve forgotten also that you undertook to cure her
with Koch's tuberculin.

RIDGEON. And instead of curing her, it rotted her arm right off. Yes:
I remember. Poor Jane! However, she makes a good living out of that arm
now by s