uring of a
presumably minor disorder that most robust male adults have. In personal
tribute I may add that I have never been hypochondriac in any possible
respect. However, toward the end of those three weeks I formed the
decision that I would go to see a doctor or so. But I would sneak up on
these gentlemen, so to speak. I would call upon them in the role of a
friend rather than avowedly as a prospective patient, and take them into
my confidence, as it were, by degrees. Somewhere in the back part of my
brain I nursed a persistent fear that my complaints might be diagnosed as
symptoms of that incurable malady known as being forty-four years old,
going, on forty-five. And I knew that much already without paying a
physician twenty-five dollars for telling me so the first time and ten
dollars for each time he told it to me over again.

Rather shamefacedly, with a well-simulated air of casualness, I dropped in
upon a physician who is a friend of mine and in whose judgment I have
confidence; and then, after a two-day interval, I went to see a second
physician of my acquaintance who, I believe, also thoroughly knows his
trade. With both men I followed the same tactics--roundabout chatting on
the topic of this or that, and finally an honest confession as to the real
purpose of my visit. In both instances the results were practically
identical. Each man manifested an almost morbid curiosity touching on my
personal habits and bodily idiosyncrasies. Each asked me a lot of
questions. Each went at me with X-ray machines and blood tests and
chemical analysissies--if there isn't any such word I claim there should
be--until my being was practically an open book to him and I had no
secrets left at all.

And the upshot of all this was that each of them told me that though
organically I was as sound as a nut in fact much sounder than some of the
nuts they knew professionally--I was carrying an overload of avoirdupois
about with me. In other words, I was too fat for my own good. I was eating
too much sweet stuff and entirely too much starch--especially starch. They
agreed on this point emphatically. As well as I could gather, I was
subjecting my interior to that highly shellacked gloss which is peculiar
to the bosom of the old-fashioned full-dress or burying shirt upon its
return from the steam laundry, when what my system really called for was
the dull domestic finish.

"Well, doc," I said upon hearing this for the second time in langu