, to the vast
circulatory system. Here it is yanked back and forth through the heart,
lungs and capillaries, and if anything is left to fork over to the
disease, it has to squeeze into the long, bony, air-tight socket that
holds the spinal cord. All this is done without seeing the patient's
spinal cord before or after taking. If it could be taken out, and hung
over a clothes line and cleansed with benzine, and then treated with
insect powder, or rolled in corn meal, or preserved in alcohol, and then
put back, it would be all right; but you can't. You pull a man's spine out
of his system and he is bound to miss it, no matter how careful you have
been about it. It is difficult to keep house without the spine. You need
it every time you cook a meal. If the spinal cord could be pulled by a
dentist and put away in pounded ice every time it gets a hot-box, spinal
meningitis would lose its stinger.
I was treated by thirteen physicians, whose names I may give in a future
article. They were, as I said, men I shall long remember. One of them said
very sensibly that meningitis was generally over-doctored. I told him that
I agreed with him. I said that if I should have another year of meningitis
and thirteen more doctors, I would have to postpone my trip to Europe,
where I had hoped to go and cultivate my voice. I've got a perfectly
lovely voice, if I would take it to Europe and have it sand-papered and
varnished, and mellowed down with beer and bologna.
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