Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. A Fashionable Doctor
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One day, one of my best friends hit me on the back
of the head with a hammer he had got hold of in
some inexplicable way, and I was carried
unconscious to the infirmary. It was a terrible blow,
my friend was an ex-blacksmith who knew his
business. They thought at first I had a fracture
of the skull. Not I! It was only a commotion
cérébrale and my misadventure brought me a
flattering compliment from the chef de clinique:
“Ce sacré Suédois a le crâne d’un ours, faut voir
s’il n’a pas cassé le marteau!”
“After all it may be in the head and not in the
hand,” said I to myself when my mental
machinery set to work after a standstill of forty-eight
hours. As I lay there in the infirmary a whole
week with an ice-bag on my “head of a bear” and
no visitors or books to keep me company, I began
to think hard on the subject, and not even the
blacksmith’s hammer could make me abandon
my theory that it was all in the hand.
Why could I put my hand between the bars of
the black panther’s cage in Ménagerie Pezon and,
if nobody came near to irritate him, make the big
cat roll over on his back, purring amiably at me,
with my hand between his paws and yawning at
me with his big mouth wide open? Why could I
lance the abscess in Léonie’s foot and pull out the
splinter of wood that had made the big lioness
tramp about restlessly on three legs for a week
in agonizing pain? The local anæsthetic had
proved a failure, and poor Léonie moaned like a
child when I pressed the pus out of her paw.
Only when I disinfected the wound she got
somewhat impatient, but there was no wrath in the
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