The Autocratic Doctor.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 26, 27 June 1901, Page 18

The Autocratic Doctor.

Thebes, according to Professor Mahaffy. was a noted place for stuffing and gormandising in the days of ancient Greece. Dinner is still the great event of the day in many a modern family ; but we know of no place where the traditions of Theban gorging are a living fact and principle of conduct except in the consumptive sanatoria that adopt the Nordrach system of treatment by open air, regulated exercise, and over- feeding. The last-mentioned item is the most important feature of the cure, but it is one that the patient does not at first take kindly to, and it sometimes requires considerable vigilance and firmness as well on the part of the medical superintendent to tra'n his subjects into the requisite degree of voraciousness A well-known actor who had gone successfully through the treatment, wrote the following verses, whioh appeared in a recent issue of the Bristol Medico- Chirurgical Journal, with, of course, profound acknowledgment to Mr. Rudyard Kipling. The verses are headed ' The Autocratic Doctor," and are timely in connection with the celebration of the second anniversary of the only consumptive sanatorium in New Zealand — that of 1 Nordrach Cottage,' near Dunedin :

'When jou've swallowed Scott's Emulsion by the gallon or the jug, When you've finished iodining of your back, Will yon kindly drop your sputum in my little china mug And send it to a party in Nordracb ? He's an Autocratic Doctor with a rough and ready tongue, But Tubercular Bacilli can't abide him, And the patient finds him busy wiping something off his lung By cramming lots of little things inside him. Raw meat, cooked meat, meat of a hundred kinds. Fifty chronics at table ttriving to eat their lunch, Each of 'em doing his level best to swallow the skins and rinds. Pass your plate for credit's sake and munch, munch, munch.

• There are some who pouch in secret, asking no permission to— For they know they wouldn't get it if they did — Scraps of cheese and bits of lobster, lumps of meat they couldn't chew, And a rather more than " gatney " kid. And havin' been so casual, they feel sorry when they're gone (For the Autocratic Doctor's sure to " out" 'em),

When their lungs are going " dicky " with the winter coming on, They'll miss the bloke who understood about 'em. Cooked food, raw food, plenty of milk and rest, Quarter o' pound o' butter, Schwartzbrod by the hunch, Each of 'em trying to raise his weight and widen his girth and cheat. Pass your plate for credits sake and munch, munch, munch.

Pins and Needles. We children of a larger growth have all been babies ; and Dame Satire, ever mindful of her favorites, threw a cloud over our infantine brows and obscured our intellects so that the memory of our early days is, happily for us, a blank. Bishop Earle puts this idea more poetically when he describes the soul of the child as ' like white paper unscribbled with observations of the world.' We know the wisdom of this now. If our faculties were developed in babyhood our first scribblings would be ' thoughts that burn ' culled from the overheated imagination of maiden aunt or crabbed bachelor, whilst the remainder of the page would be devoted to the thousand-and-one ionly and correct methods of rearing healthy infants. Tom Hood, the inveterate pinster — punster, we mean — had very early recollections of pins, and he put both — the pins and the recollections thereof— into verse :—: — ' Methinks I still suffer the infantine throes, When my flesh was a cushion for any long pin — Whilst they patted my body to comfort my woes, Oh ! how little they dreamt they were driving them in I'

* Most of us, happily, shed our pins and our long-clothes together. But it remains to a Parisian girl and a New South Wales boy of the present day to literally moult and shed needles as a bird does its feathers — to make the illustration more apt we might say the feathers of their wingß or pin-ions. The boy O'Brien of Goulburn does not ' moult ' quite easily. They have been using poultices as magnets to draw the needles out, or, as the old housewives say, 'to bring them to a head.' And then they only come by instalments. There is a separate operation for each piece, as in the oase of the gentleman who ' upon a rampant cactus sat down quite euddenlee.' The Parisian is a nurse-girl aged 16 years. At the early age of 11 years she made a bet that she would swallow a packet of needles —which she did, and gained a penny thereby. Now her sin is findiDg her out, and each needle she isheds points a moral and may ytt, in a seamstress' hand, adorn a dress ' tail ' which will pick up some merry microbes from i the muddy streets and kill the musing moralist. But the needles — except that they may possibly prick her conscience, or point, like the magnetic needle, with her early ' gamble ' for their pole — cause the bright Parisian about as much concern as did the collection of wire nails and ironmongers a sundries annexed by that ■ voracious cow ' at Ashburton a few weeks ago. And all this in spite of the fact that needles, ns an article of food, have been considered about as deadly as a dose of lyddite. * ' I pity those women.' says the Rev. 11. W. Beecher, ' whose staff is their needle ; for when they lean upon it it pierces, not their side, but their heart. I think the needle has slain more than the sword.' It is the weary wearing-out ' stitch, stitch, stitch 'of the 'Song of the Shirt ' over again. But the gay Parisian suffers from no stitch in the side or prickly sensation of tender skin that a certain brand of soap is warranted to cure. She is simply a ' bonne ' lass with one more mystery about her, one more puzzle that mere man can never fathom. Let us hope that woman, who is at the bottom of most mysteries, will get to the bottom of this.