The Stark Munro Letters X - Cadogan Terrace, Birchespool, 21st May, 1882

Arthur Conan Doyle (0:01)

CHAPTER X of The Stark Munro Letters This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org. THE STARK MUNRO LETTERS by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle CHAPTER X. Categan Terrace, Birch Spool, 21st of May, 1882 My dear old chap, things have been happening, and I must tell you all about it. Sympathy is a strange thing. For though I never see you, the mere fact that you over there in New England are keenly interested in what I am doing and thinking makes my own life in old England very much more interesting to me. The thought of you is like a good staff in my right hand. The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name. You remember that in my last I had received my dismissal, and was on the eve of starting for the little country town of Stockwell to see if there were any sign of a possible practice there. Well, in the morning, before I came down to breakfast, I was putting one or two things into a bag when there came a timid knock at my door, and there was Mrs. Collingworth in her dressing jacket with her hair down her back. Would you mind coming down and seeing James, Dr. Munro? said she. He has been very strange all night, and I am afraid that he is ill.

Down I went and found Collingworth looking rather red in the face and a trifle wild about the eyes. He was sitting up in bed with the neck of his nightgown open, and an acute angle of hairy chest exposed. He had a sheet of paper, a pencil, and a clinical thermometer upon the coverlet in front of him. Deuced interesting thing, Munro, said he.

Come and look at this temperature chart. I've been taking it every quarter of an hour, since I couldn't sleep, and it's up and down till it looks like the mountains in the geography books. We'll have some drugs in, hey, what, Munro? And by crumbs, we'll revolutionize all their ideas about fevers. I'll write a pamphlet from Personal Experiment that will make all their books clean out of date, and love to tear them up and wrap sandwiches in them. He was talking in the rapid, slurring way of a man who has trouble coming. I looked at his chart and saw that he was over 102 degrees.

His pulse rub-a-dubbed under my fingers, and his skin sent a glow into my hand.

Any symptoms? I asked, sitting down on the side of his bed. Tongue like a nutmeg grater, said he, thrusting it out. Frontal headache, renal pains, no appetite, and a mouse nibbling inside my left elbow. That's as far as we've got at present.

I'll tell you what it is, Cullingworth, said I. You have a touch of rheumatic fever, and you will have to lie by for a bit.

Lie by be hanged, he cried. I've got a hundred people to see today. My boy, I must be down there if I have the rattle in my throat. I didn't build up a practice to have it ruined by a few ounces of lactic acid.

James, dear, you can easily build up another one, said his wife, in her cooing voice. You must do what Dr. Munro tells you.

Well, said I, you'll want looking after, and your practice will want looking after, and I am quite ready to do both, but I won't take the responsibility unless you give me your word that you will do what you are told. If I'm to have any doctoring, it must come from you, laddie, he said. For if I was to turn my toes up in the public square, there's not a man here who would do more than sign my certificate. By crumbs they might get the salts and oxalic acid mixed up if they came to treat me, for there's no love lost between us. But I want to go down to the practice all the same.

It's out of the question. You know the sequel of this complaint. You'll have endocarditis, embolism, thrombosis, metastatic abscesses. You know the danger as well as I do.

He sank back into his bed laughing. I take my complaints one at a time, thank you, said he. I wouldn't be so greedy as to have all those. Eh, Munro, what? When many another poor devil hasn't got an ache to his back.

The four posts of his bed quivered with his laughter.

Do what you like, laddie, but I say mind if anything should happen, no tomfoolery over my grave. If you put so much as a stone there by Crum's Munro, I'll come back in the dead of the night and plant it on the pit of your stomach.