The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Coffin Cure, by Alan Edward Nourse

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Title: The Coffin Cure

Author: Alan Edward Nourse

Release Date: January 14, 2008 [EBook #24276]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The
Coffin
Cure

by Alan E. Nourse

When the discovery was announced, it was Dr. Chauncey Patrick Coffin who
announced it. He had, of course, arranged with uncanny skill to take
most of the credit for himself. If it turned out to be greater than he
had hoped, so much the better. His presentation was scheduled for the
last night of the American College of Clinical Practitioners' annual
meeting, and Coffin had fully intended it to be a bombshell.

It was. Its explosion exceeded even Dr. Coffin's wilder expectations,
which took quite a bit of doing. In the end he had waded through more
newspaper reporters than medical doctors as he left the hall that night.
It was a heady evening for Chauncey Patrick Coffin, M.D.

Certain others were not so delighted with Coffin's bombshell.

"It's idiocy!" young Dr. Phillip Dawson wailed in the laboratory
conference room the next morning. "Blind, screaming idiocy. You've gone
out of your mind--that's all there is to it. Can't you see what you've
done? Aside from selling your colleagues down the river, that is?" He
clenched the reprint of Coffin's address in his hand and brandished it
like a broadsword. "'Report on a Vaccine for the Treatment and Cure of
the Common Cold,' by C. P. Coffin, _et al._ That's what it says--_et
al._ My idea in the first place. Jake and I both pounding our heads on
the wall for eight solid months--and now you sneak it into publication a
full year before we have any business publishing a word about it."

"Really, Phillip!" Dr. Chauncey Coffin ran a pudgy hand through his
snowy hair. "How ungrateful! I thought for sure you'd be delighted. An
excellent presentation, I must say--terse, succinct, unequivocal--" he
raised his hand--"but _generously_ unequivocal, you understand. You
should