rge: its like a bald-headed man trying to sell a
hair restorer. Thank God I'm a surgeon!

B. B. [sunnily] I am never sick. Never had a day's illness in my life.
Thats what enables me to sympathize with my patients.

WALPOLE [interested] What! youre never ill?

B. B. Never.

WALPOLE. Thats interesting. I believe you have no nuciform sac. If you
ever do feel at all queer, I should very much like to have a look.

B. B. Thank you, my dear fellow; but I'm too busy just now.

RIDGEON. I was just telling them when you came in, Blenkinsop, that I
have worked myself out of sorts.

BLENKINSOP. Well, it seems presumptuous of me to offer a prescription to
a great man like you; but still I have great experience; and if I might
recommend a pound of ripe greengages every day half an hour before
lunch, I'm sure youd find a benefit. Theyre very cheap.

RIDGEON. What do you say to that B. B.?

B. B. [encouragingly] Very sensible, Blenkinsop: very sensible indeed.
I'm delighted to see that you disapprove of drugs.

SIR PATRICK [grunts]!

B. B. [archly] Aha! Haha! Did I hear from the fireside armchair the
bow-wow of the old school defending its drugs? Ah, believe me, Paddy,
the world would be healthier if every chemist's shop in England were
demolished. Look at the papers! full of scandalous advertisements of
patent medicines! a huge commercial system of quackery and poison. Well,
whose fault is it? Ours. I say, ours. We set the example. We spread the
superstition. We taught the people to believe in bottles of doctor's
stuff; and now they buy it at the stores instead of consulting a medical
man.

WALPOLE. Quite true. Ive not prescribed a drug for the last fifteen
years.

B. B. Drugs can only repress symptoms: they cannot eradicate disease.
The true remedy for all diseases is Nature's remedy. Nature and Science
are at one, Sir Patrick, believe me; though you were taught differently.
Nature has provided, in the white corpuscles as you call them--in the
phagocytes as we call them--a natural means of devouring and destroying
all disease germs. There is at bottom only one genuinely scientific
treatment for all diseases, and that is to stimulate the phagocytes.
Stimulate the phagocytes. Drugs are a delusion. Find the germ of the
disease; prepare from it a suitable anti-toxin; inject it three times
a day quarter of an hour before meals; and what is the result? The
phagocytes are stimulated; they devour the disease; and the patient