Our first big game that season was with Wesleyan and we lost it by default, both my teammate, Carson Hull (later known as Big Bill Edwards), and I forgetting all about it. Some of the undergraduates got very angry at us for this, and for many days, every time we would appear on the campus, they would point at us and shout: “You bad men, you!”
XII
I Transfer from Princeton to Medicine
After the Wesleyan game fiasco, there was some talk of firing myself and Big Bill Edwards off the team and selecting other players to represent Princeton at hockey, but this idea was given up when it was found that we were the only two men in college who had skates.
Our second game was with my former alumna, Yale, and Big Bill, who was then known as Hull on account of his resemblance to that part of a ship, broke it up the moment he stepped on the ice. The balance of the hockey season was spent trying to get him out of the lake, where the fish were making vigorous complaints about the congestion. The lake was called Lake Carnegie after the library of that name, it being used as a receptacle for the students’ books.
Owing to my success on the mandolin club, where I played E string on one of the banjos, my name came to the ears of the Dean.
“Have you registered?” he asked.
“No,” I replied.
“Well,” said Dean Cornwell, “you register and we’ll fix you up the best we can. But you can’t have a bath because there is an Odd Fellows’ convention here this week.”
“What is his name?” I asked. “And why does he object to people’s having baths?”
The Dean was greatly amused at my simplicity and in after years we met again and got a hearty laugh out of the episode.24
Dean Cornwell next inquired regarding my choice of a course.
“Well,” I said, “six thousand yards is plenty if it’s well trapped.”
Once more I had displayed my naivete and the Dean was in hysterics.
“Lardner,” said he, “I wish you would stay at Princeton all your life. You are a yell!”25
Aided by the Dean’s influence, I soon became a member of the Dekes, the Alpha Delts, the Phi Beta Kappas, the Kiwanis, and Realty Board and was rushed by the Triangle Club, the most exclusive of Princeton’s social organizations. They rushed me as far as Trenton and then relinquished the chase on my promise to enter the University of Illinois.
At Illinois I took up the study of medicine, a six months’ course in those days, unless you were bright. Among my classmates were Harold (Red) Grange, L. M. (Mike) Tobin, C. C. (Chamber of Commerce) Pyle, and Fred (Peaches) Nymeyer. Illinois had the right idea about that bane of most medical students’ existences—anatomy. It was the custom at that time for the instructors to employ some prominent undergraduate or alumnus and dissect him with a view to showing, for the pupils’ benefit, his general structure and the location and function of his various organs.
Yale, for example, used Mr. Taft and it took two years to go all over him, even in a hurry. And the same at Michigan, where Germany Schulz was selected as the subject. At Illinois, on the other hand, we dissected one of Singer’s Midgets and got through the course in one day, with an hour off for glee club rehearsal.
I was graduated in medicine and awarded my M.D. after only two months of study; moreover, I passed the final examination with a perfect mark of 100 and still have a copy of the questions and answers of that examination, which may be of interest to medical students and practicing physicians of the present day:
Q. Where is your appendix located? A. In Washington Park Hospital, Chicago, unless the cleaning woman has been in.
Q. How does the stomach act when you eat regularly? A. Surprised.
Q. What has been your hospital experience? A. Terrible.
Q. What would you do in a case of an epileptic fit? A. Call a doctor.
Q. What would you do if somebody had a stroke? A. See that they counted it.
XIII
My Medical Career
Most young doctors make the mistake of hanging out their shingles in large or small cities where there are already more medicos than can earn a comfortable living. At the time I received my degree, automobiles were just coming into vogue and after giving the subject considerable thought, I evolved the following scheme—to establish a gasoline station on a popular motor highway, far from any town; to run a restaurant in connection with it, and to keep secret the fact that I was an M.D. I selected a site halfway between Kansas City and Pittsburgh, put up two gasoline pumps and an attractive roadhouse and painted a sign, “Filling Station for Man and Motor.” The sign itself amused everybody.26
For a wage of four dollars a week, I hired a fifteen-year-old boy who, in infancy, had fallen through an open stopper in a wash basin and spent a week in the waste pipe, and ever since had had a horror of water in any form. By now he was so soiled and blurred that people began to languish the instant they saw him.
It was Roach’s (this boy’s) task to stand out in front by the gasoline pumps and as soon as customers stopped for gas, got a good look at him and started to droop, he would say, “Madam, or Sir (as the case might be), you ain’t well. Fortunately, there is a doctor stopping with us,” whereupon I would be summoned and would minister to my patient or patients, charging huge fees and getting away
