of them looks funny. You sure you didn't make these yourself?' They didn't take the one-dollar offer.
The girl was baffled and angry; the doctor was baffled too, but triumphant. He had two dollars, and the girl had a half-interest in something nobody wanted. But, he suddenly marveled, the thing had been all right to cure the kid, hadn't it?
'Well,' he asked her, 'do you give up? As you see, the kit is practically valueless.'
She was thinking hard. 'Don't fly off the handle, doc. I don't get this but something's going on all right... would those guys know good stuff if they saw it?'
'They would. They make a living from it. Wherever this kit came from—'
She seized on that, with a devilish faculty she seemed to have of eliciting answers without asking questions. 'I thought so. You don't know either, huh? Well, maybe I can find out for you. C'mon in here. I ain't letting go of that thing. There's money in it—some way, I don't know how, there's money in it.' He followed her into a cafeteria and to an almost empty corner. She was oblivious to stares and snickers from the other customers as she opened the little black bag—it almost covered a cafeteria table—and ferreted through it. She picked out a retractor from a loop, scrutinized it, contemptuously threw it down, picked out a speculum, threw it down, picked out the lower half of an O.B. forceps, turned it over, close to her sharp young eyes—and saw what the doctor's dim old ones could not have seen.
All old Dr. Full knew was that she was peering at the neck of the forceps and then turned white. Very carefully, she placed the half of the forceps back in its loop of cloth and then replaced the retractor and the speculum. 'Well?' he asked. 'What did you see?'
' 'Made in U.S.A.,' ' she quoted hoarsely. ' 'Patent Applied for July 2450.' '
He wanted to tell her she must have misread the inscription, that it m»st be a practical joke, that—
But he knew she had read correctly. Those bandage shears: they had <|nven his fingers, rather than his fingers driving them. The hypo needle «wt had no hole. The pretty blue pill that had struck him like a thunderbolt.
'You know what I'm going to do?' asked the girl, with sudden animation. 'I'm going to go to charm school. You'll like that, won't ya, doc? Because we're sure going to be seeing a lot of each other,'
Old Dr. Full didn't answer. His hands had been playing idly with that plastic card from the kit on which had been printed the rows and columns that had guided him twice before. The card had a slight convexity; you could snap the convexity back and forth from one side to the other. He noted, in a daze, that with each snap a different text appeared on the cards. Snap. 'The knife with the blue dot in the handle is for tumors only. Diagnose tumors with your Instrument Seven, the Swelling Tester.
Place the Swelling Tester—' Snap. 'An overdose of the pink pills in Bottle 3 can be fixed with one white pill from Bottle—'' Snap.' 'Hold the suture needle by the end without the hole in it. Touch it to one end of the wound you want to close and let go.
After it has made the knot, touch it—' Snap. ' 'Place the top half of the O.B. Forceps near the opening. Let go. After it has entered and conformed to the shape of—' Snap.
The slot man saw 'FLANNERY 1—MEDICAL' in the upper left corner of the hunk of copy. He automatically scribbled 'trim to .75' on it and skimmed it across the horseshoe-shaped copy desk to Piper, who had been handling Edna Flannery's quack-expose' series. She was a nice youngster, he thought, but like all youngsters she overwrote. Hence, the 'trim.'
Piper dealt back a city hall story to the slot, pinned down Flannery's feature with one hand and began to tap his pencil across it, one tap to a word, at the same steady beat as a teletype carriage traveling across the roller. He wasn't exactly reading it this first time. He was just looking at the letters and words to find out whether, as letters and words, they conformed to Herald style. The steady tap of his pencil ceased at intervals as it drew a black line ending with a stylized letter 'd' through the word
'breast' and scribbled in 'chest' instead, or knocked down the capital 'E' in 'East' to lower case with a diagonal, or closed up a split word—in whose middle Flannery had bumped the space bar of her typewriter—with two curved lines like parentheses rotated through ninety degrees. The thick black pencil zipped a ring around the '30
which, like all youngsters, she put at the end of her stories. He turned back to the first page for the second reading. This time the pencil dre^ lines with the stylized 'd's' at the end of them through adjectives an<j whole phrases, printed big 'L's' to mark paragraphs, hooked some o Flannery's own paragraphs together with swooping recurved lines.
At the bottom of 'FLANNERY ADD 2—MEDICAL' the penc' slowed down and stopped. The slot man, sensitive to the rhythm of his beloved copy desk, looked up almost at once. He saw Piper squinting t the story, at a loss. Without wasting words, the copy reader skimmed •t back across the masonite horseshoe to the chief, caught a police story jn return and buckled down, his pencil tapping. The slot man read as far as the fourth add, barked at Howard, on the rim: 'Sit in for me,' and stumped through the clattering city room toward the alcove where the managing editor presided over his own bedlam.
The copy chief waited his turn while the makeup editor, the pressroom foreman and the chief photographer had words with the M.E. When his turn came, he dropped Flannery's copy on his desk and said: 'She says this one isn't a quack.'
The M.E. read:
'FLANNERY 1—MEDICAL, by Edna Flannery, Herald Staff Writer.
'The sordid tale of medical quackery which the Herald has exposed in this series of articles undergoes a change of pace today which the reporter found a welcome surprise. Her quest for the facts in the case of today's subject started just the same way that her exposure of one dozen shyster M.D.'s and faithhealing phonies did. But she can report for a change that Dr. Bayard Full is, despite unorthodox practices which have drawn the suspicion of the rightly hypersensitive medical associations, a true healer living up to the highest ideals of his profession.
'Dr. Full's name was given to the Herald's reporter by the ethical committee of a county medical association, which reported that he had been expelled from the association, on July 18, 1941 for allegedly 'Milking' several patients suffering from trivial complaints. According to sworn statements in the committee's files, Dr. Full had told them they suffered from cancer, and that he had a treatment which would prolong their lives. After his expulsion from the association, Dr. Full dropped ut of their sight—until he opened a midtown 'sanitarium' in a brownstone front which had for years served as a rooming house.
'The Herald's reporter went to that sanitarium, on East 89th Street, with the full expectation of having numerous imaginary ailments diagnosed and of being promised a sure cure for a flat sum of money. She expected to find unkempt quarters, dirty instruments and the mumbo- jumbo paraphernalia of the shyster M.D. which she had seen a dozen tunes before.
'She was wrong. Dr. Full's sanitarium is spotlessly clean, from its tastefully furnished entrance hall to its shining, white treatment rooms. The attractive, blond receptionist who greeted the reporter was soft-spoken and correct, asking only the reporter's name, address and the general nature of her complaint. This was given, as usual, as 'nagging backache.' The receptionist asked the Herald's reporter to be seated, and a short while later conducted her to a second-floor treatment room and introduced her to Dr. Full.
'Dr. Full's alleged past, as described by the medical society spokesman, is hard to reconcile with his present appearance. He is a clear- eyed, white-haired man in his sixties, to judge by his appearance—a little above middle height and apparently in good physical condition. His voice was firm and friendly, untainted by the ingratiating whine of the shyster M.D. which the reporter has come to know too well.
'The receptionist did not leave the room as he began his examination after a few questions as to the nature and location of the pain. As the reporter lay face down on a treatment table the doctor pressed some instrument to the small of her back. In about one minute he made this astounding statement: 'Young woman, there is no reason for you to have any pain where you say you do. I understand they're saying nowadays that emotional upsets cause pains like that. You'd better go to a psychologist or psychiatrist if the pain keeps up. There is no physical cause for it, so I can do nothing for you.'
'His frankness took the reporter's breath away. Had he guessed she was, so to speak, a spy in his camp? She tried again: 'Well, doctor, perhaps you'd give me a physical checkup, I feel rundown all the time, besides the pains. Maybe I need a tonic.' This is never-failing bait to shyster M.D.'s—an invitation for them to find all sorts of mysterious conditions wrong with a patient, each of which 'requires' an expensive treatment. As explained in the first article of this series, of course, the reporter underwent a thorough physical checkup before she embarked on
