A Study in Pathological Romance
“Castor Oyle”
Holmes was not the only creation of Conan Doyle’s to feel the lampooners’ sting. The publication of Round the Red Lamp inspired this parody of two of the stories: “The Third Generation” and “My First Operation.” It appeared in the Dec. 1 issue of Lika Joko. The short-lived magazine was edited by former Punch illustrator Harry Furniss (1854-1925), who went on to become a pioneering animator for Thomas Edison.
It was raining heavily. The water came down like a douche bath, and stung the few passers-by like a carbolic spray.
Dr. Hardas Stone sat in his dining-room in Harley Street, sipping his wine after dinner, and admiring its rich ruby tints, like those of a carminative mixture, as he held his glass to the light.
A hansom splashed and rattled furiously along the unlovely street. “Ha!” said the doctor, with that marvellous diagnosis which marked him out above the rest of the College of Surgeons; “ha! a patient!”
In a moment the bishop-like butler ushered in a gentleman of distinguished appearance, but pale and haggard-looking. “I have no time to attend to you,” said Dr. Hardas Stone; “at this moment I am the trusted medical adviser of half the crowned heads, and all the peerage.”
“I am the fourth baronet of my family,” gasped the intruder.
“In that case,” said the doctor, “I can give you five minutes. Sit down and tell me your symptoms.”
The patient introduced himself as Sir Fancy Symptoms, and began to tell his ailments in a round-about and discursive fashion, but the doctor did not listen to him. Through the thin party-wall came the groans of a piano and the shrill screams of a fiddle as the neighbouring surgeon’s daughters vivisected the intermezzo of an Italian composer.
“Time’s up!” said Dr. Hardas Stone, snapping his watch with a peculiar click. Then this man, who had done things that no other man in the profession had dared to do, put up his spectroscope and his datura tatula into his hat, and, cramming his pockets with bistouries, scissors, lint, forceps, and hypodermic syringes, hurried his visitor into the pair-horse barouche in which he drove to see his illustrious patients.
They tore furiously through the dank, dark streets in dead silence. Only once the doctor moved uneasily.
“Is my case so utterly hopeless, then?” muttered Sir Fancy.
“Your case? Pooh!” said Dr. Hardas Stone, in his deep bass voice; “the instrument-maker’s case. I have been sitting on the bistouries.”
In another moment they were passing through double rows of students, each one with his stethoscope in his hat-band, and his note-book and a roll of lint under his arm, on the way to the operating theatre. They entered. Round them and above them rose serried rows of faces, the elder hard and callous, the younger pale and sick with anticipation; for Hardas Stone was famous for plunging the medulla oblongata, marvellous instrument of his own invention, nearer the source of life than any other man.
In a moment the doctor had laid Sir Fancy on the dissecting table, and turning with his best society smile to the house-surgeon, remarked, “Lovely girl dancing at the Frillery. I go every night. Will probably develop ossification of the patella.” Then the doctor placed his large, white muscular hands, with their long tapering fingers, on Sir Fancy’s face, and with his thumbs on each side of his nose moved it backwards and forwards.
“Gentlemen,” he said, half-turning to the breathless and awe-struck theatre, “gentlemen, a most interesting case. It is planipetalous, and adherent in one spot.”
“I knew it,” groaned the patient, casting his arms up to heaven.
“How long have you known it?” said Dr. Hardas Stone, turning his stern steel grey eyes on him.
“Since this morning, when I blew my nose,” whimpered Sir Fancy.
“It is impossible,” said the doctor, “to diagnose the case unless you have full confidence in your medical man, and be careful that no false modesty prevents you from speaking out. Do not think,” he continued, in his Big Ben voice, “that I do not want your secrets, because we are men in a book, and all these people are listening.”
“I have told all,” wailed the patient. “I have concealed nothing. I drink nothing but aerated water, but my grandfather was a three-bottle man.”
Dr. Hardas Stone put his tongue in his cheek and made a strange clicking noise. Then he turned again to his audience. “It is also pachydermatous,” he continued.
Tears came into Sir Fancy’s eyes, and a young student in the front row turned a ghastly white.
“And primogeniture,” continued the doctor, his deep bass voice ringing through the theatre.
The patient rose to a sitting position, clasped his face in his hands, and screamed out—“Oh, heavens! What have I done to suffer like this? I never touched my grandfather’s three-bottle nose! And I was to have been married on Tuesday!”
“Impossible with a nose like this,” said the doctor, taking the organ between his finger and thumb, and forcing Sir Fancy back into a recumbent position.
But the patient had fallen back on the table in a dead faint.
* * * *
When he came to himself he was lying in the theatre, which was in darkness but for the light of a solitary candle. He sat up and felt his nose.
“It is not off,” he groaned, “and the doctor said it was polyphloisboiothalassical. How long have I to live?”
A student laughed. “By fainting like that you missed one of Hardas Stone’s most brilliant lectures. For two hours he entertained us with his most racy stories.”
“And was there no operation, then?”
“Not a bit of it. Why, you have not even a cold in the head! But you can’t have too much local colour in a short story.”