The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck Read Free Page B

he says, ‘The boy dead?’ just as loud as before. Oh, I could have—well, never mind. The old farmer says, ‘We ain’t afraid to learn, now, any more, Doctor,’ and he snaps, ‘Why should you be? I told you four days ago it was no use.’ He’s off his head, Dave, really. Oh, you’ve got to believe me.
    “Well, the kid was dead. But even that wasn’t enough for the old devil. He starts right away saying that the hospital couldn’t pay for the oxygen, trying to make them pay forty dollars right away. Forty dollars! They won’t see that much actual cash in a year, on the kind of a farm they must have.
    “And there’s old Wyck in his swanky clothes, telling that ragged couple to rake up forty dollars. They can’t let him go on in the clinic. He’s insane. I know it.
    “Got any more reasons than that for thinking so?” I asked, pausing in front of Alling’s.
    She seemed to shudder. Her hands folded into fists. “No,” she said. “No, nothing special.”
    “Well, have you reported this to anyone yet?”
    She gasped suddenly. “No! Oh, no. And you mustn’t either. They’ve got to find some other things about him that I don’t know about. Don’t you see? He’d know it was me that told, unless— Those old people! I wish they’d have the nerve to come right to Alling about it.”
    She stared at me in a strange fashion, turned suddenly, and hurried on.

Three
    I found that Prexy Alling was waiting for me in his study, and made once more the conscious effort to be at east which was necessary in the presence of his deformity. You must have seen his picture in the papers; but he usually poses in a fashion to conceal the twisted body that may have more than a little to do with her personal interest in unusual places of medicine and surgery. All year I have been taking notes for a work, the title of which reveals its author’s attitude. Planned to fill at least six sturdy quarts, it pleases him to call it A Short Sketch for a History of Concomitant Variations in Morphogenesis and Psychogenesis. [ 1 ] The title is not overly modest as he himself sees it, in comparison with all that yet remains to be collated.
    As I came in on the morning of which I have been writing, he said, “Hello, Saunders. While it’s fresh in mind I want you to take this revision for that introduction to the third part. I at last got it straight in my mind while I was shaving this morning.”

    I am reproducing this material from my notes, because of the bearing which it has on later events:
    “Science,” he dictated, “has its own superstitions. Among them is a bewildering tendency to act as if it sees nothing whatever, when confronted by phenomena which it cannot as yet see clearly and fully. Yet as we advance the science of therapeutics, our methodologies encroach more and more upon realms now loosely described as ‘psychic.’ It has long been known and generally acknowledged that madmen are wont to exhibit super-physical strength. On the 7th of February, 1932, under the supervision of the Director of the Main State Asylum for the Insane, Dr. A. V. Kernochan, I personally was permitted to measure with a dynamograph the physical reactions of certain inmates of that institution. The most significant case was that of J. T. L., still an inmate, who makes a continual boast of his great strength. J. T. L.’s weight is 157 pounds. His proportions are about normal, his muscular development pronounced but not extraordinary. With shoulders strapped into the mechanism show in plate No. (?) he was able to exert 2600 foot-pounds of contractile effort between shoulders and fists. On the other hand, R. O. M., a profession wrestler who volunteered for the same experiment on the 12th of February, at the Maine State College of Surgery, in the presence of Gideon Wyck, M.D., could exert a maximum of only 1050 foot-pounds in the same apparatus under like conditions. R. O. M. weighed 211 pounds, stripped, and displays abnormal muscular