Athothis : a satire on modern medicine / by Thomas C. Minor.

CHAPTER V. A MODERN CONSULTATION—AND ATHOTHIS MAKES A PROG- NOSIS. HE three consulting physicians were engaged in earnest conversation. " Who are these men ? " inquired Athothis, and Paulus Androcydes answered : " You see before you Doctors Pillem? Billeni, and Killem, all leading practitioners of medicine. These scientists are highly esteemed by the public, and have multitudes of patients among the wealthy and fash- ionable classes of society. The tall man, sitting at the table examining a clinical thermometer, is Professor Billem, one of the oracles of our faculty ; he lives in finer style than any physician in the city. His brown-stone front is a perfect palace, and the consultation rooms therein are grandly fitted up. There, all the modern in- struments of precision are conspicuously displayed and produce a sublime moral effect on his clients. His silver- plated galvanic battery, mounted as handsomely as a concert piano, is always open, and his curious visitors are never weary of casting admiring glances at the mysterious cabalistic symbols on the key-board. A brass-mounted microscope, made in London, regardless of cost, serves as a shining ornament to the expansive bay-window. His walls are adorned with sphygmographic tracings taken directly from the pulses of great statesmen, renowned generals, eminent divines, and the nabobs of the land. Bright colored charts of diseased brains and spinal col-