naked, thin, with a closely cropped head of black hair, and a face pinched and blanched with fear.  Surrounded by a fair-sized army of big, muscular surgeons and white-clothed nurses, and a gallery filled with a hundred or more of the leading medical men of the metropolis, he certainly seemed a helpless speck of humanity with all the unknown forces of science and modern life arrayed against him.  Under ordinary conditions he would have been etherized in an adjoining chamber and brought into the operating-room entirely unconscious.  This cripple, however, had been selected as a favorable subject for an interesting experiment in modern surgery, for he was to undergo an extremely torturous operation in a state of full consciousness.

Among the assembled surgeons was a large-framed, black moustached and black-haired, quick-moving, gypsy-like Rumanian—­Professor Thomas Jonnesco, dean of the Medical Department of the University of Bucharest, and one of the leading men of his profession in Europe.  Dr. Jonnesco, who had landed in New York only two days before, had come to the United States with a definite scientific purpose.  This was to show American surgeons that the most difficult operations could be performed without pain, without loss of consciousness, and without the use of the familiar anesthetics, ether or chloroform.  Dr. Jonnesco’s reputation in itself assured him the fullest opportunity of demonstrating his method in New York, and this six-year-old boy had been selected as an excellent test subject.

Under the gentle assurances of the nurses that “no one was going to hurt” him, the boy assumed a sitting posture on the operating-table, with his feet dangling over the edge.  Then, at the request of Dr. Jonnesco, he bent his head forward until it almost touched his breast.  This threw the child’s back into the desired position—­that of the typical bicycle “scorcher,”—­making each particular vertebra stand out sharply under the tight drawn skin.  Dr. Jonnesco quickly ran his finger along the protuberances, and finally selected the space between the twelfth dorsal and the first lumbar vertebrae—­in other words, the space just above the small of the back.  He then took an ordinary hypodermic needle, and slowly pushed it through the skin and tissues until it entered the small opening between the lower and upper vertebrae, not stopping until it reached the open space just this side of the spinal cord.

As the needle pierced the flesh, the little patient gave a sharp cry—­the only sign of discomfiture displayed during the entire operation.  When the hollow needle reached its destination, a few drops of a colorless liquid spurted out—­the famous cerebro-spinal fluid, the substance which, like a water-jacket, envelops the brain and the spinal cord.  Into this same place Dr. Jonnesco now introduced an ordinary surgical syringe, which he had previously filled with a pale yellowish liquid—­the much-famed