Sir Patrick [grunts]!

B. B. [archly] Aha!  Haha!  Did I hear from the fireside armchair the bow-wow of the old school defending its drugs?  Ah, believe me, Paddy, the world would be healthier if every chemist’s shop in England were demolished.  Look at the papers! full of scandalous advertisements of patent medicines! a huge commercial system of quackery and poison.  Well, whose fault is it?  Ours.  I say, ours.  We set the example.  We spread the superstition.  We taught the people to believe in bottles of doctor’s stuff; and now they buy it at the stores instead of consulting a medical man.

Walpole.  Quite true.  Ive not prescribed a drug for the last fifteen years.

B. B. Drugs can only repress symptoms:  they cannot eradicate disease.  The true remedy for all diseases is Nature’s remedy.  Nature and Science are at one, Sir Patrick, believe me; though you were taught differently.  Nature has provided, in the white corpuscles as you call them—­in the phagocytes as we call them—­a natural means of devouring and destroying all disease germs.  There is at bottom only one genuinely scientific treatment for all diseases, and that is to stimulate the phagocytes.  Stimulate the phagocytes.  Drugs are a delusion.  Find the germ of the disease; prepare from it a suitable anti-toxin; inject it three times a day quarter of an hour before meals; and what is the result?  The phagocytes are stimulated; they devour the disease; and the patient recovers—­unless, of course, he’s too far gone.  That, I take it, is the essence of Ridgeon’s discovery.

Sir Patrick [dreamily] As I sit here, I seem to hear my poor old father talking again.

B. B. [rising in incredulous amazement] Your father!  But, Lord bless my soul, Paddy, your father must have been an older man than you.

Sir Patrick.  Word for word almost, he said what you say.  No more drugs.  Nothing but inoculation.

B. B. [almost contemptuously] Inoculation!  Do you mean smallpox inoculation?

Sir Patrick.  Yes.  In the privacy of our family circle, sir, my father used to declare his belief that smallpox inoculation was good, not only for smallpox, but for all fevers.

B. B. [suddenly rising to the new idea with immense interest and excitement] What!  Ridgeon:  did you hear that?  Sir Patrick:  I am more struck by what you have just told me than I can well express.  Your father, sir, anticipated a discovery of my own.  Listen, Walpole.  Blenkinsop:  attend one moment.  You will all be intensely interested in this.  I was put on the track by accident.  I had a typhoid case and a tetanus case side by side in the hospital:  a beadle and a city missionary.  Think of what that meant for them, poor fellows!  Can a beadle be dignified with typhoid?  Can a missionary be eloquent with lockjaw?  No.  No.  Well, I got some typhoid anti-toxin from Ridgeon and a tube of Muldooley’s