Tornado Pratt by Paul Ableman Page A

out of his huge pop eyes and I began to feel hostility grow inside me. I could tell he was kidding me and it jarred my pride. He continued:
    “If you’re not interested in haruspication and you’re not interested in medicine, then why have you come?”
    “Now look, Doctor, I want—”
    “You want to hear my views on your case. Before I’ve examined you—either of you. But until I’ve examined you, I haven’t got any views on your case. I’m a medical man not a soothsayer. Let me ask you something, Mr Pratt, do you know what the pancreas is?”
    “Part of the innards.”
    “Eloquently put, Mr Pratt. Could you possibly state, in a few succinct words, what the pancreas does?”
    “No, I couldn’t.”
    “Neither could most people—outside the medical profession. I wonder if you know what the liver does—or the spleen? You probably realize that the heart beats, but I wonder if you could draw me a diagram of the heart, Mr Pratt? In my experience, most people know less about the inside of their bodies than they do about the inside of their cars. This is very strange, really, because you’d think it would be a subject dear to them. Now I know quite a bit about the insides of people, Mr Pratt, and what I know has suggested to me how much I don’t know. I believe you’re a millionaire, Mr Pratt?”
    I didn’t like this wise-cracking freak, Horace, and I made no reply.
    “It would probably be unfair to accuse you of just shufflingpapers, Mr Pratt. I know that getting anywhere in this world means you have to be smarter than thousands of other guys who would be in your place if they could. I’m sure you have a sound grasp of your field. Nevertheless, will you believe me when I say that the units with which you operate are as static as stones and as inert as lead compared to the cells and tissues of the human body? You see, Mr Pratt, even after exhaustive physical examination by an A-1 diagnostician like myself, even after laboratory tests, it is still a challenge to know just what is going on inside a particular human body. This is because a man—and, of course, a woman too—is not a crude assembly of inert parts like a car or even a watch but a dynamic assembly of individually dynamic parts. Each sub-division of the whole is itself a living entity. The simplest statement a doctor can make may be contradicted by the human body’s almost infinite capacity for surprising. I have seen three doctors pronounce dead a man who lived to study medicine. I have seen infected wounds heal without treatment and gaping wounds appear, for no apparent reason, in healthy tissue. I have even seen Indians think themselves to death because a medicine man told them they would die. Now it is possible that when I examine you, I will find manifest and obvious reasons for your failure to have a child. But I may also find that the results of all the tests I make are inconclusive and that it is beyond my skill to help. I will be patient and I will attempt, as long as any hope remains, to find the impediment so it can be mended. But I will not, and cannot, Mr Pratt, offer any views at all until I have made an examination.”
    And, cool as peppermint, Horace, he ushers Nat into his consulting-room. By that time, Horace, I had already thawed somewhat towards this voluble, gum-chewing doctor and subsequently he became a close friend of mine. And that is just the reason I’ve been telling you all this, Horace. Something has gone wrong with my head and the only person who can put it right is Ezra Schumacher, who was known as “Chuck” to his friends. I had a cable from him this morning, stating: dear old buddy, should you happen to get a stroke today, send for me at once. So what I want you to do right now, Horace, is cable Ezra Schumacher—sometimes we called him “Chuck”—to hustle out here and vanquish the crimson armies that are storming the citadel of my life. Ezra has the modern weapons that can lick them.
P RATT’S T IME OF P