"Avram Davidson - Blunt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

AVRAM DAVIDSON

BLUNT

Recent books of Mr. Davidsoh's include The Boss in the Wall and the upcoming
collections The Avram Davidson Treasury and The Investigations of Avram
Davidson.

HE HAD THE USUAL MOUNTAIN boyhood in one of those mountainous counties below the
Mason-Dixon line -differing from most other such counties only in being one of
the few that regularly voted Republican -- where there was not much schooling;
but somewhere in the course of what schooling there was, Huey P. Blunt read a
piece about yellow fever and the Panama Canal and how one was conquered so the
other could be built, and he decided to be an Army doctor. Someone {in after
years he tried to remember who first told him, but so many people had agreed and
repeated it and everyone took it for granted it was correct} told him that the
way to do it was to enlist soon's he was old enough and work his way up. Blunt
wasn't talkative and he was six months in the Army before anyone there knew of
his plans, and before he learned what they were worth. What they were worth
officially, that is. He made them worth something, after all, by an illegal
conversion of knowledge. He listened, he watched, he read, he worked; and he
learned much. The Army Medical Corps taught him more than it planned to. Blunt
had deft hands and a good memory.

After his enlistment expired he went back to the hills, to his home country.
There was a very old man practicing medicine there, his name was Elnathan
Wisonant, and he had never been to college either, having picked up all his
knowledge of medicine as apprentice to his father, a "doctor" of similar status.
At one time there were many practitioners of that kind around-- it would not be
accurate or fair to call them quacks -they represented an older tradition in
native medicine than the A.M.A. -they supplied the only"care available at a time
when medical schools were few, and not too well thought of, either. Gradually
they became extinct. For the last forty years o[ his career old Wisonant had
been protected by a state law that exempted all those in the trade at the time
the law was passed from having to meet the qualifications required thereafter.
Blunt became his assistant, which meant that he very shortly took over most of
the hard work while old Wisonant sat by watching and advising, and speaking ill
of "college doctors."

"Horse-leeches," he called them; "bumshavers, quacksalvers, peddlers of snake
oil and pink aspirin.

"A trust, a vile and contemptible monopoly, a guild of grave robbers aping their
betters among the natural philosophers," he would snarl.

One morning the old phlebotomist was found on the floor of his office, white
beard pointing to the ceiling. Although urged by the hill people to carry on and
the hell with them city doctors and their laws, Blunt declined. Roads were
coming into the hills, and automobiles. The day the old man was buried from the
little church of the Foot-Washing Baptists, Blunt was approached by the only