"C M Kornbluth - The Little Black Bag" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

After twenty generations of shilly-shallying and "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it," genus homo
had bred itself into an impasse. Dogged biometricians had pointed out with irrefutable logic that mental
subnormals were outbreeding mental normals and supemormals, and that the process was occurring on
an exponential curve. Every fact that could be mustered in the argument proved the biometricians' case,
and led inevitably to the conclusion that genus homo was going to wind up in a preposterous jam quite
soon. If you think that had any effect on breeding practices, you do not know genus homo.

There was, of course, a sort of masking effect produced by that other exponential function, the
accumulation of technological devices. A moron trained to punch an adding machine seems to be a more
skillful computer than a medieval mathematician trained to count on his fingers. A moron trained to
operate the twenty-first century equivalent of a linotype seems to be a better typographer than a
Renaissance printer limited to a few fonts of movable type. This is also true of medical practice.

It was a complicated affair of many factors. The supemormals "improved the product" at greater speed
than the subnormals degraded it, but in smaller quantity because elaborate training of their children was
practiced on a custom-made basis. The fetish of higher education had some weird avatars by the
twentieth generation:
 "colleges" where not a member of the student body could read words of three syllables; "universities"
where such degrees as "Bachelor of Typewriting," ''Master of Shorthand" and "Doctor of Philosophy
(Card Filing)" were conferred with the traditional pomp. The handful of supernormals used such devices
in order that the vast majority might keep some semblance of a social order going.

Some day the supernormals would mercilessly cross the bridge; at the twentieth generation they were
standing irresolutely at its approaches wondering what had hit them. And the ghosts of twenty generations
of biometncians chuckled malignantly.

It is a certain Doctor of Medicine of this twentieth generation that we are concerned with. His name was
Hemingway-John Hemingway. B.Sc., M.D. He was a general practitioner, and did not hold with running
to specialists with every trifling ailment. He often said as much, in approximately these words: "Now,




uh, what I mean is you got a good old G.P. See what 1 mean? Well, uh, now a good old G.P. don't
claim he knows all about lungs and glands and them things, get me? But you got a G.P., you got, uh, you
got a, well, you got a .

all-around man! That's what you got when you got a G.P.-you got a all-around man."

But from this, do not imagine that Dr. Hemingway was a poor doctor. He could remove tonsils or
appendixes, assist at practically any confinement and deliver a living, uninjured infant, correctly diagnose
hundreds of ailments, and prescribe and administer the correct medication or treatment for each. There
was, in fact, only one thing he could not do in the medical line, and that was, violate the ancient canons of
medical ethics. And Dr. Hemingway knew better than to try.

Dr. Hemingway and a few friends were chatting one evening when the event occurred that precipitates
him into our story. He had been through a hard day at the clinic, and he wished his physicist friend Walter
Gillis, B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D., would shut up so he could tell everybody about it. But Gillis kept rambling
on, in his stilted fashion: "You got to hand to old Mike; he don't have what we call the scientific method,