Jasper County Democrat, Volume 6, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 July 1903 — Father of Stories About Doctors. [ARTICLE]

Father of Stories About Doctors.

Dr. W. W. Keen of Philadelphia has the hobby of collecting anecdotes of physicians. These anecJdotes he preserves in scrapbooks and in costly extra illustrated volumes, and sometimes he reads selections from them at medical festivals. “The most common medical anecdotes,” Baid Dr. Keen recently, “suggest that the physician is a murderer. All such stories are as old as the hills in their fundamental idea, though your modem writer puts them in new clothes. And they look ghastly in their new clothes—as ghastly as though you should array a corpse in fancy dress. “A lawyer and a doctor were conversing. The doctor said, TTonr profession doesn’t make men angels, sir.’ The lawyer answered, ‘No; it is yours which does that.* “This anecdote, which is 2,000 years old,” said Dr. Keen, “is reputed to be the parent of all the myriad of medical anecdotes that now exist.”