The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston

Author:Wayne Johnston
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), General Fiction
ISBN: 9780676972153
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1998-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

FIELDING’S JOURNAL, JANUARY 17, 1932

Dear Father:

You were a doctor, a “chest man,” scornful of your profession because you loved your patients and pitied them for having no one better to turn to for help than, as you put it, “the likes of me.” If you muttered aloud in your consulting room the way you did at home about some man who, for all you knew, your remedies were inadvertently murdering by slow degrees, your patients must have been a fretful lot.

You inherited from your father a reprint of a pamphlet that was written in the sixteenth century by a John Fielding, who was probably not an ancestor of ours, though you liked to believe or pretend that he was. The pamphlet described in great detail a medical procedure that you called mental ventilation, that is, the drilling of holes in the skulls of the sick to let the “evil spirits” out. You loved to read the pamphlet aloud. “This yeere have we the skull drille employed with great success. Three men died who woulde anywaye have perished, but three still live and showe signes of recoverye that we hope will soone make possible a seconde application of the drille.”

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