From One Third Off, by Irvin S. Cobb, Illustrated by Tony Sarg; New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921; pp. 75-94.
CHAPTER VII
Office Visits, $ 10
IT required all of two weeks of experimenting with my interior to convince me that whatever it might be that annoyed me, it surely was not a thing which an intensive bombardment of the liver would cure. The liver has a low visibility but is easy to hit.
I had the aversion to seeking professional guidance for the curing of a presumably minor disorder that most robust male adults have. In personal tribute I may add that I have never been hypochondriac in any possible respect. However, toward the end of those three weeks I formed the decision that I would go to see a doctor or so. But I would sneak up on theses gentlemen, so to speak. I would call upon them in the rôle of a friend rather than avowedly 76 as a prospective patient, and take them into my confidence, as it were, by degrees. Somewhere in the back part of my brain I nursed a persistent fear that my complaints might be diagnosed as symptoms of that incurable malady known as being forty-four years old, going on forty-five. And I knew that much already without paying a physician twenty-five dollars for telling me so the first time and ten dollars for each time he told it to me over again.
Rather shamefacedly, with a well-simulated air of casualness, I dropped in upon a physician who is a friend of mine and in whose judgment I have confidence; and then, after a two day interval, I went to see a second physician of my acquaintance who, I believe, also thoroughly knows his trade. With both men I followed the same tactics — roundabout chatting on the topic of this or that, and finally an honest confession as to the real purpose of my visit. In both instances the results were practically identical. Each man manifested an almost morbid curiosity 77 touching on my personal habits and bodily idiosyncrasies. Each asked me a lot of questions. Each went at me with X-ray machines and blood tests and chemical analysissies — if there isn’t any such word I claim there should be — until my being was practically an open book to him and I had no secrets left at all.
And the upshot of all this was that each of them told me that though organically I was sound as a nut — in fact much sounder than some of the nuts they knew professionally — I was carrying an overload of avoirdupois about with me. In other words, I was too fat for my own good. I was eating too much sweet stuff and entirely too much starch — especially starch. They agreed on this point emphatically. As well as I could gather, I was subjecting my interior to that highly shellacked gloss which is peculiar to the bosom of the old-fashioned full-dress or burying shirt upon its return from the steam laundry, when what my system really called for was the dull domestic finish.
78“Well, doc,” I said upon hearing this for the second time in language which already had a familiar sound — “well, all that you say being true, what then?”
“For one thing, more exercise.”
“But I take plenty of exercise now.”
“For example, what?”
“For example, golf.”
“How often do you play golf?”
“Well, not so very often, as the real golfbug or caddie’s worm would measure the thing — say, on average of once a week in the golfing season. But I take so many swings at the ball before hitting it that I figure I get more exercise out of the game than do those who play oftener but take only one wallop at the pill in driving off. And when I drive into the deep grass, as is my wont, my work with the niblick would make you think of somebody bailing out a sinking boat. My bunker exercises are frequently what you might call violent. And in the fall of the year I do a lot of tramping about in the woods with a gun. I might add 79 that on a hunting trip I can walk many a skinny person into a state of total exhaustion.” I stated this last pridefully.
“All right for that, then,” he said. “We’ll concede that you get an abundance of exercise. Then there is another thing you should do, and of the two this is by far the most essential — you should go on a diet.”
Right there I turned mentally rebellious. I wanted to reduce my bulk, but I did not want to reduce my provender. I offered counter-arguments in defense. I pointed out that for perhaps five years past my weight practically had been stationary. Also I called attention to the fact that I no longer ate so heavily as once I had. Not that I wished actually to decry my appetite. It had been a good friend to me and not for worlds would I slander it. I have a sincere conviction that age cannot wither nor custom stale my infinite gastric juices. Never, I trust, will there come a time when I shan’t relish my victuals or when I’ll feel disinclined to chase the last fugitive bite around 80 and around the plate until I overtake it. But I presented the claim, which was quite true, that I was not the consumer, measured by volume, I once had been. Perhaps my freighterage spaces, with passing years, had grown less expansive or less accommodating or something.
Likewise, I invited his consideration of the fact, which was not to be gainsaid either, that many men very much less elaborated than I in girth customarily ate very much more than I did. I recalled, offhand, sundry conspicuous examples of this sort. I believe I mentioned one or two such. For instance, now, there was Mr. William Jennings Bryan. The Bryan appetite, as I remarked to the doctor, is one of the chief landmarks of Mr. Bryan’s home city of Lincoln, Nebraska. They take the sight-seeing tourists around to have a look at it, the first thing.
[45]TO OBSERVE MR. BRYAN BREAKFASTING IS A SIGHT WORTH SEEING.
81To observe Mr. Bryan breakfasting on the morning when a national Democratic convention is in session is a sight worth seeing. A double order of cantaloupes on the half shell, a derby hat full of oatmeal, a rosary of sausages, and about as many flapjacks as would be required to tessellate the floor of a fair-sized reception hall is nothing at all for him. And when he has concluded his meal he gets briskly up and strolls around to the convention hall and makes a better speech and a longer one and a louder one than anybody. Naturally, time, the insatiable remodeler, has worked some outward changes in Mr. Bryan since the brave old days of the cross of gold. His hair, chafed by the constant pressure of the halo, has retreated up and ever up his scalp until the forehead extends clear over and down upon the sunset slope. The little fine wrinkles are thickly smoked at the corners of the eagle eyes that flashed so fiercely at the cringing plutocrats.
But his bearing is just as graceful and his voice just as silvery and as strong as when in ’96 he advocated free silver to save the race, or when he advocated anti-expansion in the 82 Philippines, or government ownership of the railroads, or a policy of nonpreparedness for war when Germany first began acting up — Grover Cleveland Bergdoll felt the same way about it and so did Ma Bergdoll; — and I, for one, have no doubt that Mr. Bryan will be just as supple, mentally and physically, three years hence when, if he runs true to form, he will be advocating yet another of that series of those immemorial Jeffersonian principles of the fathers, which he thinks up, to order, right out of his own head, when a campaign impends. Mr. Bryan knows how to play the political game — none better; but he certainly does have a large discard. That, however, is aside from the main issue.
The point I sought to bring out there in the office of my friend Doctor So-and-so was that Mr. Bryan, to my knowledge, ate what he craved and all that he craved, yet did not become obese. When the occasion demanded he could be amply bellicose, but the accent was not upon the first two syllables.
83I cited similar cases further to buttress my position. I told him that almost the skinniest human being I ever knew had been one of the largest eaters. I was speaking now of John Wesley Bass, the champion raw-egg eater of Massac Precinct, whose triumphant career knew not pause or discomfiture until one day at the McCracken County fair when suddenly tragedy dire impended.
He did not overextended himself in the gustatory line — that to one of John Wesley Bass’ natural gifts and attainments well-nigh would have been impossible; but he betrayed a lack of caution when, having broken his former record by eating thirty-six raw eggs at a sitting, he climbed upon a steam merry-go-round, shortly thereafter falling off the spotted wooden giraffe which he rode, and being removed to the city hospital in an unconscious condition.
That night later when the crisis had passed the doctors said that as nearly as they could figure out a case so unusual, Mr. Bass 84 had had a very close call from being just naturally scrambled to death. I spoke at length of my former fellow townsman’s powers, dwelling heavily upon the fact that, despite all, he never thickened up at the waistline. Throughout the narrative, however, the doctor punctuated my periods with derisive snorts which were disconcerting to an orderly presentation of the facts. Nevertheless, I continued until I had reached what I regarded as a telling climax.
“Piffle!” he rejoined. “One hoarse raucous piffle and three sharp decisive puffs for your arguments! I tell you that what ails you is this: You are now registering the preliminary warnings of obesity. The danger is not actually here yet; but for you Nature already has set the danger signals. There’s a red light on the switch for one I. Cobb. You are due before a great while for a head-end collision with your own health. You can take my advice or you can let it alone. That’s entirely up to you. Only 85 don’t blame me if you come back here some day all telescoped up amidships.
“And please don’t consume time which is reasonably valuable to me, however lightly you may regard it, by telling me now about slim men who eat more than you do and yet keep their figures. The woods are full of them; also the owl wagons. The difference between such men as those you have described and such men as you is that they were made to be thin men and to keep on being thin men regardless of their food consumption, and that your sort are naturally predisposed to fatness. You can’t judge their cases by yours any more than you can judge the blood-sweating behemoth of Holy Writ by the plans and specifications of the humble earwig.
“One man’s meat is another man’s poison; that’s a true saying. And here’s another saying — one cannot eat his cake and have it, too. But that’s an error so far as you are concerned. The trouble with you is that when you eat your cake you still have it — in 86 layers of fat. If you want to get rid of the layers you’ll have to cut out the cake, or most of it, anyway. Must I make you a diagram, or is this plain enough for your understanding?”
It was — abundantly. But I still had one more bright little idea waiting in the second-line trenches. I called up the reserves.
“Ahem!” I said. “Well now, old man, how about trying some of these electrical treatments or these chemicalized baths or these remedies is see advertised? I was reading only the other day where one successful operator promised on his word of honor to take off flesh for anybody, no matter who it was, without interfering with that person’s table habits and customs.”
My friend can be very plain-spoken when the spirit moves him.
87“YOU ARE NOW REGISTERING THE PRELIMINARY WARNINGS ——”
[88]“Say, listen to me,” he snapped, “or better still, you’d better write down what I’m about to say and stick it in your hat where you can find it and consult it when your mind begins wandering again. Those special mechanical devices to reduce fat people are contrived for the benefit of men and lazy women who are too slothful to take exercise or else too besotted in the matter of food indulgence to face the alternative of dieting. They may not do any harm — properly operated, they probably do not — but, at best, I would regard them as being merely temporary expedients specially devised as first aid to the incurably lazy.
“And as for pills and boluses and bottle goods guaranteed to reduce your weight, and as for all these patented treatments and proprietary preparations which you see boosted in the papers — bah! Either they are harmless mixtures, in which event they’ll probably do you no serious injury, but will certainly do you no real good; or else they contain drugs, which taken to excess, may cut you down in size, but have the added drawback of very probably cutting short your life.
“No, sir-ree! For you it’s dieting, now and from now on. You may be able to relax 90 your diet in time, but you can never altogether forego it. Give us this day our daily diet — that’s your proper prayer. And you’d better start praying pretty soon, too!”
“All right, doc,” I said resignedly. “You’ve practically converted me. I can’t say I’m happy over the prospect, but if you say so I’m prepared to become a true believer. But since, between us, we’re about to take all the joy out of life, let’s be thorough. What must I do to be saved? Give me the horrible details right here. I might as well hear the worst at one session.”
“I’m no dietitian,” he said. “I don’t profess to be one. That’s not my line — my line is the diagnostic. Of course I could lay down a few broad general rules for your guidance — any experienced practitioner could do that — but to get the best returns you should consult a diet specialist. However, in parting — I have several paying guests waiting for me and we are now about to part — I will throw in one more bit of advice without charge. No matter what suggestions 91 you may get from any quarter, I would urge you not to follow any banting formula so rigorous as to take off your superfluous flesh very rapidly. Take your time about it. If you live as long as both of us hope you may you’ll have plenty of time. There’s no rush, so go at it gradually. Be regular about it, but don’t be too ambitious at the outset. Don’t try to turn yourself into a tricky sprite in two weeks. For a fat man too abruptly to strip the flesh off his bones I regard as dangerous. It weakens him and depletes his powers of resistance and makes him fair game for any stray microbe which may be cruising about looking for a place to set up housekeeping.”
At first blush it might appear to the lay mind that a germ would scarcely care to pick a bone when it had fat meat to feed on, but my own recollections bore out my friend’s statements. I remembered a man of my acquaintance, an enormously fleshy and unwieldy man, who, fearing apoplexy, undertook a radical scheme of banting. He 92 lost fifty pounds in three months, so apoplexy did not get him, but pneumonia did with great suddenness. He was sick only three days. Nobody suspected that he was seriously ill until the third day, when suddenly he just hauled off and died.
So I promised to have a care against seeking to hurry myself right out of the flounder class and right into the smelt division.
CHAPTER EIGHT
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The Friendly Sons of the
Boiled Spinach
