A disinherited son adopts the medical profession. His father going mad, and being given up by the other physicians, he treats him successfully, and is then reinstated in his rights. Subsequently his step-mother also goes mad; he is bidden to cure her, and, declaring his inability to do so, is once more disinherited.
1
There is neither novelty nor strangeness, gentlemen of the jury, in my father’s present proceedings. It is not the first time his passions have taken this direction; it has become an instinctive habit with him to pay a visit to this familiar court. Still, my unfortunate position has this much of novelty about it: the charge I have to meet is not personal, but professional; I am to be punished for the inability of Medicine to do my father’s bidding. A curious demand, surely, that healing should be done to order, and depend not on the limits of one’s art, but on the wishes of .ne’s father. For my part, I should be only too glad to find drugs in the pharmacopoeia which could relieve not only disordered wits, but disordered tempers; then I might be serviceable to my father. As it is, he is completely cured of madness, but is worse-tempered than ever. The bitterest part of it is, he is sane enough in all other relations, and mad only where his healer is concerned. You see what my medical fee amounts to; I am again disinherited, cut off from my family once more, as though the sole purpose of my brief reinstatement had been the accentuation of my disgrace by repetition.
