Read Online The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck by Alexander Laing - Free Book Online

adjourned, Prendergast was talking quickly and passionately with his companion. Dr. Wyck, still wearing his topcoat, walked up to Prexy and demanded the two blue books. Prexy handed them over without speaking a word. Wyck thrust them into an inside pocket and stalked from the room.
    Presently Prendergast’s pompous little companion marched up from the back of the room, and Prexy advanced to meet him, looking cordial and solicitous at once.
    “I’m terribly, terribly sorry about this wretched business, Senator,” he said. “I was altogether sincere in my belief that Dr. Wyck was too ill to be present, as I told you. I was sure that no action would be taken at this time.”
    The little statesman snorted something unintelligible. It was only then that I realized the full extent of the calamity. The stranger was obviously Prendergast’s uncle—Senator Tolland—one of the pivotal group in the legislature, whose allegiance Prexy had gained only through the exercise of much shrewdness and tact. Moreover, Prexy himself had had no idea of the relationship between Senator Tolland and Prendergast until that very evening.
    “Do you mean to say, sir,” he asked, “that on all these seventeen occasions which Dick, here, had cited, the faculty as a group voted unanimously to override this man Wyck, in—in assigning grades, and whatnot?”
    Prexy nervously admitted that it was so.
    “You should have discharged him on the first repetition of it, sir. If he is not cashiered at once I shall submit a bill to the legislature to withhold the carry-over appropriation voted last term, pending an investigation, sir, of Dr. Wyck’s fitness to teach.”
    Prexy mildly pointed out the Prendergast’s record had been continually worse, not only under Wyck, but in all his work except dissections, all year. The nephew broke in to say that this was due to Wyck, whose persecution had unsettled him to the verge of a nervous breakdown.
    Senator Tolland significantly mentioned a society for protecting animals from cruelty, and a number of religious organizations. Prexy visibly blanched. It was terrifically hard to get cadavers for dissection, over the prejudices of squeamish folk, and the antivivisectionists were continually seeking injunctions against the use of living animals in medical research. I did not blame Prexy for inviting the senator to confer with him further at his own residence.

Histoire Générale et Particulière des Anomalies do l’Organisation chez l’Homme at les Amimaux; etc. des Monstruosités, des variétés et des vices de conformation, ou Traité de Tératologie,  par M. Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Paris: J. B. Ballière, Librairie de l’Académie Royale de Médecine, 1837. (The volume referred to above is the “Atlas” containing twenty engraved plates and a table of contents.)
A kind of blank notebook, with blue covers, in which formal examinations at most colleges and similar institutions are written. The standard blue book cannot be purchased, and is given out by the proctor at the time of the examination, to reduce the chance for cheating, or smuggling notes into the examination room.—Ed.

Eight
    Atlantic Street in unlighted for the three deserted blocks between the lunch wagon and the two big globes over the hospital gates. Consequently, as I swung along the sandy side path, I was able to see two figures standing in the middle of the gateway. I approached noiselessly, all the more interested when I recognized one of them as Nurse Finch. The other, I soon gathered, was the farmer named Tompkins; he was objecting, “But I can’t afford to pay no more to thet place, miss, ’spite of what ye say.”
    “You leave her for the night,” Muriel insisted. “She’s just completely tuckered out, and there’s no sense bumping her back to the farm tonight. I’ll see to it that you don’t have to pay anything. And about the other bill, for the oxygen and all, just you forget it. None of the other doctors but him