Doctor In The Swim Read Online Free Page B

the express elevator to the street, and pretty cosy it was out there, too, particularly as in America, where they do everything properly, they don’t only have heat but they have humidity as well. We picked up a cab, the driver put us square on the international situation, and we arrived at the Conference in the Liberty Room of the Washington-Herxheimer Hotel.
    Early in the proceedings I began to suffer from a chilly feeling which had nothing to do with the air conditioning.
    I’m much in favour of medical conferences, as long as they’re properly organized. At a medical conference in England they naturally always provide a hall for a few enthusiasts to hear another one rambling away over some cracked lantern slides shown upside down. The rest of the doctors take the chance to clear off and play golf, or to go on the toot with other doctors out of sight of their patients.
    But when American doctors hold a conference, they jolly well confer. I was banking on everyone gently drifting away once Archbold had raised the tapes with his Presidential address, so I could pass a happy three weeks seeing the sights of New York, such as Jack Dempsey’s Bar and the burlesque shows. But those enthusiastic chaps went hammering at the door of knowledge from eight in the morning till six at night, with an hour off at noon for waffle-burgers and Coca-cola. And anyone mounting the rostrum with a folder of notes slimmer than the Manhattan telephone directory was clearly thought to be betraying the great traditions of American oratory.
    ‘Thank you, Grimsdyke, for kicking me on the ankle when I started to snore,’ mentioned Sir Lancelot, when we were released at the end of the day.
    ‘Not a bit, sir, Always glad to avert an international incident.’
    ‘I fear I must have been sadly wrong over the years,’ he sighed, ‘when I held at St Swithin’s that anyone could express all his knowledge of any scientific subject on a postcard. Though how an executive or anyone else can possibly ever feel completely healthy in this place is totally beyond me.’
    He indicated with his umbrella a poster outside the subway announcing that we’d arrived in National Nephrosis Week, while from other posters I gathered the citizens had only just got over National Hemiplegia Week and could look forward after Sunday to a jolly National Schizophrenia Week,
    ‘Our American chums are well up with the clinical articles in the Reader’s Digest , and regard Time as the great healer, sir,’ I suggested. ‘They’d never fork out for our dear old British charities with their Spare a Copper for the Distressed Gentlefolk or Our Roof is Leaking.’
    ‘They certainly have an eye for clinical detail. Even in the obituary pages of the newspapers. The New York Times this morning quite reminded me in parts of the Pathologist’s Handbook .’
    I nodded. ‘Especially as the undertakers oil round the margins with cosy invitations to let them lay you out on the never-never. Could make an executive feel pretty nasty over breakfast I should think, particularly on hot mornings with a hangover.’
    ‘Odd,’ mused Sir Lancelot, hailing a cab, ‘that everyone here should take death so extremely seriously.’
    But our American chums don’t pass their days simply looking forward to their absolutely slap-up funeral, any more than we spend ours puffing our churchwardens in our smocks at the doors of our thatched cottages, in between Morris dancing and trying to trace our ancestors. The clouds of oratory were brightened no end by the nightly flashes of hospitality, and after a week even Sir Lancelot started making concessions to the New World, such as drinking Scotch-on-the-Rocks and calling Archbold by his christian name. Though he still wouldn’t dress up in white blouse and trousers like Dr Kildare to visit Archbold’s private hospital, saying he refused to go around looking like a ruddy West End hairdresser. For years, of course, he had found it unnecessary to go round