Classic Poem

Did you ever hear
Of old Dr. Wise,
And his theories queer,
Half fact, half surmise,
Which excited such vast scientific surprise?
This old Dr. Wise was a wonderful man,
Who mostly to projects and theories ran:
He could tell how a fever-germ acted and grew,
And always could show you a dozen or two,
Tho' the poor devil lying
Fever-stricken and dying
He seldom or never contrived to pull through.
With the greatest presumption
He discoursed of consumption,
And laid all the blame on some parasite sly;
As for cancers and tumors,
They came of bad humors,
And absorption would cause them to shrink up and die.
But this wonderful man not alone
As a common practitioner shone;
For who has not heard how the whole world was stirred
When he published his book, " The Domestic Outlook;
Or, How to Exterminate Rats
Without Ferrets or Poison or Cats " ?
Why, the plan was so pretty, so simple and witty,
It seemed a great pity
That rats by the million and billion and trillion
Should haunt human dwellings in country and city.
Just secure a mad cat;
Let the cat bite a rat,
And there'd be a mad rat;
There ends your labor;
He'd bite his neighbor,
And then this other
Would poison his brother.
Ah! I see your face dimple with joy at the scheme.
'Tis as easy and sure as mince pie and a dream.
The madness would spread
Till the last rat was dead.
But 'twas most as a critic that Dr. Wise came
To make for himself a professional name,
For, whenever a patient of wealth or of birth
Would escape his physicians by fleeing from earth,
Dr. Wise never failed to indite a review
Which showed that the death to malpractice was due.
It is small wonder surely,
That a man of such skill
Declared death to be purely
An avoidable ill which ought never to kill.
In fact, he announced it to be his conviction
That death in all cases resulted from friction;
For the body was naught but machinery cunning,
While life was the power that kept it a-running.
Then why should not science
Some cordial distil
That might bid defiance
To death's power to kill?
Some unctuous elixir, to friction superior,
That should lubricate man's complicated interior
Whenever he felt himself grow slightly wearier?
This argument met on all sides with great favor,
For of reason it really did seem to savor.
Besides, it is true in religion and physic,
When the spirit or body is feeble or is sick,
Man retains best the nostrums of pleasantest flavor.
Or, to hold this thought up to more evident view,
Man accepts as the truth what he'd like to have true.
How many a preacher is salaried well
For a weekly discourse on the absence of hell,
Though his parrot-like lips nothing further can tell!
Now in all human breasts is implanted a strong,
Illogical longing to live, and live long,
Antedating De Leon's historical scramble
Through dangerous wilderness, thicket and bramble,
Over desert and plain and impassable mountain,
To regain his lost years in a mythical fountain.
The world then received
Dr. Wise very kindly;
And ere long it believed
His great theory blindly.
The excitement produced in a storm culminated,
Into which the famed savant at last fulminated
That he, the invincible investigator,
Had found a receipt for the great lubricator.
Well, to shorten a story already too long,
A hall was secured and a numberless throng,
The young and the gray,
The religious, the gay,
Sisters and brothers and fathers and mothers,
Assembled from everywhere, distant and near,
A lecture on " How to Live Always " to hear.
No scoffers were there, their belief was complete,
And each brought a note-book to take the receipt.
Eight o'clock was the hour which the Doctor had set —
Eight o'clock, and he came not; half-past, and not yet
Did his faithful disciples grow weary or fret.
Nine o'clock, and then ten, when, at some one's suggestion,
A carriage was sent for the great man in question.
It went, it returned, and the news quickly spread
That the lecture was off, for the Doctor was dead!