The Good Doctor

Dr. John Tenorio was one of the 500 researchers at St. Christopher's Hospital and consequently he nursed fierce ambitions for fame and money. Driven by a profound faith in his fellow man, he was inventing a new disease. He could see that the public would not accept another killer like cancer or heart disease, and in his carrel he bent over a large drawing of the human figure, inking long red arrows to the sites of every ailment he could find in his pathology handbook to see if any region had been slighted. He could find none. Mankind was already pretty well diseased up. He despaired.

Dr. Emmett Ellis, a milky, diffident young man, looked over the partition. Fired by the hope that the brass would take notice and give him a decent job, Ellis was writing up the cases of three different housewives in three different station wagons taking their kids to three different schools, who had been sawed in two by seat belts in trifling accidents. Employed in an automobile hospital, Ellis thought of automobiles. He lacked imagination, Tenorio thought. And Ellis, balked by his inability to write coherent English, was always leaning over the partition and whispering, "What you working on now, John? What you working on now?"

Tenorio tried to maintain a stony silence, but he burped. Like all public institutions, St. Christopher's served mostly carbohydrates; and (continued on page 154)Good Doctor(continued from page 99) what Tenorio retasted was a specially foul cannelloni he had eaten for lunch; but, as if in answer to his despair, the loathsome pasta casing and the myelin sheath of the nerves came together in his mind in a true gratuitous act of creation. A wasting away of the myelin sheath! Unheard of! He was aware of the similarity to multiple and lateral scleroses, but in them there was no wasting away, rather interruptions of the neural impulses by the formation of platelets on the sheath. "Some Observations on Myelin Degeneration." He could see the studiously modest title of his article at once. The disease would be prevalent, crippling and severe. He finished off the article that afternoon, complete with four fictive case histories. He plastered an envelope with air-mail stamps and stickers and sent it off to the 40-story stainless-steel tower of the United States Journal of Medicine looming above the cotton fields and oil wells of Amarillo, a monument to the aggressive sales promotion that had driven the slower A. M. A. journal to the wall.

When they read Tenorio's piece, the editors stomped their stitched boots and threw their curly-brimmed hats into the air with many a huzza. They stopped the giant presses and made it the leading article for the month, supplanting a piffling study of laudable pus.

Within a week a Life researcher had picked it up and waves of energy convulsed the mighty Luce empire. Flights of cables girdled the globe. Stringers and staffers everywhere were alerted to the symptoms of the new disease. The medical profession of the world was interviewed almost to a man--a Mali witch doctor eluding one staffer who was laid low by a tsetse fly. Of course, the usual safari was dispatched to St. Christopher's, keen young men in Brioni suitings with their attendant secretaries, staff photographers curt to bearers loaded down with cameras and film.

The spread of photographs in Life was magnificent, one of Dr. Tenorio in new tweed jacket holding serious converse with the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Tenorio in spotless white scrutinizing an upheld test tube in the lab, Tenorio informally slouched at his desk, deep in thought, making a steeple of his fingers, Tenorio in shirt sleeves in his Spartan bedchamber unbuttoning one sleeve with a shy smile.

Naturally, the great spread in Life was followed by appearances on all the major television shows. (Tenorio wrote letters purporting to come from his agent and he got a good price.) Chagrined at being scooped, Look and Newsweek trailed with picture layouts and an astrological character study. A lady writer hit the Reader's Digest with Tenorio as "The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met." A scandal magazine sent skulkers to peep into the nurses' dormitories at St. Christopher's. They discovered Tenorio was a lecher, but in too small a way to interest their magazine.

Although his rugged, handsome countenance became as well known as Ringo's, not once during this spate of publicity did Tenorio reveal the strain he was undergoing. Was his faith in his fellow man betrayed? Was his public going to let him down? Seething with nervousness, he waited for the first cases of the new disease to be reported. His promotion to assistant director of research was gratifying but expected, and it gave him no relief; for what good is a new disease if nobody has it? Barricaded in his office against the persistent newsmen, he paced the floor in agony, waiting.

A bare two weeks after his appearance on the Merv Griffin show, Dr. Tenorio read about the first case in The New York Times. He relaxed, his faith vindicated, with a bottle of bourbon in his office. Typically, the victim lived in the great Los Angeles complex of cities at Anaheim, a Mrs. Camperdown, age 32, wife of a traffic policeman and mother of four. She exhibited what was to become the classic syndrome, tremor of the hands, buzzing in the ears and one leg dragging. The Associated Press supplied a name for the disease, myelinitis. Mrs. Camperdown said it was hell.

The next day two more cases were reported, one in Pennsylvania, one in Kansas, and during the week, 43 more, well scattered. Editors throughout the country feared an epidemic and mysteriously urged their readers to eat lots of fruit. The big foundations issued emergency grants to start research on a cure.

The spare little bedroom caught so clearly in the Life photograph had become a kind of shrine to the other researchers at St. Christopher's. They had subscribed nickels and dimes out of their pittances and covered half the door with a plastic plaque disclosing Dr. Tenorio as Mercury bearing a caduceus (gilt). He thought it the best part of modesty to go on living there, at least for a while.

Early one morning he woke up after a restless night and he didn't feel good. His ears seemed to snap. His hands trembled. When he tried to get up, his right leg wouldn't move. He had, of course, his own disease. As this dawned upon him, he choked with anger and suspicions of foul play. He set up a shout for Emmett Ellis, who lived across the corridor.

Ellis came in sleepily. "What's the matter, John?"

"Help me sit up."

Ellis gave him a hand. "What's the matter? You sick?"

Taking his right leg in his hands, Tenorio turned until he was sitting on the edge of the bed. "Gimme a cigarette."

Ellis found one in a pack on the table. "What's wrong, John?"

"I've got myelinitis, I think."

"Honest? Yeah, the leg. And you got the tremor." Ellis, eager to hitch a ride, had familiarized himself quite early with the symptoms. "How's the ears?"

"Buzzing. I've got it, all right."

"Gee, that's tough. But working with it all the time the way you've been ..."

"Working with it, hell. There's no such disease. I invented it."

A flight like this was too much for Ellis. "Yeah?" he drawled dubiously, but his eyes were troubled, beginning to bug out. "But you got it. You got all the symptoms."

"I tell you I invented it, symptoms, research, everything, and I'll cut your heart out if you ever tell anyone."

"I wouldn't tell anyone, John, you know that. But there weren't any automobiles until Ford, and now look. I got a Mustang myself. What you going to do, be a martyr to science?"

"Martyr, my ass." Tenorio was thinking, and fast. "It had better be something simple," he said. "Like twenty grains of aspirin. No, wait, we'll form a corporation. You can be president, Emmett, old buddy. Put the stuff up in little pieces in colored Spansules timed to go off every hour on the hour, how about that? Little teeny things whirling around in front of your eyes on TV. The Ford Foundation will give us the money to start. Help me up."

Ellis, spellbound and uncomprehending, lifted him to his feet. Fame was OK, but now that he had found where the real money lay, Tenorio limped off quite cheerfully to the laboratory to invent the cure.