is nothing wrong with your body. You have a fine body and you must not think about that. If you are religious remember that what you complain of is no sinful state but the means of consummating a sacrament.”
“I can’t stop it happening,” the boy said. “I pray all night and I pray in the daytime. It is a sin, a constant sin against purity.”
“Oh, go and—” Doctor Wilcox said.
“When you talk like that I don’t hear you,” the boy said with dignity to Doctor Wilcox. “Won’t you please do it?” he asked Doc Fischer.
“No,” said Doc Fischer. “I’ve told you, boy.”
“Get him out of here,” Doctor Wilcox said.
“I’ll get out,” the boy said. “Don’t touch me. I’ll get out.”
That was about five o’clock on the day before.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“So at one o’clock this morning,” Doc Fischer said, “we receive the youth self-mutilated with a razor.”
“Castrated?”
“No,” said Doc Fisher. “He didn’t know what castrate meant.”
“He may die,” Doctor Wilcox said.
“Why?”
“Loss of blood.”
“The good physician here. Doctor Wilcox, my colleague, was on call and he was unable to find this emergency listed in his book.”
“The hell with you talking that way,” Doctor Wilcox said.
“I only mean it in the friendliest way. Doctor,” Doc Fischer said, looking at his hands, at his hands that had, with his willingness to oblige and his lack of respect for Federal statutes, made him his trouble. “Horace here will bear me out that I only speak of it in the very friendliest way. It was an amputation the young man performed, Horace.”
“Well, I wish you wouldn’t ride me about it,” Doctor Wilcox said. “There isn’t any need to ride me.”
