Therne.[*]
_Absit omen!_ May the prophecy be falsified! But, on the other hand,
it may not. Some who are very competent to judge say that it will not;
that, on the contrary, this strange paralysis of "the most powerful
ministry of the generation" must result hereafter in much terror, and in
the sacrifice of innocent lives.
[*] It need hardly be explained that Dr. Therne himself is a
character convenient to the dramatic purpose of the story,
and in no way intended to be taken as a type of anti-
vaccinationist medical men, who are, the author believes, as
conscientious in principle as they are select in number.
The importance of the issue to those helpless children from whom
the State has thus withdrawn its shield, is this writer's excuse for
inviting the public to interest itself in a medical tale. As for the
moral, each reader can fashion it to his fancy.
DOCTOR THERNE
CHAPTER I
THE DILIGENCE
James Therne is not my real name, for why should I publish it to the
world? A year or two ago it was famous--or infamous--enough, but in
that time many things have happened. There has been a war, a continental
revolution, two scandals of world-wide celebrity, one moral and the
other financial, and, to come to events that interest me particularly
as a doctor, an epidemic of Asiatic plague in Italy and France, and,
stranger still, an outbreak of the mediaeval grain sickness, which is
believed to have carried off 20,000 people in Russia and German Poland,
consequent, I have no doubt, upon the wet season and poor rye harvest in
those countries.
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