' 'And so,' I said,
'you give me no sympathy, the gentlemen laugh at me, and the ladies turn
their pretty backs upon me. No, I didn't come here for that! If Miss von
Hinkefuss had met _me_, if half a bushel of bee-stings had been planted
in _her_ body, I should have asked her every morning with the utmost
propriety how she was. But let her alone! There is no market where
people can buy kind-heartedness! Come away, doctor, and pull the stings
out of my body.' He said he couldn't do it. 'What!' I asked, 'can't you
pull bee-stings out of a man's skin?' 'No,' he said, 'that is to say, I
_can_ do it, but I dare not, for that is an operation such as surgeons
perform, and I have no diploma for surgery from the Mecklenburg
government.' 'What?' I asked, 'you are allowed to draw gout out of my
bones, but it is illegal for you to draw a bee-sting out of my skin? You
dare not meddle with the outer skin which you can see, and yet you
presume to attack my internal maladies which you can't see? _Thank_
you!' Well, Charles, from that moment I lost all faith in the
water-doctor, and without faith they can do nothing as they themselves
tell you when it comes to the point. So I went away quietly and got old
Metz, the surgeon at Rahnstaedt, to draw out the stings. That was the end
of the water-cure; still it's a good thing; one gets new ideas in a
place like that, and even if one's gout is not cured, one gains some
notion of what a human being can suffer.
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