John's Other Practice

By Winston Marks

Slot machines usually give you a big pain
in the wallet. But Cunningham's Symptometer was
more considerate—it also diagnosed the pain....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
July 1954
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I knew that John Cunningham had been warned on graduation day that no man with a romantic nature should specialize in gynecology. John was not only a romanticist; he was also the best looking intern north of the equator.

The laws of probability functioned. Within three years, John Cunningham was married, divorced, disgraced and flat broke. And so it was that the winsome, six-foot, blonde-headed nurse's idol of the flashing smile and brilliant mind, approached life with three strangely related goals, namely: (1) To practice medicine successfully without (2) coming in contact with his patients, and yet (3) make back the family fortune he had squandered mixing potions with poetry.

In a much less interesting way, I, too, was diverted from an otherwise promising career in the practice of conventional 21st Century medicine. My final exam before the board revealed an aptitude that landed me a fat offer from the International Medical Association. The job was Special Investigator on the Malpractice Board of Control. My apparent immunity to emotional disturbances from the other sex, ironically, was the deciding factor of my appointment.

My first intimation of John Cunningham's vicarious practice came in the form of an order to check on a complaint from the Hotel Celt in New York. I bussed over to the 48-story hostelry and questioned the manager, a fat, bald man of some forty-two years and no arches.

"A lady doctor," he mourned, "has served warning she will sue unless I take out the slot machines from our mezzanine powder rooms."

"I know," I said. "She filed the complaint that brought me here. What I want to know is what does a slot machine violate by being in the ladies' room?" I meant, what violation beyond the usual federal, state and county restrictions whose ineffectual enforcement rendered them anachronisms in this age of device-gambling.

"Why does this remotely concern the medical profession?"

Mr. Dennithy, the manager plucked an imperfect petal from his buttonhole carnation and reluctantly pointed out. "These machines are vending, not gambling devices. They issue medical advice—on a limited scale," he added hurriedly.

"What!" I yelled in his face. "Let's go see this."

The tastefully decorated lounge was jammed with females, many of whom were bunched in little chirping bevies along the west wall. Stubby queues of women gave the place the look of a pari-mutuel stand, but the cheerful, tinkly chatter had nothing of the grim spirit of betting.

The three women attendants threw up their hands in despair when I told them to clear the room. "We can hardly get them to leave at night so we can clean up the place," one complained.

Impatiently I barged in, flashed my gold and platinum serpent-and-staff badge, and shouted. "These machines are illegal. This is a raid! Stand where you are, every last one of you!"

That did it. I almost got trampled in the stampede of high heels. Score one for my specialty in applied psychology and semantics. I learned later that, compared to one John Cunningham, I was a babe in the maternity ward.

Of this I got my first inkling when I examined one of the ten machines along the wall. It had a slot for a quarter. It was only two feet across by seven feet high and one foot thick. A circular mirror at eye level drew the female attention, and alongside was the slogan in large orange print:

"DO YOU REALLY FEEL WELL? Have you pains in your abdomen? Answer correctly the following questions and learn the truth from the Appendicitis Symptometer."

The next machine was named a "Kidney Stone Symptometer." The next advised about allergies, the next, pulmonary tuberculosis, and so on down to the one on the far end. Before this somewhat larger machine was the densest litter of carmine-tipped cigarette butts, some still smoldering on the carpet. This evident number-one favorite on the Symptometer Hit Parade asked disturbingly:

"COULD IT BE YOU ARE PREGNANT?"

Each machine had a bank of detailed questions to answer, each so couched that it could be satisfied by pressing one of three buttons. The instruction read: "Push the Red Button to answer YES, the White Button for NO, and the Yellow Button for SORT OF." This machine required a dollar.

To say that I was intrigued would only be searching for words. Having no change I demanded a silver dollar from Dennithy. He shifted from one foot to the other, and never before have I seen a genuine hotel man blush.

"Really, Mr. Klinghammer—"

"Doctor Klinghammer," I reminded him.

"Oh, yes. But—actually, I hadn't realized the exact nature of these devices. The, er, diseases which they purport to diagnose, I mean. My engineer, Mr. Shiftin merely said—"

"We do not prosecute innocently victimized business-men," I told him. "Now, that dollar, please."

"But wouldn't one of the quarter machines—" he trailed off under my best scowl and produced a silver disc from his fawn-colored vest.

I sent him out for more coins and set about inserting negative symptomatic answers. Upon examination the questions appeared to be remarkably phrased. Several of them seemed unrelated to the condition of pregnancy, but it turned out that Cunningham knew what he was doing.

When the last button was depressed a soft, melodic chime disguised the click of the mechanism which ejected the cardboard tab. It read:

"IF YOU HAVE ANSWERED THESE QUESTIONS HONESTLY THE SYMPTOMETER OBSERVES THAT IT IS EXTREMELY UNLIKELY THAT YOU ARE PREGNANT. YOU ARE URGED TO CONSULT A COMPETENT OBSTETRICIAN. VERIFY THIS OPINION."

Next, I set into the machine the proper answers to describe an ambiguous condition with contradictory symptoms. Dennithy came back with more change, and this time the tab read:

"THERE IS A POSSIBILITY OF PREGNANCY INDICATED. A COMPETENT PHYSICIAN CAN DETERMINE AT ONCE. THERE IS ALSO AN INDICATION THAT YOUR ANSWERS MIGHT BE EITHER INSINCERE OR FACETIOUS. THE INVENTOR OF THE SYMPTOMETER WISHES TO POINT OUT THAT IT'S YOUR DOLLAR YOU JUST SPENT, LADY."

I could imagine the chuckle this would get from the old dowager, wise in the ways of such matters and smugly secure from any such contingency; the woman who would be most likely to feed in such confusing data.

I snatched another coin from Dennithy and pushed in the buttons which should give symptoms of pregnancy in the last week of the last month. The card read:

"MADAME CALL AN AMBULANCE. YOU HAVE NO BUSINESS DOWN TOWN!"

At first I was plain furious. The inventor was selling not only medical diagnoses, but providing penny arcade entertainment as well. Then the impossibility of reporting the results of my investigation to the board struck me. In what conceivable manner could I phrase my findings and still maintain the dignity of our profession? And, worse yet, when you got right down to it, on what grounds could we outlaw and confiscate these machines?

Twenty-four quarters later I confirmed this suspicion. All ten machines were paragons of discretion. Each urged the patient to visit her doctor, or bore some other innocuous medical platitude. They were designed to painlessly accommodate the confirmed hypochondriac without wasting a busy doctor's time. And yet when a truly sick person indicated genuine symptoms, the diagnosis was general but accurate. The instruction to see a physician at once was urgently definite.

I was back before the dollar machine musing at my ugly expression in the mirror, when a light female voice behind me said, "I believe you have the wrong room, gentlemen."

She had short, bronzed, curly hair. She wore trim flannel slacks of dead white. Across her immaculate blouse was slung a pair of straps, one supporting a small tool kit, the other a stout leather pouch which rested on one shapely hip. She looked, to my first embarrassed glance, cute, feminine, intelligent and quite amused.

"We, ah, we were not intruding, Miss," Dennithy spluttered. "I cleared the room so I could show this equipment to—" I kicked him in the shin "—to Mister Klinghammer. He—has a hotel on the west coast. He is interested."

The reason for this evasion was the fact that emblazoned in red over her left breast was the legend:

"JAYSEE SYMPTOMETER SERVICE"

"Clever machines," I flattered. "Well based in feminine psychology," I added, entirely overlooking that she might reasonably be expected to have the same psychology.

"I only service them," she said shortly. "Please step aside so I can operate." She gave me a long, searching look before she swung open the first top panel. Apparently satisfied I was merely a prospective customer, she let me look on.

A swift look inside gave me a virulent case of the quim-quim. Here was no simple coin-snatcher. The answer buttons were switches. From each one ran leads to a panel which bristled with tiny vacuum tubes. It was uncomfortably remindful of the latest in electronic calculators which were rapidly gaining the reputation of being, "man's other brain."

"Tell me, Miss—"

"Doctor Calicoo," she prompted me pleasantly, as she slipped the tiny test prods of a miniature meter into the machine's mercenary heart.

"Tell me, Dr. Calicoo, how may I get in touch with the supplier of this equipment?"

She handed me a card and with it a slightly interested look that dropped my stability quotient at least three points.

The card was less interesting than the expression in her provocative blue eyes. I broke down and asked, "Doctor of what?"

"Philosophy. Electronics and Mathematics. You don't run a hotel," she said shrewdly.

"Make a liar out of Mr. Dennithy if you choose," I told her, "but would you be kind enough to take me to," I glanced at the card, "to Dr. John Cunningham?"

"I'll take you," she nodded, then her voice hardened a little, "but if you are just a snooper or a patent-jumper it will be no favor."

She invited candor, so she got it. I showed her my badge. Her mouth pulled into a startled little "o," like an oversized, pitted cherry.

We left Dennithy clinking quarters, trying to determine how he might figure into a possible scandal. In the elevator to the basement garage I commented acidly, "You must have known this was inevitable, of course?"

"To the contrary," she parried, "I had a notion that a genuine M.P. sleuth would be ninety-two years old and wear a white coat with a stethoscope in his side pocket. You seem to have youth and a rather charming virility, Doctor."

"Cut the flattery," I said. "Let's find your car."

The address was over in New Brooklyn. She slipped the light blue sedan into the proper cross-town tunnel entrance, adjusted the automatics and turned upon me suddenly. The dim reflection of the headlights from the dull-painted walls of the one-way tunnel gave her face a ghostly loveliness. I had just become sharply aware of this phenomenon, when she brushed a light, experimental kiss across my lips.

Volume II, of Dr. Bankawaya's "Twenty-First Century Emotional Reactions to the Love Stimulus" notwithstanding, my socially-adjusted, medically-trained and professionally-restrained instincts played a rotten trick on me. Instead of staring at her with a cool eye and calming her with a proper, chilling remark, I responded like a frog's leg to an electric shock.

My chin jerked out to follow the sweetest sensation I could remember. It didn't have far to go. She had retreated only three inches.

The tunnel curved right there, and the car lurched. I made a bad connection with only half her mouth, but a slight correction on her part squared us off to what is outrageously described in the texts as a basic, or primary, wooing gesture.

After the first, delirious second I knew it was a frame. After the second moment, I didn't care. But it wasn't until several minutes had elapsed that Doctor Calicoo's cool resolve collapsed, and I learned what a kiss could really mean from a woman who meant it, herself.

She tore out of my arms with a little cry. "Look out!" Then I became aware that the warning light had been flashing unnoticed. We were coming to the tunnel's exit where manual vehicle control became necessary. With trembling hands she gripped the controls until her knuckles were white knobs.

As we flashed past the patrol station and two alert faces checked the interior of our car, I said, "I think I know what you had in mind. You had me hooked on but good. Why didn't you go through with it?" I referred to the easy possibility of our shooting from the tube in each other's arms and thereby violating the safety code for tube passage. Such a simple frame would have put M.P. Investigator Klinghammer on the tabloid front page, if his feminine companion had chosen to file a complaint—with police witnesses to the act. Exit Klinghammer to a hobby of his own, probably less lucrative than building phantom symptom machines.

"I guess I overdid it," she said simply. She began to cry. Her white blouse quivered.

All I did was pat her gently on the shoulder, and the tears ran like mercury from a retort. "Let us not assume that we are enemies," I said, regaining a portion of my composure and all of my stuffiness. "So you are the frustrated Mata Hari; perhaps I'm on your side. Were you acting on orders? Was this a set up?"

She shook her head. "When we went into the tunnel I was in love with John Cunningham. I kissed you to frame you, all right, but it was my own idea. I'm impulsive, I guess." The only part I caught was the past tense of her first sentence.

"You mean you can change loves in the middle of a tunnel?" I blurted. Whereupon I learned one more "don't" that was never mentioned in lecture. The car slewed to the curb. She jabbed the emergency stop switch, leaned across me and slapped open my door.

"Walk!" she commanded. The remaining tears were fairly steaming from her red cheeks. I was smart enough not to fumble for an apology. I walked.

When I found a cab, I had no chance to think clearly. The cabby bored me the whole way with the excited news of the opening of the Brooklyn Centennial Celebration. Brooklyn in the spring meant baseball, and the Bums were celebrating their one-hundredth year in the league.

"Only we're changing the name from 'de Bums' to 'de Boids.' 'De Blueboids' woulda been prettier, but a hockey team got to that name foist."

Brooklyn in the spring. Baseball. Love out of the blue. Blueboids. Platitudinous slot-machines.

When I stood before the gray, translucent door of Dr. John Cunningham's penthouse apartment, I was something less than the eager, efficient, young Dr. Klinghammer of the remarkable stability. From bed-rock to quicksand in one easy tunnel.

A man answered. He was at least one cut above the most adored idol of video and movie screen, his slacks even more unpressed and his beach shirt even gaudier. He looked me in the eye for a moment and said, "Dr. Sledgehammer, I presume?"

"Klinghammer," I corrected.

"Sorry. Sue seemed a little confused on several details. Come in, please."

Sue. Sue Calicoo. Out of the blue. Blueboids. John Cunningham. This was a disrupting thought. So this is the guy she's really in love with. Malpractice? Without a doubt.

I followed him into a spacious, skylighted room, a corner of which instantly caught my eye, first, because it contained Sue, and second, because it was the only orderly spot in the whole littered place. Sue sat in the tiny office-space at a small desk, furiously filing a fingernail over a blue wastebasket. She didn't look up.

The look of tidiness ended there. The balance of the chamber gave a fair impression of a wholesale video-repair shop on moving day. Benches and racks were spaced at random, and each was loaded with electronic gear, meters, cable and tools. Unassembled units squatted in a semicircle before a large framework at the far end of the laboratory.

"May we be alone?" I asked.

"Alone?"

"Your girl friend, there," I said bitterly.

Cunningham tossed his blond head back and laughed. "Girl friend? That little fiend who calls herself my partner? Huh-uh! My girl friends are in there. Let's go introduce you." He started through a side door, and the unmistakable revelry of a cocktail party burst into the room.

Cunningham, himself, was not sober. I looked at Dr. Sue Calicoo. She hissed, "If you mention anything about the tunnel I'll brain you! Anything! Do you understand?"

I chased after Cunningham, hauled back with one hand and clipped him carefully with the other. I slammed the door and told Sue, "Help me sober him up."

She whistled softly. "He's not that drunk. Bring him to and you'll find out."

I worked on his heavy neck for a moment until his eyes flickered. I was in no mood to make him comfortable, so I just propped his back against a packing-case and took off on him. "What kind of a travesty on the practice of medicine do you call this?" I began.

Sue yawned and went to join the party. "Call me when the patty-cake is baked," she said as she closed the door.

The glare of hostility gradually vanished from Cunningham's handsome face. Without it he looked better. He lit a cigarette, thought for a moment and smiled at me. "Have you been kissing my partner?"

I blurbled in my throat.

He went on, "You are acting as strangely as Sue did. I have often conjectured that if you could bottle Sue's kisses adrenalin would be obsolete."

"You—kiss her—often?" I asked against my will.

"Only twice. The day she came to work, and two weeks later when they took the stitches out of my head. The second one was just to show there were no hard feelings."

"She loves you," I said with inane persistence.

He shrugged, "Could be. But she means matrimony. I flunked that once. Won't take the test again. But now, Doctor, you didn't come here to make a match, surely. Sue reports that the M.P. board takes a dim view of my Symptometers. Have you filed a report yet?" he asked warily.

"Not quite yet," I admitted. Blueboids. Sue Calicoo. Brooklyn in the Spring.

"And when your respiration becomes normal again," Cunningham assured me, "I think you will realize that such a report will be difficult to file. Am I right?" He hoisted himself from the carpet. "You know," he went on, "this investigation was sure to come. I knew it. And I guess it threw me a little more than I thought it would. Now that it's here I'm relieved. I think they sent the right man, Doctor Klinghammer."

He fished a bottle from the debris on one of the benches and offered it to me. He did it in such a neighborly manner that in my preoccupation I accepted and tilted down at least a deciliter before coming to my senses. Then it was too late. A remarkable thing happened when that liquefied plutonium hit bottom. I twanged like a sixty-pound bow, and I began laughing. I felt sorry for this poor, misguided Romeo. The solution to his whole problem spread before me like an atlas.

Slowly his smile vanished. "Before we discuss this further, I'd like to impress a point or two. Those coin machines are only a means to an end." He pulled heavily at the bottle, took me by the arm and led me over to the huge, half-created machine at the end of the lab.

"This is my life's work," he said solemnly. "Between my exwife and this mechanical monster, I ran through a rather substantial family fortune. I had to have funds. So I excised a few of the simple circuits from this contraption, threw on some window dressing and turned them loose in a few key locations where women congregate. Yesterday, after three weeks of operation, sixty of those gadgets coughed up $82,000. Unfortunately, I had to borrow almost a hundred thousand dollars to build them. In another week I'll show a profit."

"In another week," I told him, "you'll be held for malpractice and indicted for fraud—unless—"

"Unless I cut you in, I suppose," he sneered.

"Unless you give me another drink," I said after a suitable dramatic pause.

Cunningham pulled one eyebrow down, nonplussed, but he handed over the liquor. I choked on a swallow as Sue's voice cut over my shoulder, "I left you to play patty-cake, and now it's spin-the-bottle. Are you down to business, or shall I leave again?"

John said, "Stay here, kid, Doctor Hammerhead has an idea."

She came over and deliberately leaned up against him. He put his arm around her waist in what I tried to believe was a fraternal gesture.

"The name is Klinghammer," I said. "Don't antagonize me. I'm trying to help you."

Doctor Calicoo had recovered any selfcomposure she may have mislaid in the tunnel. She said sarcastically, "It couldn't be that you are trying to figure a way out of this for yourself, could it?"

"Quit patronizing, both of you," I snapped. "You both know this will be embarrassing to the Board. But all I face is a big blush and an international horse-laugh. I'll grant you, we probably can't confiscate the machines. But my testimony could easily damn you for unethical practices if nothing else. With luck I might get you for fraud, too."

A look of synthetic concern passed between them. I took another drink. "I would like to know what possible justification you have for retaining the right to call yourself a medical man, Cunningham."

"What's wrong with research?" he demanded.

"In your case," I cracked, "nothing that a few scruples wouldn't improve."

Dr. Calicoo stamped her small foot at me. "Don't you make fun of us. John has a wonderful idea. His big general diagnosing correlator has some of the finest memory and calculating control circuits in it that exist anywhere." She nodded to herself. "I built them myself."

Cunningham explained earnestly, "It will assimilate and coordinate over a thousand separate symptoms, including every known particle of clinical data on a patient. Why it will reduce physician error to practically zero."

"If it works," I said sourly.

"It will, it will!" he assured me. "Of course I have probably a year or more to spend in quantitative calibration of the input circuits, and maybe a couple or three years on the qualitative differentiations of the output."

"I see," I said. "And you want to calibrate and differentiate without the necessity of practicing on the side to provide funds. So you invented the one-armed bandit with the Johns Hopkins accent to tide you over. Right?"

"Right!"

"You have made one mistake in the means to your end," I told him. "Now I have a plan." They both leaned forward, a little too far, I realize now.

My report caused quite a sensation. The ten-man board read it and called me almost at once to clarify verbally what I had hinted to be a likely solution to our dilemma, namely: A desirable alternative to facing a mortifying legal action in restraining the present use of the Symptometer.

When I entered the rich, old mahogany chambers, the chairman pointed to the lecture stand. He was goateed and morbidly curious. Before I could clear my throat he urged impatiently, "Get at it, boy. What's this business of skinning a cat you mentioned?"

"Honorable Doctors," I began self-consciously, "you all realize the legal difficulties with which we are faced. Before we face them, I give you the suggestion that we prevail upon the inventor of the Symptometer to license its manufacture for use only in medical clinics. Having operated the machines I can testify that the results of the questioning of these devices can be definitely informational and could assist a physician in more rapid diagnosis and treatment."

I held up my hand to silence the horrified grunts of disapproval. "Let me continue, please. A few minor changes in the recording mechanism would enable the equipment to produce a coded card. This, without a physician's attention, would direct the clinical staff to perform the necessary laboratory functions to verify or disprove the indicated symptoms. With this card and the results of the clinical examination in his possession, the physician then meets the patient for the first time. He has been spared the preliminary examination, the redundant, lengthy interview in which madame hypochondriac recapitulates the history of her hives or biliousness.

"Naturally, the coin operation of the machine would be eliminated. But there is no need for a doctor to adjust his fees downward because he performs his work more efficiently, now is there? And with the Symptometer at his disposal, a physician should be able to easily double the number of office calls per hour.

"What does this do for the doctor? It frees him from so much of the annoying drudgery of patient interviewing. It eliminates the wait from first interview to final consultation. It keeps the laboratory details in their proper place. In short, it makes a true executive of the physician."

My eloquence was beginning to tell. All these men had long practices behind them. The practical advantages were undeniable. The important point, however, was that my radical suggestion did offer a less distressing alternative to bringing this into court.

The gray-fringed bald heads bobbled before me, and I knew from the higher pitch of their grunts and mutters that I was making my point. I was sweating, but then so were they.

That evening I phoned Cunningham. "You're in like Flynn," I told him. "Whether you like it or not, get those machines back and the changes made within a week. If we give them too much time to think about it they might change their minds."

I thought I caught laughter in the background, but I hadn't made a video connection. I did so at once, and there was Cunningham with a suspiciously smug smirk on his face. "Thanks, old man," he said softly.

"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "I thought you were reluctant about this idea?"

A babble of feminine voices and a background blur on the visor distracted him from my words. He turned away, then back to the screen. "Sue is on her way over to your suite to pick you up. Tonight we celebrate. My girl friends are here. Gotta go now."

The idea of a party just then was repugnant, but the thought of another cross-town ride with Sue was not. As I dressed I achieved an almost gala mood.

It persisted until I was beside Sue again, same car, same tunnel, same Spring in Brooklyn, but the Blueboids went fluttering when I identified the same smug smirk on her face that John Cunningham had betrayed a half hour ago.

"What," I demanded, "have you invented now?" She looked long into my eyes, and the amused look slowly left her. She leaned over to me.

With a perversity I was growing to hate I refused to accept this perfectly good answer. "I sold your Symptometer to the Board, but I want you to know," I told her loftily, "that I'm not subscribing to your fantastic general diagnoser."

"Nooooo?" she said softly. She kept looking up into my eyes in a way, I am told, that women have of concentrating while pretending to listen.

"It's absurd," I pointed out. "Why, he needs five years just to calibrate the thing. It has no possibilities of mass-production. And even if it did, the cost would be so outrageous that the average hospital could hire a whole staff of physicians for the price of one machine. And figure one thing more: What medical man would welcome into his heart a gadget that would leave him nothing to do but stand around with a voltmeter and an oilcan?"

"Good point," Sue nodded with an exaggerated flounce of her auburn halo.

"Of course," I conceded, "if John wants to fiddle around with that pile of junk as a hobby, that's his business."

"Darrrrrrrling, you've been had," she said lazily. "That pile of junk we told you was a super-gadget was nothing more than an assembly jig and test rack for the Symptometer units."

"You misled me!" I exploded.

"That is the understatement of the week," she smiled sweetly. "But we couldn't have chosen a better Symptometer salesman if we'd had our pick when I phoned in that complaint to the Board and the Hotel Celt."

"You—you?" I stammered, my pulse loud in my ears.

"Yes, darling. And you were so sweet to get the solution so quickly. We didn't even have to suggest it to you." Somehow her arm had crept up behind me, and her fingers got inside the back of my over-heated collar. "Don't you understand? With John's trouble, what chance do you suppose he would have had peddling those gadgets directly to any clinic? Anyway, what product ever started out in life with a better endorsement than that of the International Medical Association? Now SHEDDUP!"

I could have resisted the pressure of her arm, being a strong man. But a bega-volt thought hit me. She had everything out of me she had come for, so why did she want to kiss me unless—anyhow, we hit the tunnel curve just then.

Once again I didn't notice the warning signal light. And this time we got a ticket.