Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11 Moravian brother, I am not quite sure which. He had been
living amongst us for many years and behaved with won-
derful dignity. He was a kind-hearted and humane man. He
treated the sick poor and peasants for nothing, visited them
in their slums and huts, and left money for medicine, but
he was as obstinate as a mule. If once he had taken an idea
into his head, there was no shaking it. Almost everyone
in the town was aware, by the way, that the famous doc-
tor had, within the first two or three days of his presence
among us, uttered some extremely offensive allusions to
Doctor Herzenstube’s qualifications. Though the Moscow
doctor asked twenty-five roubles for a visit, several people
in the town were glad to take advantage of his arrival, and
rushed to consult him regardless of expense. All these had,
of course, been previously patients of Doctor Herzenstube,
and the celebrated doctor had criticised his treatment with
extreme harshness. Finally, he had asked the patients as
soon as he saw them, ‘Well, who has been cramming you
with nostrums? Herzenstube? He he!’ Doctor Herzenstube,
of course, heard all this, and now all the three doctors made
their appearance, one after another, to be examined.
Doctor Herzenstube roundly declared that the abnor-
mality of the prisoner’s mental faculties was self-evident.
Then giving his grounds for this opinion, which I omit
here, he added that the abnormality was not only evident
in many of the prisoner’s actions in the past, but was ap-
parent even now at this very moment. When he was asked
to explain how it was apparent now at this moment, the old
doctor, with simple-hearted directness, pointed out that