La Presse 07 juin 1923

the rehabilitated spleen

The spleen

For many years, doctors had persisted in treating the spleen as the last of the useless.

The rat, vexed at first, had quickly grown accustomed to this contempt for men, and, disdainfully, she observed with phlegm such monstrous ignorance. The rat, who is not without religion, told herself that the Most High had created nothing useless and that one day men, too inclined to speak without thinking, would turn pale from having fallen into their noses. error.

A day has come, that day of glory and rehabilitation has arrived for the spleen. Doctors have just recognized, in the middle of the Academy of Sciences, that the spleen was used for something. To what? That's what they haven't been able to establish yet. We must not go to work so quickly and consider the effort that medicine had to make to arrive at this first result. Hearing this news, the sympathetic vascular gland in his left hypochondrium sighed. Elie jumped like a possessed, going from the stomach to the false ribs with the agility of a caged canary. But she calmed down and listened to the eminent professor who, in a most interesting communication, informed honorable society that a man deprived of his spleen was continually starving.

Then his joy redoubled. She thought, for she is not stupid, that with this high cost of living, it would no doubt be thought of endowing men with an additional spleen taken from an inferior animal. which would allow this human to eat much less and moderate his expenses.

Finally, the rehabilitated little gland would no longer be alone in its sad hypochondrium. She would have a companion with whom to talk about the pretentious and insufficient knowledge of these men too accustomed to not straining their spleens.

And we saw the eminent professor, who had just made this grave declaration, suddenly burst out laughing in the face of his stupefied listeners. It was his spleen dilating.

JEAN KOLB