
		You might find this funny.  The last time I sent
		it out, everyone thought I had fallen off my rocker...


	   "The Professor was unconscious of  the passage of time, the
	   atmosphere in the  room,  or  the  necessity for  food  and
	   drink.  He  was a thin  little white-haired  man with large
	   spectacles  who was   standing   behind  his  desk  talking
	   enthusiast- ically  about a  little-known variety of louse.
	   Lice were the Professor's  life.  For thirty years they had
	   filled his  thoughts during  the day and  spilled into  his
	   dreams at night.  He   had,  at  points during  that  time,
	   married and raised  five children, but he was  only faintly
	   aware of these occurrences.   The fore-  ground of his mind
	   was filled by lice.   He spent his  time  in  his own small
	   laboratory on the top floor of the hospital wholly occupied
	   in  studying  their  habits.    He rarely came    near  his
	   students.  He  left the  teaching  to  his as-  sitants and
	   considered he had done his share  by occasionalyy wandering
	   round the  students' laboratory,  which  he   did  with the
	   bemused air of a man whose wife has invited a lot of people
	   he didn't know to a party.  He insisted, however, in giving
	   to each  class a  series of lectures on his  specialty.  He
	   was  the greatest authority on lice  in the world, and when
	   he lectured to o other  pathologists in Melbourne, Chicago,
	   Oslo, or Bombay, men would  eagerly cross half  a continent
	   to hear him.  But the students of his own hospital, who had
	   only the effort of shifting themselves out of the  sofas in
	   the common room,  came  ungracefully and  ungratefully, and
	   found it all rather boring."


                        Gordon Ostlere, "Doctor in the House," 1952.

