Disowned (0-4)

A son who had been disowned studied medicine. When his father became insane and had been given up by the other doctors, he cured him by administering a remedy, and was again received into the family. After that, he was ordered to cure his stepmother, who was insane, and as he refused to do so, he is now being disowned again.[*]

There is nothing novel or surprising, gentlemen of the jury, in my father’s present course, and this is not the first time that he has displayed such anger ; on the contrary, he keeps this law always in readiness and resorts to this court by habit.[*], There is, however, something of novelty in my present plight, in that I am under no personal charge, but am in jeopardy of punishment on behalf of my profession because it cannot in every particular obey his behests. But what could be more absurd than to give treatment under orders, in accordance, not with the powers of the profession, but with the desires of my father? I could wish, to be sure, that medical science had a remedy

For my part, in cases which can be cured I do not wait to be summoned; on the previous occasion, for instance, I came to his relief uncalled. But when a case is perfectly desperate, I am unwilling even to essay it. And in respect to this woman I am with good reason even less venturesome, since I take into consideration how I should be treated by my father if I were to fail, when without having so much as begun treating her I am disowned. I am indeed pained, gentlemen of the jury, at my stepmother’s serious condition (for she was a good woman), at my father’s distress on her account, and most of all at my own apparent disobedience and real inabilit to do the'service which is enjoined upon me, bot because of the extraordinary violence of the illness and the ineffectiveness of the art of healing. I do not think, however, that it is just to disown a man who declines at the outset to promise what he cannot perform.

The charges on which he disowned me before can be readily understood from the present situation. To those charges I have made a sufficient answer, I

I who am so difficult and disobedient, who so disgrace my father and act so unworthily of my family, on the former occasion thought it behoved me to make little opposition to him when he was making all that clamour and straining his lungs. On leaving the house, I expected to have a grand jury and a true verdict in my subsequent life, with its disclosure that I was at a very great remove from those offences with which I had been charged by my father, that I had devoted myself to the noblest of pursuits, and that I was frequenting the best company. I foresaw, too, something like this, suspecting even then that it indicated no great sanity in a father to be angry unjustly and to concoct false accusations against a son. And there were those who held all that to be the beginning of madness, the hostile demonstration and skirmish-fire of the disease that was soon to fall upon him—the insensate hatred, the cruel law, the ready abusiveness, the grim tribunal, the clamour, the anger, and in general the atrabiliousness which impregnated the whole proceedings. Therefore I expected that perhaps I should some day need a knowledge of medicine.

I went abroad, then, studied with the most famous physicians in foreign parts, and by dint of great labour and insistent zeal thoroughly mastered the art. On my return I found my father by then defin-

Since I saw that my father was still within hope and his ailment not beyond professional skill, after long observation and accurate investigation of all details I set my hand to it at last and compounded my remedy confidently, although many of those present were suspicious of my prescription, critical of my treatment of the case, and ready to bring charges against me.