He said that he never prescribed for men, he is required to examine for insurance, but he told me to take a certain remedy for the next three months and then report to him. Meantime his company would "hold me off."
"We won't reject you outright," he explained "because this thing may be only temporary--may not be organic--and it wouldn't be a fair thing to your heirs to decline you outright, because that would most likely prevent you from ever getting life insurance anywhere in the future."
That was a new idea to me and gave me a good deal of a scare.
It occurred to me that the future of a man's family--where it depended on the insurance money of its head--was subject to considerable uncertainty from the various fads of the doctors.
Here I was in danger of being rejected--pronounced an unsound risk--by four separate and distinct companies for four separate and distinct ailments of which my own doctor could find not the least trace and I could feel not the faintest twinge.
If any one of them decided positively against me the future of my family was nil--so far as insurance went, for the examining physician of no other company would be bold enough or sufficiently lacking in "professional courtesy" to pronounce in my favor, whether he could find anything wrong with me himself or not. I began to realize that what I had so far looked upon as rather a good joke might be serious after all.
It occurred to me, too, that it would be a good deal more far reaching than I had supposed.
If Old Pulmonary--as the agent called him--stuck to his theory of my lungs, not only I, but my children, would be unable to get insurance. It would establish a family history--a "heredity"--hard to get rid of. My little joke in speaking of the fact that my aunt had been said to cough before she died, together with Dr. Pulmonary's ability to scent lung trouble in the breathing apparatus of a porous plaster, might lead to a serious complication not only for me but for my children. I concluded to make a clean breast of it. I did not quite dare tell Dr. Pulmonary that I had been deliberately guying the profession--and in fact that was not my first intention--but I asked if he did not think it a little odd that no two of them had held me off for the same reason and that each one had found indications of the particular disorder for which he had a special leaning. He pricked up his ears at once and asked all about the others. I told him that one had found albumen, another enlarged liver, and the third was afraid of heart failure or softening of the brain, and one was still waiting, because he could find no trouble--on account of professional etiquette--before reporting at all.