Approximately half the people I know, from my physical therapist's receptionist to a journalist friend who canceled a luncheon meeting last week, have taken sick this cold and snowy winter. I wonder if they know about Christopher Morley's magic elixer?
The founder of the Baker Street Irregulars once wrote:
What opiate can best abate
Anxiety and toil?
Not aspirins, nor treble gins,
Nor love, nor mineral oil --
My only drug is a good long slug
Of Tincture of Conan Doyle.
But the great adventure writer Robert Louis Stevenson, a fellow Scot, made the same discovery long before Morley. In 1893, he wrote Arthur Conan Doyle from Samoa to laud The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:
"That is the class of literature I like when I have the tooth-ache. As a matter of fact, it was pleurisy I was enjoying when I took the volume up; and it will interest you as a medical man to know that the cure was for the moment effectual."
It couldn't hurt, folks!
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