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FORWARDE
Find here enclosed a tale as preposterous to the mind as one can put to letters. I urge you, Reader, before tossing aside this astounding story and scorning its humble Author as a traipsing cozener, rest assured in good and hearty Faith that I swear every writ syllable from my pen is as true as the divine and immutable Gospel, and I stake their veracity on my word as a Christian, good Doctore of bodily health, and an Englishman.
The tale begins in my youth. I was new to my practice, having recently graduated from Oxford University, and had a good deal of success in using salves and tinctures in curing a number of cruel ailments for the people of Birmingham, namely diseases such as Gout, the King’s Cough, Frenchman’s Gout, mictus cruentus the prattling of the elderly, feminine hysteria, left-handedness, the Screaming, and Irish Gout. Having honed my craft and tested my theories in the midlands without causing death or injury in too high a quantity, I gathered my instrumenta doctorum and set home for London to continue my practice in earnest.
It was at that time, shortly before my leaving Birmingham, in the parlor of my cousin, Colonel Blankert of the Romsley Blankerts, that I first heard of the Oafe of Ebrington.
“They say a fool has wandered into Ebrington and has a penchant for spouting odd Prophecy between bouts of mania,” my cousin told those present, including Myself, my Cousin’s Wife and Two Sisters, the Dog, and Doctore Alistair J Renfroe, who studied in his native Glasgow (Keep in mind, Dear Reader, that I do not hold his Scottishness against him).
“An oafe in Ebrington?” Dr. Renfroe scoffed, “and how did anyone notice?”
Much applause at this bit of hilarity. It was, indeed, the funniest jape anyone present had heard that year.
“Theosophus,” Renfroe said, addressing me while wiping tears from his eyes, “you’ve had good luck in dealing with the insane.” He was surely referencing my recent success in treating a Woman.
“Why don’t you pay this lunatic a visit?”
Another hearty guffaw.
It was then Colonel Blankert interjected, “I’ve heard he is not a common Ebrington yawny, dear Theosophus. I have on good authority he predicted somewhat correctly, and on repeated occasions, outcomes of battles with the Colonies. When he isn’t drooling on himself, I assume.”
“Why, Theo, this lunatic is Heaven sent for a man of your talents,” Doctor Renfroe mused.
It was then that I surmised that the object of their humor was myself, for during my short few years tending to madmen and oafes, it would appear that I was commonly mistaken for a madman and an oafe myself. Dare I risk the sin of Pride in saying that I was the first in those days to attempt to ameliorate the suffering of fools and lunatics—a Sisyphean effort that earned me nought but the japes and sneers of my fellow Doctores—and none so vociferous a foreman of the Rumor Mill as AJ Renfroe himself! And how did I respond to the scorn of Polite Society? I eschewed it! I eschew to my Dying Day! This is the duty of those oath-takers of Hippocrates. Enemies of pestulant Satan and his myriad vexations, vanquishers of all manners of plague and true stalwarts of the vital, the True Doctores! Did my sacred Oath to protect and proliferate the Bodily Healthe of mankind not include such lowly sorts as the insane, destitute, self-abusers, and the left-handed? I decided I would see the lunatic, and prove them all wrong about the immutable nature of the downtrodden!
How naive I was.
Find below a record of my three visits with the man. I have resorted to copying my old notes, including all information which I find vital in the cause of defeating Madness, inscribing our conversations as fully and accurately as my notes do allow in the interest of this aforementioned crusade.
MY FIRST VISIT
There was some initial difficulty in tracking down the Oafe, for Ebrington was currently in possession of several publicly known fools, and the locals brought me first to another, who incidentally was no oafe at all but a lost Frenchman. After a period of some searching, I found my man. He was given a room in the Church by the kindly Priest there.
Upon entering his room, but a small cloister, I announced myself loudly so as not to frighten or confuse him, weak-minded as he may be.
“Hark, Madman! The Angel of Your Rejuvenation has arrived to deliver ye from Ruin!”
Despite my clear self-introduction, the Patient immediately startled and took a defensive posture, rising at his bedside with hands in the air as if to ward off some brigand.
“(Eegads!)” he cried. (Note: the man’s exclamation upon my entrance varied somewhat from what I have listed here. I have taken the liberty of expunging his expletives to better suite the tastes of the refined Reader.)
The Madman, hereafter known as the Patient, is of a somewhat tall stature, his mass no more than fourteen stone in weight. His clothes are of a make completely unknown to me. He is in possession of wide, Hibernian features, fair of hair, not unlike an Englishman. (Note: bring calipers; measure skull of subject in question.)
“Have no worry, friend, you are in the care now of a goodly Doctore, Theosophus Sydney Calcraft, and I assure you that I am of a different sort than those you have encountered in this fair hamlet thus far. I understand your affliction as well as any mortal the great Demiurge has seen fit to avail it to!”
The Patient stared at me, dumbfounded, and I reasoned that he must be oafe first and madman second.
“Sir, do tell me of your plight.” Then, I recalled that the infirm do best when they believe their companions to be of a nature quite like themselves. I quickly crafted an expert deception, attempting to make the Patient believe I was cut from the same cloth as he.
“I too am criminally insane and stupid.”
This did not calm the Patient.
“I’m not insane. For (Heaven’s) sake, I don’t think I’m insane, just very lost. Is this like, an amish colony, or like that moovy, the ’em night unintelligible one, the village?”
I told the poor sufferer that both the content and form of his speech eluded my ears, but I assured him that we were indeed in a village and congratulated him on this observation. Indeed, the manner of his speech was quite unlike any I had hitherto encountered.
“(Zounds!) I was just in Shickago!”
He asked a series of questions concerning his surroundings, which I did my best to remind him of, inspecting his head for some sort of trauma. Nothing in his strange speech suggested foolishness save for his mighty ignorance.
Upon hearing the year, he became very agitated and insisted he was not of this Time. At this point, his anger gave me reason to suspect he may be Spanish. When I suggested this, he grew all the more animated. (Note: I have not ruled out Spanish ancestry.)
“What makes you think you are not of this time?” I asked.
The Patient dithered on, but I did not listen to his ramblings. I was focused on his skull, looking for the low epicanthal tilt of the forebrow that suggests madness in most Spaniards.
Realizing that I did not follow his reasoning, he proclaimed, “I can prove it!”
It was then that I recalled his reputation as an occasional Prophet, and I allowed this Part-Time Moses his moment on the mountain. He wracked his ailing brain.
“Benjamin Franklin! He will discover lightning! Or, electricity, but he uses lightning to figure it out! With a kite!”
“My good sir, Mr. Franklin conducted that study nearly twenty years ago.”
“(Gadzooks)!”
He appeared desperate now. I half-fancied I could see smoke rising from his taxed and ailing frontal lobes.
“I’ve got it! Vaccines. I saw an article about this. Vaccines are… about to be invented.” He paused and looked at me hopefully. “Here, I think, in England.”
“Vaccines? You speak of cows?” I asked. I must admit, my knowledge of Spanish was very poor.
“What? No. There’s a… a drug, a kind of drug that you take as an injection. It can keep you from getting sick. They might have made it in China or something… but the point is someone here is about to make the first, like, real one, to fight smallpox or something.”
I found this hash-dash description of a Magick Elixir quite charming, and even find myself, as a Man of Medicine, quite enamored with the idea, even yearning it be so. And how fitting it is, that it comes from the Orient, where it is said Immortals dine on quicksilver feasts to ward off the yawning of the Grave.
Upon informing the Patient that his delusion was as enticing as it was fantastical, he grew despondent and clutched at my elbows with both of his hands, tears in his eyes.
He repeated: “Vaccines, vaccines. Please. Remember vaccines.”
I pitied him, and realized in his dreadful repetition that he would not be shaken of this delusion. This manner of echolalia was not unique and erupted on several other occasions. There were a number of phrases that he gravitated towards and said unceasingly during our conversation.
Exempli gratia:
But I’m not Spanish.
Are you really a doctor?
Why does everyone smell like shit?
(Note: Having bathed just the previous winter, I deduce his insistence that I too smelled of excrement to be yet another, persistent delusion.)
Seeing I could do nothing for the Patient during so short a visit, I prescribed him Laudanum in the standard proportions of Ambergris and Opium, and an increased quantity of Gin so as to combat his Spaniards’ mania.
Insuring the Patient he could present my prescription to the Druggist, I bid him adieu. As I departed, I told the kindly Priest that the man, once at greater ease, is not so much a fool as perhaps commonly believed, and would make a suitable pig herder if goaded.
I payed the Druggist an advance on the Patient’s bill, doubting seriously the Oafe had anything of value, and left for Home.
MY SECOND VISIT
My next opportunity to visit the Patient did not come for another nine years. Lady Luck, like so many of the Ladies of London, scorned me in the interim, all for the crime of being a True Doctore. No amount of Laudanum I ingested could turn this Dreadful Tide nor the growing pains it inflicted on my Soul, so I doubled down, keeping my nose to the grindstone and visiting asylum after asylum, treating as many of the poor deranged as I could, until I too counted myself among their ranks, at times too poor to afford lodging, and bedding down in the very same facilities as my patients. This state of affairs was made all the worse by the knowledge that my principal detractors (Renfroe chief among them) maintained lives of ease and splendor treating only those patients who came from respectable backgrounds and whose ailments could be ameliorated with a simple leeching or bit of cocaine.
It was nearly a decade of this squalor when my cousin, the Captain Blankert, died in a vicious Ballooning Accident that AJ Renfroe so conspicuously survived, so after attending his funeral in Birmingham I stopped in Ebrington to visit my old Patient.
I found the Patient at the nearest workhouse, curled in bed, looking quite unlike himself. He had lost perhaps two stone in weight and was rather unkempt.
“Sir, have you been too excessive in bathing?” I asked, trying to root out the cause of his Depression.
“No,” he said, not turning to meet me.
“Perhaps it is the Miasma of this fetid air causing such unease,” I suggested.
“No. It is not Miasma, it isn’t because of my ethnicity, it’s not because I crossed paths with a raven without bowing, and it isn’t because I was born on a (blasted) Wednesday!
“I’m depressed because my son’s birthday was last week. I wasn’t there, because I’m here, where everyone is superstitious, cruel, dirty, miserable, and too stupid to wash their hands.”
I found that I could not argue with the Patient. He was right, wretch as he was, right in all he said but one matter: Why would someone wash their hands?
Clearly, however, his delusions were still in control of his faculties. Even as a stopped clock is right twice a day, a dolt and simpleton may slur his way into an uneasy truth. I recalled, again, how some had once mistook him for a Prophet. A damnable poor Prophet. I confess, I found that my heart had hardened, my pity soured into loathing. Seeing his condition so acutely, and his knowledge of its wretchedness so exact and unflinching, caused me to look upon my life with the same critical eye. Two men, out of Time.
“You say you are not of this Time! Well then make this Time of you!” I shouted, advising he do that which I myself had failed to do for the last decade. Disgusted, I threw my note prescribing him laudanum at his meagre cot and left.
MY THIRD VISIT
Eight years later, I payed the Patient my final visit. This time, it was purely to stoke my curiosity, for I renounced my occupation as Doctore. I know, Reader, that those of you unfamiliar with my current station must be aghast! Have I not just pages ago lit the torches of zeal and marched them up the great Ziggurat of Medicine herself, declaring myself her most Avid Patron?
Alas, Age wares the fury off the hottest flames, dulls the edges of the most obstinate blocks until they, too, may roll on with the rest towards fated and peaceful senility. I found myself at the end of “middle-age” at a hoary and desiccated 39 years old. It was then, in the waning of my years, I finally lay down my copies of Boethius and Paracelsus, and donated the rest of my opiates to those who are neediest in this world, a pack of Orphans I often crossed on route to the Post Office. I was, according to all, a failure. My efforts to cure the insane had been rarely, if ever, successful. All of my colleagues saw my toil as, at best, a grand amusement, and, at worst, a rather boring, tiresome sort of amusement.
I say this only to inform the Reader of my general state of mind during my final visit, and to explain that my true motive in seeking the madman was to make a sort of amends, a sincere apology that I would make, most likely, I thought, before his pauper’s grave. But I digress. I first checked the workhouse, but there heard that the Patient had returned to Ebrington some years prior. Traveling there, I asked the locals about the Madman, but was directed to a series of Frenchmen and Masturbators and eventually realized the Patient was not among them.
I described the Patient in detail to a local, and to my shock, the fellow knew of whom I spoke. He gave me directions to a manor, the former residence of the last local Viscount. I, hardly believing my ears, raced to the manor as quickly as my servants could carry me.
At the front door, one of the manor servants informed us that his Master was in the garden, and always welcomed visitors, such that I may stroll around the house if I so please and call out to him. This was a strange custom, of course, but the servant assured me it was his Master’s way.
Crossing round, I saw a Gentleman, engaged in sport with a young girl, both of them swinging raquets at a rubber ball in the French style, he occasionally pausing to offer her gentle instruction. It was, unmistakably, the Patient.
I called out to him, and he turned, a look of jubilation grew on both our faces, and we embraced.
“Meet my Daughter. Her Mother is in town now, or I’d introduce you,” he said with that peculiar accent of his, and I exchanged courtesies with his daughter, wishing I brought along a child-sized bag of cocaine for the darling girl.
“How have you done so well! Have your delusions subsided?” I asked.
He laughed with such mirth as I had never seen him muster.
“I’m not sure about anything subsiding. But I took a piece of advice you gave me, years ago. I worked for a bit, pig-herding and such, until I could scrape together what I needed to design a few patents. Canning. Zippers. Next, bicycles.”
“Bicycles? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Yes. You haven’t,” he said, grinning. I was amazed that the Patient had improved his station yet appeared more lunatic than ever.
“How about you?” he asked, “Still a Doctore?”
“Oh, no, I gave that up,” I said, “I too broke into the sphere of business. Cutlery. I own the only pure lead cutlery manufactory in the world. Only the highest quality lead. Knifes, forks, and spoons, even pots and pans. Why, I could supply your manor free of charge!”
“Wow,” he blinked at me with a steady grin, “That is… That’s great,” he said, stupefied. I suppose the Spanish always did prefer gold.
EPILOGUE
My third visit with the Patient may have been our final one, but it was the beginning of a long and fruitful correspondence. His success in business, despite his total derangement, restoked my nearly extinguished fire, and I have reinvested a portion of my time to the advancement of respect and dignity for the Child-brained and Idiotic Class. I must admit, the Patient’s declaration that a word of my advice urged him towards such a fruitful life undid the decades of criticism I had endured. Now, AJ Renfroe himself could not dissuade me now from my righteous campaign. As a brief aside, I’ll have the Reader know that I’ve had the last laugh in this final matter. You may already be well aware of Renfroe’s latest public gaffe that cost him dearly in the society papers. Spurred by his odious dismissal of all my endeavors, he baselessly lambasted my lead cutlery business as a public health hazard. I must admit, it is almost embarrassing to see how low the former titan now stoops.
I shall share one last detail with you, Reader, one that I fear may cause some of you to malign me as a liar. However, my reputation has long suffered the slings and arrows of unrepentant legions already. Owing to my years as a pariah, I no longer fear such attacks on my name. The reason I wrote this pamphlet and printed it for dissemination is, in truth, two-fold. The first fold being my aforementioned pledge for progress in the study of and aide to the insane. The second and much stranger fold is to share a most peculiar fact. A recent invention has been added to the panoply of medical serums and devices designed to combat the creeping hands of death. The principal inventor of this testament to man’s progress is from no other than Gloucestershire, the seat of Ebrington itself!
Imagine my surprise, after months of hearing rumors regarding the efficacy of new inoculatory devices, when I opened the August Edition of the Saunders’s Newsletter and saw that word, printed in black ink as solid and immutable as the Ten Commandments hefted by that austere and hoary Prophet millennia ago, that word that was uttered to me with such conviction nearly twenty years prior:
Dr. Edward Jenner has demonstrated, incontrovertibly, genuine vaccine inoculation in greater Bath.
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AUTHOR BIO:
Evan Wellbrock is an English teacher from Nashville who currently lives in Zhengzhou, China. He is previously unpublished and is very excited to be making his literary debut. When he isn’t writing, he’s often travelling around China, where he finds new and exciting places to sit down, read a book, and have a coffee.
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WHY WE CHOSE TO PUBLISH “A Record of Three Visits with the Lunatic Oafe of Ebrington”:
Author Evan Wellbrock has utilized the same literary trick employed by Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to craft this amusing tale of a modern man mysteriously transported back in time, in this case to the mid-1700s. The parallels are similarly amusing.
We loved Wellbrock’s use of language and attitudes of the time to add flavor to plant the reader firmly into the narrative. There are so many wonderful lines in this that make it a genuine pleasure to read.
We suspect that the excellent ending was the premise the author began with, asked “what if,” then crafted his story to lead up to it. But however the story came about, in our view it’s a complete success, and that’s why we selected it for our magazine.
And course we’re delighted to be the magazine to give Mr. Wellbrock his literary debut.