Stephen tells me the wrinkles methodology is a hoax, like astrology, phrenology and those other "unsuccessful bridges between science and superstition." This, after working three months together, here at the clinic where we are interns, assigned by our medical school, here where, each day, we place our hands on the foreheads of children and check them. We tell them to smile, frown. We record on our pads the lines that show up in their faces. And then we diagnose them. Tell them their futures.
Now Stephen says he wants nothing more to do with wrinkles after this assignment is over. But that is easy for him to say. He has long planned to confine his practice to the city — to bond brokers and their sterile wives, and he will have little need for the wrinkles methodology. In my frontier practice I will of course see many children, and this knowledge will be essential. Like with this morning's only negative diagnosis, the young Scot, fresh in from the gold fields. His crisp horizontal indentions above the eyebrows were an exact match to that same feature displayed by nearly every case of manic dementia found in New England during the past decade. Stephen had sighed as he filled out the report that would derail the child's future.
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