One of the leading doctors of our tow asked the Lash editor recently what we would charge to run his advertisement in our columns. We told him our rates for advertising were 15 cents per line each issue. He complained that our rates were too high, but said we didn’t run the paper for accommodation he saw.
We wonder if he is running his business for “accommodation.”
One good healthy doctor’s bill would run this print shop for a month.
An editor works half a day for $3 with an investment of $4,0000. A doctor looks wise and works 10 minutes for $200 with an investment of three cents for quinine and a pill box that cost $1.37. A doctor goes to college two or three years, gets a diploma and a string of words that the very Dickens couldn’t pronounce, buys a box of pills, a chloroform snuffer and a meat-saw and comes home and stick out his shingle as a “Physician and Surgeon.” He will then doctor you until you die at so much a visit, and put them in according to what you have in your pocket book.
An editor never gets his education finished—he learns as long as he lives, and studies all his life. He eats corn bread and bull liver, he takes his pay in hay and turnips, and allows the doctor to remain in town by not publishing the truth about him. If the editor makes a mistake he has to apologize for it, but if the doctor makes a mistake he buries it. If an editor goes astray there’s tattling, tall swearing and smell of sulphur, but if the doctor goes astray, there is a funeral, flowers and a smell of varnish. If the doctor goes to see another man’s wife, he will charge the man for his visit. If the editor calls on another man’s wife, he gets a charge of buck shot in his pants.
Any medical college can make a doctor, but you can’t make an editor—he has to be born one. When the doctor gets drunk it’s a case of ‘overcome by heat or nervousness.’ When an editor gets drunk, it is too much booze, and if he dies it’s a case of delirium tremens. The editor helps men to live better and the doctor helps men to die quicker.
From The Lash, Moravian Falls, N.C., Nov. 1, 1922, Leonard Laws, editor and publisher.
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