"Speaking of Operations--"

Cobb goes to a doctor about a pain, is passed along a chain of specialists each more expensive than the last, is relieved of his appendix and a good deal of money, and reports the whole thing: the consultation at which nobody quite tells him anything, the hospital's cheerful determination to wake him for the night nurse, the ether, the visitors who come to describe their own operations in detail, and the discovery that an operation is the one subject on which everybody wants to hear you talk and you want to talk.

Irvin S. Cobb published the piece in the Saturday Evening Post in 1915 and as a small book the same year, and it became one of the best-selling humorous works of its decade.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.