see, but it went down wonderfully well among the chaps who stood round.
"I must say he went to work in what seemed to me a more reasonable way than Doctor Page did. Page, who was generally ill with gout or asthma himself, tried to make out to you that you were pretty well all right when you went to see him and discouraged you from going on. Hankins claimed to be the only sound man in Crossgate, and offered to prove scientifically that everyone else had something wrong and getting worse inside him and sapping his vitality, even though he might know nothing of it. Every night he gave a lecture in the market-place opposite the Goat and people came miles to hear him. He had a platform and life-sized pictures of your body in colour with the different inward parts to flap backwards and forwards on hinges, so that he seemed to take you in on one side of yourself and bring you out on the other, telling you all about the various diseases, unbeknown to ordinary professional doctors, that you met with on the way. Then he went through the symptoms of different fatal ailments and showed you what you looked like inside when you'd got them. Before he'd done, pretty nearly everyone felt that they had most of the things he described and he did a first-rate business in remedies. Whether it was his medicines—as he claimed—or not I don't know, but he certainly had a wonderful frame. He'd stand on his platform and bellow like a bull for five minutes at a time to show what really healthy lungs were like. I've heard him from this station, three miles away, on a still evening. I've seen him jump off his platform and leap over it twelve or fifteen times backwards and forwards without stopping for breath.
"'There's a heart toughened with Hankins’s Vital Elixir,' he'd say. 'I was a puny thriftless wisp of a boy,
