As to your reference to the most highly respected Doctor Theodore Mesmer, M.D., I would remind the good Sir or Madame that as a Doctor I take great offense to your reference toward the most highly esteemed Doctor Theodore Chunks of Scabs On Slick Red Hands Mesmer, M.D. as a "quack."

Those of us who work under conditions that make the compassionate soul threadbare need all the sustainance we can get. Moral fiber comes from a diet rich with the roughage of support. How would you like, good Sir or Madame, to spend your days elbow thick in the pulsating wet masses of what were once the inviolate fortresses of good health? To spend your days thinking of illness, nothing but illness, to the exclusion of all things other than illness? It can drive a person quite mad. Indeed, disease of the mind is sister to disease of the body. Brothers and sisters in decay do not make fine bedfellows, and the nights are becoming long. Disease can take one in the night. Fevered dreams, in fact. To cut open the diseased body, to exorcise the demon, having no thoughts other than this demon ... it can be quite confusing. For how can anything be naught but illness when all one thinks of is illness, exclusively illness, nothing but illness, madness of the body, and madness of the mind? Dear lord, I have spent hours before an open body, my wet, red hands shaking as I thought, "What to cut? What am I supposed to cut?" When I see pink tissue turning brown before my eyes ... when I see every cell in terms of its decay and death, what, good Sir or Madam, can be considered healthy when everything is dying? Indeed, the only solution is to cut everything out; everything, leaving nothing. Indeed, if one is to think of illness and nothing but illness, excluding all save illness, one has no choice but to remove everything.

I am familiar with the work of the good Doctor Mesmer, M.D. Murder is the inevitable conclusion of a medical career. When one solves through excising, the complete solution is to excise completely.