Only just in time.

“On this subject of health we are much too ready to follow advice,” I agreed.  “A cousin of mine, Mrs. Wilkins, had a wife who suffered occasionally from headache.  No medicine relieved her of them—not altogether.  And one day by chance she met a friend who said: ‘Come straight with me to Dr. Blank,’ who happened to be a specialist famous for having invented a new disease that nobody until the year before had ever heard of.  She accompanied her friend to Dr. Blank, and in less than ten minutes he had persuaded her that she had got this new disease, and got it badly; and that her only chance was to let him cut her open and have it out.  She was a tolerably healthy woman, with the exception of these occasional headaches, but from what that specialist said it was doubtful whether she would get home alive, unless she let him operate on her then and there, and her friend, who appeared delighted, urged her not to commit suicide, as it were, by missing her turn.

“The result was she consented, and afterwards went home in a four-wheeled cab, and put herself to bed.  Her husband, when he returned in the evening and was told, was furious.  He said it was all humbug, and by this time she was ready to agree with him.  He put on his hat, and started to give that specialist a bit of his mind.  The specialist was out, and he had to bottle up his rage until the morning.  By then, his wife now really ill for the first time in her life, his indignation had reached boiling point.  He was at that specialist’s door at half-past nine o’clock.  At half-past eleven he came back, also in a four-wheeled cab, and day and night nurses for both of them were wired for.  He also, it appeared, had arrived at that specialist’s door only just in time.

“There’s this appendy—whatever they call it,” commented Mrs. Wilkins, “why a dozen years ago one poor creature out of ten thousand may possibly ’ave ’ad something wrong with ’is innards.  To-day you ain’t ’ardly considered respectable unless you’ve got it, or ’ave ’ad it.  I ’ave no patience with their talk.  To listen to some of them you’d think as Nature ’adn’t made a man—not yet: would never understand the principle of the thing till some of these young chaps ’ad shown ’er ’ow to do it.”