Word: cronins
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Right from the start, Cronin formed the two-sided habit of proudly sticking out his neck and humbly accepting the spiritual chastisement that invariably followed. His pride took a sharp beating in his very first job, in the clinic of a lunatic asylum: he was nearly strangled to death by a patient whom he had urged the superintendent to release as "such a decent chap." It took another beating at the hands of the crusty old general practitioner who took him on as an assistant and harnessed him mercilessly to the back-breaking round of rural practice...
...Cronin recognized the value of this arduous work, but when a shrewd Scotsman from whose throat he had neatly extracted a herring bone gave him a stock-market tip, he was dazzled by the chance to get rich quick. Planking down his hard-earned savings of ?100, he saw them swell miraculously to ?1,000 in a few days. But he was out on the moors, delivering a baby, when his stock crashed, leaving him ?7. Cronin decided that he had learned another priceless lesson; he dug into his pocket to buy the newborn baby a silver mug, inscribed with...
...called in, purely for emergency reasons, to attend a wealthy patient, and in her wake came an avalanche of Mayfair clients who filled his purse with a "golden stream." Unlike his Scottish and Welsh patients, many of these newcomers were merely "idle, spoiled and neurotic," but young Dr. Cronin was too thrilled by success to care much about that "("I was, I assure you, a great rogue at this period"). For these new patients he invented an ailment named "asthenia" ("which means no more than weakness or general debility"), and soon his anti-asthenia injections were the toast...
...long before Cronin's Scottish conscience began to ride him horribly. Against his swollen bankbook he could posit nothing, on the moral side, except occasional free work and the persuading of "two errant wives to return to their long-suffering husbands." Along with the plaguey conscience came an equally debilitating ulcer. Cronin decided it was time for him to clean house. He sold his rich practice, rented a lonely farmhouse in Scotland, and settled down to write a heartfelt novel about "the tragic record of a man's egotism and bitter pride...
Bomb of Love. The novel was Hatter's Castle. It was the first time Dr. Cronin had ever written anything except "prescriptions and scientific papers," and he thumped it out in the same mood of mingled desperation and "sheer willpower" that he had felt as a struggling medical student. Hatter's Castle was a labor of love and spiritual rejuvenation-and it hit the bestseller lists like a bomb. In no time, Author Cronin found himself richer and more fashionable than he had been at the height of his asthenic heyday. And the more he wrote, the more...