（外文电子版资料）Avram Davidson - Blunt.pdfVIP

AVRAM DAVIDSON BLUNT Recent books of Mr. Davidsohs include The Boss in the Wall and the upcoming collections The Avram Davidson Treasury and The Investigations of Avram Davidson. HE HAD THE USUAL MOUNTAIN boyhood in one of those mountainous counties below the Mason-Dixon line -differing from most other such counties only in being one of the few that regularly voted Republican -- where there was not much schooling; but somewhere in the course of what schooling there was, Huey P. Blunt read a piece about yellow fever and the Panama Canal and how one was conquered so the other could be built, and he decided to be an Army doctor. Someone {in after years he tried to remember who first told him, but so many people had agreed and repeated it and everyone took it for granted it was correct} told him that the way to do it was to enlist soons he was old enough and work his way up. Blunt wasnt talkative and he was six months in the Army before anyone there knew of his plans, and before he learned what they were worth. What they were worth officially, that is. He made them worth something, after all, by an illegal conversion of knowledge. He listened, he watched, he read, he worked; and he learned much. The Army Medical Corps taught him more than it planned to. Blunt had deft hands and a good memory. After his enlistment expired he went back to the hills, to his home country. There was a very old man practicing medicine there, his name was Elnathan Wisonant, and he had never been to college either, having picked up all his knowledge of medicine as apprentice to his father, a doctor of similar status. At one time there were many practitioners of that kind around-- it would not be accurate or fair to call them quacks -they represented an older tradition in native medicine than the A.M.A. -they supplied the onlycare available at a time when medical schools were few, and not too well thought of, either. Gradually they became extinct. For the last forty