DR. SULLIVAN

With the irrationality of a peeved child, and his characteristic perversity in misjudging issues, Mickey Sullivan has been throwing mud at Harvard's latest philanthropic scheme. Following the University's gift of an expensive X-ray machine to the Cambridge Hospital, Mickey opened up proceedings in the city council to raise enough money to purchase the machine and thereby take control of its operators away from Harvard.

Mickey bases his objections on two points, first, that by controlling the appointments of operators, Harvard is beginning to extend an insidious domination over the hospital, and second, that as its first operator Harvard has chosen a German refugee, from the medical school. It is plain that Harvard wishes to appoint these technicians itself in order to insure expert handling of the delicate and costly apparatus, and also to give its young roentgenologists practical experience before placing them permanently.

But it is a gross exaggeration of the amount of thought-process behind Mickey's statement to treat it thus logically. For when he entered the clinic, his counsellorial dignity suffered the unspeakable insult of being "greeted in the sharp tones similar to those given by an army officer." The effect on such a sensitive and fine-grained temperament as Mickey's must have been cataclysmic, to judge by the tirade it produced against Harvard's subversive influence and against "German refugees giving military orders in a hospital." It was chivalrous of Mickey to try to protect Cambridge Hospital from Fifth-column assault. Nevertheless, one might perhaps warn him that his grounds are nil, his arguments flabby, and his mode of expression calculated to draw nothing but the horse-laugh.