The Lepidopterist
On my first visit to Mr Stanley, his wife met me at the door
and nervously explained his state to me.
I calmly entered and asked to see him, trying to radiate the rational,
stable influence that a family doctor should bring into the home. Mrs Stanley took me through to the bedroom,
where the patient lay propped up a little by miscellaneous pillows, his arms
atop the quilt but otherwise covered. He
had loose jowls but gaunt eyes, and neatly combed grey hair with some sort of
oil or pomade running through it, giving him a devilish look to correspond to
his pale skin. Mr Stanley spoke,
apologising for not getting up.
“You should know, doctor, that my wife called you out. I feel chipper, just this cough.”
On cue, he coughed loudly, a sandpapery ticking cough that
gave me an unusual shudder. I had to
listen to his breathing, so I had him sit up and pressed the cold stethoscope
to his back. The breathing was heavy but
normal, yet when he coughed there was a sound as it tailed off which I had not
heard before. It faded away with a sort
of fluttering, like a dropped object bouncing to rest, or a distant knock on a
door becoming weaker. I didn’t really
know what to make of it, but since the symptoms were not severe, I prescribed
some medicine for the cough and left.
Two days later, Mrs Stanley called me again and round I
went. Answering the door, Mrs Stanley
looked even more worried than on the last visit.
“The coughing has got worse, and something odd happened this
morning,” she said.
Mrs Stanley had understated it. I found Mr Stanley out of bed, sitting at a
bureau in the corner of the lounge. He
was wearing pyjamas and a threadbare dressing gown, and had spectacles on the
end of his nose. All his attention was
on a small object held by a pair of tweezers.
“The doctor’s here, dear,” said Mrs Stanley.
Mr Stanley was in a boyish, excitable mood. “Doc, look at this. This is a species I’ve never seen before.”
I approached the man at the bureau and saw that pinched by
the tweezers was a butterfly with delicate lilac wings. Curiously, the next thing he said was: “I
coughed that up at 7.20 this morning.”
I looked to Mrs Stanley for corroboration, and she provided
it with a bewildered nod.
*
ELDERLY LEPIDOPTERIST DESCRIBES RECORD NUMBER OF NEW SPECIES
Herbert Stanley, a former butterfly cataloguer at the
Natural History Museum, has returned from retirement to publish a remarkable new
paper, describing eighteen new species of butterfly. All the butterflies were apparently
discovered in just a two week period, adding an extra sheen to this record number
of species described by an individual lepidopterist. All of them are novel species, seemingly
never seen by any collector before.
Stanley has kept his discovery site (or sites) shrouded in secrecy,
however, and has refused to comment on where these diverse species were
found. This has drawn the ire of others
in the lepidopterology community; it seems that Stanley was not a well-known or
even well-liked figure in the field during his career at the Natural History
Museum. Many are complaining that the butterflies
cannot be confirmed as new species without independent judgements made. Others have voiced opinions that he is taking
credit for other’s findings, hence the concealment of sources.
*
Certain people in the more cerebral press became very
interested in Mr Stanley’s case, perhaps due to its unusual human interest
angle and the whiff of either intellectual espionage or the revealing of an
uncelebrated folk hero. I knew this
because I started to receive calls from journalists at various national
newspapers, but of course I had to maintain confidentiality. In truth, I could not have helped with their
enquiries anyway. Unsurprisingly, I
could find no medical precedent for coughing up butterflies, much less as-yet
undiscovered ones. I visited Mr Stanley
again a number of times, taking the most detailed history of my career to
attempt to find out how it could be. He told
me that not every cough produced a butterfly. He could tell when they were coming, though,
not but butterflies in his stomach, as he joked, but a headache of the kind
caused by intense concentration on one thing for many hours. Mr Stanley confirmed that he had not, as yet,
produced a second butterfly of any of his new species; each one was unique. He maintained the lively mood I had found him
in when he first showed me a butterfly, relishing the waves he was making in
his former field of expertise.
“My entire career, I described the butterflies other people
had found. Now, though, I’ve got plenty
of knickers in a twist over this,” he announced with glee. The case had me worked up too; it brought the
unwelcome doubts over the irreproachability of medicine. It made me nervous about my diagnoses of
other patients and lose confidence in the power of drugs I prescribed. These misgivings continued long after the
conclusion of the case, which was the death of Mr Stanley.
His wife called to say that his condition had worsened; I
went at once. Mr Stanley was in bed, and
indeed he looked fatigued and pale. His pulse
was weak and he coughed frequently.
“They’ve stopped being productive, my coughs,” he
managed. “My butterfly birthing time is
up.”
His eyes sparkled now.
“You’re a woman of science, doc.
So am I. But neither of us can
explain this. All I know now is that I’m
in the record books. A legend in
butterflies. Those quacks who harried me
will be guessing about this forever.”
With that, he coughed once more, and laid his head back onto
the pillows.
