Professor Wilder Dwight Bancroft, 67-year-old Cornell University chemist, dislikes doctors as scientists. His immediate reason is that they refuse to concede that he has discovered an elixir of long life, a panacea for insomnia, alcoholism and sciatica, a preventive of "nervous breakdowns," hardening of the arteries and common colds, a cure for manic depressive insanity and epilepsy.
Identity of his four-powered substance is sodium rhodanate, a crystallized compound of soda, sulphur and cyanide, otherwise called sodium thiocyanate.
Professor Bancroft's thesis is that the thread-like nerve ends clot when exhausted by wakefulness or worry or poisoned by sedatives, hypnotics, narcotics, anesthetics or alcohol. He...
