My battle against gonorrhea.

摘要

The familiar white urinals, puce-colored walls, and the queasy odor of disinfectant in M207-the men's room on the mezzanine floor of the University of Pittsburgh's medical school. I remember standing in a ragged line of seven young men across from the toilet stalls, pants stripped to my ankles. This was the moment, the crux of the clinical trial, the procedure that had seemed so trivial a few weeks earlier when I had agreed to participate.Two men wearing long lab coats busied themselves arranging a sequence of labeled catheters on a metal cart near the sinks. The short one looked like a Marine drill sergeant; the other, older one reminded me of Marcus Welby, television's kindly general practitioner. But this time Welby wasn't curing the sick. He snapped on a pair of latex gloves as the drill sergeant turned toward me and the other half-naked subjects and barked, "Okay, gentlemen, we're ready to inoculate."