I love some books for their wonderful writing.  I love some books for their wonderful characters.  I even love a few for their couldn’t-guess-that plots.   But All My Patients are Under the Bed and After All They’re Only Cats keep their place on my bookshelf because of their subject.  They’re about the pets we make part of their lives.  In this case they’re both about cats.

Dr. Louis Camuti was a veterinarian that practiced in New York during the 20th century and  specialized in treating cats.   This is unexpected because a) he wasn’t really a “cat person. having no cats of his own and b) he was allergic to felines. Consequently, he really had under no illusions about the species.   He saw they could be good companions and he liked their assertive personalities but he knew they could be sneaky, naughty creatures as well.  So All My Patients are Under the Bed is a collection of professional anecdotes Dr. Camuti collected during his years of practice.  Some are well worth remembering.

There were the times when he treated the cats in Tallulah Bankhead’s house (to make him completely unique, Dr. Camuti made housecalls!) and learned that however badly the actress treated herself and other human beings, she was a very kind person to cats.  Camuti had to pick his way around fallen guests who didn’t survive the previous night’s party and various bric-a-brac to find his client and the owner but the cat was well attended to.   And if the cat needed an injection, Camuti used the contents of the liquor cabinet as handy andiseptic!

He tells of other celebrity (and non-celebrity) related cats always emphasizing how a fair number of the cat injuries result from pairing the cat’s nature with a lifetime of indoor living with humans.   My favorite is when he’s summoned by an owner, convinced the cat has a prolapsed colon (a nasty condition where the inside body part gets pushed to the outside).  Camuti examines the animal and learns the extending piece is a curtain tie-back the poor animal managed to consume.  Camuti stands the cat on the grand piano, firmly grasps the exposed part of the tie-back and swats the animal so it jumps off the piano.  The cat went flying, the tie-back came out and the maid (who thought this was some barberic type of surgery) fainted.  Someday that scene needs to go into a motion picture.

If Louis Camuti was a non-cat person who treated people, then the late Patricia Moyes wrote from the perspective of someone who became a cat person.  She was a mystery writer, married to a non-cat person when he begrudgingly agreed they might manage to share their home with one kitten provided the cat kept away from him.  Of course the Siamese kitten they interviewed chose her husband (Jim) to be her person and Moyes pointed out one of the cat-truths I’ve watched ever since: cats automatically gravitate toward the one person who doesn’t fawn over them.   Stick a cat in a room full of people and the feline will ignore every crooning voice to jump into the lap of the sole cat hater.  The Siamese, Belinda, did it in the book, my Kansas cats did this when my late grandfather came to visit and when I was going through my anti-cat phase, Charlie-Belle did this to me.  Cats like a challenge; it’s part of their nature.

Another part of their nature, Patricia Moyes pointed out was their abhorrence of printed material.  If anyone lives with cats and books, you can bear me out on this.   Put the book down and the cat will ignore you.   Pick the book up and the cat has to get between you and the pages, laying on the open book if possible.  Cats are all members of the anti-book league and it only gets worse when you are trying to write.  Belinda developed the Papoose Effect, which involved jumping onto her writer’s back, digging her front claws into the human’s shoulders and dangling suspended like so much  dead weight down’ the human’s.  Instinctively, Ms. Moyes would fling her own arms under the cat’s hind quarters to ease the weight digging into her body. The cat now had her pinned.  The writer’s hands were off the typewriter and kitty curled up against the small  her back, purring with joy.  It’s a wonder Ms. Moyes managed to write at all after that.

But, write she did for another twenty years as have others who live with felines have done.  The writer is a self-centered sort of person (has to be, really) and a cat can be an ideal companion, independent, a bit aloof and unimpressed with their human’s accomplishments.  To the cat, best-seller status, and literary admiration mean nothing.  Win the Caldecott award one morning, the Pulitzer that afternoon and scoop the Nobel prize that night but the feline won’t be impressed.  The cat still demands to be scratched, petted and fed a tasty dinner because in the end, it’s not about the human, it’s all about the cat.  And that is as it should be.