October 4 Friday – The Clemens party was still at the Menzies Hotel in Melbourne. Sam’s carbuncle problem caused the cancellation of a performance planned for Bendigo’s Masonic Hall.
From Cooper (102-3): "The next day, Dr. Thomas Fitzgerald, the leading Australian surgeon of the day and the first Australian to be knighted for eminence in medicine, attended Clemens. The doctor froze and lanced Clemens's carbuncle, gave him an injection of opium, and prescribed plasters, which Mrs. Clemens conscientiously applied."
Sam stayed out of the public eye and recovered enough to travel by Oct. 11 [Shillingsburg, “Down Under” 12; At Home
Shillingsburg (p73) reports that Twain offended the good doctor while on his return trip to Melbourne from Adelaide "by asking for his bill as if it were a tradesman's". Dr. FitzGerald's treatments were the cure, though. From Twain's Autobiography (V1 pg189-90); "Carbuncles have families, when they are treated by bunglers. Mine’s first son was born at sea and was lanced in Sydney. The second son was born in Melbourne, but there was a real doctor there—Fitz Gerald—a doctor with an immense practice, and he said he would cure it in twenty-four hours. He kept his word; also, he taught us his art, and we squelched the rest of the family, one by one, as they arrived. Only one of them lasted two days. The carbuncle-expert of Elmira charged me $135 for half-curing one carbuncle. If I had not been obliged to leave on the lecture-tour he would be [propagating] that one’s posterity to this day.".