jemadar jannock , porter at st jude 's hospital , is a keen participant in psychological experiments and in that guise has been subjected to a number of curious tests including three days chained to a chair being fed only on dark chocolate before being required to list as many seventeenth and eighteenth century poet laureates ( or poets laureate ) in forty-two seconds as he could : ( jonson , davenant , shadwell , nahum tate , nicholas rowe , laurence eusden , colly cibber , whitehead , warton and pye- ( for some unaccountable reason he forgot john dryden but as he is the most obscure , the psychologists did not punish him especially severely ) ) he was also asked to speak for two minutes on the subject of botanical classification after jussieu without hesitation , repetition or deviation ( each being punishable by an increasingly powerful electrical current transmitted to jemadar 's body via his thumbs ) , and recite the story of jack and jill backwards whilst standing in a bucket of horse-piss .