a fitter of clothing, or of machinery

as rare as a hen's tooth

In the late 1950s Howard Fabing, a medical doctor, obtained permission to inject bufotenine intravenously into a number of inmates at the Ohio State Penitentiary.

Indeed, he uses his reportorial talent for description to conjure the glum, shopworn world they inhabit: he notices the linoleum curling at its seams, the fake antique furniture “broken out in pediments and lathework grenades and ornamental buboes,” the old sewing machine “whose plastic had gone yellow.”