I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for
some slight ailment of which I had a touch - hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down
the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly
turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which
was the first distemper I plunged into - some fearful, devastating scourge, I know
- and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was
borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again
turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever - read the symptoms - discovered that
I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it - wondered
what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I had that
too, - began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and
so started alphabetically - read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and
that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I
was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned,
I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I
seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six
letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight.
Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while,
however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known
malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without
housemaid's knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized
me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with
from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there
was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical
point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no
need to "walk the hospitals," if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they
need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my
pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to
start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to
the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating.
I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all
the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted myself all
over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each
side, and a little way up the back. But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to
look at my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and
tried to examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I
could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.
I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit
wreck.
