I sat and thought it over. What an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what a gift 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 to 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, suddenly, it started off. I pulled out my watch and counted. 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 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, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other. I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a weak wreck.
I went to my medical man. He is my old friend, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn4 by going to him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, usual patients, with only one or two diseases each.” So I went straight up and saw him, and he said: “Well, what’s the matter with you?”
I said: “I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. But I will tell you what is not the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I have got.”
And I told him how I discovered it all. Then he examined me. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded it up and gave it to me, and I put it in my pocket and went out. I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist’s, and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back. He said he didn’t keep it.
I said: “You are a chemist?”
He said: “I am a chemist. If I was a store and family hotel combined, I might be able to help you. But I am only a chemist.”
I read the prescription. It ran:
“1 lb.5 beefsteak, with 1 pt.6 bitter beer every 6 hours. 1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 every night.
And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.7”
I followed the directions and my life is still going on.
In the present instance, going back to the liver-pill leaflet, I had all the symptoms, the chief among them was “a general dislike of any work.” As a boy, the disease hardly ever left me for a day. My parents did not know, then, that it was my liver and they used to put it down to laziness. “You lazy little devil, you,” they used to say, “get up and do something for your living, can’t you?” – not knowing, of course, that I was ill. And they didn’t give me pills; they gave me clumps on the side of the head. And those clumps on the head often cured me better than a whole box of pills does now.
We sat there for half-an-hour, describing to each other our diseases. I explained to George and William Harris how I felt when I got up in the morning, and William Harris told us how he felt when he went to bed; and George illustrated us by acting how he felt at night.
At this point, Mrs. Poppets knocked at the door and brought in the tray with supper. I must have been very weak at the time; because after the first half-hour or so, I seemed to take no interest in my food – an unusual thing for me – and I didn’t want any cheese.
After the supper, we refilled our glasses, lit our pipes, and continued to discuss our state of health. What was the matter with us we couldn’t be sure of;
but all of us believed that it – whatever it was – was a result of overwork.
“What we want is rest,” said Harris.
“Rest and a complete change,” said George. “Change of scene and no necessity for thought.”
I agreed with George, and suggested that we should look for some quiet place, far from the noisy world, and spend there a sunny week.
“If you want rest and change, you can’t beat a sea trip,” said Harris.
I objected to the sea trip strongly. A sea trip does you good when you are going to have a couple of months of it, but, for a week, it is wicked. You start on Monday thinking that you are going to enjoy yourself. You wave to the boys on shore, light your biggest pipe, and swagger about the deck as if you were Captain Cook, Sir Francis Drake, and Christopher Columbus8 all rolled into one. On Tuesday, you wish you hadn’t come. On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, you wish you were dead. On Saturday, you are able to swallow a little beef tea9, and to sit up on deck, and answer with a faint, sweet smile when kind-hearted people ask you how you feel now. On Sunday, you begin to walk about again, and take solid food. And on Monday morning, as, with your bag and umbrella in your hand, you are getting ready to step on the shore, you begin to really like it.
I remember my brother-in-law going for a short sea trip once, for the benefit of his health. He took a return ticket from London to Liverpool; and when he got to Liverpool, the only thing he was anxious about was to sell that return ticket. It was offered round the town at a tremendous reduction, so I am told; and was eventually sold for eighteen-pence to a bilious-looking youth who had just been advised by his medical men to go to the sea-side, and take exercise.
“Sea-side!” said my brother-in-law, pressing the ticket affectionately into his hand; “why, you’ll have enough to last you a lifetime; and as for exercise! why, you’ll get more exercise, sitting down on that ship, than you would on dry land.” He himself – my brother-in-law – came back by train. He said the North-Western Railway was healthy enough for him.
Another fellow I knew went for a week’s voyage round the coast, and, before they started, the steward came to him to ask whether he would pay for each meal as he had it, or arrange beforehand for the whole series. The steward recommended the latter course, as it would come so much cheaper. He said they would do him for the whole week at two pounds five. He said for breakfast there would be fish, followed by a grill. Lunch was at one, and consisted of four courses. Dinner at six – soup, fish, entree, joint, poultry, salad, sweets, cheese, and dessert. And a light meat supper at ten.
Lunch came just as they were off Sheerness. He didn’t feel so hungry as he thought he should, and so contented himself with a bit of boiled beef, and some strawberries and cream. He thought a good deal during the afternoon, and at one time it seemed to him that he had been eating nothing but boiled beef for weeks10, and at other times it seemed that he must have been living on strawberries and cream for years. Neither the beef nor the strawberries and cream seemed happy, either – seemed discontented like.
At six, they came and told him dinner was ready. The announcement aroused no enthusiasm within him, but he felt that there was some of that two-pound-five to be worked off, and he held on to ropes and things and went down. A pleasant odour of onions and hot ham, mixed with fried fish