Three invalids.âSufferings of George and Harris.âA victim to one hundred and seven fatal maladies.âUseful prescriptions.âCure for liver complaint in children.âWe agree that we are overworked, and need rest.âA week on the rolling deep?âGeorge suggests the River.âMontmorency lodges an objection.âOriginal motion carried by majority of three to one.
There were four of usâGeorge, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we wereâbad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.
We were all feeling seedy, and we were getting quite nervous about it. Harris said he felt such extraordinary fits of giddiness come over him at times, that he hardly knew what he was doing; and then George said that he had fits of giddiness too, and hardly knew what he was doing. With me, it was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all.
It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touchâhay 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 intoâsome fearful, devastating scourge, I knowâand, before I had glanced half down the list of âpremonitory symptoms,â 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 feverâread the symptomsâdiscovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing itâwondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitusâs Danceâfound, as I expected, that I had that too,âbegan to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabeticallyâread up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Brightâs 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 housemaidâs knee.