It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read an advertisement for a new medicine without coming to the belief that I am suffering from the disease that the medicine will cure.
One day I was not feeling very well, I had been reading about a medicine for stomach- trouble, so I went to the British Museum to read up what I should do for myself. I got down a medical book and read all I had come to read about stomach-trouble, and then I started reading about all the other diseases in the book. I went very thoroughly through the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and realized that I had got all the diseases described; the only one I had not got was housemaid's knee.
Jerome
[ʤəˈroʊm]
Read up = study
I sat and thought. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point
Point of of view. If medical students had me, it would no view = way longer be necessary to ‘walk the hospitals’. I was a
of thinking
Walk the hospitals = study at hospitals
All of a sudden = suddenly
Start off = start
For nothing = without charge
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 to see what it was. It was a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel it. It had stopped beating. I tried to look at my tongue. I put 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 from what I could see of that I felt only all the more certain that I had fever.
I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I left it, feeling that I had one foot in the grave.
I went to see my doctor. He is an old friend of mine, and feels my pulse, looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I'm ill; so I thought I
THE THREE MEN IN A BOAT
would do him a good turn by going to see him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said to myself, “is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary 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. Life is short Pass away and you might pass away before I had finished. But = die 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 re- mains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I have got."
And I told him how I came to discover it all.
Then I took off my clothes and he looked at 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
