Three Men in a Boat | Page 4

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.

I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my
pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for
nothing, when I fancy I'm ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn
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, commonplace 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 brief, and you might pass away before I had
finished. 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 came to discover it all.
Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my
wrist, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn't expecting it - a
cowardly thing to do, I call it - and immediately afterwards butted me
with the side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a
prescription, and folded it up and gave it 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 co-operative stores and family hotel
combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers
me."
I read the prescription. It ran:
"1 lb. beefsteak, with 1 pt. bitter beer every 6 hours. 1 ten-mile walk
every morning. 1 bed at 11 sharp every night. And don't stuff up your
head with things you don't understand."
I followed the directions, with the happy result - speaking for myself -
that my life was preserved, and is still going on.
In the present instance, going back to the liver-pill circular, I had the
symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being "a general
disinclination to work of any kind."
What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell. From my earliest infancy I
have been a martyr to it. As a boy, the disease hardly ever left me for a
day. They did not know, then, that it was my liver. Medical science was
in a far less advanced state than now, and they used to put it down to
laziness.
"Why, you skulking little devil, you," they would 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;