CHAPTER V
The Didactics of Seasickness
Breaking the Sabbath—Giving up—Humiliation—Beef Tea Versus Coffee—A Disappointed Engineer—English without Grammar—The Lecture—Pathology—She-sickness—A Rebuke—Symptoms—A Homœopathic Cure—The Passive Treatment—A Reproach—Conclusions—A Suggestion and a Vote of Thanks.
During the first day of the “norther” both the ship and myself came through without any but threatened accidents, although neither of us was seaworthy. The next morning, however, my stomach broke the Sabbath and my pride had a fall. To arise early on Sunday is a bad habit; we are commanded to make Sunday a day of rest, I ought to have known better.
I arose in time for “coffee” and found the “norther” breaking the Sabbath, but did not take the hint. I stumbled out of bed and was precipitated across the stateroom, balancing and plunging from door to washstand and from bunk to trunk. I got one foot in my trousers and fell over, tried it again and sat down on the floor, holding on with my right hand while I pulled up my left suspender, and vice versa. Suddenly my stomach felt as if it were going to break, as the Germans say. I quickly ducked my head and allowed myself to be thrown into my bunk, and called up Christian Science, as I had successfully done the day before. But it was Sunday and she wouldn’t work. It would have been a feather in Doctor Brower’s hat to have caught me. But he probably was too busy himself to be out hunting for feathers. After a short rest I took some sherry, which is not a calendar saint, and it worked, for in half an hour I was able to finish my toilet and go to the dining-room and publicly drink a cupful of beef tea. The ship coffee did not tempt me, which was a point in its favor. Indeed, if all coffee were poor it would be better—it would have less opportunity to do harm in the world.
I lay around in the dining-room after a light breakfast and listened to instructive talks about yellow fever, leprosy, etc., but was particularly interested and enlightened by a non-professional Western gentleman who had gone to Panama in search of a job; one of those travelers who, like Walter Raleigh, had never eaten with a fork. He claimed to be an experienced engineer (whether civil or locomotive, he did not say) who had not been able to procure any kind of work there with a larger salary than thirty dollars a month, although Wallace was drawing much more than that. Hence he had kicked some of the mud off his feet and was on his way back to “God’s earth.” He could not praise De Lesseps and the French enough. The French employed white men and paid them like gentlemen.
But the most interesting part of his long and loud conversation was the illustration it afforded of how the English language can be used to express vividly and intelligibly all sorts of sentiments for hours at a stretch without conforming to a single rule of grammar. It was a most complete triumph of synesis over syntax, of eloquence over elegance. How he had learned to disregard the rules of grammar so unerringly was marvelous. The unequivocal force and fluent ferocity of his expressions afforded a striking compliment to our self-made language. Foreigners think that the English language has no grammar, and it was the mission of the engineer to prove that it could do without it. He expressed himself much more clearly and impressively than a large proportion of men do whose speech is all grammar. He said:
“Them French was cracker-jacks, and no joke. They wasn’t afeared to employ white men, nohow; and they knowed how to treat ’em. The Amerikins won’t employ nobody but niggers or such as works for niggers’ wages. They’ll never get the blamed banana canal digged no way. They ain’t nothin’ doin’, nor won’t be while them fellers is bossin’ the job, and it’s up to you and I to show ’em up. A man kin go down there and work until he pegs out, but he can’t get no pay fur it—only hell. The hull business ain’t got nuther head nor tail, it needs preorganization, and that’s what it ain’t got. As to Wallace, him and me ain’t old cronies, but we know each other, and that’s enough.” I concluded that he was a locomotive engineer, a loco as the Spanish would call him.
As it was Sunday and there was no ordained preacher aboard, and Doctor Senn wouldn’t preach, and Doctor Brower couldn’t preach while the wind blew, I delivered a medical lecture on seasickness, believing that the best way of benefiting them morally was by material instruction. I felt that I could speak from experience, and that there were those about me who could appreciate from experience. We could at least hold an experience meeting. I began:
“Seasickness may be defined as an uncertain attitude followed by a certain act. It is one of the most ancient and orthodox of known ailments. The Greeks called it nausea or boatsickness, and it has changed neither in name, in nature nor in the manner of manifesting itself. It is thus as immutable as the Catholic religion, although it depends upon the weather, which, during the past few centuries, has undergone many changes, like the Protestant. It resembles religion in that it has no pathology; it resembles disease in that it makes people sick. It depends neither upon germs nor upon imagination as do the modern orthodox ailments.”
At this there was a murmur of dissent and slight temporary inattention. Raising my voice, therefore, like a lawyer, I proceeded:
“To illustrate: When a woman has hysteria she wishes you to treat her, and not the disease; but when she is seasick, she wishes you to treat the disease, and let her alone.”
Doctor Morrow, the tall, lardaceous, disgustingly healthy and handsome-looking young doctor from California, who could laugh more eloquently than he could talk, interrupted me and wanted to know if it wasn’t she-sickness that I referred to.
“No, sir,” I said, “I refer to seasickness. Seasickness does not wear off during the daytime and does not depend upon conditions within, but on conditions without the body. In order that seasickness or Greek nausea may exist there must be a boat and a breeze—a zephyr, as the Greeks called it. ’Tis interesting to note that the discovery by the Greeks that the disease was a boat-sickness, or disease of the boat, led them to personify the boat. And this is why a boat is called she instead of it. The word nausea originally had an h in it, and was spelled nau-she-a.”
“Then the Greeks did consider it a she-sickness,” butted in Doctor Morrow, who was still harping on women—a man of one idea.
“Doctor Morrow, you have yet to learn the silence of medicine, which, in practice, is as important as the science. And as for the art, the Greeks would have made a statue of Hercules out of you, and would have given you muscle in place of fat, form in place of speech, poise instead of avoirdupois. A want of silence is often more meaningless than a want of speech. The disease could not have been she-sickness, although if you insist on gender, you might call it her-sickness since the disease can be said to affect her, but can not be said to affect she. Both Greek and grammar are against it.”
He was silenced, even to his laugh.
“The symptoms are exaggerated but honorable hiccups, a persistent but harmless disinclination to retain food, and an indifference to danger that makes one willing to be thrown overboard without having the courage or energy to insist upon being thrown.
“The treatment is always successful, for the patients all get well. As an illustration of how a complete cure may thus be effected I will relate the case of a confessed homœopath who, I am ashamed to say, crossed the Atlantic in the same boat in which I did. He prescribed for himself pure water taken according to homœopathic ‘dilution,’ viz., ten drops of water in a tumblerful of whiskey, two tablespoonfuls to be taken every half hour or two while awake. And he continued thus taking water until we arrived at our destination. I met him three days after, and asked him if he had been seasick. He said that he had felt bad since leaving the boat, but couldn’t remember having felt sickness of any kind on the boat. This was a perfect remedy in his case, and the proper one for those who believe in homœopathy.”
“Hear, hear!” “Y-o-u-reka!” “Down with homœopathy,” and other spontaneous applause greeted me from all sides, and encouraged me to continue talking.
“But there is another class of cases and another kind of treatment, viz., the passive or starvation treatment, which is homœopathy carried to its true and logical end and aim.
“It consists in going to bed and eating nothing and drinking water from a teaspoon until the boat has given up plunging, or arrives at its destination. If the patient is still able to do so he then arises and assumes the activities and indulgences of life, and temporarily recovers. This is the fat man’s remedy. His stomach is relieved of its fat and of its fullness. It gives him the prolonged fast that his burdened system needs and which he has not the self-denial and fortitude to take on shore. It constitutes the benefit of a sea voyage upon his health, and is the only obesity cure worthy of trial, except the one employed by Panama cabdrivers upon their horses.
“We have an illustration of the efficacy of the passive treatment in Doctor Frank. He stays in bed and rests his stomach. He neither eats nor drinks, yet not one of you is improving in health as he is. It is the repudiation of our food and the ridicule of our remedies, since the patient has nothing to do but not to eat and drink. If his patients knew of this and had common sense instead of blind faith, Doctor Frank would not have to go to sea to starve. Our patients should therefore know what we do, but not what we do not do. For a lot of doctors to embark in a boat and have everything their own way, and learn nothing and do nothing about boat-sickness, except to get it, is a reproach to our profession. You talk knowingly, but you must remember that boat-sickness is not a mere postprandial-ephemera. You ought to know that one should not only fast on board but also on land before boarding. How not to eat is an oriental delicacy——”
Here I was interrupted with such long-continued applause and discussion and such frivolous interrogations that I concluded that they were unfit to be reformed, and did not wish to learn how not to eat. How not to eat is one of the lost arts. In keeping with the development of the culinary art, man’s longevity has diminished in 6,000 years from 969 down to 70 years, and his teeth and appendix have been steadily dwindling and will soon fall out. In a few thousand more years another zero will be dropped from his age and the world will contain babes only. But as my audience was unprepared for such a revelation, I closed with the following short summary of my views:
“Therefore, seasickness is not a disease to be avoided, but a remedy to be taken. You have much to learn, but much more to unlearn before you can tell the world anything about it. You must become as babes, and be unborn and born again before you can unlearn and learn again.”
“Every man to his berth,” shouted Morrow, who was entirely devoid of a sense of humor. He regarded my lecture as a joke.
A vote of thanks was passed with the request that, if I should talk again, I take up the subject she-sickness, which they considered more interesting and more in my line. They were still harping on women, and I resolved to cast no more pearls, remembering that all big D’s do not stand for doctor.