THE STORY OF A MICROBOPHOBIAC
There was once upon a time a man who underwent a severe and prolonged attack of Microbophobia. You may not find the term in the dictionaries, nor in the medical lexicons; but, as it is quite possible that there are a variety of things in heaven and earth not yet dreamt of in the lexicons, there is really no justification for denying the existence of microbophobia on that ground. And as to the name itself, there is hydrophobia, and photophobia, and Anglophobia—so why not microbophobia?
Microbophobia is a disease of advanced civilization, of recent origin, and infectious. Its victims are to be found among the married rather than the unmarried, in the city rather than in the country, and among the cultured rather than the uncultured. In a word, the disease rages most in college and university communities, but is also pronounced in high school, grade school, and kindergarten spheres of influence. As all these, however, are in close connection with colleges and universities, microbophobia may be said to belong to institutions of higher learning.
Microbophobia rarely succeeds in engrafting itself onto healthy organisms. No one in perfectly sound mental, physical, and spiritual health need fear its attacks. Its host is almost always in a state of depletion at the time of colonization, and the point of attack invariably the sensus communis, an organ situated in that part of the anatomy usually known as the cranial cavity.
Its symptoms—
But the history of the case shall tell you of the symptoms.
The subject was a professor. It seems that he had laid the foundations of the disease in his college days by exposing himself to bacillus scientificus, and contracting a case of methoditis scientifica, again an ailment whose attack is directed at the sensus communis, and whose ravages are greatest among the learned, especially those whose work necessitates intimate contact with symbols, chemicals, ancient manuscripts, and other odorous and dusty material. Its victims usually betray their condition by rushing about insisting that any and all the business of life is susceptible of the same orderly disposition as the material of their laboratories.
This explains how it was so easy for microbophobia to get firm hold of the professor in after days. After taking the degree of doctor of philosophy, he was called to a university chair, where, being still in a state of impaired vitality, he suffered from a recrudescence of methoditis, which left him so weak that without resistance he fell a prey to microbophobia in the very first year, the immediate cause of infection being without doubt his association with various of his faculty brethren who were in the school of medicine, or worked in the bacteriological laboratory and lectured on sanitation, or served on the university committee of hygiene. All of these men, he afterward learned, were in various stages of the disease—though all considered themselves in perfect health.
For one of the worst things about microbophobia is that the victim has no suspicion of the real nature of his ailment; more than that, he falls a prey to the strange hallucination that it is his environment, and not himself, which is the seat of infection, and consequently will not listen to diagnosis. Individuals have been known to advance in the malady until the sensus communis was all but absolutely gone, without realizing the gravity of their condition.
The professor might have gone on for some time; for, though he was in the grip of the disease, he had not yet begun to suffer, owing to a good constitution inherited from sound progenitors who were not university bred. But an event occurred which hastened the progress of his malady. He married.
Now, marrying is ordinarily a good thing for the sensus communis. Many sufferers of both sexes have found it a most efficacious remedy for the ailments of that rather uncertain organ. But it so happened that the professor's alliance was with a member of the Woman's Club, who was also college bred, a possessor of the degree of Mistress of Home Economics, and, unfortunately, already infected with microbophobia, and visibly impaired in health. Some of his bachelor friends had warned him that conditions in that part of town were notorious, but he laughed at them, and said that a little fumigation was the worst that could happen.
The gravest fears of the professor's friends, however, were soon realized. They saw him begin to sink before their eyes. In his low state of vitality, he was soon hopelessly in the clutches of the dread malady. Even if he had not been vitally reduced, his case would have been desperate, for his wife continued to expose herself week after week at the club. And besides, she took several Health Journals, all of which came from infected centers, and which not only she, but the professor himself, handled with all the carelessness of immunes. The professor read at first because he was amused, but it was not long before he, as well as his wife, hovered with almost religious devotion over the column headed Sanitas Sanitatum, by Doctor Septic Septington, which he ought to have known was swarming with bacillus microbophobicus.
The ravages of the disease in both of them were frightful to behold. The professor's case developed with especial rapidity, so that in a few months both were in the same stage.
Stage? Yes, the stages of this disease are very clearly marked. In the first stage, you are attacked by a noticeable degree of thirst for knowledge about microbes; you read and talk about them constantly, and attend lectures on them at the university and the club.
This is a mild stage. You are for the most part amused, and only occasionally entertain the strange hallucinations which afterward come to possess you so thoroughly. Just to quiet your conscience, however, you adopt a few precautions—such as the use of bottled spring water, and the increase of your interest in the appearance and personal habits of the dairyman. This stage is termed microbophobia intellectualis. The professor and his wife early passed through it, with no serious results.
The second stage is more grave. You insist on a certificate from your dairyman, visit his barns, have the milk examined by your friend in the university laboratory, and finally, to be absolutely sure, pasteurize it. The drinking water you begin to filter and boil, you withdraw your patronage from the Chinese laundryman because you have heard of the dreadful way he sprinkles the linen, and you take an active interest in the enforcement of the anti-salivation ordinance and the encouragement of the bubble-cup campaign.
It is at this point that Dread, the most characteristic manifestation of the malady, begins to assume really noticeable proportions. You dread going out to dinner, for example, because you are afraid that the water and milk on your friend's table will not be properly sterilized. You don't like to abstain from both, and you don't like to attract attention by taking a bottle of boiled water or milk with you. The result is, that you avoid going out at all, and when you are compelled to go, you take a double dose of microbicide. You dread the effects of the public school system, with all its opportunities for the distribution of microbes. Your dread extends even to the communion, and so grows on you that you omit the sacrament because of the common cup—or, if you are a Foot-washing Baptist, because of the common basin. The second stage is denominated microbophobia alarmans.
The professor and his wife were uncomfortable enough in this stage, but in the third they really suffered, though of course with cheerful resignation; for were they not enduring their hardships in the interest of science and for the good of mankind? The third stage is known to science as microbophobia parentum; in popular parlance, the baby stage. Its symptoms are most pronounced in the female. The first thing you do in this stage is to order Madame di Ana's Daily, "The Mother-Maker," together with her two fine volumes on "The Mistakes of Mothers," and "Microbes in the Home." You also join the Mothers' Club, and take your husband to the open meetings. You make him cut off his beard, because you have read how it looks under the microscope—and he will kiss the baby. You boil not only the drinking water, but the water for the baby's bath, and the water you wash your hands in before you take him up; and you insist on the sterilization of all the baby's linen, and all the nurse's apparel. You are determined that the child shall be brought up scientifically, and not be exposed to the risks you ran in your childhood. Having read that mothers are subject to excitement, and that excitement is bad for the fountain source of baby's sustenance, you substitute a bottle; and you use pasteurized milk scientifically compounded with other ingredients which nature forgot to employ in her chemistry; and warm it in a sterilized glass jar, set in sterilized water in a sterilized pan in a room which is disinfected twice a day, and you test it with a sterilized thermometer. You keep on hand a bath of boiling water in which you sterilize at frequent intervals all the usual playthings—nipples, rubber rings, rattles, etc.; and you make due provision for the little fingers which seem so bent on going into the little mouth.
In this stage you also avoid shaking hands, never allow yourself to touch a door knob barehanded, and leave off drawing books from the library, determined to be neither a borrower nor a lender of books or anything else; and, even though your church has deferred to scientific suggestion and introduced individual communion cups, you still shrink from the sacrament because the bread, too, is not individualized, and you are not sure about the linen which covered it, or the silver which contained the grape juice, or the person who picked the grapes, or the feet by which the juice was trodden out.
The fourth stage is known as microbophobic moscophobia, which is the pathological term describing the fear of flies as carriers of infection. You get new screens, interrupt the housemaid every half hour with orders to see whether there are more flies to be found, cover the baby and yourself with netting when you nap, have a cement pit made for the garbage can, and repaper or repaint your interiors—that is, the interiors of your house—every six months. You read, too, that mosquitoes carry yellow fever in the West Indies, and malaria in Italy—distant places, indeed; but still, why shouldn't mosquitoes fly across the sea and land and light on the baby, or yourself? So you screen the household by day as well as by night, and avoid evenings out and picnics in the shade.
In the latter part of this stage you also change your religion on account of the communion service, have your letters disinfected, leave off kissing the baby, steer to windward of rug-beaters and street sweepers, hold your breath as you pass dogs and cats, eat nothing not cooked, drink nothing not boiled, carry a bottle of microbicide in your pocket, dream that the earth is full of microbes as the waters cover the sea, and that the hand of every one of them is lifted against you, and have cold sweats at night and cold feet by day. You realize that you are uncomfortable, but the real cause of it never occurs to you: you attribute your condition to the uncleanliness of your environment, and to your willingness to sacrifice your own comfort to the cause of scientific sanitation.
By this time, too, your sense of humor, never very robust, has decayed, atrophied, and disappeared. Your fat, good-humored, unscientific neighbor calls out from his back porch as you come out to yours to get the milk bottle: "Dangerous stuff, that there! They say they's forty-three million four hundred an' ninety-nine thousand two hundred an' seventeen microbes in a half a drop of it"—and you don't laugh, any more than you laugh when you advise your professor friend to disinfect the contents of his pay envelope, and he replies, "Don't worry—there's no microbe could ever live on my salary!"
In the fifth stage you begin to be physically as well as spiritually uncomfortable. In the eloquent words of the old hymn, you are a prey to "fightings without and fears within." What with the insufficiency of your means to meet the demands of disinfection, and what with the difficulty of getting properly prepared food even if you have the money, and what with the continual strain of anxiety lest you entertain a microbe unawares, you grow thin and nervous. Of course you continue to lay it to microbes, and double your precautions—and worry more, and starve more. If you are not rescued, you finally pass into delirium microbophobicum, which is as much more awful than delirium tremens as microbes are smaller and more insidious and wiser than serpents.
The professor and his wife entered upon the fifth stage, and were alarmingly near the last extreme. If this were a subject for levity, and not for high seriousness, I should be tempted to parody the essayist on Man, and say:
Lo, the poor professor, whose untutored mind
Saw microbes in the clouds, and heard them in the wind.
But they were saved. One night the professor's wife dreamed that a monster centipedal microbe slowly let himself down from the ceiling, and enveloped her in his hundred long wriggling legs. She awoke screaming, to find herself enmeshed in the mosquito bar.
The next day they called another doctor. Hitherto, their doctors themselves had been infected, though neither they nor their patients knew it. But this time they were more fortunate; Dr. Goodenough had been attacked by the disease, had made a brilliant recovery, and consequently was immune.
He listened to the history of their cases, gave them a thorough examination, using his new instrument, the cranioscope—of course more for the purpose of inspiring confidence in his patients than to find out anything; for he well knew what ailed them.
"Don't be alarmed," he finally said. "You really are in a bad state; but I give you my word for it that you will recover. I find your sensus communis all but disappeared. A little more excitement like that of last night, and you might have a hemorrhage—and there you are! Now put yourself entirely in my hands, or I'll not answer for the consequences."
He reached for his prescription blank, and after a few moments handed them a bit of unintelligible writing—the sort that only doctors and their druggist partners can interpret. As I happen to be in the secret, I may tell you that the prescription called for three fluid ounces of city water, not distilled, with two drops of aniline, a drop of nux vomica, a lump of sugar, and a teaspoonful of whiskey, and that the druggist charged them a dollar and seventy-five cents.
"Begin taking immediately," said the doctor impressively. "Take two drops and a half in a half glass of boiled water every three hours from six a. m. to nine p. m. And you must go into the country to-morrow morning, and spend your whole vacation there.... Leave orders for your magazines and journals of all kinds to be held here, tell your friends they are to write you under no circumstances, and don't dare to come back to town on any errand whatsoever. Cut loose from everything! Delay is dangerous, and might be fatal."
The professor and his wife didn't dare to disobey. The doctor was a vigorous and imposing personality, and he had terrified them. They didn't know what a sensus communis was, even though the professor was a Latinist; the doctor had disguised the term by using the English pronunciation, and imagination contributed the usual amount to the impressiveness of his words.
So they packed up all their pasteurizers and sterilizers and disinfectors and bottles and screens and other antiseptic paraphernalia, and drove into the country to a farm fifteen miles away from any car-line or railroad, where there was no telephone or other connection with the scene of their unhappiness.
They hadn't got out of sight of the town before they began to feel differently. No one but a college professor knows how big his institution seems while he is within its precincts, and how small and insignificant when he is out of sight of it. The tension left their bodies and minds, and a balmy sense of repose and freedom succeeded.
But they felt a shock when, just as their carriage disappeared from view over the hill on its return, they saw two dogs and a half dozen cats on the porch of the farmhouse, noticed that the well was not more than ninety feet from the pigpen, whereas all the journals said it should be one hundred, and became sensible of the drowsy murmur of swarms of flies about the kitchen door, attracted thither by a barrel which was wide open—and smelled!
That was not all, however. Fortune seemed against them. It was bad enough for themselves, though they could sterilize their drinking water and pasteurize their milk, and exercise many other of their wonted precautions; but when it came to the baby, they were almost powerless. Watch him as they would, he was continually getting into unhygienic predicaments of the most dreadful description. Before they even entered the house, he had grasped one dog by the tail, and been thrown down by the other, as a mere mark of welcome; and when he got up, crying, in the instinctive effort to console himself of course he resorted to the habit of sucking his fingers, and put into his mouth two of those on the hand which had grasped the tail. The next moment, too, he was licked all over the nose and mouth by the repentant dog that had knocked him off his feet. Horrors!
And then the cats followed him into the house, and rubbed against his legs and licked his fingers, while he gave little screams of delight at the novel sensation. At supper, he toddled to the table in advance of the rest, and before his mother realized his intentions, had an unsterilized spoon in his mouth; and after supper he succeeded in browbeating the baby of the house, who was a month or so younger, and more timid than his experienced guest from the city, into giving up his gum.
The professor and his wife were horrified, but helpless. He went on in that way for a week. They simply could not keep track of him. He drank out of the horse-trough, dabbled in the puddles, consorted with pigs and chickens, shared his bread with the dogs and his milk with the cats, picked up crumbs from the dining-room sweepings, looked upon half rotten, muddy, and fly-specked apples found on the lawn as the greatest of prizes, and reveled in delight with old scraps of rags and hats and shoes which he, with the little country comrade under his leadership, resurrected from the most unlikely and unsanitary places.
The frightened and powerless parents read up again on the periods of incubation of all the microbes mentioned in the books. They could at least be ready with plans to meet whatever came, and cope with it at the earliest possible moment.
But it didn't come. At the end of two weeks nothing had happened. The child slept well and ate all he could get, and was in the best of spirits. At the end of three weeks he had gained four pounds. It was in direct and flagrant violation of all reason and all science, and thoroughly incomprehensible; but what could you do?
After much marvelling at the failure of science, however, they concluded to make a virtue of what was plainly a necessity, and gave the baby the freedom of the farm. And more than that; after a decent period of worrying, they too began to tread the primrose path, and let the little child lead them. They drank unsterilized milk and unboiled water, threw all precaution to the winds, rough-and-tumbled with the boys and dogs on the lawn, napped under the trees unprotected from flies and mosquitoes, ate apples with the skins and all, and without even washing them, went fishing in the creek a mile away up the marsh, and when overcome by blazing thirst drank of the water in the stream, played peg and got their mouths full of dirt, drew pictures for the children on the slate and erased them in the old familiar way—and did all the other reckless things they had done in their own childhood, when the microbe had not yet made a stir in the world, when delirium tremens was still the worst example of pathological misfortune, and nervous prostration had not yet spread to the masses.
When they returned to the city, clothed and in their right minds, they brought with them the half emptied medicine bottle, and charged smiling Dr. Goodenough with duplicity. He charged them—
Well, we shall not say what he charged them. Whatever it was, they engaged him for the next baby, and were grateful to him ever afterward. And as for microbes, before having to do with them in the future, they resolved to let them come at least half way.