On the Seaboard: A Novel of the Baltic Islands

by August Strindberg

It was a greeting from the ladies and an inquiry if the commissioner would come down.

This he answered by returning his regards, but he had no time this evening because he must work, unless some urgent circumstances required his presence.

There was silence for a moment. As he thought he surely knew what would follow he left his interrupted work and placed his manuscript in order; he had just completed this when he heard the mother's step on the staircase. Instead of waiting for her to knock he opened the door and greeted her with the question, "Miss Mary is sick?"

The mother started, but recovered herself at once and asked the doctor to come down and see her as it was impossible to get a physician.

The commissioner was not a physician but he had acquired the elements of pathology and therapeutics; had observed himself and all the sick that had come within his circle; had philosophized over the nature of diseases and their remedies, and finally, made up a therapy, that he applied to himself. Therefore he promised to come in about half an hour and bring the medicine with him as he heard the girl lay in convulsions.

It certainly was not difficult for him to guess the nature of her sickness. As the first messenger had said nothing about illness, it must have occurred between the two messages and had been caused by his refusal to go. It was a psychical indisposition, which he so well recognized and which passed under the yet undefined name of hysteria. A little pressure on the will, a thwarted wish, a cross plan, and at once followed a general depression under which the soul tried to place the pains within the body without being able to localize them. He had so often seen in the pharmacodynamics beside the names of remedies and their action small cautious remarks as "acts in a yet unexplained way," or "action not yet fully known," and he believed that he had found by observation and speculation, that just because of the unity of mind and matter the remedy acted both chemico-dynamically and psychically at the same time. Recent medical ideas had left out the medicine or the material basis and assumed in hypnotism a purely psychical, or in diet and physical exercise a vulgar and often detrimental mechanical method. These exaggerations he regarded as necessary and beneficial transition forms, although their trial had demanded its victims as, for instance, when one with cold water excites a nervous person instead of soothing them with warm baths, or tired out the weak with violent exercises in the raw air.

He believed he had found that the old remedies could still be of service as a kind of instruction material, to use the popular expression, in order to awaken and change impressions, and just as the group of astringents really cause a contracting of the stomach, just so do they cause a concentrating of the soul's scattered powers, which the dissipated drinker knows from experience when he in the morning winds up his run down movement with an "Angostura."

This woman felt herself bodily indisposed without directly being so. Therefore he now composed a series of remedies, of which the first would cause a real physical ailment whereby the patient should be urged to leave the sickly condition of the soul and localize it definitely in the body. To this purpose he took from his family medicine case the most nauseating of all drugs, asafœtida, which could best develop a condition of general illness, and in such great doses that actual convulsions would result; that means, the whole physique with the senses of smell and taste should rise in revolt against this strange substance in the body, and all the functions of the soul should direct their attention to its removal. Thereby the imaginary pains would be forgotten, and it would only remain then to cause in succession transitions from the one nauseating sensation down through less unpleasant ones, until finally the release from the last stage, by means of an upward grade of cooling, covering, softening, mitigating remedies, should awaken a complete sensation of vivacity as after having passed through troubles and dangers, which are delightful to recollect.

After having dressed himself in a white sack coat of cashmere and tied on a cream colored necktie with pale amethyst stripes, he for the first time since the arrival of the ladies put on his bracelet. Why all this he could not explain, but he did it under the influence of an impression, brought from the sick bed he was to visit, and which he produced in himself. And when he looked in the mirror without observing his face, he noticed that his exterior gave a mild sympathetic impression, but also with a touch of the unusual and that it would attract attention, without exciting a nervous person.

After this he collected his requisites like a magician who is going to perform, and went to the sick bed.