They are saying in the house that Ethel is going to die. If she does, they certainly ought to kill the fiend who is responsible for her misery. I’m sure I can feel for the poor girl. Sally B. has thrown me over for a lop-sided, yellow cat, with one eye and no tail—a paltry Manx thing that would disgrace Seven Dials. Oh yes, the beast can fight, I know; but I was dead out of training at the time. Not that I care. I might have known what to expect from a French cat. There are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it.
Shall give up keeping a diary. The thing only makes people laugh at you after you are gone. Besides, you often think of things you can’t even say to yourself, let alone write in a book.
Resume my diary after several years. I’ve felt very seedy lately and been getting worse every day for a year. Shabby and old. Don’t create any sensation as of yore. Vet comes to see me, and the case evidently interests him a good deal. He says a pinch of arsenic is the only thing for me, and my old ladies both begin to cry. I suppose it’s expensive. Still, as this is the only cure the man can suggest, they are bound in decency to allow me to have it. They agree to the vet’s proposal, though reluctantly. Disgusting to see meanness at such a time. However, it’s all right: I’m to have the arsenic to-morrow.
INOCULATION DAY
I HAD been reading far into the dim avenues of night, and when finally I cast from me the Lancet, with all its marvellous chronicles of the eternal battle between Science and Death, I passed into a dream-survey of therapeutics; wherein the subject, touched by a liberated imagination, launched me upon visions so real, so tremendous, that, waking once more, I arose and set them down in the dawn-light.
I seemed to wander by that road along which our mighty sons of healing will march in time to come. My phantom survey traversed the far past, the present, the remote future; it bore me through the whole history of medicine and surgery, of human diseases and their discovered remedies. From the science as indicated in Homeric poetry under the ægis of Æsculapius, to the system of Hippocrates; from the Alexandrian school and great empiric doctrines, to Roman methods—to Pliny, Galen, Aretæus, and other early lights—I progressed. I saw also the schemes of Arabic medicine; glanced at the science as expounded and practised in the Middle Ages; saw Paracelsus in his laboratory; Van Helmont, the mystic; and Bacon, the philosopher. Still sweeping forward upon the lightning pinions of a dream, I passed from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century and beheld new ideas, new theories, new systems plentiful as the sands upon the sea-shore.
A mechanical theory of disease was then the favoured conceit, and I noted Cheyne writing his survey of fever upon that basis; I saw Mead putting forth his treatise on The Power of the Sun and Moon over Human Bodies; I examined Keill’s application of Newtonian principles to the explanation of humanity’s physical machinery. Then arose that mighty Boerhaave and his school; Hoffmann of Halle, with his notion of a universal ether permeating all regions of the body; Stahl and his “animism”; Haller, Morgagni, Cullen, Brown, and Avenbrugger—a genius of Vienna, who invented the method by which ailments of the lungs were first investigated by percussion.