“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.”