O Karlsbader Wässer,
Wäret ihr nicht besser
Als eure Doctoren,
Wir wären verloren!
So ran an agonised distich I found written up on a rock somewhere. But doctors and waters are much of a muchness, I think. Yearly will Charles’s Bath claim its hecatomb; I know not why. Harrogate is as nasty, and as dangerous. To my mind, of all the poisons distilled out of the bowels of the sometimes harmful earth, these same waters are the worst. Strength and weakness are convertible terms for health and sickness; and that which weakens by reducing maketh not strong. And at this point of my sermon take warning again, ye hypochondriacs, and beware.
I returned from Carlsbad seriously ill, and I grew worse very rapidly. The supposed reaction which is so ingeniously claimed as the result of these nasty drinks—to account for the natural fact that all but the herculean among the drinkers grow steadily worse for some time afterwards, and better again when the effects have passed off—failed to show itself in me for some years. It did at last, no doubt; and I may send a votive tablet to Carlsbad yet. I became, as I said, a bore. I was passed on from doctor to doctor, and, as one of them frankly said, each gave me another kick down the ladder. On one of the steps only do I ask to linger for a moment, and to thank the one among them, true friend and good man, whose eye this may chance to meet, to whom I owe as much as one man can owe to another in this world. Only he and I, in this world, know what I mean.
At last I reached the lowest rung of the medical ladder indeed; for what the wine-trade is to the man who has failed generally, so I take it is the lunacy trade (with marked and fine exceptions, of course) to the doctor who is no good for any other ‘specialty,’ and knows he is not. His province is the unknown; the law works for him; he is in charge of a certain number of unfortunates, whom others—not he—have pronounced ‘mad;’ he argues, when he argues at all, backwards. He has not to say to his patients, ‘Your words and thoughts are inconsecutive, your eye is wandering, &c.; therefore you are mad;’ but, ‘You are mad; therefore your words and thoughts are inconsecutive, and your eye is wandering.’ This argument has been absolutely used in that shape with me; and I leave honesty to judge what the effect was.
But I could not afford to be angry, for that would have been ‘excitement’ and madder still. The position in which you put some of us—some of you—with the light heart of M. Emile Ollivier—is a cruel and terrible one, indeed, for the man conscious of sanity, but under the ban, ladies and gentlemen. And believing, as I do, that I am one of the very few who can ever have come through such an ordeal as this with all his wits throughout about him, I cannot wonder for a moment that others have been content to sit down quietly under this most intolerable wrong, and to hold their tongues, lest ‘excitement’ should be again brought up against them. But I will not, that is all. With all my heart I believe in the grand old Sophoclean line, which used to console Mortimer Collins:
Οὐδεν ποθ’ ἑρπει ψευδος εἰς γηρας χρονον.
For the benefit for those who have no Greek: ‘No lie ever crawls to old age.’ And even in this coward world I believe truth is master when used as the one fearless weapon, for attack or for defence.
But I have been growing ‘excited,’ good my readers, and I beg pardon. Some of my friends are naturally afraid of any excitement on my part. It is not easy to avoid sometimes. After this storm that has swept over my life, there is a great strong current of righteous wrath that will run on deep down beneath it to the end, but not more deep than I mean that it shall be still. Out of the nettle danger I have plucked the rose of safety.
It was bitter winter when, as the beginning of the end, I was relegated to the care of a good-natured young village medico, with about as much knowledge of the buildings of the brain, I should think (and small blame to him), as of Cambodian architecture. He was a kindly fellow, and did all he could; but he dwelt in a tiny hamlet on the borders of one of the dreariest tracts of our forest-country, and I reflect with sorrow to what a stupendous extent I must have bored him. I am consoled by thinking that I must have been of great value to him in his studies, as he was trying his ’prentice hand in ‘nervous’ cases, to which he suspected himself of a call, on me; and I wonder he failed to catch the malady.
Goethe once said that the greatest of physical blessings is a big head with enough blood to feed it, and the greatest of physical trials the same head without the blood, whose place has to be supplied by all sorts of fancies, which of course take the most morbid form. In my case they turned, as they have in such thousands of cases, to religious hypochondria. There is nothing more difficult to explain away, on any Darwinian or Contist hypothesis of which I am aware, than ‘phenomena’ of this kind. They exist, and will have to be dealt with somewhere. The curious story of John Bunyan has been repeated constantly since his days. They were trying at the time. I was fully convinced that I was the wickedest man that ever lived, and even in my illness rather triumphed in the fact after the fashion of Topsy.