"Ah!" I replied; "all is discharged, and I bear nothing more upon my brain but a capillary or hair-net of swollen veins, or such a kind of diver's-cap of death as the people commonly call a stroke of apoplexy."
"A fool's cap thou hast on, in thy inner man; for this is the way the thing stands. In the hypochondriac all nerves are weak, but those are the weakest which he has most abused. Now, as one mostly contracts this weakness by sitting, studying and writing, and consequently deprives the bowels, which yet must be the Moloch of these intellectual children, of all the motion which is given to the fingers; one confounds the sick bowels with sick nerves and hopes that Kämpf's visceral-syringe will prove a double-barreled musket against the one and the other. Believe it not, however; a hypochondrical chest may rest upon a vigorous abdomen. It is not that the lobes of the lungs are impaired, if they sometimes flag, but that the lung-nerves are exhausted of animation, by which the lung-wings should be lifted, or else the nerves of the cuticle. If my gastric nerves are unstrung, then thou hast as much dizziness and nausea, as if there were actually a dietetic sediment in the stomach or a flow of blood on the brain. Even a weak stomach is not always a consequence of weak nerves; only observe how greedily a faint hectic patient eats and digests half an hour before death. Hence, thy yellow, autumnal color, thy fleshless petrifaction of the bones, thy remittent pulse, even thy fainting have--nothing to say, my dear Paul."
"Ha! the devil!" said the patient!
"For," said the doctor, "as all is carried on by the nerves, whereof the learned class to which I belong often do not so much as know the definition, accordingly the periodical and movable, but fleeting, cramps and exhaustion of the nerves gradually run through the whole semeiology, but not the entire pathology. Now comes on the second paragraph of my gold-edged dissertation."
"What then has become of the first?" I asked.
"That was it: accordingly the second throws all medicine-vials into the street, blows all powders into the air, with lightnings of excommunication lays all cursed stomach medicines in ashes, empties even warm and often cold bath-tubs, and shoves Kämpf's clyster-machines under the sick-bed and is exceeding mad. For the nerves can no more be strengthened in a week (even by the best iron-cure) than they can be exhausted in a week (by the greatest excess); their strength returns with as slow steps as it departed. Medicine must therefore be changed into food--and as this is injurious--consequently food must be changed into medicine."
"I eat very few things."
"That is the most blamable intemperance; and the stomach exercises then according to its powers a kind of skepticism, or Fabiism, or at least apathy. Invert rather the literary rule (multum non multa) and eat many kinds of things, but not much. Dietetics have no commands to give as to the kind, in eating, drinking, sleeping, etc., but only as to degree. At most, every one has his own rainbow, his own belief, his own stomach and his own--system of diet. And yet all this is not my third candidate's paragraph; but here it is first presented: Simple movement of the body is the first assistant physician against hypochondria; and--as I have already seen hypochondria and motion united in a movable tiers état--simple absence of all motion of the soul is the first body-physician against the entire devil. Passions are as unwholesome as their enemy, thinking, or their friend, poetizing; only the complete coalition of them all is more poisonous still.
"Under the influence of the passions," he continued, "grief, like thawy weather, dissolves all the powers, just as enjoyment is the strongest of all levers of the nerves. I will now bring all thy medicinal blunders and illegalities into a heap that thou mayst just hear a true account of thyself."
"I pay no attention to it," said I.