“One of the peculiar things about his idea of being choked, doctor, is that when he is merely dozing he always wakes up in time, and has the power to throw it off. He claims that the strength of these spirits is not equal to his own when he is awake, or even dozing, but when he’s asleep their strength is greater and that then they may injure him. Sometimes, when he has had a fright like this, he will come out in the hall and down to my desk there at the lower end, and ask if he mayn’t sit there by me. He says it calms him. I always tell him yes, but it won’t be five minutes before he’ll get up and leave again, saying that he’s being annoyed, or that he won’t be able to contain himself if he stays any longer, because of the remarks being made over his shoulder or in his ear.
“Often he’ll say: ‘Did you hear that, Miss Liggett? It’s astonishing, the low, vile things that man can say at times!’ When I say, ‘No, I didn’t hear,’ he always says, ‘I’m so glad!’”
“No one has ever tried to relieve him of this by hypnotism, I suppose?”
“Not that I know of, doctor. Dr. Major may have tried it. I have only been here three months.”
“Tuberculosis is certainly the cause of the throat trouble, as Dr. Major says, and as for the stomach trouble, that comes from the same thing—natural enough under the circumstances. We may have to resort to hypnotism a little later. I’ll see. In the meantime you’d better caution all who come in touch with him never to sympathize, or even to seem to believe in anything he imagines is being done to him. It will merely encourage him in his notions. And get him to take his medicine regularly; it won’t cure, but it will help. Dr. Major has asked me to give especial attention to his case, and I want the conditions as near right as possible.”
“Yes, sir.”
XI—January, 1909
The trouble with these doctors was that they really knew nothing of anything save what was on the surface, the little they had learned at a medical college or in practise—chiefly how certain drugs, tried by their predecessors in certain cases, were known to act. They had no imagination whatever, even when you tried to tell them.
Take that latest young person who was coming here now in his good clothes and with his car, fairly bursting with his knowledge of what he called psychiatrics, looking into Davidson’s eyes so hard and smoothing his temples and throat—massage, he called it—saying that he had incipient tuberculosis of the throat and stomach trouble, and utterly disregarding the things which he, Davidson, could personally see and hear! Imagine the fellow trying to persuade him, at this late date, that all that was wrong with him was tuberculosis, that he didn’t see Mersereau standing right beside him at times, bending over him, holding up that hand and telling him how he intended to kill him yet—that it was all an illusion!
Imagine saying that Mersereau couldn’t actually seize him by the throat when he was asleep, or nearly so, when Davidson himself, looking at his throat in the mirror, could see the actual finger prints,—Mersereau’s,—for a moment or so afterward. At any rate, his throat was red and sore from being clutched, as Mersereau of late was able to clutch him! And that was the cause of these lumps. And to say, as they had said at first, that he himself was making them by rubbing and feeling his throat, and that it was tuberculosis!