The Unpopular Review Vol. I / January-June 1914

by Various

This explains how it was so easy for microbophobia to get firm hold of the professor in after days. After taking the degree of doctor of philosophy, he was called to a university chair, where, being still in a state of impaired vitality, he suffered from a recrudescence of methoditis, which left him so weak that without resistance he fell a prey to microbophobia in the very first year, the immediate cause of infection being without doubt his association with various of his faculty brethren who were in the school of medicine, or worked in the bacteriological laboratory and lectured on sanitation, or served on the university committee of hygiene. All of these men, he afterward learned, were in various stages of the disease—though all considered themselves in perfect health.

For one of the worst things about microbophobia is that the victim has no suspicion of the real nature of his ailment; more than that, he falls a prey to the strange hallucination that it is his environment, and not himself, which is the seat of infection, and consequently will not listen to diagnosis. Individuals have been known to advance in the malady until the sensus communis was all but absolutely gone, without realizing the gravity of their condition.

The professor might have gone on for some time; for, though he was in the grip of the disease, he had not yet begun to suffer, owing to a good constitution inherited from sound progenitors who were not university bred. But an event occurred which hastened the progress of his malady. He married.

Now, marrying is ordinarily a good thing for the sensus communis. Many sufferers of both sexes have found it a most efficacious remedy for the ailments of that rather uncertain organ. But it so happened that the professor's alliance was with a member of the Woman's Club, who was also college bred, a possessor of the degree of Mistress of Home Economics, and, unfortunately, already infected with microbophobia, and visibly impaired in health. Some of his bachelor friends had warned him that conditions in that part of town were notorious, but he laughed at them, and said that a little fumigation was the worst that could happen.

The gravest fears of the professor's friends, however, were soon realized. They saw him begin to sink before their eyes. In his low state of vitality, he was soon hopelessly in the clutches of the dread malady. Even if he had not been vitally reduced, his case would have been desperate, for his wife continued to expose herself week after week at the club. And besides, she took several Health Journals, all of which came from infected centers, and which not only she, but the professor himself, handled with all the carelessness of immunes. The professor read at first because he was amused, but it was not long before he, as well as his wife, hovered with almost religious devotion over the column headed Sanitas Sanitatum, by Doctor Septic Septington, which he ought to have known was swarming with bacillus microbophobicus.

The ravages of the disease in both of them were frightful to behold. The professor's case developed with especial rapidity, so that in a few months both were in the same stage.

Stage? Yes, the stages of this disease are very clearly marked. In the first stage, you are attacked by a noticeable degree of thirst for knowledge about microbes; you read and talk about them constantly, and attend lectures on them at the university and the club.

This is a mild stage. You are for the most part amused, and only occasionally entertain the strange hallucinations which afterward come to possess you so thoroughly. Just to quiet your conscience, however, you adopt a few precautions—such as the use of bottled spring water, and the increase of your interest in the appearance and personal habits of the dairyman. This stage is termed microbophobia intellectualis. The professor and his wife early passed through it, with no serious results.

The second stage is more grave. You insist on a certificate from your dairyman, visit his barns, have the milk examined by your friend in the university laboratory, and finally, to be absolutely sure, pasteurize it. The drinking water you begin to filter and boil, you withdraw your patronage from the Chinese laundryman because you have heard of the dreadful way he sprinkles the linen, and you take an active interest in the enforcement of the anti-salivation ordinance and the encouragement of the bubble-cup campaign.

It is at this point that Dread, the most characteristic manifestation of the malady, begins to assume really noticeable proportions. You dread going out to dinner, for example, because you are afraid that the water and milk on your friend's table will not be properly sterilized. You don't like to abstain from both, and you don't like to attract attention by taking a bottle of boiled water or milk with you. The result is, that you avoid going out at all, and when you are compelled to go, you take a double dose of microbicide. You dread the effects of the public school system, with all its opportunities for the distribution of microbes. Your dread extends even to the communion, and so grows on you that you omit the sacrament because of the common cup—or, if you are a Foot-washing Baptist, because of the common basin. The second stage is denominated microbophobia alarmans.