Chapter III (4)

Yet it is but fair to mention that the laugh is not all on this side. It is an historical fact that the public has its medical freaks, without being called an invalid, and that whole nations "go daft" on the shallowest impositions. At one time the English were made to believe that all diseases were caused by the contraction of one small muscle of the body; at another, Parliament itself helped make up the five thousand pounds given by the aristocracy to one Joanna Stephens for an omnipotent powder, decoction, and pills, composed chiefly of egg-shells and snail-shells; at another time every one drank snail-water for everything, or to prevent it, and then tar-water became the rage. In Paris the Royal Academy once procured the prohibition of the sale of antimony, on penalty of death, and in a year or two prescribed it as the great panacea. Pliny reports that the Arcadians cured all manner of ills with the milk of a cow (one would like to see them manage the bilious colic).

Mesmer, who was luminous for a while, did not fail to dupe the people. When asked why he ordered bathing in river instead of spring water, he said, "Because it is warmed by the sun."

"True, yet not so much but it has to be warmed still more."

Not posed in the least, Mesmer replied, "The reason why the water which is exposed to the rays of the sun is superior to all other water is because it is magnetized. I myself magnetized the sun some twenty years ago!"

Yet the name of Mesmer has founded a system, while that of Dumoulin, who, with simple wisdom, observed, on dying, that he left behind him two great physicians, Regimen and River-water, has gained but a scanty fame.

Says Boswell, "At least be well if you are not ill"; but the dear public is always ill. In our own country, with an apparently healthy pulse, it has drank the worth of a marble palace in sarsaparilla, and has built a hotel out of Brandreth's pills. It has fairly reeled on Schiedam Schnapps; and even the infant has his little popularities, having passed from catnip and caraway to Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup. There is never a time when the public will not declare upon any well-advertised remedy its belief in the motto of the German doctors, "We do cure everything but death."

It is often interesting to note the various phases which invalidism takes on. Sometimes one seems folded in a dense dream,--has gone away almost beyond one's own pity, and has not been heard from for months. It is to be hoped that friends who hunt "the greyhound and turtle-dove" will meet the missing, and duly report. Meantime one resides in a mummified state,--a dim thinkingness that may be discovered when another coming in says with vigor the thing one had long thought without quite knowing it; in this demi-semi-consciousness it had never pecked through the shell. This looks very imbecile, and is charitably treated to be only called invalid.

Is it mere helplessness that one lies so remote from all but surface sensation, day after day gazing at the address of letters that come, with a passive wonder of how soon she is to vacate her name? Also a friend calls to say that to-morrow he travels afar. It seems then that he will be too much missed, and the parting has its share of unutterable longing. But by the morrow it is not the one left who is sorry. The new sun shines on an earth miles off from yesterday. The night has given many windings more in the folds of this resigned mummy, that now lies securely as an insect in a leaf. Given the beloved hand, and all things may go as they will.

"Our hands in one, we will not shrink
From life's severest due;
Our hands in one, we will not blink
The terrible and true."

And sometimes one bounds to the other side of sensation,--has a terrible rubbed-the-wrong-wayedness, and is as much alive as Mimosa herself. This is often on those easterly days which all well-regulated invalids shudder at, when the very marrow congeals and the nerves are sharp-whetted. Then, Prometheus-like, one "gnaws the heart with meditation"; then, too, always fall out various domestic disasters, and it is not easy to see why the curtain-string should be tied in a hard knot that must be cut at night, or why the servants can't be thorough, deft-handed, and immaculate. One has indigestion, scowls fiercely, tries to swallow large lumps of inamiability, and fears she is not sublime.

It is a saying of Jean Paul, that "the most painful part of corporeal pain is the uncorporeal, namely, our impatience and disappointment that it continues." Whether this be true or not, what with the worry and constant pressure, these physical disabilities often appear to sink into the deepest centre of the being. Hence, if one have had a cough for a very long time, it would seem that the soul must keep on coughing in the next world. If so, this gives a subtile sense to the despatches of departed spiritualists, who telegraph back in a few weeks that their pain is _nearly_ gone,--as if the soul were not immediately rid of the bad habits of the body.

But most demoralized in æsthetic sense must be that invalid who does not constantly look to the splendid robustness of health. Sickness has been termed an early old age; far worse, it is often a tossing nightmare in which the noble ideal of fairer days is only recalled with reproachful pain. Towards this vision of vigor the victim seems to move and move, but never draw near. Well might Heine weep, even before the stricken Lady of Milo. An old proverb says, that "the gods have health in essence, sickness only in intelligence." Blessed are the gods! One can quite understand the reckless exulting of some wild character, who, baffled with this miserable mendicancy everywhere, at length discovered the idea that God was not an invalid. He was probably too much excited to perfect his rhyme, and so tore out these ragged lines:--

"Iterate, iterate,
Snatch it from the hells,
Circulate and meditate
That God is well.

"Get the singers to sing it,
Put it in the mouths of bells,
Pay the ringers to ring it,
That God is well."

Therefore make a valiant stand against that ugly thing, disease. By all Nature's remedies, hasten to be out of it. Fight it off as long as possible, defy it when you can, and refuse "to hang up your hat on the everlasting peg." Be reinforced in all honorable ways. If not too ill, read the dailies; know the last measure of Congress, the price of gold, and the news by the foreign steamer. Disabuse the world for once of its traditional invalid, who sits mewed up in blankets, and never goes where other people go, because it might hurt him. Be out among the activities; don't let the world get ahead, but keep along with the life of things. Then, if invalidism is to be accepted, meet it bravely and serenely as may be; and if death, then approach it loftily, for no one dies with his work undone, and no just-minded person can wish to survive his service. None should aspire to say, with the antiquated Chesterfield, "Tyrawley and I have been dead these two years, but we don't choose to have it known."

But happy they on whom the deep blight has not fallen, and who day by day restore themselves to the grand perfection of manly and womanly estate; happy again to "feel one's self alive" and

"Lord of the senses five";

happy again to "excel in animation and relish of existence"; happy to have gathered so much strength and hope, that, when begins the melody of the morning birds, again shall the joy of the new dawn, with all the possible adventure and enterprise of the coming day, thrill through the heart.

GRIFFITH GAUNT; OR, JEALOUSY.