for some slight ailment of which I had a touch--hay fever, I fancy it
was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an
unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began indolently to
study diseases generally. I forget which was the first distemper I
plunged into--some fearful, devastating scourge, I know--and, before I
had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne
in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for a while, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of
despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever--read
the symptoms--discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for
months without knowing it--wondered what else I had got; turned up Saint
Vitus's Dance--found, as I had expected, that I had that, too--began to
get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and
so started alphabetically--read up ague, and learned that I was
sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about
another fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only
in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for
years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed
to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six
letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was
housemaid's knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort
of slight. Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious
reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I
reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and
grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid's knee. Gout,
in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my
being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from
boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there
was nothing else the matter with me. I sat and pondered. I thought what
an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an
acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to "walk
the hospitals," if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they
need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diplomas.

Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I
felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of
a s