Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/612

604 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