Cockeyed Optimist

In this morning’s copy of The Weekend Australian Magazine, Ruth Ostrow’s column is about the dangers of using the Web instead of seeing the doctor. She quotes her GP:

The internet is the bane of my life. Everyone is now self-diagnosing.
… Then people order medication without prescriptions over the net and this is really dangerous.

This practice is not confined to the internet, and is not even very recent. Here is a passage from Jerome K. Jerome’s “Three Men in a Boat”, first published in 1889:

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment 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 to indolently 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.

He goes on to find that he also had typhoid fever and St. Vitus’s Dance. He then worked alphabetically through the book, starting with ague, Bright’s disease, Cholera and diphtheria. To cut a long story short, he discovers that

… the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

At first he feels rather hurt about this, why not housemaid’s knee, since he had everything else?

I had walked into that reading-room a happy healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

He eventually goes to see his doctor, who, fortunately, is a sensible man, and gives him the following prescription:

1 lb. beefsteak, with
1 pint bitter beer, every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.

Maybe we’d all do well to follow this advice!

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