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Three men in a boat / Трое в лодке, не считая собаки. Книга для чтения на английском языке
Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the Dog)
CHAPTER I
There were four of us – George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were – bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.
We were all feeling unwell, and we were getting quite nervous about it. Harris said he felt such extraordinary fits of lighth-headedness, that he hardly knew what he was doing; and then George said that he had fits of light-headedness too, and hardly knew what he was doing. With me, it was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver, because I had read a liver-pill leaflet, in which the symptoms were described by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all.
It is the most extraordinary thing, but whenever I read a medicine advertisement I always make a conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease. I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight illness – hay fever1. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then I turned the leaves, and began to study diseases. 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 St. Vitus’s Dance2 – found, as I expected, that I had that too, – began to get interested in my case, and so started alphabetically. Cholera I had, with serious complications; and diphtheria I was born with. I patently studied the twenty-six letters, and the only disease I had not got was housemaid’s knee3.
I sat and thought it over. What an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what a gift 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 to do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
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, suddenly, it started off. I pulled out my watch and counted. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other. I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a weak wreck.
I went to my medical man. He is my old friend, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn4 by going to him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, usual patients, with only one or two diseases each.” So I went straight up and saw him, and he said: “Well, what’s the matter with you?”
I said: “I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. But I will tell you what is not the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I have got.”
And I told him how I discovered it all. Then he examined me. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded it up and gave it to me, and I put it in my pocket and went out. I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist’s, and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back. He said he didn’t keep it.
I said: “You are a chemist?”
He said: “I am a chemist. If I was a store and family hotel combined, I might be able to help you. But I am only a chemist.”