A pretty severe fit of indisposition which, under the name of a
nervous fever, has made a prisoner of me for some weeks past, and is
but slowly leaving me, has reduced me to an incapacity of reflecting
upon any topic foreign to itself. Expect no healthy conclusions from
me this month, reader; I can offer you only sick men's dreams.
And truly the whole state of sickness is such; for what else is it
but a magnificent dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw day-light
curtains about him; and, shutting out the sun, to induce a total
oblivion of all the works which are going on under it? To become
insensible to all the operations of life, except the beatings of one
feeble pulse?
If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed. How the patient lords
it there! what caprices he acts without controul! how kinglike he
sways his pillow--tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering,
and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever varying
requisitions of his throbbing temples.
He changes _sides_ oftener than a politician. Now he lies full length,
then half-length, obliquely, transversely, head and feet quite across
the bed; and none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four
curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum.
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he
is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon
him as his only duty. 'Tis the Two Tables of the Law to him. He has
nothing to think of but how to get well. What passes out of doors, or
within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not.
A little while ago he was greatly concerned in the event of a
law-suit, which was to be the making or the marring of his dearest
friend. He was to be seen trudging about upon this man's errand to
fifty quarters of the town at once, jogging this witness, refreshing
that solicitor. The cause was to come on yesterday. He is absolutely
as indifferent to the decision, as if it were a question to be tried
at Pekin. Peradventure from some whispering, going on about the
house, not intended for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him
understand, that things went cross-grained in the Court yesterday,
and his friend is ruined. But the word "friend," and the word "ruin,"
disturb him no more than so much jargon. He is not to think of any
thing but how to get better.
What a world of foreign cares are merged in that absorbing
consideration!
He has put on the strong armour of sickness, he is wrapped in the
callous hide of suffering; he keeps his sympathy, like some curious
vintage, under trusty lock and key, for his own use only.
He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to himself; he yearneth
over himself; his bowels are even melted within him, to think what he
suffers; he is not ashamed to weep over himself.
He is for ever plotting how to do some good to himself; studying
little stratagems and artificial alleviations.
He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, by an allowable
fiction, into as many distinct individuals, as he hath sore and
sorrowing members. Sometimes he meditates--as of a thing apart from
him--upon his poor aching head, and that dull pain which, dozing or
waking, lay in it all the past night like a log, or palpable substance
of pain, not to be removed without opening the very scull, as it
seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities his long, clammy, attenuated
fingers. He compassionates himself all over; and his bed is a very
discipline of humanity, and tender heart.
He is his own sympathiser; and instinctively feels that none can so
well perform that office for him. He cares for few spectators to his
tragedy. Only that punctual face of the old nurse pleases him, that
announces his broths, and his cordials. He likes it because it is
so unmoved, and because he can pour forth his feverish ejaculations
before it as unreservedly as to his bed-post.
To the world's business he is dead. He understands not what the
callings and occupations of mortals are; only he has a glimmering
conceit of some such thing, when the doctor makes his daily call:
and even in the lines of that busy face he reads no multiplicity of
patients, but solely conceives of himself as _the sick man_. To what
other uneasy couch the good man is hastening, when he slips out of
his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so carefully for fear of
rustling--is no speculation which he can at present entertain. He
thinks only of the regular return of the same phenomenon at the same
hour to-morrow.
Household rumours touch him not. Some faint murmur, indicative of life
going on within the house, soothes him, while he knows not distinctly
what it is. He is not to know any thing, not to think of any thing.
Servants gliding up or down the distant staircase, treading as
upon velvet, gently keep his ear awake, so long as he troubles not
himself further than with some feeble guess at their errands. Exacter
knowledge would be a burthen to him: he can just endure the pressure
of conjecture. He opens his eye faintly at the dull stroke of the
muffled knocker, and closes it again without asking "who was it?" He
is flattered by a general notion that inquiries are making after him,
but he cares not to know the name of the inquirer. In the general
stillness, and awful hush of the house, he lies in state, and feels
his sovereignty.
To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. Compare the silent
tread, and quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, with which he is
served--with the careless demeanour, the unceremonious goings in
and out (slapping of doors, or leaving them open) of the very same
attendants, when he is getting a little better--and you will confess,
that from the bed of sickness (throne let me rather call it) to the
elbow chair of convalescence, is a fall from dignity, amounting to a
deposition.
How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where
is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the
family's eye? The scene of his regalities, his sick room, which was
his presence chamber, where he lay and acted his despotic fancies--how
is it reduced to a common bedroom! The trimness of the very bed has
something petty and unmeaning about it. It is _made_ every day.
How unlike to that wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic surface, which it
presented so short a time since, when to _make_ it was a service not
to be thought of at oftener than three or four day revolutions, when
the patient was with pain and grief to be lifted for a little while
out of it, to submit to the encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and
decencies which his shaken frame deprecated; then to be lifted into it
again, for another three or four days' respite, to flounder it out of
shape again, while every fresh furrow was a historical record of some
shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking for a little ease;
and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the crumpled
coverlid.
Hushed are those mysterious sighs--those groans--so much more awful,
while we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they
proceeded. The Lernean pangs are quenched. The riddle of sickness is
solved; and Philoctetes is become an ordinary personage.
Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of greatness survives in
the still lingering visitations of the medical attendant. But how
is he too changed with everything else! Can this be he--this man of
news--of chat--of anecdote--of every thing but physic--can this be he,
who so lately came between the patient and his cruel enemy, as on some
solemn embassy from Nature, erecting herself into a high mediating
party? Pshaw!'tis some old woman.
Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous--the spell that
hushed the household--the desart-like stillness, felt throughout
its inmost chambers--the mute attendance--the inquiry by looks--the
still softer delicacies of self-attention--the sole and single eye of
distemper alonely fixed upon itself--world-thoughts excluded--the man
a world unto himself--his own theatre--
What a speck is he dwindled into!
In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, yet
far enough from the terra firma of established health, your note,
dear Editor, reached me, requesting--an article. In Articulo Mortis,
thought I; but it is something hard--and the quibble, wretched as it
was, relieved me. The summons, unseasonable as it appeared, seemed to
link me on again to the petty businesses of life, which I had lost
sight of; a gentle call to activity, however trivial; a wholesome
weaning from that preposterous dream of self-absorption--the puffy
state of sickness--in which I confess to have lain so long, insensible
to the magazines and monarchies, of the world alike; to its laws, and
to its literature. The hypochondriac flatus is subsiding; the acres,
which in imagination I had spread over--for the sick man swells in
the sole contemplation of his single sufferings, till he becomes
a Tityus to himself--are wasting to a span; and for the giant of
self-importance, which I was so lately, you have me once again in my
natural pretensions--the lean and meagre figure of your insignificant
Essayist.