But the history of the case shall tell you of the symptoms.
The subject was a professor. It seems that he had laid the foundations
of the disease in his college days by exposing himself to _bacillus
scientificus_, and contracting a case of _methoditis scientifica_,
again an ailment whose attack is directed at the _sensus communis_,
and whose ravages are greatest among the learned, especially those
whose work necessitates intimate contact with symbols, chemicals,
ancient manuscripts, and other odorous and dusty material. Its
victims usually betray their condition by rushing about insisting that
any and all the business of life is susceptible of the same orderly
disposition as the material of their laboratories.
This explains how it was so easy for microbophobia to get firm hold of
the professor in after days. After taking the degree of doctor of
philosophy, he was called to a university chair, where, being still in
a state of impaired vitality, he suffered from a recrudescence of
_methoditis_, which left him so weak that without resistance he fell a
prey to microbophobia in the very first year, the immediate cause of
infection being without doubt his association with various of his
faculty brethren who were in the school of medicine, or worked in the
bacteriological laboratory and lectured on sanitation, or served on
the university committee of hygiene. All of these men, he afterward
learned, were in various stages of the disease--though all considered
themselves in perfect health.
For one of the worst things about microbophobia is that the victim has
no suspicion of the real nature of his ailment; more than that, he
falls a prey to the strange hallucination that it is his environment,
and not himself, which is the seat of infection, and consequently will
not listen to diagnosis. Individuals have been known to advance in the
malady until the _sensus communis_ was all but absolutely gone,
without realizing the gravity of their condition.
The professor might have gone on for some time; for, though he was in
the grip of the disease, he had not yet begun to suffer, owing to a
good constitution inherited from sound progenitors who were not
university bred. But an event occurred which hastened the progress of
his malady. He married.
Now, marrying is ordinarily a good thing for the _sensus communis_.
Many sufferers of both sexes have found it a most efficacious remedy
for the ailments of that rather uncertain organ. But it so happened
that the professor's alliance was with a member of the Woman's Club,
who was also college bred, a possessor of the degree of Mistress of
Home Economics, and, unfortunately, already infected with
microbophobia, and visibly impaired in health. Some of his bachelor
friends had warned him that conditions in that part of town were
notorious, but he laughed at them, and said that a little fumigation
was the worst that could happen.
The gravest fears of the professor's friends, however, were soon
realized. They saw him begin to sink before their eyes. In his low
state of vitality, he was soon hopelessly in the clutches of the dread
malady. Even if he had not been vitally reduced, his case would have
been desperate, for his wife continued to expose herself week after
week at the club. And besides, she took several Health Journals, all
of which came from infected centers, and which not only she, but the
professor himself, handled with all the carelessness of immunes. The
professor read at first because he was amused, but it was not long
before he, as well as his wife, hovered with almost religious devotion
over the column headed Sanitas Sanitatum, by Doctor Septic Septington,
which he ought to have known was swarming with _bacillus
microbophobicus_.
The ravages of the disease in both of them were frightful to behold.
The professor's case developed with especial rapidity, so that in a
few months both were in the same stage.
Stage? Yes, the stages of this disease are very clearly marked. In the
first stage, you are attacked by a noticeable degree of thirst for
knowledge about microbes; you read and talk about them constantly, and
attend lectures on them at the university and the club.
This is a mild stage. You are for the most part amused, and only
occasionally entertain the strange hallucinations which afterward come
to possess you so thoroughly. Just to quiet your conscience, however,
you adopt a few precautions--such as the use of bottled spring water,
and the increase of your interest in the appearance and personal
habits of the dairyman. This stage is termed _microbophobia
intellectualis_. The professor and his wife early passed through it,
with no serious results.
The second stage is more grave. You insist on a certificate from your
dairyman, visit his barns, have the milk examined by your friend in
the university laboratory, and finally, to be absolutely sure,
pasteurize it. The drinking water you begin to filter and boil, you
withdraw your patronage from the Chinese laundryman because you have
heard of the dreadful way he sprinkles the linen, and you take an
active interest in the enforcement of the anti-salivation ordinance
and the encouragement of the bubble-cup campaign.
It is at this point that Dread, the most characteristic manifestation
of the malady, begins to assume really noticeable proportions. You
dread going out to dinner, for example, because you are afraid that
the water and milk on your friend's table will not be properly
sterilized. You don't like to abstain from both, and you don't like to
attract attention by taking a bottle of boiled water or milk with you.
The result is, that you avoid going out at all, and when you are
compelled to go, you take a double dose of microbicide. You dread the
effects of the public school system, with all its opportunities for
the distribution of microbes. Your dread extends even to the
communion, and so grows on you that you omit the sacrament because of
the common cup--or, if you are a Foot-washing Baptist, because of the
common basin. The second stage is denominated _microbophobia
alarmans_.
The professor and his wife were uncomfortable enough in this stage,
but in the third they really suffered, though of course with cheerful
resignation; for were they not enduring their hardships in the
interest of science and for the good of mankind? The third stage is
known to science as _microbophobia parentum_; in popular parlance, the
baby stage. Its symptoms are most pronounced in the female. The first
thing you do in this stage is to order Madame di Ana's Daily, "The
Mother-Maker," together with her two fine volumes on "The Mistakes of
Mothers," and "Microbes in the Home." You also join the Mothers' Club,
and take your husband to the open meetings. You make him cut off his
beard, because you have read how it looks under the microscope--and he
_will_ kiss the baby. You boil not only the drinking water, but the
water for the baby's bath, and the water you wash your hands in
before you take him up; and you insist on the sterilization of all the
baby's linen, and all the nurse's apparel. You are determined that the
child shall be brought up scientifically, and not be exposed to the
risks you ran in _your_ childhood. Having read that mothers are
subject to excitement, and that excitement is bad for the fountain
source of baby's sustenance, you substitute a bottle; and you use
pasteurized milk scientifically compounded with other ingredients
which nature forgot to employ in her chemistry; and warm it in a
sterilized glass jar, set in sterilized water in a sterilized pan in a
room which is disinfected twice a day, and you test it with a
sterilized thermometer. You keep on hand a bath of boiling water in
which you sterilize at frequent intervals all the usual
playthings--nipples, rubber rings, rattles, etc.; and you make due
provision for the little fingers which seem so bent on going into the
little mouth.
In this stage you also avoid shaking hands, never allow yourself to
touch a door knob barehanded, and leave off drawing books from the
library, determined to be neither a borrower nor a lender of books or
anything else; and, even though your church has deferred to scientific
suggestion and introduced individual communion cups, you still shrink
from the sacrament because the bread, too, is not individualized, and
you are not sure about the linen which covered it, or the silver which
contained the grape juice, or the person who picked the grapes, or the
feet by which the juice was trodden out.
The fourth stage is known as _microbophobic moscophobia_, which is the
pathological term describing the fear of flies as carriers of
infection. You get new screens, interrupt the housemaid every half
hour with orders to see whether there are more flies to be found,
cover the baby and yourself with netting when you nap, have a cement
pit made for the garbage can, and repaper or repaint your
interiors--that is, the interiors of your house--every six months. You
read, too, that mosquitoes carry yellow fever in the West Indies, and
malaria in Italy--distant places, indeed; but still, why shouldn't
mosquitoes fly across the sea and land and light on the baby, or
yourself? So you screen the household by day as well as by night, and
avoid evenings out and picnics in the shade.
In the latter part of this stage you also change your religion on
account of the communion service, have your letters disinfected, leave
off kissing the baby, steer to windward of rug-beaters and street
sweepers, hold your breath as you pass dogs and cats, eat nothing not
cooked, drink nothing not boiled, carry a bottle of microbicide in
your pocket, dream that the earth is full of microbes as the waters
cover the sea, and that the hand of every one of them is lifted
against you, and have cold sweats at night and cold feet by day. You
realize that you are uncomfortable, but the real cause of it never
occurs to you: you attribute your condition to the uncleanliness of
your environment, and to your willingness to sacrifice your own
comfort to the cause of scientific sanitation.
By this time, too, your sense of humor, never very robust, has
decayed, atrophied, and disappeared. Your fat, good-humored,
unscientific neighbor calls out from his back porch as you come out to
yours to get the milk bottle: "Dangerous stuff, that there! They say
they's forty-three million four hundred an' ninety-nine thousand two
hundred an' seventeen microbes in a half a drop of it"--and you don't
laugh, any more than you laugh when you advise your professor friend
to disinfect the contents of his pay envelope, and he replies, "Don't
worry--there's no microbe could ever live on my salary!"
In the fifth stage you begin to be physically as well as spiritually
uncomfortable. In the eloquent words of the old hymn, you are a prey
to "fightings without and fears within." What with the insufficiency
of your means to meet the demands of disinfection, and what with the
difficulty of getting properly prepared food even if you have the
money, and what with the continual strain of anxiety lest you
entertain a microbe unawares, you grow thin and nervous. Of course you
continue to lay it to microbes, and double your precautions--and worry
more, and starve more. If you are not rescued, you finally pass into
_delirium microbophobicum_, which is as much more awful than
_delirium tremens_ as microbes are smaller and more insidious and
wiser than serpents.
The professor and his wife entered upon the fifth stage, and were
alarmingly near the last extreme. If this were a subject for levity,
and not for high seriousness, I should be tempted to parody the
essayist on Man, and say:
Lo, the poor professor, whose untutored mind
Saw microbes in the clouds, and heard them in the wind.
But they were saved. One night the professor's wife dreamed that a
monster centipedal microbe slowly let himself down from the ceiling,
and enveloped her in his hundred long wriggling legs. She awoke
screaming, to find herself enmeshed in the mosquito bar.
The next day they called another doctor. Hitherto, their doctors
themselves had been infected, though neither they nor their patients
knew it. But this time they were more fortunate; Dr. Goodenough had
been attacked by the disease, had made a brilliant recovery, and
consequently was immune.
He listened to the history of their cases, gave them a thorough
examination, using his new instrument, the cranioscope--of course more
for the purpose of inspiring confidence in his patients than to find
out anything; for he well knew what ailed them.
"Don't be alarmed," he finally said. "You really _are_ in a bad state;
but I give you my word for it that you will recover. I find your
_sensus communis_ all but disappeared. A little more excitement like
that of last night, and you might have a hemorrhage--and there you
are! Now put yourself entirely in my hands, or I'll not answer for the
consequences."
He reached for his prescription blank, and after a few moments handed
them a bit of unintelligible writing--the sort that only doctors and
their druggist partners can interpret. As I happen to be in the
secret, I may tell you that the prescription called for three fluid
ounces of city water, not distilled, with two drops of aniline, a drop
of nux vomica, a lump of sugar, and a teaspoonful of whiskey, and
that the druggist charged them a dollar and seventy-five cents.
"Begin taking immediately," said the doctor impressively. "Take two
drops and a half in a half glass of boiled water every three hours
from six a. m. to nine p. m. And you must go into the country
to-morrow morning, and spend your whole vacation there.... Leave
orders for your magazines and journals of all kinds to be held here,
tell your friends they are to write you under no circumstances, and
don't dare to come back to town on any errand whatsoever. Cut loose
from everything! Delay is dangerous, and might be fatal."
The professor and his wife didn't dare to disobey. The doctor was a
vigorous and imposing personality, and he had terrified them. They
didn't know what a _sensus communis_ was, even though the professor
was a Latinist; the doctor had disguised the term by using the English
pronunciation, and imagination contributed the usual amount to the
impressiveness of his words.
So they packed up all their pasteurizers and sterilizers and
disinfectors and bottles and screens and other antiseptic
paraphernalia, and drove into the country to a farm fifteen miles away
from any car-line or railroad, where there was no telephone or other
connection with the scene of their unhappiness.
They hadn't got out of sight of the town before they began to feel
differently. No one but a college professor knows how big his
institution seems while he is within its precincts, and how small and
insignificant when he is out of sight of it. The tension left their
bodies and minds, and a balmy sense of repose and freedom succeeded.
But they felt a shock when, just as their carriage disappeared from
view over the hill on its return, they saw two dogs and a half dozen
cats on the porch of the farmhouse, noticed that the well was not more
than ninety feet from the pigpen, whereas all the journals said it
should be one hundred, and became sensible of the drowsy murmur of
swarms of flies about the kitchen door, attracted thither by a barrel
which was wide open--and smelled!
That was not all, however. Fortune seemed against them. It was bad
enough for themselves, though they could sterilize their drinking
water and pasteurize their milk, and exercise many other of their
wonted precautions; but when it came to the baby, they were almost
powerless. Watch him as they would, he was continually getting into
unhygienic predicaments of the most dreadful description. Before they
even entered the house, he had grasped one dog by the tail, and been
thrown down by the other, as a mere mark of welcome; and when he got
up, crying, in the instinctive effort to console himself of course he
resorted to the habit of sucking his fingers, and put into his mouth
two of those on the hand which had grasped the tail. The next moment,
too, he was licked all over the nose and mouth by the repentant dog
that had knocked him off his feet. Horrors!
And then the cats followed him into the house, and rubbed against his
legs and licked his fingers, while he gave little screams of delight
at the novel sensation. At supper, he toddled to the table in advance
of the rest, and before his mother realized his intentions, had an
unsterilized spoon in his mouth; and after supper he succeeded in
browbeating the baby of the house, who was a month or so younger, and
more timid than his experienced guest from the city, into giving up
his gum.
The professor and his wife were horrified, but helpless. He went on in
that way for a week. They simply could not keep track of him. He drank
out of the horse-trough, dabbled in the puddles, consorted with pigs
and chickens, shared his bread with the dogs and his milk with the
cats, picked up crumbs from the dining-room sweepings, looked upon
half rotten, muddy, and fly-specked apples found on the lawn as the
greatest of prizes, and reveled in delight with old scraps of rags and
hats and shoes which he, with the little country comrade under his
leadership, resurrected from the most unlikely and unsanitary places.
The frightened and powerless parents read up again on the periods of
incubation of all the microbes mentioned in the books. They could at
least be ready with plans to meet whatever came, and cope with it at
the earliest possible moment.
But it didn't come. At the end of two weeks nothing had happened. The
child slept well and ate all he could get, and was in the best of
spirits. At the end of three weeks he had gained four pounds. It was
in direct and flagrant violation of all reason and all science, and
thoroughly incomprehensible; but what could you do?
After much marvelling at the failure of science, however, they
concluded to make a virtue of what was plainly a necessity, and gave
the baby the freedom of the farm. And more than that; after a decent
period of worrying, they too began to tread the primrose path, and let
the little child lead them. They drank unsterilized milk and unboiled
water, threw all precaution to the winds, rough-and-tumbled with the
boys and dogs on the lawn, napped under the trees unprotected from
flies and mosquitoes, ate apples with the skins and all, and without
even washing them, went fishing in the creek a mile away up the marsh,
and when overcome by blazing thirst drank of the water in the stream,
played peg and got their mouths full of dirt, drew pictures for the
children on the slate and erased them in the old familiar way--and did
all the other reckless things they had done in their own childhood,
when the microbe had not yet made a stir in the world, when _delirium
tremens_ was still the worst example of pathological misfortune, and
nervous prostration had not yet spread to the masses.
When they returned to the city, clothed and in their right minds, they
brought with them the half emptied medicine bottle, and charged
smiling Dr. Goodenough with duplicity. He charged _them_--
Well, we shall not say what he charged them. Whatever it was, they
engaged him for the next baby, and were grateful to him ever
afterward. And as for microbes, before having to do with them in the
future, they resolved to let them come at least half way.