The Start

“…estábamos en  mi habitación, fumando, y hablando acerca de lo mal que nos sentíamos…” del clásico de Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat…

"…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. Three Men in a Boat

We were all feeling squalid, and we were getting quite nervous about it.  Harris said he felt such extraordinary fits of dizziness come over him at times, that he hardly knew what he was doing; and then George said that he had fits of dizziness 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 that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order.  I had them all.

It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form.  The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.

Checking his health

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight illness 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 curse , 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.

 I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the indolence of despair, I again turned over the pages.  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 Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to separate it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up in a fever, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight.  Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years.  Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with.  I proceeded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight.  Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee?  Why this unpleasant reservation?  After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed.  I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee.  Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood.  There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me..." (Adaptado de Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat)

Vocabulario reemplazado

Seedy  Giddiness  Ailment  Scourge  Listlessness  Sift  Ague  Plodded  Invidious

Vocabulario destacado

The British Museum: el Museo Británico es un museo en Londres dedicado a la historia y la cultura de la humanidad.  Comprende una colección cercana a los 8 millones de trabajos. Fue establecido en 1753 basado en las colecciones del científico Hans Sloane. Abrió sus puertas en Montagu House en Bloomsbury. Luego se crearían otras instituciones relacionadas como el Museo de Historia Natural en South Kensington en 1887. Como otros museos nacionales en el Reino Unido el Museo Británico no cobra una entrada.

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