put among the foolish humors of
invalids, but they are quite reasonable compared with many of the droll
fancies on record. Take the instance of the elderly man who had been
dying suddenly for twenty years; whose last moments would probably
amount to a calendar month, and his farewell words to an octavo volume.
His physician he pronounced a clever man, but added, pitifully, "I only
wish he would agree to my going suddenly; I should not die a bit sooner
for his giving me over." It is evident the physician had not the
shrewdest insight, or he would have granted this heady maniac his way.
"Ah!" would exclaim the constantly departing patient, "all one's
nourishment goes for nothing if once sudden death has got insidiously
into the system!" More famous were Johnson with his inevitable dried
orange-peel, and Byron with his salts. Goethe, too, after renouncing his
Lotte, coquetted with the idea of death, every night placing a very
handsome dagger by his bed and making sundry attempts to push the point
a couple of inches into his breast. Not being able to do this
comfortably, he concluded to live. Years after, when he sat assured on
his grand poet throne, he must have smiled at it, as with Karl August he
"talked of lovely things that conquer death." And still more refined and
genuine was the vapor of the imaginative young girl who died of love for
the Apollo Belvedere.

Yet it is but fair to mention that the laugh is not all on this side. It
is an historical fact that the public has its medical freaks, without
being called an invalid, and that whole nations "go daft" on the
shallowest impositions. At one time the English were made to believe
that all diseases were caused by the contraction of one small muscle of
the body; at another, Parliament itself helped make up the five thousand
pounds given by the aristocracy to one Joanna Stephens for an omnipotent
powder, decoction, and pills, composed chiefly of egg-shells and
snail-shells; at another time every one drank snail-water for
everything, or to prevent it, and then tar-water became the rage. In
Paris the Royal Academy once procured the prohibition of the sale of
antimony, on penalty of death, and in a year or two prescribed it as the
great panacea. Pliny reports that the Arcadians cured all manner of ills
with the milk of a cow (one would like to see them manage the bilious
colic).

Mesmer, who was luminous for a while, did not fail to dupe the people.
When asked why he or