The Princess of Monaco had brought me to him, and so when we got out into the street, I ran up and down the steps three times as hard as I could, and laughed with her afterwards.
A year later, in passing the doctor's house, I went in to call on him. After examining me carefully, he told me that my heart was in perfect condition, my arteries like those of a boy; and he wondered why I had come to him.
When I referred him to his prediction, he turned my case up in his diary and said he had written that my heart was almost inaudible, weaker than any woman's. He begged me to tell him what I had done and how I had brought about the change.
I have already explained that it was my house doctor in London who first made me acquainted with the stomach pump. It taught me what I could digest and what I ought to shun, thus giving me a complete and scientific dietary. As I made it a rule to leave off everything that disagreed with me I soon came to almost perfect health.
Of course, every now and then I sinned a little. If, inspired by company, I drank a little more than I should, the washing out of my stomach cured the evil and gave me perfect rest. If I ate a little too much starch or oil, and the first water of the purging was colored or impure, I gave my stomach another bath, but always went to bed with my stomach as clean as my mouth.
One fact I may give here, which doctors and scientists may seek to explain.
After some years of careful dieting I found that I could eat and digest little bread or even butter. Of course, I would only eat the butter or bread at lunch, but sometimes a slight pain in my forehead a couple of hours afterwards taught me that I had indulged too freely: the pain passed away and I took my usual light dinner. Four hours or so later I would wash my stomach out and suddenly the butter, eaten at lunch twelve hours before, would appear. The stomach had allowed all the rest of the lunch and dinner to pass on into the intestines, but had retained the butter to be washed out in due course.
This fact has made me almost believe that the individual cells of the stomach are semi-rational in some sort, and will act in the interests of the general health.
One other factor should be mentioned in connection with the stomach pump, and that is the intestinal bath of warm water, which is taken once or twice a week to regulate the bowels and keep them healthy.
But even the most careful dietary did not bring perfect health without regular exercise. From boyhood on I had exercised pretty carefully both morning and evening. I recognized early that indigestion in adults usually comes from the fact that they do not move the middle part of the body enough. The child is always bending and stooping, and so exercises the abdomen; but the adult keeps the stomach and bowels almost quiescent. I found that exercising this part of the body was better for health than developing the muscles of the arms and legs and chest. And so for many years my exercises were all taken with a view to bettering my digestion.
I may note here that I was nearly forty before I had the first attack of indigestion; it was really the dreadful experience on the Zambesi that ruined my stomach. As I grew in years from forty on I found that exercise could easily be too violent: I began to leave off the heavy clubs and large dumbbells I had loved to use in youth.
Strangers, and even those who know me, are continually surprised and astonished at my almost perfect physical health and a comparative youthfulness of appearance that goes with it. When I explain that my health is due to study of the body and to careful observance of the rules which are conducive to healthy living, they all beg me to publish some of the facts.
Very few people realize how completely it is within the power of a fairly strong man to make himself perfectly healthy. After my breakdown in health in 1896, I began, as I have said, to study health and digestion in every way possible. In the autumn of this year, I found I was growing bald: a bald spot had appeared on the top of my head. I immediately set myself to think out a remedy. Advancing years, of course, was the real cause, and my spell of ill health; but now that I had regained my health, what was I to do to get rid of the baldness? It seemed to me that the bald spot came chiefly through the use of the hat, which prevented the hairs being blown about and the roots of them exercised; accordingly, I thought of a substitute and I began to scratch my head so as to excite the hairs surrounding the bald spot. In a little while I found that I was right, because the hairs came back and the baldness gradually disappeared: six months did the trick and I have had no trouble since.
In much the same way, later still, I found my eyes tiring with much reading and writing. I went to the best oculists and got glasses which helped me a little, but soon again, in spite of the glasses, I began to suffer. I had always been short-sighted from astigmatism, but I saw well near at band, and up to about fifty could read for ten or twelve hours a day without noticing any fatigue; now, after four or five hours reading or writing, my eyes used to get blurred for minutes together; I had to put the book down and wait. These weak spells grew more and more frequent at an alarming rate, I went to the oculists, but found they were just as ignorant as the doctors: one recommended different glasses, but no change helped me; another told me that I should be very proud of being able to read two hours at a stretch without suffering. In fact, I got no satisfaction from any of the so-called specialists; whereupon I took the matter up for myself. 'You are suffering,' I said, 'because your eyes move mechanically up and down a page and so grow tired.' Thereupon I began to exercise my eyes every morning, casting them from one end of the room all over it to the other, for a quarter of an hour a day. At the end of a month I threw away all my reading glasses and now find that at over seventy I can read or write twelve or fourteen hours a day without trouble, just as I could as a boy. A change of work is almost as good a rest for the eyes as for the other parts of the body.
I am often asked where I get my knowledge of the body. As a German student fifty years ago, I heard of the celebrated doctor Bilroth in Vienna, and went there and studied under him. I would rather at that time have been a doctor than anything else. There were two sacred orders of mankind to me always: those who diminish pain and those who increase pleasure. I didn't think my self good enough to be a writer or scientist and so give enjoyment, but I did think I could be a great doctor; I soon found that I was taking the science much more seriously than the ordinary students or doctors or even professors.
I could give dozens of shocking instances of the careless indifference to human suffering, not only of the students and doctors, but also of the nurses; but I will simply give the final one, which made me leave the university. I came into the operating-room one day and found that a doctor had just carried out the difficult operation of cutting a cancer from a woman's breast.
The room was half-filled with students, which astonished me, and I asked what was the occasion? I was told the doctor had bet a fairly large sum that he would cut the cancer out and finish the operation in a certain number of minutes; I think it was fifteen. I was horrified when he turned around and smiling remarked that he had won. When I looked at the patient I suddenly saw a small trickle of blood on her breast. I pointed and said to the doctor:
'You have been too hasty.' His face changed: he had immediately to take the stitches out, open up the wound again and tie up the artery, which he had forgotten or overlooked because of the constant application of the ice-bag.
By the time the breast was open, the blood was already spurting from the artery; and as he took it up to tie it, the woman made a slight movement and was dead.
'It might have happened to any one,' he remarked.
'You are a brute,' I cried, 'and should be charged with worse than murder.' I left the room or I would have struck him. I spoke of it to the superiors, which all the students resented, but the superiors consoled me and themselves with the fact that she was a poor woman and really couldn't expect such treatment as was given to those who paid.
The whole incident, coming on top of fifty lesser experiences, made me see that I would always be at odds with the whole of the profession and that I might as well give up my wish to be a surgeon, so I left Vienna and went on to Greece.
Before I leave this question of health, I must say just one thing: the wisest of French proverbs is une fois n'est pas coutume — (once is not a habit), which, being interpreted, means that you can do a great many things once which, if you attempted to do frequently, would bring you to utter grief. I have known the time that a drinking bout did me real good, but if I had continued it every night for a week I should have been a pitiable object; and so there are many things one can eat once in a while which one can't eat every day. Une fois n'est pas coutume is a great rule of physical health.
