TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)
Three Men In A Boat redux -<p><i>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.I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment 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 scourge, 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.<p>I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness 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 sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, 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 plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.<p>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 invidious 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.<p>I sat and pondered.  I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class!  Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me.  I was a hospital in myself.  All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.<p>Then I wondered how long I had to live.  I tried to examine myself.  I felt my pulse.  I could not at first feel any pulse at all.  Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off.  I pulled out my watch and timed it.  I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute.  I tried to feel my heart.  I could not feel my heart.  It had stopped beating.  I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it.  I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back.  But I could not feel or hear anything.  I tried to look at my tongue.  I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other.  I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.<p>I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man.  I crawled out a decrepit wreck.<p>I went to my medical man.  He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now.  “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice.  He shall have me.  He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.”  So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:<p>“Well, what’s the matter with you?”<p>I said:<p>“I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me.  Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished.  But I will tell you what is not the matter with me.  I have not got housemaid’s knee.  Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it.  Everything else, however, I have got.”<p>And I told him how I came to discover it all.<p>Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn’t expecting it—a cowardly thing to do, I call it—and immediately afterwards butted me with the side of his head.  After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.<p>I did not open it.  I took it to the nearest chemist’s, and handed it in.  The man read it, and then handed it back.<p>He said he didn’t keep it.<p>I said:<p>“You are a chemist?”<p>He said:<p>“I am a chemist.  If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you.  Being only a chemist hampers me.”<p>I read the prescription.  It ran:<p>“1 lb. beefsteak, with  
1 pt. bitter beer<p>every 6 hours.<p>1 ten-mile walk every morning.<p>1 bed at 11 sharp every night.<p>And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.”</i>