Free The Biographer's Tale by A. S. Byatt Page B

phenomena as cannot otherwise be explained.”
    His father had greatly desired him to become a medical man, and he spent many years as a medical student and clinical clerk. During his time in the dispensary he made another taxonomic or statistical experiment, deciding to work through his pharmacological supplies from A to Z, taking two drops of each and studying the effects on his own constitution. He was stopped by the effects of croton oil. “I had foolishly believed that two drops of it could have no notable effects as purgative and emetic; but indeed they had, and I can recall them now.” A description of his first operation on a young man’s jaw suggests an optimistic humour.
    â€œA boy came in looking very deplorable, walked up to me and opened his mouth. I looked awfully wise and the boy sat down in perfect confidence. I did not manage the first proceedings well, for first I put in the key (that is the tooth instrument) the wrong way, then I could not catch hold of the righttooth with it. At last I got hold. I then took my breath to enable me to give a harder wrench; one—two—three and away I went. A confused sort of murmur something like that of a bee in a foxglove proceeded from the boy’s mouth, he kicked at me awfully, I wrenched the harder. When, hang the thing,—crash went the tooth. It really was dreadfully decayed—and out came my instrument. I seized hold of the broken bits—the boy’s hands were of course over his mouth and eyes from the pain, so he could see nothing—and immediately threw them on the fire and most unconcernedly took another survey of the gentleman’s jaws. The tooth was snapped right off. Well, I pacified him, told him that one half the tooth was out and I would take out the other (knowing full well that he would not let me touch it again) and that it was a
double
one. But, as I had expected, he would not let me proceed.”
    On his tours of the wards he noted healing and decay, communal hysteria in the female wards (infecting the nurses) and the physical and mental effects of
delirium tremens
elsewhere.
    â€œThe struggles were sometimes terrible, yet the pulse was feeble and the reserve of strength almost nil. The visions of the patients seemed indistinguishable by them from realities; in the few cases I saw they were wholly of fish or of creeping things. One of the men implored me to take away the creature that was crawling over his counterpane, following its imagined movements with his finger, and staring as at a ghost. Poor humanity! I often feel that the tableland of sanity, on which most of us dwell, is small in area, with unfenced precipices on every side, over any one of which we may fall.”
    As we shall see, he experienced the falls from the tableland more than once, himself. At various stages in his life he suffered from a kind of nervous collapse. At Cambridge he had to abandon his mathematical tripos and go home for a term.
    â€œA mill seemed to be working inside my head; I could not banish obsessing ideas; at times I could hardly read a book and found it painful even to look at a printed page … I had been much too zealous, had worked too irregularly and in too many directions, and had done myself serious harm. It was as though I had tried to make a steam-engine perform more work than it was constructed for, by tampering with its safety valve and thereby straining its mechanism.”
    He had a more serious episode much later, after thirteen years of marriage. He remarks with his usual judicious good sense:
    â€œThose who have not suffered from mental breakdown can hardly realise the incapacity it causes, or, when the worst is past, the closeness of analogy between a sprained brain and a sprained joint. In both cases, after recovery seems to others to be complete, there remains for a long time an impossibility of performing certain minor actions without pain and serious mischief, mental in the one and