I remember going to the British Museum one day to read about the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch - hay fever, I fancy it was.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. I sat and pondered.I forgot 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. I sat for a while 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 .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 plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with.Why hadn't I got housemaid housemaid's knee?After a while a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed.I crawled out a decrepit wreck.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.Why this invidious reservation?I tried to examine myself.