Text 8. What the doctor wrote.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some illness of which I had a touch. I got down the book and read all I came to read and then, in an unthinking moment, I turned the pages and began to study illnesses generally. I forget which the first I read about was but before I had looked down the list of symptoms, I was sure I had it.
Then I turned over the pages again. I came to typhoid fever-read the symptoms-discovered that I had typhoid fever-wondered what else I had and so started to read alphabetically. I read through the twenty-six letters and found out that I had all the illnesses.
Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel my pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I took out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. But I could not feel or hear anything…I went to my medical man. He is an old friend of mine, and feels my pulse, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I think I am ill.
The doctor looked at me and said, “Well, what’s the matter with you?”
I said, “I shall not take your time, dear boy, with telling you what the matter with me is. Life is short and you might die before I have finished.
And I told him everything.
Then he opened me and looked down me. After that he sat down and wrote a prescription, and gave it to me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.
I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist’s and handed it back. He said he didn’t keep it.
I said, “Are you a chemist?”
He said, “I am a chemist, not a co-operative store and family hotel combined”.
I read the prescription.
“I pound beefsteak, with
I bottle of beer ever six hours.
I ten-mile walk every morning.
I bed at 11 every night.
And don’t fill up your head with things you don’t understand.”
(After Jerome K. Jerome)
Text 9. AIDS.
AIDS is an insidious and up to the present moment incurable but less contagious disease than measles or hepatitis B. AIDS is thought to be caused primarily by a virus that invades white blood cells (lymphocytes) and certain other body cells, including the brain.
In 1983 and 1984, French and U.S. researchers independently identified the virus believed to cause AIDS as an unusual type of slow-acting retrovirus now called «human immunodeficiency virus» or HIV. Like other viruses, HIV is basically a tiny package of genes. But being a retrovirus, it has the rare capacity to copy and insert its genes right into a human DNA. Once inside a human host cell, the retrovirus using its own capacities begins to copy its genetic code into a DNA molecule which is then incorporated into the host's DNA. The virus becomes an integral part of the person's body. But the viral DNA may sit hidden and inactive within human cells for years, until some trigger stimulates it to replicate. Thus HIV may not produce illness until its genes are «turned on » five, ten, fifteen or perhaps more years after the initial infection.
During the latent period, HIV carriers who harbor the virus without any sign of illness can unknowingly infect others. On average, the dormant virus seems to be triggered into action three to six years after first invading human cells. When switched on, viral replication may speed along, producing new viruses that destroy fresh lymphocytes. As viral replication spreads, the lymphocyte destruction virtually sabotages the entire immune system. In essence, HIV viruses do not kill people, they merely render the immune system defenseless against other infections, e.g. yeast invasions, toxoplasmosis, cytomegalovirus, massive herpes infections, special forms of pneumonia that kill in half of all AIDS patients.
That is AIDS. There are several types of AIDS. No one has been cured up to the present moment.