Taking the Cure

In 1849, when very ill, suffering from constant sickness,
he was urged by a friend to try the water-cure. . . .

—Francis Darwin

Distress, complaint, a ligature of relief,       the bowels ache and cannot disguise             the pebble of grief carrying its limp to his brain. He was glad to be sitting.       The coach nearer than away. Tea & toast             waiting at Down when an old companion stepped in on leave with only astonishment       delaying his greeting at meeting             an old friend in such a state, a frail captive of his chair. The weather was not good.       The barnacles he hoped Henslow would send             would stay locked in their box while he vomited, saw spots, a last, faint       white crust of winter trembling in him             before it fell. He needed release from this grip. In every spoon he tasted a dyspeptic's       dread. He remembered it now: the returning             voyage, worse than learning German, the sour wine of rough seas pouring its poison through him       somewhere between Santiago and Valparaiso.             He drank it. How the ship's surgeon dosed him with calomel. How the fever stayed       an incurable stain never leaving his life—             a proposition of labels and crates some servant might dismantle, a maze       of bones, Polypi and filaments of the most             vital crust, fragments of a mammoth he got scent of. It would be difficult not to live       for that. Not to understand the story well enough             to tell it. Only Dr. Gully could erase the pain, enliven the spirit, perhaps, collapsed in him.       No one else could see this. A gout released             and taken up by the blood. A troubling case. And then he vomited. Made notes, a diary       of sickness, with morning on one side, night             the other. A planet of headaches, boils and pain. The right treatment, he thought, might       cleanse the sediments, unbind the patient,             wash the wounds, disasemble the knot keeping him from his barnacles. He was       thinking too much. The Doctor             would make him wise on less. Less sugar, salt and stimulants. Even figs       were too sweet a meat. In fact anything good.             From now on Dr. Gully's Water Cure Establishment would rule. Tumblers of it, the sweet       air of routine drinking him in. Up at seven.             Drowned by nine in a cold sea of dripping sheets, rubbings rough with cold and heat       to clear the stream, unleash the circulation,             do the trick and turn the patient, drown the disease or him. Wrapped in a cold attentiveness       he improved, the nerves of his stomach             less spastic, grew calm. Something shrank the pin in him. He bought a horse.       Rode and walked the outline of hills, became             a boy seizing every beetle again beneath its leaf, every day a calming, tolerable       fact. He was pleased to be in this rain.             So he let the idleness fill him, six weeks become months. But in a calm sea nothing moves.       He felt the held breath of his work, syllables             of wasted days. The pain no longer clung like a red leaf in him.       Gone were the messy accumulations,             the motionless days of an invalid, food untouched on its plate. He felt the clean       washed loveliness of dawn, sparrows             skimming the treetops, even the rain darkening fields. Wrapped in a patient       cradle of hands and healing baths, that sure             signature of cure came: he put on weight. The furor within him seemed still.       He could move to the next page             where his barnacles waited.