Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal Read Free Page A

aversion if there is anything wrong with your head. I understand this feeling; and, to a considerable extent, share it myself.
    Of course, when I am dealing professionally with a brain tumor, my patient’s mental disorder does not offend or annoy me, for I have a scientific interest in his dementia as an inevitable concomitant to the pressure on his brain. Indeed, the phenomena of his lunacy sometimes aid me in defining the field of the pressure.
    But professional curiosity aside, I am very uncomfortable in the society of people whose minds are upset. I dislike hysterics. I have a strong distaste for exhibitionism in any of its manifestations. I have no use for the mentality that hankers to be unique. I have no patience at all with eccentrics who go chasing about after ridiculous isms and fantastic ologies. I like normal people and I should like to be considered normal myself.
    When a man tells me that his Aunt Alicia roused suddenly in the middle of the night, dressed, packed a bag, and took a train, at the behest of some esoteric hunch that her bankrupt nephew was on the brink of a tragedy, and arrived at the nick of time to talk him out of his revolver and into a new resolution, I instinctively add this fellow’s name to the list of those with whom I shall not be going on a canoe-trip around the world.
    I try to avoid the balmy, the monomaniacs, the religious fanatics, the obsessed, except in my hospital where it is my business to see them. I would walk a mile to escape a conversation with somebody who had gone in for spiritualism, astrology, yogism, or an expectation of the return of Christ by a week from Tuesday. I take no stock in magic. Belief in the supernatural comes hard with me. I automatically shy off at reports of miracles, both classic and contemporary.
    And the reason I am so tiresomely insistent upon the orderly and conservative nature of my own mind, and my distaste for persons with odd kinks, quirks, maggots, crotchets, hallucinations, and various benign psychoses, is that I want the reader of this journal to believe that I am as sane as anybody he knows. I insist on this, at the outset, my friend, for I shall be documenting some very strange events.
    It is broad daylight now, and we are both weary. I have to be in the operating chamber at ten, and I assume that you, too, have something important to do. It is unlikely that an idle person would have access to this book.

2
    At Home
October 10, 1913, 9:30 P.M.
    I t all began on a fine June morning in 1905. Nothing has been the same since. Life took on a new meaning, that day.
    It was the first anniversary of my wife’s death, I had found it hard to reconcile myself to that loss, and the recurrence of the date revived in sharp detail the whole pitiful story of Joyce’s unwilling departure and my unspeakable desolation.
    For some time it had been in my mind to order a suitable marker for her grave. I had been tardy about it, hoping that my financial circumstances might improve. But there was no sign of such improvement. My affairs were growing more dismaying.
    Restless and lonely, I resolved to visit some concern dealing in memorial stones and see whether I could afford to honor my dear girl’s grave with a little monument. It was while engaged in this errand that I came by the secret of personal power.
    Joyce and I had been very companionable. Not only were we naturally congenial, but her long illness had bound us together in a tender intimacy hardly to be achieved under any other circumstance. During the last year of her life, which we spent in Tucson, I made no attempt to do anything but keep her comfortable and amused. I tried to stand between her and all the little jars and irks and shocks. When the baby cried, I promptly found out what she wanted and got it for her. I have been doing that ever since, and if she isn’t a spoiled child she has every right to be.
    I loved my wife no more for her devotion to me than my own sympathy for her. I think we