A MORTAL ANTIPATHY

By Oliver Wendell Holmes




PREFACE.


"A MORTAL ANTIPATHY" was a truly hazardous experiment. A very wise and
very distinguished physician who is as much at home in literature as he
is in science and the practice of medicine, wrote to me in referring to
this story: "I should have been afraid of my subject." He did not explain
himself, but I can easily understand that he felt the improbability of
the, physiological or pathological occurrence on which the story is
founded to be so great that the narrative could hardly be rendered
plausible. I felt the difficulty for myself as well as for my readers,
and it was only by recalling for our consideration a series of
extraordinary but well-authenticated facts of somewhat similar character
that I could hope to gain any serious attention to so strange a
narrative.

I need not recur to these wonderful stories. There is, however, one, not
to be found on record elsewhere, to which I would especially call the
reader's attention. It is that of the middle-aged man, who assured me
that he could never pass a tall hall clock without an indefinable terror.
While an infant in arms the heavy weight of one of these tall clocks had
fallen with aloud crash and produced an impression on his nervous system
which he had never got over.