Hypochondria

Now Heartbreak House, with Butler and Bergson and Scott Haldane
alongside Blake and the other major poets on its shelves (to say
nothing of Wagner and the tone poets), was not so completely
blinded by the doltish materialism of the laboratories as the
uncultured world outside. But being an idle house it was a
hypochondriacal house, always running after cures. It would stop
eating meat, not on valid Shelleyan grounds, but in order to get
rid of a bogey called Uric Acid; and it would actually let you
pull all its teeth out to exorcise another demon named Pyorrhea.
It was superstitious, and addicted to table-rapping,
materialization seances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing
and the like to such an extent that it may be doubted whether
ever before in the history of the world did soothsayers,
astrologers, and unregistered therapeutic specialists of all
sorts flourish as they did during this half century of the drift
to the abyss. The registered doctors and surgeons were hard put
to it to compete with the unregistered. They were not clever
enough to appeal to the imagination and sociability of the
Heartbreakers by the arts of the actor, the orator, the poet, the
winning conversationalist. They had to fall back coarsely on the
terror of infection and death. They prescribed inoculations and
operations. Whatever part of a human being could be cut out
without necessarily killing him they cut out; and he often died
(unnecessarily of course) in consequence. From such trifles as
uvulas and tonsils they went on to ovaries and appendices until
at last no one's inside was safe. They explained that the human
intestine was too long, and that nothing could make a child of
Adam healthy except short circuiting the pylorus by cutting a