In "Three Men in a Boat", published in 1889, the narrator reads a medical textbook and is stricken with the certainty that he has every condition described there:
"I came to typhoid fever -- read the symptoms -- discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it -- wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance -- found, as I expected, that I had that too ... I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee." (Read the book here)
My boating days are over and I have no close friends - to say nothing of the dog - with whom I can share all my ailments, but some days I feel like the label on the flyleaf of this more-than-a-hundred-year-old book:
