Three Men in A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

Then I wondered how long I had to live.  I tried to examine myself.  I felt my pulse.  I could not at first feel any pulse at all.  Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off.  I pulled out my watch and timed it.  I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute.  I tried to feel my heart.  I could not feel my heart.  It had stopped beating.  I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it.  I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back.  But I could not feel or hear anything.  I tried to look at my tongue.  I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other.  I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.

I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man.  I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

I went to my medical man.  He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now.  “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice.  He shall have me.  He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.”  So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:

“Well, what’s the matter with you?”

I said:

“I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me.  Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished.  But I will tell you what is not the matter with me.  I have not got housemaid’s knee.  Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it.  Everything else, however, I have got.”