`Like the Spider'

“Though Mr. Johnson was commonly affected even to agony at the thoughts of a friend's dying, he troubled himself very little with the complaints they might make to him of ill health. `Dear Doctor (said he one day to a common acquaintance, who lamented the tender state of his inside), do not be like the spider, man; and spin conversation thus incessantly out thy own bowels.” 

Strapped to a gurney, trussed and almost naked like a tender capon, I waited to be wheeled into the O.R. I wanted quiet and found myself repeatedly questioned by hospital staff, who seemed to think my temporal lobe, not my ear, was ailing: “What is your name, sir? What is your date of birth?” Competing for dominance with the interrogative barrage was the bellyaching of a college-age man, also strapped to a gurney and whining as though he were the elected representative of his generation: “I’m cold. I’m thirty. Can I use the bathroom? My head hurts. When can I go home? Where’s my watch?” 

“But what can a sick man say, but that he is sick? His thoughts are necessarily concentered in himself; he neither receives nor can give delight; his inquiries are after alleviations of pain, and his efforts are to catch some momentary comfort. Though I am now in the neighbourhood of the Peak, you must expect no account of its wonders, of its hills, its waters, its caverns, or its mines.” 

 [The first and harsher passage is drawn from Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. During the Last Twenty Years of His Life (1786); the latter from a more forgiving letter written by Johnson in the year of his death, 1784, to his friend William Windham.]