A MORTAL ANTIPATHY

By Oliver Wendell Holmes

CONTENTS

PREFACE.

INTRODUCTION.

THE NEW PORTFOLIO: FIRST OPENING.

A MORTAL ANTIPATHY.



I. GETTING READY.

II. THE BOAT-RACE.

III. THE WHITE CANOE.

IV. THE YOUNG SOLITARY

V. THE ENIGMA STUDIED.

VI. STILL AT FAULT.

VII. A RECORD OF ANTIPATHIES

VIII. THE PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.

IX. THE SOCIETY AND ITS NEW SECRETARY.

X. A NEW ARRIVAL.

XI. THE INTERVIEWER ATTACKS THE SPHINX.

XII. MISS VINCENT AS A MEDICAL STUDENT.

XIII. DR. BUTTS READS A PAPER.

XIV. MISS VINCENT'S STARTLING DISCOVERY.

XV. DR. BUTTS CALLS ON EUTHYMIA.

XVI. MISS VINCENT WRITES A LETTER.

XVII. Dr. BUTTS'S PATIENT.

XVIII. MAURICE KIRKWOOD'S STORY OF HIS LIFE.

XIX. THE REPORT OF THE BIOLOGICAL COMMITTEE.

XX. DR. BUTTS REFLECTS.

XXI. AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION.

XXII. EUTHYMIA.

XXIII.    THE MEETING OF MAURICE AND EUTHYMIA.

XXIV. THE INEVITABLE.

POSTSCRIPT: AFTER-GLIMPSES.

MISS LURIDA VINCENT TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD.

DR. BUTTS TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD.

DR. BUTTS TO MRS. BUTTS.

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.

The lasting effect of a shock received by the sense of sight or that of hearing is conceivable enough.

But there is another sense, the nerves of which are in close relation with the higher organs of consciousness. The strength of the associations connected with the function of the first pair of nerves, the olfactory, is familiar to most persons in their own experience and as related by