16 June 1919 – 22 June 1919

Bateson and his love of the louse for its own sake. Pedigree lice. £ ioo a year from the Royal In- stitute: a large family: desperately poor: but he never notices. The lives he saved in the Balkan war with shaving and Thymol. Cases reduced from 7000 to 700. No reward, not even an O.B.E. He dissects them, finds their glands and so on, keeps them in tiny boxes ; they feed on his arm. The louse and the bedbug. Hydatids: the Australian who got them: handfuls of immature grapes. They attack the liver. In the hu- man body they reproduce indefinitely. When they are passed and a sheep is attacked by them, they develop hooks and become long worms. The Egyptian disease: a parasite which attacks the veins and arteries and causes fluxion — constant bleeding. It is another egg drunk in water. After it has been in man the only thing it can affect is a water- snail. It goes through an entirely new cycle of being until it can attack man again. Dysentery : another parasite. Hydrophobia: the virus from the dog is taken and a rabbit is infected. That rabbit is used to infect another rabbit : the 2nd a 3rd, and so on, until you get a rabbit who is practically pure virus. The spinal cords are then taken from these rabbits and dried by a vacuum. The result is pounded up fine into an emulsion: 1st rabbit, 2nd rabbit, 3rd rabbit, etc., and the patient is injected progressively till at last he receives a dose which, if he had not been prepared to resist it, would kill him outright. The disease develops very slowly; the treatment is very expensive. Symptoms are a pro- fuse shiny bubbling saliva, and gasping and groaning as in gas-poisoning. No barking, no going on all fours. In lockjaw the jaw does not lock. Pasteur was a very dreamer of dreamers. Human beings are a side-line to science. All this I talked over with Sorapure, June 21. His point of view about medicine seems to me just com- pletely right. I'd willingly let him take off my head, look inside, and pop it on again, if he thought it might assist future generations. Quite the right man to have at one's dying bedside. He'd get me at any rate so in- terested in the process — gradual loss of sensitiveness, coldness in the joints, etc. — I'd lie there thinking: this is very valuable to know ; I must make a note of this. As he stood at the door talking : " Nothing is in- curable; it's all a question of time. What seems so useless to-day may be just that link which will make all plain to a future generation. ..." I had a sense of the larger breath, of the mysterious lives within lives, and the Egyptian parasite beginning its new cycle of being in a water-snail affected me like a great work of art. No, that's not what I mean. It made me feel how perfect the world is, with its worms and hooks and ova, how incredibly perfect. There is the sky and the sea and the shape of a lily, and there is all this other as well. The balance how perfect! (Salut, Tchehov!) I would not have the one without the other. The clocks are striking ten. Here in my room the sky looks lilac ; in the bath-room it is like the skin of a peach. Girls are laughing. I have consumption. There is still a great deal of moisture (and pain) in my bad lung. But I do not care. I do not want anything I could not have. Peace, solitude, time to write my books, beautiful external life to watch and ponder — no more. O, I'd like a child as well — a baby boy; mats je demande trop!