John Cowper's health


    All his life John Cowper suffered from ulcers and dyspepsia, to a great degree. He had four major operations for duodenal ulcer. Perforce, he finally had to adhere to a strict diet, where raw eggs, strong tea with a lot of sugar, milk and thin slices of bread and butter, was all he could absorb.
...My gastric ulcers used periodically to seize upon me and make me press myself upon railings and lean over gates and jab my knuckles in desperation into the pit of my stomach. My nervous excitement used to cause the most deadly acids to pour forth within me, and trickle, like drops of some fermenting devil's brew, upon the raw places they constantly aggravated. I used to tell myself as a sort of comfort - and I still hold it to be the truth - that I was lucky to have these sufferings in a portion of my body so far removed from my brain. (Autobiography)

The whole of Dreiser's nature was roused to come to my aid when in 1917 I had the operation they call gasterenterostomy under the miraculous hands of Dr. John Erdmann. He took me himself to the Post-Graduate Hospital; and the next morning, when I had the anaesthetic, the last thing I can remember was seeing him dressed in the white overalls of a doctor, talking to the anaesthetist. He described the whole thing to me later and told me that he actually held in his hands at one moment some important portion of my guts. (Autobiography)

These money troubles and my various physical discomforts are what worry me most at present. I suppose I am a fool and ungrateful to the gods not to be more thrilled at my recovery. I wonder what Lazarus felt when he found he owed money and had a Haemoroid.
(17 October 1917, Letters to His Brother Llewelyn)
    It was partly due to his gastric ulcers which around 1929 'had moved from the pit of (his) stomach and pitched their tents in (his) duodenum' - and probably advised by Dr. Einhorn, a stomach-specialist, - that he resolved to stop lecturing and 'make the great plunge', 'try to earn (his) living by his pen.' It also put an end to his 'fits of unconsciousness'. He had also become afflicted with severe constipation problems around 1915, and finally had to resort to enemas as a definitive way of solving this problem.
    But there was another problem, which also had to do with his health. In his Autobiography Powys describes what has been since ascribed to epilepsy, but which at the time he chose to call his 'queer fits of unconsciousness'. He writes he had, all in all, four of these 'fits' during which he lost his memory 'for as long as half an hour, and sometimes for more, both before and after (he) fell.' One of them happened at Sneden's Landing, New York:
I can just remember leaving the road, when the bolt of blackness fell; and when, so to speak, I woke up, and I must have walked at least a mile and a half in total unconsciousness, I found myself in that house by the river from which I had started.
    The last of these curious collapses occurred about eight years ago in New York City itself. It was in fact from a spot in Hudson Street that my soul paid a temporary visit to the 'powerless heads of the dead.' Since then, with the attainment of a more peaceful life, my fits of unconsciousness have been confined, thank the Lord, to my pillow. (Autobiography)
    According to Prof. Ernst Verbeek (De Goden Verzoeken [Tempting The Gods], Van Gorcum, Assen/Maastricht, ISBN 90 232 2464 7), these descriptions correspond to minor forms of epilepsy, le petit mal, to which Powys seems to have been subjected since he was quite young. He is also of the opinion that the ecstasies Powys describes seem to be linked to his fits of epilepsy; they are different in nature from the type of ecstasy Proust experienced in Remembrance of Things Past, because for Powys 'One has the power of calling up this happiness by a motion of the will...' (see In Defence of Sensuality) .