AS OTHERS SEE THEMSELVES

"... We talk abut feeling liverish or having heartburn or chills on the kidney, but all these visceral images have to be invented, and our only source of information for the inventions is what we have been told. We reconstruct our insides from pictures in advertisements for patent medicines, from haif-remembered school science, from pieces of offal on butchers' slabs and all sorts of medical folklore.

These promptings may account for the otherwise inexplicable fact that the French seem to have far more trouble with their liver than the English do. It is hard to believe that this organ is so much more threatened in France than it is in England, in spite of what we have been told about their drinking habits. It seems more reasonable to assume that the French interpret their symptoms in the light of a national fantasy about the liver and unconsciously reshape their sensations in terms of this phantom organ. The English, on the other hand, are obsessed with their bowels. When an Englishman complains about constipation, you never know whether he is talking about his regularity, his lassitude, his headaches, or his depression. Once an organ gains a hold on the collective imagination, its influence is almost invariably exaggerated and a wide range of symptoms are explained in terms of it."