maladeimaginaires:

Joly was a youthful malade imaginaire. Such medicine as he had learned had made him more a patient than a doctor. At twenty-three he considered himself a chronic invalid and he spent his life inspecting his tongue in the mirror. He maintained that man was subject to magnetism like a compass-needle, and placed his bed with its head pointing north and its feet south so that his circulation might not be affected by the attraction of the poles. He felt his pulse in thundery weather. For the rest, he was the gayest of them all. His youthful inconsistencies, exaggerated, morbid but light-hearted, blended harmoniously together to make an eccentric, agreeable, young man to whom his comrades applied the English word ‘jolly’. Joly had a habit of rubbing his nose with the knob of his cane, the sign of a sagacious mind.