The Song in Mr S.'s Head
A further curious case arose, recorded in a now obscure German medical journal in 1898. It seems that a certain Mr S. from the city of Düsseldorf had gone to a physician with a rather atypical complaint, that he had a song stuck in his head. Naturally, the physician dismissed him at once, as he had no wish to have his time wasted by such a trivial and everyday matter that harmlessly happens to everyone on occasion and was by no means a concern demanding medical consultation. Mr S. persisted, finding another physician and another, always with this same complaint—that he had a song stuck in his head. He grew increasingly distraught, despondent as they each in turn turned him away, some in annoyance, some in good cheer, others mocking him for his foolishness. Word had begun to spread and many would not even see him, knowing full well for what he sought their expertise and assured of the pointlessness of the endeavor. A few tolerated him and indulged him a moment, hoping perhaps only for the opportunity to study a new sort of lunacy, or otherwise to examine an “imbecile”, as the day’s barbarous parlance would have had it. They would ask him what song it was, and invariably he would tell them that he didn’t know, and they would then ask him to hum a bit, their tone always so haughty and displeasing to his ears, until he became distressed at their lack of understanding, crying that it wasn’t like that, that that isn’t what he meant, and so overwhelmed he would become that he would breakdown into tears and weep there before them. This did nothing to soften their stone faces nor warm their cold hearts and would usually leave them eager to be rid of him for good. None would take his concerns in the seriousness which he protested it merited, but as none quite rose to level of having him committed to an asylum, he was free, at least, and continued in desperation to seek a sympathetic ear.
Eventually at last he found a doctor, a certain Dr M., who was willing to examine him in full, without prejudice and without condescension; a doctor who was wiling to entertain what had seemed unbearably frivolous to those many colleagues before. This certain Dr M. examining our certain Mr S. at first, too, found nothing amiss about him. He certainly wasn’t mad, there seemed no physical ailment, and moreover his intellectual faculties were to all testing intact. Nevertheless, there must have been something about the case which spoke to the doctor, as he remained committed in the utmost—in spite of the opinion of the field, in spite of all evidence thus far—to the care of his unusual patient. A new technology he had been eager to acquaint himself with, and only first discovered a few years prior, that of the X-ray, seemed best poised to him to answer the intriguing question that had fallen to him; and so he arranged, after no little trouble, it being difficult to secure the necessary access for such a marginal case considering the scarceness of available machines in those days, to have the man’s head examined with that newfound technological wonder.
Presumably it required some skill for a physician on account of the skull obscuring the interior in the radiograph, but the piriform aperture and the mouth wide agape provided portals and in them, though only in glimpses of such sections as passed through the cranium, it was unmistakable. Mr S. had a song stuck in his head. The images themselves have been lost to time. Our Dr M. does not go into detail in this long forgotten paper about the song's appearance, whether it was too difficult to describe or he was simply not interested none now can say, nor does he take any pains to attempt to identify the specific tune, but only notes that there could be no question as to the fundamental facts as they appeared in the X-ray. Mr S. had a song stuck in his head. Now one can hardly imagine, let alone appreciate, the tide of relief that came over our certain Mr S. when he heard the news. All he had wanted all these months of doctor after doctor after doctor and now that nightmare that followed him all his waking hours had passed and passed into his most fervent dream made reality. Once, just to hear it once. And with that, he smiled, closed his eyes, and seated there in the office of Dr M., finally died.