It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the partciular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.

Jerome K. Jerome makes this comic observation in his early humorous essay “On the Reading of Medical Books,” written in the late Victorian period when self-diagnosis, popular “medical” handbooks, and heavily marketed patent medicines were widespread in Britain. Jerome describes how reading medical descriptions (and, by extension, advertisements) can make an anxious reader imagine symptoms in himself. The joke draws on a recognizable contemporary experience: sensational claims in ads and manuals that encouraged people to interpret ordinary sensations as signs of serious illness, feeding hypochondria and consumer demand for proprietary cures.

The line satirizes suggestibility and health anxiety: once primed by authoritative-sounding “diagnoses,” the reader retrofits every past twinge or discomfort into evidence of the advertised disease. Jerome’s humor exposes how language can manufacture illness by providing a ready-made narrative for ambiguous bodily sensations. It also critiques the commercial manipulation behind patent medicine advertising, which often relied on broad symptom lists to make as many readers as possible feel implicated. The passage remains resonant as a portrait of psychosomatic worry and the way media can amplify it.