In these circumstances it was thought best that I should change my doctor. Dr. Bowles was abroad at the time, so I arranged for interviews with Dr. Tryer, who was by common consent the second-best mind-healer in London. She was a tall, rather sinister-looking woman, and I always felt like a frightened rabbit in her presence. This had the unfortunate effect of making me mix up my words, as I always do when I am nervous, and she regarded this confusion on my part, as clear evidence of an inhibition somewhere in my subconsciousness. For example, one of the first things she did was to ask me about my interview with my own doctor: I said, “He told me to put out my pulse, felt his head, and then shook my tongue”—in a moment Dr. Tryer had rushed to her typewriting-desk and was recording my idiotic remark for future reference. You know how it is when you once start losing your head? I could never say anything right after that. She held interminable conversations with me, and it was quite a long time before she struck platinum on that long-forgotten air-raid. Then it was all plain sailing: I was simply docketed “cellar shell-shock”—the sort of phrase only Dr. Tryer could have pronounced without tripping over it—and herded together with a lot of other patients who had all to undergo the same treatment. Once a week we used to collect in a cellar, the doors of which were tightly locked, and Dr. Tryer, by some ingenious mechanical arrangement, contrived to make the most fiendish noises overhead. I do not suppose that even a modern air-raid could be quite so daunting; she called it “reconstructing the conditions.” When it was time to let us out she sounded the “All clear!” (this was the signal for the end of an air-raid in the Five Years’ War, apparently), and encouraged us to whistle it to ourselves as often as possible during the day. I still do it inadvertently when I am not thinking. This treatment obsessed my mind for nearly three months, and did everything except enable me to overcome my distaste for the presence of S——. By that time, at any rate, it was quite clear that what was chiefly wrong with me was nerves. Accordingly I put myself under the direction of the Berthellot school, determined to rid myself of nerves by the then popular expedient of auto-suggestion.