Wry-neck

Yesterday, in the course of the second reading of Le Locataire (reference 1), I got around to looking up 'torticolis', from what I could make of the text, a neck complaint which comes with colds.

Also a word in English, sometimes spelt with two 'l's rather than one, sometimes translated as wry-neck. This last phrase being a literal rendering of the word.

Talking with Cortana, I find that wry-neck is a very common cause of more or less chronic pain, accounting for a significant proportion of the total. It seems that it can be caused by throat infections, but that is far from being the whole story. I am reminded of the difference between real pain, caused by the proper workings of the nerves which do pain, and fake pain, caused by the nerves which do pain not working properly, usually because they have been damaged. False positives to use a phrase much in the news just presently. I am also reminded that our pain machinery is constructed on rather general purpose lines, and often generates the experience of pain when that is not very helpful, when there is nothing much to be done about the damage or problem in question.

I then remembered that I quite often used to be conscious of a stiff neck when walking from Vauxhall to Westminster on the way to work in the morning, perhaps a mild case of same. Usually dealt with by waggling the head about a bit. BH thought that I was being silly, attaching the grand label torticollis to this fleeting niggle, to this trifle, but then she went on to explain that at one of the keep fit classes that she goes to - not just presently - that the leader spends quality time on neck exercises, presumably to avert this very problem. Maybe not so silly after all.

I also remembered about Simenon being an enthusiastic amateur of the medical sciences, certainly in later life collecting lots of books and journals on same and spending quality time with medical people. Is the torticolis of the present story a case of his hobby intruding into his work, something which he loudly deplores in his (voluminous) autobiographical writings.

The snap being of the house in which Simenon lived, in Marsilly, a little to the north of La Rochelle, at the time he wrote the story. Also quite near the Île de Ré, the scene of one of the closing scenes of the story, the ceremonial departure of convicts to Devil's Island, the island of Papillon fame. I dare say Simenon had witnessed the ceremony from time to time.

Reference 1: Le Locataire - Simenon - 1932. Volume 1 of the collected works.