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Vienna, December 11, 1893
Dearest friend,
My prompt reply to your letter means that I have a few free hours on Sunday and is not a request for reciprocation in kind. Write when you have time and material.
Unfortunately I saw your dear Ida only too briefly and too rarely; on one of the three days I was in Brno, and she spent all three days at the bedside of her mother. I found her looking glorious1 and she
honored me with the admission that already today, her first day, she is bored!! She will not remain Viennese for very long. The transplantation seems to have succeeded. I heard from her that you intend to lecture on my hysterical paralyses, and felt so honored that I thought this must be a misunderstanding.
She further told me of your practical physics, her indignation about it, and I agreed with her without reservation — that is, with the one reservation that I could not maintain this opinion if you yourself convinced me that it was necessary to study this new subject. In spite of this humble uncertainty, I still think that if you were to succeed in improving the coitus devised by God Almighty, everything else would be rubbish in comparison and I would gladly come to Berlin and help you select a place in the Tiergarten2 for your statue.
The congress is in Rome; there will not be much left over for Vienna; you should speak and write, I think, certainly there and elsewhere. By the way, Scheinmann has been heard from again; his ideas move along very similar lines. Don't you know him? In September the congress of scientists will meet here, and I have been appointed first secretary of the neurological section.
My nose was affected by catarrh; at last it got well again and now I have a clear head and am in a good mood. “Today” I started to restrict my smoking — that is to say, to reduce the continual smoking to a discontinuous, countable amount. I really have the impression that the whole business is organic and cardiac; something neurotic would be much harder to take; one i