Meaning of “I was a hospital in myself. All they…”

After reading through a medical reference alphabetically, the narrator is disappointed to find only one illness missing, making hypochondria funny through impossible comprehensiveness.

The narrator’s self-diagnosis escalates every advertisement into a personal medical crisis, satirizing suggestibility and the way anxious reading can turn ordinary sensations into certainty.

Nothing physical has changed, but the narrator’s interpretation has transformed completely; the comic contrast shows how anxious reading can alter felt experience without new evidence.

Social appearances repeatedly exaggerate or contradict reality, making ordinary life look like an ongoing parody of its own pretensions.

Regular reading is compared with physical exercise because repeated intellectual use can strengthen attention, knowledge, and mental capacity over time.

The speaker asks whether education should develop mental as well as bodily capacities. In the dialogue this opens a discussion of early nurture, training and the proposed legal order.