MS Through History
Bruce Frederick Cummings (1889-1919)
Bruce Frederick Cummings was a zoologist of the early 20th century. Highly intelligent and with a great passion for life, Cummings was tragically afflicted with MS and fought a constant battle against his progressive disability.
Under the pseudonym WNP Barbellion, Cummings gave a moving personal account of his suffering in his book The Journal of a Disappointed Man, published in 1919. The book remains one of the finest personal testimonies of an MS sufferer, with the entries detailing the gradual incapacitation brought by the disease.
Cummings eloquently highlights the cruelty of MS and his grief at being relentlessly robbed of his physical abilities. He wrote:
Why this deliberate, slow-moving malignity? Perhaps it is a punishment for the impudence of my desires. I wanted everything so I get nothing... I am not offering up my life willingly—it is being taken from me piece by piece, while I watch the pilfering with lamentable eyes. (July 5th, 1917)
