Nobody writes a headache quite like this. In four short stanzas, with two speakers and one complaint, Jane Austen manages to make a whole profession look faintly ridiculous. She is best known as the novelist of *Pride and Prejudice* and *Emma*, and this little piece shows her wit working in miniature.
The story is simple. Miss Beckford announces her pain. Mr. Newnham, instead of diagnosing it, turns the question back on her: "What can you do Ma'am?" She suggests a dose of calomel, hedging politely ("if you think there's no risk"), and he greets this with "What a praise worthy Notion," promising to take the potion himself. The central idea is a reversal of authority. The doctor, supposedly the expert, becomes an agreeable echo of his patient. The poem seems to tease both of them: the woman who relishes being "suffering" and the professional who cares more about pleasing her than treating her.
That echo is built into the structure. The second stanza recycles the first almost word for word, with "Doctor so dread" and "pain in your head" handed back like a ball returned over a net. Parroting is all the doctor has to offer, and in the final line he parrots her plan as well: "And so will I too Ma'am." The poem ends on that "Ma'am", a tiny flourish of deference that leaves the doctor's judgment nowhere to be found.
The rhythm supports the joke. Lines like "I've a pain in my head" bounce along in a light, galloping pattern of two strong beats, closer to a nursery rhyme than to a medical consultation. The rhyme scheme is a steady ABAB in every stanza, and it works hard. "Head" chimes with "dread", "Suppose" with "Dose", "Notion" with "potion". The names are the strained spots. "Beckford" is paired with the near-miss "for't", and "Newnham" with "Ma'am". The poem seems happy to let its rhymes stretch, which gives it the feel of quick, off-the-cuff comic verse. The pairs sound faintly absurd because they are tied to the two names.
The word choices are small, comic touches. "Dread" as an adjective ("Doctor so dread") sounds like something from an old ballad, and "suffering Beckford" has the same inflated tone. Both phrases make a headache and a consultation sound heroic, and then the action refuses to live up to it. The punctuation adds to the staginess. Her "Oh! what shall I take for't?" and his "Ah! What can you do Ma'am?" are matching exclamations, like two actors trading lines.
"Calomel brisk" is perhaps the sharpest detail. Calomel was a mercury-based purgative that doctors of the period prescribed widely. To a modern reader a mercury compound sounds alarming, which makes the cheerful "brisk" funnier, as though it were a bracing morning walk. The word "risk" sits right beside it in the rhyme, so the danger is mentioned and brushed aside in the same breath. Mr. Newnham's final promise is open to two readings. He may be offering companionable solidarity, or he may be so eager to agree that he will swallow a purgative for a headache he doesn't have. Either way, no actual medicine is practised anywhere in the poem.
What makes it worth reading is how much character it packs into so little space. Neither speaker is described, and each is revealed by what he or she says: her vague, self-dramatising request, his flattery and lack of any plan. That is the same method that drives Austen's fiction, where people give themselves away through their own words. Readers of *Emma*, with its anxious Mr. Woodhouse and his deference to the apothecary Mr. Perry, will recognise the territory of health, worry and polite nonsense. As a poem it is slight and meant to amuse, but it delivers a complete comic scene with a clear punchline, in sixteen lines and only a few moments of reading.