'...I must just write and tell you about Mumps. I had them when I was 16. Of course it's infinitely worse at 23.[...] It's not so much the pain, - though that's incredible, - as the Disgrace, - and the madness.[...] At first they just swell and swell and swell, till they're tight and shiny and cracking, two monstrous red balloons. Then, all of a sudden, they go hard, - hard as a rock. You lie and stare at the mountain under the bed-clothes, and pretend it's your knees. The doctor strips you and eyes them till you have an erection, and then thinks you're a bad lot. You cannot pumpship and your semen turns green. And night and day the thought and torment of these vast twin scarlet bleeding pineapples is with you. It lasts for months. I suppose the fatal cases are when they grow too far and explode...'
from a letter from Rupert Brooke to James Strachey, dated April 27, 1911, in Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914
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