"The Last Test" by H.P. Lovecraft with Adolphe de Castro

This story was written by Adolphe de Castro and subsequently revised by Lovecraft before being published in Weird Tales.

0:00:00 Chapter 1
0:14:06 Chapter 2
0:44:56 Chapter 3
0:53:30 Chapter 4
1:20:26 Chapter 5

The portrayal of newspapers as slime who fabricate stories is hardly unique to this tale. Poe has similar complaints decades earlier in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt". And of course, Mark Twain and Thomas Jefferson made their famous quips about the news being nothing but lies. We even have an exemplary case in our own life time, back in 2003, when the New York Time's Jayson Blair had to be fired after being caught red-handed publishing complete fabrications as if they were real news. Other recent examples exist, but the point remains: this is not something Lovecraft (or de Castro) just made up to enhance the story, it was, and is, a real problem.

'Alienist' is an outdated term for psychiatrist.

Personally I enjoyed this ending to the story. A bit of a twist, definitely very Lovecraftian.

The pictures used in order of appearance:

Chapter 1: San Quentin Penitentiary

Chapter 2: Amastigotes in a chorionic villus. From TDr database from WHO. Credit line: WHO/TDR/El-Hassan. Used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Also knows as visceral leishmaniasis, or kala-azar, or... "black fever". Yep, it's a real disease. Although it was first identified in India, not Tibet. Ah well, this probably wasn't the disease the author had in mind anyways, he probably thought he was inventing a new, fictitious disease.

Chapter 3: Photograph of the California State Capitol taken in 1890 by Winfield J. Davis.

To follow along: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/lt.aspx