Quênesville's metallic iron. I shall give you this prescription, not as a drug or as a medicine, but as an element of your body; without a certain abundance of which, neither you, nor any mammiferous creature, nor bird, nor creeping thing can live. I verily believe, that even a monas crepusculum would die but for his iron. You ought to have found the dose in your bread and butter, your rice, your salad, and your chicken, daily, these two and a half years. past. It was there, but you did not get it. I shall give it to you, and shall present it daily to your organs, and you shall see what the effect will be. Here, give me a scrap of paper. I shall begin the prescription in German, and end it in English; and so you see my caption is "Mit huelfe Gottes. "Take of Quenêsville's metallic iron, one hundred grains. "Powdered gum Arab. and sugar, a sufficient quantity. "Make a pilular mass to be divided into fifty pills, and direct, for Miss Helen Blanque. To take one pill for a dose immediately after each breakfast, dinner, and supper. C. D. M. "Now you must take this iron regularly, and exactly, and for a long time. Eat plenty of bread and meat, and take one or two glasses of good Bordeaux wine at your dinner; but it should be diluted with water. Rise early, and go to bed early. Think, what is true, that you have made yourself sick by a silly indulgence upon some slight maladive sensation, which will disappear, when you shall again learn to act like a reasonable creature as to the care of your health; and I will answer for it, that you will soon be found to make no more complaints. "You have often heard of the general faith and belief in quinine as a cure of ague and fever, haven't you?" "Oh, yes. I know that is what everybody takes, and what all the world believe in." "Very well; I believe in it, too, implicitly; but I have quite as strong a belief in the power of this medicine to cure your hæmatosic membrane, to enrich your blood by bringing it up to its proper crasis, so that its figures shall stand respectively, at 790, 137, 80, 3. And that is all you want; for when you have that, and are totally destitute of any organic lesion whatsoever, your rich and valid blood shall disengage by its oxygen, a full nerve-power in the brain-which, exciting life motions in due intensity every where within your economy, you shall in vain try to find the point so big as a pin, that is not in consummate order and health and perfection; and when that shall come to be the case, when the red tint of the butter pear shall glow on your cheek again, and the cherry turn pale in comparison with your lips, you shall seem as charming as you really are, and I will say, after good old Ambrose Paré, 'I dressed, and God healed her.' "And, now I must bid you good morning; for it is time to visit some persons who are really sick, which, thank Heaven, you are not." "Stop, stop, doctor, a word before you go. I assure you that for more than two years I have been most unhappy, most wretched, in the contemplation of a present and prospective ill-health. Nothing has pleased me-nothing given me the hope of true enjoyment. I have been even sensible that I was daily losing a naturally good and placable temper; and becoming what a lady should never become, unamiable, acâriatre, tracasseuse! I believe that I have been in some sense like Lady Macbeth—not in the wickedness, I hope, but in the phantasy: there is a pretty Shakspeare on the table; do open it at Act V. Scene iv., and read it for me." M.-Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it:- There, Miss Helen-there is your quotation. I hope you will follow the last line, 'Come, put your armor on.' "Depend upon it, doctor. I shall try to follow your advice. I cannot say that the conversation I have had with you, has enabled me to understand as clearly as I think you do, what ails me, and what I require for the re-establishment of my lost health and spirits. Perhaps, indeed, a long preliminary study is requisite to the understanding of those points, that you characterize by such very hard words, as en-en-end-angium, was it not? and Hematosis? yes, Hematosis, and other such gibberish. But, admitting that I have not learned anatomy and physiology from your discourse, I at least have obtained some glimpses of the nature of my indisposition, and feel that from this hour forth, I shall be better, for I have found courage and confidence. I am convinced that the game is in my own hands. I know it will be a hard game to play, but I also know that 'le jeu vaut bien la chandelle,' and be assured I am about to play it well. In fact you have cured me already by opening my eyes, and cleansing my bosom of that perilous stuff. I thank you heartily for this visit. My father, who is rich, will know how to send you a good fee for it, for he loves me, you know I am his only child. I thank you the more heartily, because you have not even once made me poke out my tongue; and because, though a doctor, you have neither cut me with a lancet, blistered me like a Miss Marsyas, nor poisoned me with that detestable calomel, and oh!-ugh! castor oil! So now good-bye, doctor; come and see me again. I feel that I shall be soon well and happy." Such was my conversation with Miss Helen Blanque. In twenty days, I met her as beautiful as a Houri; with a gait like Hygiea, and a cheek that might put Euphrosyne or Hebe to shame. C. D. M. LETTER XIII. GENTLEMEN:-In my twelfth letter, I spoke at large, and perhaps in rather a random manner, on the subject of prolapsions of the womb, and was led away by the train of my thoughts, to contemplate the state of a young woman complaining of aches and pains and inabilities, that are the usual accompaniments and simulations of the uterine displacements. I said that many painful, inconvenient and annoying sensations are produced in the female pelvis, from very different causes, which are, in their operation on the sensitive system, the same, whatever may be the difference of their true causes. I also said that, for the diagnosis of many cases of such complaints, it is not indispensable to proceed to the taxis as the sole means of coming at a sufficiently clear understanding of the disorder; and that, while I would rigorously insist upon the right of using all necessary and proper means to clear up the obscurities and difficulties that embarrass the decision and action of the practitioner, I should be held conscientiously to abstain from any unnecessary inquiries or modes of inquiry. I think that a diagnosis by exclusion will in many diseases lead to the discovery of the truth-that is to say, a physician ought to be able to judge the rate of all the accessible functions of the body, and by comparing their actual state with a standard of health that he knows how to erect in his mind, he ought to be able to say this and this and this are right; and so through the great catalogue-excluding all the healthy ones— but this and that are wrong-and they are wrong-in this or that especial way. Where he cannot decide in what especial way the deviation of the function takes place then let him carry his explorations to the farthest proper extent. In my conversation with Miss Helen Blanque, and in the observations that I made, in regard to her gestures, her mode of sitting down, and of standing up; of walking; of the tone of her voice; her respiration, her complexion, her style of dressing, her physiognomical expression, her sentiments and trains of thought, &c. &c., I was quite convinced, that although she was affected with pains, aches, and inabilities, like those of the patient from prolapsus, I could very clearly trace them to faulty innervations, arising from deficient crasis of the blood; and I concluded that, by exposing her to exercise; to the bath; by a better diet and drinks; by sending her into the air-the sunlight; by insisting upon her effecting those modifications in development, that can be brought about by a course of training, I should cure her of her complaints, without resorting to the shocking ultima ratio—the exploratory taxis, or the still more detestable resort of the pessarium. I also ordered for her a preparation of iron, which is probably the most efficacious of all the ferruginous articles, and has the additional good property of being quite destitute both of taste and odor. I cannot say that my hypothetical conversation with Miss Helen was able to make her acquainted with my views of her hygienic and therapeutical wants; but I flatter myself, it may have succeeded in recalling to your memory some of the many arguments and rationales I had the honor to present to you last winter, and that they disclosed to you, if not to Miss H. herself, the precise views that actuate me in my professional ministry over many such cases. How many times have I spoken to you in that way! Whether these views be just or not; whether I have been able fully to disclose my thoughts or not, this is very certain, namely, that I have many, many times, held conversations like that, with young people whom I found depressed, and indeed almost brokenhearted, under a painful idea that they were ruined in body, by a disease which, after tormenting them for a number of years, was destined to bring them to an untimely grave. It is a great matter, in the management of such a case, to clear the mind of the pernicious impression, for everybody knows, (look again at my quotation from Seneca,) that the mens sana in corpore sano, is an indispensable condition of happiness and health. I intend not to deny that a good man may be calm under physical suffering, the most extreme. Nay! I have seen a fine fellow, dying on the rack of a traumatic tetanus, and rejoicing in his spasm and smiling forth from amidst the most horrible cramps, even of his face; and glorying in an approaching death that was to enlarge his soul for its instant flight to Heaven. I have seen this, and more than this, for I have seen greater courage and peace amidst protracted and hopeless pain; hopeless at least, as to earthly hope; but it is true, nevertheless, that a thought can kill, and a conviction utterly destroy. The morale of the patient has as much to do with his cure as the calomel, the senna, or the cinchona. If a girl, in coming up to the age of puberty, is badly managed; if her digestive organs are suffered to become permanently deranged, under a vicious course of feeding; her nervous system to be badly or imperfectly developed, by means of vicious habits of education, in exercise, in sleeping and waking, in unnatural attitudes, in the consumption of the nervous force in studies at school and at home; it is reasonably to be expected that the whole future life will take a color of feebleness and impressionability from the character of the constitution acquired at the close, and true completion of the puberic age. |