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Treating A Case Actively
by
“Sarah,” he said, “why, in the name of goodness, did you permit the doctors to butcher me in this way? I’m laid up for a week or two, and all for nothing.”
“It was to save your life, dear.”
“Save the–!”
“H-u-s-h! There! do, for mercy’s sake, be quiet; every thing depends upon it.”
With a gesture of impatience, H–shut his eyes, teeth, and hands, and lay perfectly still for some minutes. Then he turned his face to the wall, muttering in a low, petulant voice–“Too bad! too bad! too bad!”
I had not erred in my first and my last impressions of H–‘s disease, neither had Dr. S–although he used a very extraordinary mode of treatment. The facts of the case were these:
H–had a weakness; he could not taste wine nor strong drink without being tempted into excess. Both himself and friends were mortified and grieved at this; and they, by admonition, and he, by good resolutions, tried to bring about a reform; but to see was to taste, to taste was to fall. At last, his friends urged him to shut himself up at home for a certain time, and see if total abstinence would not give him strength. He got on pretty well for a few days, particularly so, as his coachman kept a well-filled bottle for him in the carriage-house, to which he not unfrequently resorted; but a too ardent devotion to this bottle brought on the supposed apoplexy.
Dr. S–was right in his mode of treating the disease after all, and did not err in supposing that it would reach the predisposition. The cure was effectual. H–kept quiet on the subject, and bore his shaved head upon his shoulders with as much philosophy as he could muster. A wig, after the sores made by the blister had disappeared, concealed the barber’s work until his own hair grew again. He never ventured upon wine or brandy again for fear of apoplexy.
When the truth leaked out, as leak out such things always will, the friends of H–had many a hearty laugh; but they wisely concealed from the object of their merriment the fact that they knew any thing more than appeared of the cause of his supposed illness.