CHAPTER LXXVII.

BLEEDING AND BLISTERING OMITTED.

One of my neighbors had fallen down-stairs, and injured himself internally, in the right side of the chest; and a degree, greater or less, of inflammation had followed. The pain was constant, though not severe; but the soreness was considerable, and did not give promise of speedy amendment.

My advice was to keep quiet, both in body and mind, and to avoid all kinds of exertion that could possibly affect the chest. I also advised the use of water, not only for drink, in small draughts, but, if the pain and soreness should be troublesome, as an external application to the part affected. The food was to be mild and unstimulating. A tendency to crowd around the fire was to be guarded against and prevented, by putting on, if necessary, an increased amount of clothing.

Two days passed away with no great variation of the symptoms, either for better or worse. I was now fully convinced that I had taken the true course, because, otherwise, my patient must, by this time, have become worse. Accordingly, I persevered in my general let-alone plan for about two weeks, when the patient fully recovered.

He was a slender boy, in the fifteenth year of his age, strongly inclined, by inheritance, to disease of the chest and brain; and this consideration, among others, led me to be extremely cautious about his treatment. The greater the danger the greater the necessity that what is done should be done right, or we shall defeat our own purposes.

But the most remarkable fact in relation to this very interesting case is,--and it is chiefly for the sake of this fact that I have related the story,--that more than forty-eight hours had passed, after the occurrence of the accident, before it came into my mind that any thing could, by possibility, be done for the chest, in the way of bleeding, blistering, etc.,--so utterly irrational had this treatment, once so fashionable, come to be regarded, both by myself and a few others. How strange that I should not think of it in two whole days! Twenty years before, I should not have dared to pass through the first twenty-four hours, in such a case, without _thinking_, at least, of balsams and mustard poultices and the whole paraphernalia of external treatment, to say nothing of bleeding and blistering.