which
reduced the evacuations from thirty-three to three a day. But her
distress was still very great, and her feet soon began to turn purple,
and she began to bloat in her stomach and bowels. This continued till
she was as full as she could be; and you could have heard her scream and
groan as far as the road (a distance of three or four rods). The
physician then applied ether, to relieve her distress, and gave
twenty-five drops of laudanum, and a morphine powder, upon which her
distress left her for a very short time, but soon returned, not to leave
her again while she lived. Almost her last breath was a scream. She died
in just eight days after Dr. Q. came to see her.

"But I must close by saying that we think if our sister could have been
a patient of yours, she would have been restored to health. But it is
past, and we cannot recall it; and all I can now do, is to tender our
thanks to you for your kindness and attention during our sister's
sickness. I trust you will have life and health, long to pursue your
noble vocation."

I am afraid the patient reader of this long chapter, will be led to one
conclusion which the writer would exceedingly regret; viz., that all
medical counsel, in chronic disease, is of more than doubtful utility;
and that it would be safer to leave it wholly to nature and to good
nursing. There are medical men in the world who are honest as well as
skilful, and who, because a case is difficult to manage, will not,
chameleon-like, tell two or three different stories, and thus half ruin
a profession that embraces so many noble and honorable-minded men; nor
will they persist in a course of treatment which is evidently murdering
their patients.

It is hardly needful to say that the patient above described was
murdered; but I am obliged to say, without doubt, that there was no
necessity of her coming to such an untimely end. Her sister, it seems,
thought that, had she fallen into my hands from the first, she might
have been saved. I think so too. And yet, it might have been otherwise.
In any event, she ought not, at the first, to have been treated for
consumption, but for dyspepsia. Starvation, and a little mental
quietude, with daily exercise, such as she could bear, in the open air,
would have greatly changed her condition, when her diarrhoea first
commenced.

I never knew a case which was worse managed in my whole life. It is a
wonder to me, when I think of it, that she so long survived under