d now, but at that time the excitement had
strung my mind up to a high pitch of courage and determination; and
perhaps the daily, almost hourly, scenes of death had made me somewhat
callous. I need not linger on this scene, nor give the readers the
results of my operation; although novel to me, and decidedly useful,
they were what every medical man well knows.

We buried the poor little body beneath a piece of luxuriant turf, and
stole back into Cruces like guilty things. But the knowledge I had
obtained thus strangely was very valuable to me, and was soon put into
practice. But that I dreaded boring my readers, I would fain give them
some idea of my treatment of this terrible disease. I have no doubt
that at first I made some lamentable blunders, and, may be, lost
patients which a little later I could have saved. I know I came
across, the other day, some notes of cholera medicines which made me
shudder, and I dare say they have been used in their turn and found
wanting. The simplest remedies were perhaps the best. Mustard
plasters, and emetics, and calomel; the mercury applied externally,
where the veins were nearest the surface, were my usual resources.
Opium I rather dreaded, as its effect is to incapacitate the system
from making any exertion, and it lulls the patient into a sleep which
is often the sleep of death. When my patients felt thirsty, I would
give them water in which cinnamon had been boiled. One stubborn attack
succumbed to an additional dose of ten grains of sugar of lead, mixed
in a pint of water, given in doses of a table-spoonful every quarter
of an hour. Another patient, a girl, I rubbed over with warm oil,
camphor, and spirits of wine. Above all, I never neglected to apply
mustard poultices to the stomach, spine, and neck, and particularly to
keep my patient warm about the region of the heart. Nor did I relax my
care when the disease had passed by, for danger did not cease when the
great foe was beaten off. The patient was left prostrate;
strengthening medicines had to be given cautiously, for fever, often
of the brain, would follow. But, after all, one great conclusion,
which my practice in cholera cases enabled me to come to, was the old
one, that few constitutions permitted the use of exactly similar
remedies, and that the course of treatment which saved one man, would,
if persisted in, have very likely killed his brother.

Generally speaking, the cholera showed premonitory symptoms; such as
g