believe I had not
used. Cheerful conversation, music to some extent, and the society of
pleasant faces had all been invoked. Still there she was, on her bed. It
seemed next to impossible for her "chariot" to go either backward or
forward.

One day she asked for some milk. In an instant I determined to try it.
So I took a teaspoonful of this fluid, warm from the animal, and gave it
to her, only requiring her to swallow it very slowly. She not only
obeyed me, but appeared to relish it. Nor was there any nausea
afterward, nor any evidence of evil effects or evil tendencies.

At the end of four hours, I gave her another teaspoonful of milk, in the
same way and with similar effects. At the end of four hours more,
another was given; and thus onward. In twenty-four hours I was able to
increase, slightly, the dose. All this while there was no stomach
sickness, in the smallest degree. In three or four days, she could bear
a table-spoonful of the "new medicine," every four hours, or a quantity
equal to two or three ounces a day. In a week or ten days, she could
take nearly half a gill at once, and had gained considerable strength.
She recovered in the end, though her recovery was very slow.

But I had hardly used the milk three days, before I began to be
denounced as an almost insane man, especially by those who were wont to
set themselves up as the arbiters of public opinion, and who lived too
remotely to witness the good effects of the course I was pursuing. The
family, of course, though they disapproved of what I did, could say
nothing against it, especially as it afforded the only ground of hope of
recovery. The whole public mind, in that region, was affected by the
belief that milk, in a fever, is heating and dangerous. "What a strange
thing it is," said many an old woman, and not a few young ones, "that
the doctor should give milk to a person sick with a fever! He will
certainly kill the girl before he is through with her. If these young
doctors are determined to make experiments, they ought surely to make
them on themselves, and not on their patients."

The public complaint involved one serious mistake, else it would have
had the semblance of reason to justify it. As a general fact, milk is
heating in a fever, and is consequently inadmissible. The mistake to
which I allude consisted in the belief that the fever still existed,
when it had wholly passed away and left nothing behind it but debility,
or the consequences o