to attend a case of typhoid fever in a
young girl. In the same vicinity there had been under the care of one of
my forceful brethren a woman in middle life, whose stomach was
habitually rejecting all the milk and alcoholics poured into it, the
doctor having a theory that good would result no matter how brief the
time they were retained.

For a month my patient swallowed only the desired water and doses which
did not corrode, a desire for food coming at the end of the month. The
only day and night nurse was an overwrought mother, who got into bed
with the same disease as soon as the daughter got out of it. There was
another month of severer sickness, when without food and without the
horror of dosage, as before, the call for food marked the close of the
disease. My services ended here some days before the undertaker took
charge of the doctor's case.

A girl in her later teens, with a mild, so-called malarial fever, fell
into the same forceful care. There was a true history in this case of
nearly two gallons of whiskey, and daily milk from the quart at first
down to inability to take the least nourishment at last. Then there were
more than a month of days when vital power sustained itself without the
ways of violence, death occurring during the _nineteenth week_.

The ravenous brain had absorbed the lips to such thinness that the
depressions between the teeth were clearly revealed. From the first dose
to the last breath this was a case of dying, and the most persistent
fight for life against immense odds I have ever become aware of in an
acute case. In this case the stomach had become so seared by the
alcoholic that digestion was impossible, as would have been the case in
a body that was not sick.

Near this home there was a more delicate girl of about the same age
taken with the same fever; but with mild dosage and no food--in Nature's
care--hunger came at the close of the fourth week.

Later on in the same family there was a case of la grippe, in which for
several years there had been chronic, ulcerative bronchitis that bid
defiance to blisters and inhalations, the various specifics of another
forceful predecessor, who also was a believer in large doses and full
rations of alcoholized milk.

The coughing was so persistent, so continuous, that only the hypodermic
needle met the need. To prevent the tearing of a raw surface in the
bronchial tubes by the cough was as necessary as to apply splints to a
broken bone. T