pepsia; dysentery depends on dyspepsia; and even
diarrhoea must own dyspepsia as its parent. The effects of cold and
damp, of obstructed perspiration, of scrofulous tendencies, and a
thousand other causes, pass for nought; dyspepsia rears its head as the
sole parent of ill, and little doubt can be entertained, that in the
event of a man, a little weakened by sickness, falling and breaking his
leg, this dyspeptic monitor would call the case dyspeptic fracture. Well
may the poor patient who peruses the pages of his work be called "an
unhappy dyspeptic;" and if he be not so already, he cannot read long, if
his attention and conviction go hand in hand, before the discovery of
such an accumulation of horrors, and all referred to his own person,
will render him a fit subject for the author's experiments. Some of
these symptoms are of too extraordinary a character to be passed over
without notice: coldness in the head, ears, and eyes, difficulty of
speech, and a jarring through the chest, numbness and coldness at the
stomach, and sometimes a weight as if a lump of lead were there: if this
be the case--

"Who breathes, must suffer; and who thinks, must mourn,
And he alone is bless'd, who ne'er was born."

Then again, our author has been told by a sufferer, that he felt as if a
number of wires passed up from the stomach to the brain, and there
ramifying into small branches, communicated a sort of jarring or
vibrating sensation to each particular nerve. This is a perfect musical
case of a dyspeptic, who has a sort of piano-forte stomach; we might
fancy him exclaiming in the language of Shakspeare,--

"This music mads me; let it sound no more;
For though it have help'd madmen to their wits,
In me, it seems, it will make wise men mad."

Then come "pains between the shoulders and in the small of the back,
cramps, stitches, pains in joints, with universal soreness and
weariness." This is as bad as the plague, a very wilderness of agonies.
Heaven guard us from them! To crown all, the sufferings of Caliban under
the magical touches of Prospero are applied to the wretched dyspeptic,
who has "cramps by night, and side-stitches to pen his breath up; old
cramps (one attack is not sufficient) shall rack him and fill his bones
with aches, making him roar so loud, that beasts shall tremble at his
din;" this is the very climax of bodily suffering--long may we all be
preserved from the Halsted Dyspepsia!

Error in diet