his presence.

Raphael gave way before their custom, thinking that he could slip into
a passage adjoining, whence he could easily overhear the medical
conference in which the three professors were about to engage.

"Permit me, gentlemen," said Brisset, as they entered, "to give you my
own opinion at once. I neither wish to force it upon you nor to have it
discussed. In the first place, it is unbiased, concise, and based on
an exact similarity that exists between one of my own patients and the
subject that we have been called in to examine; and, moreover, I am
expected at my hospital. The importance of the case that demands my
presence there will excuse me for speaking the first word. The subject
with which we are concerned has been exhausted in an equal degree by
intellectual labors--what did he set about, Horace?" he asked of the
young doctor.

"A 'Theory of the Will,'"

"The devil! but that's a big subject. He is exhausted, I say, by too
much brain-work, by irregular courses, and by the repeated use of too
powerful stimulants. Violent exertion of body and mind has demoralized
the whole system. It is easy, gentlemen, to recognize in the symptoms
of the face and body generally intense irritation of the stomach, an
affection of the great sympathetic nerve, acute sensibility of the
epigastric region, and contraction of the right and left hypochondriac.
You have noticed, too, the large size and prominence of the liver. M.
Bianchon has, besides, constantly watched the patient, and he tells us
that digestion is troublesome and difficult. Strictly speaking, there is
no stomach left, and so the man has disappeared. The brain is atrophied
because the man digests no longer. The progressive deterioration wrought
in the epigastric region, the seat of vitality, has vitiated the whole
system. Thence, by continuous fevered vibrations, the disorder has
reached the brain by means of the nervous plexus, hence the excessive
irritation in that organ. There is monomania. The patient is burdened
with a fixed idea. That piece of skin really contracts, to his way of
thinking; very likely it always has been as we have seen it; but whether
it contracts or no, that thing is for him just like the fly that some
Grand Vizier or other had on his nose. If you put leeches at once on the
epigastrium, and reduce the irritation in that part, which is the very
seat of man's life, and if you diet the patient, the monomania will
leave him. I will say n