When his daughter, not six months
old, was attacked by croup, he gave her in twenty-four hours "32 grains of
calomel, besides bleeding, blistering, and emetics." When he was called to
baptize a sick baby, he seized the opportunity of giving it a dose of
castor oil. One day he writes--
"I am performing miracles in my parish with garlic for
whooping-cough."
Another:--
"We conquered the whooping-cough here with a pennyworth of salt of
tartar, after having filled them with the expensive poisons of
Halford.[63] What an odd thing that such a specific should not be more
known!"
"I attended two of my children through a good stout fever of the
typhus kind without ever calling in an apothecary, but for one day. I
depended upon blessed antimony, and watched anxiously for the time of
giving bark."
"Douglas[64] alarmed us the other night with the Croup. I darted into
him all the mineral and vegetable resources of my shop, cravatted his
throat with blisters and fringed it with leeches, and set him in five
or six hours to playing marbles, breathing gently and inaudibly."
After an unhealthy winter he writes:--
"Our evils have been want of water, and scarlet-fever in our village;
where, in three quarters of a year, we have buried fifteen, instead of
one per annum. You will naturally suppose I have killed all these
people by doctoring them; but scarlet-fever awes me, and is above my
aim.
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