Page:An Old English Home and Its Dependencies.djvu/261

Rh convalescent, I heard from him: "It is a perfect miracle that I am not dead. The doctor gave me up, but he administered what he said might kill or cure, and he is such a genius—he pulled me through. No one else could have done it, not the best doctor in London, so he told me. He alone knew and used this specific. But it was my fault leaving matters so long—I ought to have sent for him before."

After all, supposing that the country surgeon were able to set a bone and sew up a wound, it was just as well that he did not employ the astounding medicines and follow the desperate practices in force in the medical profession at the end of last century and the beginning of this. Bleeding with lancet and with leeches, cupping, cauterising, blue-pill, et toujours blue-bill, were in vogue. Starving in fever water-gruel administered where now is given extractum carnis, toast and water in place of beef-tea the marvel is that our forefathers did not die off like flies under the treatment.

I remember saying to a yeoman in Essex one day: "What! nine—ten miles from a doctor?"