Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/193

Rh of deafness—total deafness in one ear—experienced during the voyage; to her female friend, she writes a few words in explanation of the cause. One thing, she says, troubles her; "one small abscess forms and breaks after another in her ear," and "is there any remedy for excruciating face-ache?" This statement was made no longer than five days before her death. The deafness had been succeeded by these continual abscesses; the decrease of her physical strength, and the want of necessary rest (the total want for some days and nights) going on all that time. Is it improbable that this disease, though merely local, and apparently not dangerous, had more to do with premature dissolution, than poison incautiously swallowed, when not a single trace of any such medicine having been taken is discoverable?

Are there not—if we are rightly informed there are—instances of abscesses in the ear breaking, not outwardly, but inwardly? Where one after another formed and broke, this may not irrationally be presumed to have happened. In that case, the result would have been a suffusion on the brain, attended possibly with all those appearances that have been described. Those appearances, at all events, are not exclusively the symptoms of death by poison; they present themselves under other "forms, modes, shows" of death; and are no better or more final evidences in themselves, than is a mere label on a bottle, when the presence of the medicine it refers to cannot be detected.

Such consideration only as fairly belongs to them, is claimed for these reflections. The spirit in which they are here put forward, must not be misunderstood. There is no intention and no wish to strain such suppositions too far; or to offer