Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/95

 horrid train of nervous aberrations that now afflict the better half of civilized society. I am loth to say it, but it is the eternal truth nevertheless. If a person is ill, it is fashionable to assign the disturbance to the stomach, and to forthwith begin to cram that unfortunate organ with purgatives, and a long catalogue of herb teas, and outrageous compounds, which, if cast into the sea would poison all the fish, turn leviathan's stomach inside out, and line our coasts with rank carcasses, sufficient to kill all who dared breathe the pestilent odor; and yet this is called medical "science"! If a woman is sick, give her quassia, say the doctors; if rheumatic, give colchicum; if she is irritable, administer assafoetida, bitter almonds, castile soap, croton oil, valerian, and cubebs; or else attempt a cure on strictly homoeopathic principles, — with the little end of nothing whittled down to a sharp point; with boli of the quintillionth solution of a grain of mustard seed; else souse her, douse her, stew, steam, bake, broil, grill, roast, boil, freeze, or drench her; else resort to botanizing her with marley, barley, parsley, mullein, rose-leaves, lilies, toadstools, catnip, and daffa-downdillies; or poll her to pieces with the "Movement Cure;" or take the prescriptions of one of the charlatans, who, calling themselves professors, are as ignorant of the chemistry of the human body, as they are of who built Baalbec, or "The Old Stone Mill." Pursue either of these courses, and perhaps you will cure the patient as fishermen cure shad and salmon—when well dead! — certainly not before that event! A man has the catarrh: Well, give him plenty of peppery snuff, to irritate the seat of his ailment! Rheumatism: go and rub him down with cayenne pepper, coal oil, alcohol, pitch, tar, and turpentine, ginger, salt, and allspice, — for these are all capital things to "cure."

Look! yonder is a fair-pale-visaged girl, — said to be dying with consumption of the lungs, and being doctored accordingly, when the chances are a hundred to one that the seat and source of her disease is in the valves of the arteries, fimbrae, pudic nerve, uterus, duvernayan glands, or in some of the minute lacunae of the pelvic region, producing, of course, nervous exhaustion, followed by lung ulcerations and death in nine cases in every ten. Now a month's treatment with common sense, followed with either of the four remedies, would put that girl upon her feet,