Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/55

 instruments: but, however, go and get them." I had seen in the medicine-chest a dentist's instrument, and, returning with it, I performed the operation; with the result of which she was so much pleased, that she insisted upon having another tooth out. The relief was so instantaneous, that the second tooth was no sooner gone than she commenced talking as usual.

The cough with which Lady Hester had been so long indisposed occasionally assumed symptoms of water in the chest. Sudden starts from a lying posture, with a sense of suffocation, which, for a moment, as she described it, was like the gripe of a hand across her throat, made me very uneasy about her. Her strong propensity to bleeding, to which she had resorted four or five times a year for the last twenty years, had brought on a state of complete emaciation, and what little blood was left in her body seemed to have no circulation in the extremities, where her veins, on a deadly white skin, showed themselves tumefied and knotty.

It was difficult to reason with her on medical subjects, especially in her own case. She had peculiar systems, drawn from the doctrine of people's stars. She designated her own cough as an asthma, and had, for some time, doctored herself much in her own way. Such is the balmy state of the air in Syria, that, had she trusted to its efficacy alone, and lived with habits of