Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/254

 *not cure too quickly any skin disease. But at those times, especially during pregnancy, we must look cautiously to the effects of our medicines on the rest of the system, and on a being yet unborn. When nature is putting forth all her power to accomplish one of these mysterious transformations, or is engaged in the sublime and primal act of creation, the man is fool-*hardy who "without great argument" will interfere in her subtle processes.

These eruptions are either dry, covering the skin with thousands of minute scales like bran, or contain some fluid or half-fluid substance which oozes or can be pressed from them. Many of them are accompanied with discolorations of the skin, and with more or less pain. The pain, however, is in many of them less annoying than the itching. This is at times almost insupportable, and it may be present where there is no eruption visible whatever. Old people frequently are disturbed at night by it, and some girls and women, in perfect health apparently, are most seriously distressed by intolerable itching in divers parts. We know the case of a married lady, who during each pregnancy was almost driven wild by this distress. The family physician exhausted all his resources without doing the least good. One day when a toothache was added to her other miseries, her husband told her to take a few whiffs of his cigar in order to soothe the tooth. She did so, and as if by magic the itching entirely left her.