Page:Philosophical Transactions - Volume 054.pdf/44

 This sal catharticum amarum came from England; and whether some vitriolic acid had been used in making it, I do not know; but it is likely there had.

From the first of August he took no medicines; the attacks were grown much less frequent and slighter: only he often felt in the night time like the stroke of an electrified body.

August 13. He was awaked this night by pain, as if burning irons had been clapped to the insides of his legs, with anxiety and a sense of tremor over the whole body. I was sent for, but his complaints were greatly diminished before I came. I found his pulse very quick, irregular and small: but I could find no new cause for the return of his complaints. He had alter this some smaller attacks: but in the night of the 23d he was seized with a violent fit of the same sort, with stretchings, and as if prickling sparks were flying continually out of the skin. He had palpitation of the heart, and complained of the want of breath: his left side turned cold, and his right side grew hotter. When I came he was grown better, but the pulse still very small, frequent and inordinate.

24th, He was again attacked in the same manner in the night time, and it also went off in the same manner: but he now grew feverish and kept his bed some days.

By the word stretchings I mean the stretching of his body and limbs by a slow and gentle convulsion of the extensor muscles; for in all the attacks I never observed the flexores any way affected. — His feelings were frequently so odd that, he said, he could not describe them. He often felt as if his left side,