Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/824

804 her mouth to hers, blew in as much breath as she possibly could, and in a very short time the exhausted lady awakened as out of a deep slumber, when, proper things being given her, she soon recovered. The maid being asked how she came to think of this expedient, said she had once seen it practiced by a midwife with the happiest effect."

A little stream of water falling from a height on the face and neck, the irritation of the olfactory nerves by means of snuff or pungent smells (burned pepper, etc.), the motion of a rumbling cart, have now and then sufficed to restore suspended animation. Persons subject to fainting-fits can use no better prophylactic than gymnastics in winter, and cold baths and pedestrian excursions in summer-time.

—In all disorders of a malarial and typhoid character, as well as in scarlet fever, measles, small-pox, and epidemic erysipelas, refrigeration is more efficacious than any medicine. In several zymotic diseases, besides cholera and yellow fever, the action of antiseptic drugs is annulled by the inversion of the digestive process: the chyle is forced back upon the stomach, and, mingled with the red corpuscles of the disintegrated blood, is voided in that discharge of cruor known as the black-vomit. Bleeding, instead of reducing the virulence of the fever, is apt to exhaust the little remaining strength of the patient. Lord Byron, for instance, was bled to death as surely as if the surgeon had cut his throat.

—A paroxysm of this dread penalty of idleness and intemperance is preceded by certain characteristic symptoms—lassitude, eructations, a dull headache, involuntary tears, a shivering sensation about the groins and thighs. If the lassitude has not yet taken the form of an unconquerable lethargy, the patient may obviate the crisis of his affection by severe and unremitting physical exercise, a prophylactic which, though doubly grievous in a debilitated condition, is incomparably preferable to the hellish alternative. I knew an old army officer who kept a spade in his bedroom, and, at the slightest premonitory symptoms, fell to work upon a sandy hill-side, and once dug a deep trench of forty-five feet in a single night, and toward morning staggered to his quarters and had barely time to reach his bed before he sank down in a deliquium of exhaustion, and awakened late in the afternoon as from a fainting-fit, with sore knees and sorer hands, but without a trace of the gout from which his compact with the powers of darkness proved to have respited him for a full month. The racking pain can be somewhat relieved by such counter-irritants as blisters, violent friction with hot flannel, etc., or actual cautery and the topical application of opiates. The experiments of sixteen carnivorous and alcohol-drinking nations have revealed dozens of similar palliatives, but only two radical remedies—frugality and persistent exercise.

—Chronic headache is generally a symptom of disordered digestion. To attempt the suppression of the effect while the