Page:Thirty-five years in the East.djvu/107

Rh cures, among which was that of the Emir himself, whom I recovered from a gastric-bilious fever. The unfortunate operation was the extraction of a stone from the bladder ; and the proverb is true, which says — " Non est in medico semper relevetur ut aeger, interdum docta plus valet arte malum." I had a presentiment on that occasion that I should not succeed in the operation ; the patient was already so weakened and enervated, that I felt no wish to operate on him, and yielded only to the request of the minister, who told me that the student was about to kill himself in despair, in case I persisted in my refusal. To secure myself from reproach, should the operation happen to fail, I caused a document to be drawn up, with the signatures of the patient and his brother, declaring me not be responsible for the result of the operation, as I undertook it only because they insisted on my doing so. This document was legalised by the seals of the Emir minister, and judge. I performed the operation in the presence of several witnesses, whom I invited for the purpose, among whom there were several hakims. The extraction of the stone was performed in one of the apartments of the high college. Fortunately I used the apparatus altus, or I should certainly not have been able to extract it. The patient behaved very quietly during the operation, which was more than I had expected, and said nothing but " Ya Allah! Ya Allah! " (O God ! O God !) To my grief, and to the surprise of all present, the stone was found to be immoveable, having grown into the substance of the bladder, in such a manner that I have never seen or heard of a similar case. The reader may imagine the difficulty, when, while such operations usually occupy only two or three minutes, I was fully five and twenty minutes engaged in loosening with the fingers of both hands the stone, which had upwards of twenty points, every one of which resembled a thick apple-stalk, half-an-inch long. The size of the calculus, however, did not surpass that of a hen's egg, and it was as white as crystallized