Page:Thirty-five years in the East.djvu/127

Rh they relied on my medical skill, was that of M. Shabert. The head of this respectable family had been formerly invested with the office of English interpreter.

It is the duty of a physician to have patience when he has occasion to attend old ladies; and thus I must crave the reader's indulgence while I relate what Mrs. Shabert communicated to me. She began thus :— "A young Greek stabbed my son with a stiletto; and, at the moment when he was about to cry out for assistance, the Greek was so malicious as to thrust the weapon into his mouth and cut a blood-vessel, from which a violent bleeding ensued, and it could only be stopped by immediate surgical assistance. He was taken to the consulate, in front of which it happened, and where he was employed. By the application of red-hot iron, the blood was stanched; but two or three days subsequently, the bleeding began afresh, and the patient felt exhausted; when the bleeding was renewed for the third time, he became much worse. On the ensuing night, he was restless, and in a state of great perturbation from his dreams. It appeared to him as if his adversary was running towards him, with the stiletto in his grasp. The attendant physicians, thinking this symptom to be the forerunner of another flow of blood, declared the patient's state to be very critical, being persuaded that, upon another bleeding, death was inevitable." In this awful position, the family proposed to the physicians to allow them a trial of homoeopathy. They readily consented, in the hope of meeting with a good opportunity of rendering homoeopathy ridiculous, and showing the public the inutility of that system. Mrs. Shabert having finished, her husband requested me to accompany him to the consulate, where his son was then lying, in order that I might cure him. I found the youth very much reduced, but tranquil in mind. His surgeon, a Frenchman, who was present, or rather was waiting for me, told me he had, by a repetition, stanched the blood with a red-hot iron and other styptics, but that another bleeding was to be feared as soon as the scab should come from the wound, and as the parents