VERY GREAT MEDICINE.

Northern Advocate, 26 June 1924, Page 7

VERY GREAT MEDICINE.

A SMALL BOY'S FRIEND,

Everything that ordinary medical science could do had been done. The British Pharmacopoeia had been ransacked. Every drug which might possibly give relief to the small sufferer had been tried—and tried in vain. The position looked as hopeless as any position could possibly be. The facts of it were that a seven-year-old boy had been suffering from an attack of measles. He had had a fairly bad time, but the sequel was infinitely worse. As the fever and irritation died away there came a racking cough. Hour by hour it grew more insistent, more shattering. The little lad was shaken, torn to pieces, by the paroxysms which recurred with such deadly regularity. The family doctor shook his wise head, noted the growing weakness, and invoked names of power from Harley Street. The great men came and did their best. "He is just coughing himself to death," one man said at last. "If you can't stop him, it will be the end. I have tried everything I know, but I don't know how to stop him." It was then that the family doctor got his great idea. "We have tried everything else," he declared. "There does not seem to be any medicine that is of any use. Now . . I wonder.',' He went once more into the room where the small boy was lying, rocked with everlasting cough that was shaking his life to pieces. He sat down beside the bed, gripped a small, infinitely restless hand, and spoke with the wisdom of one who remembers that he was once a small boy himself. "Now young fellow," he said—and there was that in his tone which stilled the cough for a few minutes. "I've got a new idea for you, and something pretty good for you at the end if you play the game. "Next time you want to cough take a sharp, deep breath, and tell yourself that you won't cough. Then" —a writing pad and a pencil was deftly slipped into those hot little hands

—"if you don't cough, put a stroke above the line that I have drawn in the middle. If you do cough, put a stroke below the line. '' When we've done we '11 count them up. If there are more marks above the line than below there will be a prize for you that will make you shout and sing. Will you try?" The small boy nodded violently, took a sharp, deejp breath, paused a moment, and made a mafck on the writing-pad— above the line. "It was the last hope," the doctor said to me yesterday, when we ha.dL seen a rather sketchy but entirely jubilant small boy off for a month's holiday in the healing country, where, Ave have reason to believe, he will recover certain lost poundage. "Directly I put the pad into his hand he began to fight. "Not, mark you, that ho was not willing to fight before, but becansc I had, most mercifully, found out how to help him fight. He did all the rest himself, ; bless him—all the himself. "For'the first day it was; touch and go, but he kept on, putting down his bad marks and toiling to make the good marks win. And he made them win. He had rested his throat."

The doctor nodded, rather solemnly I thought. "Of course there's nothing new in our trade," he said at last. "But do you know I wish a few of my colleagues would try the same treatment." What do other doctors think of it? —"Daily Mail."

Few people are aware of the heavy requirements of the mail service on mai! trains, and that t"wo postal officials leave Napier every morning, changing at Ashurst, for the rftum journey on the mail from Wellington (revarks the. Napier "Telegraph") Thev are engaged throughout the trip sorting late fee and other mail and putting off and receiving mail bags, and they state 'conclusively that Hastings is one of the greatest towns in New Zealand for postage on the trains, an average of. 60 or 70 letters being posted at Hastings station every morning. Considerable difficulty was experienced by vehicular traffic, particularly by -lie milk floats, in negotiating the Ash burton bridge early on a recent morning. Light rain fell during the night and this remained on the asphalt dre.3."ing of the bridge only to become frozen soon after. Consequently when traffic commenced in the mining the bridge surface was more or less iced over. More than one milkmi-n had to take his horse out of the cart, lead it over the bridge as near the edge as possible, where the surface was freer of ice, and himself drag the < art across.

There was a stir of excitement at Lansdowne the other evening when it bee-'me known that a patient attired in Ms pvjamaa had escaped from the hospital and was roaming around the suburbs (states the " Wairarapa Age"). The Hrst knowledge of anything unusual was the sight of the patient making up Totari Street with a nurse in pursuit. The aid of a pas ier-by was enlisted, and the escapee safely returned to custody at" the h.me. No soor.er had this v een done, however, than the patient made his : econd attempt, and despite the ficetnc«s of four nurses, made goo 1 his escape, being at large till the artn of the law was requisitioncNl and, the restless one returned to a comfortable bed.