TEN MONTHS' SUFFERING IN A HOSPITAL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVII, Issue 39, 17 January 1890, Page 31

TEN MONTHS' SUFFERING IN A HOSPITAL.

There is an old saying that physicians are a class of men who pour drags, of which they know little, into bodies of which they know less. This is both trae and untrue at the same time. There are good and poor lawyers, and good and poor doctors. The trouble with these medical gentlemen as a profession is that they are clannish, and apt to be conceited. They don't like to be beatsn at their own trade by outsiders who have never studied medicine. They therefore pay, by their frequent failures, the penalty of refusing instruction unless the teacher bears their own " Hall Mark." An eminent physician — Dr. Brown-Bequard, of Paris— states the fact accurately when he says : " The medical profession are so bonnd up in their self-confidence And conceit that they a. low the diamond truths of science to be picked up by persons entirely outside their ranks." We give a most interesting incident, which illustrates this important truth. The steamship " Concordis," of the Donaldson Line, sailed from Glasgow for Baltimore in 1887, baviug on board as a fireman a man named Richard Wade, of Glasgow. He bad been a fireman for fourteen years on various ships sailing to America, China, and ladia. He had borne the hard (and exhausting labour, and had been healthy and strong. On the trip we now name he began for the first time to feel weak and ill. His appetite failed, and he suffered from drowsiness, heartburn, a bad taste in the mouth, and costiveness and irregularity of the bowels. Sometimes when at work he had attacks of giddiness, but supposed it to be caused by the heat of the nre«room. Quite often he was sick and felt like vomiting, and had some pain in the head. Later daring the passage he grew worse, and when the ship reached Halifax he was placed in the Victoria General Hospital, and the ship sailed away without him. The house surgeon gave him some powders to stop the vomiting, and the next day the visiting physician gave him a mixture to take every four hoars. Within two days Wade was co much worse ihat the doctors stopped both the powders and the mixture. A month passed, the poor fireman getting worse and worse.

Then came another doctor, who was to be visiting physician for the next five months. He gave other medicines, but not much relief. Nearly all that time Wade suffered great torture ; he digested nothing, throwiog op all he ate. There was terrible pain in the bowels, burning heat in the throat, heartburn, and racking headache. The patient was now taking a mixture every four hours, powders one after each meal to digest the food, operating pills one every night, and temperature pills two each night to stop the cold sweats. If drags could care him at all, Richard had an idea that he took enough to do it. But, on the other hand, pleurisy set io, and the doctors took ninety ounces of matter from his right side, and then told him he was sure to die. Five months more rolled by, and there was another change of visiting physicians. The new one gave Wade a mixture which ha said made him trembl* like a leaf on a tree. At this crisis Wade's Bcotch blood asserted itself. He refused to stand «ny more dosing, and tald the doctors that if he most die be could die as well without them as with them. By this time a cap of milk would tarn sour on his stomach, and lie there for days. Onr friend from Glasgow was like a wreck on a shoal, fast going to piece* Wd will let him tell the rest of his experience in the words in which he communicated it to the press. He says :— " When I was in this state a lady whom I had never seen came to the hospital and talked with me. She prove! to be an angel of mercy, for without her I should not now be alive. She told ma of a medicine called • Mother Beigei's Cutaiive Syrup,' and brought me a bottle next day. I started with it, without consulting the doctors, and in only a few days' time, I was out of bed calling for ham and eggs for breakfast. From that time, keeping on with Mother Seigel's great remedy, I got well fast, and was soon able to leave the hospital and come home to Glasgow. I now^ feel as if I was in another world, and have no illness of any kind."

The above facts are calmly and impartially stated, and the reader may draw his own conclusion. We deem it best to use no names, although Mr. Wade gave them in bis original deposition. His address is No. 244, Stobcross Btreet, Glasgow, where letters will reach him. BDITOB;

Le Caron, the English spy, with his family, is now fairly settled in rather a big house in one of the prettiest and most popular suburbs of London. He does not seem to court secrecy in the least, but when he eoes out he is generally accompanied by his «00, a young fellow of twenty or so. Any morning the two may be Been coming out of one of the city stations, unnoticed and unknown among the crowds of city men. Indeed Le Caron, with his smart surtout, his lmmaculate gamp and his shiny black bat, looks quite the city man, trig, jaunty, and confident as the best of them.