TEN MONTHS' SUFFERING IN A HOSPITAL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVIII, Issue 2, 9 May 1890, Page 31

TEN MONTHS' SUFFERING IN A HOSPITAL.

Thekk is an old saying that physicians are a class of men who pour drugs, of which they know little, into bodies of which they know less. This is both true 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 beaten 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-Sequard, of Paris— states the fact acurately when he says : " The medical profession are so bound up in their self-confidence and conceit that they allow 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 " Concordia," of the Donaldson Line, sailed from Glascow for Baltimore in 1887, having on board as a fireman a man named Rcbard Wade, of Glasgow. He had been a fireman for fourteen years on various ships sailing to America, China, and India. 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 month, 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 fire-room, quite often he was sick and felt like vomiting, and had some pain in the head. Later during the passage he grew worse, and when the ship rea ched 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 physcians gave him a mixture to take eyery four hours. Withintwo days Wade was co much worse that the doctors stopped both the powder and the mixture. A month passed, the peor 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. During all that time Wade suffered great torture ; he digested nothing, throwing up all he ate. There was terrible pain in the bowels, burning heat in the throat, heartburn, and racking headache. The patient was dow taking a mixture every four hours, powders one after each mealto digest the food, operating pills one every night, and temperature pills two each night to stop the cold sweats. If drugs conld cure him at all, Richard had an idea that he took enough to do it. But on the other hand, pleurisy set in, 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 wan another change of visiting physicians. The new ons gave Wade a mixture which he said made him tremble like a leaf on a tree. At this crißis Wade's Scotch blood asserted itself. He refused to stand any more dosing, and told the doctors that if he must die he could die as well without them as with them. By this time a cup of milk wou.d turn sour on his Btomacb, and lie there for days. Our friend from Glasgow was like a wreck on a shoa], fast going to pieces Wd -vill 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 proved to be an angel of mercy, for without her I should not now be alive. She told me of a medicine called ' Mother Seigei's Curative 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 86igel'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 Street, Glasgow, wheie letters will reach him. Editob.

The Hungarian Catholics have increased so largely at Bayonne ' New Jersey, that they now have a church of their own dedicated to St. Joseph. Louis Kossutb, the veteran revolutionist and mau without a country, now in big eighty-eighth year, has been interviewed by the New York Herald at his home in Tnnn. Like all men who have failed in their ambitions, he is pessimistic in his old age. He thinks that there is no hops of a social regeneration until the world shall have been swept of its piesent inhabitants by Borne great cataclysm, when " a new race capable of a new civilisation " may appear. In his opinon the Oriental question is the one which will decide the fate of Europe. Russia will endeavour to reach the sea, and in the impending conflict he hopes for the freedom of Hungary. England is a waniog power, having lost her opportunity when she neglected 1o carry out Beaconsfield's scheme of using Indian troops in Europe. In regard to Ireland he Bays -.—'lreland is drifting away from England. Every year her people become more closely knit in sympathy with the United States. Modern invention has partly annihilated the distance between the two countries, and now it does not take much longer to go to Queenstown than to San Francisco. Theie are men now alive who will see the day when Ireland will become a State in the American Union." We wish that Kossuth were a prophet, bnt he is not even a statesman, or he would see that his own country, Hungary, has achieved a measure of freedom in Home Bnle with which Ireland would be well content if it could not hope for the greater boon of American Btatehood, or the yet greater one of absolute independence.— Pilot .