BLUNDERS OF BLOOD-LETTERS.
A noble fee, in the interests of humanity, was given by a French lady to a surgeon, who used his lancet so clumsily that he cut an artery instead of a vein, in consequence of which the lady died. On her deathbed she made a will, bequeathing the operator a life annuity of eight hundred livres, on condition "that he never again bled anybody so long as he lived."
In the Journal Encyclopédique of May 1773, a somewhat similar story is told of a Polish princess, who lost her life in the same way. In her will, made in extremis, there was the following clause:—"Convinced of the injury that my unfortunate accident will occasion to the unhappy surgeon who is the cause of my death, I bequeath to him a life annuity of two hundred ducats, secured by my estate, and forgive his mistake from my heart. I wish this may indemnify him for the discredit which my sorrowful catastrophe will bring upon him."
A famous French Maréchal reproved the awkwardness of a phlebotomist less agreeably. Drawing himself away from the operator, just as the incision was about to be made, he displayed an unwillingness to put himself further in the power of a practitioner who, in affixing the fillet, had given him a blow with the elbow in the face. "My Lord," said the surgeon, "it seems that you are afraid of the bleeding." "No," returned the Maréchal, "not of the bleeding—but the bleeder."