WIFE OF MR. DAVIS, OF PROVIDENCE, R. I.
The third I save myself the trouble of writing by copying it from Robert Dale Owen’s “Debatable Land,” page 513. But in doing so I correct an error of date which was natural enough on the part of Mrs. Davis in a narration made in 1862 of an occurrence which had taken place some five years before. In point of fact it occurred in 1857, while I resided in my house, No. 1 Ludlow Place. She erroneously makes it February, 1858, instead of 1857. My marriage with Mr. Underhill was on the 2d of November, 1858. Of course I was not “Mrs. Underhill,” but Mrs. Brown, at the time of this extraordinary cure; though it was natural that Mrs. Davis in 1862 should speak of me by the name which had then been mine for about four years; and also that this should have misled Mr. Owen, and caused him to understand the case as having occurred after I had become Mrs. U. The reader will therefore, in perusing this narrative, simply change the word “Underhill” to Brown. With that unimportant correction, the whole of it is strictly true. See letter from Mrs. Davis to me, written on her return home from this visit, dated August 8, 1857, page [391].
Paralysis of the Motor Nerve.
“In the month of February, 1858, a lady, the wife of Mr. Davis, of Providence, R. I., was residing at her home in the immediate vicinity of that city.
“It happened, one morning, when a large and powerful horse was standing harnessed in front of the house, that a servant, passing carelessly close to the animal with a child’s carriage in which was an infant daughter of Mrs. Davis, accidentally dropped the tongue of the carriage close to the horse’s heels. Mrs. Davis, seeing the danger of her child, rushed to the horse’s head, and seizing him suddenly by the bridle with her right hand, the animal reared violently so as almost to lift her from her feet. She succeeded, however, in leading him off from her child, which thus escaped unhurt.
“At the moment she experienced no pain; afterward she went about her usual occupations, but felt faint and languid throughout the day. About ten o’clock P.M., sitting down to supper, she first noticed a pain in her elbow, and then, when she attempted to use her right hand, was unable to do so; she found it impossible to close three of the fingers of that hand, the index-finger alone obeying the impulse of her will. After a time the pain increased and extended above the elbow.
“In the course of the night the right leg also became affected, the pain extending to the hip.
“In the morning she discovered that she could not, by any effort of the will, move either the right arm or the right leg.
“The physicians declared it to be a case of paralysis of the motor nerves, caused chiefly by sudden excitement. For a long time it resisted all remedies. During seven weeks the paralysis continued unabated.
“In all that time she never used hand or arm: when she walked she had to drag the right leg after her. The leg, too, became cold even to the hip, and all efforts to warm it were ineffectual.