The great difficulty that every one has encountered in treating this disease is in the reluctance of the patient to rouse himself so as to excite the system by cheerful, glowing exercise, and in the case of seamen, to control their diet. My ingenuity was often taxed for expedients to counteract these predispositions. Some that I resorted to were ludicrous enough.
James Stewart, with purpuric blotches and a stiff knee, had to wag his leg half an hour by the dial, opposite a formidable magnet, each wag accompanied by a shampooing knead. Stewart had faith; the muscular action, which I had enjoined so often ineffectually, was brought about by a bit of steel and a smearing of red sealing-wax. They cured him.
Another, remarkable for a dirty person, of well used-up capillary surface, a hard case—one of a class scarcely ever seen by any but navy doctors—sponged freely and regularly from head to foot in water colored brown by coffee, and made acid with vinegar. His gums improved at once. He would never have washed with aqua fontana.
Another set of fellows adhered pertinaciously to their salt junk and hard tack, ship bread and beef. These conservative gentlemen gave me much trouble by repelling vegetable food. The scurvy was playing the very deuce with them, when the bright idea occurred to me of converting the rejected delicacies into an abominable doctor-stuff. It was an appeal to their spirit of martyrdom: they became heroes. Three times a day did these high-spirited fellows drink a wine glass of olive-oil and lime-juice, followed by raw potato and saur-kraut, pounded with molasses into a damnable electuary. They ate nobly, and got well.
But the causes of scurvy were relaxing their energies only for the time. Before the month was out, the disease had come back with renewed and even exacerbated virulence. Some of its phases were curious. The joint of Captain De Haven’s second finger became the seat of severe pain, accompanied by a distinct tubercle cartilaginous to the touch. It exactly recalled, he said, the appearance and feeling of the part for some months after it had been hurt by a schoolmaster’s ruler twenty-five years before. One of the crew had his tongue completely excoriated. Another, who had lost a molar tooth seven years ago, spit from the cavity a conoidal wedge: I had no chance of examining it by the microscope; but an impression of the cavity in wax showed the sides perfectly smooth, and the vertex intersected by lines of ossification. I have spoken already of my lance mark in the groin: it had been healed some three years; but it now threatened suppuration again wherever it bore the marks of the surgeon’s knife.
We had unfortunately almost exhausted our supply of anti-scorbutic drinks, and were driven to the manufacture of substitutes not always the most palatable. One of them, which served at least as a vehicle for lime-juice and muriate of iron, was, however, a recognized exception. It was a beer, of which a remnant of dried peaches and some raisins, with barley and brown sugar, formed the fermenting basis. The men drank it in most liberal quantities.
On the 10th we had an exhibition of the day aurora again, less brilliant than the one I have described a few pages back, but quite well marked. It was followed at night by the paraselene. Another atmospheric display, which occurred a few days afterward, attracted more notice.
“March 13. Again a day of bright sunshine, but to my feelings colder than our lowest temperatures. The thermometer stood at -24° in the shade at noon, and the wind was very light. Yet there was a cutting asperity about it that made your face tingle—a sensation as if evaporation was going on under the skin—quite a painful one. At four in the afternoon the atmosphere was studded with glistening particles. I have never seen them so manifest and so numerous. Our slide, a polished surface of clear ice, became clouded in a few minutes, and before five o’clock it was perfectly white. The microscope gave me the same broken hexagonal prisms, mixed with tables closely resembling the snow-crystal. A haze surrounded the horizon, rising for some six degrees in a bronzed purple bank; after which it gradually blended with the sky, a clear blue, undisturbed by cirri.
“Accompanying this redundancy of atmospheric spiculæ was a parhelion of remarkable intensity. There was no halo round the sun, and no vertical or horizontal column; but at the distance of 22° 04' from the sun’s centre were three solar images, one on each side, and the other immediately above the sun. This latter image was intensely luminous, but not prismatic; the others had the rudiments of an arc, highly colored, the red upon the inner margin. The haze rose as high as these horizontal images; and the arc, which in so short a segment presented no visible curvature, expanded as it descended, so as to form an elongated pyramid or column, the prismatic tints increasing in intensity as they approached the horizon. The effect of this was that of two illuminated beacons or rainbow towers, the sun blazing between them. As we stood a little way off on the ice, it was very beautiful to see the brig, with its spars and rigging cutting like tracery against the central light, with these prismatic structures on each side, capped by a spectral sun."
Two evenings later, the parhelia gave us another spectacle of interest. Two mock suns, which had accompanied the sun below the horizon, sent up an illuminated and colored arc some eight or ten degrees in height. Midway rose a brush-like column of crimson (baryta) light. A series of flame-colored strata, alternating with an incomprehensible black cloud, was so completely eclipsed by the vertical column, that it seemed to cut its way without a diminution of its brightness. The whole atmosphere was as warmly tinted as in the evenings of Melville Bay.