After I had left him I could not help reflecting on his melancholy condition, and thinking how possibly he could be extricated out of it. The best way that offered to my mind was his cure.
I indeed considered suppuration as the only method to effect it. But not accustomed indiscriminately to adopt a method as soon as it is extolled, much less to follow it blindly, I enquired into the reasons of the frequent inefficacy of the usual practice, and soon was made sensible of them.
After mature consideration, I called upon my friend, and proposed to attempt his cure. He readily agreed. The same day he took an apartment next to mine. I immediately began his treatment, attended him closely, and by suppuration properly conducted, was radically cured in seven weeks.
Some months after, two of his acquaintances left incurable by Daran, applied to me, requesting my assistance, and both were cured in eleven weeks time. But here is not the place for enumerating cures performed by my method; I therefore proceed to point out the defects of the actual practice of preparing and using bougies to cure gleets, and shall communicate the proper way to improve it, so as never to fail the intention.
The actual method of treating gleets is frequently unsuccessful, because defective.
The first defect is the hardiness of the suppurative, common bougies are made with. This is obvious from the structure of the affected parts. The internal tunic of the urethra, although ever irritated in a virulent gonorrhœa, is seldom the seat of the disease. Its seat is commonly the glandular tunic beneath the muscular, as is shewn by the abundance of the suppuration, and more plainly by dissecting. In such case, it is evident, that a common bougie introduced in the urethra, acting immediately on the internal tunic alone, cannot cause but an imperfect suppuration of the ulcerated parts, and consequently cannot perfect the cure.
If so, when the ulcers of the glandular tunic lie at the entrance of the lacunes in the internal tunic; how much more when the corroding virus has extended its seat, and produced a kind of sinusses, as is always the case in inveterate gleets!
Another defect in common bougies is a want of degradation in their suppurative virtue.
It is well known, that practitioners employ but one kind of suppurating bougies, made with a plaister, whose basis is lytargirium of lead and oil of olives; whilst, in order to conduct suppuration properly, bougies should be more or less suppurative, according to the stages of the disease.
Having for a long while made use of suppurative bougies, practitioners use dessicative ones, even when suppuration is still abundant. But to those who have the least notion of the means employed by nature in the reproduction of fleshy substance, it is evident, that such a sudden passage from active suppurative remedies to dessicative ones, never can produce the desired effect. After a forced suppuration, kept so for a long while, far from being incarnated, the cavity of the ulcers is widened, and all the fibres around it have lost their natural elasticity.