About twenty years ago I met on a visit at Catthorpe in Leicestershire a young gentleman of distinguished learning and abilities, who at certain times was speechless. The vulgar thought it a pretence: and a jocose lady, where he was at tea with company, putting him as she said to a trial, poured out a dish very strong and without sugar. He drank it and returned the cup with a bow of great reserve, and his eye bent on the ground: she then filled the cup with sugar, and pouring weak tea on it, sent it him: he drank that too, looked at her steadily, and blushed for her. The lady declared the man was dumb; the rest thought him perverse, and obstinate; but a constant and steady perseverance in an easy method cured him.
All these are miseries which the disease, while it retains its natural form, can bring upon the patient; and thus he will in time be worn out, and led miserably, though slowly, to the grave. Let him not indulge his inactivity so far as to give way to this, because it is represented as far off; the disease may suddenly and frightfully change its nature; and swifter evils follow.
SECT. IV.
The Danger.
We have done with the obstruction considered in itself; but this, though often unsurmountable by art, at least by the methods now in use, will be sometimes broken through at once by nature, or by accidents; and bring on fatal evils. These are strictly different diseases, and are no otherway concerned here, than as the consequences of that of which we are treating.
The thick and glutinous blood which has so long stagnated in the spleen, will have in that time altered its nature, and acquired a very great degree of acrimony: while it lies dormant, this does no more mischiefs, than those named already; but when violent exercise, a fit of outrageous anger, or any thing else that suddenly shocks and disturbs the frame, puts it in motion, it melts at once into a kind of liquid putrefaction. Being now thin, it mixes itself readily with the blood again, and brings on putrid fevers; destroys the substance of the spleen itself, or being thrown upon some other of the viscera, corrodes them, and leads on this way a swift and miserable death. If it fall upon the liver, its tender pulpy substance is soon destroyed, jaundices beyond the help of art first follow, then dropsies and all their train of misery; if on lungs, consumptions; if on the brain, convulsions, epilepsy, palsy, apoplexy; if on the surface, leprosy.
The intention of cure is to melt this coagulation softly, not to break it violently; and then to give it a very gentle passage through the bowels. There is no safe way for it to take but that; and even that when urged too far may bring on fatal dysenteries.
Let none wonder at the sudden devastation which sometimes arises from this long stagnant matter, when liquified too hastily: how long, how many years the impacted matter will continue quiet in a schirrous tumour of the breast; but being once put in motion, whether from accident, or in the course of nature, what can describe; or what can stop its havock!