"I tried in vain to wean her from her anodynes, and failed altogether in doing her any good, although many remedies were resorted to, and various modes of treatment adopted. Finally, in sheer despair, I put her to bed, and began your treatment of rest, with electricity, massage, and frequent feeding. The first trace of improvement showed itself in a greater self-control, and in a lessening of her aches and pains. Next, smaller doses of the anodyne were needed, until it was wholly withheld. Then she began to pick up an appetite, which, towards the close of the treatment, became so keen that, between three good meals every day, she drank several goblets of milk and of beef-tea. At the outset I had stipulated for six weeks of this treatment, and it was with reluctance that my patient yielded to my wish. But when the time was up she had become so impressed with the wonderful benefits she had received and was receiving, that she begged to have the treatment continued for two weeks more. At the end of that time she had gained at least thirty pounds in weight, and had lost every pain and ache. Her night-terrors, which I forgot to mention as one of her distressing symptoms, had wholly disappeared, and she could sleep from nine to ten hours at a stretch. I now sent her into the country, where she is continuing to mend, and is astonishing her friends by her scrambles up and down the steep hills.
"Such were the salient features of this case; and I can assure you that I was as much impressed by the happy results of the treatment as were a host of anxious and doubting friends.
"Very faithfully yours,
"WM. GOODELL."
Miss C., an interesting woman, æt. 26, at the age of 20 passed through a grave trial in the shape of nursing her mother through a typhoid fever. Soon after, a series of calamities deprived her of fortune, and she became, for support, a clerk, and did for two years eight hours' work daily. Under these successive strains her naturally sturdy health gave way. First came pain in the back, then growing paleness, loss of flesh, and unending sense of tire. Her work, which was a necessity, was of course kept up, steadily at first, but was soon interfered with by increase of the menstrual flow, with unusual pain and persistent ovarian tenderness. Very soon she began to drop her work for a day at a time. Then came an increasing asthenopia, with evening headaches, until her temper changed and became capricious and irritable. When I saw her, she had been forced to abandon all labor, and had been treated by an accomplished gynæcologist, and was said to be cured of a prolapsus uteri and of extensive ulceration, despite which relief she gained nothing in vigor and endurance and got back neither color nor flesh.
She went to bed December 10, and rose for the first time February 4, having gained twenty-nine pounds. She went to bed pale, and got up actually ruddy. In a month she returned to her work again, and has remained ever since in health which enables her, as she writes me, "to enjoy work, and to do with myself what I like."
Miss L., æt. 26, came to me with the following history. At the age of 20 she had a fall, and began in a week or two to have an irritable spine. Then, after a few months, a physician advised rest, to which she took only too kindly, and in a year from the time of her accident she was rarely out of bed. Surrounded by highly sympathetic relatives, to whom chronic illness was somewhat novel, she speedily developed, with their tender aid, hyperæsthetic states of the eye and ear, so that her nurses crept about in a darkened room, the piano was silenced, and the children kept quiet. By slow degrees a whole household passed under the selfish despotism of an hysterical girl. Intense constipation, anorexia, and alternate states of dysuria, anuria, and polyuria followed, and before long her sister began to fail in health, owing to the incessant exactions to which she too willingly yielded. This alarmed a brother, who insisted upon a change of treatment, and after some months she was brought on a couch to this city.
At the time I first saw her, she took thirty grains of chloral every night and three hypodermic injections of one-half grain of morphia daily. As to food, she took next to none, and I could only guess her weight at about ninety pounds. She was in height five feet two and a half inches, and very sallow, with pale lips, and the large, indented tongue of anæmia. I made the most careful search for signs of organic mischief, and, finding none, I began my treatment as usual with milk, and added massage and electricity without waiting. Her digestion seemed so good that I gave lactate of iron in twenty-grain doses from the third day, and also the aloes pill thrice a day. It is perhaps needless to state that I isolated her with a nurse she had never seen before, and that for seven weeks she saw no one else save myself and the attendants. The full schedule of diet was reached at the end of a fortnight, but the chloral and morphia were given up at the second day. She slept well the fourth night, and, save that she had twice a slight return of polyuria, went on without a single drawback. In two months she was afoot and weighed one hundred and twenty-one pounds. Her change in tint, flesh, and expression was so remarkable that the process of repair might well have been called a renewal of life.
She went home changed no less morally than physically, and resumed her place in the family circle and in social life, a healthy and well-cured woman.
I might multiply these histories almost endlessly. In some cases I have cured without fattening; in others, though rarely, the mental habits formed through years of illness have been too deeply ingrained for change, and I have seen the patient get up fat and well only to relapse on some slight occasion.