ANDREW.
The doctor can’t come, for he’s down with the lumbago in the back. He questioned me as to what ailed Martin, and he got a book to go looking for a cure, and he began telling me things out of it, but I said I could not be carrying things of that sort in my head. He gave me the book then, and he has marks put in it for the places where the cures are . . . wait now. . . . [Reads] ‘Compound medicines are usually taken inwardly, or outwardly applied; inwardly taken, they should be either liquid or solid; outwardly, they should be fomentations or sponges wet in some decoctions.’
THOMAS.
He had a right to have written it out himself upon a paper. Where is the use of all that?
ANDREW.
I think I moved the mark maybe . . . here, now, is the part he was reading to me himself. . . . ‘The remedies for diseases belonging to the skins next the brain, headache, vertigo, cramp, convulsions, palsy, incubus, apoplexy, falling sickness.’
THOMAS.
It is what I bid you to tell him that it was the falling sickness.
ANDREW [dropping book].
O, my dear, look at all the marks gone out of it! Wait, now, I partly remember what he said . . . a blister he spoke of . . . or to be smelling hartshorn . . . or the sneezing powder . . . or if all fails, to try letting the blood.