She mixed a decoction composed of molasses, aquafortis, turpentine, and various other drugs, and instructed me to take a wine-glass full of it every fifteen minutes.I never took but one dose; that was enough; it robbed me of all moral principle, and awoke every unworthy impulse of my nature.Under its malign influence my brain conceived miracles of meanness, but my hands were too feeble to execute them; at that time, had it not been that my strength had surrendered to a succession of assaults from infallible remedies for my cold, I am satisfied that I would have tried to rob the graveyard.Like most other people, I often feel mean, and act accordingly; but until I took that medicine I had never reveled in such supernatural depravity, and felt proud of it.At the end of two days I was ready to go to doctoring again.I took a few more unfailing remedies, and finally drove my cold from my head to my lungs.
I got to coughing incessantly, and my voice fell below zero; I conversed in a thundering bass, two octaves below my natural tone; I could only compass my regular nightly repose by coughing myself down to a state of utter exhaustion, and then the moment I began to talk in my sleep, my discordant voice woke me up again.
My case grew more and more serious every day.A Plain gin was recommended; I took it.Then gin and molasses; I took that also.Then gin and onions; I added the onions, and took all three.I detected no particular result, however, except that I had acquired a breath like a buzzard's.
I found I had to travel for my health.I went to Lake Bigler with my reportorial comrade, Wilson.It is gratifying to me to reflect that we traveled in considerable style; we went in the Pioneer coach, and my friend took all his baggage with him, consisting of two excellent silk handkerchiefs and a daguerreotype of his grandmother.We sailed and hunted and fished and danced all day, and I doctored my cough all night.
By managing in this way, I made out to improve every hour in the twenty-four.But my disease continued to grow worse.
A sheet-bath was recommended.I had never refused a remedy yet, and it seemed poor policy to commence then; therefore I determined to take a sheet-bath, notwithstanding I had no idea what sort of arrangement it was.It was administered at midnight, and the weather was very frosty.
My breast and back were bared, and a sheet (there appeared to be a thousand yards of it) soaked in ice-water, was wound around me until Iresembled a swab for a Columbiad.
It is a cruel expedient.When the chilly rag touches one's warm flesh, it makes him start with sudden violence, and gasp for breath just as men do in the death-agony.It froze the marrow in my bones and stopped the beating of my heart.I thought my time had come.
Young Wilson said the circumstance reminded him of an anecdote about a negro who was being baptized, and who slipped from the parson's grasp, and came near being drowned.He floundered around, though, and finally rose up out of the water considerably strangled and furiously angry, and started ashore at once, spouting water like a whale, and remarking, with great asperity, that "one o' dese days some gen'l'man's nigger gwyne to get killed wid jis' such damn foolishness as dis!"Never take a sheet-bath-never.Next to meeting a lady acquaintance who, for reasons best known to herself, don't see you when she looks at you, and don't know you when she does see you, it is the most uncomfortable thing in the world.
But, as I was saying, when the sheet-bath failed to cure my cough, a lady friend recommended the application of a mustard plaster to my breast.I believe that would have cured me effectually, if it had not been for young Wilson.When I went to bed, I put my mustard plaster--which was a very gorgeous one, eighteen inches square--where I could reach it when I was ready for it.But young Wilson got hungry in the night, and here is food for the imagination.
After sojourning a week at Lake Bigler, I went to Steamboat Springs, and, besides the steam-baths, I took a lot of the vilest medicines that were ever concocted.They would have cured me, but I had to go back to Virginia City, where, notwithstanding the variety of new remedies Iabsorbed every day, I managed to aggravate my disease by carelessness and undue exposure.
I finally concluded to visit San Francisco, and the, first day I got there a lady at the hotel told me to drink a quart of whisky every twenty-four hours, and a friend up-town recommended precisely the same course.Each advised me to take a quart; that made half a gallon.I did it, and still live.
Now, with the kindest motives in the world, I offer for the consideration of consumptive patients the variegated course of treatment I have lately gone through.Let them try it; if it don't cure, it can't more than kill them.