journey, on purpose to announce to me her approaching marriage." "On September 10 a gentleman came to consult me on the case of his wife, in consequence of his attention having been directed to my former papers by a relative who is a well-known physician in London. He informed me that his wife was now fifty-five years of age, and that she had passed ten years of her married life in India. At the age of thirty she was much weakened by several successive miscarriages, and then drifted into confirmed ill health. He wrote, on making an appointment, as follows: 'I will give you at once a short outline of her case. We have been married thirty-four years, of which the last twenty have been spent by her in bed or on the sofa. She is unable even to stand, and finds the pain in her back too great to admit of her sitting up. She is utterly without strength, of an intensely nervous temperament, and suffers incessantly from neuralgia. She has, moreover, an outward curvature of the spine. There is not the slightest symptom of paralysis. Fortunately, she does not touch morphia, or any narcotic or stimulant, beyond a glass or two of wine in the day. That she has long been in a state of hysteria is the opinion of nearly all the many medical men who have seen her.' "Although the attempt to cure so aggravated a case as this was certainly a sufficiently severe test of the treatment, I determined to make the trial, and had the patient removed from her own home and isolated in lodgings. I found her in bed, supported everywhere by many small pillows, and wasted more than, I think, I had ever seen any human being. She really hardly had any covering to her bones, and looked somewhat like the picture of the living skeleton we are familiar with. It may give some idea of her emaciation if I state that, though naturally not a small woman, her height being five feet five and a half inches, she weighed only 4 st. 7 lbs., and I could easily make my thumb and forefinger meet round the thickest part of the calf of her leg. The curvature of the spine said to exist was a deceptive appearance, produced by her excessive leanness, and the consequent unnatural prominence of the spinous processes of the vertebræ. I could detect no organic disease of any kind. The appetite was entirely wanting, and she consumed hardly any food beyond a little milk, a few mouthfuls of bread, and the like. From the first the patient's improvement was steady and uniform. The way she put on flesh was marvellous, and one could almost see her fatten from day to day. Within ten days all her pains, neuralgia, and backache had gone, and have never been heard of since, and by that time we had also got rid of all her little pillows and other invalid appliances.