In furthest Ind : $b The narrative of Mr Edward Carlyon of the honourable East India Company's serviceGrier, Sydney C.
General
In furthest Ind : $b The narrative of Mr Edward Carlyon of the honourable East India Company's service
Grier, Sydney C.
British -- India -- Fiction; East India Company -- Fiction; India -- Fiction
Now after this, seeing that one of the common fevers of the place had
seized upon me, being augmented by my trouble of mind and the pain of
those wounds I had from the torture, they had in a _pundit_, that is,
an Indian physician, for to endeavour to cure me. And I have since
heard it said, that the science of these physicians is extreme
ill-considered and like to be injurious, for they are wont to cure
fevers by means of divers coolers, which, say our physicians in
England, is mighty hurtful to the patient. I can’t tell whether they
succeed in restoring many to health by such means, but all Europe
persons in the Indies are forced to trust to them, saving in those two
or three places where one or other of the trading companies hath
provided a chirurgion of its own. And thus I can testify, for the
credit of that most reverend _pundit_ that tended me, that though he
brought me to death’s very door by his blooding and his drugs, yet I
am here alive this day, and who shall say that I should be so but for
his medicines? Yet he let me blood so freely that, even after the
fever had left me, ’twas many months before I could creep from end to
end of my cell, and indeed, one night, the bandages being in some way
loosened, I had like to have died from loss of blood, had it not been
for Father Theodorus, that came for to recommend me a confessor, and
found me needing a chirurgion. ’Tis well for me that this good man
straightway forgat the confessor, and set himself to fasten my
bandages again most deftly, he having some slight skill in the medical
art, else had I never lived to write this book. But as for that matter
of the confessor, this was not the first time, nor the last, that they
pestered me by reason on’t, thinking me near my end, and desiring to
have me die in their religion, so that they would come to me of
mornings, when I was half dead after a restless night filled with evil
visions, and beseech me to reconcile myself with the Church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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