Charles was then out of immediate danger, and during the Tuesday he remained fairly well except for some soreness about the neck and mouth, which was probably due to the efforts that had had to be made to get him to swallow his medicines. Just so to-day, a patient occasionally wakes up from an anæsthetic with a stiff jaw after the efforts which have had to be made to pull his tongue forward if his breathing has given trouble while he was unconscious. Charles complained of great pain in his interior, which was probably less a symptom of his illness than of the violent purgatives that had been forced down his throat; but to the horrified Bishop Burnet it was “agonies.” The doctors, pestered by the ministers of the Crown to give the king’s illness a name, were greatly perturbed, and all fourteen[12] of them entered into many grave consultations one with another. On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 4th, the convulsions returned, and as intermittent fever was then especially prevalent in and about London they said that probably His Majesty was suffering from that complaint, though to be sure the violent convulsions, cyanosed skin, loss of speech, and turning of the eyeballs did not look quite like intermittent fever. But the council was satisfied, which, to the doctors wrestling with a mysterious and complex disease, was probably all that they could expect, for it enabled them to say that they now knew what to do, and that, apparently, the king was in no great immediate danger. As the _British Medical Journal_ rather unkindly points out: “On June 21st, 1902, the late King Edward’s Private Secretary wrote that there was not a word of truth in the rumours that had been floating about concerning His Majesty’s health, though on June 24th the coronation was postponed and he had to be operated on for appendicitis”; though, considering what a sudden thing acute appendicitis is, there is little wonder that three days before anyone might not have known of his coming ill health.