Buttermilk.--Where we prescribe this, either for drinking or for external use in poultices or bathing, it is very important it should be pure and fresh. If kept too long, it causes often terrible pain when applied to eruptive sores. There must be no "watering" or doctoring with cream of tartar, if good results are desired. If the milk be too long kept, and cannot be had fresh, it may be mixed with a little sweet milk and all churned well together. Then it may be used. If still painful, mix again with more sweet milk. To soak diseased skin in good fresh buttermilk is so powerful a means of cure, that to procure it a good deal of trouble is well spent. It is also invaluable as a daily drink for regulating the bowels, and maintaining health. Sterilise all sweet milk used. If buttermilk cannot be had, acetic acid or vinegar, or the juice of lemons, may be mixed with sweet milk or even water, until the mixture attains about the usual sourness of buttermilk. This makes an efficient substitute. Buttermilk Poultice.--Boiled potatoes beaten up with fresh buttermilk make an excellent poultice for all eruptive sores, scabbed heads, and heated skin affections. After these always apply soap lather (_see_ Lather). If buttermilk cannot be had, use acetic acid or vinegar, as above. Cancer.--Swellings in the breast often arouse fear of cancer, but are generally very simple affairs and easily yield to treatment as in article Breast, Swelling in. If not, we should chill the diseased growth so as to arrest it. Now this, as we have proved, may be effectually done, and the sorely tried patient may be saved a world of pain, and perhaps cured. We have seen more than one apparently desperate case, even where the breast had been cut off and the evil was again showing itself, in which effective cooling arrested the growth and saved the sufferer. When a growth of this kind has gone a certain length, there is severe pain. The cooling removes this, and secures the patient unspeakably precious rest without narcotics. But this is not all: it puts an effectual stop to the swelling. If the case has not gone very far, the swelling falls, and may disappear; but even when it has gone too far for this, the disease is stayed, and all symptoms of it are lessened. All swelling but the actual separate growth is removed. For instance, when the swelling has passed from the breast into the armpit it has been dispelled, and entirely confined to the actual substance of the tumour. This is managed simply by the persistent and vigorous use of cold towels. They must be large enough to allow of fourfold covering of the whole breast. They are wrung out of cold water at first, and, if possible, cooled with ice instead of being wrung out after. One at a time is kindly pressed all round and over the swollen breast. It is heated in one or two minutes, and must be changed. The second is pressed round and all over the breast in the same way.