She lived six hours after she was prescribed for. He gave her change of
scene and rest. He has quite a thriving little cemetery filled with people
who have succeeded in cording up enough of his change of scene and rest to
last them through all eternity. He was called once to prescribe for a man
whose head had been caved in by a stone match-box, and, after treating the
man for asthma and blind staggers, he prescribed rest and change of scene
for him, too. The poor asthmatic is now breathing the extremely rarified
air of the New Jerusalem.
Meningitis is derived from the Latin _Meninges_, membrane, and--_itis_, an
affix denoting inflammation, so that, strictly speaking, meningitis is the
inflammation of a membrane, and when applied to the spine, or cerebrum, is
called spinal meningitis, or cerebro-spinal meningitis, etc., according to
the part of the spine or brain involved in the inflammation. Meningitis is
a characteristic and result of so-called spotted fever, and by many it is
deemed identical with it.
When we come to consider that the spinal cord, or marrow, runs down
through the long, bony shaft made by the vertebrae, and that the brain and
spine, though connected, are bound up in one continuous bony wall and
covered with this inflamed membrane, it is not difficult to understand
that the thing is very hard to get at. If your throat gets inflamed, a
doctor asks you to run your tongue out into society about a yard and a
half, and he pries your mouth open with one of Rogers Brothers' spoon
handles. Then he is able to examine your throat as he would a page of the
_Congressional Record_, and to treat it with some local application. When
you have spinal meningitis, however, the doctor tackles you with bromides,
ergots, ammonia, iodine, chloral hydrate, codi, bromide of ammonia,
hasheesh, bismuth, valerianate of ammonia, morphine sulph., nux vomica,
turpentine emulsion, vox humana, rex magnus, opium, cantharides, Dover's
powders, and other bric-a-brac. These remedies are masticated and acted
upon by the salivary glands, passed down the esophagus, thrown into the
society of old gastric, submitted to the peculiar motion of the stomach
and thoroughly chymified, then forwarded through the pyloric orifice into
the smaller intestines, where they are touched up with bile, and later on
handed over through the lacteals, thoracic duct, etc., to the vast
circulatory system. Here it is yanked back and forth through the heart,
lungs and capillaries, and if anything is left to fork over to the
disease, it has to squeeze into the long, bony, air-tight socket that
holds the spinal cord. All this is done without seeing the patient's
spinal cord before or after taking. If it could be taken out, and hung
over a clothes line and cleansed with benzine, and then treated with
insect powder, or rolled in corn meal, or preserved in alcohol, and then
put back, it would be all right; but you can't. You pull a man's spine out
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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