One case of persistent malingering must be quoted. It was of a class not unknown in western prisons. A convict long suffered from a seemingly incurable disease of the eyes for which no treatment availed, although plasters, blisters, and leeches were tried. This particular prisoner was under sentence to receive a thousand lashes, and he was eager to postpone the punishment as long as possible. The most desperate devices have been tried for this purpose, sometimes even a murderous attack upon an officer or comrade, which would entail a fresh trial and an additional penalty, but which would also delay the flogging. The man with the sore eyes had some secret method of aggravating the disease which was never discovered, but its use was eventually checked by another operation applied to the back of the patient’s neck. The skin was taken up into the form of a blister, into which a double incision was made, one on each side and a thick thread of cotton was passed through the wound. Every day at a certain hour the thread was pulled backward and forward so that the wound would suppurate and never heal. The torture of this was intolerable, and to escape the continual suffering the convict volunteered to leave the hospital. Almost immediately after he went out, his eyes became well and as soon as the neck was healed he underwent his corporal punishment. It was a painful moment for the hospital when the victim of a severe flogging was brought in fresh from the lash. He was received with grave composure and a respect proportioned to the enormity of his offence and the amount of punishment it had entailed. Those who had suffered most cruelly were thought more of than the mere deserter guilty of a minor military crime. If the patient were too much injured to attend to himself, he received even more sympathy. The surgeons knew they were leaving him in kindly and experienced hands. The treatment of the poor back, all scored and mangled, was extremely simple: the constant application of a piece of linen steeped in cold water. A very delicate operation inflicting acute torture was the picking out from the lacerated wounds the scraps and fragments of the twigs when the flogging had been performed by rods. Yet the sufferers usually exhibited extraordinary stoicism. Dostoyevski says: “I have seen many convicts who had been whipped cruelly. I do not remember one who uttered a groan. Only after such an experience the countenance becomes pale and discomposed, the eyes glitter, the look wanders and the lips tremble so that the patient sometimes bites them till they bleed.”