Science and experience have thus far revealed no other way of making
tolerable the agonizing pain which Mr. Edgerton now endures. This pain
is quite inconceivable by the ordinary mind. It can not be described,
and the only hint by which an outsider can be let into something like
an inkling of it is the supposition (which I have elsewhere used) that
pain has become _fluidized_, and is throbbing through the
arteries like a column of quicksilver undergoing rhythmical
movement. If the arteries were rigid glass tubes, and the pain
quicksilver indeed, there could not be a more striking impression of
ebb and flow every second against some stout elastic diaphragm whose
percussion seems the pain which is felt. This is especially the case
along the course of the sciatic nerve and all its branches, where the
pulse of pain is so agonizing that the sufferer can not keep his legs
still for an instant. There is occasionally severe pain of this kind
in the arms also, but this is very rare. The suffering which usually
accompanies that of the legs is a maddening frontal headache, and a
dull perpetual ache through the region of the kidneys, described as a
sensation of "breaking in two at the waist;" nausea, burning, and
constriction about the epigastrium, and intense sensitiveness of the
liver--besides general nervous and mental distress which has neither
representative nor parallel.
All these symptoms are instantaneously met and for the time being
counteracted by the hot-bath. When the patient gets tired of it, and
it temporarily loses its efficiency from this cause, great advantage
may be gained by substituting either the Russian bath or the common
box vapor-bath, with an aperture in the top to stick the head out of,
and a close-fitting collar of soft rubber to prevent the escape of the
steam.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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