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Page 40
"Such were the salient features of this case; and I can assure you that
I was as much impressed by the happy results of the treatment as were a
host of anxious and doubting friends.
"Very faithfully yours,
"WM. GOODELL."
* * * * *
Miss C., an interesting woman, �t. 26, at the age of 20 passed through a
grave trial in the shape of nursing her mother through a typhoid fever.
Soon after, a series of calamities deprived her of fortune, and she
became, for support, a clerk, and did for two years eight hours' work
daily. Under these successive strains her naturally sturdy health gave
way. First came pain in the back, then growing paleness, loss of flesh,
and unending sense of tire. Her work, which was a necessity, was of
course kept up, steadily at first, but was soon interfered with by
increase of the menstrual flow, with unusual pain and persistent
ovarian tenderness. Very soon she began to drop her work for a day at a
time. Then came an increasing asthenopia, with evening headaches, until
her temper changed and became capricious and irritable. When I saw her,
she had been forced to abandon all labor, and had been treated by an
accomplished gyn�cologist, and was said to be cured of a prolapsus uteri
and of extensive ulceration, despite which relief she gained nothing in
vigor and endurance and got back neither color nor flesh.
She went to bed December 10, and rose for the first time February 4,
having gained twenty-nine pounds. She went to bed pale, and got up
actually ruddy. In a month she returned to her work again, and has
remained ever since in health which enables her, as she writes me, "to
enjoy work, and to do with myself what I like."
Miss L., �t. 26, came to me with the following history. At the age of 20
she had a fall, and began in a week or two to have an irritable spine.
Then, after a few months, a physician advised rest, to which she took
only too kindly, and in a year from the time of her accident she was
rarely out of bed. Surrounded by highly sympathetic relatives, to whom
chronic illness was somewhat novel, she speedily developed, with their
tender aid, hyper�sthetic states of the eye and ear, so that her nurses
crept about in a darkened room, the piano was silenced, and the children
kept quiet. By slow degrees a whole household passed under the selfish
despotism of an hysterical girl. Intense constipation, anorexia, and
alternate states of dysuria, anuria, and polyuria followed, and before
long her sister began to fail in health, owing to the incessant
exactions to which she too willingly yielded. This alarmed a brother,
who insisted upon a change of treatment, and after some months she was
brought on a couch to this city.
At the time I first saw her, she took thirty grains of chloral every
night and three hypodermic injections of one-half grain of morphia
daily. As to food, she took next to none, and I could only guess her
weight at about ninety pounds. She was in height five feet two and a
half inches, and very sallow, with pale lips, and the large, indented
tongue of an�mia. I made the most careful search for signs of organic
mischief, and, finding none, I began my treatment as usual with milk,
and added massage and electricity without waiting. Her digestion seemed
so good that I gave lactate of iron in twenty-grain doses from the third
day, and also the aloes pill thrice a day. It is perhaps needless to
state that I isolated her with a nurse she had never seen before, and
that for seven weeks she saw no one else save myself and the attendants.
The full schedule of diet was reached at the end of a fortnight, but the
chloral and morphia were given up at the second day. She slept well the
fourth night, and, save that she had twice a slight return of polyuria,
went on without a single drawback. In two months she was afoot and
weighed one hundred and twenty-one pounds. Her change in tint, flesh,
and expression was so remarkable that the process of repair might well
have been called a renewal of life.
She went home changed no less morally than physically, and resumed her
place in the family circle and in social life, a healthy and well-cured
woman.
I might multiply these histories almost endlessly. In some cases I have
cured without fattening; in others, though rarely, the mental habits
formed through years of illness have been too deeply ingrained for
change, and I have seen the patient get up fat and well only to relapse
on some slight occasion.
The intense persistency with which some women study and dwell upon their
symptoms is often the great difficulty. Even a slight physical annoyance
becomes for one of these unhappily-constituted natures a grave and
almost ineradicable trouble, owing to the habit of self-study.
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