Diving Bells and Suits 401 



had been hoisted up, according to the bad habit of the Greeks, and 

 that consequently the decompression had been very rapid. 



He had taken off his diving clothes and was going to rest on the 

 deck of his caique, when the illness began gradually by general dis- 

 comfort, and soon he perceived that he could no longer move his legs, 

 and that they were completely without sensation. 



Unfortunately, at that time I was in Kanea, that is, more than a 

 hundred miles from the place where this unhappy diver was. His 

 boat went to the nearest point where they hoped to get help; that was 

 at Sitia. There was there only an Italian physician completely ignor- 

 ant of the symptoms which may appear in divers. 



Finding no fever and no pain, he did not know what could be the 

 cause of the illness and remained completely inactive. The death 

 certificate which he gave to the comrades of the diver simply said 

 that he died: From intestinal strangulation and constipation. 



Although these words indicate that he had recognized the inabil- 

 ity of the diver to urinate and defecate, he did not heed the first 

 indication, did not catheterize the patient, and merely gave him a 

 cathartic; he did not even do that until the eighth day of the illness, 

 the day before he died. 



To the paralysis, which had been painless at the beginning, soon 

 were added the ordinary symptoms of paralysis of the bladder and 

 the rectum, when the former is not emptied and the bowels are not 

 kept open. 



When I reached Sitia, August 16, the patient had been dead for 

 two days, after terrible sufferings located in the abdomen and accom- 

 panied by a considerable increase in the volume of that part of the 

 body. The information given me by his comrades was quite recent, 

 and I am convinced that Theodoros succumbed to the paraplegia only 

 from want of care. It will be seen by the observations which I shall 

 give that when the paralysis reaches only the lower limbs, cure is 

 quite frequent, or at least if the paralysis persists, the patients do 

 not die, or at least die only after several months. (P. 48.) 



In the other two cases, the paraplegia was half cured: 



At Symi I saw two divers, Foti Kazi Foti and Yanni, who, during 

 the cruise of 1867, were both completely paralyzed in the lower part of 

 their bodies. Both of them returned immediately to Symi, where they 

 were attended by a doctor who had had his medical course at Paris, 

 M. Migliorati. I had an opportunity to talk with him; unfortunately, 

 he was very ill, in the last stages of pulmonary tuberculosis, and he 

 could give me only a little information. 



The two divers remained three months without being able to use 

 their lower limbs; little by little, however, it became possible for them 

 to make some movements; the paralysis of the bladder and the rectum 

 disappeared first. M. Migliorati exhausted all the resources of thera- 

 peutics on them: friction, blisters, cupping-glasses with scarification, 

 tincture of nux vomica rubbed in or given internally, etc. However, 

 he did not try cauterization or faradization: 



When I saw them, I noted that the paralytic lesion of the lower 



