1811.] 
the Bishop of Bristol. This amiable young 
man was taken a prisoner at the age of 13, 
together with the brave and unfortunate 
Captain Wright, in the Vicenzo, and carried 
inte France. After continuing there about 
five years, during which time he underwent 
much hardship and many cruelties, on ac- 
count of the firmness of his determination, 
even at that tender age, not to give informa- 
tion which might affect his Captain, against 
whom the enemy was bitterly incensed on 
account of their suspecting him to have 
Report of Diseases. 99 
But the sufferings which he endured from his 
long and repeated concealment in wet ditches, 
woods, and marshes, for upwards of three 
months, during the course of that escape, tuo 
visibly aftected his constitution, His friends 
were often anxious with him for a change in 
his profession, but his attachment to it was 
unalterable; and, after staying with them for 
a few weeks only, he sailed as midshipman 
on board the Circe frigate, Captain Wool- 
combe, who has, in a letter from Gibraltar, 
announced his dissoiution at the early age of 
landed Pichegru, George, &c. on their coast, nineteen, 
he finally succeeded in making his escape. 
REPORT OF DISEASES, 
Onder the Care of the late Senior Physician of the Finsbury Dispensary, from the 
20th of December, 1810, to the 20th of January, 1811. 
‘ ' re 
TP'HE Reporter was a few days since consulted by letter from a remote part of the country, 
with regard to the expediency of a chirurgical operation in a very grievous instance of 
scrophulous disease. Ata distance from the spot, and the case being of a nature partly sur- 
gical, it was of course’ only in a very qualified and conditional manner that he ventured to 
give his medical opinion. ‘The circumstances and history of the complaint, however, were 
‘zepresented to be such, as led him to discourage the too hasty performance of the meditated 
Operation. Scrophula being a disease of the constitution, is seldom to he remedied by the 
extraction or amputation of parts. The human frame rarely indeed suffers, unless when it is 
induced by external violence from any morbid affection that may strictly be regarded as Jocal. 
The appearance of it may be superficial, or confined to a particular spot, but the real root is 
for the most part fixed in the interior, and is secretly ramified througheut the whole substance 
ofthe frame. For want of a due regard to this circumstance, limbs may be lost without life 
being preserved, or health in any degree amended by the deprivation. : 
A case of epilepsy, that has recently fallen under the Reporter’s notice, was a considerable 
time before anticipated, in a-certain degree, by feelings which not unfrequently occur in a 
person who is destined, at some future period, to be the subject of this affection Not merely 
an acquaintance with the actual symptoms of a disorder, but with the previous history also of 
the patient, are highly interesting and instructive: the latter knowledge is often as necessary * 
to the prevention, as the former is to the cure, of a disease. Itfis of importance to know and 
to interpret rightly those signs which portend che approach of any formidable malady, that our 
fears may be aroused in time, and that we may seasonably oppose to the morbid tendency all 
the means of precaution end counteraction in uur power. In complaints which fall under the 
denomination of nervous, this is more particularly incumbent. Upon minute enquiry of the 
patient alluded to, it appeared that several years before the complete formation of an epileptic 
paroxysm, she had been liable to a sleepiness, which was not removed by actual sleep, toa 
frequently recurring sense of intoxication, without haying taken any inebriating draught or 
deug, to an almost habitual unsteadiness upon the feet, and sometimes to an actual staggering. 
She had been also remarkable for some months before her late, which was her first attack, of 
this complaint, for an incessant restlessness, and propensity to locomotion, a continual dispo- 
sition to change her posture or her place. This mobility extended likewise to the mind, so 
that a permanent direction of it to one subject was an effort beyond her power. The attene 
tion was always fluttering on the wing. Not long before her epilepsy, she mentions having 
frequently experienced a variety of uncomfortable feelings, such as flashes of light before her 
eyes, head-ach, violent rushings as it seemed of blood towards the head, dizziness, dimness 
and confusion of vision, and a frequent sense of faintness approaching to syncope. She also 
states the having been subject to transient absenses of the intellectual faculty, which would 
#cem to desert her for a few minutes, and then return in a manner that she could not acgount 
for. It is but seldom that we meet with a person whose previous life atiorded so many ad- 
monitory hints of the specific danger which threatened her constitution ; althougli perhaps it 
is for want of a scrutiny sufficiently strict that we do not ascertain, in every case ot true epi- 
Jepsy, the occurrence of most at least of these preliminary circumstances of 4wfyl presage. 
‘ J. Reps 
Grenville-street, Brunswick-squarey 
Fan 26, 1811. 
Whal s a id 
ny, MONTHLY 
