CLASS II. 1. 6. 7. OF SENSATION. 253 



appetite began to improve. Still his cough continued, and his 

 hectic flushings, though the chills were much abated and very 

 irregular. 



The salutary effects of motion being now more striking than 

 ever, he purchased a horse admirably adapted to a valetudinarian 

 in Dumfriesshire, and being now able to sit on horseback for an 

 hour together, he rode out several times a day. He fixed his 

 residence for a few weeks at Moffat, a village at the foot of the 

 mountains whence the Tweed, the Clyde, and the Annan, de- 

 scend in different directions; a situation inland, dry and healthy, 

 and elevated about three hundred feet above the surface of the 

 sea. Here his strength recovered daily, and he began to eat ani- 

 mal food, which for several months before he had not tasted. 

 Persevering in exercise on horseback, he gradually increased the 

 length of his rides, according to his strength, from four to twenty 

 miles a day; and returning on horseback to Lancashire, by the 

 lakes of Cumberland, he arrived at Liveqwol on the first of Sep- 

 tember, having rode the last day of his journey forty miles. 



The two inferences of most importance to be drawn from this 

 narrative, are, first, the extraordinary benefit derived from gesta- 

 tion in a carriage, and still more the mixture of gestation and 

 exercise on horseback, in arresting or mitigating the hectic pa- 

 roxysm; and secondly, that in the florid consumption, as Dr. 

 Beddoes terms it, an elevated and inland air is in certain circum- 

 stances peculiarly salutary; while an atmosphere loaded with the 

 spray of the sea is irritating and noxious. The vicinity of the 

 sea appears very injurious to almost all vegetables, and should on 

 that account be suspected in respect to its general salubrity, though 

 it may nevertheless be medicinal in some diseases, if resorted to 

 for a time in the summer months, but must be ineligible as a per- 

 manent residence. See Class I. 2. 1. 15. 



The benefit derived in this case from exercise on horseback, 

 may lead us to doubt whether Sydenharn's praise of this remedy 

 be as much exaggerated as it has of late been supposed. Since the 

 publication of Dr. C. Smith on the effects of swinging in lower- 

 ing the pulse in the hectic paroxysm, the subject of this narrative 

 has repeated his experiments in a great variety of cases, and has 

 confirmed them. He has also repeatedly seen the hectic pa- 

 roxysm prevented, or cut short, by external ablution of the naked 

 body with tepid water. 



So much was his power of digestion impaired or vitiated by 

 the immense evacuations, and the long continued debility he un- 

 derwent, that after the cough was removed, and indeed for seve- 

 ral years after the period mentioned, he never could eat animal 

 without heat and flushing, with frequent pulse and extreme 



