58 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



cases disorder of the bowels supervenes, the}' are in a hope- 

 less state, but if a favorable change takes place, symptoms 

 the opposite of those fatal ones occur," 



And then, coming down to the seventeenth century, listen 

 while we quote from quaint old Sir Thomas Browne, and I 

 doubt not that some of you will be wondering what the 

 clinician of the present day has to add to his observations. 



The following extracts are taken from a desertation 

 entitled " A Letter to a Friend upon occasion of the death of 

 his intimate friend, written, so far as we can ascertain, about 

 1670 : 



" Upon my first visit 1 was bold to tell them who had not let fall all 

 hopes of his recovery, that in my sad opinion he was not like to behold 

 a grasshopper, much less to pluck another fig ; and in no lon.g time 

 after, seemed to discover that odd mortal symptom in him not 

 mentioned by Hypocrales, that is, to loose his own face, and look like 

 some of his near relations ; for he maintained not his proper counten- 

 ance, but looked like his uncle, the lines of whose face \&y deep and 

 invisible in his healthful visage before ; for as from our beginning we 

 run through variety of looks before we come to consistent and settled 

 faces, so before our end, by sick and languishing alterations, we put on 

 new visages, and in our retreat to earth may fall upon such looks 

 which, from community of seminal orignals, were before latent in us. 



" He was fruitlessly put in hope of advantage by change of air, and 

 imbibing the pure serial nitre of these parts ; and therefore being so 

 far spent he quickly found Sardinia in Tivoli, and the most healthful 

 air of little effect where death had set her broad arrow ; for he lived on 

 unto the middle of May, and confirmed the observation of Hippocrates 

 of that moral time of the year when the leaves of the fig tree 

 resemble a daw's claw. 



" In this consumptive condition and remarkable extenuation he 

 came to be almost half himself, and left a great part behind him which 

 he carried not to the grave. And though that story of Duke John 

 Ernestus Mansfield be not so easily swallowed, that at his death his 

 heart was found not to be so big as a nut ; yet if the bones of a good 

 skeleton weigh a little more than twenty pounds, his inwards and flesh 

 remaining could make no bouffage, but a light bit for the grave. I 

 never more lively beheld the starved characters of Dante in any living 

 face ; an aruspex might have read a lecture upon him without exenter- 

 ation, his flesh being so consumed that he might, in a manner, have 

 discerned his bowels without opening of him, so that to be carried 

 " sexta cervice " to the grave was but a civil unnecessity, and the 

 compliments of the coffin might outweigh the subject of it." 



