326 
TREATMENT OF SCURVY. 
knee, had to wag his leg half an hour by the dial, op- 
posite a formidable magnet, each wag accompanied 
by a shampooing knead. Stewart had faith ; the mus- 
cular action, which I had enjoined so often ineffectu- 
ally, was brought about by a bit of steel and a smear 
ing of red sealing-wax. They cured him. 
Another, remarkable for a dirty person, of well 
used-up capillary surface, a hard case — one of a class 
scarcely ever seen by any but navy doctors — sponged 
freely and regularly from head to foot in water col- 
ored brown by coffee, and made acid with vinegar. 
His gmus improved at once. He would never have 
washed with aqua fontana. 
Another set of fellows adhered pertinaciously to 
their salt junk and hard tack, ship bread and beef 
These conservative gentlemen gave me much trouble 
by repelling vegetable food. The scurvy was playing 
the very deuce with them, when the bright idea oc- 
curred to me of converting the rejected delicacies into 
an abominable doctor-stuff. It was an appeal to their 
spirit of martyrdom : they became heroes. Three 
times a day did these high-spirited fellows drink a 
wine glass of olive-oil and lime-juice, followed by raw 
potato and saur-kraut, pounded with molasses into a 
damnable electuary. They ate nobly, and got well. 
But the causes of scurvy were relaxing their ener- 
gies only for the time. Before the month was out, 
the disease had come back with renewed and even 
exacerbated virulence. Some of its phases were cu- 
rious. The joint of Captain He Haven’s second finger 
became the seat of severe pain, accompanied by a dis- 
tinct tubercle cartilaginous to the touch. It exactly 
recalled, he said, the appearance and feeling of the 
part for some months after it had been hurt by a 
