364 
SCURVY. 
bath into the freezing mixture alongside ; hut in most 
cases without unpleasant consequences.” 
I remember only one serious exception. It was 
that of our heroine of the Thespian corps, Jim Smith. 
The immediate result for him was an attack of scurvy, 
so marked, yet so blended with the active symptoms 
belonging to arthritic disease, as to incline me to an 
opinion for the time that there may be such a thing 
as acute scurvy, or a sudden inflammatory sthenic 
action, whose characteristics are scorbutic. He had 
immediately stitch, dyspnoea, pains in the back and 
joints, and in the alveolar and extensor muscles, just 
as in his previous attacks of scurvy, but without fever. 
The day after, he was so distressed by his stitch, that 
I feared pleuritis. On looking at his shins, I found 
large purpuric blotches, which were not there a week 
before. I commenced the anti- scorbutic tyranny at 
once ; and the next morning his gums bled freely, his 
pains left him, and he took his place again at the ice- 
saw. 
“Several laridse flew about us: I heard them to-day 
for the second time — pleasant tones, with all their dis- 
cord. Do you remember the skylark’s song, ‘a drop- 
ping from the sky,’ in the ‘Ancient Mariner?’ I 
thought of it this morning when the gulls screeched 
over our motionless brig. 
^‘May 18, Sunday. First, of late, in my daily records 
is this glorious wind, still from the northwest, fresh 
and steady. It is, as is every thing else for that mat- 
ter, a Godsend. To-day’s observation places us but 
thirty-two miles from Cape Searle, and seventy from 
Cape Walsingham, the abutting gate of Davis’s Straits, 
where the channel is at its narrowest, and where our 
imprisonment ought to end. 
