Part 28
Humboldt is of a contrary opinion, and maintains that the temperature is from two to three degrees lower in shallow water; and he therefore is of opinion that the thermometer might prove of material use to navigators. He attributes this diminution of temperature to the admixture of the lower bodies of water with that of the surface. Who is to decide between these two ingenious experimentalists? "Experientia fallax, judicium difficile." The curious reader may consult in this investigation the tables of Forster in Cook's second voyage, those of Lord Mulgrave when Captain Phipps, and various other navigators.
The salutary medicinal effects of sea-bathing are generally acknowledged, although too frequently recommended in cases which do not warrant the practice; in such circumstances they often prove highly prejudicial. The ancients held sea-water baths in such estimation, that Lampridius and Suetonius inform us that Nero had it conveyed to his palace. As sea-bathing is not always within the reach of those who may require it, artificial sea-water has been considered a desirable substitute; and the following mode of preparing it, not being generally known, may prove of some utility. To fifty pounds of water add ten ounces of muriate of soda, ten drachms of muriate of magnesia, two ounces of muriate of lime, six drachms of sulphate of soda, and the same quantity of sulphate of magnesia. This is Swediaur's receipt. Bouillon Lagrange, and Vogel, recommend the suppression of the muriate of lime and sulphate of soda, to be replaced with carbonate of lime and magnesia; but this alteration does not appear necessary, or founded on sufficient chemical grounds for adoption.
Sea-water taken internally has been considered beneficial in several maladies; and, although not potable in civilized countries, it is freely drunk by various savage tribes. Cook informs us that it is used with impunity in Easter Island; and Schouten observed several fishermen in the South Sea drinking it, and giving it to their children, when their stock of fresh water was expended. Amongst the various and capricious experiments of Peter the Great, an edict is recorded ordering his sailors to give salt water to their male children, with a view of accustoming them to a beverage which might preclude the necessity of laying in large stocks of fresh water on board his ships! The result was obvious: this nursery of seamen perished in the experiment. Russel, Lind, Buchan, and various other medical writers, have recommended the internal use of sea-water in scrofulous and cutaneous affections; but its use in the present day is pretty nearly exploded.
PROVERBS AND SAYINGS REGARDING HEALTH AND DISEASE.
An ague in the spring is physic for a king.
Agues come on horseback, but go away on foot.
A bit in the morning is better than nothing all day.
You eat and eat, but you do not drink to fill you.
An apple, an egg, and a nut, you may eat after a slut.
_Poma, ova, atque nuces, si det tibi sordida, gustes._
Old young and old long.
They who would be young when they are old, must be old when they are young.
When the fern is as high as a spoon, You may sleep an hour at noon. When the fern is as high as a ladle, You may sleep as long as you are able. When fern begins to look red, Then milk is good with brown bread.
At forty a man is either a fool or a physician.
After dinner sit a while, after supper walk a mile.
After dinner sleep a while, after supper go to bed.
A good surgeon must have an eagle's eye, a lion's heart, and a lady's hand.
Good kale is half a meal.
If you would live for ever you must wash milk from your liver.
_Vin sur lait, c'est souhait; lait sur vin, c'est venin._
Butter is gold in the morning, silver at noon, and lead at night.
He that would live for aye, must eat sage in May.
_Cur moriatur homo, cui salvia crescit in horto?_
After cheese comes nothing.
An egg and to bed.
You must drink as much after an egg as after an ox.
He that goes to bed thirsty rises healthy.
_Qui couche avec la soif, se leve avec la sante._
One hour's sleep before midnight is worth two hours after.
Who goes to bed supperless, all night tumbles and tosses.
Often and little eating makes a man fat.
Fish must swim thrice.
_Poisson, goret, et cochon vit en l'eau, mort en vin._
Drink wine and have the gout, drink no wine and have it too.
Young men's knocks, old men feel.
_Quae peccamus Juvenes, ea luimus Senes._
Go to bed with the lamb, and rise with the lark.
Early to bed, and early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Wash your hands often, your feet seldom, and your head never.
Eat at pleasure, drink by measure.
_Pain tant qu'il dure, vin a mesure._
Cheese is a peevish elf, It digests all but itself.
_Caseus est nequam, Quia digerit omnia se quam._
The best physicians are Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merryman.
_Si tibi deficiant medici, medici tibi fiant Haec tria; mens laeta, requies, moderata diaeta._
Drink in the morning staring, Then all the day be sparing.
Eat a bit before you drink.
Feed sparingly and dupe the physician.
Better be meals many than one too many.
You should never touch your eye but with your elbow.
_Non patitur ludum fama, fides, oculus._
The head and feet keep warm, the rest will take no harm.
_Tenez chaud le pied et la tete, au demurant vives en bete._
_Qui ne boit vin apres salade, est en danger d'etre malade._
Cover your head by day as much as you will, by night as much as you can.
Fish spoils water, but flesh mends it.
Apples, pears, and nuts spoil the voice.
Quartan agues kill old men and cure young.
Old fish, old oil, and an old friend.
_Pesce, oglio, ed amico vecchio._
Raw pullet, veal, and fish, make the churchyard fat.
Of wine the middle, of oil the top, of honey the bottom.
_Vino di mezzo, oglio di sopra, e miele di sotto._
The air of a window is the stroke of a cross-bow.
_Aria di finestra, colpo di balestra._
_Piscia chiaro, ed incaca al medico._
When the wind is in the east, it's neither good for man nor beast.
A hot May makes a fat churchyard.
That city is in a bad case, whose physicians have the gout.--_Hebrew Proverb._
When the sun rises, the disease will abate.[21]
If you take away the salt, throw the meat to the dogs.
_Splen ridere facit, cogit amare jecur._[22]
Lever a cinq, diner a neuf. Souper a cinq, coucher a neuf. Font vivre dans nonante neuf.
_Surge quinta, prande nona, coena quinta, dormi nona, nec est morti vita prona._
Hunger's the best sauce.
_Optimum condimentum fames._
_Plures occidit gula quam gladius._
_Qui a bu, boira._ Ever drunk ever dry.
_Vinum potens, vinum nocens._
The child is too clever to live long.
_Praecocibus mors ingeniis est invida semper._
Le chant du cocq, le coucher du corbeau, Preservent l'homme du tombeau.
Bitter to the mouth, sweet to the heart.
_Paulo deterior, sed suavior potus est cibus; meliori quidem, sed ingrato, praeferendus est._
Apres la soupe, un coup d'excellent vin Tire un ecu de la poche du medecin.
THE NIGHT-MARE.
The Night-mare or Ephialtes, _incubus_, from [Greek: ephallomai], "to leap upon," and _incubo_, "to lie upon," may be considered a sympathetic affection of the brain during our sleep, generally arising from a derangement in the digestive functions. We therefore observe it after a heavy supper, or the use of any article of food of difficult digestion. It is to these circumstances more than to the "unusual loss of volition," which some physiologists consider as its cause, that we are to attribute this unpleasant perturbation of our repose, which impresses the sleeper with the idea of some living being pressing upon the chest, inspiring terror, impeding respiration, and subduing all voluntary action that might endeavour to remove the unwelcome visiter. It has been observed that persons of a melancholy and contemplative disposition are more subject to it than the gay and the vivacious. Sedentary employment and anxiety of mind often bring it on; and it has been noticed in _nostalgia_, or regret of home, in soldiers and sailors. The sense of apprehension remains after the sufferer is awakened, and the fluttering of the heart and quick pulse are observed for some time after, while drops of cold perspiration frequently trickle down his brow. When the night-mare is the result of too much repletion, it is possible that its symptoms denote a pressure of the loaded stomach on the solar plexus.
It is said that the _night-mare_ derives its name from _Mara_, an evil spirit of the Scandinavians, which, according to the Runic theology, seized men in their sleep, and deprived them of the powers of volition. Our old Anglo-Saxon name for the disease was _Elf-Sidenne_, or elf-squatting; hence the popular term "hag-ridden."
There is a variety of the malady which makes its attack by day, and when waking: it has been called the day-mare, or _ephialtes vigilantium_. This affection, although uncommon, has been noticed by Forestus, Rhodius, Sauvages, and Good. Forestus has known it to return periodically like an intermittent fever.
It is not always that the patient experiences unpleasant sensations in these nocturnal attacks, which were not unfrequently of a curious nature. The ancients thought that these intruders were sometimes sportive Fauns; hence Pliny calls the affection _ludibria Fauni_. At a subsequent period, superstition replaced the Fauns by _Incubi_, or evil spirits, who visited the earth to destroy virtuous women; and it was once gravely discussed by the Sorbonne, whether the offspring of such an union should be considered human, or the fair lady's reputation injured by the involuntary act of giving a young incubus to the world. The absurd stories of the pranks of the _Succubi_ and _Incubi_ are well known.
Ephialtes has been known to be epidemic, and has attacked numbers at a time. Caelius Aurelianus informs us that Silimachus, a disciple of Hippocrates, observed the phenomenon in Rome, when the disease generally proved fatal. It is more than probable that in these cases the night-mare was merely symptomatic of other complaints. A French physician, Dr. Laurent, however, has related a very curious instance of a species of night-mare attacking an entire regiment; he thus relates the singular occurrence:
"The first battalion of the regiment Latour d'Auvergne, of which I was the surgeon, was garrisoned at Palmi, in Calabria, when we received a sudden order at midnight to march with all possible speed to Tropea; a flotilla of the enemy having appeared off the coast. It was in the month of June; we had a march of forty miles of the country, and only arrived at our destination at seven o'clock the following evening, having scarcely halted during those thirty-one hours, and suffered considerably from the heat of the sun. On our arrival the men found their rations cooked and their quarters prepared; but, having arrived the last, our regiment had the worst accommodation, and eight hundred men were pent up in a building scarcely capacious enough for half the number. The soldiers were in consequence much crowded, and slept upon the straw without any bedding, and most uncomfortably. The building was an abandoned monastery; and the inhabitants warned us that we should not be able to occupy it quietly, as it was haunted every night. We laughed at their superstitious fears, but were much amazed when, towards midnight, we heard loud cries, and the soldiers rushed tumultuously, and in evident terror, out of their rooms. Being interrogated as to the causes of this alarm, they all affirmed that the devil was in the abbey; that they had seen him enter in the shape of a large black dog, that had jumped upon their breasts and disappeared. To convince them of the absurdity of their fears was of no avail; not a single man could be persuaded to return to his quarters, and they wandered about the town until daybreak. On the following morning I questioned the most steady non-commissioned officers and the oldest soldiers; and though under ordinary circumstances they were strangers to fear, and never gave credit to any tales of supernatural agency, they assured me that the dog had weighed them down and nearly suffocated them. We remained that day in Tropea, and had no other quarters to occupy but the same monastery, and the soldiers would only take up their residence on the condition that we should remain with them: the men retired to sleep--we watched; all was quiet until about one in the morning; when they awoke in the same terror, and fled from the building in dismay. We had looked out most attentively, but could not perceive the cause of this commotion. The following day we returned to Palmi; and, although we marched over a great part of Italy, and were frequently equally crowded and uncomfortable, a similar scene never recurred."
Dr. Laurent very judiciously attributes this singular attack to the pernicious local influence of some deleterious gas, and the very crowded state the men slept in. It is also probable that they did not take off their accoutrements, and lay down with their belts on: might they not also have eaten some unwholesome fruit upon the line of march, for it was in the month of June, when various berries grow in abundance along the road-side?
Hippocrates's theory of the night-mare was, that, during our sleep, our volition being suspended, the soul, still awake, watches over all the functions of the body. It is rather odd that the animal that most persons pretend to have thus annoyed them, is a long-haired black dog. Forestus assures us that it was a similar visiter that tormented him in his youth. This circumstance can only be attributed to vulgar superstition and tradition. Dubosquet has preceded his Treatise on Ephialtes with the engraving of a large monkey who had perplexed a young lady whom he attended; the monkey most probably came on horseback, as his steed is also delineated looking over the sleeping victim.
Various medicines have been recommended to prevent these attacks; amongst others, saffron and peony: and several learned commentators have endeavoured to prove and disprove that they were only specific in the form of an amulet. Zacutus Lusitanus recommends aloes, and his advice is perhaps as good a one as could be given. The ancients attributed many powerful effects to saffron, and, amongst other properties, it was considered as an effective narcotic, and was said to occasion violent headaches. Curious anecdotes are related of its effects. Amatus Lusitanus having exhibited this medicine to accelerate a tardy accouchement, the woman was delivered of two yellow daughters; and Hertodt, in his work called Crocology, relates that, having tried it on a bitch, all her pups were of a similar colour. The ancients called saffron the king of plants, the vegetable panacea, and the soul of the lungs. In modern times we do not recognise any peculiar property in this production; and in Spain and Italy it is used as a condiment with perfect impunity. Peony was also deemed a valuable remedy, when gathered as the decreasing moon was passing under Aries: the slit root being then tied round the neck of an epileptic person, he was forthwith cured. "Unlimited scepticism," Dugald Stewart observes, "is as much the child of imbecility as implicit credulity." How difficult it is to steer the vessel of our understanding between those shoals!
Medical writers have divided the night-mare, according to its phenomena, into complete, incomplete, mental, and bodily. The complete night-mare, in which the suspension of the functions had been so powerful, has been known to prove fatal. In the incomplete, we fancy ourselves placed in a peculiar situation, opposed by some unexpected obstacle, and all our efforts seem of no avail to extricate ourselves from our difficulties. There is an incubus, called indirect, in which the dreamer is not the individual arrested in his movements; but he is impeded in his progress by the stoppage of his horse, his carriage, his ship, which no power can propel. In the mental or intellectual night-mare, the flow of our ideas is embarrassed, all the associations of our very thoughts appear to be singularly unconnected; we think in an unintelligible language; we write, and cannot decipher our manuscript: all is a mental chaos, and no thread can lead us out of the perplexing labyrinth. In the corporeal ephialtes, we imagine that some of our organs are displaced, or deranged in their functions. One man fancies that a malevolent spectre is drawing out his intestines or his teeth: a patient of Galen felt the cold sensation of a marble statue having been put into bed with him. These, however, are nothing else than the actual sensations we experience at the time. Thus Conrad Gesner fancied that a serpent had stung him in the left side of the breast; an anthrax soon appeared upon the very spot, and terminated his existence. Arnauld de Villeneuve imagined that his foot had been bitten, and a pimple which broke out on the spot soon degenerated into a fatal cancerous affection. Corporeal night-mare may therefore be simply considered as a symptom of disease, and not as a mysterious forewarning.
The cold stage of fever that often invades us in our sleep is the natural forerunner of the malady. This was the case with Dr. Corona, the physician of Pius VI. who upon two occasions was attacked with typhus fever, ushered in by a distressing dream or incubus. These physical phenomena only strengthen the opinion, that in our sleep we are equally alive to mental impressions and bodily sufferings; and that, correctly speaking, there is no suspension of our intellectual faculties of perception, nor is there any interruption in the susceptibilities of our relative existence. The various doctrines regarding dreams illustrate this position.
INCUBATION OF DISEASES.
The term "incubation" in its rigid sense applies to the act of hatching eggs, either naturally or artificially. It has however been adopted by physicians to denote that state of predisposition to disease, in which the germ of the malady lurks, latent and unperceived by the inexperienced observer. Too frequently the individual who is thus menaced is totally unaware of his condition. So far from being depressed in spirits, his hopes are more sanguine, and his future projects more industriously formed than usual. At other times, on the contrary, he labours under a load of despondency which he cannot explain, and his gloom seems to anticipate his end. This presentiment has oftentimes been singularly prophetic. Moreau de St. Remy relates the case of one of his most intimate friends, who visited him, saying, "I come to die near you." He was apparently in perfect health, but the prediction too soon proved true.
It is no doubt probable, that in these cases the influence of the mind labouring under these fatal impressions brings about, by its all-powerful sympathetic power on our functions, the expected yet dreaded event.
Incubation is observed in many contagious affections; and in hydrophobia its duration is amazing, this dreadful malady developing itself years after the original accident. In mental diseases, aberrations of the intellectual faculties are noticed long before the patient can be pronounced insane; oddities, as they are called, are frequently the precursors of mania.
The ancient Greeks and Egyptians use the term "incubation" in another sense. With them it expressed the religious ceremony of sleeping in the temples of the gods, to be inspired with the means of relieving their sufferings. Nothing can express this superstitious rite more forcibly than the following letter from Aspasia to Pericles, recorded by one of the scholiasts of Aelian.
"Aspasia to Pericles, greeting. Podalirius! Podalirius, to whom Love taught the art of healing, and who in return didst consecrate thine art to Love, I return thee my thanks. Athens will once more see me beauteous! I shall have lost none of my attractions, and Pericles shall find in his Aspasia all that he once held dear! Podalirius, I return thee my thanks; and thou, Pericles, be grateful to my benefactor. I did not wish to write to thee until I was certain that I had been cured. I shall relate to thee my voyage. I punctually followed the instructions of Nocrates, that wise and enlightened physician. I first repaired to Memphis, where I visited, but without success, the temple of Isis. I there beheld the goddess, and her son Orus, seated on a throne, supported by two lions. The _Sebestus_[23] grew round her shrine! Incense was burnt in the morning, myrrha during the day, and cyplis at eve. I was assured that young Alexander had come to this temple not long before to indulge in a holy contemplation, and learn by inspiration the means of curing his friend Ptolemy: his supplications were heeded. I also slept in the temple, but found no relief. This misfortune, alas! was attributed to my incredulity. I took my departure, and repaired to Patras. There I saw in her temple the divine Hygeia; not as she was represented by Aristophanes, when she relieved Plutus, sweet and graceful, clothed in an aerial robe and a short tunic, and holding in her hand a cup of _Musa_, whence a serpent was seen to spring, but she appeared to me in the form of a mysterious pentagon. I first paid a devout visit to the fountain; and while I deposited my offerings at the feet of the goddess, a mirror was floating on the surface of the waters upon which I gazed by order of the priests, but I was not cured! Thence I went to sleep at Pergania and at Hercyna. But the gods seemed to slumber when Aspasia slept! On a sudden the name of Podalirius struck mine ear! I was informed that his temple was at Lacera. I instantly sought it; and, on my arrival, bathed in the Althonus. After the bath, I was anointed with the perfumed balsams that our friend Sosinius had given me in the temple of Mercury the day I left Athens. I then put up my prayers to deserve the favour I implored from the god. At nightfall I sought repose on the skin of a ram close to the statuary pillar. I soon found myself in that state when we are no longer wide awake, but when sleep has not yet lulled our senses to repose. Methought that a celestial light was shed around me. Aesculapius appeared to me with his two daughters; and, from the clouds that surrounded him, he promised me my pristine health. I soon after fell into a profound sleep; but towards the break of day I beheld Cypris--Cypris who was always the friend of Podalirius: she came herself! I recognised her, although she had assumed the form of a gentle dove. Yes, Cypris came to cure me. Podalirius! Aesculapius! Cypris! each day shall you be thanked by Aspasia and by Pericles.