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It agrees with the accounts quoted above in making mention of the swellings, the blood-spitting, and the awful rapidity with which the disease ran its course. It omits all mention of the eruption on the surface of the skin, the flushed eyes, and, above all, the swollen and inflamed condition of the larynx, the cough, the sneezing, and the hiccough, which Dr. Collier found so significant.
It has been noted how Cardan, previous to his journey to Scotland, had posed as the discoverer of a cure for this malady. In the list of his cures successfully treated he includes several in which he restored patients suffering from blood-spitting, fever, and extreme emaciation to sound health, the most noteworthy of these being that of Girolamo Tiboldo, a sea-captain.
The first case he notes is that of Donato Lanza, a druggist, who had suffered for many years with blood-spitting, which ailment he treated successfully.
Nothing that deserved the name of tree, if we except a few stunted specimens of queñoa trees, and here and there patches of the Ratanhia shrub, which covered the hill-sides. Both these are used by the mountain Indians as fuel, but the Ratanhia is also a favourite remedy against dysentery and blood-spitting.
On the night of 3 February, 1820, on returning to the house at Hampstead which he shared with Mr. Brown, the poet had his first attack, a violent one, of blood-spitting from the lungs. He rallied somewhat, but suffered a dangerous relapse in June, just prior to the publication of his final volume, containing all his best poems Isabella, Hyperion, the Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia, and the leading Odes.
A sort of couch had been prepared for him of mattresses and cushions upon the floor; and upon that rude bed was the emaciated form of the dying monarch extended. To his customary attacks of blood-spitting, had succeeded a strange, and, until then, unknown symptom of malady, from which the very physicians recoiled with horror.
This used to create a great deal of smoke, which tended still further to vitiate the air. When he returned "to grass" his saliva used to be as black as ink. About five years before giving up underground work he had had inflammation of the lungs, followed by blood-spitting, which used to come on when he was at work in what he called "poor air," or in "cold-damp," and he had never been well since.
Philip traveled slowly. For three days and nights the air was filled with the "Arctic dust" snow that was hard as flint and stung like shot; and it was so cold that he paused frequently and built small fires, over which he filled his lungs with hot air and smoke. He knew what it meant to have the lungs "touched" sloughing away in the spring, blood-spitting, and certain death.
Both these are used by the mountain Indians as fuel, but the Ratanhia is also a favourite remedy against dysentery and blood-spitting. Its extract is even exported to European countries, and is to be found in the shop of the apothecary. Now and then a beautiful species of locust was seen with its bright red flowers. It was the "Sangre de Christo" of the Peruvian flora.
For his irritability increased in measure as he perceived the medicine was doing him no good; he found fault with the doctors, railed against them unjustly, and all the while the little; cough continued, and the blood-spitting returned at the end of cruel intervals, when he had begun to hope that at least that trouble was done with.
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