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Early in 1845 his health began to fail rapidly and on the very day of Polk's inauguration he was at the point of death. Rallying, he struggled manfully for three months against the combined effects of consumption, dropsy, and dysentery. But on Sunday, the 8th of June, the end came.

The pangs of shame, tenderness, and self-reproach, incessantly preyed on his vitals; his constitution was broken; he lost his strength and his sight; the rapid progress of a dropsy admonished him of his end, and he sunk into the grave on Nov. 10, 1770, in the sixty-fourth year of his age. A family tradition insinuates that Mr.

In the end of 1783, in addition to his gout and his catarrhous cough, he was seized with a spasmodic asthma of such violence that he was confined to the house in great pain, being sometimes obliged to sit all night in his chair, a recumbent posture being so hurtful to his respiration that he could not endure lying in bed; and there came upon him at the same time that oppressive and fatal disease of dropsy.

A niece, Cynthia, is being treated for the dropsy by "drinking copiously of a decoction made by charring wormwood in a close vessel and putting the ashes into brandy, and every night being subjected to a heavy sweat." It recommends plenty of blue pills and boneset for the ague. Later, Susan writes of a friend who is "under the care of both Botanical and Apothecary doctors."

Many mothers have not considered that the circulation of the blood in young infants is peculiarly active; that a large amount of blood is at that period carried to the head; that in consequence of this, the head is proportionably hotter than in adults; and that from this source arises the tendency of very young children to brain-fever, dropsy in the head, and other diseases of this part of the system.

He also took some dust out of the temple, if any happened to be there, and put a little of it into the vial, and gave it her to drink; whereupon the woman, if she were unjustly accused, conceived with child, and brought it to perfection in her womb: but if she had broken her faith of wedlock to her husband, and had sworn falsely before God, she died in a reproachful manner; her thigh fell off from her, and her belly swelled with a dropsy.

Above forty years ago, after a violent fever, my legs swelled as much as you describe yours to be; I immediately thought that I had a dropsy; but the Faculty assured me, that my complaint was only the effect of my fever, and would soon be cured; and they said true.

Knowing its ghostly celebrity, I have investigated the grounds of existing prejudice, and find that of the ten persons who have died there during the last fifteen years, three deaths were from hereditary consumption, one from dropsy, two from paralysis, one from epilepsy, one from brain-fever, one from drowning, and the last from a fall that broke the victim's neck.

Vitus's dance, and lockjaw or tetanus, we all agree to consider as nervous maladies; convulsions, and the vast number of cases known in the death-lists as dropsy of the brain, effusion on the brain, etc., are to be looked upon with more doubt.

I now relieve the readers of this Work from any farther personal notice of its authour, who if he should be thought to have obtruded himself too much upon their attention, requests them to consider the peculiar plan of his biographical undertaking. Soon after Johnson's return to the metropolis, both the asthma and dropsy became more violent and distressful.