Who does not know poor souls in all stages of all these,--outbreaks of
rebellion against all forms, all creeds, all proprieties; secret adoptions
of perilous delusions, fatal errors; and slow settling down into
indifferentism or narrow dogmatism, the two worst living deaths?
These are they who live. Shall we say any thing of those of us who die
between our seventh and eighteenth spiritual month? They never put on
babies' tombstones "Died of teething." There is always a special name for
the special symptom or set of symptoms which characterized the last days.
But the mother believes and the doctor knows that, if it had not been for
the teeth that were coming just at that time, the fever or the croup would
not have killed the child.
Now we come to the treatments; and here again the parallelism is so close
as to be ludicrous. The lancet and the rubber ring fail. We are still
restless, and scream and cry. Then our self-sacrificing nurses walk with
us; they rock us, they swing us, they toss us up and down, they jounce us
from top to bottom, till the wonder is that every organ in our bodies is
not displaced.
Pages:
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238