Page:Essay on the mineral waters of Carlsbad (1835).pdf/71

Philippine Velser laboured under such concretions. We see every year a great number of patients, in whom their existence is manifest, or at least very probable; others bring with them, as proofs, the specimens they have collected. I remember, amongst others, a patient, with an indurated liver and jaundice, who, after having drunk only three days, evacuated innumerable gall-stones, about the size of small and large peas, with which he filled several boxes. A most remarkable patient of mine, an Italian nobleman, voided daily, during two months without interruption, a good tea-spoonful of gravel, and numberless gallstones, of very different size. I counted once 270, passed in four and twenty hours, of the usual yellow (ginger-bread) colour, but some of them sky-blue. He never felt any pain nor any derangement of health from those double concretions, except an excessive moral anxiety about their prodigious abundance, attended besides with continual borborygms, attributed by some to a collection of gas, by others, to a collection of water, in the bowels themselves, or between them and the peritoneum. This patient, after having drunk during two months, tried the Franzensbad waters, which are chalybeate and acidulous. They stopt both evacuations; he came back to Carlsbad, where, as soon as he began again to drink, both excretions (sand and gall-stones) took place, as copiously as before. I observed, during two seasons, this singular case, but the patient returned to Italy, and gave no further account of himself. The sky-blue

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