Page:Essay on the mineral waters of Carlsbad (1835).pdf/77

The best confirmation of the efficacy of our waters in gouty disorders, and the best description of a complete crisis I can give, is certainly my own case: I was born in 1770, counting, on the fatherly side, four gouty generations. When thirty-five years old, I began to feel this inheritance, by a severe fit of podagra, which lasted a fortnight, after which my foot remained a long time weak and tender, but without any other ailment. A few weeks, sometimes many months, elapsed, without any attack. In 1822, the podagra disappeared suddenly on the third day, and produced the most alarming symptoms: cough, dyspnaea, sleeplessness, intolerable tickling of the throat; copious, puriform and acid expectoration, rapid decay, cadaverous complexion, in short, all the fore-runners of a tracheal consumption. Leeches, guaiac, Plummer’s powders, and particularly, goat’s-milk, restored me, but I never lost a painful sensation of stricture in the trachea, so that the air I breathed seemed to pass over an ulcerated surface, and my voice, like a good hygrometer, following the atmospheric variations, was extinct in damp weather, and returned when dry. A little before my departure from Vienna, in April 1826, the same symptoms returned, but with less general weakness and emaciation than formerly. In spite of the alarming state of my lungs and trachea, which counter-indicated the use of the waters, and attending merely to the arthritic principle, I began to drink, on the 17th of May. On the fourth day, I