After a week's massage I made her get up. I had won
her full trust, and she obeyed, or tried to obey me, like a child. But
she would faint and grow deadly pale, even if seated a short time. The
heart-beats rose from sixty to one hundred and thirty, and grew feeble;
the breath came fast, and she had to lie down at once. Her skin was
dry, sallow, and bloodless, her muscles flabby; and when, at last, after
a fortnight more, I set her on her feet again, she had to endure for a
time the most dreadful vertigo and alarming palpitations of the heart,
while her feet, in a few minutes of feeble walking, would swell so as to
present the most strange appearance. By and by all this went away, and
in a month she could walk, sit up, sew, read, and, in a word, live like
others. She went home a well-cured woman.
"Let us think, then, when we put a person in bed, that we are lessening
the heart-beats some twenty a minute, nearly a third; that we are
causing the tardy blood to linger in the by-ways of the blood-round, for
it has its by-ways; that rest in bed binds the bowels, and tends to
destroy the desire to eat; and that muscles at rest too long get to be
unhealthy and shrunken in substance.
Pages:
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81