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OF THE DYSENTERY,

mentioned above, is made by boiling a few handfuls offme'flour, tied in a cloth, for six or seven hours, till itbecomes as hard as starch. Two or three table-spoonfuls of this may be grated down, and boiled insuch a quantity of new milk and water as to be of thethickness of pap. This may be sweetened to the pa-tient's taste, and taken for his ordinary food.*

In a putrid dysentery the patient may be allowed toeat freely of most kinds of good ripe fruit'; as apples,grapes, gooseberries, currant-berries, strawberries, &c.These may either be eaten raw or boiled, with or with-out milk, as the patient chooses. The prejudice againstfruit in this disease is so great, that many believe it tobe the common cause of dysenteries. This, however,is an egregious mistake. Both reason and experienceshew, that good fruit is one of the best medicines, bothfor the prevention and cure of the dysentery. Goodfruit is in every respect calculated to counteract thattendency to putrefaction, from whence the most dan-gerous kind of dysentery proceeds.1 The patient,

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* The learned and humane Dr. Rutherford, late professor of me-dicine in the university of Edinburgh, used to mention this food in hispublic lectures with great encomiums. - He directed it to be made bytying a pound or two of the finest flour, as tight as possible, in a linenrag, afterwards to dip it frequently in water, and to dredge the out*.side with flour, till a cake or crust was formed round it, which pre-vents the water from soaking into it while boiling. It is then to beboiled till it becomes a hard dry mass, as directed above. This, whenmixed with milk and water, will not only answer the purpose of food,but may likewise be gi'ven in clysters.

t I lately saw a young man who had been seized with a dysenteryin North America. Many things had been tried there for his relief,but to no purpose. At length, tired out with disappointments frommedicine, and reduced to skin and bone, he came over to Britain,rather with a view to die among his relations, than with any hopesof a cure. After taking sundry medicines here with no better suc-cess than abroad, I advised him to leave off the use of drugs, and totrust entirely to a diet of milk and fruits, with gentle exercise.Strawberries was the only fruit he could procure at that season.These he ale with milk twice, and sometimes thrice a day. Theconsequence was, that in a short time his stools were reduced fromupwards of twenty in a day, to three or four, and sometimes not somany. He used the other fruits as they came in, and was in a fewweeks so well as to leave that part of the country where T was, withH view to return to America.