Note 38 — Chapter IV

Mr. Curling agreed with Dr. Watson, Principles and Practice of Physic, in the cases of “the sticking of a fish bone in the fauces, the stroke of a whip-lash under the eye leaving the skin unbroken, the cutting of a corn, the biting of the finger by a sparrow, the blow of a stick on the neck, the insertion of a seton, the extraction of a tooth, the injection of a hydrocele, and the operation of cupping,” but not with “the percussion of the air caused by a musket-shot.” He also explained that the supposed case of tetanus produced at once where a negro servant cut his thumb with a dish, rested on the authority of an old cyclopædia, and that his judgment was more mature and his experience greater than when, twenty-two years of age, he wrote the treatise in which he had quoted this case. (It was only in Rees’ Cyclopædia.)