Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c16.31

c16.31

So great is the dependence which the Eastern practitioners have on opening the pustules, in every malignant kind of the disease, that where the fluid state of the matter has been suffered to elapse without being evacuated, they pronounce the issue fatal, and it generally proves so; they order it in every kind, even the most distinct; for although in these it should seem scarcely necessary, yet they conceive it effectually prevents inflammation and weakness of the eyes, biles, and other eruptions and disorders, which so commonly succeed the disease, however benign; in very critical cases, they will not trust the operation of opening the pustules to the nurses or relations, but engage in it themselves, with amazing patience and solicitude; and I have frequently known them thus employed for many hours together; and when it has been zealously persevered in, I hardly ever knew it fail, of either entirely preventing, the *second fever*, or mitigating it in such sort, as to render it of no consequence; in various instances, which I have been a witness to, in my own, and others practice, I have seen the pustules in the *contiguous* kind, upon being successively opened, fill again to the fourth and fifth, and in the *confluent*, to the sixth, seventh, and eighth time; in the very distinct sort they will not fill again more than once or twice, and sometimes not at all, which was a plain indication, that the whole virus of the disease was expelled in the first eruption.