Under Fever-Diphtheria

Called into use chloral and opiates
to enforce sleep, you are now prepared
for the suggestion of bromides to quinine
so that the druggist rejoice at the luckless
much like the condition of the schoolyard
at term-time, there was a high pulse
and a few days later death closed the scene
after the usual typhoid tenderness of broken
rest, the vital power had got so low yet
when there was a clean tongue a cure
affected by a stomach that was still
ejecting curds and whiskey, I have
no reason to doubt the treatment was well
up to the latest science of therapeutics
that is to say the brain becomes disabled
from withdrawing its supplies from
tissues by some unknowable process
of cell destruction or paralysis however
that success of a method of practice
is gauged by the mortality diminished
and well before the skeleton condition
is reached, it will be because death
was inevitable and never because I
have failed through failure to bombard
the symptoms I so often found in the army.