XI. Si se puede lavarse con agua fria.—In almost every case of lingering illness in either sex, it is vexatious to witness the reluctance to ablution that prevails in the capital; and this prejudice, with the dread of shaving connected with it, is particularly cherished among those who have been delicately nurtured; the male part of whom are often heard to ask “si se puede lavarse con agua fria o afeytarse?”—if it be safe to wash with cold water or to shave.
The Limenians are fond of seasonal bathing and the pleasures of a watering-place, which they know how to enjoy for three months in the year.
Chorrillos, three leagues to the south of Lima, is the favourite watering-place, much frequented during the sultry summer months by gambling parties, and persons of rank and fashion from town. It is only a small village of fishermen, and constructed of cane and mud. The Indian owners of the shades, and neatly constructed houses or ranchos, let them to the bathers at a high rate during the bathing season; and some persons either take these for a term of years, or construct other light summer houses for themselves, which they fit up very tastefully, and pass the summer months in them in the midst of gaiety and mirth. Chorrillos is sheltered from the south-western blast by an elevated promontory, called the Moro-Solar, which rises like a gigantic guaca overlooking the numerous monuments, or pagan temples, of this name, which are scattered over the naturally rich, but now in a great measure waste and desolate plain, that extends from Lima to Chorrillos.
During the raw, damp, and foggy months of July and August in Lima, Chorrillos enjoys a clear sky and a genial air. The south-westers laden with heavy clouds spend their strength on the friendly Moro-Solar, (on which burst the only thunder-storm witnessed by the Limenians in the memory of any one now living,) and divide into two currents: the one pursues the direction of the village of Mira-flores, and the other the hacienda of San Juan, leaving Chorrillos clear and serene between. Thus protected, the village of Chorrillos feels not the chilly mists of winter; and it is the great hospital of convalescence for agueish, asthmatic, dysenteric, rheumatic, and various other sorts of invalids from the capital during the misty season, when the clinking of dollars and noise of the die no longer disturb the repose of the sickly.
The salutary practice of bathing in the sea was in former times confined chiefly to those affected with cutaneous diseases; but within the last forty or fifty years, as we are told, sea-bathing has been preferred to river-bathing, or to the cold baths by the old Alameda, and fountain of Piedra-lisa. The women are usually cleanly in their persons; but, however congenial cleanliness may be to their sex, they, like the sick and bearded men, seem to be greatly afraid of ablution in hectic fever, and some thoracic diseases with which they are often visited.
Of the Indian in the interior we need not speak in the same breath with his brother in the capital, or with the maritime Indian, whose ordinary occupation in fishing, or more delicate engagement of safely conducting the ladies over the surf during the bathing season, especially at Chorrillos, necessarily leads to cleanliness. But the indigenous mountaineers never perhaps in the whole course of life wash their bodies thoroughly; and their skin (at least in the warm valleys) is habitually covered with a thick coating of perspirable matter and extraneous dirt, which it is not easy to wipe off.
In very many cases of acute disease, the warm bath is, with the natives of the coast, a favourite and most valuable remedy, rarely neglected; but its application is usually forbidden in affections of the chest.
It will be readily imagined that the frames of those who fly from impressions of cool air and hazy weather, which, with all their care to shun, they cannot entirely escape, easily become so sensitive as to render them more susceptible in proportion to their self-indulgence, and more liable to catarrhal affections, than those who, by free exposure of their persons, train their constitutions to greater hardihood.
As evidence of the evil results arising from the vain endeavour to avoid the impression of the common physical causes to which, through life, every one must be occasionally exposed, we would particularly notice the peculiar delicacy of the delicately reared Limenian. When somewhat weakened by bad health, or a slight indisposition which confines him to his apartments for a few days, should he happen to shave and wash the face with cold water, he is thereby put in danger of being visited by a spasmodic affection of one side of the mouth, or affected, as is more likely to take place, with a cold in the head; so that the inflammation thus induced in the nostrils and fauces may soon be observed to extend itself along the continuous mucous membrane, and through the windpipe into the cavity of the chest; and there it is hard to foretel what ravages it may commit.
We need not therefore be surprised to hear the often reiterated query of the convalescent in the words, “No me hara daño lavar y afeytarme?”—will it not do me harm to shave and wash? Nor should we indulge in a smile at his expense, as we see him gradually venture on the first degrees of ablution, by rubbing over the hands and face with a cloth dipped in tepid water sharpened with aguardiente, or the common spirits of the country.
XII.—Morir en regla. This expression, which means to die according to rule, is one which all good Catholics are most solicitous to realize for themselves and friends; and the custom it refers to is deemed of the utmost importance in a religious and professional point of view.
When a physician visits a patient, and finds him in a doubtful or critical state, he must never omit to warn the patient or his friends of his real situation, with a view to enable them to call a medical consultation, and allow time for testamentary preparations and spiritual confession. The neglect of this precautionary measure would, in the event of the disease terminating fatally, bring great blame on the physician; but, after he has notified what he considers to be the patient’s real condition, then, whether the parties interested in such communication choose to act upon his advice or not, he has acquitted himself properly; and when the patient, previously confessed and sacramented, dies with the benefit of a consultation, or duly assisted by a medical junta, he is said to die according to rule, that is, morir en regla.
The great medical juntas in Lima, by which we understand consultations where more than four or five doctors are met together, are remarkable occasions of oratorical display. The warmest discussion frequently turns on the dose, composition, or medicinal operation of some common drug; and all the learning, method, and criticism, sometimes discovered at these solemn debates, terminate not unfrequently in the most simple practice, by which the nurse is enjoined to have recourse to the jeringa, and the patient told he must drink “agua de pollo,” or chicken-tea, until the return of the junta. In former times such consultations were called oftener than necessary, because a great junta became a sort of ostentatious exhibition, in which all who could afford to cite a group of doctors desired to imitate the great and the wealthy.
A sample, on a little scale, of such fashionable follies, is familiar to the Limenian in the well-known local story of the two doctors, who, for a month or more, daily met in consultation at the house of a family in town, where, as they retired to the supposed privacy of a consulting-room, the one would clear his throat, and ask the other, “Come el enfermo hoy?”—May the patient eat to-day?—to which the second doctor would reply, “Como no? si, comera.”—Why not? yes, he shall eat. Thus, day after day, began and ended the consultation, as far at least as its topics of discussion concerned the patient; while the good old doctors spun out a regular allowance of time before they rejoined the patient, or his attendants, serenely to announce