I asked leave to introduce Mr. Lowther to them.  They received him with great politeness, and recommended their Jeronymo to his best skill.  Mr. Lowther’s honest heart was engaged, by a reception so kind.  He never, he told me afterwards, beheld so much pleasure and pain struggling in the same countenance, as in that of the lady; so fixed a melancholy, as in that of the marquis.

Mr. Lowther is a man of spirit, though a modest man.  He is, as on every proper occasion I found, a man of piety; and has a heart tender as manly.  Such a man, heart and hand, is qualified for a profession which is the most useful and certain in the art of healing.  He is a man of sense and learning out of his profession, and happy in his address.

The two surgeons who now attend Signor Jeronymo, are both of this country.  They were sent for.  With the approbation, and at the request, of the family, I presented Mr. Lowther to them; but first gave them his character, as a modest man, as a man of skill, and experience; and told them, that he had quitted business, and wanted not either fame or fortune.

They acquainted him with the case, and their methods of proceeding.  Mr. Lowther assisted in the dressings that very evening.  Jeronymo would have me to be present.  Mr. Lowther suggested an alteration in their method, but in so easy and gentle a manner, as if he doubted not, but such was their intention when the state of the wounds would admit of that method of treatment, that the gentlemen came readily into it.  A great deal of matter had been collected, by means of the wrong methods pursued; and he proposed, if the patient’s strength would bear it, to make an aperture below the principal wound, in order to discharge the matter downward; and he suggested the dressing with hollow tents and bandage, and to dismiss the large tents, with which they had been accustomed to distend the wound, to the extreme anguish of the patient, on pretence of keeping it open, to assist the discharge.

Let me now give you, my dear friend, a brief history of my Jeronymo’s case, and of the circumstances which have attended it; by which you will be able to account for the difficulties of it, and how it has happened, that, in such a space of time, either the cure was not effected, or that the patient yielded not to the common destiny.

In lingering cases, patients or their friends are sometimes too apt to blame their physicians, and to listen to new recommendations.  The surgeons attending this unhappy case, had been more than once changed.  Signor Jeronymo, it seems, was unskilfully treated by the young surgeon of Cremona, who was first engaged:  he neglected the most dangerous wound; and, when he attended to it, managed it wrong, for want of experience.  He is, therefore, very properly dismissed.

The unhappy man had at first three wounds:  one in his breast, which had been for some time healed; one in his shoulder, which, through his own impatience, having been too suddenly healed up, was obliged to be laid open again:  the other, which is the most dangerous, in the hip-joint.