Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 January 1894 — THE GRIP. [ARTICLE]

THE GRIP.

A Description of the Disense by One Who Hss Suffered. 1 Ever had the gr/p? asks the Winona •Herald. I will give you a few pointers. Yotfc will imagine you have a bad cold and can wear it out, but you need not try it. The grip has fastened his fangs on to you and will not let go. You have got to give up. go home and go to bed. In a short time you will feel like that Chicago drummer who took the Keely cure at Dwight, 111. You will feel like an anarchist and want to bomb. You will realize Beecher’s dream of holi. You will think your head has been removed and an old beehive, with the empty comb, left in its place. mouth will taste like a pail of 6our krout You have the grip. The doctor comes, looks you over, touts his thermometer In your mouth, (finds your temperature 104 in the ptaade, your pulse going at the rate of two miles and three laps to the second. He orders you to stay in bed and gives you medicine that i« so strong and sour that simply setting the bottle on the clock shelf stopped the clock. He will tell your wife that she may give you warm drinks and try to get you to sweat, and take his leave. Now all wives are family doctors by right of their position in the house, and as you have gone to sleep, delirious and exhausted, she begins her treatment by putting a belladonna plaster across your lunas, a flaxseed poultice on one side and a mustard poultice on the other, a hot flatiron and a jug of hot water to your feet, and a sack of boiled corn in the ear, piping hot, to your back. You sleep and dream of being away to the far North in search of the north pole, or out in the center of some beautiful sheet, of water like Lake Superior, or the lawn tennis Bkating-rinjc, helpless and alone, with the ice breaking all around yon, and you slowly sinking. You finally awake, burnt, blistered, and baked. The doctor calls, finds your tempera-, ture about eighty degrees at the north side of the house and your pulse normal, not needing a pace-maker. He pronounces vou better, convalescing. Orders beef tea, chicken soup, gruel and toast as a diet. You take the big rocking-chair exhausted, tired, discouraged and ugly; you feel like licking your wife, kicking the dog, and breaking up the furniture, but you won’t do anything but sit there, day after day, weak, helpless and tired.