Forty-Fifth, or Sexagesima, Section
An ominous pleurisy—if one may put any faith in the entire system of semeiology and the hard beatings of the pulse and strictures in the chest—has grasped and held me since day before yesterday and threatens to make an end of my maltreated life and of this biography—unless by a fortunate cure death should be softened into an empyema88—or into a phthisis—or vomica [abscess] or into a scirrhus [glandular induration], or else into an ulcer.——After such a heating, one has only to bore into my breast, so as to draw out, from that source whence there once came a book full of the milk of human kindness, life and the morbid matter together....