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 empyema[88]--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....