Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1888-04-07

way, is the dispensary and drug store, pre-
sided over by an officer with some knowl-
edge of the pharmacop@ia and the treat
ment of the less serious ailments which
convict flesh is heir to- He is assisted by
of DIR. Eagle the former acts as his
locum teneas and deputy. The dispensary
is clean, sweet-smelling apartment,
stocked with all the mysteriously labeled
bottles and gallipots whose contents in
some one or another of their combina-
tions are supposed to be capable of routing
the whole alphabet of diseases, from apo
plexy to iona. In congregation of over
$50 men there must necessarily be daily
proportion who are suffering from some
trifiing bodily indisposition or ache, which
only needs local treatment to disperse it.
For the benef. of these, as well as for
those who are in the initial stage of more
serious sickness, DR.. Eagle
HOLDS A DAILY LEvEE.
At which any prisoner may attend who
has got anything the matter with him.
These smaller ailments as a rule yield
readily to the remedies which the doctor
prescribes, and include all forms Of dys-
pepsia, sluggish liver, relaxed throat, be-
sides scratches, cuts and abrasions, the
fruits of carelessness or accident. The ills
Of many of the prisoners are moral rather
than physical, but the latter when not
feigned, DIR. Eagle and his assistant do
their best to cure. Cases of malingering
and shamming are Of course not uncom-
mon, but to all Dr. Eagle gives a pa
tient hearing, and when necessity calls for
it the appropriate remedy is given. Pris-
oners as a rule are a priori less healthy than
ordinary human beings, for the reason that
perverted moral sense is seldom found
out of body which in some greater or
less degree is not in sympathy with it.
Honest men are more healthy than dis
honest men all the world over, an assump-
ton which the researches of Dr. Maudsley
and others have furnished overwhelming
evidence of the truth of. While, however,
communities afflicted with moral disease
are more liable to physical disease than
societies of men who are collectively hon
est, the tendency to the latter is more than
compensated by the temperate lives the
former class of beings are compelled to
lead.
1T Is THE PACE WHICH KILLS
And not the length of the stage, hence
convicts often live till ripe old age, and
carry their years well. Sentiment has in
vested the deathbeds of conv1cts with a
horror by no means justified by what has
been observed of their phenomena That
convicts do occasionally die unhappy and
distressing deaths is true, but then so do
bishops and philanthropists, and in the
former case the environment plays as little
part in coloring the death scene as in the
latter. MAN goeth to his long home" and
his journey thither is often made as peace
fully in striped fustian as in lawn sleeves.
Unlovely in their lives, convicts are not
infrequently most pleasant in their deaths,
and when, as sometimes happens, the vital
rushlight is extinguished in the wards of
prison hospital, those who have been wit
nesses of these scenes declare that the
faces of the actors become TRANSPORTED and
suffused with glory which the presence
of iron bars and whitewashed walls only
serve the purpose of throwing into higher
relief. G. A. S.