Billingsgate might have gone to school to Drayton House. _Inter alia,_
they seemed in love with a term that Othello hit upon; only they used it
not once, but fifty times a day, and struck decent women with it on the
face, like a scorpion whip; and then the scalding tears were sure to run
in torrents down their silly, honest, burning cheeks. But this was not
all; they had got a large tank in a flagged room, nominally for
cleanliness and cure, but really for bane and torture. For the least
offence, or out of mere wantonness, they would drag a patient stark naked
across the yard, and thrust her bodily under water again and again,
keeping her down till almost gone with suffocation, and dismissing her
more dead than alive with obscene and insulting comments ringing in her
ears, to get warm again in the cold. This my ladies called "tanking."
In the ordinary morning ablutions they tanked without suffocating. But
the immersion of the whole body in cold water was of itself a severe
trial to those numerous patients in whom the circulation was weak; and as
medical treatment, hurtful and even dangerous.
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