Translations:Victor of Aveyron/93/en

My embarrassment now became extreme. I perceived myself, at the moment when all my assiduities had succeeded only so far as to convert this poor child into an unfortunate epileptic, repeated attacks, and the force of habit confirmed a malady, which is one of the most terrible, and least curable, in the catalog of human diseases. It behooved me then as soon as possible to remedy it, not by medicines, which are so often ineffectual, not by gentleness, from which there was no longer any reason to expect advantage, but by a treatment that was calculated to awaken horror, very nearly similar to that which Boerhaave had employed in the hospital at Harlem. I was perfectly convinced that it the first method which I was about to adopt, should fail of its effect, that the evil would only be exasperated, and that every mode of treatment of a similar nature would become ineffectual. In this firm conviction, I made a choice of that which I believed would be most alarming to a being, who as yet did not know, in his new state of existence, any species of danger.