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Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1936

Letter ID: 1738

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

October 1, 1936

I don’t know if you want a separate report from me of D.L., apart from what I sent you through Pavitra. R surely writes everything and Pavitra tells you all. I have said that R doesn’t agree with Valle’s diagnosis and writes in today’s report that it is “dyspeptic congestion of the colon”!! About Chlorodyne, Dr. Becharlal and I have given our opinion.

The report you speak of has not reached me, so I don’t know anything about the chlorodyne. There is a letter from R, but it gives only the general condition during the day (hyper-pyrexin and a crisis due to tympanitis), says that in spite of that there is some amelioration, I understand from Pavitra that Valle found some amelioration in the condition of the heart in the evening.

As to the diagnosis. Valle, you say assigns a gynaecological cause for the illness, so far that agrees with what was R’s insistence all along in his letters to me that there must be such a cause – he named some such specific causes also – but he could not be sure because no such cause was admitted at the time by the patient. That was when there were the epigastric pains and before there was the generalisation. It is now over the present development that there is dispute. But I gather from your report that, it being an advanced stage of peritonitis, there is no hope. In a day or some days – or according to R in some weeks, if it is peritonitis – she must go. But then it does not seem to matter what treatment is given,– the best can only give her some more days of suffering. Is this right? All are agreed at least on that matter?

The only hope then is that it might not be peritonitis or that it being peritonitis, R’s optimism aided by any force I can give, which cannot be much under the circumstances, will pull her through as it did the others in R’s cases whose lives were given up by the doctors. But for this last miracle the conditions are not very favourable. Perhaps if she lives through tonight and the next few days with an amelioration there may be a chance. I put this all down in order to have the situation clear in my mind. One thing only is a good sign that the Mother’s force + R’s medicines blessed by her pulled her out of the certain death which had come on her the other night; but on the other hand it did not prove as it would have been in another case, decisive.