The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon

Fielding's own first-person memoir of his final illness and voyage, fetched directly and verified against the quoted passage. Written after he became Ward's patient in February 1754 for dropsy; Fielding records that Ward's medicines 'had seldom any perceptible operation' on him, that Ward 'declared it was as vain to attempt sweating me as a deal board,' and that 'this distemper of the dropsy stands, I believe, first in the list of those over which he is always certain of triumphing.' Fielding died of the same illness in Lisbon on 8 October 1754, roughly eight months after starting Ward's treatment. Used as the case's first-person patient account of both the marketed dropsy-cure claim and its failure in a single documented case.