On the remedial agency of a local anaesthetic or benumbing temperature, in various painful and imflammatory [i.e. inflammatory] diseases / by James Arnott.

  • Arnott, James Moncrieff, 1794-1885.
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the remedial agency of a local anaesthetic or benumbing temperature, in various painful and imflammatory [i.e. inflammatory] diseases / by James Arnott. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    mentioned by Heberden, that time alone, after a course of years, will generally mitigate or vanquish his disease. Congelation, or a benumbing and permanently depressing degree of cold, the therapeutical agent which it is the purpose of these pages to bring into notice, is of a very different character from the remedies hitherto employed in this disease. It has been proved, by numerous trials, to be efficacious in the various headachs not arising from organic affection; and its nature or operation appears exactly suited to effect the object desired. A morbid irritability or inflammatory condition of nerves and often of bloodvessels, at a certain distance from the surface, has to be removed. The severe cold penetrates to the depth required; it immediately benumbs the painful nerves; it permanently lessens their sensibility; it produces a lasting depression of the vascular system of the part; and probably otherwise modifies the vital actions. By the time that this depressing or sedative influence of the cold has ceased, the morbid condition will be removed, or so much lessened, as to require only a few repetitions of the same remedy to complete the cure. It is not only in the more common kind of headach that con- gelation would be pointed out by our knowledge of the disease, as the appropriate or best adapted remedy; the same agent is obviously equally suitable to the rheumatic and periosteal species, of which vascular excitement is probably the principal morbid condition. If the doctrine that, in headach it is the nerves or blood- vessels upon the exterior of the brain that are morbidly affected, required confirmation, it would be amply afforded by the results of the use of congelation as its remedy. Therapeutics have on many occasions thrown light on pathology, but in none more strikingly than in the present instance. Judging from a con- siderable experience of its use in dispensary and private practice, I should say, that of every ten cases of headach, using the term in its least restricted sense, more than half the