Pathological and practical researches on uterine inflammation in puerperal women / By Robert Lee.

  • Lee, Robert, 1793-1877.
Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Pathological and practical researches on uterine inflammation in puerperal women / By Robert Lee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    82/86 (page 80)
    gentle perspiration to prevent and to combat puerperal peritonitis, that he made every woman recently delivered take from time to time, and at intervals more or less distant, small doses of Dover’s powder, and applied emollient cataplasms to the abdomen. Where inflammation of the peritoneal covering of the uterus is fully developed, and where the disease is prevailing in an epidemic form, this treatment will prove wholly insufficient to arrest the progress of the affection, and unless blood-letting and the other means for subduing visceral inflammation be vigorously employed, it will in most cases proceed to a fatal termination. In no inflammatory disease, are the good effects of blood-letting more strikingly observed than in the first variety of uterine inflammation, puerperal peritonitis; we do not however, as Dr. Gordon has stated, possess a remedy in it which will certainly cure the disease in all cases if early applied. Where the symptoms of peritonitis manifest themselves with great violence, twenty ounces of blood should be immediately drawn from the arm, and in a few hours, if relief is not obtained, ^xvi more should be abstracted. The first general bleeding should be followed without loss of time by the application of leeches to the abdomen, re¬ gulating their number by the severity of the pain,