Sleep and sleeplessness / Haydn Brown.

  • Brown, Haydn.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sleep and sleeplessness / Haydn Brown. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    produce a condition that may be difficult to dis- tinguish from other kinds of coma. In all coma- tose conditions not created by direct injury to the brain the cause is therefore really a poison of one kind or another ; thus it may be either a poison generated by disease, or one constituted of an injuriously large quantity of some stimulant or narcotic, or again it may be one of the scheduled poisons of a corrosive or paralysing nature. It is extremely necessary for certain people to be able to recognise particular kinds of comatose sleep. Policemen, for instance, or those in attend- ance in crowded public places, not uncommonly make disastrous mistakes, perhaps conveying a person who has fallen comatose from apoplexy to the police station as one who is profoundly in- ebriated, giving them a can of water and an un- comfortable cell alone for the night instead of a home or hospital bed under the most skilful attend- ance. Comatose conditions are all very much alike to the untrained eye, and when a person has previously taken alcoholic stimulant on account of feeling unwell, the suggestion that the coma is one of drunkenness may be all the greater. Many an apoplectic patient has died in a police cell during the night who might have lived under appro- priately careful and scientifically-directed condi- tions. Coma from head injury is also sometimes mistaken for drunkenness, and even appearance of blood and observance of actual injury will not always serve to lead the judgment on the right track, for a drunken man may fall and injure his head, and even a trained ambulance man may sup- pose that drunkenness had been the sole cause of