Volume 1

Therapeutics and materia medica : a systematic treatise on the action and uses of medical agents including their description and history / by Alfred Stillé.

  • Stillé, Alfred, 1813-1900.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Therapeutics and materia medica : a systematic treatise on the action and uses of medical agents including their description and history / by Alfred Stillé. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    Stomach which is insusceptible of assimilation, or which is capable of acting as an irritant of the gastro-intestinal mucous membrane. It tends to excite vomiting or purging, and is expelled from the body, or it merely augments the secretion of mucus which sheathes and pro- tects the bowels. A splinter or other foreign body is lodged in the flesh; it usually excites suppuration around it, by which it is loosened from its connections, and on the opening of the abscess is discharged. Or, as in the case of a leaden bullet, the tissues around it become thickened and form a cyst which cuts off its communication with the rest of the body. Even in ordinary inflammation, the tendency to form an abscess, or at least to erect a barrier of coagulated albumen between the central seat of the lesion and the surrounding structures, illustrates the conservative operation of nature. For, let the powers of life have fallen so low that the required effusion of albumen fails to take place, diffuse inflammation of the cellular tissue ensues, and perhaps gangrene, terminating, if not in death, yet in irreparable injury to the organs involved. Congestion, which is usually the first stage of inflammation, may occur as an isolated phenomenon, the result sometimes of local, and sometimes of general causes. It consists merely in the undue disten- sion of the bloodvessels, and may be terminated by their giving passage externally to the blood itself, to serum, a constituent of the blood, or to mucus or some other proper secretion formed from the blood. And plethora, which is a general fulness of the bloodvessels, often threatening apoplexy, or a dangerous tension of various important organs, is frequently relieved spontaneously by bleeding from the nose, anus, or other part. The doctrine of crises, which formed so capital an element of the Hippocratic pathology, and the one of all others which does not coun- tenance a perturbative treatment, was a clear recognition of the suffi- ciency of nature to cure disease, provided that her efforts are untram- melled. According to this doctrine, all acute febrile diseases tend to terminate on certain days by discharges of blood, or mucus, urine, serum, sweat, &c.; or, in other words, whenever a cure occurs, it is effected by and through the proper powers of the constitution itself. In these diseases, also, we observe, on the one hand, an unwonted excitability of the nervous system which consists of mere restlessness, or which may rise to delirium and phrensy, and on the other, when a tendency to recovery is established, a disposition to repose and sleep, which thus provides a natural remedy for the overtasked brain. Nor should we forget that among the first symptoms of acute disease are pain, debility,