New guide to health ; or botanic family physician : containing a complete system of practice, upon a plan entirely new; with a description of the vegetables made use of, and directions for preparing and administering them to cure disease : to which is added a description of several cases of disease attended by the author, with the mode of treatment and cure : to which is annexed, A narrative of the life, &c. of the author / by Samuel Thomson.

  • Thomson, Samuel, 1769-1843.
Date:
1834
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: New guide to health ; or botanic family physician : containing a complete system of practice, upon a plan entirely new; with a description of the vegetables made use of, and directions for preparing and administering them to cure disease : to which is added a description of several cases of disease attended by the author, with the mode of treatment and cure : to which is annexed, A narrative of the life, &c. of the author / by Samuel Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library at Emory University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library, Emory University.

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    when a person would naturally be awake, sleep is irresistibly induced. In still larger doses, it acts in the same manner as the narcotic poisons, giving rise to vertigo, headache, tremors, delirium and convulsions; and these terminating in a state of stupor, from which the person cannot be roused. This stu- por is accompanied with slowness of the pulse, and with ster- tor in breathing, and the scene is terminated in death, attend- ed with the same appearances as take place in an apoplexy* \n intermittents it is said to have been used with good effect It is often of very great service in fevers of the typhoid type. In small pox, when the convulsions before eruption are fre- quent and considerable, opium is liberally used. In cholera and pyrosis, it is almost the only thing trusted to. The ad- ministration oi opium to the unaccustomed, is sometimes very difficult. The requisite quantity of opium is wonderfully different in different persons, and in different states of the same person. A quarter of a grain will in one adult produce effects which ten times the quantity will not do in another. The lowest fatal dose, to the unaccustomed, as mentioned by authors, seems to be four grains; but a dangerous dose is so apt to puke, that it has seldom time to occasion death. From the above extracts it will readily be seen that the use of opium as medicine, is very dangerous, at least, if not de- structive to health; its advocates, it will be observed, do not pretend that it will cure any disorder, but is used as a pallia- tive for the purpose of easing pain, by destroying sensibility. Pain is caused by disease, and there can be no other way to relieve it, but by removing the cause. Sleep produced by opium is unnatural and affords no relief to the patient, being nothing more than a suspension of his senses; and it might with as much propriety be said, that a state of delirium is ben- eficial, for a person in that situation is not sensible of pain.— The fact is, opium is a poison, and when taken into the sys- tem, produces no other effect than to strengthen the power of the enemy to health, by deadening the sensible organs of the stomach and intestines, and .preventing them from perform- ing their natural functions, so important to the maintaining of health and life. In all the cases that have come within my knowledge, where the patient has been long in the habit of taking opium. I have found it almost impossible, after remov- ing the disease, to restore the digestive powers of the stom- ach. I have made the foregoing extracts on the subject of po*-