The specific action of drugs on the healthy system : an index to their therapeutic value, as deduced from experiments on man and animals / by Alexander G. Burness and F.J. Mavor.

Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The specific action of drugs on the healthy system : an index to their therapeutic value, as deduced from experiments on man and animals / by Alexander G. Burness and F.J. Mavor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    tenesmus, and a feeling of heat and pain at the arms. Frequently there is great thirst, sense of heat and dryness in the throat, the urine is sometimes diminished or sup- pressed.” Vomiting is excited by any substance taken into the stomach ; the matter vomited is usually brown and tur- bid, sometimes mixed with blood. Pulse is quick, but small and irregular; sometimes there are cold, clammy sweats, but at other times the skin is hot; the heart’s action is irregular, giving rise to palpitation; breathing short and. painful; coma soon supervenes with paralysis, tetanic con- vulsions, or spasms in the muscles of the extremities. Such are the usual symptoms if the quantity be large, but should the quantity be small and frequently repeated, or should a person survive for some time after a large dose, there are the following symptoms : — “ Feeling of warmth or pain in the stomach and bowels, loss of appetite; thirst, nausea, and vomiting; relaxed condition of the bowels, with colicky pains; furred tongue, aphthae of the mouth, various cutaneous eruptions, inflammation of the conjunctiva) with soreness of the edges of the eyelids; quick, small, and irregular pulse; frontal headache; coryza with profuse ichorous discharge; oppressed respiration with a dry cough ; diminution or suppression of the urine; lan- guor and want of sleep; the limbs become painful and trembling, subject to convulsions, benumbed, eventually paralysed; emaciation, anaemia, and death.” In some cases the hair and nails fall off, and swelling of the face and feet is also present. Now, keeping the above symptoms before us, we see that arsenious acid, in whatever way introduced into the system, exerts a specific influence, primarily, on the mucous mem- brane and the skin, as evinced by the deranged functions