Manual of therapeutics / by L. Martinet ; translated, with alterations and additions, by Robert Norton.

Date:
1830
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Manual of therapeutics / by L. Martinet ; translated, with alterations and additions, by Robert Norton. 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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    air passages is less intense, and the patient is weak, very vonng, or has already teen bled in the arm, leeches below each clavicle may be substituted; but it is a general prin- ciple applicable to all pulmonary affections, that general should be preferred to local bleeding. The parenchyma of the lungs is too vascular, congestions of blood, however short a time they may remain, are too mischievous, and alterations of tissue too rapid, to allow the neglect of such a precaution. Inflammation of the minute ramifications of the bronchia, the true suffocating catarrh, requires still more imperatively general bleeding; we must not be afraid to repeat it even four, five, or six times, if necessary, to overcome the attack. Indeed such is the dangerous nature of this inflammation, that onr only chance of success is in crushing it at its very commencement. Thus, an emetic at this period of the disease is often of the greatest benefit. Immediately after the first bleeding, blisters are to be applied to the inferior extremities, then upon both sides of the thorax, and if the Jeast local pain remains, we must direct as many as fifteen or twenty leeches to the spot, affixing glasses over the punctures when the leeches have fallen off; the chest should be covered afterwards with hot cataplasms. If, notwithstanding, the symptoms of inflammation con- tinue with the same intensity, and the pulse retains its frequency, we think, from the numerous facts that have g3