Elements of therapeutics and practice according to the dosimetric system / by D'Oliveira Castro.

  • Castro, D'Oliveira.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Elements of therapeutics and practice according to the dosimetric system / by D'Oliveira Castro. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    * twenty per cent. Subsequently Dr. Burggraeve, by his alkaloido-therapeutic treatment, both preventive and curative, brought the mortality down to two and a half and five per cent, where it has since been maintained. He judged that the traumatic fever was due to a stoppage of blood in the capillaries, caused by a pa- ralysis or a fatigue of the vaso-motor nerves which control the circulation. He thought that, by restoring to these nerves their tone and improving their vitality, he would bring back the circulation to its normal condition and put a stop to that stagnation of the blood which is at first a source of heat and then of inflammation, and thus be- comes the origin of congestion, changes of texture, and finally of lesions. He recalled to mind a successful treatment of inter- mittent fever and cholera in Russia, in 1832, by Dr. Mandt, of St. Petersburg, described in a memoir upon Indian cholera, which was read in 1854 by Dr. Everard before the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium. The Academicians paid no attention to this memoir, they did not even discuss it, the cholera epidemic hav- ing ceased. Dr. Burggraeve, however, found in this memoir material for serious study, and he decided to apply Dr. Mandt's methods to the fever cases which came under his charge in the Hospital of Ghent. He, however, substituted alkaloids for the substances of the plants which Mandt had used. He gave to his patients strychnine in small doses, repeated at short intervals, to give tone to the vaso-motor nerves, and thus to re-establish the circulation of the blood. At the same time with the strychnine he gave small doses of aconitine and veratrine, to lower the temperature