On the value of phosphorus, as a remedy for loss of nerve power and functional disorders of the nervous system, induced by over-work and the exigencies of modern life : with formulae and directions for treatment / by Edmund A. Kirby.

Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the value of phosphorus, as a remedy for loss of nerve power and functional disorders of the nervous system, induced by over-work and the exigencies of modern life : with formulae and directions for treatment / by Edmund A. Kirby. 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.

    23/108 (page 23)
    The direct proof which Dr. B. Jones desires, is, I venture to remark, supplied by clinical experience. No one who has fairly and conscientiously employed Phosphorus in the .various states of the system—to which I have only briefly referred—can doubt but that Phosphorus furnishes us with the means of directly promoting the nutrition of the brain and nerve substances, exactly as he admits that iron favours the formation of new blood-globules. That it as- sists in the formation of protagon is as doubtful as the existence of protagon itself That it may be directly introduced into the blood can be no more reasonably doubted than that it is necessary to the formation of the phosphorized bodies, which are the essential constituents of healthy brain matter. It is a familiar clinical observation that, if Phosphorus be withheld for a time, when the indications for it are pronounced in a case which is progressing favourably towards recovery, the patient will invariably relapse, and again improve on restoring the Phosphorus. In a case reported in the British Medical Journal, Nov. 13th, 1880, of defective nutrition, which apparently had given rise to congenital malformation. Phosphorus was administered with signal success :— A young married lady applied to me to attend her in her confine- ment. The child, when born, was puny, feeble, never breathed pro- perly, or took proper nourishment. It died in a few days. A second pregnancy ensued ; the child of this delivery had terrible convulsive attacks from a few days after birth until its death, at the age of over a year. Its feet were clubbed, its hands twisted, and its spinal column hopelessly curved. A third pregnancy and delivery took place ; this third child had hare-lip, cleft palate, club-feet, twists of the hands on to the forearm, in addition to spinal curvature. It lived, if I re- member rightly, over a year. The poor mother came to tell me the dread news of her fourth pregnancy. Happening at the time to be much exercised in my mind, on account of an annoying failure I had had in selection or in luck in the breed of horses, I had been reading every available treatise thereupon, and was greedy for every scrap of information. In an American veterinary note, I saw that a farmer down West had used Phosphorus, with marked success, as a medicine given throughout pregnancy to mares who threw malformed foals. I immediately put my patient on a combination of Phosphorus and