Homœopathy in acute diseases / By Stephen Yeldham.

  • Yeldham, Stephen.
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Homœopathy in acute diseases / By Stephen Yeldham. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The foregoing remarks have special reference to those more favourable cases, which, occurmg in persons of robust habit and sound constitution, run their course rapidly, and notwith- standing the employment of the violent measures I have described, result in the restoration of perfect health. But it unfortunately happens that the most critical attacks of inflammation occur, not as might be expected, in the strong and robust, but in those who, possessing constitutions naturally weak, or from other accidental circumstances ren- dered so, are least able to withstand the effects of depleting remedies—delicate females, infants, aged persons, and those predisposed to consumption. That the medical man of the old school cannot be placed in a more perplexing situation than when called upon to treat a case of this description, I can testify from personal experi- ence. On the one hand he sees a disease, which if left to itself, will in all probability, directly or indirectly, prove monia, or inflammation of the lungs with pleurisy, written by Mr. Guthrie, and reported in the “ Medical Times” of February 19th, 1848— “In the year 1801, I found myself, not seventeen years of age, in charge of aregiment of infantry, on the top of the Berry Head, the outermost point of Torbay. The men were soon attacked by pneumonia. I had been taught the practice of physic in London—had followed, among other avocations, the late Drs. Rowley and Hooper for three years, and, in consonance with their views, bled my patients three and four times in the first forty-eight hours. _ I first drew sixteen ounces, then fourteen, then twelve, then abstracted, as the complaint continued, eight ounces; gave tarter-emetic, so as to keep up nausea; then calomel, antimony, and opium, and lost my patients. Discomfitted by my failures, I reconsidered every case, and saw that, however systematically I had acted, the disease had not been arrested in any one of them. Jn fact enough had not been done. Recollecting what I had been told of northern constitutions, and of country practice, I determined that in future, they should die of the bleeding, and not from excess of inflammation. I then took away on each occasion, as much more blood; my sixteen ounces became from twenty to thirty. It would not do, I arrested the rapid course of the disease, but did not effectively subdue it. It was evident that, to succeed, I must place no limit to the abstraction of blood in the first instance, but the decided incapability of bearing its further Joss,”