On the use of the alcoholic stimulants in fever: a paper read before the Glasgow Southern Medical Society, on the 19th Aug. 1847 / [John Leech].

  • Leech, John, -1870.
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the use of the alcoholic stimulants in fever: a paper read before the Glasgow Southern Medical Society, on the 19th Aug. 1847 / [John Leech]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the sincere and utmost attempts of our legislators; who, with a manliness of purpose above all praise, forgetting their party feuds in the overwhelming urgency of the case, united their energies to roll the incubus from the breast of the nation, and, by the total re¬ peal of the bread tax, so long cherished by a powerful party (as their household idol), gave practical demonstration that they were sincere in their professions. But, in spite of all their attempts, even while backed by the cor¬ dial co-operation of the monied interests, had not the merciful inter¬ position of Him who causes his sun to rise, and his rain to descend upon the just and upon the unjust; and who, in tender compassion for his frail creatures, has called to the angel of destruction, “It is enough; stay thy hand!” and has blessed the springing of the year, and the further advancing fruits of the soil, giving us a pros¬ pective hope that his anger is turned away, who could tell what might not have been the awful result in turning man to destruction had such another season as the past been again assigned to us? The waste of enormous quantities of grain in the process of distillation, notwithstanding the prevailing famine, the principal predisposing cause of fever, is a glaring anomaly, inexplicable upon any rational principle. While a public fast was proclaimed at head-quarters, and, hand uplifted to heaven, we were imploring the Divine interposition to avert the calamity,—with the other hand, those very bounties we were thus humbling ourselves to procure, were by us reoklessly de¬ stroyed, and that, too, by being perverted into an evil and a curse. The consistency of such conduct is of a parallel to that of a party whose premises having taken fire, stretches one hand to Heaven imploring help, while with the other he is actively engaged in tossing his goods and chattels into the devouring element. Fire is an invaluable agent, however, when legitimately em¬ ployed; and so is alcohol a most important addition (when skil¬ fully used) to our pharmacopoeia, from whence it first came, and to which it ought to be confined. In no case is the apparent anomaly more strikingly verified than in the treatment of the disease we have to consider in its relations to alcohol; nor do I think I overstep the bounds of modera¬ tion, when I assert that I believe it to have been verified in the universal experience of the profession (the exceptions are undeserv¬ ing of notice), that without the aid received from some one or other of the class of alcoholic stimulants, in all of which it is to the