A family herbal: or, Familiar account of the medical properties of British and foreign plants, also their uses in dying, and the various arts, arranged according to the Linnaean system / [Robert John Thornton].

  • Thornton, Robert John, 1768?-1837.
Date:
1814
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A family herbal: or, Familiar account of the medical properties of British and foreign plants, also their uses in dying, and the various arts, arranged according to the Linnaean system / [Robert John Thornton]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    EUROPEAN OLIVE. It at Smyrna, and with the happiest success. The body was rub¬ bed all over with tepid olive oil. A wine-pint was esteemed a cure. It is a curious coincidence, that the use of oil is mentioned in sacred writ. ei Let the sick be anointed with oil, and saved.’'51 TheCaffres, who constantly smear the body writhlard, or oil, re¬ main free from the yellow fever; and the Esquimaux tribes, who also regale on seal oil, remain also free; and when the plague raged in London, tallow-melters and butchers were found exempt. Instead of clogging up the pores, as might be suspected by some, the pores became open, and the consequence of the oil was to produce a salutary sweat. I know but of one case where this remedy was tried in our common typhus, or putrid fever. Being requested, says Dr. Fothergill, to visit a poor boy named Thomas Countey in a wretched lodging in a narrow alley in Bath, on the sixth day of a fever, I found the surface of the body discoloured with pur¬ ple petechice; attended with great prostration of strength, low tremulous pulse, inquietude, delirium, &c. Though these sym¬ ptoms, and the advanced state of the disease, seemed to pre¬ clude all hopes of success from either internal or external reme¬ dies ; yet, rather than abandon him to despair, the whole body was directed to be rubbed with olive oil every four hours, if strength would permit, and its operation to be aided by warm whey, accompanied by a suitable diet of gruel, and arrow-root, and he took a moderate dose of castor oil, as coinciding with the general plan. After some time his parched skin became moistened, and at length he broke out into a full perspiration. By continuing this simple plan all the alarming symptoms sub¬ sided, the purple spots vanished, and his recovery was speedy beyond my expectation. No sooner, continues Dr. Fothergill, had the lad recovered, when the poor woman, his mother, who nursed him through the illness, was seized with evident symptoms of having caught the infection. The above-mentioned process being instantly per¬ formed, and having now much less difficulty to encounter, this new plan was very speedily and strikingly crowned with success. Dr. Oliver^ relates (Philosophical Transactions, vol. xlix. p. 49) * An eminent physician of Bath, who wrote on the Bath waters.