Volume 1

A system of medicine / edited by J. Russell Reynolds.

Date:
1866-1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A system of medicine / edited by J. Russell Reynolds. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    245/976 (page 225)
    system, and eliminated without undergoing any chemical change, or at most only a very partial chemical change. He assumed therefore that that power of preventing putrefaction and fermentation which they exercise outside the body they would exercise probably equally well within the body. And further experi- ments made by him upon the lower animals, by the introduction of putrid matters into their blood, and by putting them at the same time under the influence of the sulphites, led him to believe that he had in these agents discovered valuable remedies for the various forms of septicaemia. It would seem that large doses of these sulphites (from thirty to sixty grains three or four times daily), may be given with impunity. yVe are not aware whether this plan of treatment has been so largely tested as the promises it seems to hold out might justify. We know of one case of supposed Pyaemia in which it was believed to have wrought a cure, but we know that in the practice of Mr. Simon, at St. Thomas’s Hospital, it has entirely failed. (c) Treatment of Symptoms and Complications.—When a case of Pyaemia is under treatment, it always becomes a question of treating, in addition to the general disease, certain symptoms as they arise, and it may be, certain of the secondary lesions. On this head, again, we fear there is little satisfactory to be said. Some have recommended, on theoretical grounds, that diarrhoea should be encouraged: there seem no valid grounds for this course; and certainly if the diarrhoea became excessive we should recommend that it be restrained, either by remedies administered by the mouth or by opiate enemata or suppositories. Again the pulmonary symptoms may become some- times exceedingly distressing; and then, although probably we have no means of either checking or curing the morbid processes going on in the lungs, we may by opiates or other sedative medicines, judiciously administered, render the symptoms more endurable; or it may be that expectorants, especially ammonia, may be of benefit. Of course if abscesses form in superficial parts they should be early punctured. As regards other symptoms, and other complications, we have really nothing to say. Many of them will need no special treatment at all; and generally where special treatment seems to be required, the medical man must be guided by his general knowledge of his profession, and treat them as he would treat such complications arising in the course of