On the state of therapeutics in tetanus.

Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the state of therapeutics in tetanus. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    [Rq>iinted from The Pkactitionee for August 1877.] The ancient treatment of tetanus was only palliative, and it was unsuccessful; so that the old writers, who give the first place to the common method of alleviating pain, biing up afterwards the drugs that they knew to act on the nervous system very much, with the honest courage of men who are not ashamed of showing all their strength when it is most overmatched. “Nor yet,” says one of them, “ can the physician standing by and looking on be now of any service to his patient to rescue him either from death or from pain, or from the shameful contortions of his disease. No longer of any assistance, he can only be sorry for him, as he sees him overcome.” Modern medicine, in despair for a specific, forgets that she is armed with a sheaf of weapons that would have made the ancients contented. In the attempt to cure we have arrived at alleviation, and at such complete alleviation as often to bring cure with it; and if we have accomplished nothing more, yet the step already made must encourage the highest hope. And that nothing more has been accomplished, a consideration of what has been done in different instances by these drugs wiU show. To begin with chloroform. Certainly if tetanus were curable by chloroform we should all know it: its general use has ensured it a wide trial, and from the ease and quickness with which it can be introduced into the system, its effects are at first sight most brilliant, nor need it always, in order to relieve the mus- cular contraction and spasm, be pushed to narcotism. Under