Handbook for the ship's medicine chest / by George W. Stoner ; prepared by direction of the Surgeon-General.

  • Stoner, George W.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Handbook for the ship's medicine chest / by George W. Stoner ; prepared by direction of the Surgeon-General. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    22/116 (page 16)
    gm.) of plienacetin may afford relief, and, if necessary, a second dose may be given after an interval of three hours. Vichy or other alka- line mineral .water should he given in small quantities frequently repeated. The bowels should then be kept open by means of rectal injections of warm, soapy water. A long tube attached to the syringe should be passed into the bowels as far as possible and at least a quart injected once or twice a day. If black vomit occur, give 15 or 20 drops of tincture of chloride of iron in a little water every three hours. Apply mustard to the stom- ach, and give cold champagne and viehy, or brandy and ice water. Used clothing, body linen, and bedding of the patient and nurse should be immersed at once in boiling water or in a disinfecting solution. * * * u All mosquitoes on board should be destroyed by burning pyrethrum powder (Persian insect powder) or by fumigation with sulphur. Mosquito larvae (wigglers, or wiggle tails) should be de- strovecl in water barrels, casks, and other collections of water about the vessel by the use of petroleum (kerosene) ; where this is not prac- ticable use mosquito netting to prevent the exit of mosquitoes from such breeding places. (U. S. Quarantine Regulations.) The sick room, as soon as it is vacated, also the room occupied by the nurse, should be thoroughly disinfected by burning sulphur, 2 pounds for every thousand cubic feet of air space, to destroy possibly infected mosquitoes. The sulphur is placed in an iron pot, the pot i* then set on two bricks in a tub containing a sufficient quantity of water to prevent the burning sulphur from running on the floor and setting lire to the ship. The windows and all crevices should be tightly closed. When everything is ready the nurse should then light the sulphur, leave the room and close the door. At the end of twelve hours the doors and windows should be thrown open. The walls and ceiling and all articles of furniture should then be washed down with a solution of bichloride of mercury (1 to 1,000) and the ship should be taken to the nearest quarantine station for thorough fumigation to destroy mosquitoes in other parts of the vessel. MALARIAL FEVER. Malarial fever is an endemic infectious disease, caused by a para- site of the blood. The disease is transmitted to man (inoculated) by the bite of certain kinds of mosquitos, of the genus Anopheles. The parasite in the blood of persons sick with malarial fever was discovered in 1880 by Laveran, a French surgeon in Algiers. At lirst repudiated, the discovery was later confirmed by other French surgeons and bv numerous Italian, British, German, and American investigators.