They are not dead : Restoration by the "heat method," of those drowned, or otherwise suffocated / by T.S. Lambert.

  • Lambert, T. S. (Thomas Scott), 1819-1897.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: They are not dead : Restoration by the "heat method," of those drowned, or otherwise suffocated / by T.S. Lambert. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    so it may be in some cases of suffocation, that time is an element or factor in the recovery. LET SOMETHING BE DONE. While, therefore, I am of the opinion at present that the application of heat to the suffocated is the only, and it is certainly the first, thing necessary to be done, I think there is no harm in discussing all sides of this question, nor in trying any experiment that any authoritative person suggests. Results cannot be made worse than they are, nor can the crassic ignorance be more absurd than it is now. A friend, a doctor, the other day, said that a x^atient told him that when his mother died they put all the ice that they could about her for two days, yet could not make her cold, and were obliged to bury her while yet warm. What an as- tounding fact ! A gentleman whom I have known as a reliable man for years, told me that a lady living near him a few years ago, died in the evening, as her doctor and her family thought. She was laid out in the parlor, the upper sashes a little lowered, and the family retired. Waking in the morning they heard a noise in the parlor, and hurrying in, found their mother sitting up and asking why she had been left there alone and clothed so thinly in the chill night air. She is ahve and well to-day. If she had been subjected to the ice treatment, where or when would she have come to consciousness ? Dr. Richardson's experiments (article cited) tend to prove that ice or cold sometimes preserves the Tissues, as he thinks, in a condition for restoration, that is non-p»ectous, but cold certainly prevents self-restoration. A lawyer recited to me a case that he read some twelve years ago in the London Lancet A person taken from the water a considerable time after being drowned, was, for some