Rapport sur le traitement du crétinisme dans l'établissement de l'Abendberg (Canton de Berne) : extrait des lettres publiées par le docteur Guggenbühl à Zurich, 1846.

Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Rapport sur le traitement du crétinisme dans l'établissement de l'Abendberg (Canton de Berne) : extrait des lettres publiées par le docteur Guggenbühl à Zurich, 1846. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    ble remedies, which he discovered in gestation, friction, and the use of wine. By various exercises he proposed, to render the pores more open, and to make the juices and corpuscles, the rétention of which causes disease, to pass more freely. Hence he used gestation from the very beginning of the most burning fevers. He laid it down as a maxim that one fever was to be cured by another; that the strength of the patient was to be exhausted bymaking him watch and endure thirst,, to such a degree, that for the first two days of the disorder he would not allow them to cool their mouths with a drop of water. Abernethy’s regulated diet is luxurious living com- pared to his plan of abstinence. For the three first days he allowed his patients no aliment whatever; on the fourth, he so far relented as to give to some of them a small portion of food: but from others he absolutely withheld ail nourishment till the seventh day. And this is the gentleman who laid it down as a maxim that ail diseases are to be cured “ Tuto, ce- leriter et jucunde.” To be sure he was a believer in the doc- trine of compensation; and in the latter stage of their dis- eases endeavoured to recompense his patients for the priva- tions he caused them to endure in the beginning of their illness. Celsus observes that though he treated his patients like a butcher during the first days of the disorder, he afterwards indulged them so far as to give directions for making their beds in the softest manner. He allowed them abundance of wine which he gave freely in ail fevers; he did not forbid it even to those afflicted with phrenzy; nay, he ordered them to drink it till they were intoxicated; for, said he, it is absolute- ly necessary that persons who labour under phrenzy should sleep, and wine lias a narcotic quality. To léthargie patients he prescribed it with great freedom, but with the opposite purpose of rousing them from their stupor. His great remedy in dropsy was friction, which, of course, he employed to open the pores. With the same view he enjoined active exercise to the sick ; but what is a little extraordinary, he denied it to those in health. Iirisistratus, who was a great.speculator, and whose théories