Breakfast, luncheon, and tea / by Marion Harland.

  • Marion Harland
Date:
[1875]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Breakfast, luncheon, and tea / by Marion Harland. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    248/264 (page 244)
    slowly, dry gum arable, which has, likewise, curative qualities. Mustard Plasters. 0 It should be more generally known that a few drops of sweet oil, or lard, rubbed lightly over the surface of a mustard plaster, will prevent it from blistering the skin. The patient may fearlessly wear it all night, if he can bear the burning better than the pain it has relieved temporarily, and be none the worse for the application.' This, I know, to be infallible, and those who have felt the torture of a mustard blister, should rejoice to become acquainted with this easy and sure preventive. A mustard plaster is an excellent remedy for severe and obstinate nausea. It must be applied, hot, to the pit of the stomach. In less serious cases, flannel, dipped in hot camphor, wrung out and applied, still smoking, will often succeed. A drop of camphor in a single teaspoonful of water, given every twenty minutes, for an hour or so, is also a good palliative of nausea. For Nausea. 0 But the specific for nausea, from whatever cause, is IIOSFORD’S Acid Phosphate, a by no means unpleasant medicine. Put twenty drops into a goblet of ice-water; add a little sugar, and let the patient sip it, a tcaspoonful at a time, every ten or fifteen minutes. Or, where more active measures are required, give a drop in a teaspoonful of water, every five minutes for an hour. At the'same time use the mustard plaster as above directed. My reader, to whatever “ school ” she may belong, would not frown at what may seem to her like unla\vful dabbling in the mysteries of medicine, had she stood with me beside the bed of a woman who had not been able, for three days and night§, to retain a particle of nourishment upon her stomach ; who was pronounced by physicians to be actually dying of nausea—and seen her relieved of all dangerous symptoms, within the hour, by the harmless palliative I have named. Inter nos, sister mine, in the matter of drugs 1 am heterodox, choosing, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, to trust dear old Mother Nature, and skillful, intelligent nursing. But to become a good nurse one should possess some knowledge of Materia Medica, especially in the matter of what are known as “ simples.”