The domain of medical police / by Louis Elsberg.

  • Louis Elsberg
Date:
[1862?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The domain of medical police / by Louis Elsberg. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    apothecaries, regulation of the sale of poisonous and secret or patent remedies, and inspection of drugs, medicines, and perhaps also, of sur- gical instruments. The question of establishing here, too, a tariff of prices, with limitations if necessary, might also be considered. (3.) During the prevalence of an epidemic it would be the duty of medical police to make any extra provision for the treatment of the sick, necessitated by the circumstances. (4.) Whenever a sick individual is supplied with the aid he re- quires without its assistance, medical police must not interfere, but it is its duty to procure proper medical and other attendance and pro- visions when, from any cause whatever, the sick cannot otherwise be provided for. [For the care of these sick, the following means may be used: (a.) General public hospitals; (b.) Special hospitals or institutions for the relief of particular maladies, as asylums for the insane, the imbecile, the blind, the deaf and dumb, invalid houses or hospitals for incura- bles, women's hospitals, children's hospitals, orthopedic institutions, etc ; (c.) Dispensaries, or places to which the needy sick can go for advice and medicines; and (d.) Dispensary out-door departments, with their district physicians, or physicians for the poor, specially employed by the medical police authorities to visit the sick at their homes. Either of these means may be partly or wholly supplied by private charity, but medical police must, whenever necessary, encourage or assist their establishment, or else establish them itself; and in all cases it must exercise over them a certain supervision.] (5.) It is the duty of medical police to prevent the interment of persons only apparently dead. (That persons have been buried while really alive, there can be no doubt.) Certificates from physicians, special inspection and investigation before granting permission for burial, and the keeping of all bodies for a certain length of time in dead/houses, before interring them, are among the precautions to be considered. (The duties of coroners are closely related to this sub- ject.) (G.) Provisions for rescue in apparent death, and from accidents, fall also within the sphere of duty of medical police. Wherever deemed necessary, therefore, it should provide both means and in- struction as to the popular and immediate aid to be given to the drowned, frozen, strangled and suffocated; to persons fallen from heights, or bitten by suspected dogs, cats, &c, or poisoned in any way, or scalded or burnt; to the asphyxiated, from intoxication, for- eign bodies in the air-passages, etc., etc.