The nature of inflammation, and the principles on which it should be treated, examined from a common sense point of view / by Thomas Inman. To which is added, A history of atheroma in arteries, its nature and alliances, showing the bond of union between consumption, aneurism, apoplexy, scrofula, and fatty degenerations of the heart and other organs.

Thomas Inman

Date:: [1860?]

Credit: The nature of inflammation, and the principles on which it should be treated, examined from a common sense point of view / by Thomas Inman. To which is added, A history of atheroma in arteries, its nature and alliances, showing the bond of union between consumption, aneurism, apoplexy, scrofula, and fatty degenerations of the heart and other organs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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$of the fire ? I do. Then, returned Dr. Dignity triumphantly, how are you to put the fire out at all ? The question is very apposite, said Dr. Sense, and I must answer it in a roundabout way. In the first place, I would remark that you do not want to put the fire out altogether, for a slow process of combustion is always going on in health; you only wish to moderate it: and in the second, that the essential characteristics of the two different schools are to be seen in the method they employ for this end. The old school attempted to reduce the fire of inflammation by abstracting fuel exclusively: the new school attempts to check it by leaving it comparatively alone for a time. The plan of the former was attended, in the first stage, with Btriking results; the intensity of the fire was checked wonderfully, but soon after it began to languish bodily, and threatened to be extin- guished altogether. This, as I remarked above, is not the object of the physician, he has to keep alive the living flame—the ordinary fire of life,—and to do so he was at last assiduous in nursing the small embers left; but, as you know, it is not easy to rekindle a fire from dying ashes, and it too often happened that the abstraction of fuel ended in the blackness of darkness. The ■D.e\^ school allow the fierce- ness of the fire to expend itself in a gi'eat degree; and, according to its intensity or decadence, employ checking or encouraging means. They do not abstract more fuel than they can possibly help, and they do not wait tiU the embers are dying before they administer a fresh supply. Nay, I may even say, taking erysipelas and some other low inflammations as a type, that the physician attempts to check the fire by throwing on more coal, sufficient to smother it. Wine and powerful tonics will, we know, cui-e erysipelas as signally as they would aggravate acute gout. Well, said Dr. Dignity, somewhat pettishly, I wish you would leave metaphor, and tell me how you would treat this inflammation which you are so fond of comparing to a fire. Patience, my dear sir, says Dr. Sense, We do not put out all fires in the same way. If a candle wick is on fire we blow it out or place an extinguisher over it. If a chinmey is on fire we put sulphur or water on the ashes in the grate or stop up the top or bottom of the chinmey. If a ship is on fire we try to reach and throw overboard the burning articles, or we batter down the hatches and pump in water, steam, or carbonic acid if we can. In like manner we have more methods than one for the arrest and cure of inflammation. Sometimes it may be necessarj' to reduce the fuel rapidly by the abstraction of blood in large quantities; at another we only abstract it from the part where the flame is the hottest; at another we throw cold water upon it; at another we diminish the$

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