Gunshot wounds and other injuries of nerves / by S. Weir Mitchell, George R. Morehouse, and William W. Keen.

  • Mitchell, S. Weir (Silas Weir), 1829-1914.
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Gunshot wounds and other injuries of nerves / by S. Weir Mitchell, George R. Morehouse, and William W. Keen. 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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    Burning Pain.—For this the patient has one treat- ment, which he adopts early and uses with perse- verance. It is the constant wetting of the part. He never allows it to dry, and it is often hard to per- suade him to use any other means of relief. When we first encountered this formidable symp- tom, we exhausted our ingenuity in devices for its relief. Most of these were addressed to the nerve or the cicatrix—no one of them did any good. Finally, we were led to suspect that the starting- point of the pain lay in some altered state of the ultimate nerve fibres, and that it was connected with the defective nutrition of the part. When, in accordance with this view we sought to change the surface condition by repeated blisters, our success was more than we could have dared to hope for in so obstinate a malady. The treatment is a simple one. The palm, if that be the seat of pain, is first blistered with Granville's lotion, and afterward with the ordinary cantharidal ointment, or with cantha- ridal collodion. The blistering is repeated, not once, but many times, until the pain is absent, and even afterward at intervals. This is all we need do; but it must be done thoroughly and repeatedly. In some cases the blister, or rather the absence of water, is so painful, that it is necessary to inject mor- phia under the skin of the arm once a day at least while using the blisters. In rare examples, two out of twenty, this treatment has given no relief. Where it failed, we used, as we had used in many others, the morphia injections. They eased the pain, but we have seen no permanent benefit from their employment in these or in any instances of