Volume 6

Sajous's analytic cyclopedia of practical medicine / by Charles E. de M. Sajous ... assisted by Louis T. de M. Sajous ... with the active co-operation of over one hundred associate editors.

  • Charles E. de M. Sajous
Date:
1922-
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sajous's analytic cyclopedia of practical medicine / by Charles E. de M. Sajous ... assisted by Louis T. de M. Sajous ... with the active co-operation of over one hundred associate editors. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tractions of every-day life, personal demands and habits. [Isolation and enforced submission pro¬ vide the physician advantageous oppor¬ tunities for thoroughly exploring each and every point and symptom, whether conscious or submerged, and for estimat¬ ing their significance and limitations. Many of the sensory distresses are evanes¬ cent and negligible; others are of grave import, though suppressed or below the threshold of consciousness. Among the manifold phenomena deserving critical attention are: abnormal subjective and objective sensations; paresthesias, of pres¬ sure, constriction, numbness, tingling; of varieties of headaches, backaches; sense- organ anomalies, visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory; spinal and other tender¬ nesses, backaches, derangements of secre¬ tory and sexual organs; abnormalities of motion, direction, of power or weakness, local or general, cardiovascular, renal, and endless others. Physicians often urge objections to the rest treatment which are erroneous or fanciful; or cite instances where no good was accomplished by it, or where actual harm is charged. This opposition is due to insufficient knowledge of t-he true pur¬ poses and procedures, or to a lack of per¬ sistence in enforcing them. Where suit¬ able cases present, and it is decided to employ the measure, there are usually strong objections urged by the patient against such long and radical procedures. In consequence of this the temptation is for the medical adviser to so modify essential steps, in the endeavor to please patient and family, that it fails to supply definite needs, which may be clear to the physician, but not to the ailing person. Where protracted disabilities have in¬ duced that mental confusion and misin¬ terpretation of symptoms, which in¬ evitably follow from hope long deferred, much suffering and disturbance of cus¬ tomary habits, then the one quality a physician must display is decision, deter¬ mining what is best and unfalteringly pursuing his plans to a successful issue. He should decide and execute. There should be no greater difficulty in pursuing a course of rest treatment than in any other logical or rational measure. One can always accomplish by it far more prompt, uniform and permanent results, than by a course at some foreign spa or by haphazard travels, and it is more cred¬ itable to the physician. J. Madison Taylor.] The chief features of rest treatment submitted here are from the stand¬ point of one long familiar with its features and possibilities, and should furnish the general practitioner with confidence in rendering more avail¬ able this excellent form of systematic therapeutics. Accuracy of diagnosis is requisite in dealing with any derangement; it is pre-eminently necessary that the physician shall have adequate time and opportunity to study those com¬ plex problems involved in the neu¬ ropathies, neurasthenias and psycho¬ neuroses. In by far the largest pro-r portion of those who have suffered from protracted ailments or illnesses, there has arisen an involved mental state compounded of real and unreal phenomena. The solution can then only be reached by a nice degree of awareness in which psychology is on a par with the utmost scientific re¬ sources of purely medicinal measures. The most efficacious means of se¬ curing a state of physiologic recep¬ tivity, both for psychic and physical adjustment, is to place the sufferer at absolute rest, to seclude from all outside influences, family, mail, news, and the like. Under no consideration should this be attempted in the pa¬ tient’s own home if psychopathy be a pronounced feature. Mere physical rest, moreover, is frequently not enough. Hence Weir Mitchell in¬ itiated and developed a systematic method of what he describes as “robbing rest of its evilsnay,