A dispensatory, or commentary on the phgarmacopoeias of Great Britain.

  • Robert Christison
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A dispensatory, or commentary on the phgarmacopoeias of Great Britain. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    state advantage has been derived from it in the treatment of indo- lent ulcers, especially for destroying their callous edges, and like- wise in the treatment of caries of the bones. In the shape of oint- ment, made with sixteen times its weight of olive oil and axunge, as directed by the Dublin Pharmacopoeia, it has been found a use- ful stimulant dressing for various chronic eruptions. Among its external uses may be also enumerated its employment for fumigat- ing infected apartments. It is probably the best of the disinfecting gases or vapours, and it may be disengaged throughout the air of an apartment without the previous removal of the sick. The readiest mode of using nitric acid vapour for fumigating a room is to put into a shovelful of hot sand an earthenware pot containing for a cubic space of ten feet half an ounce of nitre and as much sulphuric acid. As a tonic and refrigerant, nitric acid is administered internally in continued fever with frequent advantage. Two to five drops of the concentrated acid, or one or two fluid-scruples of the London and Edinburgh diluted acid in a tumbler of water make a good acidulous drink in most febrile diseases; and the same amount given every two hours in less water, but sweetened with sugar to take off the sharpness of its acidity, has seemed beneficial as a ge- neral tonic in the typhoid form of continued fever. Through its tonic action on the stomach it proves useful in cases of phosphatic gravel. Its good effects are here occasionally undoubted, and were supposed at one time to depend on its rendering the morbid urine acid. But doubts are entertained whether the alkaline urine which attends phosphatic gravel can be rendered acid by any such means, and I can bear testimony to nitric acid having always failed to ef- fect such change in my hands. It does however pass off by the urine when taken in poisonous doses (Orfila). Its tonic action upon the stomach is possibly likewise the source of the benefit oc-. casionally obtained from it in chronic hepatitis. The treatment of that disease by nitric acid, first proposed not many years ago by Mr Scott of Bombay, has gone out of fashion. Yet it has seemed to me sometimes serviceable; and even in irremediable cases of chronic enlargement of the liver it proves useful in clean- ing the tongue, improving the appetite, abating thirst, and some- times retarding the progress of the disease. Nitric acid is one of the remedies which have been proposed as substitutes for mercury in the treatment of the venereal disease. It certainly seems to have proved of service in the hands of many practitioners, especially in cases complicated with the scorbutic or strumous diathesis [Hoist] ; yet a different explanation may be given of its apparent good ef- fects, now that we are acquainted with the frequent sanability of syphilis under simple local treatment combined with a well-ordered diet and regimen. Besides curing the syphilitic disease, it has been held to possess the property of mitigating the physiological action oi' mtrcury on the month and salivary organs; but this doctrine
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