A practical treatise on the diseases of children / by Alfred Vogel ; translated and edited by H. Raphael.

Date:: 1886

Credit: A practical treatise on the diseases of children / by Alfred Vogel ; translated and edited by H. Raphael. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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$ous methods of treatment that liave been employed and generally acknowledged as useless : (1.) The antiphlogistic treatment, especially abstraction of blood ; (2.) Antispasmodics and narcotics ; (3.) Dia- phoretics and counter-irritants; and (4.) The evacuating method. Each of these methods of treatment has its advocates, and each has its contemners. Of all the remedies, the narcotics are the most promising. In one case I gave tr. opii, one drop every hour ; in another, one drop every two hours ; in another, I used chloroform every two hours. In this child, the rigidity passed off during each narcotism, but returned in from half to one hour afterward. On the next day the symptoms were the same ; and, as I was about to narcotize it for the seventh time, I found it was dead. The most rational treatment seems to be, not to allow the child to perish by inanition ; which is accomplished by injecting, twice daily, milk or beef-tea, with yolk of eggs, into the stomach by the aid of a gum-elastic catheter, which is easily introduced through the oesophagus ; and to cauterize the spot that formed the starting-point for the trismus, the cicatrix of the navel, with the ferrum candens (actual cautery), a treatment which I intend to try in the next case that may present itself to me. [Dr. Alois Monti, of the St. Ann’s Child’s Hospital at Vienna, reports in the Jalirh. far Kinderheilkunde, 1869, three cases out of five cured by calabar bean. He prefers subcutaneous injections, as he thinks the internal use uncertain. He repeats these injections every ten or fifteen minutes until the spasms cease ; then intermits them even for several hours until the convulsions return. For new- born children he uses one-tenth of a grain of the extract per dose, and goes up to one-third, one-half, or a whole grain a day. Older children can commence with one-third of a grain at a dose. For in- ternal use, from one to four grains a day may be given. Reasoning from the facts that chloral hydrate has been employed with success in tetanus of the adult, both idiopathic and traumatic, and that the cause of trismus neonatorum is believed to be an irrita- tion of the sentient extremities of the cutaneous nerves exposed in the unhealed surface left by the decadence of the cord, we venture to suggest the future use of this powerful sedative in cases of this hith- erto almost irremediable disease.] Y.—SCLEROMA {from, <TK\vpot, hard). INDUEATIO TELAE CELLULOS^N, ZELLGEWEBSVERHARTUNG {INDURATION OF THE CELLULAR TISSUES). Scleroma, by some also called oedema neonatorum, or oedema compactum, consists in an induration of some parts of the cutis, which, in this manner, occurs only in the first weeks of infantile life.$

A practical treatise on the diseases of children / by Alfred Vogel ; translated and edited by H. Raphael.

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