Anatomical and physiological description of the late Signor Sarti's new anatomical model, : together with the causes, symptoms, and treatment of the diseases of the principal organs. / By W. Mawhinney, surgeon.

  • Mawhinney, W.
Date:
[between 1849 and 1854?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Anatomical and physiological description of the late Signor Sarti's new anatomical model, : together with the causes, symptoms, and treatment of the diseases of the principal organs. / By W. Mawhinney, surgeon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    31/48 page 31
    CONSTIPATION. diseases arising from too great a flow of blood to the head. Here you have great fulness of the system, the pulse lull and oppressed, the arteries throbbing, especially those about the head, and the eyes red. In this case, cooling purgatives must be given and full living carefully avoided. Headache may be an original disease, unaccompanied with any of the symptoms which I have described, and commonly called a nervous head¬ ache. It may last for along time, rendering life very miserable. Although this form of the disease is very unmanageable, relief is sometimes obtained by giving strict attention to the bowels and digestive organs. The food should be nutritive and easily digested. The temperature of the body ought to be equable, and the feet kept warm and dry ; an occasional purgative should be taken. When the disease is periodical, quinine has been found useful; or, when a severe fit comes on, ammonia, musk, or ether, may be tried. Sometimes the disease ceases entirely, from some change having taken place in the nervous system. CONSTIPATION. The frequency for persons in good health to evacuate the bowels is once in twenty-four hours. But there may be considerable deviation from this, while the body is in a perfectly healthy state, from the peculiar habits of the individual. Young children have a g^eat tendency to costiveness—I have no doubt, from the condition oi the intestines induced by the accumulation of bile previous to birth. The first milk of the mother generally serves as a laxative in these cases, or a tea—spoonful of cantor oil or otuer mild aperient will be found sufficient. In adult life, great regularity ought to he observed, in regard to the time at which the bowels ought to be evacuated, as habit in this manner will have much influence. A proper proportion of animal and vegetable food should not be overlooked. I think, eight ounces of animal food and twenty-four ounces of bread, or other vegetables equivalent, ought to be taken in the day. The quantity of fluid ought to be about sixteen ounces. These must of course vary according to circumstances. I may here state that the use of tea, which some have considered it their duty to condemn, as producing costiveness and also causing a great irritability of the nervous system, is one of the safest and best stimulants with which I am acquainted, especially under great mental exertion; but, like most articles of food, too much has been expected from it. The toil-worn seamstress has employed it instead of a sufficient number of hours of repose. The student has used it instead of relaxation and exercise in the onen air. And all who are ot sedentary habits look to it as the restorer of comfort and the very soul of their happiness, until, by continued neglect of the proper means of health, they find their constitutions com¬ pletely broken up, and the nervous system shattered throughout. Then, as tea has been their ordinary beverage, they look upon it as the cause of all their sufferings, and their friends condemn it as the source of all their misery. Causes of costiveness may be enumerated thus : a sedentary life, anxiety of mind, fear, rice, the finer kinds of bread, roast beaf without a proper proportion of vegetables, cheese, port, and other dry wines, or a sea voyage, will produce the complaint in certain individuals. In the female, a confined state of the bowels is borne with less inconvenience than in man, owing to the greater width of the pelvis; hence that state
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3