The cholera unmasked ; or its true name, nature, and causes pointed out ; also a more consistent and successful mode of treating it / [Bracy Clark].

  • Clark, Bracy, 1771-1860
Date:
1832-1833
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The cholera unmasked ; or its true name, nature, and causes pointed out ; also a more consistent and successful mode of treating it / [Bracy Clark]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    upon the general system, and especially upon the parts immediately concerned ; but in very many cases this purging is not present at all, and therefore is not a necessary concomitant or character of the disease. Perusing the various descriptions of this disorder, as well in England as on the Continent, I have been a long time firmly persuaded that its prevailing character bore a nearer analogy to a complaint that I had had often to contend with among animals, than to any enumerated in the books on human nosology; and that, in fact, it was a more or less complete suppression of the process of digestion or chylification, as we shall presently illustrate by actual cases, and that it bore a closer resemblance to, and was proceeding from very much the same fatal causes as the Strophos, or the Gripes, of horses ; in which com- plaint, in the early part of my practice in this great metropolis, I had had a large and not unsuccessful experience, having discovered its true cause, and a mode of combating it, that generally gave a favourable result. Attacks of this complaint, like the cholera, often carried off the animal in a few hours ; and in the commencement of my practice, though employing and using all the then known and recommended remedies, (and such are sure to be numerous and discordant enough, where the character of the disease and its treatment are not understood,) I frequently lost my patients. Fearful of losing my credit also, I took unusual pains, by watching, dissection, and other- wise, in satisfying myself of the nature of the disease, and of what should be its proper treatment, and at length so far succeeded, that for years I never lost a patient, though often contending with protracted and cruel cases. The success that attended my treatment induced me, for a considerable period, to keep the remedy a secret, and it was extensively sold privately ; but, at length, becoming more generally known, and abused also, and not given with the laws prescribed with it, I determined on publishing an account of it, and (what was of fully as much or more consequence) my views respecting the nature and causes of the complaint, and how it should be treated by properly sustained measures in aid of the medicine.— (See “Essay on the Gripes of Horses,” London, 1816.) —I believe, in the different large breweries in this metropolis that I at that time attended, some thousand pounds worth of horses were saved by what I called a duly-sustained treatment of the complaint, and of which testimonies were given me, which appear at the end of the above treatise. In respect to the cause of the disease, I traced it satisfactorily, at its com- mencement, to an insufficient power in the alimentary organs to carry on and perfect the digestive process, either from the accession of some debilitating cause, which rendered these organs unequal to the task, or from the unfavour- able nature of the contents of the viscera as to quality or quantity, or from both or all these causes combined. The lowering agency of a sudden chill to the abdomen would alone produce it under ordinary circumstances, and still more easily if a refractory quality or unusual quantity was superadded. De- rangement or suppression of the chylifacient process taking place in the intestines, the disease would be carried on there to its termination in death; or it might be communicated by sympathy or by connexion to the stomach, or vice versa, beginning in the stomach, it might be carried to the bowels. In either case the suppression or arrestation of the digestive process would quickly produce