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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    by the fire and rubbed with a flannel bag over the hand, the abdomen, and in a quarter of an hour had dispelled the symptoms. This is the simplest form perhaps of the complaint, or rather the point of commencement of it, when it can be more easily subdued—especially if there be no great opposition from the mass of food, or from its quality not being of a very refractory nature, and the animal powers in tolerable force. The knotted state of the abdomen appears to arise from the recti and other abdominal muscles being contracted in sym- pathy with the suffering parts beneath. For some remarkable cases, where the restoration in the horse was opposed by a combination of untoward cir- cumstances, I must refer the reader to the treatise above described, and for a great deal of reasoning and observation which would be out of place in this small sketch. As to anodynes or opiates, it must be obvious, relieving pain by mere soothing and lulling the nerves must be nugatory while the causes of that pain remained uncontrolled : I, therefore, early quitted the use of them, and found, by doing without them, their total uselessness ; and as bleeding may exhaust the very powers we want to rouse, that also I never resorted to till the next day, if any inflammatory symptoms appeared to remain from the lateness of the remedy or from the extensive application of it, when a gentle purgative or a venesection wasMecisive. There may be cases, though I believe but rarely, where the cardiac system (or heart, arteries, and veins) may be oppressed by an overcharge of blood, as in some plethoric people, where breathing a vein would set the springs more at liberty for motion, and be of service ; otherwise blood-letting I believe not to be necessary, unless to suppress, as we have stated, any inflammation consequent upon the remedy, or that may have arisen from its late application. After this manner may be successfully treated, we believe, a very great number of these strophic attacks, if for once we may be allowed to drop the erroneous term cholera, for there is certainly no yoM or bile to characterize the complaint, or concerned in it; but rather, perhaps, a want or suppression of this secretion ; and which want of the daily purgative of life it is which adds to the facility of access, and severity, perhaps, of the complaint: and may not the diarrhoea, complained of in many cases as preceding the complaint, derive its origin from the want of the stimulation of this natural fluid ; the intestines really inflaming for the want of its usual operation upon them— thus inducing a capillary arterial flow into them and a purging—for the same causes that suppress the digestive act, will, it is probable, tend also to diminish biliary secretion. Though by no means generally, yet in several instances we have of late observed that the remedies proposed were of the description here pointed out. Horseradish tea has been given at Ely, in Cambridgeshire, and a cholera tincture is now sold in the shops ; but, in the manner of using them, there does not seem to be a full understanding of the true nature of the disease, which they continue to call cholera ; nor do they appear to be aware of the necessity of making their treatment efficient by a combined plan of operations in the attacking it; so that their treatment is almost an empirical one, and would not, in this case, be attended with nearly so extensive a success.