Selected monographs.

Date:: 1888

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

162/440 (page 144)

with our purely medicinal treatment. This is the reason why new remedies are continually being recommended. They are, however, as little eflBcacious as the old ones. Neither the astringents, tannin in jmrticular, nor fuchsin, nor pilocarpin, nor the acids, produce the effects with which they have been credited, and the same remark applies to nitric acid, lately recommended in accordance with Hansen's prescription forty years ago, hut which Frerichs ^ has already found to he useless. There is, at most, one drug, viz. iodide of potassium, which must be allowed to possess a certain amount of efficacy in some forms of chronic nephritis. It must be understood that I am referring now to the albumi- nuria, and not to other symptoms such as the dropsy and the asthmatic attacks, for which we possess really efficacious remedies. It is easy to be deceived with regard to the usefulness of a remedy employed in cases of acute renal affection, for these very often terminate favorably without any medicinal treat- ment, and the albuminuria in particular, which not unfre- quently continues for some time as the last remaining sym- ptom, eventually disappears, unless the circumstances are altogether unfavorable. And in dealing with chronic renal affections it is easy to over-estimate the value of a remedy if we forget that their course is usually fluctuating, and that whether medicines are given or not the quantity of albumen in the urine may go on diminishing for days and weeks. Such fluctuations are due to the fact that the inflammatory process in the kidney is not uniform but irregular in its course, and to the occurrence of complications which increase the albumen; while against these may be set the avoidance of injurious influences and the adoption of sxdtalle hygienic arrangements. Since we can do so little with medicines in the treatment of albuminuria, the greatest importance must be attached to hygienic measures, and experience teaches us that the results to be anticipated, if not remarkably brilliant, are far better than those attained by any medicinal treatment whatever in the absence of such measures. That such is the case is proved by the fact that in chrouic renal affections ' I Die Briglit'sclie Niorenkvanldieit,' 1S151, s. 237.