First principles of medicine / By Archibald Billing.

  • Archibald Billing
Date:
1831
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: First principles of medicine / By Archibald Billing. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to taking it up fast enough, but when we act upon the arterial capillaries, so as to check their exhalations, we know that, the absorbents, continuing their action, wiil gradually carry off the overplus of effused fluid; and we know, that we can restrain the effusion from arterial capillaries, in two ways, either by constringing them, or by allowing less fluid to go to them; but of the ab- sorbents we know no demonstrable mode of altering their action, and I hold that the medicines which are commonly satd to increase the action of the absorbents, act on the capillary arteries so as to check their depo- sition, and that this is the true account of the removal of dropsical swellings, by the action of mercury and other medicines, which cause either an alteration in the action of the capillaries, so as to stop their depositions, or by causing evacuation, actually diminish the quantity of matter supplied by the arteries, as Elaterium and diuretics do in dropsy, and Mezereon, Daphne Lau- reola and other drastic purgatives and emetics do in syphilis, when patients are cured without mercury by starving and sudorific and evacuant medicines. Dropsy is not a disease in itself, a primary disease, it is only a constitutional disturbance, a symptom, a state induced by some diseased organ; the partial sudden effusions which sometimes take place from inflammation of a serous membrane such as the Empyema of Lannec, from the pleura, (which by the bye is not the Empyema of Cullen) should rather be called Inflammatory Effu- sion than dropsy. Dropsy is inducéd by any protracted disease which by irritation or slow fever robs the secretory organs of