First principles of medicine / By Archibald Billing.

  • Archibald Billing
Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

    48/142 (page 40)
    and fauces from mercury is a contradiction of their being starved, but though swelled they are worse nourished, are spongy; weak, soft, as a limb may be swelled by dropsy, though actually emaciated as to its — natural substance, another apparent objection to this idea of starvation is that mercury stops ulceration, but in many of our medical explanations we appear to “ blow hot and cold,” it stops ulceration for the same reason in one case, that it produces it in another, it contracts the capillaries; so that a healthy part is ulcerated by what contracts its nutrient capillaries from a natural state, an unhealthy ulcer is stopped by what contracts its relaxed capillaries fo a natural state. But this term contraction of the nutrient vessels does not quite express the cause of the sponginess of the gums, because there is really inflammation, relaxation, which is the secondary result of the contraction, the excessive contraction occasioning the loss of contractility, that is, over action of the remedy causing at last a loss of power, as cold, which at first contracts, will at last destroy the power of the capillaries, so that relaxation, that is inflammation (chilblain) takes place; as we see in a variety of instances that a remedial agent too long or too powerfully applied becomes noxious by exhaust- ing the vitality, in fact wearing out or straining the machinery of the organ, so that it can no longer answer to the nervous infiuence, whether the organ be capillary tube or any other structure, and it remains for us still to investigate what part of the machinery is injured the contractile or nervous fibres. | But even granting that syphilis or ague might be cured by starvation, abstraction of blood, and other