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.

    65/142 (page 57)
    minute cannot be cured by common depletory anti- phlogistic means but yields to colchicum, mercury, antimony, bark, &c. introduced into the capillaries through the circulation. Now these medicines, bark, arsenic, nitrate of silver, cure what are called nervous diseases which I consider inflammation of the capillaries of the nerves themselves, for irritation as before mentioned though a part of general inflammation, is itself an inflammation of the nerves, but their capillaries being so fine, so little pal- pable, it is difficult to detect that state. I have thus endeavoured to prove that the proximate cause of all inflammatory disease even of the nerves is in the capil- laries and that proximate cause debility. The narcoric principle in drugs is that which dimi- nishing the sensibility of the nervous system, allays pain and procures sleep; narcotics must be distinguished from stimulants on the one hand and from sedatives on the other, and the distinction is the more necessary, because in nature the narcotic principle is generally combined with one of the others; hence the contradictory ‘and unsatisfactory reports of the value of narcotic remedies, and the difficulty experienced in their application, by those who do not know the reason, why opium suits one case, hyoscyamus another; it has been very common to try one first and if that did not suit to resort to the other; but any one who knows that opium contains stimulus along with narcotic, will not administer it when the skin is hot and dry, with permanent thirst, delirium,-and other evidences of symptomatic fever (pyrexia), but will on principle prefer conium, or hyos- cyamus, which contains the sedative combined with the H