Dr. Stevens's treatise on the cholera, extracted from his work entitled Observations on the healthy and diseased properties of the blood / [William Stevens].

  • William Stevens
Date:
1832
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr. Stevens's treatise on the cholera, extracted from his work entitled Observations on the healthy and diseased properties of the blood / [William Stevens]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    affords of bringing before our readers the statements of Dr. Stevens, whose views with regard to the state of the blood in malignant diseases appear to us to merit more attention than they have received, and which are, to a certain extent, though indirectly, strengthened by some of the phenomena which the Cholera has presented in the north of Europe. ‘ In our number before last we published a letter from Dr. Barry, in which he says — “Two physicians, (Ger¬ mans,) Ysenbeck and Brailow, stated publicly and firmly yesterday, in my presence, at the Medical Council, that during the preceding eleven days they had treated, at the Custom House Hospital, thirty Cholera patients, of whom they had not lost one. They give two table spoonfuls of common table salt, in six ounces of hot water, at once, and one table spoonful of a similar mixture cold every hour afterward. They always begin by bleeding.” A similar treatment has also been tried with success at Warsaw, by Mr. Scarle; — and most of our readers will recollect, that this is neither more or less than the practice which has been so warmly recommended by Dr. Stevens, not only in yellow fever, but also (reasoning from analogy) in the cure of all other malignant diseases and after reprint¬ ing the first paragraph from the paper which had been read at the College of Physicians, the editor observes: — ‘Now Dr. Stevens holds the saline materials of the blood to be the cause of its red color, and certain other properties essential to life. He does not, indeed, identify the saline with the coloring matter; on the contrary, he considers the latter as a mere animal dye, which is naturally black, but which possesses the peculiar properly of striking a red color with a solution of the neutral salts. He also considers the saline ingredients in the blood as the cause of its fluidity, on the assumed ground that the fibrin and the albumen
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