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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    is by what Berthollet called disposing affinity, a force exemplified in the rapid action of phosphuret of lime on water, though neither phosphorus nor lime decompose that fluid. Thus also, the two elementary constituents of water readily exchange their liquid binary union for other combinations of a more complex nature, when invited by the various elements of organic nature and the force of elasticity. But if we present to the same water any substance which has a strong attraction for it as a liquid compound, and none for its aerescent constituents, then the quiescent affinity gains such an ascendency, that the divellent affinity, though excited even by the contact of vegetable and animal products of a putrefactive kind, is no longer effective, or so feebly so, that the organic matter changes very slowly indeed. This appears to be the principle on which sugar, and various neutro-saline matters preserve or cure, as it is called, vegetables, butchers’ meat, &c.’ I may observe, that during the present irruption of Cholera in the prison at Cold-Bath Fields, one of the prisoners was attacked who had been laboring under dropsy for some time. He was getting rapidly into a state of collapse, when its progress was arrested by very large doses of the non-purgative salts. He is now out of danger, as far as relates to Cholera, and the fluid in the abdomen has entirely disappeared.
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