An essay on the relation between respiratory and circulating functions / by Charles Hooker ... ; read at the annual New Haven County Meeting of the Connecticut Medical Society, April, 12, 1838 ; republished from the Boston medical and surgical journal.

  • Charles Hooker
Date:
1838
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay on the relation between respiratory and circulating functions / by Charles Hooker ... ; read at the annual New Haven County Meeting of the Connecticut Medical Society, April, 12, 1838 ; republished from the Boston medical and surgical journal. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    by bleeding, which should be stopped as soon as faintness is induced, or the blood assumes a florid, arterialized appearance ; or, if possible, the disparity between the respiration and the pulse should be obviated by other means without bleeding. Antimony has a striking effect in diminishing the action of the heart, without producing a corresponding diminution of the respiration. In cases of inflammatory excitement it is useful in reducing arterial action, but it is particularly useful when such excitement is connected with defi- cient respiration. This affords one reason for its efficacy in pneumonitis, in which this remedy has been employed successfully in frequent large doses, by Ra- sori, Laennec, and other modern writers. In this disease, the refrigerant and alterative powers of the remedy have a favorable operation, in re- ducing and resolving inflammation ; but I have found it especially adapted to those cases in which the symptoms of deficient arlerializa- tion are prominent—when the respiration is infrequent and small, the skin livid, and the cerebral powers oppressed. Laennec observed pa- tients, in this disease, to recover their consciousness under the use of this remedy ; and he advises a persevering employment of it when the oppression is great, or the head affected. Dr. Thomas Marryatt, of Bristol, England, who published a treatise on therapeutics, in 1788, gave tartar emetic successfully in fever and in pleurisy. I have seen many instances, he observed, wherein a paper has been given every three hours [gr. x. in six papers], without the least sensible operation, either by sickness, stool, sweat, or urine ; and, though the patients had been unremittingly delirious for more than a week, with subsultus tendinum, and all the appearances of hastening death, they have perfectly recovered without any other medical aid—a clyster every other day excepted. Laennec found tartar emetic successful in hydrocephalus [cerebral congestion ?], supervening in the course of continued fever, and o-eneral debility —also in nervous affections connected with a con- gested state of the brain or spinal marrow. Dr. Graves employs this remedy in delirium tremens, and with very remarkable success at various periods of fever, but principally towards its termination. In the low stages of spotted fever, when the symp- toms denoted a combination of primary general nervous excitement with a secondary cerebral congestion, he found a combination of tartar emetic with laudanum very successful. This method, he observes,