A letter to the president and fellows of the Royal College of Physicians, in relation to the evidence, cited in their late report, on the treatment of epidemic cholera / by Joseph Ayre.

  • Joseph Ayre
Date:
1854
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to the president and fellows of the Royal College of Physicians, in relation to the evidence, cited in their late report, on the treatment of epidemic cholera / by Joseph Ayre. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of calomel every five or ten minutes, with one or two drops of laudanum with the first few doses of the drug, and in perseveringly continuing the same dose at the same intervals of time, until the symp¬ toms of collapse become materially subdued. This plan I have uninteruptedly pursued from the first to the last patient I ever attended in the disease, amounting to a very large number; and my reason for giving the small dose of the calomel was, that large ones were rejected from the stomach, and I repeated it frequently because it was small, and that thus the action of the medicine on the stomach might be constantly kept up in a disease whose duration is to be counted by minutes. I gave the minute dose of the opiate to enable the stomach to retain the calomel, and prevent its too early descent into the bowels, and not as a sedative. I abstained from the use of all auxiliary treatment in my early cases, that I might not compromise the conclusion at which I desired to arrive—as to the remedial power of calomel; and I have uniformly avoided them since, because I believed that calomel in doses small and fre¬ quently repeated was an effectual remedy. I have never given stimulants in any form, because I found them not to be necessary, and believed they would prove pernicious wThen, from the long duration of the collapse, and the delay in commencing the treat¬ ment, consecutive fever might be feared ; and, lastly, I fixed no other limit to the quantity of calomel which I gave than that which the duration of the collapse prescribed, having become early assured
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