Experiments to determine the precise effect of bromide of potassium in epilepsy / by T. S. Clouston.

  • Thomas Clouston
Date:
[1868]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Experiments to determine the precise effect of bromide of potassium in epilepsy / by T. S. Clouston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    [From the Journal of Mental Science for October, 1868.] EXPERIMENTS TO DETERMINE THE PRECISE EFFECT OF BKOMIDE OF POTASSIUM IN EPILEPSY. By T. S. CLOUSTON, M.D., Medical Superintendent of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Asylum, Carlisle. What asylum physician is there, who, in prescribing drags for his patients, has any approach to a feeling of certainty that these drags will have the effect he anticipates ? I re- fer more particularly to sedative drugs. Is there any such physician who will lay down a rale by which it may be known whether opium, hyoscyamus, Indian hemp, or bromide of potassium is the best medicine to be given in a particular case ? We have the statements of individual authors in re- gard to the right mode of giving some of these drags, but after all those are merely opinions founded on most limited observations, and lack the exactitude of research, and the numerical basis on which alone scientific truth is founded. It is no wonder that many of our specialty are sceptics in re- gard to medical treatment in insanity, when we generally find that the advocates of particular medicines, or of special modes of adniinistering them, merely give us selected cases. To anyone who has read something of the history of medicine, it seems a mere waste of words to advocate any new treatment of a disease, except it is clearly shown that the spirit of fairness and scientific impartiality has regulated the observations on which the would-be conclusions are founded. And as for discussing and quarrelling over the general question of the good effects of medical treatment versus moral treatment, surely the energy and acuteness so expended would be employed to far more purpose in observ- ing and recording facts, so that we might have something certain on which to base an argument on the one side or the other. And by observing facts, I do not mean vaguely noticing the course of certain random cases subjected to ^systematic and desultory treatment, and accepting the confused impression of the result left on the mind as scientific truth, on which an argument may be founded or a