First principles of medicine / [Archibald Billing].

  • Billing, Archibald, 1791-1881.
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: First principles of medicine / [Archibald Billing]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tion, instead of attributing them to the true cause, morbid sensibility; and, on that account, not only resorting to low diet and antiphlogistic medicines, but also to frequent bleeding by leeches or other- wise, which makes the patient more hysterical, and increases morbid sensibility. I have seen a young female who had been re- duced by diet and medicines, including salivation, for a cough and loss of voice, which was attributed by several practitioners, some of them of note, to chronic laryngitis, but which was nothing more than what I call an hysterical cough, and which gave way to tonic medicines and a generous diet, with exer- cise in the open air—the patient having been un- necessarily shut up for nearly two years from the air of heaven and human society. There is no more common error than that of excluding the air from patients who have that kind of cough called spas- modic asthma, especially those cases which depend on chronic (Laennec’s dry) catarrh, and which I find are curable much more quickly provided the patient be sent out to take exercise in the open air even in winter. The lungs are provided by nature to admit cold air without irritation, but not over-heated air after being out in the cold: the most frequent cause of catarrh in winter is going to the fire and breathing hot air after having been out, the pre- judicial effect of which is exactly analogous to that of putting the hands to the fire after being out in the cold, which produces chilblain ; the same thing occasions a degree of chilblain in the fauces or larynx. ‘The cold air is wrongfully accused, and