The experience and opinions of medical men on the value of pancreatic emulsion and pancreatine as remedies in wasting diseases / [collected] by Savory and Moore.

Date:
[1871?]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The experience and opinions of medical men on the value of pancreatic emulsion and pancreatine as remedies in wasting diseases / [collected] by Savory and Moore. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    general symptoms and physical signs may disappear com¬ pletely, and that even extensive excavations in the pulmonary tissue may heal up and cicatrize.” To improve the faulty nutrition, * it is of all things important that fatty matters should be assimilated in large quantities.’* “ Until a short time ago, cod-liver oil was without doubt the best medicine we possessed, and that it is a most valuable one, is, I think, an undoubted fact; far superior to other animal fats and oils which have been tried, such as cream, butter, neatsfoot oil, etc.; fat meats, as pork, mutton chops, bacon, etc. But when we try to administer cod-liver oil we are met by a difficulty which it is often impossible to over¬ come, that is, to enable the patient to take it; for if we can overcome the distaste to fats of all kinds which usually exists, and induce our patient to try it, in many cases we find that the stomach will reject even very small quantities of the oil, and although in some cases it may at first be retained, yet, after a short time, it will be rejected. In many instances we can by no means overcome this intolerance of the stomach. That this is not due to the excessive acidity of the strumous dyspepsia, present in nearly all tuberculous patients, is, I think, proved by alkalies so signally failing to procure the retention of the oil. “ If we examine, then, the effects of cod-liver oil, we find that in some it is retained, and acts most beneficially, even per¬ forming a cure. In some it is retained, and acts beneficially for a time, but then its good effects cease, and the patient gradually gets worse. In others it is retained for a short time, and then rejected before it does much good ; and in others it is not retained at all. There are a few cases in which the disgust to oil is so great that even an attempt to take it cannot be made. “What is wanted, therefore, is a remedy which will aid the good effects of cod-liver oil in those cases in which it is retained, and which will supply its place in those in which the oil is rejected, and (as in phthisis it is necessary to succeed in getting a large quantity of oleaginous food assimilated) will educate the stomach to retain cod-liver oil * Atkin’s “Practice of Medicine,” vol. ii., p. 230.
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