On the action, use and value of oxygen in the treatment of various diseases, otherwise incurable or very intractable.

  • Birch, S. B. (Scholes Butler)
Date:
1868
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the action, use and value of oxygen in the treatment of various diseases, otherwise incurable or very intractable. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    servation of the fact. Hence a sufficient number of well-recognised facts, proving the utility of a remedy, must be considered sufficient reason for employing it, especially when it can be shown that it meets emergencies for which we cannot provide an equally effective substitute. I might rest my advocacy of oxygen as a therapeutic on facts alone; but we have^ in using this agent, scientific light to aid us. Physiology teaches the nature of its action on the organism, and thus elevates it to a higher scale in medicine than the major part of our remedies. There is not anything new in suggesting, though extreme difficulty in re-introducing, oxygen as a remedy. My professional brethren must nearly all be aware that towards the close of the last, and during the first part of the present century, it was used by Drs. Beddoes, Hill, Thornton, and several other physicians with signal success.* Some of my respected medical brethren have joined issue with me upon the presumed too-rapidly- destructive metamorphosis of tissue when oxygen is employed in exhausting diseases. Others have met me with the strongly-expressed opinion that it “must be an injurious stimulant or excitant to the * Upon reflection, I now omit Dr. Riadore’s name. His refer- ence to oxygen was of a most trivial character, but I desired to be strictly just, and carried that feeling somewhat too far in his case. [Second edition.]