Lectures on sulphate of quinia : delivered in the regular course of the medical department of the University of Michigan / by A.B. Palmer.
- Alonzo Benjamin Palmer
- Date:
- 1858
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Lectures on sulphate of quinia : delivered in the regular course of the medical department of the University of Michigan / by A.B. Palmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)
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![subject, I shall express to you no decided opinions which have not been tested and confirmed by my own experience and ob- servation. But, independent of this, the intrinsic importance of the subject requires me to ask your particular attention to what may be said upon it, as I shall urge upon you also to give special attention to other leading therapeutical agents, such as opium, mercury, cathartics, and the hygienic remedies. The most important therapeutical power of Quinine is that by which it controls diseases manifesting in their course marked periodicity; — and hence I have placed it under the head of Antiperiodics. [I shall here introduce some remarks which were made on the general subject of Antiperiodics, introductory to a con- deration of the particular articles of that class.] Antiperiodics are medicines designed to remove the element of periodicity in diseases, or which are given for the purpose of interrupting those diseases which are marked by decided par- oxysms, occurring, or tending to occur, at stated and regular intervals of time. Nearly all diseases are, to a greater or less extent, periodical—that is, they have periods, commonly diurnal, more or less perfectly manifested, of exacerbations and abate- ments. There has been no little discussion among medical writers as to the cause of this general tendency to periodicity in diseases, and many ingenious, and several plausible, theories have been proposed. I could not stop to enumerate all these hypotheses, extending back, as they do, to the period when almost every thing in Pathology was accounted for by the quali- ties, changings, and mixings of the four humors, even if I could now call them all to mind. It should be remembered that in health there is a rhythm of the vital processes—there are periods of comparative activity and repose of all the organs and func- tions, and the diurnal habits of sleeping and waking, of labor and repose, of food and abstinence, and the like, give a tendency to diurnal fluctuations in diseased actions. In some diseases, the morbid cause probably operates rythmically; in others, the periodicity in symptoms depends upon the changed function of](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21145283_0018.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
