Fat and blood : an essay on the treatment of certain forms of neurasthenia and hysteria.

Silas Weir Mitchell

Date:: 1884

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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fat and blood : an essay on the treatment of certain forms of neurasthenia and hysteria. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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here, however, to state the various disorders in which it has seemed to me applicable, and in which it has proved itself conspicuously service- able. As regards some of them, I shall try briefly to indicate why their peculiarities point it out as needful. There are, of course, numerous cases in which it becomes desirable to fatten and to make blood. In many of them these are easy tasks, and in some altogether hopeless. Persons who are re- covering healthfully from fevers, pneumonias, and other temporary maladies gather flesh and make blood readily, and we need only to help them by the ordinary tonics, careful feeding, and change of air in due season. It may not, however, be out of place to say here that when the convalescence from these maladies seems to be slower than is common, and ordinary tonics inefficient, massage and the use of electricity are not unimportant aids to- wards health, but in such cases require to be handled with an amount of caution which is less requisite in more chronic conditions of dis- ordered health. In other and fatal or graver maladies, such as, for example, advanced pulmonary phthisis, how-