Thomsonian practice of midwifery : and treatment of complaints peculiar to women and children / By J.W. Comfort, M.D.
- Comfort, J. W. (John W.)
- Date:
- 1845
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Thomsonian practice of midwifery : and treatment of complaints peculiar to women and children / By J.W. Comfort, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.
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![Super-carbonate of soda, salseratus, soot tea, lime-water, pre- pared chalk, and purified or refined charcoal, are used to correct acidity of the stomach. The charcoal is also a valuable remedy for costiveness. American valerian [Thomson's nerve powder] scullcap, sca- bious, clivers, pipsissawa, pennyroyal, juniper berries, oil of ju- niper, balsam copaiva, myrrh, cubebs, ditany, extract of dande- lion, conserve of hollyhock, No. 3, or canker pills, catnip, prick- ly ash, burdock root, yellow dock root, slippery elm, Ward's paste. These and various other articles are recommended chiefly as auxiliary remedies. The few general Thomsonian remedies—lobelia, cayenner composition and bayberry, with the aid of the vapour bath, are all the remedies that are really necessary in the treatment of disease, at least until the disease is overcome, and then bitters are appropriate. In chronic cases of disease, however, it is not so easy always to point out the remedies best suited to the case, and they frequently require to be changed; still, even in these cases, we are not under the necessity of going out of the pale of Thomsonism. SECRET NOSTRUMS. The community are greatly imposed upon by secret nostrums in the form of Indian remedies, vegetable pills, dyspeptic reme- dies, cough balsams, certain cures for consumption, etc. When a person gets well while taking some secret nostrum, it is pro- bably published in the newspapers as a remarkable cure, while the hundreds that are not benefited, and even injured, are of course unnoticed. And again those nostrum venders who pay the most to the proprietors of newspapers for advertisements, are now and then favoured with a puff from the editor, and in this way peo- ple are induced to buy nostrums, and oftentimes the tone of the stomach is so much impaired by pills and purgatives in other forms that it never regains a healthy condition, when time and patience alone and proper regimen and diet, would in many in- stances have been sufficient for the recovery of the health.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2102909x_0220.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
