Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Lectures on the theory and practice of physic (Volume 1). 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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![and how this is to be treated. If the disease be severe or of consi- derable duration, you may look for paralysis of one or both of the upper extremities with a good deal of certainty. This part of the subject, 1 believe, more properly belongs to the consideration ot ner- vous affections, but, as I have gone so far into the treatment of painters' colic, I mav as well give the whole together. The para- lysis which follows this disease is different from that which is the result of apoplexy ; it is a neurosis of the passive kind, and to be treated as such. The patient, some time after the occurrence of the usual symptoms of colic from lead, begins to complain of weakness m his arm, he feels some difficulty in extending his fingers or raising his hand to his head, and then the symptoms become more marked. The arm and forearm become rapidly atrophied, the paralysis prin- cipally affects the extensors, while the flexors retain a considerable share of power, the fingers are bent, and the arm hangs by the side. Here the first thing you should do is to adopt the treatment recom- mended by Dr. Pemberton in his work on Abdominal Diseases, namely, to apply a splint to the inside of the forearm and hand, so as to counteract the preponderating influence of the flexors. Apply a splint to the forearm, wrap it up in flannel, and make the patient keep it supported by a sling. In this way you establish a kind of balance between the antagonist muscles, and place the extensors under favourable circumstances for bringing about a cure. If the patient has both arms affected, which is sometimes the case, change the splint from one arm to the other every second day, and continue this alteration until the cure is completed. You will next have recourse to the use of strychnia, one of the best remedies we possess in cases where the paralysis does not depend upon organic diseases of the brain. This is a remedy which is given with good effects even in cases of paralysis from apoplexy, luhere there is reason to suppose that absorption of the clot has taken place. In cases of apoplexy it can be employed only after some time, and where depletive measures have been sedulously put in force, but in a paralysis of this description you may begin with it and inert in the digestive tube. But practice has not sanctioned the theory. Mercury has been given by different physicians for lead colic, with a view to procure its sialagogue effects ; but salivation will not unlikely predispose more readily to palsy, and we are not, be- sides, reduced to the strait, in this case, of curing one kind of poison- ing by exciting another. But in some of the more unmanageable forms of the disease, attended with great irritability of stomach, lead itself, in the shape of sugar of lead, has been given by Dr. Harlan ami others m tins disease. Dr. II. combined the salt of lead with calomel and opium, as follows: — R. Cal. ppr., gr. v.; Pulv. opii, gr. ij.; Pulv. saeeii. sit., gr. iij. M, ft. pulv. : to be repeated every two hours until relief is obtained,— which, he tells us, is usually the after two or three powders have been taken. But, in this pre- scription, we cannot say what is due to the opium, and what to the sugar ot' lead, or the calomel. The same difficulty occurs in his prescription of sugar ot' lead with opium as an enema. — B.] vol. i.—30](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21156955_0359.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
