Thirty years of therapeutic progress : an address at the Annual Meeting of the Bath and Bristol Branch of the British Medical Association / by John Kent Spender.

  • Spender, John Kent, 1829?-1916.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Thirty years of therapeutic progress : an address at the Annual Meeting of the Bath and Bristol Branch of the British Medical Association / by John Kent Spender. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    or citrate of caffeine; infra-orbital neuralgia with croton-chloral; dental pain with gelseminum sempervirens; and lumbago with actsea racemosa. I doubt, however, whether any of these new medicines act with even an approach to the certainty with which quinine cures supra-orbital pain, the most rhythmical of all neur- algias. In the application of Faradic electricity to the alleviation of pain, the skin should be dry, and we should use dry conductors. What an improvement has taken place in the therapeutic con- duct of those early stages of mental disorder which come under our care as general practitioners, before experts are called in. When to give opium and when to abstain from it; the particular utilities of chloral, of the bromides with Indian hemp, and of digi- talis with prussic acid; and the really remarkable properties of the alkaloid hyoscyamia:— are parts of the great therapeutic movement of the last thirty years. I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Todd's famous lectures on Delirium at King's-College Hos- pital in 1850 and 1851, and his teaching bore immediate fruit in the altered treatment of a condition which had been supposed to denote acute (or sthenic) inflammation of the brain. To feed delirium, and to support the patient's strength through it, soon become true and wholesome doctrine : and it was, so to speak, only another doctrine of the same school to insist upon the ad- ministration of a very large quantity of food as a substantial part of the therapeusis of nearly all cerebro-spinal diseases. ^ I recollect a paper by a distinguished physician, some time in 1863 or 1864, plead- ing for the administration of cod-liver oil, cream, and butter, as a matter of physiological common sense in the management of neural- gia, because they supply what is wanting in the nutrition of the cere- bro-spinal system. How much more reasonable than the vast apparatus of empirical stuff handed down from our grandfathers ! Dr. Hughes Bennett used to tell his clinical class that two of the main causes of tuberculosis are the dearness of butter, and the abundance of pastry-cooks. It is a perpetual homage to the k An unquestionable scepticism is spreading over tlie profession about li-Iectricity in every branch of its therapeutic worlc, owing perhaps to the iniuchcious advocacy of its friends. ^ v uie / For illustrations of this point, see Dr. Blandford's Leciurts on Insanity.
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