Volume 1

Treatise on therapeutics / A. Trouseau and H. Pidoux.

  • Armand Trousseau
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Treatise on therapeutics / A. Trouseau and H. Pidoux. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    explained the success of M. Gendrin, who does not shrink from covering1 cme whole side of the chest with an enormous blister at the beginning and the height of a pleurisy or pneurnonia. The want of extension, in transpositive inflammation, is madegood by the intensity of the action. We need not despair of deriving a capillary bronchitis, though it be impossible to blister a surface as large as the out- spread bronchi, for we may by cantharides inflame the skin to a great depth and thus make intensity compensate for extension. Relative to the nature of the clisease.—lt is impossible to transfer a phlegmonous inflammation to another point, and the same is true of cer- tain spécifie inflammations. We may try in vain to drive away a syphili- tic chancre, or a diphtheritic angina with a blister. Dartres in the adult, and the rashes called gourmes [crusta lactea] in children, are in the same case. Blisters and issues are a standard remedy in gourmes and dartres; it is most important to study their influence upon these affections. Let us recall certain facts. An irritant application made to the skin often causes a general phleg- masia of that organ; a Burgundy pitch plaster, having caused the local development of a great number of vesicles, sometimes occasions a general eczema, at first acute, which may afterwards become chronic. The ap- plication of croton oil or mercurial ointment may, in certain cases, pro- duce the same accidents. But few years pass in a hospital with female patients, without an ex- plosion of eczema due to a badly dressed blister. In 1840 we had a female patient in the Hôpital Necker to whose thigh we ordered the ap- plication of a flying-blister to cure a rheumatisrn; it was dressed with gummy diachylon plaster. A few days later there appeared around the sore a vesicular éruption which soon invaded the whole surface of the body, causing high fever; this condition became gradually quieted, but was replaced by a pemphigus which lasted some months and required the long-continued use of sublimate baths. We lately applied to an old woman’s temples two ammoniacal blisters for temporo-facial neuralgia; thev were dressed with diachylon, and in a few days an eczema appeared on the forehead, and soon the face, neck, and arms were invaded, and the accidents were not calmed without great difficulty. This singular tendency to contract cutaneous phlegmasias, very rare in men, but a little less so in women, is common in children. How often hâve we seen, both in and out of hospitals, an acute, simple, or impetigi- nous eczema attack a poor chiIci after the application of a flying-blister to relieve pneurnonia? The affection is mostly chronic; and, considering that the children had previously no cutaneous troubles, we must admit that the blister was, if not the full and radical cause, at least the occa- sional cause of the manifestation of the disease. We may then State formally, that the blister often gives rise to “ gourmes.” Hence, as a préventive of such rashes, it often fails, and even frustrâtes its own end.