Illustrations of unconscious memory in disease : including a theory of alteratives / by Charles Creighton.

Date:
1886
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Illustrations of unconscious memory in disease : including a theory of alteratives / by Charles Creighton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    dyscrasia because we do not know their ultimate nature.* Dr. Brunton is equally clear about retaining them as a class, approximately denned : Custom has now excluded from this class all medicines which give external signs of vigorous action by purgation, sweat- ing or diuresis, and has restricted the term to such remedies as do their work slowly and secretly, but none the less effectually. In short, we use the word 'alteratives' very much as a cloak for our ignorance.5't And, to go back to a writer of the last century,! we find alterative action defined in the same negative terms, or by exclusion : Mercury in this way [small doses], although it produces no visible effect on a healthy person, often procures the removal of a diseased state. Its action, therefore, in such circumstances, is termed alterative. Now, when we come to examine more closely the list of drugs that are included by tradition or common consent in the alterative class, we shall find that the more conspicuous of them, if not the whole of them, have something positive in common. Antimony, arsenic, free phosphorus, iodine, mercury, zinc, copper and silver, are closely allied metalloids and metals. Bromine is by some regarded as an alterative, and by others as a neurotic. Again, iron, sulphur, and * H.C. Wood,«Treatise on Therapeutics,' 5th ed., Philad., 1883, p. 383. t T. Lauder Brunton, On the Action of Alteratives, ' Practitioner,' 1876, ii, 190. X Andrew Duncan, sen., ' Obs. on the Operation of Mercury in the Venereal Disease,' Edin., 1772, p. 19.
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