Inhalation, a valuable remedy for pulmonary diseases : including laryngitis, or clergyman's sore throat, bronchitis, asthma, pulmonary irritation, and incipient consumption / by E. Halley McCoy.

  • McCoy, E. Halley.
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Inhalation, a valuable remedy for pulmonary diseases : including laryngitis, or clergyman's sore throat, bronchitis, asthma, pulmonary irritation, and incipient consumption / by E. Halley McCoy. 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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    Gentle Reader : I appear before you as the advocate of a new principle and a new method of treatment in Pulmonary Diseases ; and permit me to state in the outset, that the acquisition of Medical knowl- edge has been the one chief pursuit of my life. During the last twenty years my undivided attention has been directed to sub- jects of medical enquiry; so that if I have the reputation of knowing anything valuable, it is in connection with medical subjects; for I long since became convinced that it would not suit me to have many irons in the fire, notwithstanding the opinion of the very learned Adam Clark, that the more the better, provided we keep them moving—or, in other language, that in order to excel in any department of human knowledge, we must give it the undivided attention of our minds for a long series of years. Accordingly, I embarked in the Medical pro- fession with a fixed determination to exclude from my mind all extraneous subjects, and to give it my entire and undivided at- tention for life. Very early in my professional career, I was led to see the importance of the subject of Lung Diseases; for I found that they constituted a considerable proportion of the cases I was called upon to treat in private practice. The studious habits which I had long pursued, added to the hardships and exposures inseparable from the practice of medicine in the country, I soon found were rapidly impairing my physical constitution, which, together with an inherited hereditary predisposition to disease of the Lungs, soon pointed me out, as my friends supposed, as an early victim to this insidious destroyer of our race. I now- found myself constantly annoyed with a most harrassing cough, accompanied with occasional hoarseness, amounting sometimes to total aphonia. My pulse became accelerated with hurried respiration, and breathlessness on walking up hill. Yet, not- withstanding the warnings held out by these symptoms, I con- tinued, (recklessly to my own health,) to attend, day and night, to the duties of an extensive country practice; and it appeared to me that the people of my neighborhood almost invariably deferred sending for medical advice till in the night, which pet-