A treatise on the nature and causes of stammering : with an exposition of the best methods of cure, medical, surgical, and educational / By a physician.
- Date:
- 1843
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A treatise on the nature and causes of stammering : with an exposition of the best methods of cure, medical, surgical, and educational / By a physician. Source: Wellcome Collection.
61/82 page 51
![became severely affected with stammering' without any assignable cause. Pie was shown to two or three phy¬ sicians, and a strong purgative was recommended, more on account of the plethoric habit of the child, than with any specific view. Its effects, however, were so benefi¬ cial, as reg-arded the impediment, that it was repeated several times, and found of equal benefit as at first. The stammer, however, would recur after some time, and would require the exhibition of aperients, which, after the evacuation of morbid matters from the intestinal canal, invariably relieved the vocal impediment. It was, at length, determined to combine diet and regimen with the occasional use of aperients, for the purpose of keeping down the plethora, and maintaining a healthy action of the bowels, which together appeared to be the immediate cause of the stammer. The boy was placed on vegetable diet, and this was so restricted that the plethora was diminished, but not to such an extent as to affect his health and strength By these means the disorder was kept at bay for eight years. When in his twelfth year, and apparently free from impediment, he was sent to a public school, but there the complaint recurred, was unu¬ sually obstinate, and required “ a long and severe course of purgatives, which, however, was finally successful.” From this to the time of Dr. Bostock’s writing, when the patient had reached his fifteenth year, the affection was so . slight as to be scarcely perceptible. Calomel and jalap, followed by Epsom salts, were the medicines usually employed. On two or three occasions, flight salivation was unintentionally produced,but it was not observed that this exerted any manifest effect on the ] impediment. This appears severe treatment, and such as would, per¬ haps, not often be submitted to, until other means had failed ; but the case seems to have been unusually obsti-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2930040x_0061.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
