On the subject of priority in the medication of the larynx and trachea / by Horace Green.

  • Horace Green
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the subject of priority in the medication of the larynx and trachea / by Horace Green. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    a sufficient degree of liberality to prevent the condemnation of a practice, or, indeed, the denial of its practicability, for no better reason than that they do not understand it themselves.’1* Besides Sir Charles Bell, there are several other English surgeons for whom some credit has been claimed by foreign writers, for the revival of this practice, since Mr. Bell’s day. Mr. Vance, a naval surgeon of eminence in London, was in the habit of employing topically a solution of nitrate of silver, in the treatment of laryngeal diseases. Mr. Vance does not appear to have left any record of his labors on this subject; but from the great success he met with in practice, Mr. Hastings thinks he must have applied the solution both to the larynx and trachea; although medical men, who were intimately acquainted with his mode of practice, have informed Mr. Hastings “ that he never introduced the solution of the nitrate of silver below the glottis, but contented himself with sponging the back of the throat.”f Dr. Stokes, in his work on “ Diseases of the Chest,” remarks: “ The best means of applying these caustic lotions is that practised by Mr. Cusack: a brush of lint, of the requisite size, is sewed on the end of the finger of a glove, which is then drawn on the index finger of the right hand. The patient should be made to gargle with warm water; and the lint, being dipped into the solution, can be at once, and with great facility, carried to any part of the pharynx, and even to the rima.”J After the death of Mr. Vance, no one was found, Mr. Hastings says, to take up the treatment which had proved so successful in the hands of this surgeon, and it remained en¬ tirely neglected in London, until revived by himself, after the publication of my work in 1846. This, then, constitutes a brief history of what has been done in Europe, by those who have employed the local application of caustics, in the treat¬ ment of diseases of the air-passages. By this, it will be seen, that no one had succeeded, or claimed to have succeeded, in passing the sponge-probang, wet with the caustic solution, into the larynx, until after the announcement in my work, published in 1846, that “it is an operation which, in the treat¬ ment of laryngeal disease, I have been in the practice of performing every day for several years.” Previous to that time, the medication of the larynx and trachea by cauterizations, in the numerous forms of disease of these organs, had only been ventured upon by a few individuals in Europe; and in the practice of these, it was limited to the “ sponging of the back of the throat,” or, at the most, to the application of the solution to the aperture of the glottis, or, by pressure of the sponge, to the discharge of the fluid into the larynx. In * Op. Citat. Introduction, p. xii. f Op. Citat. Introduction, p. viii. f A Treatise on Diseases of the Chest, page 258.
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