Observations on the origin and treatment of cholera and other pestilential diseases, and on the gaseous oxide of nitrogen as a remedy in such diseases; as also in cases of asphyxia from suffocation and drowning, and against the effects of narcotic poisons / [John Hancock].

  • Hancock, John, 1808-1890
Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the origin and treatment of cholera and other pestilential diseases, and on the gaseous oxide of nitrogen as a remedy in such diseases; as also in cases of asphyxia from suffocation and drowning, and against the effects of narcotic poisons / [John Hancock]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and grateful—-and it should be, in a great measure, regulated by the patient’s feelings. If rigors, or cold shivering, are induced, we recur to the warm or vapour bath. Such alternate employment of heat and cold has often effected very signal cures in those fatal distempers, as experience has fully proved — and that, too, in the worst forms of cholera and vomito prieto, in Venezuela and Spanish Guiana, in 1815-17. In cases attended with vis¬ ceral inflammation and fever, as well as those of collapse — repeated frictions, with capsicum and vinegar, over the region affected, or rather over the whole body, — have been attended with extraordinary success. To be more explicit — at the onset I give a dose, con¬ sisting of camphor and opium, two or three grains of each ; cathartic extract, calomel, sulphate of potash, of each ten grains ; the whole is ground down, formed into soft pills with Castile soap, and given to the patient in syrup or jelly,* * a case which came under my observation, when nothing else could rouse the patient — after having swallowed several ounces of laudanum — he, by these means, (and pepper frictions), recovered from a violent Traumatic Tetanus. Here, the Tetanus was removed by the opium, and the effects of opium by the cold affusion. This case was published in the Weekly Free Press of Feb. 2d, 1830. The method ought to be generally known, since this drug is so frequently resorted to for the purpose of suicide. * The above is the common dose, or that usually found to answer for : adults, — to be regulated, however, by the judgment of the medical at¬ tendant,— according to the urgency of the case, the habit of the patient, and, especially, by the effects produced ; — a rule, indeed, which should ever !i be carefully attended to in the administration of remedies. I have often 1 found still larger doses of opium to be necessary. A valuable addition is powdered capsicum, about four grains, but this is seldom found genuine 1 here: for persons accustomed to its use, the dose may be increased to six | or eight grains. Of all remedies ever tried in Spanish America, this recipe, however unchemical, has proved the most effectual, and not only in Cholera. i| but in vomito prieto. It has the advantage, too, of being retained on the jt stomach when other medicines are rejected, — by its anodyne, antispasmodic
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