Mercury, blue pill and calomel; their use and abuse / By George G. Sigmond.

  • George Gabriel Sigmond
Date:
1840
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mercury, blue pill and calomel; their use and abuse / By George G. Sigmond. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    attends upon small-pox, occasionally upon gout, upon pregnancy, and even upon syphilis, where no mercury has been administered. Cases of salivation in all these states are to be found in our periodicals. In the twenty-sixth volume of the “ Medical and Surgical Journal ” will be read an instance of a lady who, for a fortnight, daily excreted two or three pints of viscid fluid. Two physicians were called in, during different periods of the affection ; they were equally unsuccessful in putting a stop to the salivation. Great care was taken to ascertain if any empirical remedy had been used, but there was not an}7 ground to believe that mercury had, in any shape, been taken. The diseased state yielded spontaneously, after all remedies had been given up. It has accompanied cynanche, paralysis, fever, bron- chitis—but there is a very striking difference in the symptoms that appear at the same time. There is no fcetor of the breath, no brassy taste, no spongi- ness of the gums. Dr. Bostock has, in the “ Medico-Chirurgical Transactions,” stated some experiments that he had made upon the saliva during mercurialisation. He had some years before analysed the fluid in its or- dinary state. The deductions to be drawn from his labours are, that the chemical constitution of the mercurial is, in many points, different from the common saliva, and this consists in the presence of a quantity of animal matter, possessing properties which resemble those of albumen in its uncoagulated state, or as it is found in the serum of the blood. The change would appear, he says, to consist essentially