Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 1: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the AuthorRush, Benjamin
History
Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 1: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the Author
Rush, Benjamin
Medicine; Yellow fever -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia
Tetanus, from all its causes, has nearly the same premonitory symptoms.
These are a stiffness in the neck, a disposition to bend forward, in
order to relieve a pain in the back, costiveness, a pain about the
external region of the stomach, and a disposition to start in sleep. In
this feeble state of the disease, an emetic, a strong dose of laudanum,
the warm bath, or a few doses of bark, have often prevented its being
completely formed. When it has arisen from a wound, dilating it if small
or healed, and afterwards inflaming it, by applying to it turpentine,
common salt, corrosive sublimate, or Spanish flies, have, in many
hundred instances, been attended with the same salutary effects.
The disease I have said is seated in the muscles, and, while they are
preternaturally excited, the blood-vessels are in a state of reduced
excitement. This is evident from the feebleness and slowness of the
pulse. It sometimes beats, according to Dr. Lining, but forty strokes
in a minute. By stimulating the wound, we not only restore the natural
excitement of the blood-vessels, but we produce an inflammatory
diathesis in them, which abstracts morbid excitement from the muscular
system, and, by equalizing it, cures the disease. This remedy I
acknowledge has not been as successfully employed in the West-Indies as
in the United States, and that for an obvious reason. The blood-vessels
in a warm climate refuse to assume an inflammatory action. Stimuli hurry
them on suddenly to torpor or gangrene. Hence the danger and even fatal
effects of blood-letting, in the fevers which affect the natives of the
islands, a few hours after they are formed. But widely different is
the nature of wounds, and of the tension of the blood-vessels, in the
inhabitants of northern countries. While Dr. Dallas deplores the loss
of 49 out of 50 affected with tetanus from wounds, in the West-India
islands, I am sure I could mention many hundred instances of the
disease being prevented, and a very different proportion of cures being
performed, by inflaming the wounds, and exciting a counter _morbid_
action in the blood-vessels.
When the disease is the effect of fever, the same remedies should be
given, as are employed in the cure of that fever. I have once unlocked
the jaw of a woman who was seized at the same time with a remitting
fever, by an emetic, and I have heard of its being cured in a company
of surveyors, in whom it was the effect of an intermittent, by large
doses of bark. When it accompanies malignant fever, hysteria, or gout,
the remedies for those forms of disease should be employed. Bleeding
was highly useful in it in a case of yellow fever which occurred in
Philadelphia in the year 1794.
When it is produced by the suppression of perspiration by means of cold,
the warm bath and sweating medicines have been found most useful in it.
Nature has in one instance pointed out the use of this remedy, by curing
the disease by a miliary eruption on the skin[49].
[49] Burserus.
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