Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 1: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the AuthorRush, Benjamin
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Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 1: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the Author
Rush, Benjamin
Medicine; Yellow fever -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia
3. Such occupations or professions as require constant labour or
exercise in the open air, in all kinds of weather, may easily be
chosen for a young man who, either from hereditary predisposition, or
an accidental affection of the lungs, is in danger of falling into a
consumption. In this we should imitate the advice given by some wise
men, always to prefer those professions for our sons, which are the
least favourable to the corrupt inclinations of their hearts. For
example, where an undue passion for money, or a crafty disposition,
discover themselves in early life, we are directed to oppose them by
the less profitable and more disinterested professions of divinity or
physic, rather than cherish them by trade, or the practice of the law.
Agreeably to this analogy, weakly children should be trained to the
laborious, and the robust, to the sedentary occupations. From a neglect
of this practice, many hundred apprentices to taylors, shoemakers,
conveyancers, watchmakers, silversmiths, and mantua-makers, perish every
year by consumptions.
4. There is a case recorded by Dr. Smollet, of the efficacy of the cold
bath in a consumption; and I have heard of its having been used with
success, in the case of a negro man, in one of the West-India islands.
To render this remedy useful, or even safe, it will be necessary to
join it with labour, or to use it in degrees that shall prevent the
alternation of the system with vigour and debility; for I take the cure
of consumption ultimately to depend upon the simple and constant action
of tonic remedies. It is to be lamented that it often requires so much
time, or such remedies to remove the inflammatory diathesis, which
attends the first stage of consumption, as to reduce the patient too low
to make use of those tonic remedies afterwards, which would effect a
radical cure.
If it were possible to graduate the tone of the system by means of
a scale, I would add, that to cure consumption, the system should
be raised to the highest degree of this scale. Nothing short of an
equilibrium of tone, or a free and vigorous action of every muscle and
viscus in the body, will fully come up to a radical cure of this disease.
In regulating the diet of consumptive patients, I conceive it to be
as necessary to feel the pulse, as it is in determining when and in
what quantity to draw blood. Where inflammatory diathesis prevails,
a vegetable diet is certainly proper; but where the patient has
_escaped_, or _passed_ this stage of the disease, I believe a vegetable
diet alone to be injurious; and am sure a moderate quantity of animal
food may be taken with advantage.
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