Bowels, Lax.--A teaspoonful of lemon juice (freshly expressed), along
with hot water and sugar, will often relieve where the bowels are
acting excessively. For infants in diarrhoea a mixture of honey and
lemon juice is an excellent cure, and has been most successful in our
experience. Avoid brandy and alcohol generally.
Bowels, Locking of.--Sometimes when one part of the bowels is much more
active than another, it passes into that other, and they become
_locked_, like a stocking half turned inside out. This causes dreadful
pain, and if not soon relieved is fatal. Purgatives are of no use, and
usually make matters worse. A surgical operation in very skilful hands
will relieve, and must be quickly performed when necessary.
In cases in which the one part of the bowels has not yet gone far into
the other, nothing more is required than a cold cloth gently pressed
over the parts. We have seen relief set in on the fifth or sixth change
of such a cloth, when nothing else was used whatever. When a hot bag,
or bran poultice, has been put on the back, and cold cloths
persistently changed over the bowels, the whole matter has been put to
rights, and natural motion of the bowels has been had within an hour
after the applications have been begun.
[Illustration: Interior of small intestine.]
There is, however, a stronger measure than merely heating the back and
cooling the front in this way. The patient may be put at once into a
sitting bath or small tub, and a panful of cold water poured or dashed
on to the bowels; they then contract so powerfully, and shorten
themselves so much, that all invagination, as it is called, is made to
cease instantly. We should be disposed to try the mildest method in the
first instance, unless the case is one in which the lock in the bowels
had just taken place. Then it might be well to dash the pailful of
water on so as to put all right at once, and afterwards simply to apply
such remedies as would tend to prevent a recurrence of the evil.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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