Remarks on the Uses of some of the Bazaar Medicines and Common Medical Plants of India: With a full index of diseases, indicating their treatment by these and other agents procurable throughout India; to which are added directions for treatment in cases of drowning, snake-bites &c.Waring, Edward John
Science
Remarks on the Uses of some of the Bazaar Medicines and Common Medical Plants of India: With a full index of diseases, indicating their treatment by these and other agents procurable throughout India; to which are added directions for treatment in cases of drowning, snake-bites &c.
Waring, Edward John
Botany, Medical -- India; Materia medica, Vegetable -- India; Medicinal plants -- India; Traditional medicine -- India
_Tetanus_ (_Lock-jaw_). Try Datura (131). The treatment of Tetanus by
smoking GUNJAH (INDIAN HEMP), introduced by Assistant-Surgeon A. C.
Khastagir (_Indian Medical Gazette_, August 1878), promises to supersede
all others in India if it were only from the fact that the remedy is
procurable at a trifling cost in every bazaar throughout the country,
and that its application is simple in the extreme. A pipe, _hookah_, or
Indian hubble-bubble, charged with about 15 grains of dried Gunjah
leaves, alone or mixed with twice as much tobacco leaves, is to be kept
in readiness, and immediately on the indication of a spasm coming on it
is to be lighted and handed to the patient with directions to smoke. By
the time this is finished, or even before, the spasm relaxes, the eyes
close, and the patient falls into a kind of slumber. The pipe is again
charged, and kept in readiness for the approach of the next spasm, when
the process is repeated with similar results. In this way the drug is
administered day and night uninterruptedly, during which the irritation
of the nervous system slowly but steadily yields to its influence. Mr.
K. details five cases successfully treated in this manner. No auxiliary
medicine, beyond an occasional purgative if required; no solid food
allowed; milk and soup the only nutriments. This treatment is further
advocated by Dr. J. C. Lucas, of the Bombay Medical Service (_Med. Times
and Gaz._, February 21, 1880). The advantages which he claims for it
are—(1) the spasms are cut short; (2) they reappear gradually at longer
and longer intervals; (3) they gradually become not only less frequent,
but less severe; this (4) saves the patient's vital powers, and thus, by
prolonging life and preventing death, life, which would otherwise have
succumbed, may eventually be saved. He places the dose at from eight to
thirty grains, commencing with the smaller dose, and gradually
increasing it as tolerance is established. He insists, properly, on the
vast importance of quiet, _perfect quiet_, in a pure air (without too
much breeze or draught), and he directs that the patient should on _no
account be disturbed to take his food or for any other reason_, for
which opportunity is to be taken when the patient awakes of his own
accord, or from the recurrence of spasm. In the case of very young
children, this mode of treatment cannot, of course, be carried out, but
in all others it seems well worthy of a fair trial.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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