The art of natural sleep : $b with definite directions for the wholesome cure of sleeplessness : illustrated by cases treated in Northampton and elsewhere — John Shaqi
The art of natural sleep : $b with definite directions for the wholesome cure of sleeplessness : illustrated by cases treated in Northampton and elsewherePowell, Lyman P. (Lyman Pierson)
Religion
The art of natural sleep : $b with definite directions for the wholesome cure of sleeplessness : illustrated by cases treated in Northampton and elsewhere
Powell, Lyman P. (Lyman Pierson)
Emmanuel movement; Insomnia; Sleep
For insomnia there is no specific known to medicine. While the good
family doctor may correct digestive disturbances, banish for the time
neuralgic pains, modify arterial disease, relieve with the oculist’s
assistance eye-strain, and through the dentist remove the cause of
dental lesions, sometimes insomnia persists long after the physical
cause has disappeared. I have had in my clinic one case of chronic
sleeplessness caused by a headache which appeared incurable though the
cause of the headache and insomnia alike had vanished years before.
Drugs which induce sleep induce it merely for the time. Doctor Caillé
in his large experience has found morphia invaluable for the inhibiting
of pain or of severe dyspnœa, chloral and the bromides useful in cases
of visceral neuralgia, codein and urethan in arteriosclerosis, and
in pulmonary tuberculosis, where beer and porter failed to bring the
longed-for sleep, dionin, trional, and hyoscin. But in ordinary cases
of insomnia, where the cause is evidently more psychical than physical,
he is inclined to turn rather to suggestion in one form or another.[7]
Drugs are sure to make a difference in the morning. The dulness and
depression which they leave behind, in spite of all the claims of
those who put on the market their proprietary hypnotics, offset to
some extent the artificial sleep they have the night before produced.
Sometimes they fill the mind for days with morbid fancies and with
dangerous obsessions. Dr. J. Madison Taylor describes in some detail
the case of a lunatic under his care who developed homicidal tendencies
as a consequence of the administration of large doses of bromide, and
who lost the same the moment the bromide was withdrawn from him.[8] On
credible authority I am informed that there is among the alienists a
growing disposition, on this account, to give no drugs at all to induce
sleep in patients in the higher class of hospitals for the insane.
Morphia is not only no specific; it sometimes causes both a mental and
a physical depression worse than the insomnia it would relieve. In my
clinic I have one woman from whom morphia, administered to relieve
acute pain, took away the power to sleep at all, and for years she
stoically bore her pain rather than resort to morphia, until last
winter she found in the Emmanuel treatment immediate and unfailing
relief from pain, followed by sound sleep, which has only at rare
intervals been interrupted in months past.
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