Technique of massage of the stomach / by Gustaf Norstrom.

  • Norstrom, Gustaf.
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Technique of massage of the stomach / by Gustaf Norstrom. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    assimilated, and the best proof that we may give thereof is the diminution of the quantity of faeces, a diminution that is great enough to frighten some patients.1 Another advantage of performing massage two or three hours after the meal is the avoidance of the rippling noise which is so unpleasant to the patient and which Is almost always produced, especially if there is the slightest dilatation of the organ. These conditions fulfilled and the patient being placed in the dorsal decubitus, massage is at first performed from the cardia toward the pylorus for a few minutes, as in the old method; then the position is altered, the patient lying on the right side, and petrissage is performed on the stomach with both hands, alternately, from the pylorus toward the cardia, dwelling for some time on each of the regions of the organ as one does for the colon in cases of constipation. Generally, after a few sittings the patient gets accustomed to the treatment and one is able to mass easily. In very un¬ favorable cases, that is, when the teguments or the organ are very sensitive or the patient very pusillanimous, one is obliged to use great gentleness during the first five or six stances in order to let the unpleasant contusional sensation pass away before beginning the definite petrissage. The amelioration most often Shows itself by the return of the appetite, then follows very rapidly the disappearance of the spontaneous rippling, the eructations, the gastric pains, the cephalalgy, the vertigo, etc., in a word, all the symptoms of gastric affections. The sittings ought to last about a quarter of an hour when one has to treat the stomach exclusively, but most often the different diseases of this organ are attended with constipation and it is necessary to mass the intestine at the same time. 1 Last year an elderly lady got so frightened at the diminution of her stools that she asked me if a part of her faecal matters did not hide itself somewhere in her belly.