A treatise on Asiatic cholera / edited and prepared by Edmund Charles Wendt, in association with Drs. John C. Peters, Ely McClellan, John B. Hamilton, and Geo. M. Sternberg.

  • Wendt, Edmund Charles, 1857-1903.
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on Asiatic cholera / edited and prepared by Edmund Charles Wendt, in association with Drs. John C. Peters, Ely McClellan, John B. Hamilton, and Geo. M. Sternberg. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Gerstein Science Information Centre at the University of Toronto, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto.

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    Tisitecl Ly the doctors of any school, preferring to put their trust in cliarms and prayers to their various divinities, having from long experience had •quite as much reason for belief in the curative powers of one as of the other. He thinks it is not necessary to add the moral to the above. So long ago as 1805 Velpeau ' wrote as follows: It is not imjiossible that a notable number of cholera patients recover without remedies or specifics, and in spite of them; and the proof is that in all epidemics—in the violent one of 1833, as well as those of 1849 and 1854—more than ono?^ half of the cholera patients have recovered—have recover^-Jjy methods of treatment most opposed and various. Against such views, the unqualified acceptance of which would con- traindicate all medical interference, we maintain that accumulated clinical experience of an unimpeachable kind makes it appear extremely probable that the early stages of specific cholera are amenable to treatment. Dr. Leale'^ goes so far as to state that a very large proportion of even the severest cases of the disease may end in recovery if the proper medicinal treatment is early resorted to, and our profession can point with pride to its success in promoting a convalescence, or, at the early stage, in prevent- ing the violence of the disease from killing the sufferer. So that, while strongly deprecating blind interference, we nevertheless liold that the physician is not justified in merely folding his hands in re- signed inaction, in the face of this unpromising disease. Therefore when called upo7i to assume the charge of a case, even in the advanced stage of the attack, his counsel must not be withheld on the ground that nothing will avail. Death alone can command a cessation of honest effort to rescue the poor sufferer from his impending fate. Though fully convinced that his best endeavors are likely to prove futile, duty clearly demands that the physician do all in his power to assist the victim of cholera, in the same way that he would unhesitatingly assist a sufferer from any chronic form of incurable disease*. If he cannot stay the morbid process, he has at least some power to relieve suffering, assuage anxiety, and stimulate failing hope. He should be careful not to make the mistake of the good Kentucky doctor, Avho when grievously importuned to prescrilje for a cholera patient in apparently hopeless collapse, added to his prescription to be given every hour until he dies, and found his patient almost convalescent at his next visit. (Peters). The Treatment of Premonitory Diarrhcea and Cholerine.— Under this and the following heading we propose to sketch such a general plan of treatment as we conceive to be in accordance with our present knowledge of the disease, but which is above all things supported by rational clinical empiricism. This may be profitably supplemented by some account of particular methods or remedies that have received the sanction of authority, or whose claims to recognition have been warmly urged, more particularly during the recent European outbreak. In the prevalence of an epidemic, the safest rule in practice is to treat every case of diarrhoea, no matter how slight, with the utmost care, and on the princii:)le that it may be premonitory of a grave attack of Asiatic cholera. It goes without saying that the physician must studiously avoid causing unnecessary apprehension, or spreading alarm among his clientele. ' T/Abeille Medicale, November 13, 1865. 2 Tlie New York Medical Journal, February 21, 1885.