Lectures on Surgery (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. DELIRIUM TREMENS. It would seem at first as though there should be some excuse for including this in the surgical course. The excuse in my mind is that we have so much to do with it in all surgical cases, and that it is especially in surgical cases that it complicates the treatment, and leads to so many bad results. By delirium tremens we mean a peculiar condition of the nervous system produced by the use of alcohol, and, perhaps, by its too sudden abandonment. I would not, however, confine the evils of the effects of alcohol in surgical cases merely to this disease. Yon all, I think, must notice as you go on through hospital practice and sights that the patients who do not drink do a great deal better than those who do, in every form of accident and injury. The calmness of body and mind is with the temperate. The resistance to shock is with the temperate. The ability to respond to stimulants promptly is with the temperate, for the intemperate have already used up their powers of vital resistance; they have become accustomed to the overuse of stimulants, and they do not respond readily to them, and you do not get the benefit from stimulants which you expect. An illustration of this is seen in etherization; as we said before, it takes a great quantity of ether, and laborious and excitable and protracted etherization, to overcome the drunkard, and make him go to sleep; whereas the patient who is temperate, as a rule, takes it calmly, succumbs to it easily and recovers promptly. There can be no doubt, I think, that the continuous use of alcohol has a deleteriouseffect on the tissues, hardens them, thickens them, prevents absorption as readily, dilates the veius, leads to a slow and labored circulation; in that way delays absorption, and, moreover, produces finally som...