New England Medical Monthly Volume 18, No. 9 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 Excerpt: ...opinion from even the most commanding authority cannot shake it. I have advised that the lancet be used promptly on the occurrence of convulsions, but this case illustrates the wonderful efficacy of venesection when its employment was deferred even to the eleventh hour. I have been informed by recent graduates in medicine, one from Albany and one from New York, that in the treatment of puerperal eclampsia, venesection, when advocated at all, has been given only a secondary place by their professors and clinical teachers. One very prominent professor says: "Bleed only in plethoric cases, and then not as a means of cure, but to gain time." The question occurs tome--"Time for what?" One of these young men states to me that when he was house physician in a hospital in one of our largest cities that two cases of convulsions occurring in his service, to use the Doctor's own words, "were allowed to go on from fit to fit, treated only with fifteen grain doses monobromide camphor once in three hours." As a perfectly natural consequence both the patients died. Such a proceeding as that savors either of idiocy or of criminal neglect, and this in our boasted age of advanced therapeutics. Cases of puerperal eclampsia, treated by Dutchess county physicians, have incidently come to my knowledge, which have ended fatally, and which were not bled. I assume that these practitioners had their reason for withholding the lancet, but whether these reasons were good and sufficient, I am unable to say, but the fact remains, that these women were not even offered this chance for their lives, which phlebotomy affords in so many cases; and if they had been bled, the result certainly could have been no worse. I believe that the use of the lancet, in eclam...