Page:Medical guide.pdf/8

 CHOLERA (A).

.——Unknown. Intemperance, and all irregularities in living, deficiencies in food or clothing, want of cleanliness in house or person, the use of impure water, or accumulations of filth near dwelling, predispose to this, as in fact to almost every other disease.

.-The first and easily curablocurable [sic] stage, is simple looseness of the bowels, which precedes the attack of the real cholera sometimes for some days, going off and returning alternately, till the purging become copious, and the matter passed resembles thin gruel, then vomiting a similar fluid. After this has continue for a longer or shorter period, the extremities become cold, which extends gradually over the whole body, till it has the cold feel of a corpse. The disease is accompanied in the latter stage usually with cramps in the limbs, arms, and often the whole muscular system, and which are the cause of intense suffering. The voice sinks into a whisper——the pulse leaves the wrist, and gradually the heart ceases to beat——a blueish lividity is over the body——the nose pinched, and the eye-balls' sink deep into the sockets, and sometimes, previous to death, the patient has all the appearance of a living corpse.

.——In this formidable scourge, any good that is to be done must be done at the very commencement, and this is to check the bowel complaint that precedes the real disease, and which may in general bobe [sic] easily accomplished by taking 30 or 40 drops of laudanum (the patient having previously gone to bed). A mustard poultice ought to be applied over the stomach and bowels. Should the purging continue, a mixture of chalk and laudanum, in the proportion of a dram of chalk, 3 drams of laudanum, with 2 ounces mualage of gum arabic, and thothe [sic] same of cinnamon water, from 1 to 2 teaspoonfulls after every inclination to stool. Also, 2 grain doses of calomel, administered every 20 minutes, until the gums get tender, when the danger is almost over. The patient ought to be well covered