When I was speaking of the cure of the digestive organs, I spoke of
stomachic irritation, and said it was occasioned by some morbid
peculiarity. It is difficult to find out the exigents; it must be done by
experiment. We give a medicine, it answers. The digestive organs have such
a sympathy with contiguous organs, that no wonder if such contiguous organs
are affected. The liver, for instance, cannot perform its office aright if
the bowels are uncomfortable. Violent drastics are wrong, they do not do
good; you cannot go on giving physic every day, this will teaze the bowels
and not tranquilize them, The cure is to repeat the excitement of
progressive action. People in general will not find out that what may be an
adequate excitement one day, may not be an adequate excitement on another
day. As to these things, they are easily managed, and you should attend to
them. Every person advanced in life knows this, and attends to it. Doctor
Curry, whom I used to call the poetical doctor, says, very justly, "It is
in medicine as it is in morals, you must break bad habits, and establish
good ones."
Where the liver is primarily affected, small doses of quicksilver act in a
wonderful and a prodigious manner. How the stomach, when wrong, disturbs
the head, is apparent to every one. How a faulty action of the liver
disturbs the head is also well known; but the liver, in an especial manner,
disturbs the head.
A Yorkshireman came three hundred miles, as he told me, on purpose to see
me, and he said he was going back again by the mail the same night. I asked
him what could induce him to come so far. His reply was, "Why you once set
up a friend of mine, and I thought you could set me up too."
I would have you keep your eyes open to this, that we are perpetually
putting wrong our digestive organs by our absurdities in diet. These
organs, if long wrong, will affect the spinal chord, producing lumbar
numbness. Now, then, I have surveyed the influence of local maladies in
disturbing the nervous energies, and now I say there is a reflected action
in them, and they become a fruitful source of a numerous and dissimilar
progeny of local diseases.
People are disposed to say I am apt to exaggerate too much; but I merely
relate what I have seen in my time, and you will all have numerous
instances by and by of making the same observations, and I think at last
you will come to the same conclusions.
I now speak of local diseases; and, first, of phlegmonous inflammation. I
do not much like the term phlegmonous inflammation, because phlegmon alone
is inflammation. That the vessels, particularly the arteries, of inflamed
parts are disposed to receive more blood, is manifest. Mr. Hunter froze the
ears of rabbits, and the arteries inflamed and were filled with blood,
throbbing, and pain. When there is great disturbance of the arterious
system, with throbbing, there is always acute pain. In common whitlow of
the finger, how the arteries of the arm, the brachial in particular, throb,
is well known. In proportion as arteries are excited to vehement action,
some difficulty occurs to the transmission of the blood into the veins. Dr.
Phillips found that inflamed blood is slower in cooling than common blood.
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