_Sir_:—In the November number of the AMERICAN THERAPIST, I contributed a
short account of a long, violent and very refractory exacerbation of
bronchial asthma, which yielded almost instantly to the application of
ice-packs over the pneumogastrics. The vagi are held to contain both
dilator and contractor filaments for the bronchial muscles. This attack
seemed to me to be a convulsion, so to speak, of the afferent contractor
filaments. By freezing the vagi, then, these violent motor impulses
should be inhibited; and such turned out to be the case.
A day or two since I received a letter from Dr. Ezra Peters, of
Missouri, saying: “I have just returned from a case of asthma very
similar in every particular to the one reported by you in the November
number of the AMERICAN THERAPIST, except that I did not use nitro
glycerin. After a hard tussle for fifty-two hours for air, a fifteen
minute’s application of the ice-pack to the neck caused the respiration
to become quite full and free, and the pulse to fall from 138 to 80.”
I publish this additional experience in the hope that others will give
this simple procedure a further trial.