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My opinion is, that aperients, as a rule, are quite unnecessary, and should only be given in severe illness, and under the direction of a judicious medical man. How much misery, and injury, might be averted if milk were always given to a child in combination with water!
If they fail, a plaster composed of common pitch, with a very small quantity of yellow wax and some powdered cantharides, spread on sheep's-skin, should be placed over the whole of the lumbar and sacral regions, extending half-way down the thigh on either side. The bowels should be kept open by mild aperients, in order that every source of irritation may be removed from the intestinal canal.
In the treatment of chorea there must be no bleeding, no excessive purgation, but aperients or alteratives, merely sufficient to keep the faeces in a pultaceous state, so as to carry off any source of irritation to the intestinal canal, and particularly some species of worms, too frequent sources of irritation there.
I consider my great success in the treatment of scarlet fever to be partly owing to my avoidance of aperients during the first ten days of the child's illness.
Do not give aperients unless it be, as before advised, the castor oil guarded with the opium; do not stuff him with artificial food; do not fail to send for a judicious and an experienced medical man; for, remember, it requires a skilful doctor to treat a case of dysentery, more especially in a child. What are the symptoms, the causes and the treatment of Nettle-rash?
I refer to it because I have often seen it overlooked both by parents and doctors at its outset, since the pain then is often not severe nor the tenderness intense, and because I have seen the patient's condition rendered hopeless by strong aperients being given to overcome the constipation which was supposed to be all that ailed the child.
"Two women at once?" "Yes." "What was the trick?" The two young men were sitting outside a café on the Boulevards, and drinking liquors mixed with water, those aperients which look like infusions of all the shades in a box of water-colors. They were nearly the same age, twenty-five to thirty.
The same remark applies to the action of narcotics, of aperients, which, in the one, take effect directly, in the other not perhaps for twenty-four hours. A journey, a visit, an unwonted exertion, will affect the one immediately, but he recovers after it; the other bears it very well at the time, apparently, and dies or is prostrated for life by it.
If the protrusion of the bowel have been brought on by the abase of aperients, abstain, for the future from giving them; but if medicine be absolutely required, give the mildest such as either Syrup of Senna or Castor Oil and the less of those the better.
Nor was the treatment of plague-patients in Avignon by any means objectionable; for, after the usual depletions by bleeding and aperients, where circumstances required them, they endeavoured to bring the buboes to suppuration; they made incisions into the inflammatory boils, or burned them with a red-hot iron, a practice which at all times proves salutary, and in the Black Plague saved many lives.
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