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Although patients thus treated sometimes recovered, they also sometimes perished from congestion of the lungs and brain. Among cardiac and nervous sedatives, digitalis, veratrum album and viride, veratria and aconite, have each, at one time or other, been employed indiscriminately. Such treatment, of course, has only proven itself to be a monument of rashness to those who employed it.
Everyone can understand that if we give an Allopathic dose of Ipecac to a patient already sick and vomiting, or of Veratrum album to a patient suffering from Asiatic cholera or cholera morbus, we will almost certainly aggravate the disease, perhaps to a fatal extent; for it is the reaction of the vital forces of the system against the new excitement caused by the remedy, which overcomes this new excitement and the diseased action at the same time.
As Lady Veratrum left us, she remarked casually, 'His Grace will join us at tea. The door closed, and at the same moment I fell upon the brocaded satin state bed and tore off my hat and gloves like one distraught. "Hilda," I gasped, "you brought me here, and you must rescue me, for I absolutely decline to drink tea with a duke." "Nonsense, Penelope, don't be absurd," she replied.
More especially marked were the flat low-toned bumps and splashes of large drops from the trees on the broad horizontal leaves of Echinopanax horridum, like the drumming of thundershower drops on veratrum and palm leaves, while the mosses were indescribably beautiful, so fresh, so bright, so cheerily green, and all so low and calm and silent, however heavy and wild the wind and the rain blowing and pouring above them.
On a level depression where are neither trees nor bushes, luxuriant umbelliferous plants rise amid the grass over a swamp hemlock and "Sison Amonum," smelling of cinnamon. In an isolated tuft like a vegetable aristocrat glitter the fiery blossoms of the veratrum; among the grass the forget-me-not spreads rankly, and the medicinal comfrey with red flowers full of honey.
I may also mention a large mertensia, a fine anemone, a veratrum, six feet high, a large blue daisy, growing up to three to four thousand feet, and at the summit a dwarf species, with dusky, hairy involucres, and a few ferns, aspidium, gymnogramma, and small rock cheilanthes, leaving scarce a foot of ground bare, though the mountain looks bald and brown in the distance like those of the desert ranges of the Great Basin in Utah and Nevada.
Or, to mention one out of many questionable remedies, shall you give Veratrum Viride in fevers and inflammations? It makes the pulse slower in these affections. Then the presumption would naturally be that it does harm. The caution with reference to it on this ground was long ago recorded in the Lecture above referred to. See what Dr.
Hilda smiled benignantly as she wound the coil of russet hair round her shapely head. "He will think whatever you do charming, and whatever you say brilliant," she said; "that is the advantage in being an American woman." Just at this moment Lady Veratrum sent a haughty maid to ask us if we would meet her under the trees in the park which surrounds the house.
We have ceased to purge and bleed and sweat, and to give large doses of aconite or veratrum viride; have ceased to starve the patient too long; we have ceased to load him with alcohol to the point of circulatory prostration, and we have recognized that he must be braced from start to finish; strychnin is the drug which has been used for this purpose, and, as stated above, overused.
I respect the evidence of my contemporaries, but I cannot forget the sayings of the Father of medicine, Ars longa, judicium difficile. I am not presuming to express an opinion concerning Veratrum viride, which was little heard of when I was still practising medicine.
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