On spasm, languor, palsy, and other disorders, termed nervous, of the muscular system / by James Arthur Wilson.

Date:
1843
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On spasm, languor, palsy, and other disorders, termed nervous, of the muscular system / by James Arthur Wilson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    tion are more immediate and remarkable in the struc- tures wliose action is constant and involuntary, than in the muscles which are under a direct influence from the will. Spasmodic diarrhoea, or urethral stric- ture, will often yield to a dose of opium which would prove utterly inefficient for the relief of cramp in the voluntary muscles. Opium, when in active circulation through the body, influences all nutrition, and modifies every secretion. Its effects on particular functions are so marked and various, that, observing them separatel}', we fail to consider them in their combination. Opium is alterative in the widest sense of the term, and should never be prescribed for the use of a part, but in remembrance of its power over the whole. The more frequent application in medicine of the rule thus inferred from opium, would correct much that is now bringing reproach on its practice. There is a lamentable satire on physic in the habit prevailing among us, of overlooking, for the time, all contingent eflfects of the remedies employed, in our one contem- plated purj^ose of the case as we wish it to be. Thus M'ith mercury, as with opium. When the mineral is administered on the direct indication of counteracting a poison already in the system, the special agencies attributed to it in relation with the functions of the liver are for the time conveniently forgotten. As occasion serves, it prevents inflammation of serous membranes in the head, chest, and belly; or is the one stimulant relied on to increase the rate of the pulse, and to rouse the dormant powers of the