A practical treatise on the domestic management and most important diseases of advanced life : with an appendix, containing a series of cases illustrative of a new and successful mode of treating lumbago and other forms of chronic rheumatism, sciatica and other neuralgic affections, and certain forms of paralysis / by George E. Day.

  • Day, George Edward, 1815-1872.
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practical treatise on the domestic management and most important diseases of advanced life : with an appendix, containing a series of cases illustrative of a new and successful mode of treating lumbago and other forms of chronic rheumatism, sciatica and other neuralgic affections, and certain forms of paralysis / by George E. Day. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

    83/394 (page 45)
    in the chapter on gout, and in other parts of this volume. In the cases in which patients complain of exces- sive perspiration, unless it seems to be debilitating them, I make a point of avoiding all active inter- ference. I have observed this phenomenon most frequently in women a few years after the change of life, and I do not entertain a doubt that it is a salutary effort of nature, perhaps rather to be encou- raged than repressed. Persons who pay little attention to their health in other respects, are apt to expend all their cares and anxieties on their bowels. That the due and regular action of the bowels is of great importance I freely admit, but I much prefer a regular spon- taneous action every second or even third day to the continuous use (I should rather say abuse) of purgatives. In the description I have given in pages 17 and 18, of the changes occurring in the struc- tures and functions of the digestive organs, the reader will see sufficient reason why the bowels should generally be more torpid in old age than in adult life. It has been my lot to meet with several patients who, from the perusal of popular works on medicine, or from ill-judged professional advice, have felt it an almost sacred duty to obtain, by fair means or foul, a diurnal motion of some sort. I shall notice the bad effects of purgatives in a future chapter, and will therefore only further remark that I have more than once obtained an admission from such patients, after breaking them of this habit, that