Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: JV O T E S. NOTE A. The difficulty of discriminating between the symptoms of disease, and the effects of treatment, has undoubtedly led to much erroneous practice, so that we cannot be too careful or vigilant, in watching the consequences of our own remedies. For a long time, the effects resulting from an excessive use of mercury, were mistaken for the phenomena of syphilis. The arterial reaction, described by Marshall Hall, which sometimes follows excessive blood-letting, has been confounded with the arterial action of disease requiring farther depletion. Constitutional irritation, produced or kept up by an inordinate use of vesicatories and other counter-stimulants, has been made a reason for the farther continuance of those applications. Much acute and unnecessary suffering has been caused by the prolonged application of sinapisms to the tender skins of infants, and the limbs of dying patients. The pains of hunger) resulting from a too restricted diet, are most keenly felt by convalescents from sickness; yet we sometimes see the cries of infants, arising from this cause, mistaken for signs of disease, and met by the practitioner with medicines, and farther restrictions. I do not speak of these things as common occurrences, yet they have been sufficiently so, to render it obvious, that circumspection on the part of the practitioner is necessary to avoid them. NOTE B. The vaccine vesicle might, if it were desired, be extirpated by the knife or caustic, although if the vesicle be sufficiently developed to excite notice, the surgical remedy would be at least as bad as the disease. In regard to medical remedies, I have had occasion to observe their inefficiency in cases where inflammatory diseases requiring treatment, have occurred during the progress of cow pox. The de…
